There is a danger of "going too far" when it comes to calls to remove statues of founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who were slave owners, Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday.
"We have to use this as an educational moment," Dershowitz told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "We have to take some of the statues that were put up more recently, for example, during the civil rights movement and perhaps move them to museums where they can be used to teach young students about how statues are intended sometimes for bad purposes, to glorify negatives and to hold back positive developments."
However, Dershowitz said he does not like the idea of "willy-nilly" erasing history, like Joseph Stalin did.
"[It] poses a danger, educational malpractice, of missing opportunities to educate people, and of going too far," said Dershowitz.
Dershowitz also noted that by erasing the legacies of presidents who have acted in ways that are problematic for today's generations, the implication is that it's only that certain behavior that is remembered when thinking about the nation's forebearers.
"Remember that President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt put 110,000 Japanese Americans into detention centers, that the president of Harvard imposed anti-Jewish quotas," said Dershowitz. "Discrimination against women was rampant."
And once the history of African-Americans is rewritten, he continued, "you have to start rewriting the history of many, many other groups."
The United States is a nation of immigrants, Dershowitz said, and that also included discrimination against them.
"The important thing is, do not glorify the violent people who are now tearing down the statues," said Dershowitz. "Many of these people, not all of them, many of these people are trying to tear down America."
Radical Americans, including "anti-free market Communists, socialists, hard, hard-left organizations that try to stop speakers on campuses from speaking, they use violence," said the law professor. "Just because they're opposed to fascism and to some of these monuments shouldn't make them heroes of the liberals."
Dershowitz said he's a liberal, and he thinks it's the obligation of other liberals to speak out against the "hard-left radicals," as it's the "obligation of conservatives to speak out against the extremism of the hard right."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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