WAJ Note: This letter was provided to us by a Cornell alumnus who was unable to get it published in The Cornell Daily Sun. The background is that a Cornell senior administrator Joel Malina was asked a question at a “private” (obviously not so private) meeting of parents organized by Cornell Hillel, in the context of hateful antisemitic and anti-Israel speech allowed on campus, whether the administration also would allow the KKK on campus if invited by a student group or faculty member. The answer to this hypothetical scenario reportedly was that it would be allowed.
That raises an important free speech issue of permitting offensive speech that is easy to demagogue, and indeed, when the Sun broke the story, it set off a firestorm of demands that Malina be fired, and so on. The Sun itself issued a strong editorial rebuking the administrator, There is No Place at Cornell for the KKK, to which this alumnus wanted to respond as to why the Sun says there is no place for the KKK, but does not announce that same position with groups that support Hamas?
In the interest of airing this important issue, we have agreed to publish the letter that the Sun would not publish.
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To the Editorial Board of the Sun,
I recently read the editorial titled “The KKK Has No Place at Cornell,” and generally agree with the Editorial Board’s views.
However, as a Jewish alumnus who has observed campus over the last 12 months, I had to ask myself the question: would the Editorial Board of the Sun write and publish the same viewpoint with “Hamas” replacing “KKK” as its subject?
As the editorial states: “The University has a commitment to viewpoint diversity and free speech. But when that speech veers into discrimination and targeted harassment, creating an unsafe environment for marginalized students, that’s where the line must be drawn.”
And like the article notes that the KKK is a domestic terrorist organization, Hamas — along with Palestine Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — has been designated by the United States as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
In the last 12 months, a professor praised the October 7th massacre of Israelis as “exhilarating” and “energizing”, a Cornell student has been sentenced to 21 months for threatening to kill Jews, and Jews were prevented from accessing parts of campus and subjected to hateful rhetoric – clear examples of discrimination and targeted harassment. This has gone on to the point that organizations have reached out to New York area Jews, telling them not to apply to Cornell, as it is “not a safe place.”
I think it’s important to note that all of the above links and references were found on just page 1 of a Google News search for “Cornell Jewish”.
The Sun’s Editorial Board sees it necessary to publish this view about a hypothetical KKK member or white supremacist speaking on campus, yet (and please correct me if I’m wrong) I have not seen anything from the Sun’s Editorial Board calling out this actual discrimination and targeted harassment on campus in the last 12 months.
So I ask again, would the Sun’s editorial board agree that “Hamas” and its proponents have no place at Cornell? Or do the limits on free speech end when Jews are its subject?
Josh Mark
College of Human Ecology ’16
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