PINATA DIPLOMACY: DON’T SACRIFICE CAMPUS FREE SPEECH
Ricky Kreitner
McGill Daily
ata-diplomacy-don-t-sacrifice-campus
March 16 2009
Canada
"Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was
Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in
favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."
– Noam Chomsky
On February 20, the Turkish professor and Armenian genocide denier
Turkkaya Ataöv, invited at the behest of the Turkish Students Society
(TSS) and to the chagrin of the Armenian Students Association (ASA),
spoke to a very divided McGill audience. I’ll allow others to outline
the historical evidence, but suffice it to say that nearly everyone
agrees that more than a million Armenians were systematically disposed
of by the Young Turk government in 1915 in what is accurately labeled
as the first modern genocide. Professor Ataöv is simply, empirically,
historically wrong.
The ASA argues that universities cannot sanction genocide denial in
the name of free speech. They could not be more wrong.
The McGill Tribune quoted Mardig Taslakian, Vice President External of
the ASA, asking, "What would the University’s reaction be if neo-Nazis
invited someone to come and preach that the Holocaust didn’t happen?" I
can’t speak for McGill, but I hope its reaction would be to politely
ask the neo-Nazis to keep the noise down and clean up after themselves,
and I would be right there screaming bloody hell if their reaction
were anything but. The distinction between denying past violence and
inciting future violence is not an insignificant one.
Taslakian wrote last Tuesday in The Tribune, "The falsification of
history, denial of the Holocaust, or of any crime against humanity
recognized as genocide by the international academic community can’t be
protected by a false label of ‘freedom of speech.’" Pardon my language,
but you bet your ass they can and must be. If freedom of speech means
anything to you – and, of course, this entire discussion is predicated
on my assumption that it does – it must mean that. If the TSS wants
to drag its name through the mud by inviting this buffoon to speak,
why not let them? McGill’s Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson made the
sole defensible decision by allowing the event to go on.
As we turn now to another recent campus free speech issue, recall last
week I wrote that an example of the new anti-Semitism can be found
in "some posters on Canadian campuses – commendably not McGill’s –
promoting Israel Apartheid Week [that] depicted an Apache helicopter
labeled ‘Israel’ firing a rocket at a lone Palestinian boy carrying
a teddy bear – a thinly-veiled modification of that old, trusty blood
libel standby."
Carleton University, among others, apparently agreed with my assessment
and ordered the posters taken down, arguing that they violated the
Carleton and Ontario Human Rights Codes.
But the ban was a terrible mistake. I’ll attack federal and provincial
human rights codes in the future, but even if the posters do violate
them, one simply must resist the sinister, illiberal passions of the
offended mob. It’s easy to ban something for being "inflammatory and
capable of inciting confrontation;" but if human rights language
is to be anything more than the collective moral masturbation of
supposedly civilized people, we must take the more difficult and
nuanced position: to condemn the anti-Semitism and yet celebrate as
loud as we can the right for others to proclaim that anti-Semitism
from the highest mountaintops.
Anyone who reads the Carleton University Statement on Conduct and
Human Rights, will be surprised to come across Section 6, which reads:
"The University respects the rights of speech and dissent and upholds
the right to peaceful assembly and expression of dissent" – all
principles that the rest of the document goes on to systematically
shred into barely recognizable fragments of their former selves. The
vagueness of Section 6 renders it utterly meaningless, and the sarcasm
is clear. Shame on you, Carleton University, for flippantly using
these hallowed words, and for treating the ideals behind them with
such unreserved contempt.
I am as proud of McGill for the fact that these posters did not appear
on campus as I am for my stubborn intuition that the administration
would have let them remain if they had.
In The Tribune’s editorial regarding Ataöv’s speech, they quoted
H.L. Mencken lamenting, "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is
that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels." If anything
at all is true in this sorry universe, it is that. Yet, as The Tribune
urged, the fight must be fought. It is not easy, and nor should it be.
But free speech must be defended even – nay, especially – when it is
the most difficult to do so. Though the pen is mightier than the sword,
it’s still best to have thick skin.