A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.
She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.
The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.
Read the whole thing for a fuller account of the story. Here’s a January 7 story from the Bergen Record, and here’s a January 8 story from the same place. Muftah reproduces some of the tweets involved. (Unfortunately, Koval’s Twitter feed is no longer operating in the public domain.) Fair Lawn, by the way, is just a few towns west of Lodi, where I teach.
Setting aside whatever narrowly legalistic insanities may reside within the various “anti-bullying” statutes, this is not a morally complex matter. A high school student tweets her political views about Israel. Some of what she says contains profanity. Some is sympathetic to, or appeasing of, Hamas. Some of her peers don’t like what she says. She gets some verbal flak from some of them. One “unfollows” her Twitter account. She doesn’t reveal the “unfollower’s” name in public, but reveals it to someone privately.
I spent a fair bit of time during the fall of 2014 boring the readers of this blog with my insistence that despite Obama’s “promise(s)” not to put “boots on the ground” in Syria, he would eventually find some disingenuous, incremental way of putting them there. Since “boots on the ground” doesn’t really mean anything, military speaking, the phrase is practically designed to guarantee plausible deniability: you can promise not to put “boots on the ground,” then send military personnel to the relevant place, and then deny that that’s what you meant by “boots on the ground.” No, no: “boots on the ground” referred, all along, to those military personnel that we haven’t (yet) sent, not the boot-wearing ones that now happen to be there.
I may be a newly-minted Democrat, but I’m not dumb, amnesiac, or loyal enough to our President to forget that this is just a tired variant on the semantic game that the Bush II Administration played with the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.” As we all by now know (or ought to know), very strictly speaking, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq as a result of the 2003 invasion; it’s just that the WMD we found found bore no relation to the WMD that furnished the rationale for the invasion. So if the invasion of Iraq was predicated on “finding weapons of mass destruction,” very narrowly conceived, well, it was a great success: weapons were found. But this is just a pathetic way of saving a pathetic thesis. The war was predicated on finding usable stockpiles of WMD, and precisely none of those were found.
For the record, I regard what’s depicted in the video as free speech, and reject the idea that it involves (or should be regarded as involving) “incitement” in any legally actionable sense. Let them dance.
If you doubt that, try to watch the videos embedded in this link, if you can. You can’t, because the heckling drowns out the speaker. The police, we’re told, refused to escort the hecklers out on “free speech” grounds, but the ultimate result was that Levy was unable to give his speech. It’s an understatement to call that “problematic.”
The preceding set of videos happens to involve a pro-Palestinian speaker and pro-Israeli hecklers, but the principle applies all ways around. Here’s Israeli ambassador Michael Oren being heckled during a speech he gave (or tried to give) at UC Irvine in 2010. I admire Levy and despise Oren, but I have the same view in both cases: the anti-Oren hecklers, like the anti-Levy ones, should have been removed from the hall–by force, if necessary.
Heckling may well take the form of speech, but it violates free speech by interfering with the free speech rights–disturbing and interrupting the speech–of the person who has prior claim to the floor. It can sometimes be unclear who has prior claim to the floor–which is why we have rules of order–but it usually isn’t. When it is clear, it’s equally clear what should be done with hecklers: either shut up or be thrown out and locked out. This sort of reaction is graceful and intelligent, but it still sort of misses the point and misses the mark (I’m referring to the effort at persuasion before the removal). So should senators be thrown out of the State of the Union address? Yes, senators too. For a one-word outburst? For a one-word outburst. Even if Obama was lying? Even if Obama was lying.
Feel free to demonstrate outside the hall, or to ask brutal questions during the Q&A–but speeches, like concerts, should compel absolute silence from the audience. If you’re sufficiently offended, leave. But if you decide to stay, the principle of free speech demands that you hold your peace–whoever you are, whoever the speaker is, and whatever the speaker is saying.
