Recently, on radio shows discussing my book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), I have detailed the hostile reception I got at three campuses this past spring, and suggested that a Gitmo detainee screaming “Death to America” in the middle of those campuses would have been welcomed. Here is an illustration of the truth of what I was saying: a Muslim leader calls for armed insurrection by Muslims and others at CUNY, and I am sure he got a rousing ovation and many affirmations of support. But a counter-jihadist at CUNY, if one were ever to be invited at all, would be treated as if Jack the Ripper were coming to campus. There would be protests, petitions, and he or she would have to come with heavy security or risk being physically attacked. Sekou Odinga and the other Leftists speaking at CUNY had no such worries; nor should they have. College campuses ought to be places where ideas can be freely expressed and discussed on their merits. But if you express a point of view that dissents from the hard-Left line on a campus today, you’re risking academic suicide if you’re a student, and physical injury.
Meanwhile, the very claim that Muslims and the other groups that Odinga names are oppressed in the United States is hysterical, baseless, and designed to foster a sense of grievance that will result in the armed insurrection Odinga wants.
“American Muslim Activist Sekou Odinga: Minorities and Immigrant Communities in the U.S. Have the Right to Armed Struggle and Self-Determination,” MEMRI, June 2, 2017:
American Muslim activist Sekou Odinga said that the “internally oppressed nations” – including the indigenous people, the “New Africans,” Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Hawaiians – had the right to conduct armed struggle for their “self-defense and liberation.” Speaking at the opening plenary session of the annual Left Forum convention, held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, on June 2, Odinga claimed that the U.S. was using the war on terror and the “xenophobic war on immigrants” to repress minorities and immigrant communities. Odinga, who served a long prison sentence for attempted murder and for RICO violations, was presented by moderator Laura Flanders as a former “U.S.-held political prisoner of war.” He said that it was the responsibility of the left to agitate and organize the people “to resist the oppressor state by any and all means.” Other panel members were artist and author Molly Crabapple, journalist and black activist Glen Ford, and American Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour. Oscar Lopez Rivera, a leader of the Puerto Rican FALN paramilitary organization, who was recently released from prison, addressed the audience by phone. A video of the session was posted on the YouTube channel of Other Voices, Other Choices on June 26.
Sekou Odinga: “For the US to acknowledge the existence of political prisoners and prisoners of war would be to admit that there are fundamental injustices that stem from the settler colonialism that built this country, that the internally oppressed nations, the indigenous people, New Africans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Hawaiians, etc., have the right to freedom and self-determination. They have the right to struggle, using whatever tactics and strategies – armed and otherwise – for their self-defense and liberation.
[…]
“Mass incarceration has been used to repress, control, and destroy black self-determination, in the same way that the war on poverty and the war on drugs was used. This is the same way that the war on terror and the xenophobic war on immigrants is being used to control and repress Muslims and immigrant communities today. These are strategies of war, meant to dismantle, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize poor working-class families and communities. They are meant to prevent self-determination and the potential for militant resistance.
[…]
“It is the responsibility of the left to educate, agitate, organize the people, especially young people, to resist the oppressor state by any and all means.”