Anti-Israel Protests on Campus: Free Speech or Hate Speech?

Last week’s congressional hearing on anti-semitism on college campuses raised questions regarding the line between free speech and hate speech, specifically regarding students protesting the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza. Are college administrators doing enough to protect Jewish students, or are they justified in defending the free speech of students protesting?

“Forbidden Rebellion”: A writer in New York Magazine (Left bias) determined universities should protect students from being “mobbed or having their classes occupied and disrupted,” but argued universities should not block “an op-ed in the student newspaper calling to globalize the intifada” or prevent a “demonstration in an open space demanding 'From the river to the sea.’” Such actions by the university would “entail wholesale violations of free speech, which, in addition to the moral problem it would create, would likely backfire by making pro-Palestinian activism a kind of forbidden rebellion rather than (as many students currently find it) an irritant.”

“Institutional Rot”: A writer in the Washington Examiner (Lean Right bias) determined the present defense of free speech for pro-Palestine protesters was coming from the same academic executives who previously punished students and teachers “for being ‘fatphobic,’ using unwanted pronouns, or asserting there are two sexes.” Framing this as one example of hypocrisy from America’s academic institutions, the writer argued that these institutions feel that they are “morally entitled to run the larger society. But first, they need to clean up their own institutional rot.”