SAVE THE DATE – Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019 – The CIJR is honoured to welcome Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld as Keynoter at its 31st Anniversary Gala taking place at Montreal’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Dr. Gerstenfeld is recognized as the leading international authority on contemporary anti-Semitism. He will speak on “Combatting the Resurgence of Global Antisemitism: Strategic Priorities for the Fight Against Contemporary Antisemitism.” For reservations and information contact cijr@isranet.org or call 1 855 – 303 – 5546
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Table of Contents:
100,000 Little Stalinists: David Mickics, Tablet, Sept. 25, 2019
Former Time Editor and CEO of Constitution Center (!) Wants To Cancel First Amendment, Pass Hate Speech Laws: Nick Gillespie, Reason, Oct. 30, 2019
Bukovsky’s Dissent: Scott Johnson, Powerline, Oct. 30, 2019
Jewish Survival: Making Music With What Remains: Paul Socken, Algemeiner, Oct. 30, 2019
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100,000 Little Stalinists
David Mickics
Tablet, Sept. 25, 2019
This spring, the writer Laurie Scheck, who teaches at the New School, asked her class why filmmakers had titled their documentary on James Baldwin I am Not Your Negro even though Baldwin actually said, in his debate with William F. Buckley Jr., “I am not your nigger.” A (white) student complained that the teacher had used a forbidden word, and Scheck, who does not have tenure, was placed under investigation. She was cleared in August after the usual months-long Kafkaesque inquisition. Scheck didn’t get to see the charges against her and was banned from taking notes during meetings with her tormenters. The New School never apologized to her and did not say what it should have, that citing the words of an author during class is protected free speech.
So, can a white professor directly quote an African American writer’s use of the word “nigger”? And will I, for that matter, get in trouble for writing that sentence? Baldwin is perhaps our greatest writer on race. Must he now be bowdlerized?
Scheck’s case happened too late to be included in Robert Boyers’ The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies, but Boyers describes a bushel of similar craziness. He teaches literature at Skidmore College, where, one gathers from his book, some of the looniest SJW battles have been fought. Boyers is a child of the ’60s, when political action often meant something substantial, like protesting your government’s mass murder of Vietnamese civilians.
Boyers identifies as a liberal, the ever-embattled species he has valiantly championed for decades in the magazine he edits, Salmagundi. Scandalously, liberals love to debate political questions because they think the other side might have its reasons, too. “The most novel and radical principle of liberal politics,” writes the political theorist Stephen Holmes, is that “disagreement is a creative force” (Boyers cites the passage). While liberals locate disagreement not just between people but also within the self, fanatics—whether putatively on “the left” or “the right”—crush any ambivalence they might feel about their beliefs, and pretend that righteous motives are all that is needed to make the case for a political agenda.
These days fanaticism is winning the battle on the left just as it has on the right. The correct political positions, we are meant to think, are so obviously true that only a bad person could possibly experience doubt. Boyers’ funniest and most acute comments take aim at the fake consensus that has been imposed on our campus culture. One day, he says, you just can’t take it, and find “you’re unwilling to sit quietly, hands nicely folded, in the total cultural environment many of your friends and colleagues want to inhabit.” But whenever you say something mildly critical about the current orthodoxy, the others stiffen as if they’ve noticed a bad smell. “Suspicion is now the required posture toward those who would wish to walk about under no one’s surveillance,” Boyers judges, and he’s right. Too often, today’s colleges and universities are comfortable with difference only when it is skin deep. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Former Time Editor and CEO of Constitution Center (!) Wants To Cancel First Amendment, Pass Hate Speech Laws
Nick Gillespie
Reason, Oct. 30, 2019
If you need more proof that free expression is under serious and sustained attack, look no further than The Washington Post, that legendary and often self-congratulatory bastion of First Amendment support, which has just published an op-ed calling for hate speech laws because “on the Internet, truth is not optimized. On the Web, it’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth doesn’t always win.”
