Columbia Spectator Is Lying About Butler Library. We Won’t Let You Forget What Really Happened.
While Columbia Spectator tries to rewrite the story of Butler Library, Columbia Sundial and students like Eliana Goldin are setting the record straight, with video, photos, and testimony. This is not a debate. This is documented.
A Violent Takeover. Whitewashed by Student Media
In May 2025, anti-Israel protesters stormed into Butler Library. They barricaded doors. They spray-painted slogans across the walls and glass. They harassed Jewish students and locked them inside rooms. And they did it all under the banner of “Free Palestine.”
It wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a targeted takeover. But according to Columbia Spectator, what happened in Butler was little more than a group of students who simply “entered the library” and “wrote messages.”
They reduce a coordinated, hostile occupation to a few innocent-sounding words on a whiteboard. They leave out the fear, intimidation, and outright defacement of university property. They leave out the students trapped inside.
Let’s be clear:
Protesters did not simply “enter” the library. They stormed and occupied it.
They did not “write messages.” They vandalized Columbia University.
And the Spectator covered it like it was a student art project.
Some Student Journalists Still Told the Truth
Not all of Columbia’s student press ignored what happened.
The Sundial described a takeover that left students shaken and unsafe.
From their article:
“CUAD’s “liberation zone” didn’t change the course of the war in Gaza, nor did it lead the University to sympathize with the protesters’ cause and divest from Israeli-affiliated companies. The people who were actually affected most by these protests were the janitorial staff who had to work overtime to clean up the mess—the same staff the protesters had villainized that afternoon. The irony of being privileged enough to attend this institution while forcing working class janitorial staff to clean up after them in the name of “liberation” should not escape anyone.
The protesters’ self-victimizing narrative hinges upon the idea that they are morally obligated to engage in disruptive forms of protest—but this is a false premise. There are other ways to protest that wouldn’t lead the University to call in the NYPD. It is disingenuous for campus media to shape the narrative around how the protesters are punished and arrested without accounting for the fact that they chose this path.”
We Won’t Let You Forget Butler
What happened inside Butler Library matters. Because when student media erases violence and downplays antisemitism, they protect the perpetrators, not the victims.
And they invite it to happen again.
We remember Butler. We remember the videos, the graffiti, the barricades, and the hate.
