After weeks of pro-Hamas campus riots, Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, was due to speak to the UCLA chapter of Young Americans for Freedom with a talk titled “Why Everything You Know About Palestine is Wrong”.
Going in, we knew that UCLA would do everything possible to stop the talk even as Hamas supporters were holding Nakba Day ceremonies commemorating the failed Muslim effort to exterminate the Jews.
After UCLA campus police had failed to stop violence against Jewish students and protesters in previous weeks, the David Horowitz Freedom Center had provided Robert’s security (because we knew campus security would do nothing) and we had people, including me, prepared to go out to be at the talk.
And then at the last minute, it was shut down.
While the doors were supposed to open at 5:30 PM, they were instead locked. UCLA wanted the event to go somewhere else, anywhere else, after threats and lies from terror supporters.
Local pro-Hamas groups had spread the same discredited lies about Robert Spencer and claimed credit for the cancelation.
But the bottom line is that UCLA had once again made the decision to choose leftists and Islamists over free speech. And after weeks in which the Left pretended to champion free speech, they went right back to suppressing it.
“At @UCLA radical protesters are allowed on campus but not civil students listening to a @yaf speaker in a room that was appropriately reserved in advance. This is a violation of their Constitutional rights. We beat the UC System before & will again. See you in court!” Scott Walker, the head of the Young America’s Foundation, tweeted.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has unfortunately seen this same game played out before on campuses.
It took a lot of legal battles until universities stopped blocking conservative speakers, but in the wake of the Hamas riots, they’re going back to the same tactics, claiming that conservative events pose too much risk and introducing technical objections that never seem to show up at leftist events.
But the David Horowitz Freedom Center will continue to do our part to uphold the truth on college campuses.
The UCLA chose terrorists over truth, but the truth must be heard.