It's easy to support liberal values such as tolerance, informed consent, and free speech in a political theory seminar, but moral emergencies provide the true test of one's principle commitments.
Yes, The free speech of everyone, no matter how vile or ignorant should be protected.
However, that does not absolve those partaking in such speech from the consequences of taking such a stance.
I believe it it is wholly within the purview of any company or corporation’s standards to choose not to hire someone who holds such vile viewpoints. They, too, are exercising their freedom of association.
I feel that if someone signs a public letter they are asking for their name to publicly associated with that letter. This goes back to John Hancock. It seems a bit of a poor defence of our future elites that Harvard club presidents can sign for the groups, but the members of the groups signed for have no say. I think it's shocking that these students are only now learning that the public expects them to believe what they sign, or is signed in their name. I think most blacklists of the past were of people rumoured to have done something, not those who have been proven to.
While I agree with most of what you are saying here, I believe you are conflating two separate issues. Short of directly advocating violence, governments should not be proscribing or punishing the speech of their citizens. This goes doubly so in the US with our First Amendment guarantee. However, the First Amendment applies to governments, not individuals. You are free to make your claims, and I am free to respond to them - absent violence - how I see fit. This would include calling attention to your claims and advocating for nonviolent responses to them. So a governmental blacklist would be prohibited, but a private one would not. It doesn't necessarily make the blacklist a good idea, but it speaks to one being protected speech and one being prohibited. I would also argue that cancel culture is not simply holding people accountable for their views. But it is the organized (governmental or non-governmental) punishment of views that were non-controversial or still within the Overton window until quite recently. Being punished for advocating for bodily autonomy or not being experimented on would be evidence of cancel culture. Being punished for celebrating murder would not.
The political principle we need to set in stone, is that a foreign nation who claim some people somewhere are "oppressed", must open its borders to take them in as refugees before engaging in war to end the alleged oppression. If Iran can send shiploads of US weapons bought in Afghanistan to Gaza, they can put Gazan refugees on those ships and let them relocate to Iran and live in peace. Iran's failure to do that exposes the true depth of the troubles in Gaza. It's an overpopulated welfare state that does not support itself, and its children are paid by foreign nations (most recently Iran) to become terrorists. If Iran won't accept these people as citizens, then it has no business paying their children to go to war and die. That hypocrisy has gone on in the former British Palestine since Hitler funded Amin al-Husseini ("der Grosse-Mufti den Jerusalem") to build the al-Aqsa Mosque and to recruit 5 divisions of Bosnian Muslims into the Wehrmacht, by promising they would march to Palestine to kill the Jewish infidels (they never got past the Serb Chetniki. It took Hitler 30 divisions of Germans to invade Yugoslavia and the 5 divisions raised by al-Husseini joined 25 German divisions trying to keep the place occupied. When Eisenhower finally gave Patton all the gasoline he wanted, Patton's armor rolled to the outskirts of Prague, linked up with the Red Army marching west, and all 30 Nazi divisions holding Yugoslavia were trapped there) but accomplished nothing of the kind. Jerusalem is nowhere mentioned in the Qur'an, an inconvenient fact for al-Husseini, but Joseph Goebbels lasting legacy was to convince many Muslims that the mosque built on the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem has some special religious significance.
A lack of frank discussion about the religion of Nazism and its insistence on subverting religious institutions into organs of Nazi propaganda or destroying them outright of they disobeyed, has contributed mightily to the troubles in the Mideast. The Iranian Shah was a Nazi sympathizer...he abandoned his throne to the Russians and British and spent 1941-45 in Nazi-occupied Paris. Khomeini and the new tyrants who followed the Shah, keep alive those elements of Nazism that suit them politically.
Free speech and inquiry is the key to undoing all the harm that came from Nazi ideas. Understanding leads to ridicule and false ideals lose their grip on people. That, more than anything else, brings about peace.
As Churchill cautioned in those dark days leading up to the Nazi Holocaust, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others". Free speech is unsettling and may induce lawbreaking when emotions run high. But in the end it is also curative. Even an unlimited amount of money spent on propaganda, cannot conceal obvious facts for very long.
