University of Florida President Ben Sasse Blasts ‘Asinine Entitlement’ Of Pro-Hamas Protesters

 Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), now the president of the University of Florida, slammed pro-Hamas demonstrators this week who have created chaos on college campuses across the U.S. and the weak leadership at the universities that has allowed the behavior to happen.

Sasse’s remarks come after the school released a statement early in the week revealing that numerous arrests were made on campus because the school would not tolerate disorderly conduct that was in violation of the school’s policies.

“Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust,” he wrote in an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal. “Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.”

Sasse said that parents were right to be angered over the “asinine entitlement of these activists and the embarrassing timidity of many college administrators.”

He said that at the University of Florida, the message that the school sends to parents and the future employers of college students is that “the adults are still in charge.”

“To cherish the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly, we draw a hard line at unlawful action,” he said. “Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. Just as we have an obligation to protect speech, we have an obligation to keep our students safe. Throwing fists, storming buildings, vandalizing property, spitting on cops and hijacking a university aren’t speech.”

He said that school’s making empty threats to quell bad behavior is not effective and only serves to embolden those who are violating policies.

“Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere,” he said. “Moving classes online is a retreat that penalizes students and rewards protesters. Participating in live-streamed struggle sessions doesn’t promote honest, good-faith discussion. Universities need to be strong defenders of the entire community, including students in the library on the eve of an exam, and stewards of our fundamental educational mission.”

He said that the school made the rules clear to the protesters who were on campus, and many of them decided that the consequences were worth it and have since been arrested and thrown off campus.

“We said it. We meant it. We enforced it,” he said. “We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas.”

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He said that schools needed to “recommit themselves to real education” instead of focusing on identity politics and other woke nonsense.

He continued:

Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism.

The results are now on full display. Students steeped in this dogma chant violent slogans like “by any means necessary.” Any? Paraglider memes have replaced Che Guevara T-shirts. But which paragliders—the savages who raped teenage girls at a concert? “From the river to the sea.” Which river? Which sea?

Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand. For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. Posting about your “allergen-free” tent on the quad is a lot easier than doing real work to uplift the downtrodden.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis set the tone in the state regarding what behavior would not be tolerated on college campuses in the aftermath of the October 7 terrorist attack.

Just a couple of weeks after the attack, DeSantis ordered the state to crack down on collegiate student groups that showed support for Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood terrorist attack.

The governor directed Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, to send notices to the University of Florida and the University of South Florida notifying them that they must deactivate their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) because they allegedly broke Florida laws about terrorism.

“During a holy Jewish holiday, the recognized terrorist organization, Hamas, launched an unprovoked attack on Israel – among those killed were babies, women, and elderly,” Rodrigues said in a letter to the presidents of Florida’s public universities. “To date, approximately 1,400 Israelis have been killed, including 31 American citizens. Governor DeSantis, our State University System and the Florida College System have condemned these attacks.”

In response to the Palestinian Islamic terrorist attack, “National Students for Justice in Palestine (National SJP) released a ‘toolkit’ which refers to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as ‘the resistance’ and unequivocally states: ‘Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement,’” the letter said.

The letter noted that under Florida law, it is a felony to “knowingly provide material support . . . to a designated foreign terrorist organization. . .” Hamas is designated by the Untied States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

“Here, National SJP has affirmatively identified it is part of the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—a terrorist led attack,” the letter continued, later adding: “Based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism, in consultation with Governor DeSantis, the student chapters must be deactivated.”

The letter concluded by saying that Florida will continue to monitor events on college campuses and will be “using all tools at our disposal to crack down on campus demonstrations that delve beyond protected First Amendment speech into harmful support for terrorist groups.”