What’s even more disheartening is that the author is Richard Stengel, a former managing editor of Time, chairman of the National Constitution Center, and Obama-era State Department official whose soul-searching apparently began when challenged by diplomats from a part of the world notorious for particularly brutal forms of censorship. As a journalist, Stengel avers, he loved, loved, loved the First Amendment and its commitment to free speech. But then he got stumped by unnamed representatives of unnamed governments who asked banal questions.
Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?
Is he kidding? “Why would a country founded in large part on the Enlightenment values of free speech and religious freedom allow free speech and religious freedom?” doesn’t seem like a tough question to answer. He doesn’t name the countries his “most sophisticated Arab diplomats represented, so we need to fill that detail in. Let’s assume they were from Saudi Arabia, a country completely unworthy of emulation when it comes to respecting basic human rights and whose Prince Mohammed bin Salman has taken responsibility for the brutal torture and murder of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. We allow the burning of the Koran for the same reasons we allow the burning of King James and St. Jerome Bibles, the desecration of the U.S. flag, and the potential libeling of elected officials: We believe that individuals have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With a few exceptions such as “fighting words,” “true threats,” and obscenity, we know that it’s better to allow more speech rather than less. Surprisingly, people get along better when they can more freely speak their minds. The search for “truth”—or at least consensus—benefits from free expression, too, as ideas and attitudes are subjected to examination from friends and foes alike. But the pragmatic answer is ultimately secondary to the expressive one: We allow free speech because no one, certainly not the government, has a right to curtail it.
As befits a man who helmed a legacy media outlet that is slowly being reduced to rubble like a statue of Ozymandias in the desert, Stengel is particularly distraught over “the Internet” and the “Web.” He implies that the “marketplace of ideas” worked well enough when John Milton and, a bit later, America’s founders pushed an unregulated press, but, well, times have changed. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Bukovsky’s Dissent
Scott Johnson
Powerline, Oct. 30, 2019
Vladimir Bukovsky died this past Sunday at his home in Cambridge (UK) at the age of 76. The New York Times obituary is here; the brief AP obituary is here. The Vladimir Bukovsky site has much more.
Bukovsky was of course the incredibly brave dissident who spent 12 years in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and labor camps before his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1976. His memoir — To Build a Castle (1978, translated by Michael Scammell and published in the United States in 1979) — is one of the great documents of the era (and now out of print). It has apparently become a collector’s item. It is posted online in PDF here; it is also available on Kindle here.
When Bukovsky turned 70, Michael Ledeen recognized him as “the greatest subversive of our time” and celebrated the occasion with this arresting observation: “We’ve been friends for a long time, ever since he came to America to study at Stanford, which he left after the university president bestowed an award on a phony group of Soviet physicians who had been actively involved in Bukovsky’s torture.”
Claire Berlinski’s 2010 City Journal essay “A hidden history of evil” drew on Bukovsky’s work documenting the crimes of Soviet Communism. The Bukovsky Archives: Communism on Trial remain a living legacy online. In her Wall StreetJournal column eulogizing Bukovsky, Juliana Geran Pilon summed up this aspect of his work:
“In 1992, the year after the Soviet Union collapsed, Bukovsky was asked to return to Russia as an expert witness at a trial against President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had banned the Communist Party and seized its property. Bukovsky’s argument, which he had always believed, was that the party had been unconstitutional. To demonstrate it, Bukovsky requested access to the Central Committee archives. Using a laptop and hand-held scanner, he surreptitiously copied and smuggled out thousands of pages before being discovered.
“His findings were captured in “Judgment in Moscow,” first published in 1995 in French, then in Russian and other European languages. It didn’t come out in English until this year. Its subtitle, “Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity,” gives a clue as to why. When Bukovsky first attempted to publish the book in English, in the 1990s, the American publisher had asked him to rewrite “the entire book from the point of view of a leftist liberal,” he wrote. Specifically, he was told to omit all mention of media companies that had entered agreements to publish articles and cover media events “under the direct editorial control of the Soviets.” He rejected the offer, and the publisher canceled the contract. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Jewish Survival: Making Music With What Remains
Paul Socken
Algemeiner, Oct. 30, 2019
The great Jewish historian Salo Baron objected to the “lachrymose” version of Jewish history — the overemphasis on Jewish suffering. Instead, Jewish history should be told, according to Baron, as the dynamic relationship between Jews and their surroundings.
