An Israel hater is disinvited by the U of Penn. The better tactic would be to counter Chris Hedges and disprove him.
The decision of the International Affairs Assn. at the University of Pennsylvania to disinvite Chris Hedges was was wrong in principle and wrong pragmatically.
Hedges is the former New York Times Middle East bureau chief, a current columnist for Truthdig.com website, and a bonafide hater of Israel. Hedges equates Israel with ISIS. A recent column of his was titled, “ISIS —the new Israel.”
Every manner of intellectual contortion has, of late, been devised to undermine Louis D. Brandeis’ principled and pragmatic answer to bad speech: more speech. When someone says or writes something heinous, the only effective way to counter it is — to counter it. To respond. To speak the truth. Especially in an age when it is impossible to suppress bad speech — what with the emails, websites, ebooks, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube — it is naive in the extreme to hope that bad speech will go away by itself, that it will simply die down. The only answer to the likes of Chris Hedges is to counter him. All the better, in person.
Remember, the logic that would deny Hedges his free speech by calling it “hate speech” or placing it under some other putatively illegal or inadvisable rubric — such as “defamation of religion” (an Islamic favorite) or “incitement to discrimination” — is the same logic that would deny pro-Israel advocates their own free speech. Either there is free speech, or there is not.
Surprise, surprise. After Chris Hedges was disinvited by the International Affairs Assn. at the U of Penn., he wrote another column titled, “Banning dissent in the name of civility.” He wrote, “Being banned from speaking about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, especially at universities, is familiar to anyone who attempts to challenge the narrative of the Israel lobby.” Of course, the truth is the opposite: It is the pro-Israel advocates on campus who are threatened, harassed, bullied and all too often shut up. But the Chris Hedges of the world, once banned, can wrap themselves in the mantle of martyrdom for free speech, promoting their own “narrative” of some mythical, all powerful Jewish cabal to silence them.
Let us look at what Hedges wrote: “Its [ISIS’] quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and massacre of hundreds of Arabs civilians, to create Israel.”
If students at the U of Penn. lack the historical knowledge to counter this melange of falsehood and distortion, then we can understand why they disinvited Hedges. The problem would not be Hedges, but ignorance of the facts. Assume, for a moment, that everything Hedges wrote were true, it should still not be difficult for a reasonably intelligent college student to point out:
• No fighter for Israel’s independence, be he or she deemed a guerrilla, terrorist or foreigner, beheaded an opponent.
• No fighter for Israel expelled anyone on the basis of religion, such as Christianity.
• No fighter for Israel massacred thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.
Then, based on knowledge of the facts, any reasonably informed student will point out:
• At worst, even if it be admitted that some of the fighters for Israel were terrorists, they were a tiny minority of the fighters, and their acts were condemned by the majority — quite the opposite of ISIS.
• The fighters for Israel — all of them — established a state that expressly recognized the civil and religious rights of all of its citizens, including its former Arab enemies and Christians — exactly the opposite of ISIS.
• The fighters for Israel fought only after their Arab enemies rejected the peaceful solution of the UN, a binational Jewish-Arab state — exactly the opposite of ISIS, which fights not reluctantly, but with the greatest of enthusiasm.
Free speech has nothing to fear from Chris Hedges. Bring him on. Just make sure the format is dialogue, not a mere speech that exempts Hedges from facing critics.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
