Fox News analyst Leslie Marshall took umbrage Thursday with comments made by a former Bush administration official accusing her of equating Islamophobia and antisemitism.
Police removed anti-Israel protesters from a plaza at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) early Thursday morning and a building at Columbia University Tuesday night as the protests turned violent. Marshall took offense after Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration, criticized liberals over the protests on college campuses when Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked for his thoughts after displaying a photo of a statue of George Washington that had been defaced by anti-Israel protesters at George Washington University (GWU).
“That picture of that statue just proves these people don’t just hate Jews, they don’t just hate Israel, they hate America,” Thiessen said before turning to comments Marshall made earlier in the segment. “They are anti-American protests as well as antisemitic protests. And Joe Biden, I know Leslie saw – said she saw anti-Islam of some kind a few here and there, the problem on our campuses right now is not Islamophobia, it is the biggest outbreak of antisemitism we’ve seen in this country’s modern history and for Joe Biden to go out and claim and do the two sides thing that he condemned Donald Trump for, say, you know, there are bad people on both sides of this protest is ridiculous.”
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“These people are hateful, they are harassing Jewish students, they are shutting down campuses and preventing people from graduating, they’re preventing Jewish students from accessing education they paid for,” Thiessen continued. “They are yelling at them go back to Poland. Can you imagine if their people saying back to Africa to black students on these campuses? The problem on these campuses, Leslie is not anti-Islamophobia, it is an antisemitism problem. Everything else saying or pointing into one or two sides is just a distraction.”
Marshall cut MacCallum off to respond to Thiessen.
“That’s not the majority,” she said before an awkward pause ensued as MacCallum tried to get a word in edgewise.
“It’s the majority of the protest,” Thiessen asserted.
After a pause, Marshall then resumed her comments.
“Certainly that’s not the majority of the protesters on any of these campuses,” Marshall responded. “And by the way there are numerous Jews that are also pro-Palestinian or supporting pro- Palestinian movement, you know, they want to cease-fire in Gaza. I think it’s extremely disingenuous to say every single Jewish person who is pro- Palestinian is anti-Semitic.”
Tensions at UCLA increased after video was posted to social media Monday showing a Jewish student being blocked from crossing the plaza occupied by the anti-Israel protesters.
The anti-Israel protesters have opposed Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack by the radical Islamic terrorist group Hamas that killed over 1,200 people. Protesters at multiple demonstrations at Ivy League schools since the attack have made statements like “resistance is justified,” including an Oct. 15 protest where attendees chanted a slogan that has connotations of wiping out Israel after a Cornell University professor called the attacks “exhilarating.”
