Should Speech Advocating Genocide of Jews Be Allowed?
Recently Hamas invaded Israel and committed atrocities, including rape and the murder of children, not as a byproduct of military operations and rogue soldiers, but deliberately, as the intent of the operation. This was followed by an Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza that resulted in thousands of civiliarn casualties, largely because Hamas used civilians as human shields. Most notably, the major hospital in north Gaza was a combination maternity-ward/military base.
The Gaza War resulted in huge controversy on American college campuses. The Left— most faculty and many students— was generally pro-Hamas; the Jewish Left, however, was split, with most supporting Israel, and Jewish college donors heavily supported Israel. A common chant was “Palestine free, from the River to the Sea”. The implication is that Israel should be destroyed and its Jews expelled or killed, and that killing Jewish children was justified, even “exhilarating”. This is not dissimilar to someone in the America of 1943 calling for the killing of Jews in Hungary because they don’t belong there and have harmed the Hungarian culture.
Should college faculty and students be allowed to say this kind of thing? That is what was at issue in the Three Presidents’ Affair. New York Representative Stefanik asked:
Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
I’m a member of the MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), founded in 2021 after University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot was disinvited from giving a prestigious endowed lecture. His lecture was to be on extraterrestial intelligent life, but he was disinvited because of a Newsweek op-ed he had written opposing DEI: affirmative action, student surveillance software, speech codes, bias response teams, and suchlike. MFSA and a faculty group pushed hard for MIT to adopt something like the Chicago Principles, and it did, to our delight.
The Gaza atrocities, however, led to dissension within MFSA, though the leadership all held pretty much the same personal position. One member, Arthur Carp, eloquently wrote:
I am looking for an extremely strong, unambiguous statement from MFSA denouncing this abuse of free speech at the 'Tute, and denouncing the rank anti-Semitism of the protest. I will accept nothing less, and I speak for a very large number of Jewish alumni, extending far beyond my classmates.
I would also like to see a petition started to sanction and defund the student organizations which organized this anti-Semitic hate speech.
I also want the the names of the student organization(s) which sponsored this demonstration, and the names of the students who are the officers of these organizations.
This is now a moment of truth for MFSA. Please do not fumble, as you will likely never recover, at least with the Jewish alumni. If you do not denounce evil - the abuse of free speech on campus to promulgate the murder of Jews - then you acquiesce, and will be numbered amongst the evil doers. It is indeed that stark a choice, both for you organizationally, and personally.
The new President of MIT, Sally Kornbluth refused to call the pro-Hamas demonstrations “abuse of free speech”, though she did direct that certain students who violated Institute rules by demonstrating in the wrong place and wrong time be sent into the disciplinary process. I talked about this in a previous Substack. MFSA also refused to call it abuse of speech. And I as an individual agree.
I believe the correct answer to Rep. Stefanik’s question is:
“No. Calls for genocide are not bullying or harassment, and they are not against MIT rules.”
The “MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom” was adopted just a year ago, and President Kornbluth was right not to repudiate it. It was meant for situations exactly like this, where someone says something abhorrent and other people call for him to be punished.
It is not really important that people dispute whether “Palestine free, from the River to the Sea” really implies genocide. In theory, it could just mean the status quo, in which one state—Israel— essentially stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, it has the rule of law1 and it is one of the few countries in the Middle East (the only one?) in which Arabs are free to vote.2 But let’s suppose the slogan means killing every single Israelis or, better yet, let’s imagine a protest without dog-whistling euphemisms, where protesters simply call for sending Israelis to the gas chambers.
Sending Israelis to the gas chambers is a political opinion, or perhaps a religious opinion3 for some people. That’s exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment was written to protect. It’s not flag burning or obscenity, or profanity or pornography, or advertising, which are not what the Founders had in mind. But in this essay we are not talking about the First Amendment. There’s an immense amount of writing and precedent about the First Amendment, which Professor Eugene Volokh has ably described at The Volokh Conspiracy recently. But the First Amendment does not apply to private universities. Hillsdale College could require faculty not to speak out against Christianity; Brandeis could require them to criticize Hamas. So the question really is what MIT should do, not what is legal.
I doubt anyone thinks that a student should be completely free to say whatever he wants. Let’s go right up the line, though, where even I, a strong advocate of free speech, would stop someone from saying something. That’s how these discussions ought to proceed.
