DePaul president actually compares Black Lives Matter protesters to the heroes of WWII

DePaul president actually compares Black Lives Matter protesters to the heroes of WWII May 31, 2016

How could someone in such a high position fall so low as to actually compare Black Lives Matter protesters to the brave men who faced down the deadly guns of the Nazis as they stormed the beaches of Normandy to fight for the world’s freedom?

But that’s exactly what DePaul University’s president Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider has done in a response to a recent event held on campus by the school’s Conservative Republicans.

Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos was invited to speak at the event but was interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists who ran onstage, violently grabbed the microphone and shut down free speech. (Click here to view all that happened.)

Holtschneider, who happened to be visiting Normandy at the time of the incident, wrote a letter expressing his disappointment in how it all played out. Yet, he mostly condemned the conservatives and praised the protesters for having “noble goals” similar to the WWII soldiers he was honoring during his visit to the memorial sites. It’s an unfathomable comparison.

For three full paragraphs, the president rails against Yiannopoulos’s conservative beliefs and how he views the controversial figure as nothing more than a provocateur, whose only goal is to “discredit the moral high ground claimed by [his] opponents.”

The “moral high ground?” As in threatening to punch him in the face?

So, now that Holtschneider got that out of the way, he moved on to more important business like saying the BLM supporters shouldn’t have disrupted the event and allowed Yiannopoulos to speak. Thanks, but the First Amendment granted that right.

“I was ashamed for DePaul University when I saw a student rip the microphone from the hands of the conference moderator and wave it in the face of our speaker,” he wrote.

But even though Holtschneider condemned the protesters out of one side of his mouth, he complemented them out of the other — “noble,” just like the heroes of WWII:

Here in Normandy, I expected to be moved by the generosity of those who gave their lives on the beaches early on June 6, 1944. I did not expect, however, to be shocked when I realized that most of the soldiers were the same ages as our students today.  The rows on rows of white crosses in the American cemetery speak to the selflessness of the human spirit at early adulthood to lay down their lives for a better world.

I realize that many of yesterday’s protesters hold similarly noble goals for a more inclusive world for those traditionally held aside by our society.  I realize also that these young soldiers died for all the freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech and assembly.  ​We honor their sacrifice best if we, too, remember and honor all the rights of human freedom, even as we fight for more freedom and justice for all.

This would all be unbelievable if it weren’t true and this cancer is spreading throughout American campuses. The targets are free speech and conservatism; the perpetrators: social justice students and administrators like President Holtschneider.


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