Duke University's student government is funding a speaker who calls Zionists a “death cult”, ... [+]
The student government at Duke University has recently voted to fund a campus speech by a virulent critic of Israel. There is nothing wrong with criticizing any nation, but this speaker, Mohammed El-Kurd, says that Israel and Jewish settlers have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood . . .”. This is an obvious allusion to the ancient anti-Semitic “Blood Libel” that Jews use Christian children’s blood to bake Matzah’s.
El-Kurd also describes Zionists (those supporting the existence of the State of Israel) as “Fascists. Terrorists. Colonizers.” On top of that, he describes Zionism as a “death cult”, “murderous”, “genocidal” and “sadistic”.
If a campus speaker spoke about any other group of people this way it would be seen as hate speech. So how do colleges rationalize bringing such a speaker on to campus?
At the University of Minnesota, the campus paper published an editorial defending El-Kurd’s visit to campus by arguing: “that not all Jews are zionists, nor are all zionists Jewish.”
That is a literally true statement but it turns a blind eye to the close connection between virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In demonizing Zionists, El-Kurd takes pains to compare them to Nazis. For example, he calls Zionist settlers “sadistic barbaric neo-nazi pigs”. He has also written that they have “completely internalized the ways of the nazis”.
This comparison of Zionists to Nazis is commonplace. It is obviously a reference to the suffering of Jews. No one compares Zionist’s treatment of Palestinians to, say, China’s treatment of the Uighurs. The Nazi’s killed 6 million Jews. The constant invocation of the Nazi’s is intended a cruel irony-the Jews are supposedly imitating the very people who tried to wipe them from the face of the earth.
In any other context, people instinctively understand that the demonization of a country easily blurs into hatred of the people of that country. When President Trump referred to African Nations as “sh-t hole” countries, this was rightly condemned as racist. The press is already publishing stories sounding the alarm that anger at Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is morphing into prejudice against innocent Russians.
There is, of course, one way to defend El-Kurd’s speeches on university campuses: freedom of speech. One can argue that students benefit from hearing even hateful and false statements because it provokes dialogue, draws attention to important issues, and creates a forum for counter-speech. There is a lot to be said for such a vigorous defense of free speech.
Unfortunately, this is not the dominant ideology on campus today. It is difficult to imagine a speaker being invited to campus who spoke about, say, Black Lives Matter, in the same way that El-Kurd speaks about Zionists. Would the campus paper publish an editorial arguing that “not all supporters of BLM are Black and not all Blacks support BLM” so calling the BLM movement “pigs” and “a death cult” isn’t racist? That hardly seems likely.
Free speech is only valuable when the same rules apply to everybody. But if hate speech against the world’s only Jewish Nation is defended on freedom of speech grounds, but that tolerance otherwise disappears, that’s anti-Semitism, not freedom.
