MARBLEHEAD — Former advisor to Barack Obama and Marblehead native Robert Wolf warned that free speech is beginning to turn into “threatening speech” during a segment about protests throughout the country against the Israel-Hamas war that aired on Fox News.
Wolf was joined on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” by fellow Fox News contributors Karl Rove and Paul Mauro to discuss the protests while looking at live footage of protests at Columbia University on Thursday. MacCallum referenced quotes from Columbia professors who have been under fire for statements they have made since the beginning of the war.
According to Fox News, Joseph Massad, a professor at Columbia, mentioned the “stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance” in reference to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Another professor there, Mohamed Abdou, allegedly said, “I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”
During a hearing of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, Columbia President Minouche Shafik said that Massad and another professor, Katherine Franke, are under investigation for allegedly making “discriminatory remarks.” She also said that Abdou will not teach at Columbia again.
MacCallum asked Wolf what he thinks about “how we got here and what these professors have been teaching a lot of these students.”
“These tenured professors should be fired for cause,” Wolf said. “I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that’s what these universities are looking at. We’ve moved from free speech to hate speech, and then hate speech to violent speech, and violent speech to threatening speech.”
Wolf added that “we’ve passed the line of what’s legal.”
Massad, in a statement released after the hearing, said that his words have been mischaracterized and taken out of context.
Wolf also mentioned Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, a movement with the goal of ending “international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.” While Wolf stated that he is not a supporter of BDS, he mentioned that people have the right to “boycott, divest, and sanction Israel on being an apartheid state by some people’s views” through free speech.
However, he said that since the Oct. 7 attacks, the line has been crossed.
“That’s moved past that after Oct. 7 and we know right from wrong,” Wolf said. “We’re seeing it live with you, and that’s wrong.”
