Fifteen Eighty Four

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Last week’s last-minute cancellation at Princeton and Columbia Universities of a lecture by Arab feminist Nonie Darwish – an author who has strongly denounced Islamic intolerance and jihadism – brings to mind American universities’ unwillingness to protect campus free speech rights for opponents of Nazism during the 1930s.

Shame on these supposed bastions of free speech for rolling over rather than courageously defending academic freedom.

Princeton’s reason for shutting down the scheduled presentation by Darwish strikingly resembles those given by Queens College’s president in April 1938 when he withdrew an invitation to anti-Nazi German Jewish exile Ernst Toller to speak on campus.

For its part, Columbia says it cancelled Darwish’s talk for a technical reason, because her trip was planned without sponsorship from any recognized Columbia group. I have no doubt, however, that the university could have found a way to accommodate this speaker if it had wanted to.

The parallels between Darwish and Toller are powerful. Both were made pariahs in their homelands and came to the United States seeking freedom. Darwish, who grew up in Gaza and in Egypt, became a staunch critic of radical Islam. She wrote a book titled “Now They Call Me Infidel.” Toller called his autobiography, published in the United States in 1934, “I Was a German.” The Nazis burned his books and confiscated almost all of his property.

In both cases, these challenges to authority made the speakers too “controversial” to appear on some campuses here.

In Darwish’s case, after the Princeton invitation was issued and accepted, a campus Muslim student group protested – and the sponsoring student organizations then withdrew their invitation. This was met with the university administration’s approval – or at least its silence. The university apparently would rather not have the headache of having to worry about bad headlines.

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