Commentary
A debate over international terrorism, genocide, and free speech is roiling the government and academia, including Harvard, Penn, and MIT. The presidents of these three institutions were rightly hauled before Congress on Dec. 7 and raked over the coals.
The American public has a legitimate and serious concern over events at these elite universities that include anti-Israel protests in which students repeat terrorist talking points, including “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and calls for
globalizing the “intifada.”These terms are widely understood as support for internationalizing the kind of Palestinian violence perpetrated on
Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people and included the systematic murder, rape, and terror of innocent civilians. The violence sought the ethnic cleansing of all of Israel’s Jews to be replaced by Palestinians, including through inciting international terrorism and war of the kind that the Houthis are now attempting against U.S. forces in the Red Sea, as well as against U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel itself. This is support for a form of war and genocide, by the U.N. definition, that should have no place on campus.
The three university presidents who testified before Congress initially presented a unified front that used free speech protections to defend their lack of action against students who call for intifada, which in Arabic means “shaking off” or “uprising,” but according to the
American Jewish Committee describes it as “periods of intense Palestinian protest against Israel, mainly in the form of violent terrorism,” for example, the “First Intifada from 1987–1990 and the Second Intifada from 2000–05.”
The three presidents argued that speech in favor of intifada is protected by academic freedom as long as it does not cross into “conduct.” Under intense questioning from members of Congress, the three presidents implied that free speech protections extend even to calling for genocide against Jewish people.
This rightly shocked the public, including many university donors. A group of
74 congresspeople called for the ouster of the three presidents. In response, one of the presidents, from Penn,
changed her mind and labeled the speech harassment. The Harvard president offered what has been interpreted as an insincere apology. The MIT president offered no apology, and her board emerged in support of her position.
Conservative critics of the three presidents rightly argue that universities tend to protect leftist speech and ignore free speech protections of conservative opinion. This fits the latest philosophical fads in universities, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism, which can go so far as denying the existence of truth, nonpartisanship, and morality in pursuit of “liberating” only those identities seen as tending to support the left.
Palestinians have long been a darling of the left, including communist parties in the former Soviet Union and China, as they are seen as “anti-colonial” and “anti-racist” against mostly European Jews who immigrated to Israel after the pogroms and Holocaust of the 19th and 20th centuries. Leftists tend to ignore the legitimate
right of Jews to form a state, along with persistent antisemitism and violence against Jews in Europe, Israel, and the broader Middle East that stretches back to antiquity. This historic violence and antisemitism is what drives Israel to so forcefully defend itself today.
But for the postmodern rejection of truth, Marxism would be more discredited in academic circles, as it is elsewhere. Postmodern and Marxist professors tend to be overly critical of market democracies, and depict left terrorism and leftist dictatorships in a rosy light. This culture can go so far as support for leftist terror and genocide, and emerges from the “New Left” of the late 1960s and 1970s that bred sympathy for terrorists like the Palestine Liberation Organization, Weathermen in the United States, Red Army Faction in Germany, and Red Brigades in Italy.
Now, post-truth leftists again facilitate sympathy for terror and genocide among some students. Nipping that sympathy in the bud is necessary before it spreads from Hamas and the Houthis to new forms of terrorism in the United States and Europe. Campus protest groups that get away with public calls for globalizing the intifada are a fertile breeding ground for the kind of extremist thought that leads to violence and genocide, just as international leftist terrorism emerged from mass protests in the 1960s and 1970s.
U.S. and European universities have a duty to ensure they do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Their core role is to educate their students well. If their students emerge from the university in support of terrorism and genocide against Jewish people, or anyone else, the universities have clearly failed.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
