Amnesty International has always been notoriously silent about Israeli apartheid, because, understandably enough, it doesn’t want to alienate its sizeable Jewish donor base. It ignores a relatively few injustices so it can attract the resources to fight far more. Well, fair enough, I suppose. Likewise the civil libertarian Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom (JCCF). If it went to bat for the Moslems on the no-fly list, it would lose the support of the largely Christian conservative constituency that financially supports it. It turns a blind eye to the periphery so it can intervene where its base demands.

Well, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) – of which I am myself on the Board – is currently dealing with a similar conundrum. There are members of SAFS who think we ought not to come to the defence of Natalie Knight, the instructor at Langara College in North Vancouver, who publicly celebrated the Hamas attack of October 7 as “amazing” and “brilliant”.

Of course the question is not whether the attack was amazing or brilliant. Clearly it was both. Though not quite as amazing and brilliant as 9/11. Rather it’s whether SAFS’ mandate directs us to support her right to publicly say so. Would the same members have refused to come to the defence of those who celebrated 9/11? I’m assuming – or at least hoping – that they would. So are they drawing the line at an act they consider apodictically antisemitic, whereas 9/11 was only indirectly so?

If I say – save satirically – “Kill all the Jews!”, that’s incitement. And incitement is not what SAFS is required to defend. But what if I merely celebrate the killing of Jews? Celebration is approval, certainly. But if celebratory approval counts as incitement, what are we to make of the pro-Lifer who approves of a fellow traveller, someone with the strength of his convictions, who attacks an abortion clinic?

If I were pro-Life – which I’m not, but that’s irrelevant to my worry here – I would find it difficult not to celebrate the bombing of an abortion clinic. And I would consider any law prohibiting me from doing so an egregious violation of my freedom of expression. Were I a pro-Lifer I probably wouldn’t bomb an abortion clinic myself. But pro-Lifer or not, I think I would bomb the police station whose officers presumed to enforce that law.

It is true, as Thomas Hobbes noted, that “a man’s actions proceedeth from his opinions”. That’s why, for him at least, the Sixth Power of the Sovereign is that “it falls to the Sovereign to determine what doctrines are fit to be taught”, and so, by implication, what doctrines are not. The problem is, once academics concede that power to the Administration – not unlike once citizens concede that power to their government – nothing remains to us but civil war. And in case you haven’t noticed, a civil war is precisely what’s brewing within the academy to which you’re blithely sending your sons and daughters for an education.

There are any number of issues – climate change, vaccination safety, the filioque – on which one can be excused for not taking sides. This isn’t one of them.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: 9/11, abortion, academic freedom, Amnestiy International, antisemitism, censorship, freedom of expression, Hamas, Israel, JCCF, Jews, Langara College, Natalie Knight, pro-Life, SAFS, Thomas Hobbes