Like many students across America, I’m scared—scared for the erosion of my own rights, scared for the safety of my friends, and scared for the future of this country. As has been extensively reported, one of the driving factors of that fear is the kidnapping and deportation of international students purely for their pro-Palestinian speech, most notably Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia. That is why when I heard that Michael Roth was standing up for free speech, I felt a twinge of hope. But what does standing up for free speech mean? In this article I wish to unpack Roth’s words, compare them with Mahmoud Khalil’s, and situate both within a local, national, and international context.
Initially, I was impressed by Roth’s statement in an interview with Politico that cowardice is not a viable political strategy. On the surface, this is extremely commendable. It is absolutely true that the premise of neutrality will not save us. At universities like Columbia University, neutrality has been invoked as plausible deniability for the repression of students’ rights. When an oppressive status quo is attacked, it is common for those seeking to disrupt it to be blamed for causing disorder rather than placing the blame on the oppression itself. While some universities might try to hide in the comfort of maintaining the status quo, that is no longer an option.
However, quickly into Roth’s interview is a statement that gives the reader pause. Commenting on the doxxing campaigns that commonly target pro-Palestine activists, he claims that while “as offensive that [he] find[s] them,” they are just a “[way] for people to express themselves” and thus constitute protected speech (unless they call for “violence or intimidation”). A month ago, Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped as a direct consequence of a doxxing campaign advanced by the pro-Israel organizations Canary Mission and Betar US and assisted by pro-Israel Columbia students and faculty. Khalil directly appealed to Columbia administrators for protection against online harassment before his arrest, to which the university never responded.
In light of these facts, President Roth fundamentally downplays the seriousness of our current situation. All doxxing is, by nature, intimidation and now, considering the secret police that is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) is arresting students at will, should be considered a grave threat. All it takes is a name for I.C.E. to detain a student, so publishing or passing along a name of a student and marking them as pro-Palestinian constitutes a threat with real gravity. By not naming the harm that this action causes, student, faculty, and alumni collaborators may be more emboldened than ever to make false and racist accusations of terrorism against their fellow students. All it takes is a rumor or online post in order to have them disappeared and deported by the state. Calling this behavior self-expression shows Roth’s perhaps tacit acquiescence of the state’s use of illegal detention and the harassment that precedes it.
Let us turn now to Mahmoud Khalil’s statement from I.C.E. detention.
In his letter, he directly blames not only Columbia, but also “anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention.”
He then compares his experiences to the status quo in Israel, stating, “I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights.” Throughout Roth’s interviews with both Politico and The New Yorker, he makes no mention of anti-Palestinian racism and even evades a question about the link between attacks on free speech in the US and Israel’s war in Gaza by speaking instead on “anti-antisemitism.” Even in the most obvious case of anti-Palestinian racism, Palestine itself appears to be a dirty word to Michael Roth. Although opposing antisemitism has been deployed as a pretext for Israeli violence, Palestinian activism is not a pretext but an explicit target. It serves the foundation for letting the American-supported Israeli genocide in Gaza continue unopposed.
As is befitting an academic environment such as Wesleyan, let us dig in deeper into the repression that Khalil refers to in Israel and how it relates to the crisis of free speech in the United States. First, a recent example: Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” was recently abducted directly from an ambulance by the Israeli military after being beaten by a masked mob of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. As Ballal overheard in conversations about his Oscar win among his jailers, he was explicitly targeted for his filmmaking. Similarly, recent Wesleyan guest Rami Younis recounted during his visit how his film “Lyd” was banned in Israel for depicting a future of coexistence without Zionism; theaters who screened the film were targeted for defunding because of the Israeli government’s invocation of a 100-year old British colonial censorship law. While famous, these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem describes how, since Oct. 7th, 2023, the Israeli Prison service, under the leadership of Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, has detained “physicians, academics, lawyers, students, children and political leaders” in conditions that amount to torture, capitalizing on the trauma of the Oct. 7th, 2023 attacks to brutalize Palestinians en masse as revenge. Of 9,623 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons in July 2024, 4,781 were detained without due process and may never see a trial. It is clear that the official state policy of Israel is to not only deprive Palestinians of free speech, civil liberties, and human rights, but also to systematically destroy Palestinian society as a whole.
It is no secret that Israel routinely brutalizes Palestinian of all ages and genders. But how does the government and Israeli society as a whole attempt to rationalize and justify these horrible crimes? Professor of Cultural Anthropology Rebecca L. Stein of Duke University may provide us an answer. In her article “‘The Boy Who Wasn’t Really Killed’: Israeli State Violence in the Age of the Smartphone Witness,” she explains how after the infamous and well-documented shooting of 12-year old Muhammad al-Durrah in September 2000, Israeli society en masse adopted an amorphous conspiracy theory Stein names “the repudiation script.” Reflected in this is the idea that all documentation of Israeli atrocities is fabricated by paid actors in order to defame Israel. In a perverse turn of logic, Palestinians who document and share their own suffering are recast as antisemitic liars, who in turn deserve the punishment meted out by the I.D.F. in the form of bombings, kidnapping, torture, or direct assassinations. This is the precise logic of how Israel has justified the killing of at least 175 journalists in Gaza since Oct. 7th, 2023, more than any other war on record.
