Gov. Ron DeSantis is sounding off about campus protesters, and they are sounding off right back, with “Free Palestine” and other related chants soundtracking a press event Wednesday.
The Florida Governor started his day in Gainesville at the University of Florida, where he was greeted by pro-Palestinian slogans as he messaged about how encampments wouldn’t be tolerated in Florida the way they were elsewhere.
“So much of this is just such a farce that it’s just kind of embarrassing to even hear some of this nonsense,” DeSantis said at one point, as chants distracted speakers.
DeSantis said students protesting were “completely fine” with how Hamas “went into Israeli communities and baked babies in ovens, raped women, assassinated elderly people in very brutal ways.”
The Governor offered extended meditations on protest movements around the country, including at “elite institutions.”
“I think a lot of these people that are just spouting nonsense, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” DeSantis said, wondering if those schools are “just graduating a bunch of imbeciles.”
“How many of them actually have studied the history of this? Very few. They’re just doing this because they think it’s a cheap cause. The reality is if you actually study the history of this, you would be able to see there’s never been a Palestinian state. That was (controlled by the) Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. Then the British mandate, then the UN partition plan and basically Israel accepted that and the Arabs rejected and they went to war and they lost.” DeSantis said in an attempt to invalidate the protesters’ arguments.
The Governor also reiterated guidance he’d made earlier in the year to encourage students from elsewhere to come to Florida schools.
“Some of these universities that haven’t been able to keep the peace, that are not standing up for their students, those students are going to be able to hotline into our universities. Now they’ve got to be qualified, but I think a lot of them are qualified and I think would be very value added.”
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