Palestinian Posters

To the Editors of The Crimson:

To take down or deface political posters is an offense against freedom of speech and hence unacceptable, especially on a campus dedicated to the exchange of ideas. It is like preventing speakers from being heard by drowning them out; they have the right to express their opinion, however unpalatable it may be to those present, however benighted or offensive or politically incorrect.

These principles obviously apply to support for the university students of the occupied West-Bank.

To be sure, there are members of the Harvard community for whom this support is perceived as a provocation or even an aggression--like displaying the Confederate flag or burning crosses to American Blacks.

These friends of Israel do not see this as a simple statement of the right to learn or a call to freedom, but as part of a larger campaign to expel the Jews from the Land--all the Land--and liquidate metaphorically and literally the people and the state of Israel. (This is what the various movements within the PLO are still sworn to by their so-called Covenant.)

These friends of Israel are not unmindful of recent parades in the West Bank and in Jerusalem by these same Arab students (among others, young and old) calling on Saddam Hussein to gas the Jews--another manifestation of freedom of opinion, protected by Israeli law and authorities in spite of its evocation of the Nazi techniques of industrialized murder.

Nor are these concerned friends of Israel unaware of the use of these West Bank universities, not as places of learning, but as centers of mobilization for political resistance and violence. It will no doubt come as news to most people that these universities had never existed before the Israelis came in 1967; the preceding Arab (Jordanian) occupation regime (but no one treated it as an occupation) had well understood the uses of such places and simply barred them.

Nor are these friends of Israel unaware of the manner in which Arab regimes deal with dissent and difference--whether non-Arab, like the Kurds in Iraq (more poison gas), or Arab, like the Sunni Muslims in Homs, Syria (was it 30,000 dead or 40,000?) and the people of Kuwait. And they quite reasonably draw the inference that if the Arabs are ready to treat their own that way, how much worse would they do to the enemy Jews, whom they define to one another (though no longer for sensitive Western ears and eyes) as intruders to be driven into the sea?

So the reaction of some Harvard students to these posters, so clever in their appeal to principle, so vicious in their sous-texte, has been to violate the rules of free speech and thereby play into the hands of the real enemies of freedom.

I can understand their anguish and impulse and sense of outrage, but that was wrong, unwise and counterproductive, and Dean Epps, whom I consider a friend to all and for whom I have always had the highest esteem, is right to denounce it.

On the other hand, it is not easy to know how to respond effectively to this kind of provocation--draw attention to it by posting people next to the posters and shouting "Rubbish!"?

Or get permission to post one's own clever or not-so-clever signs reminding people of Arab (and Palestinian) assaults on the United States or on Kuwait or on innocent travelers or on Jews peaceably worshipping in other lands? And invite further posters in return, perhaps of the more explicitly hateful kind seen on the West Bank, with English translation appended?

I fear that even a tolerant university such as Harvard will not benefit by this kind of exchange; this is surely not the internationalization as the President intended it. Dean Epps probably should have thought about these things before giving permission for extra-large posters on an issue that cannot be compared to freedom of religion or the evil of apartheid. David S. Landes   Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics