Consider three seemingly separate events which took place on three different continents during the first two weeks of October.
Just as Islamic terrorists were busy bombing Israelis and other tourists on vacation in Egypt, dignitaries at the Frankfurt Book Fair were busy honoring the Arab League which, in turn, was proudly displaying more than a dozen anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist publications such as “Sins of the Jews and Judaism,” “The Global Tentacles of the Mossad,” and “The Jewish Role in the 9/11 Destruction of the World Trade Center.” Simultaneously, Duke University in North Carolina was preparing to host the fourth annual Palestine Solidarity Movement conference.
Germany’s laws against Holocaust denial and against the use of hate to incite crime are very good, but when the Simon Wiesenthal Center called upon Germany’s prosecutor to open a criminal investigation, the Germans said they couldn’t do it. Although the Arab titles and book jackets were anti-Jewish in wild and vulgar ways – one cover displayed a photo of the World Trade Center exploding in flames overlaid with a star of David and a fingerprint; another had the star of David covering the Statue of Liberty, which held a sword which dripped blood – the Germans refused to judge the as-yet untranslated books by their covers. Thus, the Germans granted these books the same intellectual credibility and marketplace potential as those written by Nobel Prize winners and other fact-driven writers.
Similarly, Duke has draped anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hate speech in the glorious colors of free speech.
I agree that the best way to oppose free hate speech is with free true speech. I oppose censorship for this reason as does the Duke administration. But, unless the administration takes matters in hand, it will merely have delegated the dirty task of censorship to its campus Jews. It is with a very heavy heart that I write this. But, what else can I conclude when I know that at least one of the speakers at the Jewish rally for Peace was told by a young representative of Hillel International that they could not name the Palestinians or Arab Muslims as terrorists because “that would not be sensitive and we don’t want to say anything bad about anyone.”
I must now say something true and therefore “bad” about some people who are probably not “bad” people, who are, in fact, “good” people trying to do the right thing but who are, in my view, tragically and dangerously misguided. They are not the enemy – but they are aiding and abetting terrorists, and doing so in the name of “fairness” and “balance.”
That good people are also something of a problem is not unique to Hillel or to Duke which, to their credit, have both been fine-tuning the programs in response to suggestion and criticism. (Duke has corrected website material; the Freeman Center has invited formerly unwanted speakers, etc.)
The problem is bigger than Duke. For example, Aviva Michelman, a student at Vassar College, which has a large Jewish population, recently found that the Vassar Jewish Union and Jewish literary magazine “do not affiliate themselves with the Vassar Students for Israel group so as not to take a stance on the issue and risk losing or isolating members of their organizations.”
