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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/12/15

How Pro-Israel Fanatics Have Teamed up with Right-Wing Operatives to Crush Free Speech on Campus

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Reprinted from Alternet


Co-written by Julia Carmel

A McCarthyite "underground operation" to silence speech critical of Israel has a wider anti-progressive agenda.


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This is part four of a four-part investigation. Read parts one, two and three.

At a Texas Retreat convened last June by long-time neoconservative agitator David Horowitz, a baby-faced operative named Charlie Kirk outlined an "undercover, underground plan" to "control student funding," "censor professors" and "get rid of free speech zones." His plan focused on channeling right-wing money into a full-bore attack on the grassroots movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel as a means to pressure the country into respecting Palestinian human rights, known as BDS. The BDS movement has spread across US campuses and European capitals since it was devised by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005.

Described by the National Journal as "the future of the conservative movement," the 21-year-old Kirk is rapidly emerging as one the most influential right-wing campus organizers. Speaking before an audience of hundreds of conservative activists in a hotel ballroom in Dallas, Kirk laid out a strikingly authoritarian vision to systematically eradicate progressive political culture from American universities.

"What we're doing in states like California, Massachusetts and New York, is we're starting...a rather undercover, underground operation that is designed for one purpose only," Kirk explained. "And that is to run -- and win -- Student Government Association races the same way we look at Congressional campaigns. If we can successfully retake the student governments...on these really, really far left campuses such as UC-Irvine, UCLA, and we run the student government association races with the same money, time, energy and resources [as] we do a Congressional campaign, then we can start to see...an effective, neutralizing factor on these campuses. You can control student funding, you can censor professors, you can get rid of free speech zones, you can then balance the curriculum, you then can use your student government post as a bully pulpit."

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