As Glenn Greenwald points out, to believe in free speech requires that we believe in free speech for everyone regardless of their point of view. UNC Ph.D. student Kylie Broderick has lost her job because her University failed to take a principled stand on free speech.
I’m more than passionate about freedom of speech. I am also passionate about academic rigor. In this case, the two are in serious conflict. An academic offering her/himself up as sufficiently expert to teach others about a topic owes it to the public and to the Academy to be at least minimally informed. I agree that losing her job is unjust. She might be reassigned to teach a course on water rights and conflicts tied thereto in the Middle East. Or the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Doing the research necessary to teaching either would convince all but the willfully blind that neither has any connection whatsoever to religion.
I admire Glen Greenwald and consider him today’s premier investigative reporter. In this case, he is wrong. Criticism of Zionism is antisemitic. Zionism was the efforts in the late 1800s to return Jews to their homeland from places in Europe and Asia where they were subject to persecution, denial of rights, and summary execution. It was all about Jews, culturally and religiously. To rail against a movement that is associated only with a single group of people is to oppose the movement’s aims or the group of people. It is possible that the movement’s methods deserve criticism; in this case, they do not.
Zionism indeed led to the split between Muslims and Jews, but indirectly. Zionists in Europe traveled legally to the ancient Jewish homeland and sought to purchase land. They offered to buy barren land, and the Arab Muslims gladly sold it to them. A form of fatalism is rife among Arab Muslims the farther they are from centers of toleration. The meaning of Insh’allah is literally “If
God so wills.” Except it applies to everything, including empirical data. “Do two plus three equal five?” Insh’allah.
This means that everything is the way it is because God so wills. The Jews agreed, but added that the land will grow crops if God so wills, and if they tilled the soil, irrigated the land, planted seeds carefully, fertilized the crops, protected them from pests, and harvested them on time. The soil bore fruit, and the former owners were stunned. They looked around themselves and began asking for an explanation, and their authoritarian rulers had one. The Jews had cheated them. It is easier to blame someone else for your bad decisions, and nearly a millennium and a half of close relations between Jews and Muslims were destroyed.
The idea put forward by the Intercept, that criticism of Israel is not criticism of Judaism is no different than criticism of Iran is not criticism of Islam is a false equivalency. There is only one Jewish state on earth; there are literally dozens of Muslim states of earth. Should someone criticize every Muslim state, that might be equivalent, but no one does.