{"id":38838,"date":"2016-04-12T17:05:58","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T15:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=38838"},"modified":"2016-04-08T07:08:21","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T05:08:21","slug":"04-00-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=38838","title":{"rendered":"The Lie of Academic Free Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Lie of Academic Free Speech<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Richard L. Cravatts<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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How campus brownshirts make sure only one side is heard in the Israeli\/Palestinian debate.<\/strong><\/span>
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When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump\u2019s March 11th rally at the University of Chicago Pavilion was shut down last week by hundreds of leftist protestors, comprised of activists from Moveon.org, Black Lives Matter, Muslim groups, and even unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the morally indignant protestors had one purpose: to disrupt the event, prevent Trump supporters from hearing the candidate\u2019s speech, and, most importantly, suppress Trump\u2019s ideas and beliefs. Having already decided the Mr. Trump was a veritable racist, Islamophobe, and neo-Nazi, the mob of rioters\u2014inside and outside of the venue\u2014took it upon themselves to decide that Trump, and those who share his vision and ideas, do not even have the right to express their opinions, that their views have been deemed unacceptable by the self-appointed moral arbiters of our day.<\/span><\/p>\n

The disturbing campaign to suppress speech which is purportedly hurtful, unpleasant, or morally-distasteful\u2014a sample of which was evident at the Chicago rally\u2014is, for anyone following what is happening on campuses, a troubling and recurrent pattern of behavior by some of the same ideologues who shut down Trump: \u201cprogressive\u201d leftists and \u201csocial justice\u201d advocates from Muslim-led pro-Palestinian groups. Coalescing around the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, this unholy alliance has been formed in a libelous and vituperative campaign to demonize Israel, attack pro-Israel individuals, and to promote a relentless campaign against Israel in the form of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As the ideological assault against Israel and Jews intensified on university campuses, and pro-Israel individuals began answering back to their ideological opponents, the student groups leading the pro-Palestinian charge (including such groups as the radical Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)) decided that their tactic of unrelenting demonization of Israel was insufficient, and the best way to optimize the propaganda effect of their anti-Israel message was also to suppress or obscure opposing views.<\/span><\/p>\n

The pronouncements of these groups are now frequently defined by the baleful whining of these ideological bullies intent on having only their views aired while suppressing the contradictory views of others. In fact, a leaked memorandum from the Binghamton University Students for Justice in Palestine chapter revealed that members would be required to never even engage in dialogue with pro-Israel groups on their campus, they would be prohibited from \u201cengaging in any form of official collaboration, cooperation, or event co-sponsorship with [pro-Israel] student organizations and groups,\u201d and SJP members \u201cshall in no manner engage in any form of official collaboration with any student group which actively opposes the cause of Palestinian liberation nor with groups which have aided and abetted Zionist student organizations,\u201d meaning, of course, that the so-called intellectual debate that universities purport to promote in exactly this type of discussion will never take place when SJP is involved.<\/span><\/p>\n

And because they cannot win an honest, open ideological debate about the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict because they deal almost exclusively in misrepresentations and untruths (the allegation of Israeli apartheid, as the central example), just as the anti-Trump protestors wished to accomplish, SJP has characteristically tried to insure that no pro-Israel voices are heard, either by disrupting or shutting down pro-Israel events and speakers or urging administrators to disinvite speakers they deem to be Islamophobic, too pro-Israel, or critical of their own tactics and activism.<\/span><\/p>\n

The thuggish substitution of event disruption and the shutting down of other people\u2019s speech for what is supposed to be two-sided academic dialogue and debate occurs with increased regularity, and marks another, more pernicious, aspect of the campus campaign against Israel, Zionism, and Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

At University of California, Davis this month, for example, George Deek, a Jaffa-born Arab Christian, planned to give a speech entitled \u201cThe Art of Middle East Diplomacy,\u201d when some 30 pro-Palestinian activists stood up and blocked Deek with banners and took over the event by screaming \u201cFrom the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,\u201d meaning an Arab state in place of present-day Israel, and chanting such toxic ditties as \u201clong live the Intifada,\u201d \u201cAllahu Akbar,\u201d and \u201cWhen Palestine is occupied, resistance is justified,\u201d ghoulish calls for the murder of Jews, and \u201cIsrael is anti-Black\u201d and \u201cPalestine will be free, fight white supremacy,\u201d an intellectually clumsy way of trying to frame Israel as a racist state.<\/span><\/p>\n