Postscript, October 28, 2015: This story (and video) doesn’t induce me to re-think my view on heckling, but it does induce me to offer a few caveats or qualifications. I linked to the preceding version of that story because it has the best video quality of any that I’ve seen, but (like the Huffington Post version of the story) it conveniently omits the fact that the protesters interrupted Trump’s speech by chanting at him. (The Huff Post video mentions the interruption.) I have no love for Trump, but I don’t think anyone has the right to interrupt his speech (or anyone’s speech) in this way.
As a first resort, in cases like this, the protesters should be told to stop interrupting. If they don’t agree to stop, or don’t stop, they should be removed from the premises of the talk. Ideally, they should be removed by parties designated to handle security (assuming that someone is designated). If a security detail is there, no one should be allowed to remove the hecklers but them. Obviously, if the talk is being guarded by a police detail, the task of removing hecklers is their job, not that of the audience.
If the hecklers/protesters don’t agree to leave, I still think they should be forced out. But the force used to remove them should be proportionate to the force by which they resist leaving: the less they resist, the less force is needed. Disproportionate uses of force should in this context be treated as new initiations of force–in other words, as battery. The video makes clear that the force used to remove these protesters was grossly disproportionate to what was needed to remove them. The guy in the pink shirt should absolutely have been (or be) arrested for battery.
It’s amazing that a person could be recorded on video as battering someone, and not just get away with it, but have essentially been incited into the act by a candidate for the U.S. presidency. But maybe it isn’t so amazing. Maybe it’s only as amazing as the fact that Donald Trump is the GOP front-runner for the presidency in the first place. And at this point, maybe that’s not so amazing, either.
Postscript, November 6, 2015: More of the same at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,this time aimed at the Israeli ethicist Moshe Halbertal. The excerpt in the link (from The Tablet) of the University’s Student Conduct Code seems to me to take the right approach to such matters.
I have to confess that I was tempted to heckle at this presentation I attended last night, at the Alanson White Institute in New York. The temptation is (nearly) overwhelming when a presenter consciously and strategically decides to bullshit the audience for 90 minutes, evading all substantive issues and abusing his critics more or less with impunity. But I decided to take my own advice–holding my tongue, leaving about twenty minutes early, and letting loose with a torrent of profanity once I was a safe distance from the hall. I’ll have to discuss the brazen dishonesty of Jeffrey Lieberman’s presentation–and the dismal intellectual standard of the entire evening–in a post of its own.
Postscript, November 9, 2015: Here’s a good summary of the Lieberman talk, minus a few things here and there in the three-way exchanges and the Q&A. I have a query out to the White Institute asking whether they’ll be making a video of the event public. I hope they will: I’m pretty sure the event was videotaped, and a wider public would benefit from watching the presentation and subjecting it to rational criticism. [Elizabeth Rodman, of the White Institute, in an email to me: “No, there is no video available for public viewing.”]
If Dr. Lieberman and his colleagues really mean what they say about rejecting the tribalism of psychiatry’s past (and that of psychoanalysis), now would be the time for a bit of transparency. Transparency, by the way, is the other side of the audience’s obligation to refrain from heckling a speaker: no one has the right the heckle, but the speaker has the obligation to come clean with his audience and allow for criticism rather than try his best to shut it down (a la Lieberman). It’s sad to have to explain all this to supposed professionals in mental health, but I guess we all profit from having to re-learn our ABCs sometime.
Postscript, November 16, 2015: Another discursive train wreck, this time at UT Austin, care of the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Don’t really see how this sort of thing promotes Palestinian rights. So if a bunch of pro-Israel protesters comes in to disrupt a defense of Palestinian rights, we’re obliged to let them disrupt the talk? Or is it that pro-Israel protesters wouldn’t have the same rights as defenders of Palestinian rights? Kind of stupid, no matter how you parse it.
