Breibart’s Ben Shapiro talks to USC GOP

Seeing red · USC College Republicans hosted Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of Breitbart and founder of Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting ,Wednesday. – Jessica Zhou | Daily Trojan

The USC College Republicans hosted Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of Breitbart and founder of Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting, who spoke about anti-Semitism on college campuses across the United States.

“I’m here specifically to talk about the attempt to stop the Jihad,” Shapiro said. “I’m here to talk about what’s going on on campuses across the country like USC, where idiot leftists are doing idiot things, which is what they always do.”

Jacob Ellenhorn, president of the College Republicans, said that it is important that his club bring “controversial speakers” like Shapiro to campus.

“USC and the administration is not interested in bringing diverse speakers to campus,” Ellenhorn said. “They’re interested in bringing speakers who represent the major viewpoint on campus and not really bringing anyone else. That’s evident through the speakers USC has brought in the past. I think that unless there’s a drastic change in campus culture, nothing’s going to change.”

Shapiro began by saying the left has the tendency to accuse people who speak the truth of being racists, bigots, homophobic or Islamophobic. He then explained what he identified as the two goals of the left: ending Islamophobia and destroying Israel, which he went on to argue demonstrates a moral contradiction.

“Israel is a democracy,” Shapiro said. “For all of its flaws, Israel is a significantly tolerant country compared to any other country in the Middle East. Israel is a beacon of liberty in a region of darkness, and if you’re going to go after Israel and you’re going to take out everything Israel does and call it a brutal human rights violator, in order to do that, you have to remove all the context — the context being the region in which Israel exists and the people with which Israel has to deal.”

Shapiro said the left ignores the fact that Islamic countries are not supportive of other tenets of its agenda, such as gay rights, abortion, women’s equality and women’s suffrage.

“These are not places leftists would like to live,” Shapiro said. “If you were to take the LGBT club on campus and plop it down in the middle of Saudi Arabia, it would last all of two minutes. If you were to take the feminist club here and dump them in the middle of Iran, that would not be a pleasant experience. The average lifespan would diminish largely.”

Shapiro argued that the left needs to understand that the United States will never be taken down by Islamic radicalism because Western civilization is too powerful. According to him, the U.S. is the most powerful country with an extraordinary military force. He emphasized that if the United States were to be defeated, it would be defeated not by forces of radical Islam, but by a left that allows it to win.

The conversation then moved to President Barack Obama and the left’s concern over rising Islamophobia. Shapiro argued that, for the left, equality of outcome is the only thing that matters, not equality of opportunity or behavior; the left’s idea is that if one country is successful and another is not, the unsuccessful country must have been exploited.

“Believing [in] equality of outcome means you end up siding with people who are bad. The truth is, as a general rule, [if] you make responsible decisions, you tend to end up with a better outcome. This is true internationally and this is true in your personal life as well,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro spoke about what he believes is fueling rampant anti-Semitism in the United States. The left, which according to Shapiro is largely based on Marxism, looks at Israel and sees an outpost of Western colonialism: Israel has money, high-rises, and nightclubs — things that Shapiro said leads the left to believe that Israel must have exploited someone.

Additionally, Shapiro argued that evil is not just “something out there fostered by the actions of psychopaths.” In his opinion, evil comes from a place that is common: ideology. For radical Islamists, he claimed that their “ends-justifies-the-means” ideology leads to them performing evil in order to achieve “Islamic utopia.”

Toward the end of the discussion, Shapiro talked about U.S. involvement in the Middle East and its implications on the expansion of ISIS.

“Obama is a very dangerous man for Israel and the United States,” Shapiro said. “If the U.S. had not pulled thousands of troops out [of] the border meant to contain ISIS, chances are lower that ISIS would exist [in this extent] today. The question is what to do now, and the left’s favorite thing to do before calling you a racist or a bigot is shouting out ‘Bush’ at random intervals.”