On Tuesday, the dovish Israeli scholar Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to give a talk on the ethics of warfare. But a campus group organized a protest, delaying the lecture by 45 minutes with shouting and denunciations until university police intervened. Dale Carpenter, who was present at the talk, writes:
The talk did not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though Halbertal drew in part on his experience helping to draft the Israeli army’s code of ethics. . . . Halbertal argued that in fighting “asymmetric wars” professional combatants should err on the side of protecting noncombatants from casualties, even when they thereby increase risks to themselves or to their cause. . . . But the protesters had no interest in hearing the lecture or in allowing the audience to hear it. . . .
The problem is that . . . some members of university communities believe they are entitled to shut down speakers because they deem the expression offensive. . . . But mere offense cannot justify the heckler’s veto; otherwise no speech on any interesting topic would be heard on campuses. . . .
[B]eyond punishing the disruption of a public lecture, a university cannot accept any moral legitimacy in such an act or equivocate in denouncing it. It is fundamentally illiberal and destructive to the core values of an educational institution. And ironically, those who espouse unpopular and minority causes would be most vulnerable in a world where mobs feel authorized on principle to decide who may speak.
Read more on Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/11/04/israeli-academic-shouted-down-in-lecture-at-university-of-minnesota/