At the beginning of the (current) Israel/Hamas war, I wrote Cancel Thee, Not Me, which made the case that canceling pro-Palestinian was not just wrong, but very hypocritical. That article caught me a fair amount of flak from my Jewish friends, but you can’t be a supporter of free speech if you pick and choose what speech to support. That's the very hypocritical nature I was criticizing in the article. Like I told them, I’ll defend pro-Israel speech just as hard as I’ll defend pro-Palestinian speech.

Well, the moment to defend pro-Israel speech has arrived.

Students and alumni at my alma mater, Haverford College, are currently trying to get a professor fired for the grave sin of expressing his opinion.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new for Haverford.

Where Free Speech Goes To Die

If you had to sum up Haverford in one word, it’d probably be groupthink. Like most extremely liberal colleges, Haverford and free speech go together about as well as oil and water. There is a party line, and to deviate from that party line basically turns you into an unperson. There’s a reason it’s consistently ranked among the strongest stranglers of free speech.

That reason is because a large portion of the student body believes in stuff like:

With claims like this:

Or:

With profound insights like “I don’t like your opinion, so you shouldn’t be able to say it. Also, you’re a white man”.

Or a strike that wanted to put into place thought police on professors:

And quite literally banned opposing viewpoints from being published:

Or would approve an amendment to the Honor Code (the college’s governing document) that outlaws opposing (read: conservative) political opinions:

I could go on and on, but I’m sure you get the point. This is a place where free speech goes to die.

And now it’s happening again.

Professor Barak Mendelsohn

If there’s one person at Haverford who bucks this trend, it’s Barak Mendelsohn, the school’s International Relations professor.

I spent a good amount of time with Barak because he was my thesis advisor, and like everyone who has ever had a class with Barak, my feelings about him are mixed. On the one hand, he could undoubtedly be a dick (he once blew off an important call we had scheduled about a summer program) and I didn’t agree with most of his politics, but on the other hand, he was always unapologetically himself, an excellent teacher who has forgotten more about the Middle East and terrorism (his specialties) than anyone who reads this will ever know, and an absolutely steadfast defender of free speech.

Barak is also an Israeli. And although he is by his own admission far left for an Israeli, he is still a Zionist. So you have a professor who is kind of a dick, outspoken, a defender of free speech, and a Zionist.

You can probably see where this is going.

The Witchhunt

Haverford’s student body, again like most ultra-liberal schools, is staunchly pro-Palestinian. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. I made that pretty clear in Cancel Thee, Not Me.

The problem arises in that the very same students who have spent years fighting against free speech on campus are now demanding free speech:

I’d be all for that if it was genuine. But it’s not. As section c shows, the students only want protection for their preferred pro-Palestinian rhetoric.

If you don’t believe me, then take a look at this tweet from Barak:

Pretty strong language that one can definitely argue isn’t true, but it’s just one man’s opinion.

So what do the pro-Palestinian students do? Do they debate and prove him wrong? Do they boycott his classes? Do they simply ignore it, as it is literally just one man’s opinion?

Nope, they try to get him fired:

That open letter now has 9 pages of signatures, and it continues to grow.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

A Lost Cause

The purpose of this article isn’t to try to cure Haverford from this virus, as they are way too far gone at this point. Nor is it to try to save Barak. I would obviously like the one good IR professor not to be fired for expressing his opinion, but he’s weathered storms like this before (the students tried to 86 him for publishing that thoughtcrime article during the strike) and I’m fairly confident he’ll do so again (tenure helps in this regard).

Instead, the purpose of this article is to alert people in institutions that have not yet fallen to the dangers of this threat.

As I wrote last month, the opinions of college kids really matter. Don’t simply write it off as kids being kids. It was thought like that that got us into this mess in the first place.

If you are in a position to do so, please, defend free speech. If you’re an Israeli, defend the ability of the Palestinian to speak her mind. If you’re a liberal, let the Trump supporter air out his grievances. If you love LeBron, debate with the MJ acolytes.

All censoring speech you don’t like does is enable someone else to censor you later.

If you don’t want the world to end up like Haverford, now is the time to fight back.