I’m sympathetic to the idea of a homeland where Jews can live in peace and security. I’m also sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians living in what Human Rights Watch and other groups have described as an apartheid state. I’m not here to choose sides in the Mideast conflict. Plenty of others are doing that. No, I’m here to defend something which seems to be coming in for a lot of collateral damage: the principle of free speech as codified in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The recent congressional hearing in which Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, won a trophy for right-wing academia-bashing by bullying three university presidents, was a case in point. It was great to see Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Jewish Democrat from Maryland, point out in a CNN commentary that what Stefanik should have won was a Hypocrite-of-the-Year prize, given her love for a former and possibly future president who has issued numerous antisemitic outbursts.
Last week’s debacle was just the latest in a series of beatings administered to the First Amendment recently. It used to guarantee a free press, but now former President Donald Trump and his supporters are calling the news media the enemy of the people. Another of the amendment’s limbs was cut off with last year’s Supreme Court ruling that Maine and Vermont (and any other states with similar education funding systems) would have to support religious schools with taxpayer dollars.
Now we’re trying essentially to outlaw criticism of a foreign government – and our own government’s support for that one – in campus demonstrations, based on the harshest and most catastrophizing interpretations possible of a couple of protest slogans. Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, and Peter Beinart, editor at large with Jewish Currents magazine, said in an interview with the syndicated radio program “Democracy Now” that talk of genocide against the Jews is, in Beinart’s words, “nonsense” designed to silence criticism of the ongoing “slaughter” in Gaza.
The slogans in question are “Intifada (Arab for uprising) revolution” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Beinart notes that “intifada” has been used to describe uprisings against Arab governments, as well as the state of Israel. As for “Palestine will be free,” some see that merely as meaning free of the conditions that have led to the apartheid state label.
The truth is, we have had something that could be called an intifada in this country. It lasted from the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775 to the Treaty of Paris in 1783. A key turning point in that struggle came when Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga and the fort’s cannons later were taken east and mounted on Dorchester Heights, forcing the British fleet’s evacuation from Boston Harbor. For that to happen, New England had to be free from the lake (Champlain) to the sea – or at least free enough for oxen teams to haul cannons across it. Stefanik should know this history, since the Fort Ticonderoga historic site is in her district. Were the colonists, many of them of English descent, bent on genocide against the English people?
Let’s try flipping the script a bit: A university administration isn’t hiring enough Jews. Jewish students gather outside the president’s office and begin chanting, “Go to hell, WASP administrators!” The Christians in the president’s suite say, “Our theology says that you have to die before going to hell, so they’re calling for genocide against us.” “Go to hell” also might be subject to multiple interpretations. Should the Christian partisans get to decide which one is correct? Should the Jewish students be punished for their chant? I say no on both counts.
A rise in antisemitism has been widely reported in the United States since Hamas’ heinous Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Thank everybody’s gods anti-Jewish incidents haven’t escalated to the level of the shooting of three Palestinian-born students in Burlington, or the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy in Illinois.
Some speech crosses into prohibited territory. A direct threat like “kill the Jews” – offered as a possible example in these pages by University of Tennessee professor Stuart Brotman, would do that, as would direct threats and harassment or intimidation of individuals.
But if free speech is cherished anywhere in America, it should be on our university campuses, where future leaders can be taught – and practice – how to operate in a society in which the right to question power is woven into its Constitution. Where they can learn to walk the tightrope between civility and fearlessness. Where falls from that tightrope don’t automatically get students expelled or presidents fired. Where there is a spirit of give-and-take, like that envisioned by the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis. Brandeis wrote in a concurring opinion in a 1927 case, Whitney vs. California, that when speech turns odious, “the best remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Dave Gram is a retired Associated Press journalist. He lives in Montpelier.
