Posted on 05/16/2009 10:37:03 AM PDT by American Dream 246
Imagine it's 1940, and picture Adolf Hitler speaking at a US university, receiving a polite reception, while Winston Churchill is barred from speaking because his safety cannot be guaranteed.
It's unthinkable, yet the very same pro-fascist dynamic is a reality in 21st Century America.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to America knowing he is a second-class citizen who is denied the free-speech rights enjoyed even by prominent jihadists, having been violently prevented from speaking on campuses in the US and Canada in recent years.
Protestors at Berkeley, the campus once synonymous with the term "free speech," forced the cancellation of Netanyahu's speech there, as well as two subsequent speeches, in November 2000. The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California reported:
Hundreds of protesters shouting "Support the Palestinians, choose a side" and "No free speech for war criminals" blocked the gate leading to the Berkeley Community Theatre Tuesday evening, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled speech by former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Additional talks by Netanyahu that were scheduled Wednesday and Thursday in San Mateo and San Rafael were subsequently cancelled.
Waving banners reading "Zionism=Nazism" and "End U.S. aid to Israel," the crowd was estimated at more than 500 by the Berkeley Police Department and at 200 to 250 by observers...
The vitriol that greeted Netanyahu at Berkeley only worsened in the ensuing years. Anneli Rufus of the East Bay Express recalled that in 2001:
...Students for Justice in Palestine had become large enough to stage a high-profile sit-in at UC's Wheeler Hall. The group had demanded that the regents divest from companies with significant holdings in Israel. When the regents failed to respond, dozens of group members chained shut nine of the building's twelve doors. They formed human chains to block two of the remaining doors and ushered students out of the building through the last door. Professor Gordon, who had an important class scheduled that day in Wheeler, burst through the chain of students only to be showered with spit and hit by a student...
Later that year, 23-year-old Aaron Schwartz was walking toward the Hillel building as part of an obviously Jewish group celebrating the annual holiday Simchas Torah. According to accounts in The Daily Californian and the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, one onlooker mocked the procession by goose-stepping in place, chanting "Heil Hitler," and performing the Nazi salute. After punching Schwartz in the face and knocking him to the ground, the man and his two companions strolled away.
But many remember spring 2002 as the season the screaming really started. On spring break, someone hurled the cinderblock through the front door of Berkeley's Hillel Center, scrawling the words F--- JEWS nearby...
The same mentality was on display in spring 2002 at San Francisco State University, where pro-Israel students and elderly Holocaust survivors trying to hold a rally were stopped by violent protestors screaming "F-- the Jews," "Jews, go back to Russia," "Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job," and "Get out or we'll kill you."
Threats of "we'll kill you" appear to have led to the logical next step in the recent violent death of 38-year-old pro-Israel activist Daniel J. Kliman in San Francisco.
It appears that present-day northern California is to Jews what Mississippi in the early 20th Century was to African-Americans-the epicenter of explosive hate-although the same bigotry permeates much of the academic world.
That would include Concordia University in Montreal, where Netanyahu was prevented from speaking about the war against terrorism. Daniel Pipes, writing in the New York Post on September 17, 2002, described the violent scene:
... he never made it onto the campus - because a thousand anti-Israel demonstrators staged a mini-riot with the intent of preventing him from speaking...
The anti-Israel forces physically assaulted the would-be audience... They smashed a plate-glass window and threw objects at the police inside. They hurled furniture at police from a mezzanine. As Toronto's Globe & Mail put it, "By lunchtime, the vestibule of Concordia's main downtown building was littered with paper, upturned chairs, broken furniture and the choking aftereffects of pepper spray."
The police, saying they couldn't assure Netanyahu's safety, canceled the event...
Pipes noted a revealing contrast involving another speaker the same week:
On Thursday, Hanan Ashrawi, the former spokeswoman and colleague of Yasser Arafat, went to Colorado College in Colorado Springs to give a keynote speech at a symposium on "September 11: One Year Later."
Protestors noted that Ashrawi is smack on the side of America's enemies in the War on Terrorism. For example, while the U.S. government formally designates Hamas a terrorist group, Ashrawi states she doesn't "think of Hamas as a terrorist group." Also, she considers Israeli civilians living on the West Bank to be "legitimate . . . targets of Palestinian resistance" -- that is, legitimate targets for deadly violence.
