I’ve never understood private universities and employers having any “civil liberties” obligations. It’s “their” blog, law firm, university, etc. “they” can be as liberal with the proverbial ban hammer as they want.
Exceptions for private corporations that run communication and utility platforms that dominate. And you must bake that wedding cake despite your beliefs.
If your private utility company can shut off your power because of your Trump sign in your yard… if Google bans you from advertising and makes your search hits go away because you support Israel… I think that is a 1A problem. Otherwise I agree.
How does baking the cake apply to free expression? I think this is more about public accommodation, a different thing. Actually the defense to not baking the cake is because it’s forced expression.
Google, et al. control the pipes through which communication flows, but nobody is making them say anything with which they disagree. Making the homophobic baker design a gay wedding cake would be like mandating Google run a "Trump 2024" banner on its home page.
Legally, yes, but culturally I think it would be a big problem if we abandoned a robust support for free expression even in private settings. I thought this was all worked out when I was young, but obviously it has to be re-learned continuously.
You don’t, legally. I was commenting on how culturally it’s important anyway to push for free expression. It’s really to me by far the most important thing we have. So I’m agreeing with you but stressing that even though there isn’t a legal prohibition to private censorship we should treat it as a universal truth that everyone should be free to speak.
I think one can be for free speech and also put rules in place to limit speech, which is why it’s OK in some cases. The limits must be well thought out and have a good reason, and be narrowly defined. Similar to how even our government can limit speech. I really don’t see an inconsistency with Freddie’s approach. He seemed very conscious of what he was doing.
I think it's a mistake, but I'm not going to make an ethical claim that he's wrong. I would prefer open discourse, and prefer cultural norms that allow it, but I have to admit that I would throw someone out of my garden party for using racial slurs against another guest, so evidently we all have limits.
I think it’s cuz this buries the lede on legal class relations between individuals and corporations, and begs the question of “how far do constitutional rights extend to corporations operating as individuals?”
If corporate rights supersede individual rights under the contracted obligations of said entity, how protected are individual rights to begin with? What becomes legally prioritized is revealing of class interests.
Yeah, fire someone based on their race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity and watch what happens. I've come around to the idea that politics and opinion should be a protected category from discrimination in the workplace just like race, sex and the others.
Business and employment are highly regulated, I see no reason at this point not to crack down legally on political and ideological discrimination.
Any chance you can get your friend Bari Weiss to have you back on to discuss this line?
"A bunch of the people who have dined out on free speech for years are saying nothing because Zionism is more dear to them than civil liberties, and now it’s time for all of us to state your basic allegiances when it comes to free expression."
There are so many "those people are hypocrites who would never say X" arguments that get a response of "wait they said X right here, just click this link please" and then get forgotten for a few days only to show right back up again in a few days.
I mean, what would we talk about? Bari has very clearly decided that she's a Zionist first, second, and third. I don't know how productive it would be.
Like pounding on locked library doors while Jewish students are taking shelter inside? Sorry, much of this “From the river to the sea” stuff is incendiary if not actually inciting. A little prior restraint might be appropriate here to prevent actual violence against Jews.
You mean other than her being the EIC of the free press?
If she was in that in favor of suppressing speech she disagreed with one would think that she would do so on the speech that she has the most control over.
Her paper went to a pro-Palestine protest, interviewed people, printed their arguments verbatim and responded with counterarguments, hoping to win in the marketplace of ideas. I don't think some of the counterarguments are very strong, but at least they're trying to sell them. What else should a free speech absolutist do?
Bari Weiss and her writers often accuse others of being hypocrites unless they censor pro-Palestine views. They insist that by the censorious standard of "cancel culture", pro-Palestine speech should be banned. For example, if Yale Law School would discipline a student for saying "trap house" they should discipline someone for calling Hamas violence justified. I've never liked this sort of "Well, by your logic" argumentation when applied to broad groups, but I would guess a call for consistency is how she'd justify asking for institutions to crack down on anti-Zionism (or whatever). This is a different argument than if something should be banned by her own standards.
It's very hard to feel sorry for 'protestors' who routinely call for the elimination of an entire race of people. Add to that, the fact that their leaders are rabidly religious(at least they say they are) and openly call for the removal of ALL religions but Islam from the face of the earth.
If Muslims want people to quit being 'afraid' of them....maybe they should tone down the rhetoric. I have yet to hear a Jew or Israeli vow to wipe Islam from the face of the earth.
Nobody believed Hitler would actually be as vile as he turned out to be....in spite of him saying it out loud over and over.
When zealots scream things out loud....like 'from the river to the sea,' you should believe it.
Remember, Hamas broke a cease fire to murder hundreds of Jews, most of them just civilians. This cannot be overlooked.
Having said that...this is NOT a fight the US should be involved in as a country. The Jews and Muslims have been fighting each other for hundreds of years. Not our monkeys, not our circus. We have problems of our own to solve.
We don't need to favor either side unless they attack US. Israel does not need aid. They are a rich country. If they want to buy stuff from us, fine, but we shouldn't be gifting them anything.
I am on Israel's side. I am NOT on the side of the vocal Palestinians. I AM on the side of the Palestinians that were used by Hamas as targets. They KNEW Israel had to retaliate in a big way to something so heinous. They have sacrificed Gaza while they all sit in Dubai and party down.
In other words, you don't support free speech, and neither do the people liking this comment. "Oh in this case the speech is actually bad" is not a defense of free speech!
"I have yet to hear a Jew or Israeli vow to wipe Islam from the face of the earth."
Lady, you really know nothing about Israel or its constituent politics. There are tons of Israelis who are extremist lunatics who want to kill all the Muslims! 10% of the country thinks Baruch Goldstein is a national hero! https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-733523
Team "kill all Palestinians" has very little backing, but team "force Palestinians into enclaves while Israel takes the rest of the land (and kill everyone who resists)" has the backing of every major Western institution. If the Palestinians proposed to form Palestine from the river to the sea with a reserved non-contiguous quasi-state for Jews (which is what the Israelis are proposing for the Palestinians!) they would call it genocide.
Well, there's 'resisting' (and Israel has hardly killed everyone who's done *that*) and there's committing a massacre targeted at Jewish civilians. Which you have to admit, is what Hamas did.
Thought you were talking about Israel until I hit “Islam” 🤣
I don’t understand why you would post something if all you were gonna do is be a hypocrite. It’s not like any sensible person would agree with radical or extremist Islamist terrorism here, you’re just being disingenuous and constructing a sacred monolith to gore.
Do you know what 'from the river to the sea' means?
Look it up.
I am not a hypocrite. I am just saying the obvious. Radical Islamists(MOST of the leaders fall into this category, certainly Hamas does) want to wipe every religion from the face of the earth except for Islam. This is not a secret. They say it all the time. Other people aren't 'interpreting' their words. They say it outright. JUST LIKE HITLER. In fact, many Muslim leaders were followers of Hitler in WWII.....but that has been glossed over in history.
It's like western people have a death wish......'Oh, don't be mean to the guy that says he wants to kill you....'
I know that means and I know what I’m talking about, this regional conflict was my IR academic focus.
You have to accept the fact that you’re a hypocrite if you’re going to lump Palestinians and their defenders, as a group of people, under the totalizing umbrella of ideological governmental organizations like Hamas, and not Israelis and their defenders under the government of Israel.
You should try to read what Netanyahu and his settler front say outright, as in the interview included above.
"From the river to the sea" does not and has never necessarily entailed wanting to kill Jews. For some people who say it, sure. But it's just a right-wing canard to pretend that it always or usually does.
I wonder how many people who believe that if Palestinians had full political rights it would effectively genocide Jews from Israel also believe that the "Great Replacement" is a baseless conspiracy theory.
Years back I ended up at a sketchy party with sketchy people who had all kinds of sketchy politics and this one guy starts telling me about how he is a "nationalist anarchist." He told me the success of his ideology would involve the various races and nations peacefully and anarchically separating into segregated anarchist communities living peacefully their separate anarchic lives.
I get the same feeling these days reading about the peaceful version of "river to the sea"
"But it's just a right-wing canard to pretend that it always or usually does."
No it's not. If you want to defend free speech in all instances then I salute you for being consistent but don't try to gaslight people in the process about what the rhetoric in question actually means.
Dammit, Freddie, if free speech really is that important (and I, and *many* of the Usual Suspects have said as much since 10/7, those with large platforms very publicly), why is it important to downplay “From The River To The Sea”?
It is not being downplayed. People are simply refusing to understand its meaning, historical and present, in context.
This is possibly a good strategy, as it tends to distract from the horrors being committed by the IDF/settlers.
How many babies died struggling for breath at Al-Shifa hospital because of the collective punishment the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering at the hands of Israel?
Free speech means that people who want to be just like Hitler are able to promote that view, as long as they don't make a specific, credible threat (and hew to whatever other wrinkles are in Brandenburg v Ohio).
It's our job to promote better, saner, more thoughtful arguments and defeat them in the marketplace of ideas. Not to use the force of the state to shut them up.
Yes, that is in fact what it means. People who want to be Hitler should absolutely be protected from censorship and from silencing by the majority, because everyone should. You know what was immoral, even vile, 100 years ago? Interracial marriage. Gay marriage. If you're a person who says "I want these rights for myself and my side, but they should stop at X mark" then you're not a supervillain, you're a totally normal person even, but you don't actually know what the word 'rights' means.
Also the practical reason to promote robust free speech protections is that when the nazis get in, if there are mechanisms for silencing dissent, they use them. If they have to build those mechanisms, then the protectors of robust free speech will put up a fight.
Every body politic, like every body, has a time limit. Eventually our republic will sink down into a failed state or an imperium, no matter how high it rises. Some other place will be the center for trade and great ideas and success, or maybe nowhere will and life will be hard. None of this is a good reason to accelerate that collapse by undermining the principles that have made this era a golden age.
No one who asks a rhetorical question followed by "look it up" is speaking sincerely.
You and the other insane Zionists already got what you wanted. The international community is standing by as a real genocide is committed against Palestinians. But just like every conservative victory it is hollow. It will never be enough. You will not stop until every Palestinian has been killed or exiled and you've already convinced yourself that they have it coming, all while crowing about imagined "genocidal rhetoric" from random college students or protesters.
I try not to post when I'm angry or feeling hatred, but it's been impossible lately. When Western media and elites unite in a brutally cold display of support for this evil, I cannot feel anything but hatred and disgust for those who equivocate or support these actions.
Even if most Palestinian groups are actual Nazis (a ridiculous statement), actual Nazis have free speech rights too. This was famously demonstrated in the Skokie case but has also allowed people like Richard Spenser to speak on college campuses.
Well, it doesn't really explain it does it? It just says it was used in 2002 at protests. The generally accepted meaning nowadays is that Jews need to be eradicated from the river(Jordan) to the Sea(Mediterranean). Whether it started out that way is inconsequential at this point. Banning slogans does no good. In fact, it's counterproductive. I'd rather people continue to use their preferred disparaging comments....that way you know who they are.
It is through their actions that you know Hamas is serious about eradicating Jews.
Hamas is NOT Palestine.
Let me say that again, Hamas is NOT Palestine. But Palestinians need to decide someday if they want to continue to identify with them. The US had a similar issue in the 1860s didn't we? A large number of Americans needed to decide if they wanted to be associated with slavery. Many fought and died to do away with it. Palestinians cannot continue to claim victimhood if they continue to NOT denounce groups like Hamas. You cannot support evil and then cry victim. At some point, they need to make a stand. As with ALL peoples, there is always a range of good and bad.
And remember, the area was under a cease fire when Israel was attacked. Preceding Oct 7th, Hamas and others had been constantly shelling Israel as well. The Israelis did NOT start this. They have a right to fight back.
