Woman sees hope in Columbia protest, Mayor Adams calls her outside agitator

Before police officers poured into Columbia University on Tuesday night, arresting more than 100 people as they cleared an occupied school building and tent encampment, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he received a piece of intelligence that shifted his thinking about the campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza.

“Outside agitators” working to “radicalise our children" were leading students into more extreme tactics, the mayor said. And one of them, Adams said repeatedly in media appearances Wednesday morning, was a woman whose husband was “convicted for terrorism.”

But the woman referenced by the mayor wasn't on Columbia's campus this week, isn't among the protesters who were arrested and has not been accused of any crime.

Nahla Al-Arian, 63, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Adams had misstated both her role in the protests and the facts about her husband, Sami Al-Arian, a former computer engineering professor and prominent Palestinian activist.

A retired elementary school teacher, Nahla Al-Arian said she did go to Columbia — but not to teach anyone about civil disobedience.

“The whole thing is a distraction because they are very scared that the young Americans are aware for the first time of what’s going on in Palestine,” Nahla Al-Arian said. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope that at last the Palestinian people can get some justice.”

Law enforcement officials have long sought to discredit protests by invoking the spectre of “outside agitators,” dating back to the Civil Rights movement.

Nahla Al-Arian said she has lost dozens of relatives to Israeli airstrikes in recent months and wanted to see the encampment up close, so she stopped by briefly on April 25 while visiting New York City on an unrelated trip with her two daughters. She said she sat briefly on the lawn but did not speak directly with any protesters, whom she described as “busy and beautiful.”

“I sat and I felt happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine,” she recalled. “Then I was tired, so I left.”

It was a photo of her kneeling alone beside a tent, taken by her daughter and shared on X by her husband, that quickly stoked allegations of a terrorism link to the protest.

'Beautiful act of solidarity'

But the claim spread widely, fueling a narrative — vehemently disputed by student organisers — that Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement has been co-opted by external forces.

Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe," Adams also said his suspicions about external influences on the students had been confirmed after police identified a woman in the protest “organisation” whose “husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level.” At a news conference later in the day, Adams suggested that Columbia students had been taught by outsiders how to barricade themselves to repel police attempts to remove them, saying, “These are all skills that are taught and learned.”

Police declined to provide details about what groups may have been involved or to say how many of the 109 people arrested at Columbia Tuesday night were not connected to the university. Even before the students entered Hamilton Hall, police officials claimed, without providing evidence, that an outside group was helping to fund and organise the encampment.

In a statement, the group behind the encampment, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, defended its right “to include people from outside the Ivy League or the ivory tower in this global movement.”

“‘Outside agitator’ is a far-right smear used to discredit coalition building and anti-racism,” the statement continued.

Laila Al-Arian, a journalist who joined her mother at the encampment on April 25, said the mayor’s comments dredged up painful memories of her father’s years-long legal battle, which included lengthy time spent in solitary confinement. Adams, she said, "was appealing to people's most base racist instincts" to treat Muslims as dangerous outsiders.

“My mother wanted to see this beautiful act of solidarity up close,” she added. “For people to use my father to smear these students, who may not have even been alive when all of this was happening, is shameful in so many ways.”