Hillary Clinton was interrupted Friday by pro-Palestinian protesters decrying policies she supported when she was Secretary of State in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013.
“Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, you are a war criminal!” a man shouted as the former secretary of state walked onto a lecture hall stage at Columbia University in New York City.
“The people of Libya, the people of Iraq, the people of Syria, the people of Yemen, the people of Palestine as well as the people of America will never forgive you,” he continued as Keren Yarhi-Milo, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, took the microphone, asking to have him removed while Clinton waited with a bemused look.
As he was taken out of the room, he repeatedly shouted “Free, free Palestine!” and “You will burn!” The former first lady then tried to begin her speech about conflict-related sexual violence, noting, “Yelling doesn’t solve the problem,” when she was interrupted by a second protester.
She tried to talk over the protester but then gave up as more appeared to join in, saying, “OK, we’re going to stop a minute. You know what, why don’t all of you just interrupt me so that you won’t be interrupting our panelists so that we don’t have this kind of disruption when we have people who are real experts in this area.”
She added, “People are free to protest, but they are not free to disrupt events or classes and that is going to be the standards that we follow here and going forward.”
The former Democratic presidential nominee was giving a speech to the Columbia Center for Global Policy, which she chairs. In November, Clinton was also confronted by pro-Palestinian protesters outside the class she teaches at the university.
Video shared on X showed Clinton walking past a common area of Columbia University’s International Affairs Building as demonstrators chant, “Hillary, Hillary you can’t hide, you are supporting genocide!”
The protest, staged outside the lecture, was said to have disrupted a class taught by the former first lady and Secretary of State called “Inside the Situation Room.”