To those searching for the new political battleground of the 21st century - I've found it! The intellectual artillery of the forces of progress and reaction will be fired over... wait for it... er... the speaker's roster at numerous public lectures across the world(!) Armies of Jewish terrorists and Muslim Zionists [sic], dubious academics and free-world vigilanties will square-off over who is allowed to speak where and to whom (and how the promotional material is to advertise the event).
I'll cite a few random recent examples:
- David Irving, professional Holocaust denier, was recently asked to leave a Polish book festival.
- Last week the leader of the New Black Panther Party (a man apparently prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering) provoked outrage in Toronto's Jewish community after being invited to speak to the 'Black Youth Taking Action' group.
- In February, Muslims at the University of California, Davis, protested the invitation to speak extended by campus Republicans to a 'former Islamic terrorist' turned 'Zionist-Islamofacism-warrior'.
- Last week, Muslims at that same university welcomed Norman Finklestein - son of Holocaust-vicitms, anti-Zionist, and alleged Holocaust-denier - which was duly opposed by Jewish students.
- Also in the past week, an Italian university prevented a French Holocaust-denier from speaking on campus.
Now, each case does have its intricacies which complicates the cases slightly. For example, while in the UC Davis cases students invited the contentious speaker, in the last case Robert Faurisson (the denier) had been invited to speak at the University of Teramo by the very director of the master's programme in Middle Eastern studies (for the sake of 'balance', here's a link to the Italian story from an Iranian site, the previous link above being to the Jerusalem Post - though both stories say much the same thing). In addition, the university cited 'security concerns', rather than 'objectionable content' as the reason for denying the denier. In the David Irving case, the festival's planners had legal concerns as Holocaust-denial is illegal in Poland. At UC Davis, the Jewish students complained that while the anti-Islamofascist speaker had been funded privately, the university had paid some $400 to the Muslims group to fund Finkelstein's lecture expenses.
But actually these details are hardly relevant - in fact they're a total distraction (and in most cases they were merely spurious excuses for what was really censorship). The real story of note here is the total absence of political content to these cases. Rather than a proper argument about the Israel-Palestine question or even about the historical understanding of the Holocaust (though really there should be little need to discuss the latter), partisans of both sides engage in lectern-wars over who can and cannot speak. The censorious nature of no-platform policies has been widely discussed (in fact, the columnist for the Sacramento Bee is quite good on this question), but equally worrying is the promiscuous use of inflammatory terms to describe 'the enemy' - something I just indulged in, above. For these political questions - one of the few to still genuinely inflame passions - it is almost as if we need a new language to discuss the issues. The old terms have become tainted through association with the dog-whistle-politics being practiced on university campuses thousands of kilometres (or indeed decades) away from the site of actual political conflict. The bans and counter-bans, the Zionist/Islamofascist name-calling, the promiscuous use of bad historical analogies - these do not constitute politics, they are the enemy of politics.
I'll cite a few random recent examples:
- David Irving, professional Holocaust denier, was recently asked to leave a Polish book festival.
- Last week the leader of the New Black Panther Party (a man apparently prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering) provoked outrage in Toronto's Jewish community after being invited to speak to the 'Black Youth Taking Action' group.
- In February, Muslims at the University of California, Davis, protested the invitation to speak extended by campus Republicans to a 'former Islamic terrorist' turned 'Zionist-Islamofacism-warrior'.
- Last week, Muslims at that same university welcomed Norman Finklestein - son of Holocaust-vicitms, anti-Zionist, and alleged Holocaust-denier - which was duly opposed by Jewish students.
- Also in the past week, an Italian university prevented a French Holocaust-denier from speaking on campus.
Now, each case does have its intricacies which complicates the cases slightly. For example, while in the UC Davis cases students invited the contentious speaker, in the last case Robert Faurisson (the denier) had been invited to speak at the University of Teramo by the very director of the master's programme in Middle Eastern studies (for the sake of 'balance', here's a link to the Italian story from an Iranian site, the previous link above being to the Jerusalem Post - though both stories say much the same thing). In addition, the university cited 'security concerns', rather than 'objectionable content' as the reason for denying the denier. In the David Irving case, the festival's planners had legal concerns as Holocaust-denial is illegal in Poland. At UC Davis, the Jewish students complained that while the anti-Islamofascist speaker had been funded privately, the university had paid some $400 to the Muslims group to fund Finkelstein's lecture expenses.
But actually these details are hardly relevant - in fact they're a total distraction (and in most cases they were merely spurious excuses for what was really censorship). The real story of note here is the total absence of political content to these cases. Rather than a proper argument about the Israel-Palestine question or even about the historical understanding of the Holocaust (though really there should be little need to discuss the latter), partisans of both sides engage in lectern-wars over who can and cannot speak. The censorious nature of no-platform policies has been widely discussed (in fact, the columnist for the Sacramento Bee is quite good on this question), but equally worrying is the promiscuous use of inflammatory terms to describe 'the enemy' - something I just indulged in, above. For these political questions - one of the few to still genuinely inflame passions - it is almost as if we need a new language to discuss the issues. The old terms have become tainted through association with the dog-whistle-politics being practiced on university campuses thousands of kilometres (or indeed decades) away from the site of actual political conflict. The bans and counter-bans, the Zionist/Islamofascist name-calling, the promiscuous use of bad historical analogies - these do not constitute politics, they are the enemy of politics.
Alex Hochuli
