Guest post by Aleister
Several University of Minnesota Activists Arrested For Shouting Down Israeli Speaker
In case you haven’t heard, there is a radical movement that has been taking hold on college campuses. It’s called BDS which stands for boycott, divestment and sanction. It is rabidly anti-Israel and frankly, anti-Semitic.
This incident at the University of Minnesota is a classic example of their tactics.
Several activists were arrested for interrupting Israeli ethicist Moshe Halbertal on the UM campus.
The protesters took turns interrupting the event and being escorted out of the room.
Law professor Dale Carpenter reports at the Washington Post:
Israeli academic shouted down in lecture at University of Minnesota
On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University. He was invited to deliver the Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law, which is organized annually by the law school. That the freedom to present a lecture is threatened in this way at a public university is appalling, calling not only for punishment of violations but for a clear statement by university officials defending the free exchange of ideas.
The lecture, which I attended, was delayed half an hour as one by one the protesters stood up to shout denunciations of Israel and were escorted from the hall by university police. One young woman came screaming back into the lecture after having been ejected. Outside the hall, the protesters chanted so loudly that it was difficult to hear Halbertal, much less to concentrate on what he was saying, until 45 minutes after the lecture was to have begun.
The protests were apparently organized by a group calling itself the “Anti-War Committee,” which bragged on its Twitter feed about having disrupted the lecture and complained that the protesters’ “free speech” rights were violated when a few were arrested. It appears that no law students were involved, but many of the demonstrators were college-aged and the protest was endorsed by a group called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a university group. According to its Facebook page, SJP “promotes justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
These students tried to deprive someone of their free speech rights, then played the victim when they were arrested by claiming their free speech rights had been violated.
You see how that works?
(Image:Source)
