The Antisemitism Awareness Act Will Make It Illegal To Criticize Israel on Campus
Raucous pro-Palestine protests have taken over college campuses across the country for the past several days. At UCLA, protesters declared areas of campus off-limits to pro-Israel students and blocked them from entering certain spaces, even just to get to class. At night, masked counter-protesters attacked the pro-Palestine encampment, tearing down barricades and shooting fireworks at the protesters.
At the University of Texas at Austin, police brutally dispersed student protesters. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was among those arrested at Washington University in St. Louis. Administrators at Brown University persuaded protesters to disband their encampment peacefully after agreeing to discuss their demands for financial divestiture from companies that do business with the Israeli military.
Events at Columbia University came to a head after the authorities finally tired of the occupation of Hamilton Hall. Protesters had smashed the windows of the administrative building, entered it, taken over, held a janitor hostage, and demanded humanitarian aid—not for Gaza, but for themselves. (I.e., they wanted snacks.)
Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall:
“It seems like you’re saying, ‘we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food’.” pic.twitter.com/vNczSAM4T1
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 30, 2024
It is easy to make fun of these protesters, many of whom seem to know very little about why they are even protesting. And some of their antics deserve not just mockery, but condemnation: Statements in support of terrorist violence and exhortations for “Zionists” to be killed “or worse” are contemptible, as are tactics that involve preventing other students from moving about campus and pursuing their education.
But critics of the campus left should not lose sight of the much greater threat, which is that campus authority figures, members of law enforcement, and even national legislators will act in a manner that gravely threatens the free speech rights of everyone. Indeed, in response to the protests, identity-obsessed busybodies are already working overtime to criminalize protests on the grounds that offensive speech is a threat to the safety of Jewish students.
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Safe Space Reprise
These are not new arguments; for years, university bureaucrats have subtly chipped away at their institutions’ stated protections for free speech by invoking dubious safety concerns. You might remember the concept of the safe space: A very real notion, frequently invoked by progressive student activists, that being forced to confront speech with which they disagree is a form of physical violence.
In my first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, I traveled to college campuses and interviewed activists. What I learned was that for a variety of reasons—their upbringing, their ideology, their social circles—they did not want free and unfettered debate. They thought that outside speake
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