What is acceptable speech on campus these days?
Apparently, if you attend Brandeis University, you can express the most outrageous opinions about dead policemen, advocate violence, and countenance an attack on the student journalist who exposes it.
A petition on Change.org explains:
On December 20th, Brandeis student journalist Daniel Mael reported on inflammatory statements made by a Brandeis student leader on Twitter. Referring to the two NYPD policemen, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were recently assassinated, she wrote, “I have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today,” and “lmao [laughing my a—off] i just really dont have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist f—ing country.” Most alarmingly, the student leader’s online messages included calls for violence in comments like, “burn this country down,” and, “i need to get my gun license. asap.”
Commenters, responding to Mael’s article, posted disparagements, curses and threats to the student who had insulted the dead policemen. Daniel Mael immediately and in no uncertain terms publicly condemned these reactions.
Soon however, Mael himself became the target of personal, sometimes violent threats to his safety and well-being made by his fellow students on the Brandeis campus and others. Instead of censuring the hatred expressed toward innocent murder victims, an array of student groups, including several students in student leadership positions at the university, launched a campaign of vilification and intimidation against Mael, demanding that the Brandeis administration punish him for doing nothing more than truthfully reporting hateful comments made in a public forum by a student in a position of authority at the university.
University officials have a legal and moral obligation to protect their students. Since the crisis began on December 20th, University President, Fred Lawrence, has remained silent. This silence encourages the violent incitement against Daniel Mael, who did nothing wrong. At the same time, it implies official tolerance for community members using derogatory language to intimidate a student journalist — behavior that may be in violation of the school’s own code of conduct.
Brandeis officials must take immediate steps to ensure that no harm will come to any student. The climate of intimidation and hostility to free speech on the Brandeis campus must end immediately.
We call on Brandeis Trustees and Brandeis President Fred Lawrence to take the following steps:
- Declare that any Brandeis student who threatens or intimidates another student will be held accountable.
- Condemn any Brandeis student or faculty member who expresses support for the murder of policemen, or any human being, for that matter. Students have the right to their opinions; the University has the duty to judge some opinions as beneath contempt.
The incredible shape the criticism of Mael took was reported on the Daily Caller:
Brandeis senior Michael Piccione, a member of the 2014-15 student conduct board, sent an urgent email to the president of Brandeis, senior administrators, radical leftist professors and students.
The email — entitled “VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!” — claimed that “Mael has exposed Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website.” (The website to which Piccione refers is Truth Revolt.)
For reporting about Lynch’s vile tweets, Piccione declared, Mael “has potentially violated multiple parts” of a Brandeis code of student conduct including “stalking.”
“Khadijah specifically requested that her personal comments be removed from the website and the article in question taken down, but her wishes were ignored,” the student conduct board member also whined.
Piccione’s lament refers to Lynch telling Truth Revolt that her public tweets are her “own personal opinion.” Lynch had threatened that she does not want her tweets “publicized in any form and if you do not abide my wishes i constitute your disregard as slander.”
Lynch does not appear to understand the difference between slander, which is spoken, and libel, which is written. Her fellow students at Brandeis appear similarly unable to comprehend this distinction.
On the Brandeis Class of 2017 OFFICIAL page, a closed Facebook group, sophomore William Amara has written: “I am sorry that Khadijah has to put up with these fu**ing assh**es publishing (and likely distorting) her private opinions to further incite racial hatred and oppression. I hope the university will stand with you if these co**su**ers cause things to escalate further.”
Amara calls the quoting of Khadijah’s tweets “slander.”
Clifton Joseph Masdea also calls the publication of Khadijah’s tweets “slanderous.” In addition, after asserting that Truth Revolt is home to “racist a-holes,” Masdea calls Mael’s publication of Lynch’s tweets “a classic case of cyberbullying.”
Not a word of reproach for Khadijiah’s “private opinions” that included laughing her butt off at the death of policemen. It’s amazing that directly quoting those “private opinions” constitutes “harassment,” “cyberbullying,” or “stalking.”
Positively unreal.
The Change.org page links to a petition you can sign in support of Mr. Mael. If you want to get the goat of those utterly confused and ignorant lefties, makes sure you click through and sign it.
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