Free speech on college campuses — even for Hamas apologists

I sighed last week when I learned that my friend David Chung, a Gazette Editorial Fellow, was writing on the same topic I had chosen for my column today. The cool kids don’t mean to write different versions of the same editorial — we’re opinion columnists, not Hallmark movie scriptwriters. But it doesn’t surprise me that free speech on college campuses is on our both of our minds at the moment after rising antisemitism has some asking what speech should be accepted and what shouldn’t.

Each through our own experiences, Chung and I know all too well how easily free expression can be suppressed on college campuses — we’re conservative Republicans. Ideas that face resistance almost always come from our side of the aisle. Demand for their suppression almost always comes from the loud (and sometimes obnoxious) left, which usually claims that the idea is dangerous or hateful. Not wanting to be accused of embodying hate, many campus conservatives are good at self-censoring, while liberal ideas dominate campus culture.

Following the brutal Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israeli communities, however, few are tiptoeing around expressions that condemn Israel or support Hamas. At Brandeis University in Massachusetts, recognition for the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine was yanked due to the chapter “openly” supporting Hamas. At NYU, an Oct. 10 message to the Student Bar Association from its president claimed that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” The association president was promptly ousted from her role, and the law firm where she had served as a summer associate immediately rescinded its offer of future employment.

Anti-Israel sentiment among college students is indeed troubling. In an Oct. 19 Harvard Harris Poll, a majority of respondents aged 18-24 years opined that “the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” More than one out of every four believe that the long-term solution to the dispute is for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians,” even though over two-thirds indicated that they (correctly) think Hamas is designated a terrorist group by the U.S.

That’s horrifying, but not surprising if you consider how Gen Z gets informed. Forty-four percent report never receiving their news from traditional sources like newspapers or TV networks or their digital companions. Instead, three-fourths of 16 to 24-year-olds get their news from social media, most commonly on the short video streaming platform TikTok. Any gomer with a smartphone can broadcast to the world — factualness, context and accuracy not required.

Apply that abysmal standard of gathering information on college campuses, most of which are already petri dishes of liberal orthodoxy, and watch the pursuit of knowledge quickly turn to the kind of leftist groupthink I witnessed two weeks ago at a “teach-in” at Coe College on Dec. 3 titled “What’s Happening in Gaza.”

I already have a baseline understanding of what’s happening in Gaza — being the fossil I am, I get my news from news sources. But I could tell from a mile away that the “audience-led” event would have left-leaning undertones, and it seemed valuable to find out what young campus leftists who get their news from TikTok think and believe about the crisis in Gaza.

The teach-in was organized and moderated by Mimi Daoud, a board member of Advocates for Social Justice, one of the sponsoring groups. The discussion was pretty much what I expected of college kids in an ideological hive, framing Israel right away as the evil white supremacist colonialist tyrant committing genocide against the embattled and displaced and oppressed.

Sarcasm aside, I won’t minimize the horrors that millions of people in the region are facing. War — and terrorism — is the unleashing of hell on earth. In fact, that’s partly why I was bothered by how phrases like “colonialism” and “white supremacy” and other leftist buzzphrases were immediately central to the conversation while the word “Hamas” wasn’t even uttered until almost 30 minutes in. Even then it was only when an audience member condemned President Biden for repeating unverified claims of Hamas beheading babies during the Oct. 7 attack.

The topic of Hamas did eventually pop up (a good idea, given the occasion), and while a more ideologically diverse audience (and better panelists) could have explored some really engaging subject matter on the tensions in the region and the main players, Daoud instead offered a number of statements that might earn a few Pinocchios from a Washington Post fact-checker. Among them:

“Israel uses Hamas as an excuse to ‘humanitarianly’ bomb Gazan civilians.” I’m not sure what that means, but it was on her slideshow.

(The) “U.N. does not give Israel the right to defend itself.” True, but only in narrow context: The U.N. is not a governing authority, nor a grantor of rights. True that Israel cannot defend itself from Hamas because it cannot invoke the right to self-defense in territory it already occupies? Maybe — if Israel actually occupies the territory. Israel hasn’t officially occupied Gaza since its withdrawal in 2005. Whether it still effectively occupies Gaza is debated, but not settled.

“Most of Hamas’ work is centered on humanitarian causes.” You say “humanitarian,” some 32 countries say, “terrorist organization.” Potato, potahto, apparently.

“Hamas has since created a new charter … and has specifically and explicitly said that it is not about the eradication of the Jewish community, it is about the Zionist enemy.” That claim requires some semantic jockeying to prove erasure of antisemitic sentiment. Hamas’ 2017 document claims that its conflict is with “Zionists” — in other words, not with Jews but with Jewish nationalism. But it still insists that it is “the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity,” and that there “shall be no recognition of the legitimacy” of that Jewish entity.

The worst of Daoud’s statements involved a list of claims about Hamas’ brutality that she said her informational sources could “debunk.” Specifically, the claim “that Hamas has raped multiple women on Oct. 7, also debunked by the [Israeli Defense Forces] themselves.”

I listened to my recording of the teach-in multiple times to confirm that I wasn’t mishearing those preposterous words. Daoud’s source, Electronic Intifada, is an online outlet with a demonstrably significant pro-Palestinian bent. Analyzing in detail the claim of mass rape committed by Hamas, they cast quite a bit of speculative doubt, but no actual debunking is confirmed, least of all by the IDF. They do, however, compare the accounts of mass rape to propaganda used by the Nazis to win political support from Germans. That’s … appalling.

Had the teach-in been attended by a broader mix of minds, I could see it resulting in some angry feedback about what should and shouldn’t be allowed at Coe. But should Daoud have been banned, either by law or by school policy, from expressing her opinion?

Unequivocally, no. That’s why we call it “protected speech.” If it weren’t protected, it would be easy to take away for being offensive or “unsafe.” Conservatives know better than anyone how heavy the hand is that stifles speech on a college campus after someone complains.

We’ve been there. During the last six years, a conservative Iowa dental student faced a threat of discipline for expressing disagreement with the dean’s position on a political issue. Conservative Iowa State students were presented with a course syllabus that explicitly forbade conservative perspective in discussion. And a pro-life student group was rejected by the UNI student government solely because of their stance on abortion.

Statehouse Republicans used their own heavy hand, and now free speech training is mandatory at Iowa’s public colleges. But while the law guarantees my right to express something controversial, it can’t shield me from the hostility of people who hate what I have to say and hate me for saying it. Not if that hostility is allowed to linger on college campuses where politics are overwhelmingly one-sided.

Which brings me to my realization from two weeks ago while looking around that Coe auditorium: Nobody in attendance seemed worried about being seen there, even knowing that the subject was controversial. No one was scared to express their point of view.

No one had had to obtain advance tickets, get wanded by security or was prohibited from bringing their backpack into the auditorium. No crowds stood in the hallway outside screaming obscenities. No eventgoers had to be ushered out a side door to avoid confrontations or got stuck in their car in the middle of the street because an incensed mob blocked traffic.

But what if the tables were turned? Would campus leftists, flanked by their leftist friends, show the same deference to the exchange of conservative ideas?

Not a chance. But it wouldn’t be called “protected speech” if no one was threatening it. Law works pretty well for speech on college campuses. It’s culture that’s got some catching up to do.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com