Charlie Kirk Criticizes Efforts to ‘Deport’ and ‘Imprison’ Critics of Israel: ‘Won’t Make Antisemitism Go Away’
Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via AP Images
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk criticized former U.S. ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman on Wednesday after Friedman celebrated President Donald Trump’s recent crackdowns on critics of Israel and encouraged him to “deport” and “imprison” them.
Reacting to a clip in which Friedman boasted that the Trump administration had “cut off hundreds of millions of dollars” to “the most anti-Semitic universities on campus,” and had “begun deporting illegal aliens” who “advocate for the destruction of Israel,” Kirk wrote:
No non-Jewish person my age has a longer or clearer record of support for Israel, sympathy with the Jewish people, or opposition to antisemitism than I do. I regularly refer to antisemitism as a “lie from the pit of Hell,” because it is. But I have to disagree with Amb. Friedman here.
The First Amendment and our strict freedom of speech is one of America’s greatest rights and sets us apart from every other country in the world. One of the central promises of Trump’s 2024 campaign was to restore and protect American freedom of speech.
Five years ago, our elites tried to destroy free speech in America in order to stop “racism.” Immediately and predictably, stopping “racism” became a justification for wrecking our cities and wrecking the lives of people who did nothing wrong. Simultaneously, in the name of stopping “transphobia,” they tried to make it impossible to dissent against the mutilation of children or radical gender propaganda in schools.
He argued, “Racism and antisemitism are both evil and must be opposed. But a government organized around jailing, impoverishing, or silencing people based on ‘racism’ is what our enemies wanted. We should not repeat their mistakes just because some keffiyeh-wearing communists are protesting on campuses.”
Kirk continued, “If you don’t like a person’s opinion that doesn’t mean they are an antisemite. But once ‘antisemitism’ becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as antisemitic — the same way the left labeled all kinds of statements as ‘racist’ to justify silencing their opposition.”
He concluded, “Not only that, but all of this won’t even work: A legal crackdown won’t make antisemitism go away. In the long run, it would make it worse! America’s free speech tradition is our birthright. We should never get rid of it.”
In the clip which Kirk reacted to, Friedman urged President Trump to “imprison” and “deport” critics of Israel and others accused of anti-Semitism.
“We’re not gonna win their hearts and minds because they don’t have hearts and they don’t have minds,” he claimed. “But we can deport them, we can put them in jail, we can make their lives miserable, we can cut off their funding, and that’s what the Trump administration is doing for the first time.”
