Front Page Exclusive Interview with Chuck DeVore

At FrontPage Magazine, "The Battle for California":

FPM: I’d like to start off with a local California issue. After the Muslim Student Union at the University of California at Irvine last month disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, you sent a letter to school’s chancellor, Michael Drake, urging him to ban the MSU from campus. Why did you decide to get involved in the controversy over the MSU and why did you call for a ban on the group at the UCI campus?

DeVore: The MSU has been complaining that this is a controversy created by outsiders who are calling for their punishment. But I am not an outsider. I represent a district that’s home to UCI and I’ve been following this issue closely for quite some time.
For years, the MSU has been bringing in speakers – people like [Hamas and Hezbollah supporter] Malik Ali – who call for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews. Unfortunately, the school has long had a walking-on-eggshells policy when it comes to the MSU. For instance, it allows them to ban recording of their events, which of course prevents people from finding out about the kinds of things that are said at those events. In the past, if you tried to record something at an MSU event, their members would surround you, and they would get the campus officials to drag you away. UC Irvine is the only UC campus that allows the MSU to get away with this.

It’s different for conservative students. When the College Republicans and conservative students tried to show the Dutch cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2006, the MSU complained and the school initially tried to shut down the event because of threats of violence. At the time, I told Chancellor Drake, “If you shut down this event, in a few years time you’ll have the equivalent of Sharia law on campus.” Eventually, the administration issued a wishy-washy statement of support for free speech, saying that if the students went ahead with it the school wouldn’t shut them down.

The MSU, on the other hand, has repeatedly violated school policy – and gotten away with it. In 2007, the MSU packed a room with protestors when Daniel Pipes was giving a speech. I showed up for that event, not only because I’m interested in Pipes’s work, but because I knew there would be trouble. And there was. The MSU’s members had duct tape over their mouths and they said that they would not be silenced and tried to shut down the event. That was a violation of university policy.

Then, last May, the MSU hosted a fundraising event with George Galloway where they were videotaped passing around a hat for donations to Hamas. First, this is a violation of UCI policy about fundraising on campus. Second, this is a violation of federal law prohibiting raising money for groups on the State Department’s designated list of terrorist groups. It’s not a hard list to figure out and Hamas, as I recall, is on it.

My understanding of radical Islamic thought is that if you keep giving them ground they will keep on taking it. That’s what happened last month when the MSU tried to shut down a speech by [Israeli ambassador to the United States] Michael Oren. Before he could even get his speech launched, 11 of them, all members of the MSU, including its president, stand up and start yelling. Finally they were taken away and arrested. This comes at the end of a very long string of abuses.

So this is something we need to deal with. The MSU at UCI is the most virulent and the most militant of the Islamist groups on American campuses today.

FPM: Why do you think UCI has not dealt with it? More generally, surveying the modern university scene, you could make a compelling case that universities have been too-tolerant of the MSU and kindred groups. What does that say about the current state of academia?

DeVore: It’s not just an issue of tolerance. It’s politically correct behavior that you find in some – not all – academic departments, especially in the social sciences. It’s a vision of the world in which America and Israel are cast as imperialist powers, where Zionism is racism, and where the MSU is a member of a noble, persecuted minority that deserves support, and even encouragement, for standing up to these evils. What the MSU has in common with these academics is that they both see the world through the same lens.

The rest is here.