When Neturei Karta member and Holocaust denial conference attendee Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss was chosen to represent the “Jewish view” in a school-sponsored foreign policy discussion, Jewish students at MIT weren’t happy.
Now Kristina M. Holton reports in the Tech that some Muslim students also rejected their representative in the discussion, Imam Mohammed al-Asi.
Members of the Jewish community distributed pamphlets to forum attendees posing the questions, “Does this man [al-Asi] represent true Islam?/Does this man [Weiss] represent true Judaism?” The presidents of many Jewish campus organizations also advertised a statement in Friday’s edition of The Tech.
Part of the advertisement read, “The organizers chose Weiss without consulting any element of the campus Jewish community. Furthermore, when we [the Jewish community] repeatedly expressed our concerns, all of the sponsors, including the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, refused to take measures to rectify the problem.”
[Social Justice Cooperative member Abdulbasier] Aziz said that before advertising the forum, “We [SJC] made it a point to ask Hillel and MIT Students for Israel for sponsorship, we did speak in person, and agreed to change the title for the event to “A Jewish View.”
The selection of speakers garnered the contempt of some members of the Muslim community as well. Abdulaziz Albahar ‘10 said, “I know that some of my Saudi Arabian friends boycotted the event because of the Imam’s [anti-Saudi] views.”
We should experience no difficulty in sponsoring lectures by individuals whose beliefs we find offensive. Such offensiveness does not necessarily depend on political affiliation: Weiss is at the far-left of the political spectrum, while al-Asi locates himself at the far-right. To classify any type of speech as “legitimate” while others are “illegitimate” is to suggest that statements of fact and statements of opinion can (and should) be evaluated by the same standards.
Some would object that we should not allow individuals to preach unvarnished ‘hate’ (if such a term can even be meaningfully defined), but one could well argue that they pose less of a danger than those who do so while masquerading as scholars. At least the former individuals make no pretense as to the objective validity of their claims.
We cannot claim to support free speech if we only invite individuals whose views fall within an acceptable continuum — that continuum, after all, is constructed by human beings who despite their best efforts will sometimes render fallacious judgments. We can only claim to defend free speech if we support it as vigorously for individuals whose views we support as we do for those whose positions we criticize.
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