Many things you might say are not encompassed in the idea of “freedom of speech”. For example, it is illegal for me to say, “Scarface, I will pay you $500,000 to kill my old adversary, Lauren Robel, half in advance and half on completion.” I can’t plead that the First Amendment gives me the right to say anything I want. It is also illegal for me to say, “Mrs. George E. Fusterbuster secretly drinks port wine every morning”, unless Mrs. George E. Fusterbuster really is a lush. If I’m lying, it’s defamation. I can’t even hold a protest rally in front of my neighbor’s house at 3 a.m with super-loud megaphones and flashing searchlights, the kind of thing Japanese gangsters do with sound trucks to collect debts. There are lots of things I’m not allowed to say.
But let’s not talk about that kind of thing. Let’s stick to political speech, proclaimed in an appropriate tone of voice during a rallly held properly on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology according to all the Institute’s regulations for time, place, and manner, and without obscenity, profanity, or defamation. Should anything be prohibited?
A simple banner saying “Death to Israel” should not. That is political speech, and it is not its manner but its substance to which people object. It is not a threat. People can perfectly well hold that opinion but not want to kill any Israelis themselves. A banner saying “We must fight Russia in its invasion of Ukraine”, nobody thinks that means the holder of the banner is personally going to go Kharkhov or is shortly going to kill a Russian walking down the street. In fact, someone calling for the elimination of Israel prefers Jews in Jersey City to Jews in Jerusalem.
The same banner, however, if held by a masked mob armed with baseball bats and rocks in front of an MIT Jewish fraternity, is prohibited by Institute rules. The difference is that this is not just expression of a political opinion, but an imminent danger, a credible threat. Meaning does depend on context, even if Harvard President Claudine Gay said that in a clumsy way.
I also would be willing to suppress speech by foreigners. The purpose of political speech is to make decisions for the polis, which has different objectives than other polises (if I may offend pedants), objectives often in conflict with foreign objectives. The President of MIT initially called for the suspension of the students who broke the rules with their day-long protest in MIT’s central corridor. She then changed her mind and just suspended them from extracurricular activities like playing soccer (or demonstrating, if she is consistent!). The reason? — that suspension might hurt the student visa status of foreign students. I would say foreign students deserve a harsher punishment than the American ones. They are guests, and should take extra care not to break rules.
Similarly, the value of political speech that is funded by foreigners is dubious, and the value of political speech funded by unfriendly governments or declared enemies of the United States is worse than dubious— it is obviously intended to harm us. Much anti-Israel student activity within the United States is directed by organizations close to Hamas, possibly even acting as front groups for it as so many organizations did for the Communists in the 1930’s and 40’s. It is completely legitimate, maybe even legally required, for MIT to investigate whether protests are being directed by organizations officially categorized as terrorist groups by the State Department.
So free speech does have limits, but they are further out than many people would advocate if they didn’t stop to think about what the First Amendment is all about. I hope that after meditating and rolling these ideas around, those who call for bans on offensive opinions would change their minds. "If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial," said Paul Graham, and his reasoning is sound. Writing this essay has helped my thinking, for example. And after a weeklong debate by MFSA members in a public forum and MFSA leadership in emails, we understand better what limits speech should have. Indeed, Arthur Carp, the member who wrote the eloquent passage I quoted earlier, came decided he could support MFSA’s statement:
I totally agree with your reasoning for the MFSA statement. If you recollect in a prior e-mail of mine to you, I supported the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie, which was very unpopular in my immediate circle, which includes founders of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). However, I pointed out to these people, as you have realized, that it is an opportunity to photograph and identify our enemies.
But I had to try. The situation, as you are well aware, is extremely dire.
Pretty much. The Supreme Court of Israel, however, has been subverting the rule of law for some time, which is the cause of a deep split in Israeli public opinion.
That is, in most or all Arab countries, nobody is allowed to vote, including Arabs. Those countries don’t have any Jews— they expelled them (all 900,000 or so) in 1948.
A very nice explanation starts like this:
It is narrated in the hadith that the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “The Hour will not begin until you fight the Jews, until a Jew will hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will say: ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah, here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him – except the gharqad (a kind of thorny tree).’ At the same time – as far as I know – the Muslims throughout history have treated the Jews well and coexisted with them, for Islam is a religion of love and peace. So why does the hadith tell us here that we have to kill them, and why did the Muslims not do that previously?