Student protesters shut down a Tuesday night College Republican event featuring anti-Islamist commentator Tommy Robinson.
Protesters first blocked entrances to the Columbia University event, then drowned Robinson out with noise, reported Campus Reform.
More than 200 people indicated they went to the protest and more than 300 people indicated they were interested, according to a Facebook event page. The protesters prevented Robinson, who was supposed to Skype in to address the Columbia auditorium, from delivering his address.
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The protest organizers called Robinson the founder of “the far-right Islamophobic hate group English Defense League.” They chanted “Black Lives Matter” and “whose campus? our campus” at the event.
“When Colin Kaepernick is out of a job, when the president of the United States calls Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, where is our free speech?” said one student protester at the event. The student thanked university community members who came to the protest to”f***ing propose an alternative to this bulls**t, to say no, and to fight back.”
Robinson never gave his prepared remarks. He instead engaged in some back-and-forth with protesters.
“The people you call ‘far-right,’ the people you call ‘fascist’ are defending the points that you’re supposed to defend because you have failed so miserably across the whole of Europe,” Robinson said to the protesters at one point. “We have gay people being persecuted in the U.K. Homophobic attacks have gone up 700 percent in Muslim communities. So, we have all of these issues and it’s left to the so-called ‘far-right.'”
Robinson complimented President Donald Trump for opposing Middle East invasions.
My full speech I had prepared before antifa tried to prevent it will be uploaded in the coming days pic.twitter.com/33bg2T684O
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) October 11, 2017
“I’m very depressed with how the event with. I realize free speech is dead,” said Ari Boosalis, College Republicans president, to Campus Reform. “People were disrespectful, they were flipping off, they were not willing to have a conversation, all they wanted to do was yell ‘white supremacy!’ and call me a white supremacist. The protesters never wanted to be challenged.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to Columbia for comment but received none in time for press.
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