“Many people feel that when they hear views that they deeply disagree with, that’s threatening to them. That’s not how universities operate. You are not entitled to feel intellectually safe. You are entitled to be physically safe.”
That quote is from attorney and former Brandeis University president, Frederick M. Lawrence, as he spoke to Democracy Now! recently about the military-like response we’ve been watching at universities nationwide.
Actual threats should be protected against, said Lawrence, but police in riot gear should be a last resort.
What we’ve seen, however, is that police, security guards, and other – often heavily armed – forces have been called in even without any real threat, pushing students and professors to the pavement, tying their wrists behind their backs, handling protesters as if they were armed suspects to violent crimes. Nationwide, we’ve seen a variety of responses — from Rutgers’ correctly compromising to students’ demands to UCLA’s mob violence from counter-protesters.
But let’s take a look at what happened in Boston, at Northeastern University, just a short time after Emerson College’s small “encampment” was forced out by police.
After a couple days of peaceful protests against the massive death and destruction in Gaza, we saw authorities swarm in and clean house in the middle of the night. The event was tame compared with what we saw elsewhere, but it was also chilling.
The official reason was not because of any real threat or violence, according to reports, but the alleged shouting of “virulent antisemitic slurs.”
In a twist that would show how our language has been perverted in official narratives, anyone who paid close attention to what unfolded discovered that what was shouted was actually sarcastic rhetoric from pro-Israel counter-protesters. This was documented in video and reporting of the short-lived protest by several sources.
“There was absolutely no reason for the university or police departments to crack down on us like that when we were expressing our right to protest and our free speech. We were creating a space of love and community care to stand in solidarity with our people in Palestine,” one of the protesters later said at a press conference, according to the student-led paper, The Huntington News. Another student told the paper, “The university said that antisemitism and remarks such as ‘Kill the Jews’ are never acceptable. And that’s true, which is why we demand that the university hold the two people who actually made those remarks accountable.”
This brings up the matter of hate speech.
We’re living a nation that seems like it was set in an episode of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” series, in which what we hear from those in power, defies what we know. We live in a nation in which a former president could call for a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. with no meaningful political consequence. Where a prominent lawmaker could endorse violence against protesters who block public ways and another who could appear to propose dropping atomic bombs on Palestinians. Where the leader of the Anti-Defamation League could on television appear to compare a traditional Palestinian scarf to Nazi symbolism and protesters supporting Palestine to Iranian proxies. Where once respected people in high places can get fired for calling Israel an apartheid state. Where criticism of Israeli policy – and calling its mass killing in Gaza a genocide – could be labeled as hate speech.
But yet, people like a well-known U.S. senator can freely say of protest groups supporting Palestinians: “These little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate full of pro Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks.”
In short, we seem to be living in a world in which harmful speech against Palestinians – and Arabs and Muslims in general – is viewed as acceptable, but speech against the horrors in Gaza at the hands of Israeli military forces and the U.S.’ support for Israel is considered hateful, or, worse, in support of terrorists.
This is not a right-left, phenomena, either. It was not long ago that perhaps the most famous Democratic lawmaker yelled at a Pro-Palestinian protester: “Go back to China, where your headquarters is.”
No person or group should be threatened or live in fear because of their religion, national origin, race, color, disability, sex or gender identity. And the holocaust was a betrayal of humanity that should never be forgotten, and which has caused trauma that will persist for generations. It was the darkest period in our modern world.
But peaceful protests of current atrocities should not be confused or conflated with hate. And freedom of expression and speech should not be smothered because people don’t like what they are hearing. How can the U.S. claim a moral argument against repression in China and elsewhere, when at home, we can’t practice what we preach?
