The Free Press journalist Eli Lake recently stated that anti-Israel activists who have been causing problems across college campuses have been the “enemy of free speech” for several years, according to Fox News Digital.
Lake said that these anti-Israel protesters “[s]etting up encampments in the middle of a quad or taking over a building and then now allowing Zionist students or Zionist professors to enter the quote, unquote ‘encampments,’ it’s not free speech.”
“It’s discrimination,” Lake continued. “Maybe you could say it’s civil disobedience. But it’s not a question of free speech.”
‘So I think that one of the problems is there hasn’t really been a balance and how the Middle East and this conflict has taught and therefore, some of it is that the professors have encouraged this kind of insane radicalism…’
Lake went on to suggest that the same anti-Israel activists who claim that they have had their free speech limited will overtly bar certain people groups from accessing their encampment and complain about someone who was invited to speak on campus.
“That insults our intelligence to take the claims of these people as if they are fighting for free speech when they just discovered that principle five minutes ago.”
“Don’t drag free speech into it. I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’ve noticed that over the last 10 years, you have been an enemy of free speech. So don’t then make free speech the last refuge of the antisemite,” Lake continued.
Lake spoke at the Dissident Dialogues festival in New York City earlier this month, and he acknowledged that some of the activists may be sincere in their rage after seeing the images surfacing from Gaza. However, he said that the anti-Israel prejudice on college campuses has been part of a decades-long indoctrination effort.
“You have had two generations of professors teaching the history of this region that are activists and far-left activists in the tradition of [the late Palestinian-American professor] Edward Said,” Lake said.
“And I don’t have a problem with teaching Edward Said on campus, but Edward Said’s approach has been taught on these campuses at the exclusion of the school of historians they attack, namely [the late British-American professor] Bernard Lewis.”
“So I think that one of the problems is there hasn’t really been a balance and how the Middle East and this conflict has taught and therefore, some of it is that the professors have encouraged this kind of insane radicalism and also this delusion that somehow you can eliminate the state of Israel, which is not going to happen.”
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