FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR GENOCIDAL HAMASNIKS, BUT NOT FOR THESE:

Shot: [Harvard President] Gay added that Harvard “rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs” and “embraces a commitment to free expression. “That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such view. But that is a far cry from endorsing them.”

Chaser: Despite Harvard’s reputation for excellent scholarship, the university has consistently failed to meet standards in one area: free speech.

According to FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, Harvard University ranked dead last at 248 out of 248 institutions. Students reported their discomfort expressing ideas, lack of confidence in the administration’s support for speech, and acceptance of students shouting down speakers.

A SMALL DISSENT ON “PROGRESSIVE” REPLACING LIBERAL: I was a college student in the Boston area from 1985-1988. At my school, the lefty activists did not have the standard liberal-moderate-conservative understanding of politics. Rather, they called themselves, stationed on the far left, “progressive”; liberals and moderates were “conservative”; and conservatives were “reactionaries.”

In this environment, Gov. Michael Dukakis chose to call himself a “progressive” rather than a “liberal,” to station himself, at least rhetorically, on the far left of his party. When he ran for president, however, the media consistently reported along the lines of “Dukakis calls himself a progressive, not a liberal, to try to appear more moderate to voters.” The truth, as noted, was the opposite, but it served Dukakis’ political prospects as he wrapped up the Democratic nomination, so he went with it.

Thus, the media took the term “progressive,” meant to convey leftist radicalism, and turned it into a more palatable, more moderate version of liberal. But the activist “progressive” left always understood their agenda to be stripping the American left of its vestiges of classical liberalism–free speech, some respect for property rights, belief in color-blindness–in favor of a totally illiberal agenda.

ANTISEMITISM IS/AS A POLITICAL STRATEGY: I’m planning to elaborate on this further, hopefully soon, but briefly more antisemitism goes beyond ordinary religious or ethnic hatred in that it manifests itself so often as a political tool. In the university context, it does two things. First, it allows “intersectional” groups that base their identities on victimhood that would otherwise be at odds with each to ally. How do you get feminist and LGBTetc groups to ally with Islamists? Shared hostility to Jews. Second, how do you overthrow the mainstream, white-dominated squishy liberal establishment that has run universities since the 1960s in favor of the hard-left? Well, secular establishment Jews largely replaced establishment Protestants as the heart of the university establishment–recently, eight of eight Ivy League presidents were Jews. By “excluding Jews from progressive spaces,” as liberal campus Jews now frequently complain about, you ensure that all the roles Jews have played in the university hierarchy will be replaced by the hard-left coalition, among whom Jews radical enough to be allowed to join are a small minority. My namesake David Bernstein’s book Woke Antisemitism is very good on the subject of how woke ideology fosters and foments antisemitism (buy it!) But I think even David wildly underestimates how much of this antisemitism is not merely a natural outgrowth of wokeism, but part of its political strategy. You can’t make an omelet (overthrowing the mainstream liberal establishment) without breaking a few eggs, and Jews are among the eggs.

SHE JUST CONDONES MASS MURDER OF JEWS, IT’S NOT LIKE SHE RETWEETED A SEXIST JOKE OR SOMETHING:

Karen Attiah is a columnist for the Washington Post, and its international opinion editor.

CHICKENS FOR KFC:

IT’S NOT JUST HARVARD: Dartmouth student and local groups blame Israel for Hamas’s massacre.

Who are these rapscallions, you may ask? “Ramsey Alsheikh ’26 is the president of the Palestine Solidarity Coalition of Dartmouth Students, Hayden El Rafei ’24 is a member of the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective and Roan V. Wade ’25 is an organizer with Sunrise Movement at Dartmouth. They submitted this column on behalf of the above organizations.”