History is full of displaced peoples. EVERYWHERE. Romans displaced people in the British Isles and France. American Indian tribes displaced other American Indian Tribes and then Europeans did the same to them. Europeans displaced a ton of people over time. History is FULL of colonization...it's kind of human nature.
Right now, city idiots are colonizing rural areas......it's the same thing. It's evolution.
Funny to me how people who profess to not really believe in property rights....like Marxists or Socialists...are SOOOO invested in the fact that somehow this land 'belongs' to the Palestinians....says who??? Who was there BEFORE the Palestinians?
"The land itself was under the control of various empires, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and eventually the Islamic Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire"......should be bring all of those people back to occupy the land as well????
>Thought you were talking about Israel until I hit “Islam” 🤣
I've had that experience frequently. Whenever someone makes a specific critique without specifying which side they're referring to, I'll assume one only to eventually find out they meant the other.
I've started to realize each needs the other as a target for hate. It's almost like these two groups are symbiotic.
Anecdotally, I have also come across videos and statements of Israelis professing to ethnically cleanse Gazans (before and after this conflict). These videos may not be coming across your internet timeline.
Similarly, I have seen Palestinian protesters side by side with Jewish folk. One of the biggest cheers at the London rally was the mention of "our Jewish friends who protested at Grand Central".
I'm not sure you should be basing your arguments on protestor free speech on anecdotes.
I don’t understand why people try to make this more complicated than it is. You believe in it or you don’t. If you do, you believe it applies to your worst enemies. If you don’t, don’t f*cking pretend you do.
Where do you draw the line though? Somebody who advocates for BLM in a social media post (the "Ima cut you" girl) gets her internship offer revoked. Seems like a slippery slope to me.
For me I lean towards a cultural view where what you do on your free time is up to you, whether that's marching in a KKK rally or a peace march. And I think that American society was a lot closer to that a few decades ago compared to the modern day.
What bothers me is when it's not a public diatribe, and someone leaks a private chat or what have you.
I'm against tattle culture, personally. If you say something in pubic, you should be prepared to own and defend that sentiment, and that's good for society. But it's also important to have ways to work through ideas privately before you have to own them in front of the world.
If those emails were on company accounts, on company time, then I guess I have little reason to disagree. But if they were personal accounts, on personal time, my opinion would be different.
Right. "Freedom of speech" exists to protect unpopular speech. If it didn't, what is even the point of such an ideal? Popular speech doesn't need protection.
The whole saga of the 1970's Nazi rally in Skokie, IL, up to and including being lampooned in the Blues Brothers, remains a pretty good Rorschach Test for this stuff IMO.
That's a triumph of the American experiment, if you are so inclined.
Interesting you bring this up, that Blues Brothers scene has real staying power over the years.
What I thought quite remarkable about it though was not that the film was basically depicting a rendition of the Skokie protest, albeit humorously. But that the solution Jake and Elwood came up with was to drive over the small bridge and force all the Nazis to jump off into the stream below. I could be wrong, but I felt like the filmmakers (Landis?) were sort of offering up their own solution to a Nazi rally: end it by driving through them.
Of course it's a comedy, and barely serious, but I distinctly remember friends and family cheering out loud while watching that scene.
And why not, they were Nazis after all right? The immortal bad guys we all can agree on. But then I thought of that Charlottesville rally from 2017 and I thought to myself, "How would we have reacted to that if it was instead a counter-protestor who drove through the alt-right crowd? Would we still unanimously condemn it, or would some of us have cheered it?"
To be fair I'm sure the Blues Brothers' scene was not meant to be taken as a real solution to Nazi rallies, but rather as a hilarious shenanigan simply meant to make the audience laugh. But I would argue underneath that grand comedy is a bit of an uncomfortable truth: we all love to see those we all hate get publicly humiliated, or even hurt, from time to time. I think the actual Skokie rally was where we did the right thing, no question in my mind about that. But the Blues Brothers scene was where Jake and Elwood (us by proxy) did what we would really rather do...if there were no legal or moral consequences for it.
Well the thing about Blues Brothers being in fact a work of fiction, or even better something like Inglourious Basterds getting even more down and dirty with cruelty against Nazis, is that there's a sort of "two can play at this free speech game" aspect to it. Fantasizing about horrific violence against people who fantasize about horrific violence.
And that's the American free speech thing, right? We are much better off having both Mein Kampf and Inglorious Basterds on the shelves of public libraries than we would be keeping all of it hidden for the benefit of public morals and public order. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Oh I couldn't agree more, I just thought the lampooning was more revealing than a simple joke.
"Fantasizing about horrific violence against people who fantasize about horrific violence." -that made me lol. I'd imagine this is what makes us human. :]
The people in Skokie weren't college students, and if they were, I doubt even in the halcyon days of free speech anyone would have argued that they should be granted tenure or allowed to chase Jews around campuses.
The anti-woke argument that you should be free to speak on contentious topics without having everything cast as hate speech to limit your participation in public institutions, does not make you a hypocrite when you say that actual hate speech should not be enshrined in public institutions. There are people who think the Civil Rights act should be repealed, but they are a minority of the people dubbed "free speech advocates."
If you are an employer with a diverse workforce, your legal team will tell you that hiring an a vocal racist is going to get you sued. If you have an employee saying, "praise our martyrs, palestine is arab" in your slack chat, you are going to have a problem if you also employ any Jews.
For years, the left tried to focus the full power of the civil rights administrative apparatus on their enemies by reframing their political opinions as matters of harm and civil rights. DEI offices now exist in major corporations to treat microaggressions as firing offences based on nothing more than the expediants of ideology. Now that the left have openly embraced hate in many cases, openly embraced macroaggresion, they can't understand why people are saying the system should be focused on them because they never really had any belief in the system to begin with and thought it was just there for their own use. This whole thing is leftists telling on themselves. They can't believe that opposition to their hate speech is anything but hypocrisy because they were always hypocrites in the first place, it was always just a tactic to gain power. Now that institutions that they thought they controlled (though it's still to be seen if anything will actually happen) and had used to dole out privileges based on ideological alignment are being forced to return to their universalist role, they can't process it as anything but a betrayal.
This whole saga honestly validates the supposedly hypocritical, anti-woke, free speech advocates. For years they had claimed that the new moral standards were nakedly partisan and would render basic concepts like hate speech mutually unintelligible, and that's what has happened.
In the case of moderate leftists who are sympathetic to Palestinian causes the perception of silencing stems from two things. First, there are people who do want to silence them and are hypocrites. But at its core, this whole accusation of hypocrisy stems from the ignorance, both willing and through omission, of just how debased the rhetoric of one side has become. And the fact that it became so debased so quickly is a direct result of them having removed the universalist and humanist safeguards that liberalism had attempted to erect in the first place. And a lot of people who found themselves surrounded by gleeful antisemites are now unable to extricate themselves or acknowledge the reality of what just happened (We've seen this in the past).
The hypocrisy goes both ways, and you're exhibiting it.
"Ah but THIS speech is just too far".
On the one hand, there is a zone of absolute content neutrality per the First Amendment where nothing is too far, including a Nazi rally in a heavily Jewish suburb where at the time many Holocaust survivors lived. A public university shutting down pro-Palestine student groups certainly falls into that bucket. Despicable hatred has permanent protected access to the public square, such is the American experiment.
And outside of the First Amendment Zone of absolute no-exceptions content neutrality, there is argument at the margins of what belongs in decent private discourse and how to enforce those limits. You don't have to think "this is what decolonization looks like" should be just blithely tolerated and neither does Bari Weiss. But neither you nor Bari Weiss gets to wear your "being challenged by uncomfortable ideas is what higher education is for" hat while cheerleading the immolation of the future professional lives of a bunch of public-spirited 21 year olds. The SJW snowflakes are hypocrites just throwing whatever rhetorical cudgel they can grab a hold of at their opponents and so are you.
Have the balls to argue against the principle of free expression. Europeans would and do.
Yes, exactly. "Gas the Jews" is too far. You seem to think that having any standards means you can't criticise someone for having bad standards, which is, well it's just stupid. Me and Bari Weiss still get to wear our "being challenged by uncomfortable ideas" badge because neither of us have crossed the red line of arguing that certain people can be ethically murdered due to their race.
Colleges are not public like a park, they are public as in public money. As in there are conditions. Therefor they need to follow Title VI of the civil rights act. If a professor is targeting Jews in his class, if a protest is engaging in racially prejudiced language on campus, if they are celebrating dangerous and racist groups, then the schools have a legal duty to shut those things down, just like they did across colleges in the 1960s when we decided that actually racism is, in fact, something that goes too far. These same equal protection clauses apply to employers as well. The line has been enshrined in law since 1964. I didn't make it.
The fact that you can't tell the difference between actual hate speech, speaks only to your moral failing and the utter poverty of whatever passes as your first principles, not to my supposed hypocrisy.
Well, see, in two posts you've bidded downwards from "praise our martyrs, Palestine is Arab" to "Gas the Jews".
In both First Amendment terms and moral terms those are very different!
(And both are also different than "from the river to the sea", incidentally)
Trying to collapse those distinctions into a unitary "with us or against us" notion of unacceptable expression which is all equally to be interpreted as literal violence is PRECISELY the "woke" project.
Now please, tell me more about how "no, actually, your speech denies my right to exist and makes my body unsafe in this space"
I think the problem here is we need to look at the spirit of '64, not '91. The First Amendment had a pretty big asterix stuck next to it with the civil rights act. You are allowed to discriminate against actual racism if. you are an employer. Indeed, if you don't want to get sued you are actively required to discriminate against actual racism. And anti-semitism, despite the arguments of lefties, is still actual racism.
There is a debate whether minimizing the ethno-terrorist violence on Oct. 7 was actually racist, or if the outburst of people who seem to be on the side of not just Palestinian Liberation in general, but of Hamas in particular is also racist, but it's not a debate I really care to have in this space. I'll suffice it to say that the attempts to frame this as a "both sides" issue really overlooks a lot of bad actors.
Have you considered that Anti-Semitism and Semitism are merely opposite side of the racist coin? The cry of Anti-Semitism being merely a tribalist rallying cry to 'gather the tribe' to confront an ancient enemy of our tribe. The cry of Anti-Semitism is an appeal to authority, and appeal 'look at me, I'm the favored son Isaac' hiss at that disfavored son Ishmael and all his unclean followers.
If I were under attack, and cried out 'Anti-Christian behavior' would anyone come to my rescue? Good luck whitey. Thus, instead of a society where all people might enjoy equality of protection; some tribes are special. Maybe this is the real problem.
As I understand it the Palestinians, for all intents and purposes, lost the Arab Israeli war and lost their territory as a result. Similar in many was to Mexico losing the Mexican American war and losing territory as a result. Well, in both cases, they lost it fair and square because they didn’t have their shit together and it’s going to stay lost so, like the Mexicans, they need to get used to it.
I mean if Mexico wants to send troops across the border to kidnap and murder Americans as part of some ill conceived plan to get California back they shouldn’t be surprised when we’re carpet bombing Mexico City. But we just want our land back! Well, you’re not getting it and the bombing will continue until you get that thought through your head.
I've seen pro-Israel commenters make the argument both ways, depending on what's convenient at the moment. Sometimes conquest is illegitimate and the Jewish people have an ancestral right to this particular place, sometimes it's legitimate and the Israeli state has rightfully conquered that same place.
If we're setting aside morality and just talking about cold realities, I think we have to reckon with the fact that this seems likely to end in Israel / Palestine being reduced to a nuclear wasteland.
Israel already has the bomb. Its enemies are likely to get it sooner or later. And nobody powerful seems remotely interested in de-escalation, so...
Korea has been lucky so far. And maybe Israel will be lucky as well. But I wouldn't put money on it. And if I lived in Israel, I'd move somewhere safer.
