Staff Editorial: A Season of Student Dissent

On the heels of Howard's own political protest, participants in a February 2010 protest at the University of California Irvine (UC Irvine) have just received the cold shoulder from the California legal system. Ten Muslim students, part of a group that came to be known as the "Irvine 11," have been found guilty of "conspiring" to "disrupt" and of subsequently disrupting a speech that Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, gave at UC Irvine early last year. (Charges against the eleventh student will be dismissed as long as he completes community service hours.) The decision has sparked a debate over the right to freedom of speech and of increasing discrimination against Muslims in the United States.

Several of the students involved were members of the Muslim Student Union. Seven of those who faced charges are from UC Irvine, and three are from UC Riverside. According to NBC News, the students were accused of disrupting the Israeli Ambassador's speech by standing and shouting statements of disapproval, such as ‘you sir, are an accomplice to genocide,' at different points during his speech, in a planned and collaborative effort. They were said to have been careful to make sure that their outbursts seemed as though they were singular acts, and not collective plans of the Muslim Student Union. (California law prohibits the intentional disruption of any legal ‘assembly or meeting' as well as ‘conspiracy to commit a crime.')

Students were reminded of conduct rules for the forum after the initial outburst, but continued. All eleven students left the event after expressing their disdain. They were then arrested. UC Irvine also disciplined the students and placed the Muslim Student Union on probation for two years.

Supporters of the students, legally and otherwise, feel that the students' rights to freedom of speech were violated, but prosecutors argued that the students' themselves hindered the expression of free speech. That argument is both interesting and true, but doesn't the person who yells "boooooo!!!!!" during a bad performance do the same thing? Is it not that person's right to express discontent, even if it impedes the performer's expression? It might be rude, but is it criminal? If that's the case, then ninety percent of Howard students should be arrested after Yardfest.

Lawyers for the students also argued that because the rules of conduct prohibited such outbursts, the students' only means of protest was taken away from them. Although we don't know all of the circumstances surrounding the plans prior to the event, we can think of other ways to protest that might have made the ‘willful disturbance' part of the California law a little more difficult to prove: organizing a boycott of the event, distributing literature there, holding up signs, asking pertinent questions during any question and answer session that might have taken place, etc. At the same time, we wonder if the response would've been equally as drastic if a group of protestors spoke out during a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speech.

(Don't mess with Uncle Sam's friends though, right?)

As future world leaders, it our right and our responsibility to make our voices heard. Legal and academic censorship contradicts the purpose of education by making dissent unnecessarily difficult.

Our View: Whether or not the "Irvine 11" chose the best course of action to express their views, the level of punishment that they received for expressing political disapproval is excessive and disappointing.