Nonie Darwish in UNM: freedom of speech vs hypocrisy

The gist of the story is simple:

A group of University of New Mexico students "mic checked" an Israel Alliance talk on their campus Thursday night, when audience members got up out of their seats and physically attacked the protesting students.

The interpretation is quite another thing. To start with, the "mic checking", which in this case is a euphemism for interrupting somebody's speech. But the "mic checking" is only one way of misrepresenting the story. Here comes another one:

Some UNM students and Unoccupy Albuquerque protesters were speaking out against Nonie Darwish. Her views on Islam have been controversial.

"Speaking out" is a nice version of events, you may think. But it is easily topped (in my opinion) by another thinker:

The public lecture, which began at 7PM in the Anthropology lecture hall, was attend by some UNM students who exercised their right to freedom of speech by vocally protesting the against the opinions put forward by Darwish.

I would say that in this impromptu competition of hypocrisy "exercised their right to freedom of speech" is a clear winner over "speaking out" and "mic checking". But it's a matter of taste, of course.

The interpretation of what had happened isn't a matter of taste, though. You, if you are an ardent supporter of Palestinian aspirations for freedom, will find all you need as ammunition in the first sentence that starts the article where "right to freedom of speech" comes from:

Thursday evening, pro-Israel audience members physically assaulted students and solidarity activists at an Israel Alliance event hosted at the University of New Mexico.

According to this presentation of the event, some bloodthirsty Zionists identified (how?) the "solidarity activists" and immediately pounced on them. You are welcome to watch a video recording of the event:



Now you know how the "activists" were recognized. Besides having screechy armor-penetrating voices, the activists could be easily identified by their outstanding stupidity. People who must have their two or three slogans written down for them are hardly going to make much progress as far as their academic record is concerned.

But of course, the article in question mentioned the "mic checking" only in passing, so if you get to it, the fact will be already overshadowed by the beginning of that piece. The headline of the piece* is, by the way:

Israel’s ‘Gandhi’ clearly absent from Israel Alliance event at U of New Mexico

Israel's Gandhi doesn't pick up his phone lately, true. However, there is another and more necessary element missing in this story: a parent that will find a strong belt and apply it to the posterior of the pampered entitled deluded brat that in all seriousness considers stifling a speaker to be an exercise of the right to freedom of speech. If a person could report on his/her behavior in this way:

These students were assaulted on UNM campus for simply trying to make their voices heard and it is a shock that a non-violent action was met with such aggression.

, the person in question is in dire need of a shock treatment. Some of it (but far from enough) were meted out in that brawl. It is past time that the "anti-Zionist" hooligans that do their best to prevent pro-Israeli speakers on campuses from speaking their minds, intimidate Jewish students and display their hate in many other ways, are taught a few lessons.

(*) The site where this piece is published deserves some small measure of attention, even it will mean going off on a tangent from the topic of this post. The explanation of the name of that blog includes the following:

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion took exactly sixteen minutes to read the scroll of the Establishment of the State to a crowd of 250 people in what was then the Tel Aviv Museum. In such a short matter of time, Palestinian sovereignty was stripped away and the forthcoming establishments paved the way for decades of humanitarian injustices institutionalized by prejudiced policies and settler-colonialist conquest.

Quite an interesting example of bending history to your immediate needs. Consider the construct "Palestinian sovereignty was stripped away". That about a land where, after destruction of Israel and dispersal of its people, there was no sovereignty but several consecutive temporary occupiers. Consider the next one: "and the forthcoming establishments paved the way": does the moron who has written this include in the list of "forthcoming establishments" the war against Israel that immediately followed Ben-Gurion's 16 minutes? Bleh... now you can see how the Palestinian school books are written.

Hat tip: Fred Lapides.

Cross-posted on Yourish.com