Brandeis Rejects Freedom of Speech

Daniel Mael, a student at Brandeis University, recently found himself threatened with disciplinary action for reporting on another student’s tweets celebrating the murder of two New York City police officers. Two years earlier, he was charged with “bullying” for having written an article taking issue with critics of Israel. His experience, writes Abraham H. Miller, is symptomatic of the decline of free speech in American universities:

Before the creation of so-called speech and decency codes, a campus dean would have advised [Mael’s “victim”] to engage Mael in a public exchange, beginning, perhaps, with the student newspaper. Today, however, universities have become hypersensitive about students’ feelings. . . . To ensure students never experience the discomfort of having their ideas openly challenged, universities have instituted speech and decency codes. . . .

The codes require the establishment of an entire bureaucracy to monitor and enforce them. As prison guards need prisoners, the bureaucracy needs violators. To create a steady population of violators, the bar for offenses has to be continually lowered; new violations have to be created, and sometimes victims have to be sought out and taught they are victims.

Read more at New York Observer

More about: Brandeis, Freedom of Speech, Israel on campus, J Street, Political correctness, University

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF