Safety is a Double-Edged Sword

About a year or two ago, J.K. Rowling, the most beloved children’s author of our generation, was canceled for verbally harming and endangering the Trans community. Ms. Rowliwng’s great sin was tweeting, in essence, that biological sex is real and has a real-world impact on the way that women are perceived in the world. 

The backlash was swift – J.K. Rowling was a trans-phobe. 

Overnight, millions of people, literally millions, began a full-scale burning of the witch. Why? Because she had deliberately and knowingly endangered the safety of trans people, or so the accusation went. 

Her words, if heard by the wrong people, could result in violence against trans-people. That is the basic principle of harm-speech (speech that causes harm). 

And, granted, this is true. The UN even says: 

“There are historical precedents that hate speech can lead to real harm.” (Source)

If you want historical precedents for this, just ask the Jews. The blood libel, the crusades, the rise of intellectual antisemitism in the 19th century, and, of course, on every American college campus. 

Let’s take Berkeley as an example. In 2016, Milo Yiannopolis was scheduled to come speak. However, students protested that his words constituted hate speech that could lead to real violence on campus. As they protested for safe speech, there were numerous skirmishes between the protestors and people counter-protesting in support of Milo. 

The final conclusion of all of this was that Milo did not speak, several protestors ended up in the hospital, and there was, more or less, no changes made at the university, other than a de facto change to invite fewer and less provocative conservative speakers. 

Thus, the campus has been made almost completely safe from, ‘conservative thought.’

 

However, the principle of safety ought to cut both ways. Meaning, that if the feelings of students alone are enough to ban transphobic speakers, then the feelings of Jewish students alone should be enough to ban antisemitic speakers. And, of course, it should be up to the Jewish students to determine what is or is not antisemitic speech. 

Jews are excluded from this privilege, however. As we have seen over the past month, university students and professors feel emboldened to say and do whatever they like to Jewish students. 

A Cornell professor said that the terrorist attack was exhilarating – that makes me feel unsafe as a Jew. 

A Stanford professor segregated the Jewish students from the other students and took away their belongings – that makes me feel unsafe as a Jew. 

A Cornell student threatened to kill all of the Jews in the Kosher Dining Hall – that makes me feel unsafe as a Jew. 

Now, let’s remember that this is 5 years after the Berkeley safe-speech riots. That means that every single one of these professors was in academia at the time, either as a professor or as a phD student. Which means that they have been around the safe-speech discourse for at least half a decade, and I would wager that many of them have used safety as an argument in their own favor before. 

Why, then, are there no protests on campus to protect the safety of the Jews? Why don’t speakers get banned for being antisemitic?  

Well, the sad answer is, because Jews don’t count. Jews aren’t deserving of safety. Jews are not in danger of being harmed, they are the harm. 

I have been told by numerous people that my words or more dangerous to the safety of the world than Hamas. Seriously, seriously. I have been told that my discussion of antisemitism is a distraction from the real issue: the Israeli-American Ruling Class and its imperial goals. Seriously, seriously. I have been told, literally by every single non-Jewish antizionist I know, that antisemitism is not a problem in this day and age. Literally every single one. As a Jewish person, I love being told that my fears of antisemitism are in my head.  

Imagine if the left made it a consistent policy to tell black people that racism is, in fact, not real.  

But, what’s even crazier than all of this, is that there are now antisemitic college students who are seeking safety from the harm caused by the Jewish response to their rhetoric. Law students at Berkeley who signed a letter supporting the violent murder of 1500 Jews are now fearing for their financial and emotional safety as major law firms state that they don’t want to hire any of these people. 

In their minds, supporting Hamas does not put anyone in harm’s way, but refusing to hire anyone who supports Hamas is putting the terrorist-sympathizer in harm’s way! 

If you are reading this to yourself and thinking, surely, surely, college educated people could not be that intellectually hypocritical and dense – I am sorry, they are. I’ve been watching this happen for years.  And it isn’t the first time. Antisemitism became a very popular intellectual movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it’s coming back in vogue.   

The basic tenet of intellectual antisemitism is that, for one reason or another, Jews don’t count as regular people. This time, we don’t count because we have been allegedly committing a 75 year genocide against the Palestinian people.  How a genocide could last for 75 years, and somehow see the population triple, I don’t know. But I do know that, because of what’s happening in Israel, I, as a Jewish American, am not entitled to safety on a college campus. No Jew is. At least not the level of safety that our peers are entitled too. 

If we were, you would listen to us when we told you that chanting “From the River to the Sea” is antisemitic, but we’re not. We’re not entitled to safety because our desire for safety from antisemitic rhetoric puts the safety of the antisemitic rhetoricians in danger, and that is something that our universities just absolutely cannot have. 

How anyone can look at what is happening on college campuses and not see the blatant and unapologetic hypocrisy of this is beyond me. People endorsing the brutal and violent invasion of Jewish homes are now seeking safe spaces on campus where they can blame the Jews without challenge.   

And, the worst part of this all is, we’re only seeing what’s happening at the university level. The level of fear and anxiety among Jewish high school students, especially in places like Berkeley, is outrageous. 

These are public schools. They have a public charge to serve their students using public funds. Are Jews a part of the public? Are Jews entitled to safety? Are we less important than the people we accuse of antisemitism?

I’ve been asking the people of California, and I haven’t heard an answer.