Baiting Is a Poor Form of Free Speech

During my college years in Nebraska, the speakers bureau brought Ralph Nader to campus to knock Detroit automakers. It brought in author Mark Lane to challenge the Warren Commission’s report on President Kennedy’s assassination. It brought in a leading black power advocate (whose name escapes me) to decry black-white relations in America.

Those were heady times for a lot of us, hearing “subversive” voices and thoughts for the first time. Previously motionless molecules in our brains suddenly began moving to and fro.

I’m harkening to those days of enlightenment as yet another campus brouhaha is in full swing at UC Irvine. Once again, it involves tension and the possibility of confrontation. Two months ago, the issue was the unveiling of the Danish cartoons that angered Muslims who said they disrespected Muhammad.

This week, the agenda belongs to a Muslim student group’s series of events that, to put it mildly, won’t make them any new friends in the Jewish community. The Muslim Student Union insists the thrust of the events isn’t anti-Semitic but includes such titles as “Holocaust in the Holy Land” and “Israel: The Fourth Reich.”

The UC Irvine administration sighs and defends free speech. One of the deans made it clear she didn’t approve of the language of all of the programs but rightly said she couldn’t do anything about it.

The head of another Muslim student group at UC Irvine says the Muslim Student Union is free to do what it wants, “but I personally believe it’s better to do it with less controversy.”

If nothing else, the week will show that no one group corners the market on hypocrisy. When the cartoon issue flared, Muslim students and others conceded the right to show the cartoons but argued that Muhammad was a sacred figure and pleaded for sensitivity.

Although the 1st Amendment is my calling, I agreed with them. I thought the cartoon display wasn’t about freedom of speech but more about baiting Muslims. I didn’t buy for a second the sponsoring group’s contention that displaying offensive things -- like the cartoons -- was better than hiding them behind a shroud.

So now we have a Muslim student group in the role of the provocateur. Under the guise of free and unfettered debate, it chooses to link “Holocaust” and “Third Reich” to its criticisms of Israel.

The group isn’t unaware of the insult; it just breezes right past it. I talked to its spokesman last week, and he seemed to believe his own rhetoric. He noted that the group had invited a strongly pro-Israel speaker to an event but he declined. The spokesman, Kareem Elsayed, said the week’s events are driven by Muslims’ duty to God and to stand against oppression and for justice.

Earlier in the week, he’d told another Times reporter that “Holocaust” isn’t a word that, by literal definition, is connected to Jews or Judaism.

True, but to the rest of the world, it has a clear link to the Nazi death camps.

If Elsayed were true to his intellectual argument, he’d have to say that “crusade” isn’t, by dictionary definition, specifically connected to Muslims. Yet we remember the unease in the greater Muslim community and elsewhere when President Bush cavalierly (and unwisely) used the word after the 9/11 attacks.

Words matter. Baiting someone or being intentionally offensive isn’t on the same plane as honest free speech.

I’m as dismayed by the tone of this week’s events at UC Irvine as I was by the insistence on showing the Danish cartoons. If either set of sponsors wanted to inspire real debate -- which I doubt -- they undercut their cause by going out of their way to inflame the other side.

I asked Elsayed if he was concerned about that. “Historically speaking, there have been tensions [between Muslim and Jewish students on campus], but there’s no reason to worry,” he said. “We just continue to do what we need to do, standing up for truth and justice.”

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.