Reminiscent of the Vietnam War, we stand today on the brink of throwing out the American ideal of free speech in favor of political correctness.
Yes, I know it normally is conservatives who cry foul over the dangers of political correctness, and I’m not one of those. It also is true that those who most frequently label ideas they oppose as “PC” may themselves be guilty of enforcing their own version of what is acceptable speech. It was conservatives, after all, who invented “cancel culture” while claiming they are victims of the very tool they wield.
Mark Wingfield
Americans and people the world over are deeply divided about the current state of affairs in Israel and Gaza. I previously wrote there are no “good guys” in this war, and I stand by that assertion. It is possible for both Israel and Hamas to behave in horrible ways at the same time. We do not have to valorize one side in order to criminalize the other.
We also must separate the world’s Jewish people from the political state of Israel. They are not the same thing. We must be able to call out Israel without attacking Jews.
What we see unfolding in the Middle East today is a human-made catastrophe of unimaginable scale. Women and children raped. Babies left to rot in maggot-infested hospitals. Kidnapping. Starvation. Disease. Being told to seek shelter in a place that turns out to be a bombing ground instead.
Already, more than 17,000 people have been killed in the fighting, mostly Palestinians and mostly women and children. Let’s say this again: What Hamas did on Oct. 7 was atrocious and horrendous and despicable and immoral. But what Israel has been doing in its retaliation also is atrocious and horrendous and despicable and immoral.
Merely stating those two facts together in the same paragraph will anger some on both sides because they claim there is no moral equivalency. Given the scale of atrocities committed by both sides, equivalency shouldn’t even be the major concern.
“The wanton slaughter of noncombatants is unprecedented in its scale in modern warfare.”
For its part, the political state of Israel — which, unlike Hamas, is a nation — is guilty of war crimes. The wanton slaughter of noncombatants is unprecedented in its scale in modern warfare.
But there are powerful people in the United States — including President Joe Biden — who don’t want us to say that. To borrow a phrase from Al Gore, it is an “inconvenient truth” that Israel is guilty of unthinkable human carnage.
It is unthinkable because Americans are fine-tuned to support Israel at all costs. There are both theological and political reasons for this. And there’s also the guilt of America for not intervening early enough to stop the Holocaust — a guilt based in legitimate failure of American foreign policy. (By the way, that same misguided “America First” ideology is making a comeback in Trumpism.)
We should not be surprised, then, that college campuses are rife with protests and marches and outrage over the war between Israel and Hamas and the victimization of innocent Palestinian people. College campuses are the perfect incubators of free speech and working out difficult issues. Again, we saw the same thing in relation to the Vietnam War. Remember Kent State, anyone?
Just as the Nixon administration tried to stifle free speech against the Vietnam War, the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress are coming perilously close to the same.
The New York Times reported Dec. 5: “Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT were hammered on Tuesday by Republican House members who claimed that the universities themselves had sown seeds of bias on campus against Jews.” We haven’t seen any House hearings on the related rise in Islamophobia, by the way. This was intended to be a political game of “gotcha,” and the university presidents weren’t taking the bait. But neither did they offer moral clarity on where the line is between free speech and hate speech. They could have helped everyone by speaking more clearly.
The greatest challenge American university administrators seem to face right now is how to balance free speech rights against concerns of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Donors are threatening to pull funding. Parents are threatening to pull students. Politicians are looking to score points.
“The American view that Israel can do no wrong is so strong that anyone who calls out Israel’s atrocities is accused of being antisemitic.”
To be sure, there have been some extreme cases of hate speech that move well beyond free speech rights. But these are not the norm of what’s currently being targeted. The American view that Israel can do no wrong is so strong that anyone who calls out Israel’s atrocities is accused of being antisemitic.
That’s not what the word means.
The dictionary definition of antisemitism is “feeling or showing hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a cultural, racial or ethnic group.” Hatred or violence toward Jewish people simply because they are Jewish is antisemitism, just as hatred or violence toward Black people because of the color of their skin is racism.
The modern state of Israel is a political entity, not an ethnic group. And the current protests against Israel’s slaughter of innocents are not aimed at Israeli leaders because they are Jewish. The protests are instead aimed at Israel’s leaders because their actions are immoral.
There’s yet another problem with this conversation as currently playing out: Palestinian Arabs are also Semites. It may be a pedantic point, but what goes for antisemitism today is really anti-Jew. It’s not just a feeling of antipathy for Semites, it’s a hatred of Jews as Jews. The same could be said for Arabs, but instead it is always conflated with Islamophobia. Palestinian Arab Christians are discriminated against with a kind of antisemitism that knows no name.
Meanwhile, some Christians particularly in America are left with no clear place to stand because they affirm the legitimate longing for Jews to feel safe in their homeland, but not at the expense of Palestinians feeling safe in that same homeland. There is a difference between political and cultural Zionism.
“Palestinian Arab Christians are discriminated against with a kind of antisemitism that knows no name.”
One of the arguments prevalent today asserts because the Jewish people have been persecuted for centuries, they are untouchable for criticism. Conflate that belief with thinking the political state of Israel equals “the Jewish people” and you get to the danger zone we’re in today.
Not even guilt over the Holocaust should give the political state of Israel a free pass to slaughter its enemies. I remember being taught by my father from a young age, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
The American ideal of free speech demands we allow everyone the right to express their opinions, so long as they do not incite violence. Protesting violence must not be considered an incitement of violence. Allowing others to express ideas you disagree with does not count as inciting violence.
When political correctness demands we not call out evil when we see it, extreme danger lies ahead. This is a recipe for autocracy and demagoguery — which is what some Americans clearly favor already.
It is the very right to free speech that allows Donald Trump to call his political opponents “vermin,” even though that Nazi-inspired language is despicable. Although I think Trump is the most dangerous man in America, I will defend his right to say awful things. In part because we need to hear those awful things in order to make wise judgments.
Democracy demands free speech. To quote the slogan of the Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of the new book Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.
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Maybe there are some ‘good guys’ in this war after all | Opinion by Mark Wingfield