John Schindler tweets: “Nice how our glorious civilization ended in an infinite discussion of which aggrieved group has greater privilege.”
This month, a student group at Brown University launched a petition to pressure Janet Mock into canceling her scheduled lecture on the Providence, Rhode Island, campus.
One might assume this cohort was virulently homophobic or transphobic to discourage the transgender activist from serving as the keynote speaker selected by Moral Voices—a group whose mission for this academic year was to raise awareness about “violence against LGBTQ+ individuals and communities,” according to a statement by one of its co-chairwomen.
No, based on their petition’s aim, these students apparently believed it was better for Mock not to speak at all than to do so at an event connected to the Hillel chapter for the Ivy League college and the Rhode Island School of Design.
That the event was not about Israel or the Middle East, or that its sponsorship by other progressive groups on campus—including the Brown Center for Students of Color, Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, LGBTQ Center, Sexual Assault Peer Educators, Office of the Chaplains, and the Rhode Island School of Design’s Office of Intercultural Student Engagement—didn’t sway these students from arguing that Mock’s appearance would be implicit support for… some Zionist conspiracy?
The petition posted on Change.org—which Brown’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) later identified themselves as at least partially responsible for when defending it in a Brown Daily Herald opinion piece—argued that Mock shouldn’t speak at the event because Moral Voices (although privately funded) operates through the Brown-RISD Hillel. According to these students, “Hillel as a corporation has consistently defended and even advocated for the Israeli state’s policies of occupation and racial apartheid. Israel’s violent policies center on colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of native Palestinians,” and charges that it “has guidelines set in place to ensure that no speaker hosted by Hillel is allowed to rigorously critique Israel.”