Yet the protestors did not block the terrorist spokeswoman from expressing her opinions (a mere year after the 9/11 attacks), and she is just one of countless pro-terror speakers who are welcome on US campuses. Sheikh Khalid Yasin, a convert to Islam, has been invited to numerous colleges to preach that terrorism is justified, homosexuals should be murdered, and Christian missionaries in Africa are injecting people with AIDS. Terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, of course, have never had to worry about efforts to shut them down at the universities where they teach.
Little wonder that when the genocide-espousing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, the event did not seem out of the ordinary. His politely received speech was hailed by many observers as a fine display of one of the noblest ideals of institutions of higher learning -the free exchange of ideas.
Hardly anyone in the media noted that, the day before he departed for America, Ahmadinejad re-emphasized the two most heartfelt ideas to which he and his regime are dedicated--"Death to America" and "Death to Israel," emblazoned on signs in a military parade over which he presided.
Were the deaths of America and Israel debatable propositions? For many in the academic world, the answer apparently is yes. After all, they would tell us, that's what universities are for. Let all views be heard.
All views, that is, with certain exceptions, including the anti-terror message of the prime minister of Israel.
Typical of Berkeley.
Or document the leftist/terrorists preventing his appearances
Pretty interesting that known terrorist Ahmadinejad is safe in the USA and Netanyahu isn't
It looks like we’re becoming Europe in more ways than one.
I would like to see conservatives and pro-Israel students get scholarships to attend UC Berkley and UC Irvine so we can reduce the jihadist attitudes in these schools.
"Death to America" and "Death to Israel" are also the (usually unspoken) slogans of students at liberal universities in the U.S., so their affinity with Ahmadinejad isn't surprising.
University of Caliphornia, Burqaley
Homodinejad can even postulate that his country doesn’t have a homosexual problem like our country does, (because they hang them,) but it ain’t okay for Bibi to insist that the muzzleims give their word and keep it...just ONCE!
Berkley. PFFFT! Who the h3ll needs it?
Imagine that it’s 1984 and that black is white, wrong is right, evil is good, up is down, that innocent human life is meant to be destroyed, that tyranny is freedom. Now stand up and shake yourself awake and look around. “Am I,”
you ask, “still in 1984 or is this 2009?” Then you realize that there is very little difference.
At the risk of having this post pulled: The Jews deserve it.
The Jewish community in the US overwhelmingly supports the very liberal Democrats who are doing this to them.
The Jewish community in the US overwhelmingly supports the very liberal Democrats who are doing this to them.
The Jewish community in the US overwhelmingly supports the very liberal Democrats who are doing this to them.
What can I say? If you’re supporting the people who would do you harm...*shrug*
Yeah - it does suck. But if people want to be stupid they have the freedom to be so.
The left is aggressive even though the majority do not support them.
You tell me when conservatives are going to demand that universities, unions, and newsrooms employ as many conservatives as liberals so that most citizens can have their views represented.
I was not aware that the Jews in Israel were synonymous with leftist “Jews” in the US. You say ISRAEL deserves it because jews HERE are insane? Or am I missing something?
Liberal intolerance of free speech...
Hey, you just had that “environmentalist” in California blast all hispanic farmers and migrant workers as illegals and in racist terms as undesirable uneducated criminals who should be run out of the state and the farmers’ water taken for that stupid smelt.
So of course the left destroys whoever gets in its way. The phoney “womens” groups betray women, blacks are denied education, Jews are called Nazis and Israel is to be destroyed. The left is Big Brother it cares squat about Jews.
Ready as ready can be.
Well he is not defending American Jews who support left wing policies which harm Israel, but you are correct the USA needs to support Israel, even if the support from that does not come from (most) American Jews.
The things the left has gotten away with, like turning the Palestinians into the new Jews, and the Jews into Nazis, are astounding. You cannot visit a campus without seeing some sign for a rally for the Palestinians against the Israelis.
I blame conservative citizens and definitely republicans who have not had the cajones to confront the destructive leftists. We allowed them to be mainstreamed when their ideas are fringe lunacy.
Just wait until Netanyahu and our "Dear Leader" meet and the Kenyan clown tells him Israel has to agree to nonproliferation of Nuclear weapons in the Middle East before he will ask Iamanutjob to do the same.
We only thought we were wining the War on Terror.
We are now losing all around us.
Our corrupt political system has brought us to this point, it will not get us out of our problems.
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