Tent encampment at Columbia University. Image courtesy of SG News
Student Protests Reveal Difference between Free Speech Protected by the First Amendment, versus Hate Speech
In the past few weeks, student protests have erupted across dozens of college campuses across America, beginning with elite, East Coast universities. Their focus began as an anti-Israeli* (others might term it pro-Palestinian) response to the war between Israel and Hamas, with a strong emphasis on the Palestinians caught amid the Gaza conflict, and demands for their universities to divest in investments that aid Israel.
On campuses from Yale and Columbia University, to Harvard, the University of South Carolina, the University of Southern California, and the University of Austin, student protests have included not just First Amendment free speech, but anti-Semitic and hate speech (ahte speech is NOT protected by the First Amendment), and in some cases violence. Counter-protestors have responded with Islamaphobic hate speech and Jewish students on campus have feared for their lives. Several hundred students have been arrested, and on the campus of Columbia, a tent city, which is reported to include non-student Palestinian activists, is refusing to budge.
U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went to Columbia University yesterday and said the University president should resign because the university could not guarantee the safety of Jewish students. Hearing heckling from the student protestors, he responded, “Enjoy your free speech.”
To be factual, there is information that students either don’t have or are ignoring about the topic of their protests; a historical context that goes back generations. There are realities of their viewpoint that those who think of themselves as “establishment” (now there’s a word from the 60s) perhaps aren’t accepting.
It would be too easy to see their protests in black and white. While some might wish to dismiss this as “just students protesting because they do”, there is more to this than first meets the eye. It appears to be, not just a symptom of our nation’s divisions, but of our inability to listen to each other.
Harvard students join the anti-Israel student protests spreading across the nation. Photo courtesy of Fox News.
As Students Protest, Some are Erroneously Conflating the Civil Rights Movement with What is Occurring in Palestine
At Ark Valley Voice (AVV), we’ve had more than one discussion in the past weeks about what this all means, and how to report on it. While this isn’t local, the context of dissent hangs over this entire country.
We first remind readers that in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel, we asked our Thinking Security columnist (an expert on Mideast conflicts) Adam Silverman to write a historical perspective on the Mideast and the generations-old conflict: https://arkvalleyvoice.com/when-wars-never-end-the-israel-hamas-war-of-2023/
Silverman pointed out that the result of extensive negotiations in the 90s with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was that the Palestinians had the chance to establish their own country in 1997. Not only did their leaders refuse the deal, but it prompted the rise of Hamas.
Because we began to see the word “genocide” tossed about, not just by students, but in local conversation, inaccurately we might add, AVV included a perspective on what genocide actually is, and how long it takes to investigate and establish. We add that Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, and residents of Srebrenica and Darfur are all among the targets of genocide in the past centuries and recent decades.
Organizers of the protests — both students and outside agitators arriving on campus — have been fueled not just by righteous anger, but manipulated by social media. Social media giant TikTok (a program of Chinese behemoth ByteDance) are cramming pro-Palestinian messaging on TikTok at a 52:1 ratio (pro-Palestinian versus support for Jewish people and Israel). Behind this barrage: China.
A dynamic that may be in play is a conflation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s (spiced then by protests against the Vietnam War) with what is going on in Palestine. But the civil rights of an entire race of citizens denied their rights do not equate to the plight of Palestinians of Gaza, who have for decades tolerated the Hamas power structure.
Image courtesy of the New York Times
Some have called Gaza an open-air prison. It’s a visual image, but Gazans have walked out of Gaza to emigrate to the U.S. and other countries. Gazans worked in Israel. Many of the Israeli settlers attacked and killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, were peacemakers, who sent their children to dual-language schools and took Gazan friends to doctor’s appointments in Israel. The prison guards, in a sense, have been and are Hamas.
The push for civil rights in the U.S. was a largely nonviolent movement. To put it bluntly – free speech protected by the First Amendment does not include hate speech. What is occurring across college campuses at this moment has devolved into anti-Semitic and Islamophobic rhetoric and that has become violent harassment.
To be clear, it is devastating to contemplate the uprooting of millions of Palestinians in Gaza, and the deaths of some 34,000 civilians, most women and children, from war and lack of food and aid. This is a tragedy by any definition. The foreign aid package just approved by Congress and signed into law yesterday by President Joe Biden will “surge food and aid as quickly as possible”. Biden has made it clear we expect Israel to allow this aid to be delivered to the people of Gaza.
But to be factual, as of January 2024, Russia has killed nearly 30,000 civilians in Ukraine. Some of the worst bombardments of civilian targets of the entire war have come in the past few weeks. That doesn’t even count the more than 70,000 Ukrainian military casualties as they have bravely, and successfully defended their country from an unprovoked invasion by Russia. Three years into this war, the aid approved for Ukraine will allow them to fight on — in what amounts to a proxy war for the U.S. against Russia.