You understand that the whole argument for Zionism is that it's the ancestral home of Israel, but they lost it by conquest to the Romans and were given it back by the UK, right? That's not rule by conquest, and if rule by conquest is what we're going for, if someone else conquers modern Israel they will have just as much right to it as the Israelis do. I don't think that's a wise stance for supporters of Israel to take.
"That's not rule by conquest, and if rule by conquest is what we're going for, if someone else conquers modern Israel they will have just as much right to it as the Israelis do. I don't think that's a wise stance for supporters of Israel to take."
Wow, you have a lot of confidence that the world would have done something if Israel had lost one of the wars against the Arab nations.
I call it like I see it. The Munsee Indians don’t have a right to take over your home, Mexico doesn’t have a right to take back California and the Palestinians should learn to deal with life as it is.
But they're still there, living in the country much the way Africans were in South Africa under apartheid. Should they be forcibly expelled to neighboring countries?
I doubt this will have much of an effect, but do you realize your argument applies to any atrocities committed by Hamas? As in, on Oct. 7, when they were killing civilians, they were justified because, in that moment, they were the stronger party? I mean, I don't think you really believe this, but it's where your "logic" leads.
The argument was self determination until the Arabs tried to eliminate Israel multiple times. They're never going to go back to the pre-1967 borders because no one trusts the Arabs to behave properly when they're even closer to the major Israeli population centers.
This logic is also applied to Native Americans, and I just don't buy it, ethically. Sure, they lost a war (or ongoing battles and treaties and a number of other atrocities), but do we really want to continue living in a world where might equals right? Still? Can't we collective decide to move beyond that yet?
I find "might makes right people" are real laissez-faire about everything until the first time someone powerful enough to kick their ass comes along, then all a sudden they git real misty eyed about doctrines of natural rights.
Right, except that ignores all the times in history when people and nations decided to set aside their advantages and their very deeply held resentments and try other solutions like toleration, reconciliation, or reconstruction. And that wasn't because they were super kum-bay-yah, it was because they were so deeply familiar with the consequences of violence that they got tired of it, which is a perfectly rational response to unending violence.
Yeah I mean, this whole "that's just the way the world works" has a real "facts don't care about your feelings" vibe; it's just a slogan, empty of morality, intelligence, or even a loose grasp of world history. If you want to say the history of human relations is that of endless war, then you also have to say it's one of endless treaties, diplomacy, strategic alliances, various approaches to codified or informal justice, legalism, long periods of relative peace, etc. Not to mention the entire postwar era is defined, in word and often in practice, by an explicit rejection of any rights conferred by conquest.
We have had relatively stable national borders for decades...not centuries, but decades. Plenty of civil wars and ethnic clashes, but not the territorial expansion that was the norm before. I hate to see us go back to that bygone era and return to conquerors and warlords. It might be fun in video games and movies, but it will truly suck in real life.
You can hardly apply that framework of "we won the war fair and square" to answer questions where human suffering is involved to this extent. The Mexican American war analogy is hardly relevant either given the lack of parallels between the two. We owe it to ourselves and the people dying over there to not think so simplistically.
Why? Their government sent fighters across the border and they are now dealing with the consequences.
You don’t step on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ long ranger and you don’t send fighters to murder and kidnap the the citizens of a country that has the power to totally destroy you. If you do? That’s on you.
What is this "government" of which you speak? And what "border"? Gaza, like the West Bank, has been under Israeli control since 1967. No one goes in, no one goes out, goods don't go in, goods don't go out, without Israeli permission. The Palestinian people living there have no rights. Gaza in particular was/is a concentration camp, and has been openly described as such by Israeli leaders. What we saw on October 7th was a breakout from that concentration camp, a prison break. Such breaks tend to be violent (see slave revolts in the US for comparison.) The fighters from Gaza attacked several of the Israeli military bases that enforce the imprisonment of Gazans. They also sought to take hostages - complain about this all you want, but Israel holds (not counting the 2.2 million Gazans!) thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including women and children. The hostages were to be used to bargain for freedom for those prisoners, and to end the crushing imprisonment of Gaza. Israeli leadership doesn't give a shit about the lives of the Israelis held hostage - that is obvious from their actions, starting on October 7th, when Israeli military forces were ordered to blast houses in the captured kibbutz, and even to bomb an Israeli military base. You are engaging in classic DARVO, blaming the victim for responding to the decades-long death, destruction and imprisonment you have inflicted. I have one question for you, the most fundamental question: are the Palestinians untermenschen, or not?
You are utterly delusional, if not consciously spreading Isreali hasbara talking points. Gaza has been a concentration camp for at least 16 years. Israel controlled all access, the air space, and the ocean. The economy of Gaza has long been crushed as a result: how can farmers get their produce to markets, when Israel can - and has - deliberately closed the exits, causing everything to rot? Israel fired upon Palestinian fishermen who dared to venture more than a kilometer or two off shore, which they need to do since water closer to shore is polluted, since Israel destroyed the sewage and water treatement plants. Every couple of years Israel "mows the lawn" (translation from Nazi-speak: bombs the enclave, killing hundreds of children, women, and men.) Yeah, sounds just like Monaco. All that was before the last month, when Israel moved to genocide, the complete destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza - along with blatant ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Wake the fuck up, and stop lying.
Some Israelis are so far-gone that they do think it applies to the Holocaust.
In 2019, Giora Radler, a Rabbi and instructor at a military prep academy, was recorded saying the following:
[Hitler] is the most righteous person. Of course he is right in every word he utters. In his ideology he is right. There is a male world which fights, which deals with honor and the brotherhood of soldiers. And there is the soft, ethical feminine world [which speaks of] ‘turning the other cheek’. ‘And we [Nazis] believe that the Jews carry on this heritage, trying, in our words, to spoil the whole of humanity, and that’s why they are the real enemy.’ Now, he [Hitler] is 100% correct, aside from the fact that he was on the wrong side.
Basically, according to Radler, Hitler's general worldview regarding "might makes right" and irreconcilable conflict between races was correct, his only mistake was being against the Jews.
I lean more toward Israel than Palestine in this wretched conflict, but that doesn't matter. It's reaching the point where I would support someone for president - literally anyone - who was passionately devoted to free speech over any other issue, foreign or domestic, free speech, period. Don't see anyone like that on the horizon, though.
Is that because you believe free speech is an unalloyed and unmatched good, or because you think it's been neglected and needs shoring up even if there are equally or more important goods?
So you would or would not support the following platform:
As President, I will impose a 99% tax on all individuals and corporations with a net worth greater than $1 billion (to be determined by a federal audit). Individuals who refuse to pay this tax will be imprisoned; corporations which refuse to pay this tax will be taken into receivership. Individuals who leave the country to avoid this tax will be stripped of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship and their assets seized by the state. Corporations which seek to evade this tax by incorporating in a foreign country will be banned from trading in American markets and all assets currently housed in U.S. institutions will be seized by the state. If my actions are challenged in the judicial branch, I will use subtle but unmistakable threats of force to compel judges to rule in my favor.
I will suspend all military and other aid to Israel. Indeed, I will instead provide substantive aid packages to the Palestinian Authority.
I will not, however, at any point as part of one of the above actions violate the First Amendment rights of any citizens of the United States, as those rights have been understood by the Supreme Court of the United States at the time of my election.
(Assume that this individual has a huge popular base and the potential to, if not win, act as a spoiler in the general election—although it's possible they could win. Say, the level of popularity Trump would have if he ran as a third-party candidate.)
"It's reaching the point where I would support someone for president - literally anyone - who was passionately devoted to free speech over any other issue, foreign or domestic, free speech, period."
So, how many more Palestine protests will have to be suppressed before you decide it's time for President Hammond?
It’s wild to hear “heterodox” British people discuss free speech. They’re a lot more comfortable with banning speech than you’d expect, presumably because they don’t have US amendment and norm.
You keep whipping this dead horse, but I just don't think firing people for debating whether puberty blockers were as safe as we were told is on the same level as firing people for debating whether it's ok to kill Jews.
The real hypocrisy here is that the "punch Nazis" crowd is now sharing talking points with actual neo-nazis. One side has clearly fallen farther than the other. And this is ignoring that Nazi included anyone right of AOC.
But to your point, I'll say the same thing I've been forced to say during the last 10 years of increasing authoritarian speech norm: This far, and no further. But I think we both know which side it is that's going to move the line again.
2. The First Amendment says we have the right to do this so long as we are not issuing a direct threat. It's not nice, but that's what freedom is. That's the whole point.
3. "the "punch Nazis" crowd is now sharing talking points with actual neo-nazis." Neo-Nazis love Israeli. They see it as a bulwark against the brown hordes. Seriously, Stormfront constantly celebrates Zionism. You need to update your rhetoric.
It's an exaggerated statement, but there certainly have been people justifying the October 7th attack as legitimate armed resistance against Israel, which I imagine is what they meant to refer to.
"Intifadah, Revolution, there is only one solution."
You're right. This isn't debating if it's ok to kill Jews. These slogans--all over many marches that have happened around the world--have decided that it is affirmatively good to kill Jews.
To be clear, I don't think anyone should be arrested for saying these things. But it's just not clear to me that "freedom of speech" means that nothing you say can be weighed in any hiring decision for any position. There's a lot of nuance here, but "it's justified to bake a baby in an oven" might be a reason to question someone's ability to be effective in certain jobs.
There's a lot of nuance here, but "it's justified to bake a baby in an oven" might be a reason to question someone's ability to be effective in certain jobs.
There is NO nuance. Such a person is not someone I wan to be around, nor would my clients or co-workers. Even if was mopping floors, working the fryer, making tacos, washing dishes, such a person a a danger to have in your workplace. They may not physically assault someone, but they will open their mouths and spew their hate at some point, and no one around them deserves such abuse.
These Substacks (or at least the ones I have read) are replete with posts on cancel culture and examples of people losing jobs or having offers revokes for all manner of speech that is "much less inflammatory." I suspect you've read a few of these posts yourself, perhaps made some comments. My point being that there is no shortage of discussion over the rights and wrongs of cancel culture, and which "much less inflammatory" speech is going to be punished by whom.
I have no problem with someone who mumbled too loudly after a few drinks that "men can't get pregnant" or "mis-gendered" some guy in a dress at the 2016 office holiday party. But, I personally draw the line at anyone who openly cheers for Hamas. I don't want those people around me.
I was trying to phrase it as gently as possible to highlight the absurdity of Freddie's claim (that believing in free speech and acknowledging that some speech will have some consequences are entirely compatible).
But I think the nuance there is that if people are entirely unemployable, then my tax dollars end up paying for them to exist, and I don't think that's a great state of affairs either. If they can have a job where their desire to see 7 million Jews wiped off the face of the earth is immaterial to their work, and they can avoid openly calling for murder in the workplace, I think that's the best we can hope for in a free, pluralistic society.
"but I think the nuance there is that if people are entirely unemployable, then my tax dollars end up paying for them to exist, and I don't think that's a great state of affairs either"
People lose their jobs and become unemployable due to something they said or did or were merely accused of, that is not related to their jobs . Ever heard of "#metoo"? (just for an example). What about the kid who lost his fast food job because someone recognized him at the Charlottesville shit show? If you can lose a job or have an offer revoked because you posted 14 years ago on Facebook that women don't have penises, then I'm OK with you losing your high paying snobby law firm offer because you openly cheer for people who just put babies in ovens and set to "bake" and tied kids to their parents and burned them all alive. Such a hate filled person has absolutely no business walking the hallways of any law firm I would work at or, as importantly, hire to represent my company and charge me a shit ton of $$ for the privilege.
I think #metoo went too far, and some people lost their jobs who shouldn't have.
