Free speech—but not for Jews

By now, the disruption of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech by Islamist students at the University of California at Irvine earlier this month has been sufficiently covered from all corners of the American political garden. Everyone agrees that the issue is free speech. Commentary’s Max Boot said the students made a “mockery of the free speech that universities are supposed to champion.” The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait was reminded of the “foundational belief that free speech ought not to apply to anybody who expresses views the campus left dislikes.” At the Huffington Post, though, Salam Al Marayati dissented from the conventionally pious view, saying that the students’ actions “epitomize[d] the confrontation against institutional injustices by means of peaceful exercise of free speech, a great American tradition.”

The YouTube video is here. The comments, you will notice, are largely enthusiastic. To me, the saddest aspect of the whole affair was the ineffectual scolding from Mark P. Petracca, a political scientist at Irvine. “This is beyond embarrassing,” Professor Petracca cried. “I have been a faculty member here for twenty-six years. This is no way for our undergraduate students to behave.” Not surprisingly, the students were not persuaded to abandon their heckler’s veto.

What would have given them pause, I wonder. How about telling the truth? By shouting down a Jew, the Islamist students were merely giving a practical demonstration of what free speech would mean for ethnic and religious minorities in a state ruled by Islamists.

Update: On the Jewish Faculty Roundtable listserve list, the University of Massachusetts philosopher Joseph Levine partially justifies the disruption of Oren’s speech by saying: “Michael Oren is the official representative of a state that the protesters consider a gross violator of human rights and a practitioner of apartheid. Now, if one believes that, it isn’t completely irrational to think that disrupting this person’s speech is what one ought to do. I don’t think it is, but it’s not crazy, hateful, or irrational to think this.”

Levine is arguing against a straw man. The question is not whether the Islamist students are crazy or irrational, but whether their actions are politically repressive—whether they practice what I have elsewhere called terrorism by other means. I believe that the Islamist disruption of Oren’s speech can be so described, using Levine’s own terms. Thus Levine writes that the “protesters consider” the state of Israel to be a “gross violator of human rights and a practitioner of apartheid,” and in their own minds, then, they are justified—disrupting a speech in defense of Israel is “what one ought to do.”

By this standard, however, I am justified in disrupting any speech delivered by the representative of an entity or even a viewpoint that I myself consider, without reference to reality, inimical to human rights. Indeed, that is just exactly what the first Islamist thug bellowed at Oren: “Propaganda for murder is not free speech!” That is, Zionism (= propaganda for murder) is not free speech. And can be justifiably repressed. I define what is propaganda for murder, and I decide whether to effect its repression.

Terrorism, as I say, by other means.