Thank you! Palestinian lives and Jewish lives are both of equal value, and both peoples have a right to be free of the ongoing terrorism from Israel/Israeli settlers and Hamas respectively. Sadly, this enlightened balance is lacking almost everywhere.
I saw extreme pro-Israel gatherings with video footage of participants calling 'kill all Palestinians, kill all of them all'. Yet no one seems to be covering these and speaking to their extreme nature. Incredible. 100% focus on the pro- Palestine gatherings. Zero on the extremes that occur on the other side. https://youtu.be/vJp3qteM2Tc?si=T_LQr3oTfVib8Ri_
Oct 19, 2023·edited Oct 19, 2023Liked by Rav Arora
Well-stated, Rav. Thank you for valiantly defending free speech and not crumbling under the barrage of emotionally manipulative propaganda engineered to foment hatred, division, and warmongering.
“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of freedom of speech.” —Noam Chomsky
Glad to see you calling out the blacklisting of the Harvard students. The same people cheering that on were outraged when Mike Lindell’s views on the 2020 election led to his products being cancelled by retailers.
"Even if one is sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians under the rule of a terrorist organization, failing to decry the barbaric actions of Hamas is AN APPALLING MORAL FAILURE that has been all-too-common across the West over the past week." I THINK THAT IS THE POINT. IF YOU CAN'T DECRY BARBARIC HAMAS... THEN PLEASE DO NOT WORK NEAR/WITH ME/MY COMPANY.
During the pandemic, a ragtag bunch of people protested against lockdowns and other measures on a regular basis. When the legacy media covered these protests at all (rarely), we often saw the linking of 'conspiracy theorists' with the 'far-right', based on some of the attendees. Of course, now we know that these protestors were right about many things, even if some of their convictions were based more on intuition than data.
We have regular events (almost weekly) organised by women's rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen, called 'Let Women Speak', where women simply do that, speak (mostly about the defence of their spaces). Once a couple of far-right types turned up (they didn't speak), and ever since then, Keen has been smeared as 'far-right' in media outlets, with the UK's version of Antifa activists regularly turning up and subjecting women to verbal and occasionally physical, abuse. Keen has no control over who turns up, nor does she have any desire to.
Now, we have protests about Palestine. From accounts I have heard, protestors, who include progressive Jews, have turned up simply because they are concerned about the plight of civilians in Gaza, subject to what even the UN, amongst many human rights bodies, have described as potential war crimes. They are mixed in with people who have deplorable views on Hamas and the attack, whom I condemn utterly but still do not wish to see criminalised. Good people are being condemned in the same way as bad people in the public square by politicians and the media.
Maybe good people should just stay home and shut up? I don't agree. People with the ability to think understand that it is possible to condemn Hamas and want to stop the killing of innocent civilians. Maybe they should organise separate protests? It doesn't work like that, bad actors will still turn up.
Where do you fall on hate speech? Towards indigenous people, african americans, hispanics? Are they all allowed, or is it only against Jews and Israel that your free speech ethos is aimed and guided at? Please reread your diatribe and replace Palestinians with KKK and Jews with african americans. Get back to me with your results.
As for peaceful, there has not been a single demonstration without the "river to the sea, Palestine will be free" chant which is a call for genocide.
"As every sensible person can agree, individuals inciting violence against the Jewish community ought to be reprimanded and punished by the state.'
Inciting violence is the line in the sand. Cross it, and we cross the bounds of free speech.
As for those protesters concluding “Hamas is a logical conclusion for people struggling and uprising”. Surely, the logical Israeli response to Hamas is to go all out to destroy it?
The students at Harvard and other universities are NOT children; many are in fact ADULT grad students in their 20's. Do they have a right to say hateful things? Yes, but doesn't mean they shouldn't be condemned for it and have to deal with the consequences, like losing a job offer. This is not cancel culture. It's called taking responsibility for your actions. And millions of Americans do not want to work or associate with them.
I 100% disagree with you on this one; free speech is necessary, the lack of consequences is not. It’s great that those supporting Hamas are called out, even blacklisted.