UPDATE: Roan Wade, btw, is another “Chicken for Colonel Sanders:”

“Art has always been a way for me to have a voice, a way of silently shouting my beliefs, a way of seizing space, a way of fighting those who have attempted to strip me of my voice. I view art as a means of communicating the revolution, raising class consciousness, and increasing awareness of intersectional struggles for our collective liberation. My work feeds the flames of revolution whether through creating art directly intended as a form of protest, or by using my own experiences with queer youth homelessness, housing and food insecurity, homophobia, sexism, and sexual harassment and violence to highlight that the personal is political. In these dystopian times, everything is political, including all my work.”

HEROES: In Heroic Battle, 15 People Saved Kibbutz Kerem Shalom From Hamas Massacre. Tragically, two defenders fell.

THEY ARE COOL WITH GENOCIDE:

There has been too much pointless debate over whether those who call for Israel’s destruction are necessarily antisemitic. The important point is that such people know that the end of Israel most likely means genocide for 7.5 million Israeli Jews, and they are okay with that.

Whether they are motivated by Islamism, leftist bs “anticolonialism,” hostility to the West with Israel as their first target, or pure hatred of Jews is immaterial, it’s much worse than mere antisemitism. Most antisemites aren’t full-on Nazis, and as much as they dislike Jews would object to mass murder (just like most people who have racist opinions of black people would object to mass murder). The so-called antizionists do not, and therefore are much worse.

It’s a weird tic of American progressivism to worry more about people’s moral intentions than their actions. I really don’t care if someone doesn’t like Jews. But someone who claims and may sincerely think that they have nothing against Jews, but is content to see my friends and relatives in Israel murdered in the name of some idiotic ideology, that’s a real problem.

PS: Here’s a test, which in my experience almost all leftist “antizionists” fail. Most of them will claim that they have some solution in mind to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will protect the rights of what would become the Jewish minority in “Palestine.” So you ask them, “well, what if it turns out as a practical matter that your one-state solution, if implemented, will likely result in the murder/expulsion/oppression of the 7.5 million Jews in Israel. Would you still support it?” This should be an easy question to answer, especially given that it’s a pure hypothetical that could not be binding. I’ve asked this many times to “antizionists,” and I’ve never received an unequivocal “no.” Like I said, they are ok with genocide.

USEFUL IDIOTS (OR WORSE): Here is the very misnamed Human Rights Watch attacking Israel for trying to enforce a no-go zone by its border with Gaza: “Both before and after the confrontations, senior officials publicly said that soldiers stationed along the barrier that separates Gaza and Israel had orders to target ‘instigators’ and those who approach the border. However, the Israeli government presented no evidence that rock-throwing and other violence by some demonstrators seriously threatened Israeli soldiers across the border fence.”

Israel argued, correctly, that these “demonstrators” were Hamas operatives trained to create a distraction for an eventual Hamas assault on Israeli border towns. As I understand it, the no-go zone eventually gave way to a “high-tech” border fence that totally failed.

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?: Footage of Hamas assault on civilians shows likely war crimes, experts say. Ya think?

Of course, as non-uniformed combatants who hide among civilian populations, everything Hamas does is a war crime…

IF YOU READ ONE ARTICLE ON THE SITUATION IN ISRAEL, MAKE IT THIS ONE: Haviv Retig Gur: A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one.

Two main points:

(1) “Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine’s Western defenders ignore, both because it’s a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don’t really understand it themselves. Palestinian ‘resistance,’ as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work…. This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.”

(2) “The Israel that emerged from Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Deluge” operation was different from the one that went into it. A tectonic shift had occurred in the country’s psyche. The horrors inflicted by Hamas sparked rage and an intense feeling of vulnerability. Where Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers while all the vaunted power of the Israel Defense Forces was helpless to stop it…. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”

Read the whole thing.

PROMINENT BAD TAKE ON HAMAS MASSACRE, II:

Literally all Hamas had to do to ensure safety, peace and prosperity for Gazans is to announce that they were no longer going to attack Israel, and mean it. Israel has no such option.

