As I mentioned earlier today, there has been a lot of discussion about "outside instigators" at the various Liberated Zones set up on campuses around the country. In general, the left has downplayed or dismissed the idea that the protesters are anything but progressive students. On the other hand, less progressive Democrats seem almost eager to blame what they are seeing on outside forces. 

Today we learned that there may be something to the talk about outside agitators after all. The NYPD has revealed that nearly half of those arrested at Columbia and City College of New York were not affiliated with the school.

Approximately 134 of the 282 people taken into custody at Columbia University and CCNY were not affiliated with either school -- more than 47%...

Investigators are looking at the role of outsiders who were on campus in the days before encampment participants shifted to Hamilton Hall, and whether those people gave the student protesters the idea to take over Hamilton Hall and the tactical knowledge to do it.

The NYPD directed attention to 68-year-old Sami Al-Arian, an accused terrorist deported to Turkey in 2015, who posted a picture of his wife in the tent encampment at Columbia...

Another activist, 63-year-old Lisa Fithian, is one of the people that police say has been escalating student protests. For decades she has been pictured in protests all over the country.

Yesterday the NY Times wrote about Lisa Fithian's role in the protests at Columbia. She was on the front lines as students stormed Hamilton Hall.

In a video captured by The New York Times, the protesters can be seen trying to push their way toward the building as the woman — decades older than the crowd — pleads with two young counterprotesters trying to block them from barricading the occupied building.

“This is ridiculous,” the woman says, as the men stand with their backs against the doors, apparently trying to keep protesters away from the building. “We’re trying to end a genocide in Gaza.”...

Videos from the scene also show Ms. Fithian later using a profanity to describe the counterprotesters, and insisting to them that “this is a historic moment.”

Fithian denied being an organizer of the protests but said she was invited to Columbia by someone whose name she can't remember (yeah, right) to conduct a general training for about 30 people. Even the NY Times finds that hard to believe.

She is the author of a 2019 book called “Shut it Down,” a guide to strategic civil disobedience and has worked as a political organizer for decades, supporting political demonstrations across the country, including Occupy Wall Street in 2011; the protests in Ferguson, Mo., that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by the local police in 2014; and the antiracism movement after the death of George Floyd in 2020.

She has also run workshops for other activists. Unions and activist groups have paid her $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach their members tactics for taking over the streets, according to a 2012 profile in Mother Jones magazine.

Fithian had cleared out by the time police arrived to make arrests. As mentioned above, the wife of a convicted terrorist was also seen hanging out with protesters days prior to the arrests.

Sami Al-Arian — who pleaded guilty in 2005 to fundraising and other support for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad — had earlier boasted on social media that his wife, Nahla, was among those who joined anti-Israel protesters at the Ivy League campus last week...

Police later clarified Nahla Al-Arian was only on the Morningside Heights campus last week and was not among the pro-terror mob that broke into an academic building early Tuesday and occupied it for nearly 24 hours before cops were given the green light to storm in and make arrests...

“We have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part but that’s something I wouldn’t want influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia,” Rebecca Weiner, the Deputy Commissioner, Intelligence & Counterterrorism, said as she addressed the ordeal.

The NY Post has a story about two other activists arrested this week:

Rudy Ralph Martinez, 32, was among the 282 protesters and agitators who were cuffed and hauled away when the NYPD encountered unruly mobs during a crackdown on tent encampments at both schools late Tuesday.

Martinez, who was nabbed at CUNY’s Harlem campus on a burglary charge, is a serial protester on the anti-Israel front, according to law enforcement sources.

Martinez reportedly works at the school after having graduated a couple years ago. Here he is praising Hamas and calling 10/7 "one of the greatest days of my life."

Anti-Semite Rudy Ralph Martinez of Brooklyn NYC now known as Rosa works for @TheIndypendent

They dude is sporting a rifle in his ear and celebrating the mass murder of Israeli innocent civilians and pet dogs on 10/7.
Disgusting human. pic.twitter.com/dCMAahXjNT

— Qugel Shmearman (Not to be confused with Q Shaman) (@QugelShmearman) December 24, 2023

But wait, there's more.

James Carlson, 40, who was cuffed at the Ivy League campus on a burglary charge, is a “long-time figure in the anarchist world” and antigovernmental “extremist circles,” sources said.

He was slapped with a string of charges, including suspicion of attempted lynching and aggravated assault on a police officer, over a violent political protest in San Francisco in 2005 that left a cop with a serious head injury, NYPD sources said.

More recently, Carlson allegedly attacked a Jewish student just off campus, stealing and burning his Israeli flag. He has now been charged with "criminal mischief, arson, and possession of stolen property" in that earlier incident.

Hopefully we'll learn more about some of the other non-student protesters who made up 47% of those looking to get arrested at the campus protests.