Columbia Protests
Genocide is different.
When the police came to clear the students from the Columbia campus back in 1968, it was because students had occupied a number of buildings, including the President’s office and a few classroom buildings, and so thwarted the ability of a university to do business. The cause of the protest, which was the Vietnam War, was not the reason to send in the police. This month, pro-Palestinian students encamped on the lawn in front of Butler Library, and the police cleared them from the campus. The same action would not have been taken if the squatters were encamped to protest world hunger. Ralph Abernathy had gotten all the permits on the WashingtonMall so as to create a March on Poverty but that encampment, reminiscent of Hoovervilles, just fizzled, not having the fizzle, I think, that MLK. Jr. did have and so was sorely missed. So what happened? We are undergoing a profound difference in the idea of free speech, where the principles and facts, the content of what is said, is becoming the criteria to use about whether free speech is accessible rather than thinking, in line with John Stuart Mill, that government is just a referee which allows the contestants to argue a contention out by themselves, let the better idea win.
The usual course would be to seewo legitimate parties contesting with one another. The Young Republicans could organize a gathering on campus to support their candidates for election, and the Young Democrats doing the same thing, these in peaceable assembly but vociferously decrying tube evil intention of their opposition, that debate extended to third party candidates, though excluding Communist speakers or teachers on the grounds that they were agents of a foreign power and not capable of thinking for themselves even though Catholics were not excluded even though they asserted to obey edicts and principles decided by other people centered abroad. Never mind. Catholics were part of the American arena and so could say what they cared to say. Politically motivated violence is not the issue; it is separately judged as the basis for intervention regardless of principle but not a judgment on the various contestants, just an excess and so to be constrained.
But what if Coumbia was asked to host by providing permits for a Ku Klux Klan rally as had happened in the 1920’s in the streets of Washington, D. C.? You could claim wearing full clad regalia was intimidating but that is a stretch in that it is not threatening violence only exhibiting signs of its malevolence. I don’t think Columbia would allow such a peaceful protest akin to what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia a few years ago when marchers chanted “Don’t replace us”, which meant don’t have Jews get Blacks to replace white people, the animus not to kill Blacks but merely to keep them servile.That idea would be sufficiently repugnant as an idea for it to be barred from Black students would be intimidated or offended. It was wrong on its own right for otherwise a minority could veto any group protest that it found offensive such as “Don’t Save the Whales” or else “Drill, Baby Drill” if there were enough environmentalists to oppose those against fracking.
Now get to the very contentious and contemporary issue of the pro-Palestine protesters. They seem by and large to be peaceful and their placard is “From the River to the Sea”, and they support Hamas, the grizzly affair of Oct. 7th either fake news or to be embraced as a just response to the subjugation of Palestinians or overshadowed by the number of Palestinian civilians as a result of the IDF response on Gaza. Quite aside from whatever are accurate figures, and people bandying about “genocide” and “war crimes”, without clear definition as that is offered in international law, where “genocide” requires intention and every day the holding of a hostage is a “war crime” according gto the Geneva Conventions, the fact is that Hamas has engaged in genocide in that it did engage in killing civilians in Southern Israel for being Jews and has promised to do so again and again. So people supporting Hamas are objectively supporting genocide whether or not they admit to using that word, the determination to be made by general consensus of the fact and not just because Jewish students are offended by that term or are rendered fearful.My view is that genocide is not a part of normal debate, such as whether you support tax increases or more strict enforcement at the border or even issues as deep and contentious as abortion, but something very special that is not disputable, genocide allowed under certain circumstances or people saying they deny the word as sufficient for engaging in discourse. To support Hamas is to propagate genocide. That is pure and simple.
Michelle Goldberg, the N. Y. Times columnist, adheres to the old standard of free speech. Unpallarable speech will wear itself out, extinguish itself through no regulative device, because people in their good sense will choose the more humane way to go. But there is something special about Hamas inspired and propagated genocide. Fascists only claimed to follow law and order and get the trains to run on time and were not genocide. German Nazis tried to hide the Holocaust. Stalin blamed the deaths of the Kulaks on economic developments. Cambodian and Rwandan genocides were quickly done. But what about the genocide of Jews? The foreign minister of Iran says Oct. 7th didn’t happen but Hamas proclaimed the glory of what it had done and planned to repeat it. So to recognize the protest movement at Columbia as such is to legitimate genocide of the Jews as just one of the many points of view which vie to persuade others. “From the River to the Sea” is not an ideology, like Marxism or Black oppression which have an interlinked set of propositions that can be applied in a number of ways, from revolution or to the ballot box, but a call to arms, even if the perpetrators are on United States soil and so remain nonviolent. Is there no way to say that there are some causes so heinous that they are illegitimate? They are not to be jailed, just not welcomed in the public arena, whether in demonstrations or in the media. That is already done in that media police hate speech. The worry is that hate speech ios like an infection that can take root, though that image is used by haters to characterize undocumented aliens.
So assess the present state of political debate with the situation that existed at the end of the Second World War where all civilization said genocide was a very bad thing and the slogan entoned was “Never Again”. Well, genocide did not stop but it was still condemned until recently when people deny engaging in genocide or defend it as the weapon of the weak and blame the term on the opposite side. That legitimizes making genocide an open option, mot even the lead bout on the boxing card, somewhat below the border or abortion or Trfump’s nature. Is there some way of constraining the debate by no longer letting it be legitimate? It might be by not considering it as legitimate discourse, that decided by popular consensus of what is outside the pale. Have no fear of stifling many topics. Abortion gets discussed however queasy it is as a topic, dealing with intimate matters, because people on both sides care about it or have become public about what was considered about only with whispers. Can we try to put genocide back into the genie’s lamp or just treat it as two sides of a debate?
Or will the genocidalists become so ugly and hateful and vicious that the sensible people who must be the majority if free speech is to operate as J. S. Mill thought will be overcome. Remember that repeating lies balances in part telling the truth and that even a brief period of disinformation can lead to an election loss or for people to switch sides on a war, Republicans presently fed by Russian propaganda Ghbere are multiple strains and dynamics of public opinilon that alter the nation and maybe genocide may no longer be treated as the exception.
Some associated developments. The valedictorian at the University of Southern California was not allowed to present the commencement address presumably so as to provide safety when the real issue was that she is aMuslim and likely to make a pro-Hamas statement that the audience might find unsettling. I wonder whether the administration did not have much choice given that a pro Hamas sp;eaker would legitimize her point of view. I make, again, a similar comparison. What if the speaker had spoken of and expected to make a speech about white supremacy? I think the trustees and the university would have been stained for having allowed it to happen . Why treat otherwise with someone who advocates genocide? Perhaps some authority might have screened her remarks in advance, but that is already censorship. There is no way of getting around that a point of view is or is not outside the limits of free speech.
And in Berkeley, once a long away outpost of New York City, there was a scuffle between an outspoken Palestinian Hamas supporter and the dean of the law school who he and his wife were entertaining students at his home, he Palestinian student just offering a happy day at the end of Ramadan but known as vociferous for her views, the wife wrestling over the student’s microphone and saying this was her own house. I consider this not an issue of free speech but a matter of rudeness. The young woman should not intrude just as protesters should allow people of prominence to go to dinner without harassment or be picketed at their homes and the wife could have been chivalrous and asked the young woman to join the group and have a glass of sherry or whatever it is that young people drink. Rudeness is very bad because it disrupts civilized discourse and is a thing disparaged throughout the ages, but these are trying times, when politics overrides politeness. People are angry to find out or declare where they stand.