In the United States, this same model frames deporting students like Mahmoud Khalil as a righteous act of self-defense. As a consequence of this logic, the definition of antisemitism can be transformed from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the state of Israel. This reasoning has emboldened genuine antisemites to spread their hateful beliefs as long as they pass a litmus test on support for Israel. Steve Bannon, who recently made headlines for the second most notable Nazi salute of the past few months, in a recent interview said, “the number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA.”
But what does any of this have to do with Wesleyan? The attacks on free speech we are seeing now must be confronted at their root. There is a historical continuity from Muhammad al-Durrah to the situation we’re in today, and debunking any defense of authoritarian repression is crucial to stop it. Even closer to home, Stein argues that the repudiation script predicts the crisis actor narrative of far-right figures like Alex Jones, which sowed the seeds for Trump’s election itself. Though it is too late to nip fascism in the bud, it is not too late to destroy its foundational premises.
Additionally, Michael Roth has a robust history of defending hate speech on the grounds of a commitment to pluralism. Clearly, he does not understand the danger of consistently playing devil’s advocate for bigots, liars, and conspiracy theorists. In 2015, he defended a racist op-ed against Black Lives Matter published in The Argus that many students of color explicitly condemned as deeply harmful. More recently, he personally moderated this year’s Hugo L. Black lecture, with New York Times Magazine staff writer and Yale Law Senior Researcher in Law and Truman Capote Fellow Emily Bazelon, who has faced accusations of promoting anti-trans hate speech in her article discussing transgender youth. The article uncritically cited Genspect, a Southern Poverty Law Center–designated anti-LGBTQ hate group. Though he wants students to read more conservative voices, conservatives in power today aren’t reading Edmund Burke and economists from the Austrian School, they’re reading “The Bell Curve” and “The Camp of the Saints.”
Conversely, Roth’s disdain for social justice activists of all stripes is no secret. He personally called the cops last September on a nonviolent sit-in calling for divestment in North College after boasting about his refusal to call the cops on the encampment protest last spring. In the ensuing weeks, Wesleyan’s administration did not recant but instead doubled down on their repressive tactics, trying to expel several students they saw as ringleaders in order to behead a movement that challenged their authority. Now, with the founding of a chapter of Students Supporting Israel at Wesleyan (whose parent organization openly denies the ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as parroting the false history that during the 1948 Nakba, 750,000 Palestinians simply left on their own accord), it is easy to predict what his response will be—that the angry, wokescold activists protesting an ongoing genocide should just stop being so small-minded towards racist misinformation. As Rebecca Stein has argued is the case in Israel, this misinformation produces the societal conditions needed to legitimize violence against those who seek to expose the truth about historical and current oppression. By asking those most affected by hate speech to tolerate it for so long, Michael Roth has produced the very crisis of free speech that he claims to be fighting back against.
So if Michael Roth’s stance on free speech is ineffectual, insufficient, and inauthentic, why is he being so vocal now? I would argue that it is the same reason he is paid nearly one million dollars per year by the board of trustees. It is not for his academic integrity, but because he is an extraordinarily talented salesman. Roth knows that opportunistically advancing his personal brand in this time of crisis will make well-meaning liberal donors and admissions applications flock towards Wesleyan. Superficial accolades like a PEN America Award for standing against Trumpist repression show his branding is paying off. In the meantime, Wesleyan students are no safer.
Perhaps I will be proven overly cynical. Perhaps Michael Roth will wake up tomorrow with a newfound conviction to follow the democratic will of his students and divest from apartheid, resurrect the Committee for Investor Responsibility, reaffirm the partnership with the University Network for Human Rights, genuinely apologize for platforming hate speech, and take a stance braver than “we want to make sure that [I.C.E] are, in fact, legally authorized.” Even if I.C.E. comes to campus under the guise of legality, it still must be opposed. But in the meantime, don’t get your hopes up. Look elsewhere for a leader who is capable of standing up for human rights even when it doesn’t benefit him.
Without a doubt, free speech is essential to academia and society as a whole. But free speech in a vacuum is not enough. By now, we should all know that the Israeli state works hand in hand with the Trump regime in violently quashing dissent in both Israel/Palestine and the United States. It is imperative that we fight back against both as dual expressions of one fascist movement.
But also, following Mahmoud Khalil’s statement that “it is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for [Gaza’s] complete freedom,” the responsibility of the intellectual is to specifically amplify the Palestinian voices authoritarianism is trying to silence. If we are to believe words can defeat fascism, it is those of the Palestinian people that have the greatest power to do so. But in the meantime, be forewarned that neglecting Palestinian voices is the surest sign that one’s support for free speech is hollow and conditional. In the recent words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, “If you can’t stand up against genocide, why should I believe you can stand up for democracy?”
Skylar Moehs is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at smoehs@wesleyan.edu.
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