Advocates for Massacres Should Lose Their Jobs | Opinion

Several weeks after Hamas terrorists tortured, raped, and massacred 1,400 Jewish men, women, and children in southern Israel, the prominent conservative Robbie George tweeted that many universities "now see the wisdom" of maintaining official neutrality about all social and political questions. George is a principled thinker and writer whose thoughtfulness I admire. But to advocate institutional neutrality about Hamas is a horrific mistake.

Consider George's assumption here—that somehow, it's Hamas that has made universities see the wisdom of not weighing in on political issues, after they have made a habit of doing so over everything from trans rights to abortion to the war in Ukraine. However unintentional, George's suggestion would validate and legitimize the antisemitism that's suddenly exploded across America, including in our most elite institutions.

George is absolutely correct that universities should adopt the principle of neutrality as a guiding heuristic—but not now, and not absolutely.

Strong free speech norms are critical to the healthy functioning of society. Institutions that ban wrong-think become breeding grounds for power struggles, silence worthwhile minority opinions, and in the extreme, slip into totalitarianism. This is the opposite of what universities are for. Institutional statements by universities stifle the free exchange of ideas, promote lockstep thinking, and hinder students' and professors' ability to pursue truth.

Even so, no principle exists in a vacuum, not even the principle of open inquiry. There are other important principles too, for example, that it's really bad for civilization to normalize and excuse raping women to death and burning and beheading babies.

Universities have spent the last few decades loudly condemning and supporting every political movement, cause, and public interest issue under the sun. To stay silent now does not communicate a principled stance on institutional neutrality but broadcasts loudly that you have nothing to say about the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, about atrocities that rank among the very worst crimes one group of human beings has ever committed against another.

Shockingly, many truly do not have anything to say. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, not everyone expressed sorrow or shame. Many people were instead emboldened to express their support for Hamas's terrorism. Even before Israel had begun to respond, "progressives" in the U.S. and Europe began holding marches and rallies designed to intimidate Jews—not Israelis, mind you but Jews. When some of those moral cretins lost their jobs, the New York Times was quick to point out the Right's hypocrisy in now promoting cancel culture.

This isn't cancel culture. Advocates for massacres should lose their jobs, even in a society that has broad free speech norms—because neutrality about whether it's OK to behead babies undermines civil society itself.

The reason why the "cancel culture" of the last decade is a problem is that it targets statements that large majorities of the country share, and about which reasonable people—within a functioning society—can disagree. People have lost jobs and reputations over jokes that didn't land, remarks taken out of context, and opinions that had been considered completely normal until they transformed into bigotry overnight.

That's not what is happening here. The problem with Hamas supporters is not their political opinions—including those opposing Israel's policies. The problem is their celebration of the cruel and deliberate torture, rape, and mass murder of civilians, in the most brutal pogrom since the Holocaust.

Truth matters as well. When people claim to be made unsafe by Halloween costumes, it's not only wrong because they are stifling speech; it's wrong because it isn't true. So much of the Israel-Palestine "debate" is built on lies—blood libels repeated over and over again.

At some point, absolute neutrality tips into the endorsement of evil. If people can reasonably disagree about whether massacre is moral (or if it even happened), civilization as we know it is over. It's not inconsistent to say that people should not be fired for bad jokes and that they should be excluded from society for celebrating mass murder and torture.

Finally, in the short term, speech defending or celebrating mass murder is unlikely to stay speech. A university that isn't sure whether to condemn the 10/7 massacre is less likely to intervene when a mob comes for its Jewish students. Why did Cooper Union's administration discourage security and police from intervening in an attempted lynching? What happens when one class of people (Jews) are repeatedly demonized in every university and left-wing space? Is it possible to stop the mob at exactly the point at which it begins to commit violence?

How then to adjudicate speech? By what principle do we draw the line?

I'm not advocating for a change to our First Amendment law. The strong speech protections Americans enjoy under the law are too important to a healthy society, and there is no way that weakening them will create a better society.

But when it comes to the norms and values expressed by people within society, we cannot abandon basic moral reasoning. We must condemn those who chant for the genocide of Jews, "From the river to the sea." University administrators should not accept these people as students, and employers should treat them no differently from neo-Nazis. Society should reinforce—in every way possible—the idea that what happened on 10/7 was evil, and justifying it is morally repugnant.

Civilization is fragile and the principles of liberty require active effort to uphold. They also involve the interplay of many wide-ranging values, of which free speech—important as it is—is just one. Societies that defend what happened that day in Israel no longer have organizing principles. If anything can be justified if the victim "deserves it," we are again reduced to brute power struggles, exactly what free-speech norms are meant to protect against.

If there was ever a time for universities to speak, now would be that time. That many universities haven't, and that this is seen as evidence of the wisdom of free speech principles, is horrifying.

Moshe Krakowski is a professor at the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education at Yeshiva University, where he directs the doctoral program.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.