Oxes, goring, etc.

One important argument for protecting speech you find offensive rests on the impossibility of laying down a principled standard to separate speech and speakers you find offensive from speech and speakers that others find offensive but that you like. If you succeed in getting government to sanction the former, it opens the door to government sanctioning the latter. And you cannot do anything about it without drawing accusations of hypocrisy.

Case in point: Universities have sanctioned faculty members for pro-Israel/anti-Palestinian/anti-Hamas speech. In several ways, they present the mirror of cases involving anti-Israel/antisemitic/pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas speech:

    • No one can agree on which is which. Did the USC prof wish death on Hamas or on all Palestinians? Did he intentionally step on the memorial display or only accidentally? The current crisis has created a counterpart to "is anti-Zionism antisemitism"--is "anti-Hamas anti-Palestinian." Whatever the merits of the questions and whatever the distinctions one can draw (based on one's views of the content at issue), government should not be drawing them.

    • Apologies are as sincere as the listener is sympathetic to the apologist's speech. One case involves a doctor at Johns Hopkins who called Palestinians "morally depraved" and "savage animals" and responded "god willing" to claims that his call for reclaiming every inch of Israel would produce large-scale slaughter. He apologized, saying his "messages in no way reflect my beliefs, me as a person, a physician, a friend, or colleague." A reporter for the Washington Free Beacon called for Hopkins to forgive the doctor. Why? Because the doctor treated the reporter's daughter--"as the father of a Klugman patient, I know he means it. Why? Because I witnessed with my own eyes how he delivered medical care.” I will let the absurdity of that last part sit without comment.

It would be great if people calling for bans on SJP and similar campus speech would see this story as a warning, as a logical risk (if not inevitability) of their efforts. I doubt it will.