Loading ...Sanders campaign apologizes to pro-Palestine activists threatened with arrest
Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) Democratic presidential campaign is apologizing to pro-Palestine college students who were threatened with arrest, apparently for displaying signs in an overflow area outside a Sanders rally.
Boston Students for Justice in Palestine activists said they were asked to put away signs at the Boston event on Saturday which read: “Will Ya #feeltheBern 4 Palestine??!” The message alluded to the popular social media phrase that has become synonymous with Sanders’s surge in the polls.
“They told us to either put the sign away or leave,” Sana Hashmani, one of the student activists, told The Intercept website, which first reported the incident. “We asked why, and they said that Bernie’s campaign staff had said the sign had to go.”
A cellphone video posted to the group’s Facebook page shows a woman telling the activists that the “Bernie team” wanted the sign taken down before the students would be allowed to stay. Seconds later, a security officer tells an activist that he is trespassing and needs to leave or he will be arrested.
Sanders’s campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Boston.com on Monday that the incident “100 percent” should not have happened, describing the person who told the activists to take the sign down was a “low-level volunteer” and wouldn’t be working on future campaign events.
“We’ve communicated to our staff to make sure nothing like this happens again,” Weaver said, according to the news outlet, adding that he reached out to the students on behalf of the campaign to apologize.
The Sanders event on Saturday in Boston drew more than 20,000 people and was among the candidate’s most popular events of the 2016 cycle in his bid to challenge Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Source: thehill.com