From The Atlantic. Surprising rational and fact supported take on the current situations
considering the Atlantic's far left writings.
Progressives who once argued that free speech is violence now claim that violence is free speech.
By David Frum
Yesterday, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were caught in a trap in front of a House committee. Each was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated rules at their university. Each president refused to answer directly, insisting that everything depends on context.
So here’s the context: On university campuses and in many other places, anti-Semitic speech regularly crosses the line into threats, intimidation, and outright violence against Jews. University rules and local laws are intentionally violated because everybody knows that the rules and laws are selectively enforced.
Liberals in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill like to compare speech and debate to a marketplace. Let all offer their ideas in peaceful competition; let all have equal opportunity to listen and judge. But there’s another tradition consolidating around us. In this tradition, speech is not like a market. It’s like a battle. The goal is not to enlighten, but to dominate. Adversaries must be overawed, intimidated, and silenced.
Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, we have heard many stories of threats to pro-Palestinian free speech in the United States. The Atlantic itself has published some accounts of them. Yet take a closer look, and something else is usually going on. Complaints that pro-Palestine speech has been curtailed again and again turn out to involve violations of norms, rules, and laws that have nothing to do with speech as liberal-minded people would define it. In New York City last week, pro-Palestine demonstrators attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. For fear of a repeat of such attacks, yesterday the state of California announced that its tree-lighting ceremony would no longer take place in person, and would be a virtual event.
Rhetoric drawn from the Jefferson-Mill tradition is now being used to defend behavior that is meant to intimidate or harm. Important elements of our society have shifted from their former claim that speech can be violence to a bold assertion that violence should count as speech. A few days ago, Canada’s York University—the country’s second-largest college—suspended three academics who had been criminally charged for their anti-Israel activism. “You should consider defending speech as opposed to the Orwellian Toronto Police on this matter,” the Toronto-born writer Naomi Klein tweeted.
What was this “speech” that Klein referred to? The three arrested academics had splashed red paint over the entrance of a downtown bookstore, then pasted posters all over the store’s windows bearing an (invented) anti-Palestinian quote they (falsely) attributed to the store’s owner, a prominent Jewish businesswoman.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/free-speech-israel-palestine-protests/676249/
