Political commentator Alan Dershowitz addressed his upcoming talk at Columbia University on the Middle East scheduled for this week, saying some students and faculty "will try to shout me down," but he is not interested in "a shouting match."
"I agreed several months ago to essentially give a seminar on the complexity of the peace process involving the Middle East," he said in an interview on Newsmax TV that will air Wednesday. "It would be an exchange of views with students, certainly not a shouting match, I don't come to the campus simply to disrupt or to prove a point."
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"I was a professor at Harvard [University] for 50 years, I taught courses on constitutional and other issues, international issues, and there are students who would like to hear my point of view," Dershowitz continued. "Some will agree with me, some will disagree with me, but then there are a group of students, probably some faculty too, who simply don't want me to speak. And they will try to shout me down, they will try to prevent the audience from hearing what I have to say because they think that there's no reason for my views to be present on any university campus."
He told The Washington Free Beacon on Monday, "I am a centrist liberal . . . If protesters try to stop students from hearing my centrist views, it shows how afraid they are of differing perspectives. I'm confident that Columbia University will assure my physical safety and allow the students to listen to me. I invite protesters to ask me hard questions, but I will not be silenced by intolerant censors, either of the extreme left or extreme right."
Dershowitz theorizes that liberals "have always had that Stalinist-left," especially at universities, but that they were silenced during the McCarthy period and have only recently been able to express their views openly.
"Now that they are empowered on campus, and they have intersectionality where they group together with other people, radical feminists, radical supporters of gay rights, radical blacks, they now are the squeaky wheel that can bring universities to a halt. And so, universities have become more tolerant of their censorship.
"I think the center-left has to fight back," he added, "which is one reason why I think I'm a good person to be speaking on college campuses. I'm not any of these extremists on the right, some of whom come to campuses simply to provoke, they have the same rights as I do, possibly, to speak on campus, but I understand why some people might be upset if they don't come with a substantive message. I'm coming with a substantive message, and if they stop me from speaking, there's no limit on who else they can stop from speaking and their target will be liberals."
Dershowitz concluded, "Remember, the greatest enemy of liberals has always been the radical left. The greatest enemy of conservatives has always been the neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan right, and so those of us who are at the center . . . we have to get together, band together, so that free speech is preserved and so the extremists on both sides are marginalized."
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