Headline: College Officials Must Condemn On-Campus Support for Hamas Violence
Oct. 20, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET
Underneath the headline is this :
By Erwin Chemerinsky
Mr. Chemerinsky is the dean of the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California and the author of the book “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
Editor: ‘How the Constitution Threatens the United States’ seems to be from the current political vocabulary of Hillary Clinton. Her latest attacks on Free Speech, as a clear and present danger, has now become the mantra of choice of a cadre of former defenders, in sum former Constitutional Essentialists, who now view that Constitution as politically toxic, in its Free Speech component. The question occurs what ‘Right’ will be next? Or will the Constitution be nullified in toto!
Mr. Chemerinsky also ignores the fact that the Genocide in Gaza has galvanized, radicalized the World : College campuses have become the epicenters of dissent: Chemerinsky’s self-willed forgetting of Mario Savio of 1964, Teach-ins, Chicago 1968, 1971 May Day protests, etc. does not surprise!
The Reader can access these two reports of violence at UCLA:
Editor: Some telling quotations from Mr. Chemerinsky essay:
The Oct. 7, 2023, attack was the deadliest on Jews since the Holocaust. Women were raped and sexually mutilated, babies were slaughtered, and whole families were burned alive. About 250 hostages were taken; more than 60 are thought to remain in Hamas’s hands.
Certainly, there is an important conversation to be had about Israel’s actions over the past year, which has led to so much devastation and loss of life in Gaza. However, these demonstrations on campuses were not that conversation. They were largely the celebration of the coldblooded murder and torture of innocent civilians. Regardless of one’s views on the conflict in the Middle East, the celebration of mass murder can only be condemned.
Editor: The rule for protected speech, was once no matter how abhorrent the speech… or should Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes be our guide?
In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the specter of a man falsely shouting “fire” in a theater into First Amendment law. Nearly one hundred years later, this remains the most enduring analogy in constitutional law. It has been relied on in hundreds of constitutional cases, and it has permeated popular discourse on the scope of individual rights.
Editor: The final paragraphs of Erwin Chemerinsky essay:
I understand the reluctance of university officials to speak out or take other actions. It is easier to do nothing than to say something that will upset some campus constituencies.
But silence, too, is a message. And it is more. In the eyes of the law, doing nothing can be viewed as deliberate indifference, which violates Title VI and can lead to action by the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education.
At the very least, campus officials must issue a simple message: “Those who have praised the terrorism of Hamas on this campus have the right to express their views. But we, as campus officials, have the duty to say that celebrating murder, rape and taking hostages is deeply offensive and fundamentally inconsistent with what this university stands for.”
Saying so should not take courage.
Editor: This final sentence is not just shocking in its political/moral myopia:
But we, as campus officials, have the duty to say that celebrating murder, rape and taking hostages is deeply offensive and fundamentally inconsistent with what this university stands for.”
Editor: If ‘we are to take the moral high ground’ ‘we’ must understand what ‘The Hannibal Doctrine’ means!
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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