I did not hear about the fast food/Charlottesville kid, but I don't think he should have lost his job.
I don't think people should lose their job for decades-old, basically inoffensive social media posts.
Like you, I am totally fine with someone who cheers for the murder of Jews losing their job at a high paying law firm. That was the point of my first post. It is substantively different than the above cases.
But I don't think that person should be entirely unemployable. As I said above, if they can get a job where their hateful opinions don't matter and they learn to keep those opinions to themselves, I think that's better than any other alternative.
By this silly logic a huge swathe of USA jews would lose their jobs. There has been no shortage of anti palestinian racism expressed on linkedin alone that would get an arab fired if he said it about jews.
Pretending this massive disparity isn't their is just flat out insincere lying.
1. Who counts as no one? There were the "gas the jews" chants in Sydney. A lot of "this is what decolonization looks like" posts during and immediately after Oct 7th. Or chanting about Khayber jewish expulsion. https://twitter.com/hurryupharry/status/1718287119452663969 It doesn't de-legitimatize all pro-palesitian claims or take away from Israeli extremists. But "literally no one" feels a bit like the literally no one is being cancelled argument.
2. I agree completely. I think this has been a great example for left of center folks that European speech laws aren't great.
“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
There are ongoing protests worldwide calling for the extermination of Israel and Jews, and many of the comments here include clear examples of popular slogans promoting martyrdom and indiscriminate violence.
And not just talk, but actually documented incidents of violence against Jews, who are neither abstract nor far away but nearby and in imminent danger as a result of this speech. Precisely why it’s not protected under 1A.
Generally the concept of free speech does not extent to blatant calls for violence. Go to any pro-Palestinian protest and you’ll hear exactly that - “glory to the martyrs” and “intifada now” are explicit calls for violence that promote terrorism and jihad.
"Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action."
Well there are certainly things you could say which would not be afforded First Amendment protection, but "from the river to the sea" ain't one of them.
I would agree “From the river to the sea” is vague enough to warrant 1A protection, but it’s obviously also a slogan that endorses ethnic cleansing and genocide.
If that’s all people are saying at these protests, I’d agree they should not be stopped. But it rarely stops at such vague language.
"it's obviously also a slogan that endorses ethnic cleansing and genocide"
The core reality of Israel/Palestine as a discourse matter, as opposed to a military matter, is that for both sides it goes absolutely without saying that it is inherent in every statement of their opposing side that they are firmly and unshakably committed to total ethnic cleansing of the entire Land of Israel.
There are people on both sides very much committed to that. There are also many (almost certainly more) for whom the idea of "winning" in that way would horrify them. Probably most of all people just support their side without thinking closely about it at all.
It's tough stuff. Third rails don't have some easy solution sitting in plain sight.
The observation that one party had the capacity to carry out ethnic cleansing in 1948 and the other party has that capacity now is very relevant to my own feelings, but all the better to keep the lines open for discourse about it.
It is obvious that someone saying "Let's go and attack this synagogue in Brooklyn in the name of Allah" is committing an illegal act per the Brandenberg doctrine and would be arrested for doing so.
Agreed that the first amendment shields these protestors from criminal prosecution (although Europe doesn’t have such strong free speech laws), but this rhetoric falls squarely outside the Overton window of reasonable opinions and should be condemned by civilized society.
People like Rashida Tlaib are hateful racists that should be treated like KKK supporters and Nazi sympathizers. It’s disingenuous for Freddie to argue that people are being canceled for peaceful advocacy of Palestinian self determination, when protestors worldwide are proudly declaring their hatred of Jews and desire to murder them.
Rashida Tlaib has used and defended the “from the river to the sea” chant and continues to promote the lie that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza (directly contradicting US intelligence and video evidence).
She directly calls for the extermination of Jews and promotes blood libel that foments hatred and rage among her supporters towards a specific group.
I personally don’t think “from the river to the sea” is a great slogan (I find it vague and unrealistic) but to claim it is antisemitic is just factually inaccurate. If that’s the reason for your claim that she is calling for the extermination of Jews, we don’t really share enough priors to warrant further discussion. This Jew is proud to support Rep. Tlaib.
The slogan is vague in the same way that the confederate flag is vague.
I suppose you could believe that Hamas and Iran use this phrase to advocate for a pluralistic society where Palestinians and Israelis live in harmony, but that is obviously not the case. The vast majority of government institutions in the West, from the White House to Downing Street, have rightfully condemned the slogan.
only a colonized mind will carelessly toss out phrases such as "terrorism" and "jihad". Your word choice belies the extent to which your thinking is controlled by the ideology of Western Imperialists.
I probably should have phrased this differently, but I’m referring to the cultural limits of free speech rather than the legal concept. You’re correct that the first amendment provides broad legal protections in the US.
My point was that Freddie equates the reaction to cancelations for relatively minor transgressions (like questioning COVID lockdowns) with people getting canceled for calling for ethnic violence and terrorism.
I don’t think these situations are the same - people should be free to voice most opinions without fear of losing their job or facing societal consequences. But once they publicly call for violence or celebrate mass murderers, that is beyond the scope of acceptable speech and I have no problem with employers taking action or people otherwise distancing themselves.
That’s up to you and I understand what you’re saying. Just be prepared to receive the same treatment. Are there any views of yours that someone has ever interpreted as a celebration for violence?
That’s fair - I think we should be very clear about what violence is and isn’t so that it’s not used as a political tool to silence opponents. Admittedly, that can be difficult when concepts like “silence is violence” enter the public discourse.
As a society we should have a shared understanding that indiscriminate murder and rape of civilians, like what Israel experienced on 10/7, is evil. That simple idea unfortunately seems to be eroding (especially in academic circles).
Hillary Clinton recently stated that people who voted against her should be sent to reeducation camps. Should she be immediately arrested for her blatant call for violence?
People who voted against sending people who said that voters should be sent to re-ediucation camps for saying that there is a free speech right to say that Hillary Clinton does not deserve the right to say what the US policy should be on the policy question of camps should not vote.
Palestinians have the right to armed resistance because Israel is an occupying force, and please spare us all the tired and worn out "Israelis eliminated their illegal settelements in gaza and didn't get a cookie for it" trope. They're blockading Gaza, deliberately as per wikileaks to impose a starvation diet on Gazans and break their resolve. They have been caught DELIBERATELY sniping at civilians and spare us again the "they could kill more so its not a genocide", the killings are deliberate and for the purpose of intimidation and domination.
"And how is that "armed resistance" working out for them currently?"
Pretty well this time around, thank God, Israels support is collapsing world wide and among the younger american generations. But this is just the might makes right argument, one Hamas somehow doesn't expect to lose.
"If the Comanche and Apache and Sioux and so on all decided to pursue "armed resistance" (i.e. scalping any white civilians they can find) so as to take back the land they lost to the Europeans, rest assured they would also end up all living in open air prisons."
They aren't living in an open air concentration camp, they have freedom of speech movement and purchasing property in America. Palestinians don't and your hasbara is very boring.
"Sometimes taking the L is a better course of action than continuing to fuck around and find out."
Something the Israelis who fled the country wisely chose.
I don't think so, the fact is Americans are okay with natives as citizens, Israelis can't accept it elsr they lose their Jewish ethnic cleansing state.
Which of course has been cratering in popularity among younger generations. Wait a bit for the boomers to die off 😁
This time is an opportunity to cultivate the culture of free speech that would improve the usefulness of our discourse. We could be watering that garden right now, but forever nope.
😏
Pretty ballsy of you to argue Palestinians are human beings ENTITLED to equal rights, frankly quite shocking to hear.
Why? Isn't that just a plain fact?
It's not like they come from space. They're made from the same flesh and blood as the rest of us.
Sarcasm
Even then, I don't quite get it. I've heard many attempts to justify the slaughter of Palestinians, but very few that argue they're subhuman.
The justification of slaughtering a group of people (a component of genocide) is de-facto dehumanization.
You haven't heard some of the radical Zionists.
“ civil liberties”
I’ve never understood private universities and employers having any “civil liberties” obligations. It’s “their” blog, law firm, university, etc. “they” can be as liberal with the proverbial ban hammer as they want.
Exceptions for private corporations that run communication and utility platforms that dominate. And you must bake that wedding cake despite your beliefs.
Well, which is it?
If your private utility company can shut off your power because of your Trump sign in your yard… if Google bans you from advertising and makes your search hits go away because you support Israel… I think that is a 1A problem. Otherwise I agree.
How does baking the cake apply to free expression? I think this is more about public accommodation, a different thing. Actually the defense to not baking the cake is because it’s forced expression.
As for "baking the cake," you are mistaking compelled speech for anti-discrimination. See my full argument here: https://christophersmith.substack.com/p/on-free-expression-and-303-creative
Google, et al. control the pipes through which communication flows, but nobody is making them say anything with which they disagree. Making the homophobic baker design a gay wedding cake would be like mandating Google run a "Trump 2024" banner on its home page.
Legally, yes, but culturally I think it would be a big problem if we abandoned a robust support for free expression even in private settings. I thought this was all worked out when I was young, but obviously it has to be re-learned continuously.
What free expression rights do I have in private settings? I wasn’t aware that I had any or any expectation of having any.
You don’t, legally. I was commenting on how culturally it’s important anyway to push for free expression. It’s really to me by far the most important thing we have. So I’m agreeing with you but stressing that even though there isn’t a legal prohibition to private censorship we should treat it as a universal truth that everyone should be free to speak.
So Freddie is wrong to ban those who bring up the thing that cannot be named?
I figure he has the right to cultivate the comment section as he sees fit.
I think one can be for free speech and also put rules in place to limit speech, which is why it’s OK in some cases. The limits must be well thought out and have a good reason, and be narrowly defined. Similar to how even our government can limit speech. I really don’t see an inconsistency with Freddie’s approach. He seemed very conscious of what he was doing.
I think it's a mistake, but I'm not going to make an ethical claim that he's wrong. I would prefer open discourse, and prefer cultural norms that allow it, but I have to admit that I would throw someone out of my garden party for using racial slurs against another guest, so evidently we all have limits.
The government has already proven there’s no “private setting” if you get any funding in any form from the Fed’s.
I think it’s cuz this buries the lede on legal class relations between individuals and corporations, and begs the question of “how far do constitutional rights extend to corporations operating as individuals?”
If corporate rights supersede individual rights under the contracted obligations of said entity, how protected are individual rights to begin with? What becomes legally prioritized is revealing of class interests.
Yeah, fire someone based on their race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity and watch what happens. I've come around to the idea that politics and opinion should be a protected category from discrimination in the workplace just like race, sex and the others.
Business and employment are highly regulated, I see no reason at this point not to crack down legally on political and ideological discrimination.
Opinion? So I can call our largest customer as a cu$t to her face and keep my Job? I mean it’s just my opinion. And hell, maybe it’s a fact.
Any chance you can get your friend Bari Weiss to have you back on to discuss this line?
"A bunch of the people who have dined out on free speech for years are saying nothing because Zionism is more dear to them than civil liberties, and now it’s time for all of us to state your basic allegiances when it comes to free expression."
There are so many "those people are hypocrites who would never say X" arguments that get a response of "wait they said X right here, just click this link please" and then get forgotten for a few days only to show right back up again in a few days.
I mean, what would we talk about? Bari has very clearly decided that she's a Zionist first, second, and third. I don't know how productive it would be.
I believe she also sees herself as a free speech absolutist. Reconciling the two would be something to talk about.
I think what's being lost here is the difference btwn speaking and ACTIONS.
Like pounding on locked library doors while Jewish students are taking shelter inside? Sorry, much of this “From the river to the sea” stuff is incendiary if not actually inciting. A little prior restraint might be appropriate here to prevent actual violence against Jews.
