Does YOUR Freedom Of Speech Entitle You To Deprive A Pro-Israel Speaker Of THEIRS?

No, it doesn't.
Not even if you are preventing a pro-Israel speaker from speaking.

Not surprisingly, the 10 Muslim students who shouted down Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren and prevented him from speaking think they did a great thing.

Until the 10 Muslim students were found guilty of disrupting Michael Oren's speech:

In an emotional conclusion to a case that generated national debate over free speech rights, a jury on Friday found 10 Muslim students guilty of disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine last year.


Although the students faced up to a year in jail on the misdemeanor charges, they instead were placed on three years of informal probation, and ordered to perform 56 hours of community service.

District Attorney Tony Rackauckas issued a statement afterward in which he called the students' disruptions "censorship by a few."

Also not surprising: the same people who think that killing civilians qualifies as "resistance" and that freedom of speech is great as long as you don't talk about Islam--are now giving their own special interpretation of freedom of speech:

"Absolutely unbelievable," Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, said of the verdict. "I believe the heart of America has died today."

Maybe it would make sense to consult someone who actually knows something about American Law:

Legal scholars such as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, agreed with the university's punishment noting that speech used to squelch another's First Amendment right is not constitutionally protected.

But he and others were critical of Rackauckas bringing criminal charges. "It's unnecessarily divisive," Chemerinsky said Friday. "Now this keeps it an open wound." [emphasis added]

The argument then is a question of degree, not of the law itself.
Personally, I am not as concerned with the potential of "an open wound" as I am with the fact that now there is a precedent that you cannot use your freedom of speech just in order to shut someone else down.

As far as the claim by the lawyers for the defendants that the sentence would "stifle student activism at colleges nationwide"--if that is what those lawyers honestly believe, they don't know anything about college students.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Free Speech.