This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, take a second to juxtapose these mental images. In the 1960s, civil rights activists were brutalized while protesting for basic human liberties — they used non-violent means to gain rights that had too long been denied. Now, in our own decade, college papers across the nation are reporting stories of students who have literally beaten themselves up, a la “Fight Club,” to then falsely claim they were attacked, in order to draw publicity to themselves or their cause.

These students have the opportunity to voice their opinions in campus debates and political controversies, yet they resort to grisly and deceptive guerilla tactics, simply because no one is attacking or denying their rights. This unnecessary faux violence is a grotesque twist of events that exemplifies just how far some have strayed from the non-violence of the civil rights era.

The stories seem too outrageous to be true, yet they are surfacing at colleges across the country. Most prominently, a Princeton junior who led a conservative advocacy group wound up at the University Medical Center after a particularly brutal self-inflicted incident. The student, Francisco Nava, began by sending threatening e-mails with lines such as “we will destroy you... you will suffer” to himself, three members of his conservative group and even his academic advisor. His fabrications escalated with fabricated death threats, and in a final episode, Nava broke a glass bottle over his head, scraped his head against a brick wall and pummeled his face before showing up at the Medical Center bruised and bloodied by his own hands. He lied to nurses and police, alleging that masked men had beaten him. Investigations revealed that Nava had also mocked threats against himself at his elite private high school.

Although perhaps the most high profile, Nava is not the only student who has falsified harrowing accounts of violence in order to create sympathy for a controversial political cause. Comparable cases collected by Time magazine include a George Washington University freshman who drew swastikas on her own door, a College of New Jersey student who faked death threats to himself and members of his gay rights group and even a professor from Claremont-McKenna College who vandalized her own car with racist and sexist epithets.

First, it should be noted that none of these individuals and their affiliated groups were actually threatened on the basis of their opinions. Their freedom to voice their opinions without fear of oppression is no small feat. Just this year, events that unfolded in Jena, La. vividly demonstrated that even today, students are threatened when trying to exercise their rights. But by invoking the images and histories of actual victims of oppression, these hoaxers make a mockery of those who genuinely lived through it. Although they enjoy the right, the hard-won luxury, of voicing their opinions without threats or injuries, they seek to generate danger in order to selfishly elevate their cause.

Has free speech become so plain and common? These hoaxes distract public attention from legitimate causes which deserve our attention. With so many subtle, and not-so-subtle, varieties of systematic oppression which still exist today, ours is not a society that can afford to be distracted by the self-flagellations of a few mendacious morons.