PROMINENT BAD TAKE ON HAMAS MASSACRE, I:

Hamas, in fact, has been trying to murder or kidnap as many Israelis as it can for decades. And “No options for their future in Gaza?” How about “we announce that we will no longer launch attacks on Israel, mean it, and become a thriving Palestinian enclave that will eventually govern an independent Palestinian state?”

CHUTZPAH: Palestinian students are suing University of Illinois Chicago for being excluded from an information session for study abroad to Israel. According to the plaintiffs’ own press release, there was disruptive scheme afoot that was thwarted: “I planned to attend the information session to voice my concerns about how a study abroad program in Israel discriminates against me as a Palestinian student.”

Well You see an ‘information session’ is for *them* to give *you* information about the program, not for *you* to hijack the session to express your political views. As a Twitter commenter noted, “the plaintiffs are seeking to establish a permanent right to harass and obstruct any activity related to Israel.”

The standard illustration of the Yiddish word chutzpah is the guy who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy because he is an orphan. Suing a university for being denied the “right” to disrupt university activities is another good one.

VOICES FOR LIBERTY SYMPOSIUM ON FREE SPEECH AND CIVIL RIGHTS: My Liberty & Law Center at Scalia Law School has a conference on Friday that some Insta-readers might be interested in attending (live if you live near Arlington, VA, online otherwise).

“Does free expression help or harm the cause of social progress? Join senior scholars and exciting new voices presenting cutting-edge research on the role freedom of speech plays in advancing civil rights movements (past, present, and future). Academic research into this important topic has been surprisingly limited. Scholars will present new papers exploring whether free expression entrenches an unjust status quo or provides critical support for groups wishing to challenge it.”

You can find the program here.

And you can register here.

MY NEW ARTICLE (bumped): “Students for Fair Admissions and the End of Racial Classification as We Know It.” Forthcoming in the Cato Supreme Court review, which always comes out on Constitution Day. Download it while it’s hot (downloads are free).

RUBE SELF IDENTIFIES: Indyk is frequently depicted as one of the US’s top Mideast diplomats. If true, that’s a real problem. Abbas has a decades-long history of Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish incitement, but it suddenly occurs to Indyk that his professed friendship with a Jewish American diplomat may not have been entirely sincere?

PS By the way, Israelis have a deserved reputation for being forthright, even blunt, sometimes even rude. Most Israelis, even diplomats (especially political appointees), are basically incapable of the kind of smooth phony “sincerity” that elites like Indyk eat up. This is, for example, a big reason why supposed “human rights advocate” Jimmy Carter got along famously with ex-Nazi military dictator Anwar Sadat, but couldn’t stand the blunt, but democratically elected, Menachem Begin.

And UPDATE: For those not following, Indyk’s tweet today was a response to a flagrant display of antisemitism by Abbas, ranging from justifying the Holocaust to the false claim beloved of antisemites that Jews are descendants of Khazars. The linked article about Abbas’s long history of Holocaust denial is from 2022, demonstrating, among others things, that this was widely known before Abbas’s recent outburst and Indyk is either feigning surprise or is truly an ingenue.

REPUBLICANS POUNCE: Ali’s tweet below is what happens when you believe, or at least pretend to believe, your own “intersectional” bullshit that requires you to think that all groups the left defines as oppressed are naturally allies.

It’s an updated, but even more ridiculous, version of the old Marxist belief that all workers naturally have solidarity with each other. Thus, for example, if American unions were excluding black workers, and black workers in turn eagerly served as strikebreakers, it was not because of racism or enmity but because they were being manipulated by capitalists. Believe it or not, this was, and maybe still is, the standard explanation for racist union policies in the labor history literature.

I’M EMBARRASSED FOR PRINCETON: A controversy has broken out at Princeton University over an upcoming course that “will include reading material [the book “The Right to Maim,” by Rutgers University professor Jasbir K. Puar] alleging the Israeli military deliberately attempts to cripple Palestinians for profit — outraging critics who have called on the Ivy League school axe the professor and apologize to students.”

