January 2012
Academic freedom, like democracy, is one of
those things everyone supports because it can mean anything to anyone. In this
sense, it is the opposite of anti-Semitism, which everyone opposes because it
can be defined so narrowly that it means virtually nothing at all. What’s
interesting is when the two concepts collide.
This is precisely what happened, for example, on
Oct. 28 at Kent State University. Guest speaker Ishmael Khaldi, a former Israeli
consul official, got a rough welcome when he visited to discuss his experience
as an Israeli Bedouin. Professor Julio Pino, a Kent State historian, asked
Khaldi hostile questions before leaving the hall shouting, “Death to Israel!”
Kent State’s president, Lester A. Lefton,
responded quite well. Lefton wrote that it “may have been Professor Pino’s right
to” shout at Khaldi, “but it is my obligation, as the president of this
university, to say that I find his words deplorable, and his behavior deeply
troubling.” Lefton did not try to censor Pino.
But he announced that Pino’s behavior was out of
bounds.
The influential Association of American
University Professors, however, was incensed. Treating Pino as the victim, AAUP
President Cary Nelson told Inside Higher Ed
that it was Lefton who had stepped out of bounds. Nelson insisted that
Pino’s behavior “falls well within the speech rights of any member of a
university community.” This of course was not at issue, since Lefton had only
voiced his own opinion.
Nelson,
however, went on. “More surprising, to be sure,” Nelson said, “is
President Lefton’s invention of an absurd form of hospitality: you must not
question the moral legitimacy or the right to exist of a guest’s home country.”
In
fact, Lefton had said no such thing. But it is telling that the AAUP’s chief
defends a supposed special right to delegitimize Israel. Natan Sharansky had
included this supposed right in his famous “3D” test: criticism of Israel
crosses the line into anti-Semitism when it uses double standards, demonizes the
Jewish state, or attempts to delegitimize it. This test is the basis for
anti-Semitism standards adopted by the U.S. State Department and the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights.
Ironically, it is Khaldi’s speech which some are
trying to suppress. This is true not only in that his rude treatment may
dissuade him from visiting other U.S. campuses. Four days before his Kent State
speech, Khaldi appeared at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There,
approximately 60 students reportedly staged a walkout of Khaldi’s presentation
in order to disrupt and embarrass him. Bilal Baydoun, who chairs one of the
student protest groups, bragged to Arab American News that their
disruption “succeeded in rattling the speaker and making him nervous; we sent
the message that this campus doesn’t welcome him.”
The goal of such protests is not merely to
disrupt, embarrass, or discomfort Israeli speakers but to silence them. “But
ultimately,” as the Arab American News quotes Baydoun, “our goal is to
prevent someone like this from even arriving on campus in the first place and we
feel confident that we will be able to accomplish this as we continue to spread
awareness.”
In this respect, Khaldi’s treatment resembles
the so-called Irvine 11’s orchestrated disruption of Ambassador Michael Oren’s
speech at UC Irvine last year. In that case too, the protesters admitted that
their intent was to shut down the pro-Israel side of the debate. Indeed, it is
now fair to say that there have been efforts nationwide to prevent university
speakers from delivering presentations that deviate from the anti-Israel
orthodoxy that reigns on too many campuses.
It is ironic that academia’s self-appointed
guardians of academic freedom and freedom of speech do not recognize this
concerted effort to squelch one side of the debate. On the contrary, some are
all too eager to recognize academic freedom only when it does not apply and to
ignore anti-Semitism where it does. Those who support academic freedom should
insist that it not be used as a weapon in support of the silencers and against
their victims. If they cannot speak out on the right side of this debate, they
should at least not join the wrong side.
Kenneth L. Marcus is executive vice
president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research and author of Jewish
Identity and Civil Rights in America. He formerly served as staff director of
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
New Jersey Jewish News, November 9, 2011.
This op-ed was
distributed by Joint Media News Service.
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