At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Muslim student leaders and their leftist allies are pressuring candidates for the student senate to pledge that they will not take a sponsored trip to Israel. And those who have taken such trips are being “outed” as Islamophobic.
You can run for the UCLA student senate and travel to any of the countries in the Islamic world where kings and emirs arbitrarily control people’s lives; gays are strung up on construction cranes; women who are raped are further punished for the offense of being a rape victim; the honor killings of women are celebrated, and child slavery flourishes. You can go to any of these regimes where human rights cease to exist and still be fit to be a UCLA student senator. You just can’t go to the Jewish state.
Eager not to offend those who are perpetually offended, a majority of student senate candidates signed on to the pledge, yielding not just their First Amendment rights but also their rights to think and experience for themselves.
On college campuses, you can’t be a champion of human rights that is critical of Islam like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose own life is a testimonial to its misogyny. Invited to receive an honorary degree at Brandeis University, Ali’s invitation offended a gaggle of leftist professors and Muslim students, who compelled Brandeis’ cowardly president to rescind the invitation.
Invited to be Rutgers University’s commencement speaker, Condoleezza Rice, one of the world’s most accomplished African American women, was forced to decline because of opposition from Muslim students and leftist faculty.
I attended a Daniel Pipes’ lecture at UC, Berkeley a number of years ago. To get into the lecture, we had to pass through airport-type security. A phalanx of police surrounded the interior of the hall. A safe room had to be set aside for Pipes and an exit strategy had to be created to get to it. The lecture was punctuated with verbal and physical disruption. Pipes had to stop while police ejected the most confrontational protesters.
After the lecture, we had to exit nearly single file through one door. Waiting for us outside was a gamut of Muslim students and their leftist sympathizers, who shouted in our faces and spat at us. We offended them. We dared to avail ourselves of the right to assemble guaranteed us under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
At the University of California, Irvine in 2010, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s address was loudly interrupted numerous times with personal attacks. He could not continue. The audience was deprived of hearing him. Eleven Muslim students were arrested and convicted for repeatedly disrupting the address.
The benefit of a diverse campus culture is that exposure to different attitudes and behaviors enrich us. But there is no enrichment when a culture, political or religious, arrogates to itself what the rest of us can hear.
Ironically, when it comes to bringing speakers on campus that will denounce America or openly call for the killing of Jews, Muslim student leaders are quick to invoke their First Amendment rights to hate speech as protected speech.
Radical Muslim or leftist speakers can come on campus and say the most offensive things, as is their right. And they will need no phalanx of police to protect them, no insults will be hurled, and no physical intimidation will take place. An escape plan or a safe room will not even be part of the security calculus.
Lurking in the back of the minds of campus administrators over who gets to be heard and who doesn’t is the potential for violence. Through physical intimidation and confrontation, Muslim students and their leftist allies raise the specter of violence while judiciously moving up to the line but only occasionally crossing it. Nonetheless, the prospect of violence often guarantees their right to use the First Amendment while denying it to others.