They could have hidden in the attic. \s
Ouch! That’ll leave a mark.
That's my point. Exactly.
IIRC, Bari Weiss was all in favor of cancel culture, as long as it was used on people she didn't approve of.
Seems at least not in this case: https://www.thefp.com/p/even-antisemites-deserve-free-speech
I don't see a reference to Bari Weiss.
You mean other than her being the EIC of the free press?
If she was in that in favor of suppressing speech she disagreed with one would think that she would do so on the speech that she has the most control over.
But instead she features it in a round up post https://www.thefp.com/p/free-speech-in-a-time-of-war, or green-light an article that interviews with pro Palestinian protestors https://www.thefp.com/p/we-went-to-a-pro-palestine-protest.
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-went-to-a-pro-palestine-protest
Her paper went to a pro-Palestine protest, interviewed people, printed their arguments verbatim and responded with counterarguments, hoping to win in the marketplace of ideas. I don't think some of the counterarguments are very strong, but at least they're trying to sell them. What else should a free speech absolutist do?
Bari Weiss and her writers often accuse others of being hypocrites unless they censor pro-Palestine views. They insist that by the censorious standard of "cancel culture", pro-Palestine speech should be banned. For example, if Yale Law School would discipline a student for saying "trap house" they should discipline someone for calling Hamas violence justified. I've never liked this sort of "Well, by your logic" argumentation when applied to broad groups, but I would guess a call for consistency is how she'd justify asking for institutions to crack down on anti-Zionism (or whatever). This is a different argument than if something should be banned by her own standards.
To be fair to Weiss is the issue free speech or is it violence (of the actual physical, sometimes people die variety)?
My rules preferred over your rules.
Your rules fairly applied vastly preferred over your rules applied willy-nilly.
It's very hard to feel sorry for 'protestors' who routinely call for the elimination of an entire race of people. Add to that, the fact that their leaders are rabidly religious(at least they say they are) and openly call for the removal of ALL religions but Islam from the face of the earth.
If Muslims want people to quit being 'afraid' of them....maybe they should tone down the rhetoric. I have yet to hear a Jew or Israeli vow to wipe Islam from the face of the earth.
Nobody believed Hitler would actually be as vile as he turned out to be....in spite of him saying it out loud over and over.
When zealots scream things out loud....like 'from the river to the sea,' you should believe it.
Remember, Hamas broke a cease fire to murder hundreds of Jews, most of them just civilians. This cannot be overlooked.
Having said that...this is NOT a fight the US should be involved in as a country. The Jews and Muslims have been fighting each other for hundreds of years. Not our monkeys, not our circus. We have problems of our own to solve.
We don't need to favor either side unless they attack US. Israel does not need aid. They are a rich country. If they want to buy stuff from us, fine, but we shouldn't be gifting them anything.
I am on Israel's side. I am NOT on the side of the vocal Palestinians. I AM on the side of the Palestinians that were used by Hamas as targets. They KNEW Israel had to retaliate in a big way to something so heinous. They have sacrificed Gaza while they all sit in Dubai and party down.
In other words, you don't support free speech, and neither do the people liking this comment. "Oh in this case the speech is actually bad" is not a defense of free speech!
"I have yet to hear a Jew or Israeli vow to wipe Islam from the face of the earth."
Lady, you really know nothing about Israel or its constituent politics. There are tons of Israelis who are extremist lunatics who want to kill all the Muslims! 10% of the country thinks Baruch Goldstein is a national hero! https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-733523
I agree those extremists exist, but they are not staging protests in the west in any numbers, nor do they have elite backing.
Team "kill all Palestinians" has very little backing, but team "force Palestinians into enclaves while Israel takes the rest of the land (and kill everyone who resists)" has the backing of every major Western institution. If the Palestinians proposed to form Palestine from the river to the sea with a reserved non-contiguous quasi-state for Jews (which is what the Israelis are proposing for the Palestinians!) they would call it genocide.
Well, there's 'resisting' (and Israel has hardly killed everyone who's done *that*) and there's committing a massacre targeted at Jewish civilians. Which you have to admit, is what Hamas did.
John Hagee spoke at yesterday’s pro-Israel rally in DC and nobody opposed it. Seriously?
Thought you were talking about Israel until I hit “Islam” 🤣
I don’t understand why you would post something if all you were gonna do is be a hypocrite. It’s not like any sensible person would agree with radical or extremist Islamist terrorism here, you’re just being disingenuous and constructing a sacred monolith to gore.
Do you know what 'from the river to the sea' means?
Look it up.
I am not a hypocrite. I am just saying the obvious. Radical Islamists(MOST of the leaders fall into this category, certainly Hamas does) want to wipe every religion from the face of the earth except for Islam. This is not a secret. They say it all the time. Other people aren't 'interpreting' their words. They say it outright. JUST LIKE HITLER. In fact, many Muslim leaders were followers of Hitler in WWII.....but that has been glossed over in history.
It's like western people have a death wish......'Oh, don't be mean to the guy that says he wants to kill you....'
I know that means and I know what I’m talking about, this regional conflict was my IR academic focus.
You have to accept the fact that you’re a hypocrite if you’re going to lump Palestinians and their defenders, as a group of people, under the totalizing umbrella of ideological governmental organizations like Hamas, and not Israelis and their defenders under the government of Israel.
You should try to read what Netanyahu and his settler front say outright, as in the interview included above.
Motte and Bailey + Strawman.
And Ben Gvir? Has someone reined him in, because last I checked the Israeli police were standing by while leftist Jews got mobbed
from their homes under his watch.
"From the river to the sea" does not and has never necessarily entailed wanting to kill Jews. For some people who say it, sure. But it's just a right-wing canard to pretend that it always or usually does.
So you think the % of Muslims who believe "From river to the sea" means killing Jews is greater or less than 10%?
I wonder how many people who believe that if Palestinians had full political rights it would effectively genocide Jews from Israel also believe that the "Great Replacement" is a baseless conspiracy theory.
Except that Gaza and the west Bank aren't part of Israel. No matter what Hamas, nor crazy settlers say.
Years back I ended up at a sketchy party with sketchy people who had all kinds of sketchy politics and this one guy starts telling me about how he is a "nationalist anarchist." He told me the success of his ideology would involve the various races and nations peacefully and anarchically separating into segregated anarchist communities living peacefully their separate anarchic lives.
I get the same feeling these days reading about the peaceful version of "river to the sea"
"But it's just a right-wing canard to pretend that it always or usually does."
No it's not. If you want to defend free speech in all instances then I salute you for being consistent but don't try to gaslight people in the process about what the rhetoric in question actually means.
Dammit, Freddie, if free speech really is that important (and I, and *many* of the Usual Suspects have said as much since 10/7, those with large platforms very publicly), why is it important to downplay “From The River To The Sea”?
It is not being downplayed. People are simply refusing to understand its meaning, historical and present, in context.
This is possibly a good strategy, as it tends to distract from the horrors being committed by the IDF/settlers.
How many babies died struggling for breath at Al-Shifa hospital because of the collective punishment the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering at the hands of Israel?
Yes, it is. Have you spent any actual time with Palestinians? They are not stupid, they understood reality.
You're dead wrong.
Free speech means that people who want to be just like Hitler are able to promote that view, as long as they don't make a specific, credible threat (and hew to whatever other wrinkles are in Brandenburg v Ohio).
It's our job to promote better, saner, more thoughtful arguments and defeat them in the marketplace of ideas. Not to use the force of the state to shut them up.
Yes, that is in fact what it means. People who want to be Hitler should absolutely be protected from censorship and from silencing by the majority, because everyone should. You know what was immoral, even vile, 100 years ago? Interracial marriage. Gay marriage. If you're a person who says "I want these rights for myself and my side, but they should stop at X mark" then you're not a supervillain, you're a totally normal person even, but you don't actually know what the word 'rights' means.
Also the practical reason to promote robust free speech protections is that when the nazis get in, if there are mechanisms for silencing dissent, they use them. If they have to build those mechanisms, then the protectors of robust free speech will put up a fight.
Every body politic, like every body, has a time limit. Eventually our republic will sink down into a failed state or an imperium, no matter how high it rises. Some other place will be the center for trade and great ideas and success, or maybe nowhere will and life will be hard. None of this is a good reason to accelerate that collapse by undermining the principles that have made this era a golden age.
No one who asks a rhetorical question followed by "look it up" is speaking sincerely.
You and the other insane Zionists already got what you wanted. The international community is standing by as a real genocide is committed against Palestinians. But just like every conservative victory it is hollow. It will never be enough. You will not stop until every Palestinian has been killed or exiled and you've already convinced yourself that they have it coming, all while crowing about imagined "genocidal rhetoric" from random college students or protesters.
I try not to post when I'm angry or feeling hatred, but it's been impossible lately. When Western media and elites unite in a brutally cold display of support for this evil, I cannot feel anything but hatred and disgust for those who equivocate or support these actions.
You have abused the word 'genocide' here.
No I haven't
There are civilian casualties, yes. But the numbers and nature of those killings are not comparable to Cambodia or the Holocaust.
Even if most Palestinian groups are actual Nazis (a ridiculous statement), actual Nazis have free speech rights too. This was famously demonstrated in the Skokie case but has also allowed people like Richard Spenser to speak on college campuses.
"From the river to the sea" is a slippery slogan. Here is a good critique of it.
https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2023-11-07/against-bans-against-slippery-slogans
Well, it doesn't really explain it does it? It just says it was used in 2002 at protests. The generally accepted meaning nowadays is that Jews need to be eradicated from the river(Jordan) to the Sea(Mediterranean). Whether it started out that way is inconsequential at this point. Banning slogans does no good. In fact, it's counterproductive. I'd rather people continue to use their preferred disparaging comments....that way you know who they are.
It is through their actions that you know Hamas is serious about eradicating Jews.
Hamas is NOT Palestine.
Let me say that again, Hamas is NOT Palestine. But Palestinians need to decide someday if they want to continue to identify with them. The US had a similar issue in the 1860s didn't we? A large number of Americans needed to decide if they wanted to be associated with slavery. Many fought and died to do away with it. Palestinians cannot continue to claim victimhood if they continue to NOT denounce groups like Hamas. You cannot support evil and then cry victim. At some point, they need to make a stand. As with ALL peoples, there is always a range of good and bad.
And remember, the area was under a cease fire when Israel was attacked. Preceding Oct 7th, Hamas and others had been constantly shelling Israel as well. The Israelis did NOT start this. They have a right to fight back.
History is full of displaced peoples. EVERYWHERE. Romans displaced people in the British Isles and France. American Indian tribes displaced other American Indian Tribes and then Europeans did the same to them. Europeans displaced a ton of people over time. History is FULL of colonization...it's kind of human nature.
Right now, city idiots are colonizing rural areas......it's the same thing. It's evolution.
Funny to me how people who profess to not really believe in property rights....like Marxists or Socialists...are SOOOO invested in the fact that somehow this land 'belongs' to the Palestinians....says who??? Who was there BEFORE the Palestinians?
"The land itself was under the control of various empires, such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and eventually the Islamic Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire"......should be bring all of those people back to occupy the land as well????
>Thought you were talking about Israel until I hit “Islam” 🤣
I've had that experience frequently. Whenever someone makes a specific critique without specifying which side they're referring to, I'll assume one only to eventually find out they meant the other.
I've started to realize each needs the other as a target for hate. It's almost like these two groups are symbiotic.
Anecdotally, I have also come across videos and statements of Israelis professing to ethnically cleanse Gazans (before and after this conflict). These videos may not be coming across your internet timeline.
Similarly, I have seen Palestinian protesters side by side with Jewish folk. One of the biggest cheers at the London rally was the mention of "our Jewish friends who protested at Grand Central".