A group of students at Princeton wrote an open letter defending the professor and attacking what they called “right-wing Zionists,” which apparently includes anyone who question the lie, rooted in longstanding antisemitic tropes, that Israel deliberately cripples Palestinians for profit.

The letter was signed by several dozen students, and another thirty or so professors. Two things are remarkable about the letter. First, it never gets around to defending the underlying lie that sparked the controversy. One would think that the truth of this claim would be highly relevant to whether the critics are justified in their criticism of the course, or are simply right-wing Zionists who reject any criticism of Israel.

The open letter does allege that “Israel, like other countries, engages in human rights violations — having illegally harvested the organs of both Palestinians and Israelis, which is well-documented.” Puar has, in fact, alleged that Palestinian bodies “were mined [by Israel] for organs for scientific research,” but that is not the crux of the complaint against using her book.

The even more embarrassing part, though, is that when the letter claims that it’s “well-documented” that Israel illegally harvested the organs of Palestinians, the letter links to two sources. First, an article from the newspaper Ha’aretz about the head of an Israeli forensic institute being prosecuted for illegally taking body parts from patients. The fact of prosecution should be sufficient to show that this was not Israeli government policy, but rogue actions.

The second link is to an article about that scandal from from an academic journal, titled, “The Body of the Terrorist: Blood Libels, Bio-Piracy, and the Spoils of War at the Israeli Forensic Institute.” The article is hardly sympathetic to Israel, and takes pains to note that, not terribly surprisingly, the bodies of Israeli soldiers killed in battle were treated more respectfully than were the bodies of Palestinian terrorists. Nevertheless, the article acknowledges that this wasn’t an issue of abusing Palestinians specifically. Rather, “body parts were taken from Jews and Muslims, from IDF soldiers and from Palestinian stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from new immigrants. There were only two considerations: the physical condition of the body and its organs, and the ability to conceal what they were doing.” Indeed, it was the families of Israeli soldiers, not Palestinians, who discovered that the institute had been tampering with bodies.

So, while the letter suggests that it’s well-documented that “Israel” specifically “harvested the organs of Palestinians,” the actual sources suggest that the head of a forensic institute was prosecuted for taking body parts from any body he could get his hands on. The connection the letter tries to draw between this and claims that Israel has a policy of intentionally maiming Palestinians is entirely spurious, and I can only imagine that the professors signed the letter either didn’t bother to check as to whether the letter’s claim was in fact well-documented, or knew it wasn’t but didn’t care.

And the complete disregard for truth and documentation of claims when Princeton professors support the underlying cause (here, hostility to Israel) is why I’m embarrassed for the university. How did it wind up with several dozen professors (and even more students) who have no regard for the truth?

SHOULD I CALL THE NEW YORK TIMES DISHONEST, OR IS THAT REDUNDANT: Here’s how the Times explains opposition to a newly appointed journalism dean at Texas A&M:

McElroy, who once worked as an editor at The New York Times, said she was notified by the university’s interim dean of liberal arts, José Luis Bermúdez, of political pushback over her appointment.

“I said, ‘What’s wrong?'” Dr. McElroy recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘You’re a Black woman who was at The New York Times and, to these folks, that’s like working for Pravda.'” Dr. McElroy left The Times in 2011….

Matthew Poling, the president of [an alumni group opposed to her appointment], said that members did not approve of Dr. McElroy’s work promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts had been a small part of her journalism and academic career, she said.

You would never get a sense from the article why McElroy was so controversial. I couldn’t believe that it was solely about the fact that she supports DEI, given that basically all academic bureaucrats are required to be on board.

So I googled for about two minutes, and got an answer from this article she wrote. She favors race-based hiring in journalism, calls “objectivity” a “flawed” goal for journalists, calls journalism a “white patriarchal institution.” (In fairness, she adds, “I wholeheartedly believe in journalism’s mission to seek truth and tell it fairly and dimensionally.”)

