You know who you are.
When someone you like is censored, you get up in arms. But when the other side is muzzled, you sit on your hands.
It’s the oldest trick in the hypocrite’s playbook: free speech for me but not for thee. And we’ve seen a stark display of it this spring, in the battles over graduation speeches on college campuses.
Rutgers University recently canceled a scheduled speech by Egyptian American tech entrepreneur Rami Elghandour after critics complained about his social media posts, which accused Israel of apartheid and genocide. A dean told him that “a few students felt that my social posts opposed their beliefs,” Elghandour reported.
So what? As Elghandour correctly argued, the point of college is to “be exposed to people who might have a different perspective than you.” Our job isn’t to keep everyone happy by confirming their assumptions. It’s to challenge those assumptions, which is why we need to guarantee free speech for all.
But Elghandour is only willing to take this free speech thing so far. In an interview after his speech was canceled, he said anyone who fought in the Israeli military — or who was part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — should be barred from speaking at commencements.
“If you take someone who served in this Israeli military and actually murdered people or made the decision to murder people, that’s very different, right?” Elghandour said. “If you brought Netanyahu to be the speaker, I would have a huge problem. He’s a wanted war criminal.”
Never mind that Israelis across the political spectrum denounced the warrant issued for Netanyahu’s arrest in 2024 by the International Criminal Court. We don’t need to hear from them, or from anyone who agrees with them. They shouldn’t speak at all.
I am outraged that Rutgers disinvited Elghandour, who produced an Oscar-nominated film about a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. It features audio from her call for help to paramedics before she died. Everyone should hear that.
But they should also hear arguments in favor of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its efforts to eliminate Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But Elghandour doesn’t want that kind of challenge.
Neither do many students at Georgetown University’s law school, who condemned the school for inviting former Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro to address its graduation. Over 200 students signed a petition demanding that Georgetown disinvite Schapiro because of his support of Israel and his denunciation of allegedly antisemitic protesters and professors on our campuses.
Schapiro “holds controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions,” the petition declared. Read: No pro-Israel speakers need apply. And anything that counters our beliefs will harm us. Smiley faces only, please.
That’s exactly the rationale that Rutgers used to cancel Elghandour’s speech, of course. The university’s decision “honors the celebratory spirit of the event to ensure that no graduate feels forced to choose between their personal convictions and a convocation ceremony,” a Rutgers spokesperson said.
And it’s the same argument that New York University invoked when it declared that graduation speakers this spring would deliver their remarks by prerecorded video, not live. Last year, a speaker departed from his remarks — which the university had preapproved — and condemned genocide by Israel, which left some listeners “feeling disappointed or disrespected,” a dean told one of the speakers.
Since when is everyone supposed to feel good? When your ideas are challenged, your feelings get hurt. That’s the price of a free university. And if you don’t want to pay it, you’re in the wrong place.
After the student protests against him, Schapiro withdrew from giving his speech at Georgetown. He said he didn’t want demonstrators “to distract from the day’s festivities.”
But he also released his planned address, which stressed the fundamental value of — yes — free and open discussion across our differences. “We are all aware that disrespect and distrust have increasingly plagued this country and the world,” Schapiro wrote. “Dialogue seems to have become a lost art, and a curse of moral certainty has infected many of our minds.”
He’s right. Every censor believes they have a monopoly on truth. But democracy is premised on the idea that nobody does. And that’s why we need to let everybody speak their minds.
Elghandour was denied that freedom, but he also said he would deny it to others. And if that’s your impulse, too, stop talking about your commitment to free speech. Either you believe in it for everyone, or you don’t believe in it at all.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
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