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Free Speech Tag

For the past 36 hours I've tried to gather my thoughts about the Charlottesville riots and killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Here goes, in no particular order. Free Speech. The sight of neo-Nazis marching with torches was nauseating. But even Nazis are protected by the First Amendment. That's why a federal judge declined to issue an injunction against their march. It's why the U.S. Supreme Court stayed an injunction issued in 1977 seeking to prevent Nazis from marching in the mostly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie.

Mike Adams is a professor in the criminal justice program at UNC-Wilmington with a fascinating political background. According to his columnist bio at Townhall:
Upon getting his doctorate in 1993, Mike Adams, then an atheist and a Democrat, was hired by UNC-Wilmington to teach in the criminal justice program. A few years later, Adams abandoned his atheism and also became a Republican. He also nearly abandoned teaching when he took a one-year leave of absence to study law at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998.

Hen Mazzig is an Israeli who makes frequent appearances abroad to promote the truth about Israel. I first learned of Hen when he wrote about his experiences with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the U.S.:
As a young Israeli who had just completed five years of service in the IDF, I looked forward to my new job educating people in the Pacific Northwest about Israel. I was shocked, however, by the anti-Israel bigotry and hostility I encountered, especially in the greater Seattle area, Oregon, and Berkeley. I had been very liberal, a member of the leftist Zionist party, Meretz, but the anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel that I have seen in the U.S. has changed my outlook personally and politically….

We’ve written before about convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh, a military member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who murdered two university students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner, in 1969 when she put a bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. She also unsuccessfully tried to bomb the British Consulate. Odeh's complicity in the bombings has been documented thoroughly, including in recent video interviews with her two Palestinian co-conspirators, who now live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Odeh was sentenced to life in prison, but spent 10 years in prison. She was released in a prisoner exchange in 1979 for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon, eventually making her way to the U.S. where she became a citizen.

Richard Dawkins is a writer, biologist, and outspoken atheist. He has long been a hero of the left and was scheduled to do an event at Berkeley hosted by a local progressive radio station. The event has been cancelled however, due to some tweets by Dawkins which were critical of Islamism.

Howard University law professor Reginald Robinson has been the subject of 504-day Title IX investigation based on two student complaints about a test question involving a Brazilian wax lawsuit. Robinson is now required to undergo mandatory sensitivity training, prior administrative review of future test questions, and classroom observation. As described by Cosmo, during a Brazilian wax, "they take the hair off the top and sides of the bikini line, but also all the way under and around the back, too. [emphasis not mine]" The test question is lengthy and quite specific about the nature of the Brazilian wax.  Its basic premise is described by Inside Higher Ed:

For a century Palestinians have been denying and denigrating the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land of Israel even as they’ve been doubling-down on their own fictitious claims to ‘Palestine’ in antiquity and to family lineages in the Holy Land that predate that of the ancient Hebrews. A former adjunct lecturer of Jewish history at Haifa University, now the creative director at a Tel Aviv advertising agency, decided to poke fun at this absurd situation in which Palestinians reject the historical accuracy of a Hebrew/Jewish presence in the land while simultaneously concocting an essentially fraudulent narrative of their own history. The literary product is History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era.

The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is becoming increasingly violent. We have seen this in the U.S. through frequent physical disruptions of Israel-related events. Indeed, as I have documented many times, disruption of Israel-related events was a precursor to the more general campus intolerance we are seeing at places such as Berkeley, Middlebury, and universities in Britain and Ireland. In my post, With campus shout downs, first they came for the Jews and Israel, I provide many examples of increasing BDS violence and physical intimidation that accompanies these shout downs. Disrupting Israel-related events is not limited to the U.S. and Britain. At Humboldt University in Berlin, a criminal complaint has been filed after an aggressive disruption.