I'm not sure you should be basing your arguments on protestor free speech on anecdotes.
I don’t understand why people try to make this more complicated than it is. You believe in it or you don’t. If you do, you believe it applies to your worst enemies. If you don’t, don’t f*cking pretend you do.
Where do you draw the line though? Somebody who advocates for BLM in a social media post (the "Ima cut you" girl) gets her internship offer revoked. Seems like a slippery slope to me.
For me I lean towards a cultural view where what you do on your free time is up to you, whether that's marching in a KKK rally or a peace march. And I think that American society was a lot closer to that a few decades ago compared to the modern day.
I think it's more that everyone has a printing press in their pocket and a column in a "newspaper" that everyone they know can look at.
People just didn't have the opportunity to broadcast their dumb opinions with the ease and reach they do now.
This is a place where there probably has to be some flex and some accommodation for 'fit,' even if that can be used as an excuse.
What bothers me is when it's not a public diatribe, and someone leaks a private chat or what have you.
I'm against tattle culture, personally. If you say something in pubic, you should be prepared to own and defend that sentiment, and that's good for society. But it's also important to have ways to work through ideas privately before you have to own them in front of the world.
If those emails were on company accounts, on company time, then I guess I have little reason to disagree. But if they were personal accounts, on personal time, my opinion would be different.
Right. "Freedom of speech" exists to protect unpopular speech. If it didn't, what is even the point of such an ideal? Popular speech doesn't need protection.
Yep.
The whole saga of the 1970's Nazi rally in Skokie, IL, up to and including being lampooned in the Blues Brothers, remains a pretty good Rorschach Test for this stuff IMO.
That's a triumph of the American experiment, if you are so inclined.
The ACLU would never support it today.
The ACLU turned into cowards after Charlottesville.
ACLU is too extreme even for this Bernie Bro.
Interesting you bring this up, that Blues Brothers scene has real staying power over the years.
What I thought quite remarkable about it though was not that the film was basically depicting a rendition of the Skokie protest, albeit humorously. But that the solution Jake and Elwood came up with was to drive over the small bridge and force all the Nazis to jump off into the stream below. I could be wrong, but I felt like the filmmakers (Landis?) were sort of offering up their own solution to a Nazi rally: end it by driving through them.
Of course it's a comedy, and barely serious, but I distinctly remember friends and family cheering out loud while watching that scene.
And why not, they were Nazis after all right? The immortal bad guys we all can agree on. But then I thought of that Charlottesville rally from 2017 and I thought to myself, "How would we have reacted to that if it was instead a counter-protestor who drove through the alt-right crowd? Would we still unanimously condemn it, or would some of us have cheered it?"
To be fair I'm sure the Blues Brothers' scene was not meant to be taken as a real solution to Nazi rallies, but rather as a hilarious shenanigan simply meant to make the audience laugh. But I would argue underneath that grand comedy is a bit of an uncomfortable truth: we all love to see those we all hate get publicly humiliated, or even hurt, from time to time. I think the actual Skokie rally was where we did the right thing, no question in my mind about that. But the Blues Brothers scene was where Jake and Elwood (us by proxy) did what we would really rather do...if there were no legal or moral consequences for it.
Well the thing about Blues Brothers being in fact a work of fiction, or even better something like Inglourious Basterds getting even more down and dirty with cruelty against Nazis, is that there's a sort of "two can play at this free speech game" aspect to it. Fantasizing about horrific violence against people who fantasize about horrific violence.
And that's the American free speech thing, right? We are much better off having both Mein Kampf and Inglorious Basterds on the shelves of public libraries than we would be keeping all of it hidden for the benefit of public morals and public order. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
Oh I couldn't agree more, I just thought the lampooning was more revealing than a simple joke.
"Fantasizing about horrific violence against people who fantasize about horrific violence." -that made me lol. I'd imagine this is what makes us human. :]
The people in Skokie weren't college students, and if they were, I doubt even in the halcyon days of free speech anyone would have argued that they should be granted tenure or allowed to chase Jews around campuses.
The anti-woke argument that you should be free to speak on contentious topics without having everything cast as hate speech to limit your participation in public institutions, does not make you a hypocrite when you say that actual hate speech should not be enshrined in public institutions. There are people who think the Civil Rights act should be repealed, but they are a minority of the people dubbed "free speech advocates."
If you are an employer with a diverse workforce, your legal team will tell you that hiring an a vocal racist is going to get you sued. If you have an employee saying, "praise our martyrs, palestine is arab" in your slack chat, you are going to have a problem if you also employ any Jews.
For years, the left tried to focus the full power of the civil rights administrative apparatus on their enemies by reframing their political opinions as matters of harm and civil rights. DEI offices now exist in major corporations to treat microaggressions as firing offences based on nothing more than the expediants of ideology. Now that the left have openly embraced hate in many cases, openly embraced macroaggresion, they can't understand why people are saying the system should be focused on them because they never really had any belief in the system to begin with and thought it was just there for their own use. This whole thing is leftists telling on themselves. They can't believe that opposition to their hate speech is anything but hypocrisy because they were always hypocrites in the first place, it was always just a tactic to gain power. Now that institutions that they thought they controlled (though it's still to be seen if anything will actually happen) and had used to dole out privileges based on ideological alignment are being forced to return to their universalist role, they can't process it as anything but a betrayal.
This whole saga honestly validates the supposedly hypocritical, anti-woke, free speech advocates. For years they had claimed that the new moral standards were nakedly partisan and would render basic concepts like hate speech mutually unintelligible, and that's what has happened.
In the case of moderate leftists who are sympathetic to Palestinian causes the perception of silencing stems from two things. First, there are people who do want to silence them and are hypocrites. But at its core, this whole accusation of hypocrisy stems from the ignorance, both willing and through omission, of just how debased the rhetoric of one side has become. And the fact that it became so debased so quickly is a direct result of them having removed the universalist and humanist safeguards that liberalism had attempted to erect in the first place. And a lot of people who found themselves surrounded by gleeful antisemites are now unable to extricate themselves or acknowledge the reality of what just happened (We've seen this in the past).
The hypocrisy goes both ways, and you're exhibiting it.
"Ah but THIS speech is just too far".
On the one hand, there is a zone of absolute content neutrality per the First Amendment where nothing is too far, including a Nazi rally in a heavily Jewish suburb where at the time many Holocaust survivors lived. A public university shutting down pro-Palestine student groups certainly falls into that bucket. Despicable hatred has permanent protected access to the public square, such is the American experiment.
And outside of the First Amendment Zone of absolute no-exceptions content neutrality, there is argument at the margins of what belongs in decent private discourse and how to enforce those limits. You don't have to think "this is what decolonization looks like" should be just blithely tolerated and neither does Bari Weiss. But neither you nor Bari Weiss gets to wear your "being challenged by uncomfortable ideas is what higher education is for" hat while cheerleading the immolation of the future professional lives of a bunch of public-spirited 21 year olds. The SJW snowflakes are hypocrites just throwing whatever rhetorical cudgel they can grab a hold of at their opponents and so are you.
Have the balls to argue against the principle of free expression. Europeans would and do.
"Ah but THIS speech is just too far".
Yes, exactly. "Gas the Jews" is too far. You seem to think that having any standards means you can't criticise someone for having bad standards, which is, well it's just stupid. Me and Bari Weiss still get to wear our "being challenged by uncomfortable ideas" badge because neither of us have crossed the red line of arguing that certain people can be ethically murdered due to their race.
Colleges are not public like a park, they are public as in public money. As in there are conditions. Therefor they need to follow Title VI of the civil rights act. If a professor is targeting Jews in his class, if a protest is engaging in racially prejudiced language on campus, if they are celebrating dangerous and racist groups, then the schools have a legal duty to shut those things down, just like they did across colleges in the 1960s when we decided that actually racism is, in fact, something that goes too far. These same equal protection clauses apply to employers as well. The line has been enshrined in law since 1964. I didn't make it.
The fact that you can't tell the difference between actual hate speech, speaks only to your moral failing and the utter poverty of whatever passes as your first principles, not to my supposed hypocrisy.
Well, see, in two posts you've bidded downwards from "praise our martyrs, Palestine is Arab" to "Gas the Jews".
In both First Amendment terms and moral terms those are very different!
(And both are also different than "from the river to the sea", incidentally)
Trying to collapse those distinctions into a unitary "with us or against us" notion of unacceptable expression which is all equally to be interpreted as literal violence is PRECISELY the "woke" project.
Now please, tell me more about how "no, actually, your speech denies my right to exist and makes my body unsafe in this space"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
It might be that the actions here are the focus, rather than the words.
I think the problem here is we need to look at the spirit of '64, not '91. The First Amendment had a pretty big asterix stuck next to it with the civil rights act. You are allowed to discriminate against actual racism if. you are an employer. Indeed, if you don't want to get sued you are actively required to discriminate against actual racism. And anti-semitism, despite the arguments of lefties, is still actual racism.
There is a debate whether minimizing the ethno-terrorist violence on Oct. 7 was actually racist, or if the outburst of people who seem to be on the side of not just Palestinian Liberation in general, but of Hamas in particular is also racist, but it's not a debate I really care to have in this space. I'll suffice it to say that the attempts to frame this as a "both sides" issue really overlooks a lot of bad actors.
Have you considered that Anti-Semitism and Semitism are merely opposite side of the racist coin? The cry of Anti-Semitism being merely a tribalist rallying cry to 'gather the tribe' to confront an ancient enemy of our tribe. The cry of Anti-Semitism is an appeal to authority, and appeal 'look at me, I'm the favored son Isaac' hiss at that disfavored son Ishmael and all his unclean followers.
If I were under attack, and cried out 'Anti-Christian behavior' would anyone come to my rescue? Good luck whitey. Thus, instead of a society where all people might enjoy equality of protection; some tribes are special. Maybe this is the real problem.
The fact that this particular ism is probably the second-oldest ism (after sexism), and it continues to persist, is the real problem.
I don't think they should ban their protests, but deport them.
If you deport people for doing something, you have banned that thing.
No, they can protest at home.
The problem is they are violent and threaten residents.
What about the ones who have lived in the UK/US/Germany their entire lives and are citizens?
No deportation of any citizen.
As I understand it the Palestinians, for all intents and purposes, lost the Arab Israeli war and lost their territory as a result. Similar in many was to Mexico losing the Mexican American war and losing territory as a result. Well, in both cases, they lost it fair and square because they didn’t have their shit together and it’s going to stay lost so, like the Mexicans, they need to get used to it.
I mean if Mexico wants to send troops across the border to kidnap and murder Americans as part of some ill conceived plan to get California back they shouldn’t be surprised when we’re carpet bombing Mexico City. But we just want our land back! Well, you’re not getting it and the bombing will continue until you get that thought through your head.
you think right by conquest is a doctrine that... helps Israel's claims? The pro-Israel argument is literally the opposite.
I've seen pro-Israel commenters make the argument both ways, depending on what's convenient at the moment. Sometimes conquest is illegitimate and the Jewish people have an ancestral right to this particular place, sometimes it's legitimate and the Israeli state has rightfully conquered that same place.
The conclusion is fixed, the arguments are not.
If we're setting aside morality and just talking about cold realities, I think we have to reckon with the fact that this seems likely to end in Israel / Palestine being reduced to a nuclear wasteland.
Israel already has the bomb. Its enemies are likely to get it sooner or later. And nobody powerful seems remotely interested in de-escalation, so...
Korea has been lucky so far. And maybe Israel will be lucky as well. But I wouldn't put money on it. And if I lived in Israel, I'd move somewhere safer.
Israel Palestine - your new house and the Munsee Indians - potato potatoe.
