Despite heavy rain and poor weather conditions, several people gathered last Thursday to protest around the City University of New York's highly questionable choice for commencement speaker: Linda Sarsour.
Sarsour, a controversial Palestinian-American activist and Women’s March organizer who has openly supported a radical Islamic terrorist along with Sharia Law, came under scrutiny after being announced as the university’s commencement speaker back in April. Despite being hailed by the left as a champion for tolerance and equality, Sarsour has made alarming statements against Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali and anti-Islam activist Brigette Gabriel, which have only furthered the resolve of protesters aiming to get CUNY to rescind the invitation.
Democratic Assemblyman Dov Hikind was among the first to criticize the school's choice of Sarsour as their commencement speaker, citing her continued support for a convicted Palestinian terrorist, Rasmea Odeh, who bombed a supermarket in Israel that took the lives of two civilians in the the late '60s.
The school's announcement garned quite a bit of media attention, even inspiring about 100 Holocaust survivors to pen a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo decrying Sarsour's invitation.
But as the opposition movement to Sarsour’s address grew, so, too, had the counter movement by progressives, who recently held a rally in front of New York’s City Hall to support her right to speech. Which, naturally, led to a clash between the two groups.
The protest was led by a mixture of conservative figureheads, including provocateurs like Pam Geller and Milo Yiannopoulos. Hikind also attended the event and defended his stance against Sarsour, saying, “Why would CUNY have a commencement speaker who supports terrorism?"
In the face of this opposition, several faculty members at CUNY stood up to defend the commencement pick, including the school’s Chancellor James Milliken, who wrote, “The fact that Ms. Sarsour might hold views that are controversial cannot be the basis for withdrawing an invitation to speak.”
While the right to free speech is one of the building blocks of America, it's interesting to note that the same left-wing activists who are now demanding that a terrorist sympathizer be allowed to give the commencement address to a public school are the same ones who regularly attack right-wing speakers who show up to college campuses to give voluntarily-attended speeches. One can only wonder where this support for our First Amendment was when Charles Murray was being attacked at Middleburg College.