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Free Speech Tag

Posted by Miriam Elman on July 30, 2017 19 Comments
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.

Posted by Mike LaChance on July 22, 2017 31 Comments
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.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on July 09, 2017 19 Comments
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:

Posted by Miriam Elman on July 02, 2017 31 Comments
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.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 01, 2017 2 Comments
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.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 28, 2017 47 Comments
Politico magazine has a very detailed article on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), for which I was interviewed, Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost Its Way?. The article, written by Ben Schreckinger, addresses several aspects of the SPLC, including its massive accumulation of wealth seemingly beyond its needs. But much of the focus is on SPLC's aggressive politics and use of "hate" and "extremist" lists:

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 28, 2017 18 Comments
In March of this year, the sociologist and writer Charles Murray visited Middlebury College to deliver a lecture. Before he could even begin, the event was set upon by a mob of students who shut it down and ultimately sent a professor to the emergency room. Students who participated in the mob received no real punishment but the incident drew national attention to the issue of free speech on college campuses. Last night, Murray made his first televised appearance since then on Tucker Carlson's show. He described the scene at Middlebury as the opposite of what higher education should be.
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