It’s 2020, and so terrorists must have their say: Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom refused to carry a virtual event featuring a terrorist, and City University of New York (CUNY) officials are outraged.
As we see practically every day now, the Left is not bound by the rules it sets for everyone else. And so it is that on college campuses, when a pro-American, pro-Israel, pro-Trump speaker gets shouted down, canceled, or even physically attacked, that’s a justifiable, entirely warranted response to the speaker’s egregious racism (or whatever is the term of art of the moment) and an endeavor to protect the marginalized students on campus (that is, those who call all the shots) from being victimized by redneck MAGA yahoos. But on the rare occasions when a Leftist speaker is canceled, that is an outrageous, unacceptable, hair-pullingly evil interference with academic freedom, which Leftists suddenly remember to love and cherish after trampling upon it the other 364 days a year. That’s what’s playing out these days at CUNY.
JNS.org reported Friday that CUNY has just “passed a resolution that rebuked the censorship of a virtual event a few months ago that featured a documented Palestinian terrorist.” The CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC) International Committee passed the resolution protesting against the decision of Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube to remove a September 23 event entitled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A conversation with Leila Khaled.”
As a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group that works hand-in-glove with Palestinian jihad terrorists and has itself been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Khaled “played a critical role in two airplane hijackings.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Khaled “hijacked El Al Flight 219 on September 6, 1970,” and that San Francisco State University (SFSU), which was actually hosting the web event, “rejected previous requests to withdraw the invitation, including a request made by Rodney Khazzam, a passenger on Flight 219 who almost lost his life when Khaled attempted to detonate a grenade while the plane was aloft.”
As if that wasn’t enough, according to Algemeiner, the PFLP also “executed suicide bombings and other attacks during the Second Intifada, resulting in more than 100 deaths. Members of the PFLP also claimed responsibility for a 2014 massacre at a Jerusalem synagogue.”
Aside from attempting to detonate a hand grenade on a crowded passenger flight, Khaled is given to rhetorical violence as well. In 2017 she likened Israelis to Nazis while speaking before the European Parliament, actually complaining that the Israelis got better treatment: “You can’t compare the actions of the Nazis to the actions of the Zionists in Gaza…The Nazis were judged in Nuremberg but not a single one of the Zionists has yet been brought to justice.”
In light of all this, it’s astounding enough that SFSU wanted to host Khaled in the first place, and that CUNY is enraged that Zoom wouldn’t allow the event to be hosted on its platform. It’s an indication of how jihad terrorism, along with Marxist violence and a host of other evils, has become acceptable on campuses all over the country today, as the fruit of the Left’s long march through the institutions that began in the 1960s. At this point, on virtually any university or college campus today, if you scream “Death to America” and burn a flag, you’re likely to be celebrated as a hero, and if you love the U.S., openly defend the Constitution, and opine that America would be better off without mass migration and no assimilation along with the outsourcing of all our industries, you’ll be excoriated, defamed, smeared, and worse.
This present incident is a prime example. Apparently no one at CUNY, or no one with any power or influence, is appalled that someone like Leila Khaled would be given a platform on any university campus. Likewise no one at CUNY would ever dream of inviting to campus a foe of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, or rebuke Zoom if it wouldn’t carry the event. Would CUNY officials do anything but applaud if such a person was canceled? The answer is clear. Universities in America today aren’t remotely centers of higher learning. They’re radioactive wastelands of hard-Left indoctrination. President Trump would do us all a service, or at least strike a blow for freedom, if he ended all federal funding of each and every one of them before he leaves office.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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