Michigan student shoves Jewish activist after free speech clash

The student dropped her phone, lunged with both hands, and shoved Liz Benichou hard enough to put her on the ground at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. A bystander pulled the attacker back as she tried to kick. She broke free and moved toward Benichou again before a police officer restrained her.

The confrontation unfolded Sunday, shortly before 5 p.m., at a folding table set up by Liberty Under Fire USA. The signs on the table asked two blunt questions: “Is Islam Compatible with the West?” and “Is Islam evil?” Taylor Sharp leads the group. Campus police later described the gathering as unpermitted and unauthorized.

Before the shove, the student had accused the activists at the table of anti-Muslim views and demanded to see a permit. Benichou, a Jewish conservative activist who had joined the argument, answered with a comparison about women’s dress and speech under the Iranian regime. “Am I wrong? If she walked around like that in Iran, what would happen to her?” she asked. On Fox & Friends the next day she recounted the sequence more fully: “She slapped Joe in the face with her phone. Then she came up towards me and I told her, ‘You would not be able to do this in Iran.’” She added that Cam Higby had said, in her recollection, “She wouldn’t be allowed to be dressed like this.”

The student’s reply, captured as the fight began, was immediate. “Don’t fucking talk to me like that.” Video described across the reporting shows the shove, the attempted kick, and the second approach before the officer took control. As she was escorted toward a patrol car she kept talking. “I would do it again every time.” Then: “I should have killed you when I had the chance.” When someone asked whether she was joking, she said she was not.

University of Michigan police confirmed officers responded to the unauthorized event and witnessed a University of Michigan student assault a woman not affiliated with the university. The student was arrested, processed, and released pending warrant authorization. The case was referred to the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office for review. Police said no injuries were reported to them. Sharp, Benichou’s manager, said she suffered a lower back injury from the fall and that she intends to pursue criminal charges.

Benichou’s public statement after the attack was short. “Political violence has no place in the United States.” She thanked the officers who moved in. On Fox & Friends she was asked whether the attack would change her work. “It will definitely not dissuade me.”

The student’s best available argument, stated in her own terms at the table, was that the activists were anti-Muslim, that the event looked unauthorized, and that Benichou’s Iran remark was an insult she would not tolerate. The record supports parts of the procedural complaint: campus police did call the event unpermitted. It does not convert a shove, a kick attempt, and a death threat into protected speech. Disagreement, even loud disagreement, is lawful. Putting hands on another person and promising to kill her is not. The First Amendment protects the right to put a controversial question on a table and the right to answer it with a hard comparison; it does not protect battery.

That distinction matters on a public campus two days before a national election. Michigan’s Senate race between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers was already the political backdrop Benichou said had drawn her to Ann Arbor. Cam Higby claimed the attacker was an El-Sayed supporter. The claim is unverified in the reporting, and no evidence has been published tying the student to the campaign. The verified facts are narrower and harder: a student used force against a visiting activist over an argument about Islam, the West, and women’s freedom, then told her she should have been killed.

Campuses have spent years insisting that words are violence while treating actual violence as a scheduling problem. The sequence at Ann Arbor runs the other way. The table carried two questions. The student answered with her hands. Police did their job in the moment; the prosecutor’s office now decides whether the release pending warrant becomes a charge that matches the video and the threat. Benichou has said she will continue. Sharp has said she was hurt. The student, in the clearest line of the afternoon, said she would do it again.