Anti-Israel activists erect Gaza camp at UCLA ahead of Ben Shapiro speech

A new Gaza camp formed at the University of California Los Angeles on Monday in advance of a speech by the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro for the Young America’s Foundation (YAF). According to the Daily Bruin, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA began setting up the encampment Monday morning, similar to chapters at UC Berkeley and Columbia University.

Approximately 50 anti-Israel activists, many of whom were wearing keffiyehs and face masks, hung banners demonizing the Jewish state and glorifying terrorist organizations.

Activists were instructed by campus officials to take down temporary structures but refused to do so.

As night fell, the campus was surrounded by police officers in riot gear and gave a dispersal order.

While most of the activists abandoned the encampment, some remained and police detained one person, according to the Daily Bruin.

Other activists attempted to interfere with Shapiro’s speech. According to The Daily Wire, one of the UCLA employees was caught on video tearing down posters advertising Shapiro’s speech, hours before he was scheduled to begin speaking. When confronted, the employee claimed that his boss told him “to take flyers down,” but refused to give the name of the supervisor.

Last week, the university’s administration forced YAF to shut down the Eventbrite page, where people could obtain tickets for Shapiro’s speech, and instead, YAF had to redirect attendees to UCLA’s main ticketing office. As a result, YAF couldn’t know in advance “if people who are known agitators or security threats are registering, or what efforts are being made to ensure that a bunch of lefties don’t gobble up the 1,200 available tickets then no-show the free event,” according to RedState.

UCLA also rejected YAF’s request for a standby line, which would have helped fill the space with people who wanted to be there if activists staged a walkout.

According to YAF’s lawyers, “UCLA has not stated any reason whatsoever for this unreasonable stance, other than to cite to its own policy number 862, which simply states that for ‘major events,’ (i.e., events presenting disfavored points of view that may result in counter-protests), ‘[n]o standby line will be allowed unless advance approval [is] provided by UCLA Fire Department and with limited standby Tickets offered,’ without providing any justification for this limitation or explanation as to why approval has not been given in this particular case.”

The lawyers added in a letter to the school’s administration, “Given UCLA’s past conduct discriminating against the expression of conservative and pro-Israel points of view … it is clear that the refusal to approve the use of the standby line procedure exacerbates the unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination that UCLA engages in. Moreover, UCLA owes a constitutional duty to impose only reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech. There is nothing reasonable about UCLA’s refusal to approve a procedure that has been used by all of its peers in the university community to great effect, and without any appreciable harm to any university’s interests.”

Hundreds of students attended Shapiro's speech which began as scheduled.