Tolerance and Treachery by Jeremy L. England Guest Contributor, The Stanford Review Volume XXXVII, Issue 5, October 27. 2006

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Harvard University needs a better sense of humor. Only an institution suffering from an excess of self-importance could fail to see the joke in inviting a former president of the world’s largest state sponsor of Islamist terrorism to give a talk about the “Ethics of Tolerance” on September 10, 2006. Mohammad Khatami, the celebrated “moderate” from within Iran’s fanatical Islamic theocracy, ostensibly came to the Kennedy School of Government to share his dreams of a harmonious future, free from violence and sectarian strife. No doubt, the event’s organizers congratulated themselves on having shown their commitment to the free exchange of ideas by welcoming a leader from the Islamic world to speak his mind on the anniversary of 9/11. Yet, by the end of the evening, the result of surrendering a podium to one of the most oppressive, belligerent regimes on the planet was all too apparent, as issues ranging from the execution of homosexuals to the destruction of the State of Israel had been transformed from a simple litmus tests of sanity and decency into matters for polite discussion and respectful disagreement. Neither for the first time, nor the last, the Academy had demonstrated how easily a propagandist can manipulate an open forum to serve his ends once he is granted the opportunity to speak.

Sadly, Harvard is only one of many elite American universities that have thrown their doors open wide to apologists for dictatorship and terrorism. This past year alone, Yale University attracted national attention for admitting a member of the Taliban, and students at Columbia heard presentations by a Syrian ambassador and a Libyan dictator. Here at Stanford, we had the dubious pleasure of listening to Robert Fisk, the British journalist whose polemical writings on the Middle East have earned him an open invitation from al Qaeda to “stop sitting on the fence” and join the jihad. At present, the Academy simply refuses to discriminate against the morally despicable, and remains determined to invite the worst sorts of misinformers to air their views under the banner of intellectual inquiry. Yet, what it fails to recognize is that its excessive openness to different points of view actually endangers the very deliberative process it is supposedly committed to protecting.

The free exchange of ideas is central to the vitality of any academic enterprise, since the pursuit of knowledge must be fueled by lively debate in an atmosphere that tolerates a wide range of differing viewpoints. But a debate that admits contributions from individuals who are not engaged in a good faith effort to increase knowledge and advance understanding can easily do more to obscure the truth than to reveal it. A representative of an evil ideology has no interest in the pursuit of knowledge, and if his “perspective” is granted equal time in an open forum, he can easily remold the discussion to his liking by unleashing an avalanche of misinformation that his opponents will exhaust themselves refuting. Thus, by showing too little discrimination in those we offer a seat at the table in an intellectual discussion, we imperil the quality of the academic discourse that we value so highly, and risk turning our halls of learning into echo chambers for the lies of despots and murderers.

One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon can be found in the “pro-Palestinian” activism that goes on at so many of our institutions of higher education. Palestinian Arab nationalists have arguably been the most committed torchbearers for the cause of genocidal anti-Semitism since the defeat of Nazism in 1945. From the alliance between the Arabs of Palestine and the Third Reich that formed before the founding of the State of Israel, to the landslide majority won in Palestinian Authority elections this past year by a terrorist group that has extermination of the Jews written into its charter, Palestinian identity has always, by construction, held elimination of the Jewish nation as its core value. Yet, unlike their Nazi role models, Palestinian nationalists and their supporters from across the Arab and Muslim world are welcomed in most academic communities as possessors of a valid and much-needed perspective on Middle Eastern politics. The Academy’s failure to identify and ignore the fabrications of (excuse the pun) a well-oiled propaganda machine during on-campus discussions of Jews, Israel, and Zionism over the last several decades has had the tragic effect of turning defamation of the Jewish State into an everyday occurrence at many colleges and universities.

As heartbreaking as this outcome is for Jewish students and other friends of Israel, it should be emphasized that the success of the Arab propaganda campaign against Israel in the academic arena ultimately poses a serious threat to the security of America and all other liberal democracies. It is no coincidence that many of today’s most vocal haters of Israel either sympathize with or openly support the aims of various movements throughout the Middle East bent on conquering the world through jihad. In arguments with fellow students, I myself have experienced how quickly an attempt to criticize the Islamic world for its history of violent expansionism and religious intolerance can elicit the baseless and irrelevant accusation that Israel is perpetrating genocide against an Arab people. Through their willingness to tell spectacular lies about the Jewish State to open-minded listeners, facilitators of jihad ensure that the limited time we have for scholarly debate goes disproportionately to assessing Israel’s criminality, rather than to examining social and political trends in the Muslim world that are extremely worrisome.

I have tried to argue here that academic communities must learn to identify and exclude propagandists like Mohammad Khatami, rather than inviting them to share their views. Interestingly, academics seem to already appreciate this principle intuitively when it comes to a few special cases. When was the last time a historian who denied the Holocaust or a pro-slavery Klansman shared his views in a prestigious academic forum? When it comes to Nazis and members of the KKK, universities appear to realize that there is a difference between respecting a hate-monger’s constitutional right to speak his mind to whoever will listen, and offering him a privileged platform that will enable him to persuade a wider audience. Of course, we should always remain uneasy about any drive to discriminate against and exclude certain arguments from a discussion; ostracism is a dangerous tool that must be used sparingly. But we would do well to remember that Khatami was hardly the first apostle of fascism to address a packed auditorium on the Charles; seventy years earlier, Harvard welcomed emissaries from Nazi Germany into the Yard to promote their racial theories. In the case of Nazism, it was only with the clarity of hindsight that our universities were able to recognize and reject absolute evil. I merely hope that when it comes to Islamic fascism, they might have a little more foresight.

Tolerance and Treachery by Jeremy L. England Guest Contributor, The Stanford Review Volume XXXVII, Issue 5, October 27. 2006

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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) is not-for-profit [501 (C) (3)], grass-roots community of scholars who have united to promote honest, fact-based, and civil discourse, especially in regard to Middle East issues. We believe that ethnic, national, and religious hatreds, including anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, have no place in our institutions, disciplines, and communities. We employ academic means to address these issues.

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