On Tuesday, Georgetown University’s law school hosted a talk by the Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed El-Kurd, who has been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and many other groups for his vitriolic statements about Jews and Israel. On Tuesday morning, the dean of students, Mitch Bailin, met with a group of Jewish students who urged the school to cancel the event. Bailin’s response, writes Nate Hochman, demonstrates that the school leadership is “terrified of a small but vocal minority of students.”
The Palestinian activist and writer Mohammed El-Kurd has claimed that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred” and “feed their warriors our own”; glorified the second intifada; called it “psychotic” to call for Palestinians to be peaceful; and expressed his “hope” that “every one of” the Israeli settlers “dies in the most torturous & slow ways,” and “that they see their mothers suffering (not that these conscienceless pigs would care).”
According to multiple students in the meeting, and a transcript of recorded audio provided to National Review, Dean Bailin defended the event on free-speech grounds, saying: “When we have a student organization that is intending to host a speaker, one of the first principles that we have is that there is a lot of latitude. . . . We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many.”
The school’s commitment to “a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community” seems to have strengthened since January, when Georgetown Law suspended Ilya Shapiro for a tweet criticizing the Biden administration’s use of racial preferences in Supreme Court nominations on the heels of an activist-led backlash. (Shapiro’s indefinite suspension, “pending an investigation” into his tweet, is now in its thirteenth week). But Georgetown Law has yet to respond to an inquiry about whether “the school’s free-speech guidelines have changed” since the Shapiro episode.
Read more on National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/georgetown-law-dean-defends-hosting-antisemite-citing-previous-speakers-who-find-gay-marriage-immoral/