Karina Garcia is a thug.
Garcia, you may recall, is a Columbia University senior and president of the school’s Chicano Caucus. She was the ringleader of last October’s anti-Minuteman demonstration, when students stormed the stage in the middle of a presentation by the anti-immigration group. Last week, she faced a disciplinary hearing that could determine her fate at the university.
So Garcia is more than just an intellectual thug. She is a violent thug as well.
From the start, Garcia’s plan was not to thoughtfully offer a different point of view than that espoused by The Minutemen, but to prevent members of the group from speaking. In an e-mail sent a week before the event, she pronounced that, “These bigots and their backward views are NOT welcome here!” demonstrating the first symptom of someone with a screw loose by using all capital letters in an e-mail.
Considering Garcia’s totalitarian political affiliations, it should come as no surprise that she would engage in such bullying tactics. Garcia has worked for ANSWER, (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a Stalinist organization that has defended the likes of Kim Jong Il. I have attended ANSWER rallies in the past and heard its leaders praise Hezbollah. And taking a break from studies last semester, she traveled the country with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, whatever that is.
I hold no grief for The Minutemen. I find their rhetoric hysterical and parts of their ideology downright creepy. Yet they represent a fascinating trend in American politics: citizens forcing an issue into the mainstream media almost entirely on their own.
I would have jumped at the chance to hear them speak and hundreds of people in the Columbia University community did just that, filling up a large auditorium. Responsible liberal organizations like the College Democrats encouraged their members to attend the event and challenge the Minutemen. But Garcia and her fellow hooligans ruined the opportunity for a productive discussion about immigration.
As someone who graduated from Yale in May, this incident came as no surprise. In my time, leftists disrupted speeches by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Middle East Scholar Daniel Pipes.
By contrast, when the anti-Semitic poet Amiri Baraka (who claims that Israel warned its citizens to steer clear of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11) was invited and applauded by members of the Yale African-American Cultural House, no one ever threatened his right to speak.
I attended his talk with other concerned students, and we sat respectfully through his hourlong tirade so as to ask questions afterwards. Even though the former poet laureate of New Jersey said I had “constipation of the face” and required a “brain enema” for my visible expression of dismay at his bigotry, I did not feel the urge to storm the platform and shout him down.
In fact, I defy anyone to find a single example of students stifling the speech of a liberal speaker at an American college campus, as liberal students routinely do and have done for decades.
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment legal scholar, has a very easy decision to make. To maintain its good name, the university has no choice but to expel Garcia and her cohort.
James Kirchick is assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.
