Liberals have an obligation to condemn Antifa and other “hard-left radicals” using violence to push their agenda, Alan Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz, appearing with Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning, admonished fellow liberals not to coddle left-wingers who attack monuments to Confederates and other historical figures of the country.
“Do not glorify the violent people who are now tearing down the statues. Many of these people – not all of them – many of these people are trying to tear down America. Antifa is a radical, anti-American, anti-free-market, communist, socialist, hard, hard-left, censorial organization that tries to stop speakers on campuses from speaking. They use violence. And just because they’re opposed to fascism and to some of these monuments shouldn’t make them heroes of the liberals,” Dershowitz said. (The comment is at 3:22 of the video.)
Dershowitz made a distinction between Confederate memorials erected in certain Southern states as a means of opposing civil rights during the 1960s and memorials erected at other times and for other reasons. The anti-civil-rights monuments may belong in a museum to teach students about how monuments can be used “to glorify negatives and to hold back positive developments,” he said.
“But the idea of willy-nilly going through and doing what Stalin did, just erasing history and rewriting it to serve current purposes, does pose a danger, and it poses a danger of educational malpractice, of missing opportunities to educate people, and of going too far,” Dershowitz said during the interview with Kilmeade.
Dershowitz also criticized President Donald Trump for his comments on Charlottesville during a press conference in New York City on Tuesday, August 15. Trump condemned both sides for violence that erupted two weekends ago.
“One of the reasons I was critical of President Trump when he suggested a moral equivalence — he didn’t quite say it — was that he has a special obligation to condemn organizations that claim to speak in his name,” Dershowitz said, referring specifically to white nationalists David Duke and Richard Spencer.
“So left-liberals should be attacking the hard left, and centrist-conservatives should be attacking the extremists on the hard right,” Dershowitz said on Fox and Friends.