Yes, The free speech of everyone, no matter how vile or ignorant should be protected.
However, that does not absolve those partaking in such speech from the consequences of taking such a stance.
I believe it it is wholly within the purview of any company or corporation’s standards to choose not to hire someone who holds such vile viewpoints. They, too, are exercising their freedom of association.
I feel that if someone signs a public letter they are asking for their name to publicly associated with that letter. This goes back to John Hancock. It seems a bit of a poor defence of our future elites that Harvard club presidents can sign for the groups, but the members of the groups signed for have no say. I think it's shocking that these students are only now learning that the public expects them to believe what they sign, or is signed in their name. I think most blacklists of the past were of people rumoured to have done something, not those who have been proven to.
How often are moral emergencies no more than clashing contradictory fictions?
While I agree with most of what you are saying here, I believe you are conflating two separate issues. Short of directly advocating violence, governments should not be proscribing or punishing the speech of their citizens. This goes doubly so in the US with our First Amendment guarantee. However, the First Amendment applies to governments, not individuals. You are free to make your claims, and I am free to respond to them - absent violence - how I see fit. This would include calling attention to your claims and advocating for nonviolent responses to them. So a governmental blacklist would be prohibited, but a private one would not. It doesn't necessarily make the blacklist a good idea, but it speaks to one being protected speech and one being prohibited. I would also argue that cancel culture is not simply holding people accountable for their views. But it is the organized (governmental or non-governmental) punishment of views that were non-controversial or still within the Overton window until quite recently. Being punished for advocating for bodily autonomy or not being experimented on would be evidence of cancel culture. Being punished for celebrating murder would not.
The political principle we need to set in stone, is that a foreign nation who claim some people somewhere are "oppressed", must open its borders to take them in as refugees before engaging in war to end the alleged oppression. If Iran can send shiploads of US weapons bought in Afghanistan to Gaza, they can put Gazan refugees on those ships and let them relocate to Iran and live in peace. Iran's failure to do that exposes the true depth of the troubles in Gaza. It's an overpopulated welfare state that does not support itself, and its children are paid by foreign nations (most recently Iran) to become terrorists. If Iran won't accept these people as citizens, then it has no business paying their children to go to war and die. That hypocrisy has gone on in the former British Palestine since Hitler funded Amin al-Husseini ("der Grosse-Mufti den Jerusalem") to build the al-Aqsa Mosque and to recruit 5 divisions of Bosnian Muslims into the Wehrmacht, by promising they would march to Palestine to kill the Jewish infidels (they never got past the Serb Chetniki. It took Hitler 30 divisions of Germans to invade Yugoslavia and the 5 divisions raised by al-Husseini joined 25 German divisions trying to keep the place occupied. When Eisenhower finally gave Patton all the gasoline he wanted, Patton's armor rolled to the outskirts of Prague, linked up with the Red Army marching west, and all 30 Nazi divisions holding Yugoslavia were trapped there) but accomplished nothing of the kind. Jerusalem is nowhere mentioned in the Qur'an, an inconvenient fact for al-Husseini, but Joseph Goebbels lasting legacy was to convince many Muslims that the mosque built on the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem has some special religious significance.
A lack of frank discussion about the religion of Nazism and its insistence on subverting religious institutions into organs of Nazi propaganda or destroying them outright of they disobeyed, has contributed mightily to the troubles in the Mideast. The Iranian Shah was a Nazi sympathizer...he abandoned his throne to the Russians and British and spent 1941-45 in Nazi-occupied Paris. Khomeini and the new tyrants who followed the Shah, keep alive those elements of Nazism that suit them politically.
Free speech and inquiry is the key to undoing all the harm that came from Nazi ideas. Understanding leads to ridicule and false ideals lose their grip on people. That, more than anything else, brings about peace.
As Churchill cautioned in those dark days leading up to the Nazi Holocaust, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others". Free speech is unsettling and may induce lawbreaking when emotions run high. But in the end it is also curative. Even an unlimited amount of money spent on propaganda, cannot conceal obvious facts for very long.