Also, it turns out that her protestation that “diversity, equity and inclusion efforts had been a small part of her journalism and academic career” is misleading. Her dissertation, as she describes it, was “about black columnists at ‘mainstream’ newspapers,” in which she “challenged Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach’s thoughts about “diverse” journalists included their seminal book “The Elements of Journalism.” So her signature academic project may not have been about DEI “efforts,” but it was about DEI.

Proponents of the autonomy of academic institutions in the name of academic freedom from political interference can still object that her appointment should have been left solely to university officials to consider, without political interference. But even if one strongly takes that position, it doesn’t excuse the Times’ reporter from her obligation to (objectively and?) accurately report on why her appointment was controversial, rather than implying that it was just racism and extremism.

IT’S A MYSTERY, WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA: Journalist claims to be unable to figure out what funds designated for a Christmas party were for:

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HEATH ISSUES DOESN’T THINK MOTHERS EXIST: Any “scientific” journal that uses a term like “birthing people” is not a scientific journal.

SINCERE THANKS TO ATTORNEY CORY LIU: My general policy as a law professor is that I don’t write briefs in cases, as an amicus (“friend of the court”) or otherwise. If I wanted to be a lawyer, I would practice law.

A bit over two years ago, attorney Cory Liu contacted me and asked me if I was planning to write a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the SFFA affirmative action cases. I explained my policy, noted above. Cory suggested that my emerging work on the arbitrariness of racial classifications, published in an article and in my then-forthcoming book, Classified, provided an important perspective on an issue that that the Court had largely ignored but needed to consider: not just whether affirmative action preferences served a compelling interest in the abstract, but whether the classifications used to grant or deny favorable treatment, such as “Hispanic” and “Asian,” were unduly arbitrary and failed to serve their purported purpose. Cory offered to write the brief with me as the named amicus, discussing my work. I agreed.

Once the Court agreed to hear the case on the merits, we filed another brief. As one of over 100 briefs filed in the case, I didn’t expect it to get any attention, and was pleasantly surprised when many articles on the case discussed this brief to the exclusion of almost all the others. Clearly, Cory and I had struck a nerve.

The fruits of Cory’s efforts were ultimately apparent in the Court’s opinions. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, stated that one reason Harvard and UNC’s policies were unlawful was that “it is far from evident … how assigning students to these racial categories and making admissions decisions based on them furthers the educational benefits that the universities claim to pursue. For starters, the categories are themselves imprecise in many ways. Some of them [such as Asian American] are plainly overbroad…. Meanwhile other racial categories, such as ‘Hispanic,’ are arbitrary or undefined.”

Roberts also cited Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, which has an extensive discussion of the arbitrariness of the classifications. Gorsuch primarily relies on, and extensively cites, Cory’s amicus brief.

Justice Thomas, concurring, also citing Gorsuch, adds that “university admissions policies ask individuals to identify themselves as belonging to one of only a few reductionist racial groups…. Whichever choice he makes (in the event he chooses to report a race at all), the form silos him into an artificial category.”

In short, the Court’s majority has given potential litigants a new rationale for challenging affirmative action preferences and other uses of race in public policy; such preferences not only constitute illicit divvying up of opportunities by “race,” but the way they are divvied up is based on incoherent, arbitrary classifications that in most situations will be impossible to justify. Given the Court’s almost total reticence on this issue before SFFA, I doubt they would have reached it but for Liu’s efforts.

FOR SOME REASON SHE ONLY THINKS THIS APPLIES TO WOMEN: Justice Kagan: Affirmative Action Suggests that Beneficiaries Could Not be Accepted Based on Merit Alone.

SPEAKING OF ERRORS IN RECENT SUPREME COURT OPINIONS: Justice Sotomayor wrote in her SFFA affirmative action dissent that during the Jim Crow era, University of North Carolina excluded “all people of color.” In fact, only black Americans were excluded.