Giulio Meotti for AFDI: Hypocritical “Antifa” and Islamic supremacists are allied against freedom’
One hundred professors who asked to ban a thirty-two-year-old blogger invited by a student association, a thousand protesters who destroyed classrooms and windows, dozens of policemen in riot gear who dispersed the crowd, the university that had to cancel the event. It didn’t happen in Qom, Iran, but in Berkeley, USA.
What “Antifa” did to Milo Yiannopoulos resembles the Islamic witch hunt against dissidents and secular writers. This brave and outspoken journalist is destroying the phony complacency of the liberal establishment. What if a “right wing mob” had disrupted a conference of Judith Butler, one of the Berkeley professors who signed the appeal to censor Milo’s speech?
In the last fifteen years, the universities of America, which before being temples of knowledge pretend to be laboratories of “equal opportunity,” dozens of events featuring both liberal and conservative speakers have been cancelled. The list is on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
California, one of the most progressive states of America, has seen the highest number of incidents. The current president of UC-Berkeley, Janet Napolitano, was banned at the Hastings College in San Francisco. The Scripps College in California has closed its doors to George Will. Rutgers University, a women’s liberal arts school in Claremont, California, prevented the visits of two former secretaries of state: Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright. Laura Bush had to give up speaking at the University of California, where the former Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers (“a misogynist”), also had to skip his conference. The brave venture capitalist Peter Thiel also had trouble at Berkeley. The mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat’s speech at San Francisco State University was crushed by “Antifa” crying “Intifada Intifada.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a dissident of Islam and apostate, was not allowed to set foot at Brandeis University.
Giulio Meotti for AFDI: Hypocritical “Antifa” and Islamic supremacists are allied against freedom
It is impossible to keep a count of all the personalities which “Antifa” has forbidden to speak: Henry Kissinger at the University of Austin (“the butcher of Cambodia”), the former World Bank president Robert Zoellick at Swarthmore College (“he is a war criminal”), the International Monetary Fund’s head Christine Lagarde at Smith College (“she is an imperialist”) and former CIA director John Brennan at University of Pennsylvania (“drones kill children”). Even a Palestinian activist for human rights, Bassem Eid, was prevented from speaking at the University of Chicago.
First they limited the freedom of expression at a specific place on their campuses. Then they started issuing licenses for speaking. And they ended by hurling Molotov cocktails, as happened with Milo in Berkeley. It is a crescendo of hysteria.
The self proclaimed “Antifa” celebrities stood silent when a Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, was shot on the morning of November 2, 2004 for having filmed the submission of women under Islam. How did the Hollywood community react to this atrocity? Silence.
The self-proclaimed “Antifa” deconstructionists, who always abuse the word “culture” in their crusade against “right wing populism,” launched petitions to “decolonialize” the literature courses at Yale, purging Chaucer and Milton, Pope and Eliot. The list is long: California University, Oberlin College, Rutgers University, University of Michigan and George Washington University are grappling with a new literary censorship hysteria, which is abolishing any critical spirit and is training the masses through a kitsch appeal to sentiment against reason.
The self-proclaimed “Antifa” feminists have been busy fighting Europe’s referendums on gay marriage, and took to the streets to liberate Californian hymens from Donald Trump, but stood silent when Yazidi and Christian women were enslaved by the Islamic State. Caliph al-Baghdadi will give them lessons in “modesty”.
The self-proclaimed “Antifa” chattering classes, which dominate the mainstream media, shouted “we are all Charlie Hebdo” after the cartoonists were massacred. But when they were alive, the same “Antifa” élites attacked, isolated and demonized the French cartoonists who still had the courage to criticize Islam. When the Islamic terrorists killed the Charlie Hebdo staff, most of the “Antifa” television networks (MSNBC, CNN, BBC…) refused to show the cover with Mohammed saying “all is forgiven.” A year later, when a domesticated Charlie Hebdo depicted a Judeo-Christian “killer God,” these televisions showed it.
The self-proclaimed “Antifa” secularists, who always rally against the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, all sided with the Muslim community to build a mosque near Ground Zero, which Pamela Geller helped to prevent. Their hypocrisy was beyond any double standard. They didn’t raise an eyebrow when the Islamic State destroyed the churches in Mosul.
The self-proclaimed “Antifa,” such as Cher, Spike Lee and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, rushed to compare Trump to Hitler, but keep silent any time the Sunni and Shia apocalypse enablers try to advance a “Final Solution to Israel’s problem.”
The self-proclaimed “Antifa” humanitarians, who are rallying against Trump’s “Muslim ban,” ignored the fate of Middle Eastern Christians. They are too aloof to denounce a real religious persecution, as if they considered these Christians heartless agents of “colonialism” who deserved to be purged from their lands.
The self-proclaimed “Antifa” academics, who see “fascism” in every conservative speaker, downplayed swastikas on Jewish buildings at Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, the University of Oregon and Emory University. They stood silent about the 54 percent of Jewish students who at US colleges suffered anti-Semitic attacks, according to research published by the Center for Human Rights Under Law at Trinity College. These “Antifa” professors also allowed anti-Israeli groups in their universities to organize pickets against the Jewish State, and supporters of Israel are routinely attacked and prevented from speaking (ask Shimon Dotan and Caroline Glick).
The US mainstream is dominated by plenty of “Antifa,” who are damaging the values of Enlightenment not less than the Islamists who just hit harder. Maurice Dantec, the French writer who recently passed away in Canada, once argued that “there are several methods to kill a civilization. One is to make you sick and then convince you that you’re saved, when the medicine administered is actually a nasty poison.” This is exactly what these “Antifa” are doing to our civilization. Their poison is the “Antifa” opium.
Giulio Meotti, cultural editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author. He is the author of three books: A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism (Encounter Books); J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel (Mantua Books), and La fine dell’Europa, about the Christian and demographic decline in Europe. He is a columnist at Arutz Sheva and his writings have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, FrontPage, Commentary, and The Geller Report.