Hate Speech At San Francisco State University

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., director of Boston University's Program in Publishing at the Center for Professional Education, published an article regarding hate speech at San Francisco State University.

Dr. Cravatts is currently writing a book about higher education which will be entitled "Genocidal Liberalism: The University's Jihad Against Israel."

Here is an excerpt from his article which was published on February 24, 2009 in American Thinker:

Most notorious, for example, was the Muslim student-sponsored, pro-Palestinian April 2002 demonstration that included odious flyers and posters depicting a dead Palestinian baby on a soup-can label imprinted with the words "Palestinian Children Meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license," echoing the centuries-old blood libel of European antisemitism that accused Jews of murdering Gentile children and using their blood to bake matzos -- a slander that has, not surprisingly, currently gained credence in the Arab world. Even if the perpetrators of this cruel protest consider this type of expression merely "academic free speech" and legitimate debate about Zionism, and also disingenuously claim that that there is no underlying Jew-hatred here, only debate about Israeli policies, and even if they are to be believed, might not such flyers possibly offend Jewish students on campus? Could accusing an ethnic group of infanticide possibly be construed as "intimidation" or fostering "incivility" on campus?

Not content to mount their own vile protests against Zionism, Jews, and Israel, the pro-Palestinian student groups took it upon themselves the following month to disrupt a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day where some 30 Jewish students who were reciting the Mourners' Kaddish -- the Jewish prayer for the dead -- were shouted down by protesters who countered with grisly prayers in memory of Palestinian suicide bombers. The pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators, armed with whistles and bull horns, physically assaulted the Jewish students, spat on them, and screamed such charming epithets as "Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job," "Get out or we will kill you," "F**k the Jews," "Die racist pigs," and "Go back to Russia, Jews." The violence escalated to the extent that San Francisco police officers finally had to usher the Jewish students to safety off campus. "This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech," lamented Laurie Zoloth, SFSU's Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the time of the incident, "this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control."

Is this merely academic debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or is something more insidious finding expression in the minds of these hate-filled students blinded by their obsession with the plight of the Left's favorite third-world victims, the Palestinians? Claims by pusillanimous college administrators that hate-filled protests against Jews and Israel are merely conversations about politics are more than disingenuous; while universities see no difficulty is making moral judgments about "hate speech" when it is aimed at groups who have achieved status as victims in a world bereft of social justice -- blacks, gays, Palestinians, illegal aliens, among them -- that same moral recognition is oddly absent when vitriolic charges of racism, imperialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide are carelessly lodged at Israel and its supporters in the U.S. and the West. Victim status also insulates members of those groups from criticism; only the acts and behavior of the "other," the oppressors, are subject to critique, a convenient way for SFSU's jihad-supporting student groups to justify their ideological onslaught against the Zionism and Jews.

How has this corruption of what should be legitimate academic debate come about? Irwin Cotler, a Canadian MP and former minister of justice and attorney-general, believes that this pernicious ideology has manifested itself so "that Israel is delegitimized, if not demonized, by the ascription to it of the two most scurrilous indictments of 20th-century racism -- Nazism and apartheid -- the embodiment of all evil. These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi' supply the criminal indictment. No further debate is required."

Given this false sense of moral superiority by the libelous framing of Israel as the singularly most evil nation on earth, its campus enemies at SFSU and elsewhere feel free to speak against it in the most destructive and hurtful way possible. At the same time, pro-Israel, anti-terrorism voices are marginalized, disregarded, shouted down, or, as in the case of the College Republicans most recently, denounced as hate speech, unworthy of being part of an ongoing, vigorous debate, and deserving only of being punished and silenced by those who want only one side of the debate to be heard in what should be a vigorous, thoughtful debate in the ‘marketplace of ideas.'

Dr. Cravatt's article can be read here in its entirety.

Posted in: Anti-Semitism,San Francisco State University