You understand that the whole argument for Zionism is that it's the ancestral home of Israel, but they lost it by conquest to the Romans and were given it back by the UK, right? That's not rule by conquest, and if rule by conquest is what we're going for, if someone else conquers modern Israel they will have just as much right to it as the Israelis do. I don't think that's a wise stance for supporters of Israel to take.
"That's not rule by conquest, and if rule by conquest is what we're going for, if someone else conquers modern Israel they will have just as much right to it as the Israelis do. I don't think that's a wise stance for supporters of Israel to take."
Wow, you have a lot of confidence that the world would have done something if Israel had lost one of the wars against the Arab nations.
I call it like I see it. The Munsee Indians don’t have a right to take over your home, Mexico doesn’t have a right to take back California and the Palestinians should learn to deal with life as it is.
They are weak and they lost and life isn’t fair.
If Arabs invade and take over Israel, will you say the same about them? Will the have the same right of conquest?
They can’t so it’s a moot point. That’s the whole argument.
Ukraine isn't getting Crimea back unless they can take it themselves.
But they're still there, living in the country much the way Africans were in South Africa under apartheid. Should they be forcibly expelled to neighboring countries?
I doubt this will have much of an effect, but do you realize your argument applies to any atrocities committed by Hamas? As in, on Oct. 7, when they were killing civilians, they were justified because, in that moment, they were the stronger party? I mean, I don't think you really believe this, but it's where your "logic" leads.
It doesn’t have anything to do with what is right or wrong or how we think things “should” be. It’s how things are.
Ukraine successfully held off a Russian invasion so they get to stay their own country. Hamas didn’t so they don’t. That’s how the world works.
And whether it's wise or not, it CERTAINLY invites, practically begs, the interpretation that is being censored in the stories above.
The argument was self determination until the Arabs tried to eliminate Israel multiple times. They're never going to go back to the pre-1967 borders because no one trusts the Arabs to behave properly when they're even closer to the major Israeli population centers.
Depends entirely on who starts the war.
This logic is also applied to Native Americans, and I just don't buy it, ethically. Sure, they lost a war (or ongoing battles and treaties and a number of other atrocities), but do we really want to continue living in a world where might equals right? Still? Can't we collective decide to move beyond that yet?
You can just say Blood & Soil next time to cut down on word count.
That’s the reality of how the world works, isn’t it?
So the folks living in the bantustans of apartheid South Africa should have gotten used to it, because that's how the world works?
You're more likely to convince this one with an argument like:
"So the Boers being forced off their land should get used to it, because that's how the world works?"
Well, he/she/whatever seems to be all about Might Is Right.
But only sometimes.
I find "might makes right people" are real laissez-faire about everything until the first time someone powerful enough to kick their ass comes along, then all a sudden they git real misty eyed about doctrines of natural rights.
Absent a world government that can enforce some sort of sovereign entity property rights - it doesn’t matter what we think. It is what it is.
Right, except that ignores all the times in history when people and nations decided to set aside their advantages and their very deeply held resentments and try other solutions like toleration, reconciliation, or reconstruction. And that wasn't because they were super kum-bay-yah, it was because they were so deeply familiar with the consequences of violence that they got tired of it, which is a perfectly rational response to unending violence.
Yeah I mean, this whole "that's just the way the world works" has a real "facts don't care about your feelings" vibe; it's just a slogan, empty of morality, intelligence, or even a loose grasp of world history. If you want to say the history of human relations is that of endless war, then you also have to say it's one of endless treaties, diplomacy, strategic alliances, various approaches to codified or informal justice, legalism, long periods of relative peace, etc. Not to mention the entire postwar era is defined, in word and often in practice, by an explicit rejection of any rights conferred by conquest.
We have had relatively stable national borders for decades...not centuries, but decades. Plenty of civil wars and ethnic clashes, but not the territorial expansion that was the norm before. I hate to see us go back to that bygone era and return to conquerors and warlords. It might be fun in video games and movies, but it will truly suck in real life.
You can hardly apply that framework of "we won the war fair and square" to answer questions where human suffering is involved to this extent. The Mexican American war analogy is hardly relevant either given the lack of parallels between the two. We owe it to ourselves and the people dying over there to not think so simplistically.
Why? Their government sent fighters across the border and they are now dealing with the consequences.
You don’t step on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ long ranger and you don’t send fighters to murder and kidnap the the citizens of a country that has the power to totally destroy you. If you do? That’s on you.
What is this "government" of which you speak? And what "border"? Gaza, like the West Bank, has been under Israeli control since 1967. No one goes in, no one goes out, goods don't go in, goods don't go out, without Israeli permission. The Palestinian people living there have no rights. Gaza in particular was/is a concentration camp, and has been openly described as such by Israeli leaders. What we saw on October 7th was a breakout from that concentration camp, a prison break. Such breaks tend to be violent (see slave revolts in the US for comparison.) The fighters from Gaza attacked several of the Israeli military bases that enforce the imprisonment of Gazans. They also sought to take hostages - complain about this all you want, but Israel holds (not counting the 2.2 million Gazans!) thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including women and children. The hostages were to be used to bargain for freedom for those prisoners, and to end the crushing imprisonment of Gaza. Israeli leadership doesn't give a shit about the lives of the Israelis held hostage - that is obvious from their actions, starting on October 7th, when Israeli military forces were ordered to blast houses in the captured kibbutz, and even to bomb an Israeli military base. You are engaging in classic DARVO, blaming the victim for responding to the decades-long death, destruction and imprisonment you have inflicted. I have one question for you, the most fundamental question: are the Palestinians untermenschen, or not?
Gaza could be Monaco if they had their shit together. But they don’t and haven’t for a long time.
You are utterly delusional, if not consciously spreading Isreali hasbara talking points. Gaza has been a concentration camp for at least 16 years. Israel controlled all access, the air space, and the ocean. The economy of Gaza has long been crushed as a result: how can farmers get their produce to markets, when Israel can - and has - deliberately closed the exits, causing everything to rot? Israel fired upon Palestinian fishermen who dared to venture more than a kilometer or two off shore, which they need to do since water closer to shore is polluted, since Israel destroyed the sewage and water treatement plants. Every couple of years Israel "mows the lawn" (translation from Nazi-speak: bombs the enclave, killing hundreds of children, women, and men.) Yeah, sounds just like Monaco. All that was before the last month, when Israel moved to genocide, the complete destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza - along with blatant ethnic cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank. Wake the fuck up, and stop lying.
So you're for Might Is Right, then.
Funny how that doesn't apply to The Holocaust.
Some Israelis are so far-gone that they do think it applies to the Holocaust.
In 2019, Giora Radler, a Rabbi and instructor at a military prep academy, was recorded saying the following:
[Hitler] is the most righteous person. Of course he is right in every word he utters. In his ideology he is right. There is a male world which fights, which deals with honor and the brotherhood of soldiers. And there is the soft, ethical feminine world [which speaks of] ‘turning the other cheek’. ‘And we [Nazis] believe that the Jews carry on this heritage, trying, in our words, to spoil the whole of humanity, and that’s why they are the real enemy.’ Now, he [Hitler] is 100% correct, aside from the fact that he was on the wrong side.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/embracing-racism-rabbis-at-pre-army-yeshiva-laud-hitler-urge-enslaving-arabs/
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/04/israeli-military-praising/
Basically, according to Radler, Hitler's general worldview regarding "might makes right" and irreconcilable conflict between races was correct, his only mistake was being against the Jews.
Detestable as that is (thanks for bringing it up), at least it is more honest than the usual double standards.
TL:DR "Freedom of Speech" is very important. Except when sacred cows are gored.
Germany and other EU countries also have a history of silencing dissent from the approved narratives with regard to Russia and Ukraine.
I lean more toward Israel than Palestine in this wretched conflict, but that doesn't matter. It's reaching the point where I would support someone for president - literally anyone - who was passionately devoted to free speech over any other issue, foreign or domestic, free speech, period. Don't see anyone like that on the horizon, though.
Is that because you believe free speech is an unalloyed and unmatched good, or because you think it's been neglected and needs shoring up even if there are equally or more important goods?
The second, I think. I don't know that there are any unalloyed goods in this fallen world.
So you would or would not support the following platform:
As President, I will impose a 99% tax on all individuals and corporations with a net worth greater than $1 billion (to be determined by a federal audit). Individuals who refuse to pay this tax will be imprisoned; corporations which refuse to pay this tax will be taken into receivership. Individuals who leave the country to avoid this tax will be stripped of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship and their assets seized by the state. Corporations which seek to evade this tax by incorporating in a foreign country will be banned from trading in American markets and all assets currently housed in U.S. institutions will be seized by the state. If my actions are challenged in the judicial branch, I will use subtle but unmistakable threats of force to compel judges to rule in my favor.
I will suspend all military and other aid to Israel. Indeed, I will instead provide substantive aid packages to the Palestinian Authority.
I will not, however, at any point as part of one of the above actions violate the First Amendment rights of any citizens of the United States, as those rights have been understood by the Supreme Court of the United States at the time of my election.
(Assume that this individual has a huge popular base and the potential to, if not win, act as a spoiler in the general election—although it's possible they could win. Say, the level of popularity Trump would have if he ran as a third-party candidate.)
I claim the Sacred Right of Internet Hyperbole to say no, I wouldn't, cause that ain't what I meant.
"It's reaching the point where I would support someone for president - literally anyone - who was passionately devoted to free speech over any other issue, foreign or domestic, free speech, period."
So, how many more Palestine protests will have to be suppressed before you decide it's time for President Hammond?
"Reaching" versus "reached".
Don't threaten me with a good time!
Believe you me, I'd vote for him in a second.
In fairness, deeply un-American speech policies in Europe go beyond this issue.
Which is to say, *actual*, constitutional free speech in America is something very much worth defending.
All the more reason to not let these discussions devolve into "it should be illegal for someone to call me a corncob on Twitter".
It’s wild to hear “heterodox” British people discuss free speech. They’re a lot more comfortable with banning speech than you’d expect, presumably because they don’t have US amendment and norm.
You keep whipping this dead horse, but I just don't think firing people for debating whether puberty blockers were as safe as we were told is on the same level as firing people for debating whether it's ok to kill Jews.
The real hypocrisy here is that the "punch Nazis" crowd is now sharing talking points with actual neo-nazis. One side has clearly fallen farther than the other. And this is ignoring that Nazi included anyone right of AOC.
But to your point, I'll say the same thing I've been forced to say during the last 10 years of increasing authoritarian speech norm: This far, and no further. But I think we both know which side it is that's going to move the line again.
"debating whether it's ok to kill Jews."
1. No one is actually doing this.
2. The First Amendment says we have the right to do this so long as we are not issuing a direct threat. It's not nice, but that's what freedom is. That's the whole point.
3. "the "punch Nazis" crowd is now sharing talking points with actual neo-nazis." Neo-Nazis love Israeli. They see it as a bulwark against the brown hordes. Seriously, Stormfront constantly celebrates Zionism. You need to update your rhetoric.
With regard to 1:
It's an exaggerated statement, but there certainly have been people justifying the October 7th attack as legitimate armed resistance against Israel, which I imagine is what they meant to refer to.
Yes, yes, yes, I think we've all heard the "no one is actually doing this" line about left-radicalism a few times now.
Ouch.
One side has had actual Nazis fighting for them, and it wasn't the Israelis.
"Resistance is always justified."
"Glory to the Martyrs."
"Intifadah, Revolution, there is only one solution."
You're right. This isn't debating if it's ok to kill Jews. These slogans--all over many marches that have happened around the world--have decided that it is affirmatively good to kill Jews.
To be clear, I don't think anyone should be arrested for saying these things. But it's just not clear to me that "freedom of speech" means that nothing you say can be weighed in any hiring decision for any position. There's a lot of nuance here, but "it's justified to bake a baby in an oven" might be a reason to question someone's ability to be effective in certain jobs.
