Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech. These groups demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.
Last week, for instance, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, had the unpleasant experience of confronting virulent anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Muslim students whose ideology on academic debate seems to be “free speech for me, but not for thee.”
The genteel, soft-spoken Oren did not fare well during his visit to U.C. Irvine, a notorious hotbed of radical anti-Israelism by Muslim students.
During the aborted speech to some 500 people about U.S.-Israeli relations, which was loudly interrupted 10 times, boorish hecklers screamed over Oren’s talk such profound observations as “Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech,” “I accuse you of murder,” “How many Palestinians have you killed?” and “Israel is a murderer.”
Oren is hardly what even his staunchest critics could consider an Islamophobe or even a rabid Zionist eager to trample the Palestinian’s aspirations for their putative state. A Columbia and Princeton graduate, Oren is also the author of two seminal books on the Middle East — “Six Days of War” and “Power, Faith and Fantasy” — all of which clearly make
him at least as qualified
to speak about the Israeli/Palestinian situation as the raucous, boorish students who had decided, in advance of his Irvine appearance, that Oren was morally unfit even to appear on their campus.
This notion — that pro-Israel speakers and scholars do not even deserve, on a moral or intellectual basis, an opportunity to participate in scholarly debate — is a very dangerous one, even if it comes from tendentious students.
It starts with the assumption that Israel, because of its perceived moral defects and its oppression of the hapless Palestinians and the theft of their lands, does not even have the right to participate in intellectual debate, that academic free speech in Israel’s case can be modified and is not absolute.
And while Muslim students and other campus radicals have, at U.C. Irvine and other college campuses, seen to it that speakers they disagree with are shut down with the “heckler’s veto,” they have never missed an opportunity to invite their own stable of slimy, anti-Israel, anti-American speakers.
A closer look at the ideas tossed about by some of the Muslim Student Union’s invited guests suggests both the moral incoherence and intellectual debasement that characterizes the human output of these events.
Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, for instance, former Nation of Islam member and convert to Islam, has been a ubiquitous, poisonous presence on the Irvine campus. He never hesitates to castigate Israel, Zionists, Jewish power, and Jews themselves as he weaves incoherent, hallucinatory conspiracies about the Middle East and the West.
Speaking from a podium in May 2006 with an execrable banner reading “Israel, the Fourth Reich,” Malik-Ali referred to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch of straight-up punks.” At a 2008 event, he incredulously claimed that “groups like Hamas and Hezbollah” are not the real terrorists at all. Rather, he said, the actual terrorists are the United States and Israel.
Another odious guest speaker who regularly makes appearances on the hate-fest circuit is Muhammad al-Asi, an anti-Semitic, anti-American Muslim activist from Washington, D.C., who has written, among other notorious ideas, that “the Israeli Zionist are [sic] the true and legitimate object of liquidation.”
Just months after 9/11, al-Asi had similar invective to utter toward Jews, in the context of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. “You can take a Jew out of the ghetto,” he said, “but you can’t take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in occupied Palestine.”
It is, of course, the MSU’s choice to hear whatever opinions they wish from whomever they choose to listen. What is not their choice, however, is to be able to prevent other views from being heard on campus — particularly the complex and thorny Israeli/Palestinian conversation — merely because pro-Palestinian students have decided that they will not recognize the very existence or legitimacy of a sovereign nation, Israel, nor hear the ideas of individuals who are able to defend it and explain the Israeli side of the argument.
University officials must repeatedly make clear that campuses must allow many different views and perspectives, and should not allow the exclusion of unpopular thought from the proverbial marketplace of ideas.
Richard L. Cravatts, director of Boston University’s Program in Publishing, recently finished writing the book “Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel.”