Israel, Hamas, and the Need for Neutral Free Speech Principles
With the launch of my new book Habits of a Peacemaker: Ten Habits to Change Our Potentially Toxic Conversations into Healthy Dialogues, I will be guest blogging here on some themes from the book. Its aim is to provide practical skills to help readers become the type of people who can use their free speech rights effectively to have productive conversations about hard topics.
One of those skills peacemakers engage in regularly is searching for the best argument against their position on any issue. They may not find that argument persuasive, but learning it and knowing it helps them nuance and strengthen their views.
Sadly, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and government and university reactions to speech around it, serve as a stark reminder that too often, too many are not committed to that norm. Rather, for certain topics they hold most dear, most people prefer to silence opposing views, instead of grappling with them. And that instinct is why we need neutral principles for the freedom of speech.
I want to be very clear that I am not referring in this post to the occupy-campus protests that erupted at the end of the last academic year. Those events and the responses to them deserve a separate analysis. I am talking here about the peaceful speech related to Israel, Hamas, Palestinians and related issues.
Prior to October 7, 2023, the common narrative from the political right was that left-wing academics and administrators were silencing speech on university campuses. And there was some truth to these accusations. Repeatedly, left-wing actors expressed skepticism of the First Amendment and its related freedoms. It seemed to be getting in the way of their desired goals and policy choices. They labeled defenses based upon it as mere “weaponization” of traditional First Amendment freedoms to allow oppressors to continue oppressing. In their effort to combat this, they tried to compel speech, to silence those who disagreed with their aims, or to force campuses to restrict what they deemed as “hate” or “discriminatory” speech.
Their methodologies were straightforward. Consider LGBT+ rights and race, although we could explore other examples as well. To silence anyone who disagreed with their proposals, leftwing actors attempted to label speech
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