While Baron is surely correct in wanting Jews, and the world, to see in Jewish history more than an endless series of persecutions, it is undeniable that Jewish history bears a terrible burden of pain. I would argue, however, that the lessons learned from that history are what has ennobled Jews and instructed anyone willing to learn.
Eli Wiesel, the eloquent spokesman for all those who survived the Holocaust — and those who didn’t — never wore gold. He remembered the moment when Jews were rounded up by the Germans. Most had hidden whatever gold and precious objects they had in their clothes and coats. When the first Jews, who claimed they had nothing, were shot dead on the spot, the rest quickly emptied their belongings and remained with only the clothes on their backs. Forever, Wiesel kept the image in his mind of his father adding the little gold he had onto the pile with trembling hands, saying, “For this, I toiled?” In memory of his father, Wiesel said he never wore gold.
The lesson Wiesel learned was the true and profound value of human life, and the relative insignificance of possessions. For him, human life and relationships over materialism was a truth he witnessed in the crucible of Jewish history.
Rabbi Yisroel Zeev Gustman was a rabbi from Vilna who survived the war and became the head of a yeshiva in Israel. One of the people who attended his classes was Professor Robert Aumann, who was to become a Nobel Laureate in economics years later. During the Lebanon war of 1982, Professor Aumann’s son died in combat. Rabbi Gustman attended the shiva. The rabbi told the professor that he too had lost a son, who died in the Holocaust. He said that his son died because he was a Jew and was helpless to save himself or anyone else, whereas Professor Aumann’s son died defending the Jewish people and the land of Israel.
Rabbi Gustman said: “I never had the opportunity to sit shiva for my son. Let me sit here with you a little longer.” Professor Aumann said: “I thought I could never be consoled, but Rabbi, you have comforted me.” From the Holocaust to modern Israel, the pain of one man comforted the other and bound them together in an indissoluble union. Their lives stand as a lesson in moral courage through their shared experience of the tragedies of Jewish history.
Yitzhak Perlman is another shining example of the Jewish ability to triumph over suffering. He was stricken with polio at a very young age, and was able to move about with the aid of braces, crutches, and a wheelchair. In spite of that disability, he became one of the greatest violinists of his generation. One night during a concert, a string of his violin broke. Instead of stopping the concert and asking for another violin, he continued to play on three strings. After completing the concert and receiving a much-deserved standing ovation, he spoke and said: “It is our task to make music with what remains.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Arabs Upset that Britain Refuses to Apologize for Balfour Declaration: Jewish Press, Elder Nov. 5, 2019 –– A reporter from Al Quds al Arabi asked Karen Pierce, the British head of the UN Security Council this month, whether she renounces the Balfour Declaration, whose 102nd anniversary was Saturday.
Kudos to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for Defending Free Speech At a Tough Moment: Sarah Ruger, USA Today, Oct. 23, 2019-– Is free speech on social media still worth the trouble? In response to hate speech, fake news, deep fakes and evidence of psychological harm, there are moves to replace broad toleration of speech on social media with heavier government censorship.
Rex Murphy: Toronto’s Public Libraries Hold the Line on Free Speech: National Review, Nov. 1, 2019 — Coming as it did the day after the election, the dismissal of the pestiferous complaint against 13 or more female cosmeticians, brought to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal by the self-declared trans woman Jesse/Jessica Yaniv (she has tweeted under both handles), hardly got the attention it deserved.
A Centenary for Free Speech: Ilya Shapiro and Michael T. Collins, WSJ,Nov. 7, 2019 — Americans may take free speech for granted, but they couldn’t do so a century ago.
This week’s French-language briefing is titled: Communiqué: De bonnes raisons d’expulser Omar Shakir (Novembre 8,2019)
CIJR wishes our friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!