Besides using social pressure
and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable,
the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions
criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different,
even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic
rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go
against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can
show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas
can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia
University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be
weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had
died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another
university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century
scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust
(and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of
the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance
and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself
to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).
Hirsch had been using Hannah Arendt’s
book about the trial of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem; he was convicted of the
war crime of forcing Jews in Hungary to march to a death camp in Poland so as
many as possible would die on the way and thus reduce the killing needing to be
done at the camp. Arendt, a Jew, is critical in her book, Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, of Israel’s illegal kidnapping
of Eichmann in Argentina. Even mentioning that text, or explaining why Arendt
criticized Israel’s founding, could run afoul of Columbia’s 2025 revision of
antisemitism, “which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech.”[1]
That’s pretty heavy language, and the penalties would surely go beyond getting
fired from the university. So it is worthwhile to unpack the claim that
criticism of Israel constitutes hate-speech.
For criticism of Israel to be
taken as antisemitic, hence anti-Jewish, speech, the criticism would have to
pertain to Jews generally, but to criticize Israelis is not to criticize Jews
who are American and live in the United States, for example, unless they hold
dual citizenship. Moreover, to conflate citizenship, which is a political designation,
with a religious or social designation is to commit a category mistake, for the
categories are distinct. To criticize another country is not to criticize a
world religion (or even religion itself, as it is a distinct category).
Once we have properly
identified criticism of a foreign government (or country) as political in
nature, we can see that such criticism is acceptable in international relations;
people criticize other countries all the time. It can even be said to be the
human condition, and we are all in trouble if that is criminalized. It
would be like making the breathing of air illegal. In short, criticizing other countries
is so normalized in international relations that to make criticizing only one
country illegal while another other country or government thereof is “fair game,”
would be highly unfair. It would be especially unfair were that country’s
government exterminating a people within its territory, for to not criticize
such a country could be considered inhuman or at least insensitive to
the desperate plight of other human beings.
That both Hirsch and Arendt are/were
Jewish and yet included criticism of Israel should be enough to dispel the
notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. So it is ironic that Hirsch,
whose very parents died in the 20th century holocaust, thought she
might have to leave Columbia university to be able to continue to include
Arendt’s political criticism of Israel in courses. This is not to say
that Columbia’s new “definition” of antisemitism is itself antisemitic because
both Hirsch and Arendt could be expunged for being in violation.
I contend that any government,
and thus any country, is “fair game” in terms of being the recipient of political
criticism, and that this does not constitute hate speech. In criticizing Israel’s
role in the Gaza Holocaust, no hatred is being directed at or even implied to
pertain to any Jews in America who are not Israelis. That Israelis in Israel
can be criticized for their government’s policies and actions is fair because
that country’s political system is democratic.
Even in an autocratic state such as Russia, the people can be criticized
for not standing up sufficiently to an unprovoked invasion of another country. Perhaps
Vatican City would be a closer parallel to Israel, but even in criticizing a
political stance of the Pope or a public policy of Vatican City, a person is
not criticizing being Catholic in terms of its religious culture or beliefs.
Vatican City is recognized internationally as a country and thus as a political
entity, and thus political criticism is fairly done without being labeled as
hate speech against Catholics. Also, to criticize them for regarding the Virgin
Mary as a divine being in being born without sin and being bodily assumed into
heaven does not constitute a political criticism of the Vatican as political
entity. It is not as if the Virgin Mary were president of Vatican City.
For the governments of Israel
and the United States to wield antisemitism as a club so to curtail adverse political
speech—and Columbia’s new definition doubtlessly came from pressure from the
Trump Administration—represents a category mistake that is ethically and politically
unfair, especially if a legitimate basis exists to criticize a policy and/or
action of the Israeli government. The Gaza Holocaust evinces such a basis.
In fact, ethically, it can be argued that it is the duty of every human
being on the planet to criticize a government (or country) for being in the
process of starving, shooting, and bombing an occupied population of people,
who, unlike in the case of a war, could not fight back. In the 20th
century as news of the Nazi holocaust broke, criticism of Nazi-Germany or even
Germany itself was not “redefined” as anti-German hate speech because a legitimate
reason for even harsh criticism existed. True to American culture, therefore,
it is best to side with free political speech in international relations.
1. Jeff
Offenhartz, “A
Columbia Genocide Scholar Says She May Leave over University’s New Definition
of Antisemitism,” The Associated Press, July 25, 2025.
