There Is No Right to Bully and Harass

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. itself 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 the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. For fear of a repeat of such attacks, yesterday the state of California that its tree-lighting ceremony would no longer take place in person, and would be a virtual event.