Last week, justice was done when an Orange County jury convicted 10 U.C. Irvine students on misdemeanor charges of disrupting and conspiring to disrupt a campus speech by Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
The students, seven from U.C. Irvine, three from U.C. Riverside and many of them members of the Muslim Student Union at U.C. Irvine, will serve no jail time. They are free on probation, and must perform 56 hours of community service.
This sounds like a slap on the wrist, which is what they deserved.
That didn’t stop one Southern California Muslim community leader from telling the Los Angeles Times after the verdict, “The heart of America has died today.”
To review the facts, on Feb. 8, 2010, Ambassador Michael Oren spoke on the U.C. Irvine campus. Prior to the event, the Muslim Student Union organized an email campaign to pack the house for a planned disruption. In other words, conspiracy.
One of those emails, made public during the trial, urged Muslim Student Union members to show Oren that he cannot “just go to a campus and say whatever he wants.”
During his speech, Oren was repeatedly heckled with cries of “Mass murderer!” “War criminal!” and “How many Palestinians did you kill?” Oren walked off the stage twice. Though he ultimately completed his speech, a planned Q&A session was cancelled.
The university disciplined the students and suspended the Muslim Student Union for a quarter. However, prosecutors determined that the students had crossed a legal line.
During the trial, defense attorneys compared their clients to Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez.
What an affront to the memory of those great civil rights leaders.
When black activists sat at Southern all-white lunch counters or staged nonviolent sit-ins back in the 1960s, they knew they would be arrested and jailed. They knew they would face the full brunt of the Jim Crow laws, and yet bravely withstood it in their fight against true injustice.
Compare that behavior to the so-called Irvine 10. They whined that they were being punished for exercising their free speech rights. Yet shutting down Oren’s free speech is precisely what they were convicted of in court.
They and their supporters whimpered over the convictions as if they expected the law to coddle their hateful antics. The legal system doesn’t work that way. The students made their case and a jury found them guilty. Deal with it.
The heart of America did not die last week. It beats stronger then ever, affirming that in a marketplace of ideas such as a university, all sides get a chance to be heard and thuggish behavior deserves to punished.