Fight antisemitism, but don’t let free speech on campus be a casualty | Opinion
This week’s special session of the Florida Legislature has prudently provided $35 million to bolster security at Jewish day schools and other potential targets of antisemitic violence.
The action is timely. Threats of violence against Jewish institutions have surged since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The Anti-Defamation League reports that during the first two weeks of the Gaza conflict, there were 312 antisemitic incidents as compared to 64 during the same two-week period in 2022.
Sadly, many of the incidents have occurred on the nation’s college campuses, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have faced off against Jewish students and others who rallied in support of Israel.
In some of these confrontations, there were even some pro-Palestinian students who voiced support for Hamas, despite the wanton brutality of its attack on Israel. Moreover, at several campuses there were also reports of Jewish students being targeted for abuses ranging from vandalism and intimidation to violent assaults.
Generally, however, the pro-Israel rallies and pro-Palestine demonstrations were verbal confrontations — shouting and screaming matches laced with the kind of epithets and salty language that are not unusual on college campuses nowadays.
These scenes have kindled a debate on many campuses, including at Harvard and several other prestigious Ivy League schools. In some cases, prominent alumni have criticized administrators for not cracking down on campus antisemitism, and major donors have threatened to withhold financial support if the schools continued to dawdle.
In Florida, however, the State University System was quick to respond. Chancellor Ray Rodrigues issued an outright ban on the pro-Palestinian group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), after Gov. Ron DeSantis railed against the Palestinians in Gaza and said they were all antisemitic.
Among other goals, the SJP supports applying to Israel the same kinds of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) tactics that student activists and others used years ago against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Unfortunately, Rodrigues, born in 1970, missed out on the campus protests of the 1960s and the lessons learned from them, but one sequence of events became the stuff of legend in higher education circles, so it may have come to his attention.
The “long-haired hippies” in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California’s Berkeley campus irked voters and contributed to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1966 gubernatorial election.
Reagan was inaugurated on Jan. 5, 1967. On Jan. 20, the Board of Regents met and fired UC-Berkeley’s president and longtime university system leader, Chancellor Clark Kerr, for refusing to crack down on the students. As Kerr later quipped “I left the presidency just as I had entered it — fired with enthusiasm.”
No doubt Rodrigues would not want to displease DeSantis and risk meeting the same fate as Kerr. Even so, banning student groups from Florida’s university campuses because they disagree with the prevailing point of view on a particular issue is an assault on the students’ First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech and the freedom to peaceably assemble.
If this group can be kicked off the state’s campuses, who’s next? Granted, the pro-Palestinian students’ criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians often reeks with the scourge of antisemitism, but antisemitism, per se, is not against the law.
Threats and acts of violence and intimidation against Jewish students and others who support Israel are against the law. Advocacy for Palestine and pushing for a shift in U.S. foreign policy is not.
If banning Students for Justice in Palestine were an isolated example, it would be less worrisome because there is reason to believe that the courts might overturn such a ban as an infringement on the students’ freedom of association.
However, as evident in the DeSantis regime’s total overhaul of Sarasota’s New College, an effort to snuff out campus dissent is well under way. As word spreads that academic freedom and the First Amendment are under assault in Florida’s top-rated university system, expect the rankings to tumble, so Florida must be careful lest it become known as the state where these freedoms go to die.
