The Volokh Conspiracy
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Campus Pro-Hamas Events on October 7: What Should be Done?
The groups holding these events are quite openly and publicly telling you who they are and what they believe, and that's important information to have.
At various universities around the country, Students for Justice in Palestine and other pro-Hamas groups are holding events on October 7. Some of these events celebrate Palestinian "resistance," while others, throwing in a blood libel for good measure, commemorate a non-existent genocide of Palestinians by Israel since the war in Gaza began.
Let's recall what happened on October 7, 2023. Thousands of Hamas terrorists, followed by "civilian" hangers-on, attacked border towns in southern Israel along with a music festival. The perpetrators recorded themselves gleefully murdering innocent people–peacenik kibbutznik and party-goers, children in front of their parents (there is one harrowing video you can find online of an eight-year-old girl asking, in vain, that the terrorists murder her), not the elderly, just everyone in their path. The murders were often undertaken in the most gruesome ways, including burning people alive. They also undertook an orgy of rape and torture, and kidnaped a few hundred Israelis, from a baby to an eighty-five year-old.
Let's also recall that on October 7, woefully underprepared Israeli forces struggled to repel the invasion. Not a single Israel soldier entered Gaza that day.
This tells us two things. First, those who see October 7 as anything but a day that should be devoted to the memory of the innocents brutally murdered, raped, tortured, and kidnaped that day at the very least are indifferent to that suffering, and at worst applaud the worst violence against Jews since the Holocaust. Unfortunately, many are in the latter category. As Seth Mandel writes, "American universities are full of psychopaths both in the student body and often in the professoriate (and sometimes administration)."
Second, there is no reason for anyone protesting the Israeli response in Gaza to the war Hamas started to use October 7 as a commemorative date, except to intentionally intrude on Jewish memory and commemorations of the atrocities of that day. To again quote Mandel, they choose October 7 "not despite the pain it causes Jews on campus but because of that pain." It's a form of emotional and political warfare, as if on September 11, 2002 students held events about a purported genocide by US forces fighting the Taliban.
So what should be done about morally repugnant university events to be held on October 7? If, as at Wake Forest, such events are sponsored by university academic departments, a university is well within its rights to shut them down, as Wake Forest did. Academic departments are subdivisions of the university, and the university may tell these departments that it refuses to allow its subdivisions, speaking as agents of the university, to sponsor events using October 7 for pro-Hamas propaganda.
For student events, however, the answer is that nothing should be done by university officials. At public universities, students have a First Amendment right to be as openly morally repugnant as they choose. Thus, a Maryland judge was correct in rebuffing the University of Maryland's attempt to stifle a pro-Hamas October 7 event. At private universities, if the university has a policy of not censoring student political events, it should not make an exception for these.
Yes, it's true that at many universities there would be a far stronger administrative reaction to an event celebrating the lynching of black people, or gay-bashing, or atrocities against Native Americans, and so on. And if students can prove that the university treats Jewish students' complaints and concerns differently than other groups', that is valid grounds for a lawsuit or Title VI complaint. And university officials certainly have no excuse not to denounce October 7 celebrations if (and only if) they regularly denounce other student events they find morally repugnant. (And of course, counter-demonstrations must also be permitted.)
Part of me wishes that I could make a principled argument for shutting these events down, but part of me does not. The groups holding these events are quite openly and publicly telling you who they are and what they believe in. To quote Mandel once more, their "leaders don't want to wait a day to hold the rally because while any other day could mark the war, no other day could mark the murder and mayhem of Oct. 7. The day is important to them because the massacre of Jews is important to them." And that's important information to have.
