The French resistance was a noble and courageous thing. It resisted, as best it could in occupied France, the most powerful force for evil ever assembled on Earth. It did so by attacking the force itself – not the force’s wives and children back in Berlin. It did so with the physical courage that is required when you are attacking soldiers who have the power to kill you if they catch you, and who you know will do just that if they get their hands on you. That’s why it’s still admired, and why its history is so romantic. And that’s why its mantle is claimed by everyone who wants to be admired by good people anywhere.
But slaughtering women and children in a restaurant, or students in a college dining hall by leaving a backpack there, is not “resistance.” All the more so if you do it in a country which lacks the death penalty for anyone, no matter how heinous a crime he commits, and where monsters convicted of abominations have access to university classes and cell phones while they’re in jail. Anyone who says that such people are engaging in “resistance,” and that they have any kind of a right to do so, automatically strips himself of legitimacy as a participant in the marketplace of ideas.
Of course, what passes for a government among Palestinian Arabs glorifies such murder every single day. It pays people to commit such crimes and it pensions people who have committed them, or the families of such people if the murderers themselves have already claimed their virgins. It lauds such insanity as a key part – perhaps the very heart – of its platform. And Rashid Khaledi is right there along with them, praising such acts, and justifying them and the people who commit them.
No African-American would engage in serious debate with a proponent of the separate but equal doctrine. No Jew should engage in serious debate with someone thinks there are two sides to the question “is it wrong to murder Jews?”
The students at Ramaz who invited Khaledi transgressed this basic principle, because they have not yet been taught that a free marketplace in ideas does not mean you must respectfully listen to someone who wants to argue about whether you have the right to breathe. The Ramaznicks are clearly in need of instruction. We should thank the leaders of their school for providing it. Many other people, no longer chronologically children, would benefit from the lesson.
I agree with those who say that we need to learn how to answer arguments like Khaledi’s. But the way to answer them most certainly does not begin by treating them respectfully. It begins by unmasking the arguments for the evil they are. The lesson plan for teaching how to answer Palestinian calls for Jewish death does not – ever — include giving a respectful hearing to the advocates for such barbarism.