The House Committee on Education and the Workforce began hearings on anti-Semitism on May 7. Unlike the April hearings last year, the new hearing was put on the defensive, including by David Cole, a law professor from Georgetown University and former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“These proceedings, with all due respect, have more in common with those of the House Un-American Activities Committee,” Cole said, referring to the HUAC committee that characterized the excesses of what is typically called McCarthyism. “They are not an attempt to find out what happened, but an attempt to chill protected speech.” Cole said that committee members had seized upon various complaints, which they have not investigated, and then brought in college presidents to “berate them based on the committee’s version of the facts, which may or may not be true.” Cole further argued that the student protesters are not hateful, but even had they been, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that “hate speech” may be reprehensible, but it is still protected, but what is not protected is any government discrimination based on that hate speech. Cole testified, “The line between protected speech that is anti-Semitic and discrimination that is anti-Semitic is a hard line to draw, but it’s a line that our Constitution compels us to draw. It’s not a line that I’ve heard a single Republican care about on this committee.”
“Getting to the bottom of what happened requires fair hearings, where both sides are heard about specific incidents,” he said. “This committee has not held a single hearing looking into a specific incident, having the perpetrator and the complainant testify.”
Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), who is Jewish, quoted from an April 23 letter from 100 Jewish faculty members from Northwestern University that says, “We are united by the conviction that our Jewishness must not be used as a cudgel to silence the vigorous exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of university life.”