In February, Bassam Eid, a Palestinian himself and the founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, witnessed very startlingly how nothing positive said about Israel is allowed to be heard, even from such a credible, though unsual, source as a Palestinian. During his speech, in which he was critical of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for their failure to seek peace, Eid was verbally attacked by a student attendee, who said in Arabic, \u201cDr. Bassam, do not dare talk about us [Palestinians] anymore. You have shamed our God \u2026 you\u2019ve shamed us, disgraced us, you are a traitor, you are a traitor, in the name of God you are a traitor \u2026 You are worse than the Jews and we will hunt you down and find you in every place, be prepared . . . .\u201d When it became obvious that his speech could would not be able to continue uninterrupted, Eid cancelled the event and had to be escorted off site by the police.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last November, the University of Minnesota Law School sponsored a lecture by Hebrew University professor Moshe Halbertal, an expert on Israel\u2019s military code of ethics, entitled \u201cProtecting Civilians: Moral Challenges of Asymmetric Warfare.\u201d The lecture was delayed for 30 minutes by the unruly heckling and chants of some 100 protestors from the Minnesota Anti-War Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), who indignantly rose from the audience, interrupted, and accused Halbertal of war crimes and complicity in the 2014 Gaza incursion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also in November, as yet another example, the University of Texas at Austin\u2019s Institute for Israeli Studies hosted an event with Stanford University\u2019s Dr. Gil-Li Vardi, who was to present a study on \u201cThe Origin of a Species: The Birth of the Israeli Defense Forces\u2019 Military Culture.\u201d At the event, twelve members of a so-called \u201cPalestine Solidarity Committee,\u201d intent on disrupting the speech, created a human wall in the back of the room with the purpose of not allowing the event to begin. The anti-Israel activists tried, without the benefit of actually knowing what the speaker would say, to prevent her from presenting her viewpoint by shrieking out such taunts as, \u201cYou are a former IDF soldier, we do not listen to you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes the silencing of pro-Israel voices is more subtle, but no less pernicious. A pro-Israel student group at Columbia University, Artists 4 Israel, were denied the opportunity to express views during Israeli Apartheid Week, during which the SJP chapter had erected their version of a mock \u201capartheid wall,\u201d emblazoned with anti-Israel slogans and symbols. To counter the display with a pro-Israel one, Artists 4 Israel had set up a 15-foot inflatable figure, a \u201cpro-Israel Pinocchio,\u201d replete with a long nose and a sign that read \u201c\u2018Apartheid\u2019 Week Compassion Abuse\u201d as an effective, sardonic swipe at SJP\u2019s toxic campaign. The chair and vice chair of Columbia\u2019s student government, who not coincidentally are members of Columbia\u2019s SJP chapter and pro-BDS activists, ordered the removal of the Pinocchio figure, offering the disingenuous justification that Pinocchio\u2019s long nose might be construed as anti-Semitic and that the pump used to inflate the figure was too loud for use on the Columbia grounds.<\/span><\/p>\n

The university officials and student groups who now try to suppress all thought of which they disapprove, and who publicly proclaim their desire for campuses where there will be vigorous discourse, on contentious issues, from many points of view, but allow the expression of only \u201cacceptable\u201d opinions, couched in the language of human rights and social justice\u2014all of these individuals have sacrificed one of the core values for which the university exists. In their zeal to be inclusive, and to recognize the needs and aspirations of victim groups, they have pretended to foster inquiry, but they have actually stifled and retarded it. And, as this otherwise noble purpose for the university has devolved, the first victim in the corruption of academic free speech has, unfortunately, been the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Lie of Academic Free Speech Richard L. Cravatts How campus brownshirts make sure only one side is heard in the Israeli\/Palestinian debate. When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump\u2019s March 11th rally at the University of Chicago Pavilion was shut down last week by hundreds of leftist protestors, comprised of activists from Moveon.org, Black Lives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38838"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38897,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38838\/revisions\/38897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}