Reeling from weeks of pro-Palestinian campus protests, New York's Columbia University has barred a student leader of the movement who said "Zionists don't deserve to live" in a video in January, according to a report.
The Ivy League school said student Khymani James had been banned from campus, but did not specify whether he had been suspended or permanently expelled, the New York Times reported.
In a posting Friday night on X James said his comments about Zionists were "wrong"
"Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification," he wrote in the posting. "I misspoke in the heat of the moment, for which I apologize."
In a statement issued Friday evening, school officials said an "individual whose videos have surfaced in recent days is now banned from campus." The university did not identify James.
The statement added that "chants, signs, taunts, and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to 'kill' Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable."
The video of James making the comments resurfaced on social media Thursday.
James, a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, made the remarks at a disciplinary hearing over his comments on social media about fighting a Zionist, according to the Times.
"I don't fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill," he said.
At the hearing, an administrator asked Jones: "Do you see why that is problematic in any way?"
"No," James reportedly responded.
He also compared Zionists to white supremacists and Nazis.
"These are all the same people," said James, a junior at the university. "The existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e. Israel, it's all antithetical to peace. It's all antithetical to peace. And so, yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die."
James said on I that he wished he had couched his comments in different language.
"Zionism is an ideology that necessitates the genocide of the Palestinian people. I oppose that in the strongest terms," he wrote.
