The latest Middle East speaker controversy began when Brown Students for Israel asked Egyptian-born Israel supporter Nonie Darwish to speak. Then the event was cancelled. Now she’s coming back, Scott Lowenstein reports for The Brown Daily Herald:

In an e-mail to The Herald, Interim Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services Rusell Carey ‘91 MA’06 wrote that he spoke “with the students who initiated the idea of bringing Nonie Darwish to campus and told them my office would sponsor such a lecture. They are proceeding with planning it for early in the second semester.”
[…]
According to [Hillel president Yael] Richardson, when it became apparent that the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center would not help fund the event, BSI asked Hillel to cover the entire cost. It was around this time that the executive board became aware of some of Darwish’s controversial statements, including characterizing women who wear Muslim attire as having “a mission of spreading Islam,” Richardson said.
“(Wearing of Muslim attire) is the Muslim women’s form of jihad - without the violence - but it could be aggressive,” Darwish wrote in a February 2002 article titled “The Veil: Female Form of Jihad.”
Members of Hillel’s executive board then “debated in a very thoughtful and deliberate way” whether Hillel should be the sole sponsor of the event, Richardson said.
“After a lot of discussion with the people who were organizing the event, with representatives from the Muslim community, with Hillel staff … with other Jewish students involved with Hillel … and with (Muslim Chaplain and Associate University Chaplain) Rumee Ahmed … we ultimately decided that Brown Hillel should not be the sole sponsor of the event,” Richardson said.

But now she will speak…unless someone changes their mind. The National Review’s David French responds in his column, “Phi Beta Cons”:

While it is nice that Brown had a temporary outbreak of good sense (now, if they would only re-invite Christian student groups they expelled earlier this year), this all prompts the question: Why? Why would Brown disinvite a speaker who so obviously offers a fresh and different Muslim viewpoint on events at home and in the Middle East? I know, I know . . . The Muslim Student Association was “alarmed.” But speakers “alarm” campus groups all the time. Why disinvite this speaker rather than, say, a speaker who “alarms” Christians?
The answer, I think, goes to the heart of the silliness that is campus identity politics. Campus identity politics depends on the notion that there exists a certain and particular “voice” for historically disadvantaged peoples. There is, for example, a “black perspective” on American history or a “Muslim perspective” on the war. Those members of marginalized communities who are arbitrarily (and fortunately for them) designated as “authentic” obtain veto power over any other view from “their” group.