There's a lot of nuance here, but "it's justified to bake a baby in an oven" might be a reason to question someone's ability to be effective in certain jobs.
There is NO nuance. Such a person is not someone I wan to be around, nor would my clients or co-workers. Even if was mopping floors, working the fryer, making tacos, washing dishes, such a person a a danger to have in your workplace. They may not physically assault someone, but they will open their mouths and spew their hate at some point, and no one around them deserves such abuse.
These Substacks (or at least the ones I have read) are replete with posts on cancel culture and examples of people losing jobs or having offers revokes for all manner of speech that is "much less inflammatory." I suspect you've read a few of these posts yourself, perhaps made some comments. My point being that there is no shortage of discussion over the rights and wrongs of cancel culture, and which "much less inflammatory" speech is going to be punished by whom.
I have no problem with someone who mumbled too loudly after a few drinks that "men can't get pregnant" or "mis-gendered" some guy in a dress at the 2016 office holiday party. But, I personally draw the line at anyone who openly cheers for Hamas. I don't want those people around me.
I was trying to phrase it as gently as possible to highlight the absurdity of Freddie's claim (that believing in free speech and acknowledging that some speech will have some consequences are entirely compatible).
But I think the nuance there is that if people are entirely unemployable, then my tax dollars end up paying for them to exist, and I don't think that's a great state of affairs either. If they can have a job where their desire to see 7 million Jews wiped off the face of the earth is immaterial to their work, and they can avoid openly calling for murder in the workplace, I think that's the best we can hope for in a free, pluralistic society.
"but I think the nuance there is that if people are entirely unemployable, then my tax dollars end up paying for them to exist, and I don't think that's a great state of affairs either"
People lose their jobs and become unemployable due to something they said or did or were merely accused of, that is not related to their jobs . Ever heard of "#metoo"? (just for an example). What about the kid who lost his fast food job because someone recognized him at the Charlottesville shit show? If you can lose a job or have an offer revoked because you posted 14 years ago on Facebook that women don't have penises, then I'm OK with you losing your high paying snobby law firm offer because you openly cheer for people who just put babies in ovens and set to "bake" and tied kids to their parents and burned them all alive. Such a hate filled person has absolutely no business walking the hallways of any law firm I would work at or, as importantly, hire to represent my company and charge me a shit ton of $$ for the privilege.
Sorry about your tax dollars.
I think #metoo went too far, and some people lost their jobs who shouldn't have.
I did not hear about the fast food/Charlottesville kid, but I don't think he should have lost his job.
I don't think people should lose their job for decades-old, basically inoffensive social media posts.
Like you, I am totally fine with someone who cheers for the murder of Jews losing their job at a high paying law firm. That was the point of my first post. It is substantively different than the above cases.
But I don't think that person should be entirely unemployable. As I said above, if they can get a job where their hateful opinions don't matter and they learn to keep those opinions to themselves, I think that's better than any other alternative.
By this silly logic a huge swathe of USA jews would lose their jobs. There has been no shortage of anti palestinian racism expressed on linkedin alone that would get an arab fired if he said it about jews.
Pretending this massive disparity isn't their is just flat out insincere lying.
1. Who counts as no one? There were the "gas the jews" chants in Sydney. A lot of "this is what decolonization looks like" posts during and immediately after Oct 7th. Or chanting about Khayber jewish expulsion. https://twitter.com/hurryupharry/status/1718287119452663969 It doesn't de-legitimatize all pro-palesitian claims or take away from Israeli extremists. But "literally no one" feels a bit like the literally no one is being cancelled argument.
2. I agree completely. I think this has been a great example for left of center folks that European speech laws aren't great.
3. The punch Nazis crowd are the same crowds at pro Palesitian protests. Especially here in Portland. That crowd's loudest advocates at least in my experience has been lefties into "direct action". Also yeah I think that neo-nazis are at the very least split over a jewish state. https://www.sfchronicle.com/us-world/article/nazi-antisemitism-israel-hamas-18476691.php, https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7zx5a/neo-nazis-hijack-pro-palestine-protest-mike-enoch. Or at least cynically down to inflame the conflict either way cuz it kills more of two types of people they hate.
Don't worry, it's a just a few college students going through a phase, it's not going to spread or anything.
Iswydt
“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
There are ongoing protests worldwide calling for the extermination of Israel and Jews, and many of the comments here include clear examples of popular slogans promoting martyrdom and indiscriminate violence.
And not just talk, but actually documented incidents of violence against Jews, who are neither abstract nor far away but nearby and in imminent danger as a result of this speech. Precisely why it’s not protected under 1A.
"You believe in [free speech rights] all the time, or you don’t believe in it at all."
This. Over and over again, this.
Thank you.
No....nowhere in there did I say they COULDN'T say it.
I said we had better LISTEN to what they are saying because they are SERIOUS.
By all means, let the loonies talk.....but there is actual intent behind their talk.
For example....the recent mass shooter in Maine professed that he was going to do a mass shooting before he did.....and NOBODY did anything.
If people come out and SAY they are going to commit acts of violence, believe them.
If they are dumb enough to say it out loud, then do something.
Words are not violence....but they can be a warning and when particularly vile, should be paid attention to.
Actually, vis a vis murderer in Maine, lots of people tried to do something about it, and were unsuccessful.
Generally the concept of free speech does not extent to blatant calls for violence. Go to any pro-Palestinian protest and you’ll hear exactly that - “glory to the martyrs” and “intifada now” are explicit calls for violence that promote terrorism and jihad.
"Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
A peaceful political rally an ocean away from the conflict doesn't pass either prong of the Brandenberg test, hateful though the rhetoric may be.
Even January 6th, way WAY more direct and immediate incitement, is a shaky case.
Yeah because all Jews live in Israel and never experience violence elsewhere 🙄
Well there are certainly things you could say which would not be afforded First Amendment protection, but "from the river to the sea" ain't one of them.
I would agree “From the river to the sea” is vague enough to warrant 1A protection, but it’s obviously also a slogan that endorses ethnic cleansing and genocide.
If that’s all people are saying at these protests, I’d agree they should not be stopped. But it rarely stops at such vague language.
"it's obviously also a slogan that endorses ethnic cleansing and genocide"
The core reality of Israel/Palestine as a discourse matter, as opposed to a military matter, is that for both sides it goes absolutely without saying that it is inherent in every statement of their opposing side that they are firmly and unshakably committed to total ethnic cleansing of the entire Land of Israel.
There are people on both sides very much committed to that. There are also many (almost certainly more) for whom the idea of "winning" in that way would horrify them. Probably most of all people just support their side without thinking closely about it at all.
It's tough stuff. Third rails don't have some easy solution sitting in plain sight.
The observation that one party had the capacity to carry out ethnic cleansing in 1948 and the other party has that capacity now is very relevant to my own feelings, but all the better to keep the lines open for discourse about it.
That’s fair.
It is obvious that someone saying "Let's go and attack this synagogue in Brooklyn in the name of Allah" is committing an illegal act per the Brandenberg doctrine and would be arrested for doing so.
Agreed that the first amendment shields these protestors from criminal prosecution (although Europe doesn’t have such strong free speech laws), but this rhetoric falls squarely outside the Overton window of reasonable opinions and should be condemned by civilized society.
People like Rashida Tlaib are hateful racists that should be treated like KKK supporters and Nazi sympathizers. It’s disingenuous for Freddie to argue that people are being canceled for peaceful advocacy of Palestinian self determination, when protestors worldwide are proudly declaring their hatred of Jews and desire to murder them.
Gonna need a citation on Rashida Tlaib being a “hateful racist”
Rashida Tlaib has used and defended the “from the river to the sea” chant and continues to promote the lie that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza (directly contradicting US intelligence and video evidence).
She directly calls for the extermination of Jews and promotes blood libel that foments hatred and rage among her supporters towards a specific group.
I personally don’t think “from the river to the sea” is a great slogan (I find it vague and unrealistic) but to claim it is antisemitic is just factually inaccurate. If that’s the reason for your claim that she is calling for the extermination of Jews, we don’t really share enough priors to warrant further discussion. This Jew is proud to support Rep. Tlaib.
The slogan is vague in the same way that the confederate flag is vague.
I suppose you could believe that Hamas and Iran use this phrase to advocate for a pluralistic society where Palestinians and Israelis live in harmony, but that is obviously not the case. The vast majority of government institutions in the West, from the White House to Downing Street, have rightfully condemned the slogan.
What do you think happens to the Jews when Hamas controls from the river to the sea?
only a colonized mind will carelessly toss out phrases such as "terrorism" and "jihad". Your word choice belies the extent to which your thinking is controlled by the ideology of Western Imperialists.
Is this satire?
Poe's law strikes again.
The concept of free speech definitely, 100% covers explicit calls for violence. Calls for war are protected speech.
I probably should have phrased this differently, but I’m referring to the cultural limits of free speech rather than the legal concept. You’re correct that the first amendment provides broad legal protections in the US.
My point was that Freddie equates the reaction to cancelations for relatively minor transgressions (like questioning COVID lockdowns) with people getting canceled for calling for ethnic violence and terrorism.
I don’t think these situations are the same - people should be free to voice most opinions without fear of losing their job or facing societal consequences. But once they publicly call for violence or celebrate mass murderers, that is beyond the scope of acceptable speech and I have no problem with employers taking action or people otherwise distancing themselves.
That’s up to you and I understand what you’re saying. Just be prepared to receive the same treatment. Are there any views of yours that someone has ever interpreted as a celebration for violence?
That’s fair - I think we should be very clear about what violence is and isn’t so that it’s not used as a political tool to silence opponents. Admittedly, that can be difficult when concepts like “silence is violence” enter the public discourse.
As a society we should have a shared understanding that indiscriminate murder and rape of civilians, like what Israel experienced on 10/7, is evil. That simple idea unfortunately seems to be eroding (especially in academic circles).
Hillary Clinton recently stated that people who voted against her should be sent to reeducation camps. Should she be immediately arrested for her blatant call for violence?
People who voted against sending people who said that voters should be sent to re-ediucation camps for saying that there is a free speech right to say that Hillary Clinton does not deserve the right to say what the US policy should be on the policy question of camps should not vote.
Are you having a stroke? Should I call 911?
Palestinians have the right to armed resistance because Israel is an occupying force, and please spare us all the tired and worn out "Israelis eliminated their illegal settelements in gaza and didn't get a cookie for it" trope. They're blockading Gaza, deliberately as per wikileaks to impose a starvation diet on Gazans and break their resolve. They have been caught DELIBERATELY sniping at civilians and spare us again the "they could kill more so its not a genocide", the killings are deliberate and for the purpose of intimidation and domination.
"And how is that "armed resistance" working out for them currently?"
Pretty well this time around, thank God, Israels support is collapsing world wide and among the younger american generations. But this is just the might makes right argument, one Hamas somehow doesn't expect to lose.
"If the Comanche and Apache and Sioux and so on all decided to pursue "armed resistance" (i.e. scalping any white civilians they can find) so as to take back the land they lost to the Europeans, rest assured they would also end up all living in open air prisons."
They aren't living in an open air concentration camp, they have freedom of speech movement and purchasing property in America. Palestinians don't and your hasbara is very boring.
"Sometimes taking the L is a better course of action than continuing to fuck around and find out."
Something the Israelis who fled the country wisely chose.
I don't think so, the fact is Americans are okay with natives as citizens, Israelis can't accept it elsr they lose their Jewish ethnic cleansing state.
Which of course has been cratering in popularity among younger generations. Wait a bit for the boomers to die off 😁
This time is an opportunity to cultivate the culture of free speech that would improve the usefulness of our discourse. We could be watering that garden right now, but forever nope.