Postscript, January 3, 2016: Here’s an interesting one, from a meeting in Orange County, New York involving a land-annexation dispute between the Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel and its non-Hasidic neighbors. Brooklyn assemblyman Dov Hikind shows up, and as an opening gambit insinuates (without explicitly coming out and saying so) that opposition to Kiryas Joel’s annexation bid is anti-Semitic. The crowd responds, understandably (but not in my view justifiably) with boos, jeers, and hisses. One guy in the second row stands up in protest at Hikind’s remarks and turns his back to him (Hikind himself had turned around to address the audience he was accusing). The presiding officer of the meeting asks security (in the form of uniformed officers) to usher the disruptive audience member out of the room. He refuses to leave, but promises to stay in his seat; eventually, security backs down.
Though I agree with the town council’s handling of the hecklers, Hikind’s behavior here is disgraceful. “The issue,” he thunders, “is not the annexation!” Actually, that’s exactly what the issue is, and a person who doesn’t want to discuss it has no business attending a meeting about it. Hikind doesn’t manage to say a single word about the merits of the annexation issue. He just engages in a bit of cheap demagoguery, then sits down. If Hikind has evidence of anti-Semitism, he should produce it. If not, he’s simply poisoning the well.
It’s actually unclear to me why a Brooklyn assemblyman would be asked or permitted to address an audience in Orange County (a good 90 minutes northwest of Brooklyn) on the subject of a disputed annexation there. In any case, the meeting’s presiding officer ought to have commented on the inappropriateness of Hikind’s comments. It’s not clear from this video how the officer reacted, or if he did. Contrary to the impression one gets, the jeering of the audience, though a problem, was far from the only problem in this episode. (Postscript, January 4, 2015: This critique of Hikind from a website run by Orange County locals is entirely on target.)
Soundtrack by Led Zeppelin (sort of)….
*I’ve renamed this post to better reflect the postscripts.
Note added, September 3, 2022: To belabor the obvious–for those who need a belaboring–this post was a response to a post on a separate blog, then called Neo-Neocon, now called The New Neo. The original post was posted in 2014; I don’t know whether it still exists. Neo-Neocon was defending the idea of US military involvement in Syria (back in 2014), which I was opposing. A commenter on the original blog post on Neo-Neocon, “blert,” had attacked my views by doing a cursory Google search, finding what he thought were photos of me, mistakenly identifying me with a fashion model with the name “Irfan Khawaja,” and then offering an elaborate confabulation about how I was an out-of-the-closet gay academic jihad blogger (implying, inadvertently, that Irfan Khawaja the fashion model was one, too). Obviously, blert’s whole comment was premised on a series of really stupid, obviously false assumptions and fabrications. That hasn’t deterred people from making some more.
To be absolutely clear: I am not Irfan Khawaja the fashion model, and have never pretended to be. The references to Irfan Khawaja the fashion model below are obviously satirical references to the erroneous identification of us made by the commenter “blert” on Neo-Neocon. If I’m gay, I must be in the closet about it even to myself, and to all of the women I’ve ever married or dated. I know nothing about the sexual orientation of Irfan Khawaja the fashion model, have no interest in knowing, and have never made any assertions about it whatsoever. I don’t mind being called a “blog jihadi,” but I have no comment on whether Irfan Khawaja the fashion model is. I don’t sympathize with ISIS, and have no reason to believe that Irfan Khawaja the fashion model does. I posted his photo in the post to satirize the error of the commenter, blert. As my bio makes clear, I’ve never claimed to be a fashion model. All of the commenters below except Irfan Khawaja the fashion model grasp that I am not Irfan Khawaja the fashion model, and am not claiming to be.
I wouldn’t have to belabor these obvious points if Irfan Khawaja the fashion model hadn’t, eight years after this post was first posted, decided to misread it by identifying my views with blert the commenter, and then attacking me for what blert had said. The ludicrous results of this misreading are now in the comments. As Dwight Eisenhower put it, “There is no final answer to the question ‘How stupid can you get?'” Continue reading →
Policy of Truth 