In my opinion the issue regarding antisemitic hate speech on campus isn’t necessary about free speech per se. It’s more about whether publicly advocating genocide is even “free speech” in the first place. I’m pretty close to being a free-speech absolutist, but calling for violence against a people merely because they belong to certain people-group seems to go beyond the realm of free-speech.
I don’t claim to have an answer as to where that line is to be drawn.
Devil is in the details obviously since “advocating for genocide” or “calling for genocide” can do a whole lot of heavy lifting.
We see threads here all the time where people are able to easily to make the step in their mind from “political guy x supports position y” to “guy x calls for genocide by supporting position y”. Hell anyone in Congress who votes against or takes any action to block aid to Ukraine is doing more to “call for genocide” than some dopey 19 year old college kids.
I also don’t think someone should be expelled/charged with a hate crime for saying things like “Christians suck so hard I wish we could put them all in a rocket and fire it into the sun” even though that probably does call for genocide.
The dumb hearings are all a semantics game by bad faith trolls to try to gotcha someone tho, and obv mission accomplished in the derposohere.
The Supreme Court has drawn the line that general advocacy of violence and illegal action is permissible free speech and it crosses the when it incites violence that is both imminent (vs some undefined future points in time) and likely. See Brandenburg v Ohio.
Useful answer. Thank you.
Lol
Yeah inquisitions are being held into whether college students chanted “from the river to the sea” when they plainly don’t even know what that means, let alone would support it if push came to shove. From the tenor of these inquiries you would think we are inches away from anti-Jewish pogroms being held in wealthy liberal enclaves in the northeast, as opposed to the truth which is that they are in the running for the best places on the planet to live as a Jew, Israel very much included. While these discussions are going on, actual whole families in Gaza are being buried under rubble, with tacit US support. It is indescribably gross, like just fuck right off with this whole pantomime.
You take that down and you take it down right now. I will not have my admiration for Otto soiled in this manner.
Perhaps we should defer to the victims of the hate before telling them how they should feel, as we might in other victim contexts?
Come on. The “victims” here are among the most safe and privileged people on Planet Earth. This is just disingenuous bullshit designed to detract attention from the important issue here, which is the people who are going to die today and tomorrow and the day after that.
Let the record show that I am generally skeptical that I have a responsibility to make people “feel safe”. Make them actually safe, sure. Treat them kindly, sure. But ultimately its impossible for the emotional state of other people to be something the rest of us are responsible for.
I don’t necessarily disagree but compare the “feeling” of being told your entire people should be eradicated, after those same people suffered the most systematic eradication ever 80 years ago, and the “feeling” of not having your lifestyle embraced with open arms.
Then consider what colleges have prioritized.
So I guess you are suggesting that colleges must expel any student that was chanting the river/sea thing? What about students that were there but not chanting? Those that liked a post that included that phrase on a social media platform?
I just don’t really get it I guess. Or maybe the colleges telling them not to do it would be enough?
What?
Of course not. But they should rebuke it; should offer safe spaces and trigger warnings for the intended victims. IOW, they should do what they do for any aggrieved group facing vicious hate. ChrisV wants victimized groups to toughen up, but colleges should be largely safe spaces from minority group-oriented hate.
If the protest calls for imminent/likely violence under Brandenburg against any particular group—hate speech in the parlance— students should suffer severe consequences for joining it.
Moreover, given the larger global and historical context and very recent history, Jews should be afforded more protection than groups like gays/trans/blacks etc. from hate speech. There aren’t massive movements with any mainstream traction calling for their eradication.
Serious question: Is this generally considered to be equivalent to a call for genocide? I spent some time on the wikipedia page for the slogan and that didn’t seem to be the case. However, I assume there has probably been a lot of editing of that in the last couple of months.
It’s not but people will try to say it is
When House Republicans and a solid bloc of Democrats banded together this week to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, for her statements about the Israel-Gaza war, they homed in on her embrace and defense of one pro-Palestinian slogan they called unacceptable: “from the river to the sea.”
The official congressional rebuke of Ms. Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, said the phrase was “widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel.”
It’s a call for a one-state solution in which the state is not a Jewish nationalist one. Some people think that can only be accomplished via genocide.
The definition of genocide seems to be as malleable as what does and disrespecting the flag/troops/anthem.
Apparently in Texas now you have to submit your picture to watch porn. I did not know this. However it seems porn sites are getting flooded with users who look like Texas AG Paxton. It’s quirky.