The president of Ukraine is Jewish. His Secretary of Defense is a Muslim. Unless AVV is mistaken, we haven’t seen any campus protests about Russia’s unprovoked attack on the democracy of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
Student protests now spilling over to commencements. Image courtesy of the Daily News.
As some “Establishment” Types Responds
Campus leadership and local and state governments have responded to the student protests in different ways; arresting some for hate speech, harassment, or physical violence, expelling others, and striking deals to move outside agitators off campus.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (Democrat) announced that students exhibiting harassment in public areas or on campus should be arrested.
Senator Tom Cotton (Republican, Arkansas) speaking about pro-Palestinian protesters, described them as “pro-Hamas” and “criminals.” He added, “If something like this happened in Arkansas, on a bridge there, let’s just say I think there’d be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard — not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they’re blocking,” Cotton said.
“And if they glued their hands to a car or the pavement, well, it’d probably be pretty painful to have their skin ripped off, but I think that’s the way we’d handle in Arkansas,” he added.
This is an extreme position. It might be easy for some to dismiss this complicated and emotional situation as “Just those kids”, or those privileged white college students picking something else to protest. But those protesting are a broad array of heritages, including some Jewish students who are separating their “Jewishness” from the actions of the state of Israel.
Student leaders talk of the “communities” that have grown up in their tent camps on campus. They speak of hundreds of them celebrating the Jewish Passover Seder, of sharing across ethnic lines, their horror over the plight of the Palestinians, of sharing food and information. Some of it sounds much like the comments of those who participated in the 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” movement during the Great Recession.
Jewish students are vastly outnumbered in a counterprotest at Brooklyn College. Photo courtesy of the New York Times
Moving Toward Civil Discourse
What is required — and what is apparently in short supply, is civil discourse.
The ability to listen to each other, to take turns trading viewpoints, while reserving judgment, is difficult (especially when facing down a crowd of hundreds of protestors) but necessary.
Sometimes this leads to a person changing their mind. This week Speaker Johnson did just that, when he reversed his position regarding the need for Ukraine aid and put the bill up for a vote on the House floor.
Assuming an attitude of respect, of actually listening to each other rather than just shouting each other down (which members of one political party have taken to doing; repeatedly talking over journalists attempting to frame questions) helps people feel heard. Just that step can help, even if ultimately you disagree with that person, to lower the temperature of discord.
What student protestors are asking of their universities amounts to taking a policy position. At least one university is taking a position of “institutional neutrality”, a phrase put forth by Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeir.
In an interview this morning with MSNBC, he said that the university he leads takes no policy positions unless it directly affects the university. “We have clear principles; we don’t politicize things and we ensure an environment where everybody can learn and participate in discussions without being harassed.”
Editor’s note: * while our original article referenced a student protest focus as an anti-Israeli* response to the war between Israel and Hamas, a reader pointed out that it more accurately could be called an anti-government response to how Israel has prosecuted their war. AVV adds that the student protests are also pro-Palestinian.
Even I think it is important to be careful about what words are used in some situations. For instance, describing the college campus protestors as “anti-Israeli” sounds not much different than calling them anti-Semitic, which I’m sure was not the intent of the author.
As we all know very well here in America, the government of a country doesn’t reflect the views of every citizen of that country, and I think it is important to be careful to avoid painting people as hating Israelis when what they are actually doing is complaining about the official actions of the government of Israel, which plenty of people inside Israel are also protesting.
Thank you for these thoughts, Jeff, there was no intent to label on our part. While we may differentiate between an all-encompassing “anti-Israeli” attitude and student complaints against the actions of the government of Israel, the differentiation appearing to be blurring on some campuses here; which is frightening many Jewish students. Unfortunately, when words turn threatening, hateful and violent, the thousands of miles between our campuses and the Mideast disappear, and students with no connection to Israel other than their religious identity can find themselves targets.
Yes, inside Israel itself, many citizens and especially the families of Hamas’s hostages have been critical of their government’s actions.
Bernie Sanders receently spoke truth to power as he called out Netanyahu for weaponizing the word “antisemitism” and creating a propaganda machine in an effort to deflect the true narrative of his genicide of the Palastinean people. A large portion of the Israeli population have also protested Netanyahu’s tactics.
Brodie White
Cañon City
Ark Valley Voice once again points out that readers need to be careful about deploying the word “genocide”. Genocide was perpetrated against Jewish people by the Nazi’s in World War II. The murders of millions in Sudan, DarFar, and dozens of outher places have not generated this outrage. Why? The genocide of the state of Israel is exactly what the Palestinian Hamas has as its stated mission; this is what the phrase “From the river to the sea” means — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean they want as their nation state — they reject a two-state solution. Genocide according to Unite Nations oversight takes years to investigate and determine (https://arkvalleyvoice.com/ceasefire-carolers-say-they-seek-end-to-mideast-violence/ — so use of it is inappropriate at this time. That said — where is the outrage over what the Russian invasion of Ukraine has done — nearly as many civilians have been killed, hundreds of thousands injured and millions displaced?