Thank you! Palestinian lives and Jewish lives are both of equal value, and both peoples have a right to be free of the ongoing terrorism from Israel/Israeli settlers and Hamas respectively. Sadly, this enlightened balance is lacking almost everywhere.
I saw extreme pro-Israel gatherings with video footage of participants calling 'kill all Palestinians, kill all of them all'. Yet no one seems to be covering these and speaking to their extreme nature. Incredible. 100% focus on the pro- Palestine gatherings. Zero on the extremes that occur on the other side. https://youtu.be/vJp3qteM2Tc?si=T_LQr3oTfVib8Ri_
Well-stated, Rav. Thank you for valiantly defending free speech and not crumbling under the barrage of emotionally manipulative propaganda engineered to foment hatred, division, and warmongering.
As the epigraph to my own defense of free speech (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/what-noam-chomsky-can-teach-us-about) reads:
“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of freedom of speech.” —Noam Chomsky
Glad to see you calling out the blacklisting of the Harvard students. The same people cheering that on were outraged when Mike Lindell’s views on the 2020 election led to his products being cancelled by retailers.
"Even if one is sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians under the rule of a terrorist organization, failing to decry the barbaric actions of Hamas is AN APPALLING MORAL FAILURE that has been all-too-common across the West over the past week." I THINK THAT IS THE POINT. IF YOU CAN'T DECRY BARBARIC HAMAS... THEN PLEASE DO NOT WORK NEAR/WITH ME/MY COMPANY.
Excellent article, thank you for saying this.
Great piece. A UK perspective.
During the pandemic, a ragtag bunch of people protested against lockdowns and other measures on a regular basis. When the legacy media covered these protests at all (rarely), we often saw the linking of 'conspiracy theorists' with the 'far-right', based on some of the attendees. Of course, now we know that these protestors were right about many things, even if some of their convictions were based more on intuition than data.
We have regular events (almost weekly) organised by women's rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen, called 'Let Women Speak', where women simply do that, speak (mostly about the defence of their spaces). Once a couple of far-right types turned up (they didn't speak), and ever since then, Keen has been smeared as 'far-right' in media outlets, with the UK's version of Antifa activists regularly turning up and subjecting women to verbal and occasionally physical, abuse. Keen has no control over who turns up, nor does she have any desire to.
Now, we have protests about Palestine. From accounts I have heard, protestors, who include progressive Jews, have turned up simply because they are concerned about the plight of civilians in Gaza, subject to what even the UN, amongst many human rights bodies, have described as potential war crimes. They are mixed in with people who have deplorable views on Hamas and the attack, whom I condemn utterly but still do not wish to see criminalised. Good people are being condemned in the same way as bad people in the public square by politicians and the media.
Maybe good people should just stay home and shut up? I don't agree. People with the ability to think understand that it is possible to condemn Hamas and want to stop the killing of innocent civilians. Maybe they should organise separate protests? It doesn't work like that, bad actors will still turn up.
Where do you fall on hate speech? Towards indigenous people, african americans, hispanics? Are they all allowed, or is it only against Jews and Israel that your free speech ethos is aimed and guided at? Please reread your diatribe and replace Palestinians with KKK and Jews with african americans. Get back to me with your results.
As for peaceful, there has not been a single demonstration without the "river to the sea, Palestine will be free" chant which is a call for genocide.
Good job
Very good article Rav.
"As every sensible person can agree, individuals inciting violence against the Jewish community ought to be reprimanded and punished by the state.'
Inciting violence is the line in the sand. Cross it, and we cross the bounds of free speech.
As for those protesters concluding “Hamas is a logical conclusion for people struggling and uprising”. Surely, the logical Israeli response to Hamas is to go all out to destroy it?
The students at Harvard and other universities are NOT children; many are in fact ADULT grad students in their 20's. Do they have a right to say hateful things? Yes, but doesn't mean they shouldn't be condemned for it and have to deal with the consequences, like losing a job offer. This is not cancel culture. It's called taking responsibility for your actions. And millions of Americans do not want to work or associate with them.
I 100% disagree with you on this one; free speech is necessary, the lack of consequences is not. It’s great that those supporting Hamas are called out, even blacklisted.
Jim