Right now, there's something called "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" going on at several colleges around the country. Speakers include Ann Coulter, Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch, and David Horowitz, among others.
Last night, Horowitz's speech was shut down by a bunch of protesters who literally shouted him down. Eventually, they canceled his speech. Who were the protesters? Several students, Islamic groups, and leftist organizations.
So left-leaning organizations and muslim groups united to shut down a speech opposing their viewpoint. At a university, where the speaker had been invited to speak. Apparently, many of the protesters were not students or faculty, either--they were members of professional protest groups. So they were outsiders to begin with.
The event happened, and the speech was canceled. The question is, were the protesters right to drive Horowitz off the stage? From the videos, it was pretty intense. Not as intense as the Minuteman speech where the protesters jumped on the stage and had a physical confrontation with the speaker, but still intense. In another article I read about this event, some of the protesters claimed that Horowitz had the right to speak, and they had the right to disrupt his speech. But is that correct--the protesters basically made sure no one could hear Horowitz's speech. Whose right to free speech is most important--the speaker and the people who wanted to listen to the speaker, or those who wanted to make sure no one else could hear the speaker?
And while many here probably think that shutting down Horowitz is a good idea, what does this say--that people can disrupt a speaker's speech because they don't like the content? What if a bunch of College Republicans had come in to Ahmadinejad at Columbia and shouted him down--would that have been okay?
It's a bit troubling the recent spate of protests that shout down or attempt to silence Conservative speakers at campuses around the country. From literal attacks on the speaker (the Minuteman incident), to pies, to several attempts to make sure the conservative speaker cannot be heard--this is a troubling pattern of events. I'm not aware of any corresponding "shout them down" attempts at a progressive speaker rally. There's protests, and attempts to get the speaker uninvited, but once the speech starts as far as I know the speaker is left to make his or her speech.
If left-leaning ideas are correct, then why should anyone be afraid of hearing conservative ideas? If you don't like the speaker, try to get them uninvited, but once they are there, is it right to attempt to make sure no one can hear them?
And it doesn't at all help the left leaning cause to have a bunch of leftists apparently acting like speech police and in a thuggish manner.
What do you think?
ETA: there was a question or two raised in the comments about whether this was to have a Q&A session afterwards. I emailed the event organizer (the College Republicans--I don't believe Emory is actually commenting on this right now), and this is what I received in reply:
We were accepting question cards before and during the speech. Unfortunately, some members of the audience were not interested in asking questions, only preventing others from having their questions answered.
We initially were going to have an open microphone or two for the audience, however it turns out we made a wise decision in not doing that. My thought was that this would give more people a chance to be heard, rather than one person taking an exorbitant amount of time and not leaving room for others. Also, we didn't screen the cards before hand.
I talked to a number of people after the event- both liberals and conservatives- who were furious that the protestors kept Horowitz from answering their questions.
So, all this to answer your question: yes there was a Q&A session to follow the speech. Unfortunately we never got to it, and those who broke the rules kept those who had legitimately left question cards from being heard.
So it sounds like that 1) they had some form of Q&A and two, they weren't screening anything.