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The Israel-Hamas War Has Scrambled the 'Cancel Culture' Tribes
“Free Speech Warriors” are AWOL now that it’s pro-Palestinian voices getting canceled, and leftists have suddenly dropped the premise that ideas make people unsafe.https://www.thedailybeast.com/israel-hamas-war-has-scrambled-cancel-culture-tribes
https://archive.ph/bRTWd
After the tragedy, the farce. While Israelis and Palestinians are burying their dead, pundits and activists in America are busy contradicting their principles to further their political claims. Take America’s self-styled free speech warriors on the Right and the so-called intellectual dark web—you know, the ones who rail against cancel culture and woke censorship, making millions of dollars while complaining that they’ve been shut out of the institutions of journalism. All of a sudden, now that it’s far-left voices being canceled, the response has been… mixed. Meanwhile, the tactics and rhetoric of the left have contradicted everything progressives say they stand for in terms of solidarity and safety, at times spilling over into overt antisemitism.
Case in point: Harvard University, where a bunch of left-wing students issued a (to my mind) outrageous, shortsighted, and offensive statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas' massacre of over 1,400 Israeli civilians, including the elderly, babies, and, as it happens, numerous peace activists as well. There is much about this statement that is repellant: conflating legitimate resistance with kidnapping toddlers and grandmothers, denying moral agency to Hamas (after all, they can’t be expected to engage in moral reasoning), and not even mentioning the slaughtering innocent civilians part. But even if the statement is wrong-headed, offensive, and even, in its gross insensitivity to the mass slaughter of Jews, borderline antisemitic, it is political speech, after all.
Yet in response, students have had job offers withdrawn, been doxxed by hard-right trolls (which has exposed them to death threats and harassment), and have faced calls from CEOs to have them blacklisted. Meanwhile, Harvard, for the sin of not condemning the students (the president of Harvard did condemn the attacks and rightly noted that student organizations do not speak for the university), has itself been widely condemned, with donors and at least one Jewish foundation withdrawing their support. (Remarkably, in my online cohort of mostly liberal American Jews, there has been widespread support for this BDS-in-reverse decision.) This is cancel culture writ large: unpopular political opinions being met with reprisals, firings, harassment, and worse. And it’s not just Harvard—similar controversies are also brewing at Columbia, Penn, and elsewhere.
And yet, “classical liberal” YouTube host Dave Rubin has called for pro-Palestine protesters to be deported, retweeting an asinine post analogizing the Jewish Voice for Peace protest this week at the Capitol to the Jan. 6 insurrection. (Another supposed free speech absolutist, Ben Shapiro, retweeted Rubin’s remark.) Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer tweeted a video of a protest outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., with the text, “Every single person here who is seen supporting Hamas and who is not a U.S. citizen should be deported posthaste.” (Meghan McCain gave it a retweet.) To be fair, there have also been voices applying free speech principles even to objectionable speech acts. “Let the Activists Have Their Loathsome Rallies,” advised Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. FIRE, the civil libertarian, heavily-Koch-funded free speech organization, has defended the right to free speech for pro-Palestinian voices and “recommended a pause” to the businesses seeking to punish students for exercising their free speech rights.
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