The Outstater
Get Ready, Here Comes Oct. 7
LET’S PUT GOV. ERIC HOLCOMB and Indiana’s ruling GOP establishment on notice: It will be on their heads if there are violent incidents on any of the state’s campuses this Monday as the culturally insane among us celebrate the first anniversary of the Hamas slaughter of Israeli families.
It will be up to the effete Governor Holcomb — God help us — to bolster the university presidents in the understanding that campus terrorism is not free speech. It is the well-known pattern of those allied to destroy Western civilization to repeat their atrocities on significant anniversaries. There can be no surprise, then. Take heed from David Randall of the National Association of Scholars:
“Those allies include far too many college administrators — even college presidents. We may expect some to act like ostriches, planting their heads in the sand. We didn’t expect anything like this to happen, they’ll say if the anti-Semites do something horrible. There was no way that we could have prepared. You can’t blame us. The excuses will be well rehearsed. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance about the potential threat. Governors and state boards of trustees should talk with public university presidents about October 7.”
For there is a reason that the courts have ruled that our First Amendment does not protect yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. It is because the intent is not to express but to terrorize. The campus groups that set up “Palestinian encampments” last year at Indiana University sounded a similarly false alarm — that a sovereign state, Israel, has no right to protect itself against enemies who have vowed only slaughter and extermination.
That is patently absurd. Such a free-speech “cause” is no more legitimate than the will to send a theater audience screaming into the night. Those in high office here who cannot make that distinction should be removed. And this would be the moment for the rest of us to understand that the target of so-called anti-semitism ultimately is much broader than the Zionists vilified on the banners of I.U. protestors.
The target is us, or more specifically any of us who opposes that particular brand of authoritarianism seeking to eliminate threats to an ideology. The Holocaust was only one of a dozen such events in human history, please know, all of similar evil intent, the demonizing of a group or class. If we need to commemorate something Monday let it begin with this list:
- Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (1949-1976) (30-45 million deaths)
- Adolph Hitler’s Holocaust (1941-1945) (11-17 million)
- Joseph Stalin’s Ukraine Holodomor (1932-1933) (3-7 million)
- Pol Pot’s Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979) (1.5-2 million)
Deaths from war, however regrettable, resulting from a nation’s efforts to protect itself from destruction, are not on the same moral plane. Rather, the events listed above reflect the destructive potential not of nationalism but of envy, hatred and unchecked power.
The right to free speech in our Constitution is written to protect those who would protest this exact human impulse, one that is recognizable today in the radical extremism emanating from Iran and by association from the protestors on the I.U. campus.
The university administration there cannot be allowed to again confuse the two. — tcl
Comments...