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A Hero in the Battle to Defend Israel and Western Civilization on the American College Campus
Thursday, November 5th | 12:00 pm EDT
Featuring Professor Jason Hill
Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University
In the spring semester of 2019 Professor Jason Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University had the courage to write and publish an article for The Federalist arguing that Israel has the moral right to annex the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), that Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable, and that Israel has the right to unilaterally apply Israeli law over the entirety of its nation state.
Within the article, Professor Hill argues that Israel made an altruistic mistake toward the Palestinian people after the 1967 defensive war with Jordan. Rather than regard them as “war settlers” or refugees or, after legally occupying conquered territory, as “illegal occupants,” they made the Palestinian people their political and moral problem. He also examines the nature of Palestinian governance and wrote that the Palestinians, “constitute a national security threat to Israel because a core feature of their identity is a commitment to destroying Israel as a Jewish state.”
Whether or not one agrees with this position, any normal human being should be outraged at the amount of opprobrium that this article had engendered. The students at DePaul university demonstrated and called for his immediate removal from the faculty. Although Jason is a tenured professor, he has been the subject of unremitting social isolation and vicious personal attacks. Thousands of students have called him “racist” and “xenophobic” and launched a petition to have him censured and removed from the faculty.
All of this is a product of the prevalent “Cancel Culture” that exists within American academia today, where only certain socially-acceptable ideas seem to enjoy first amendment rights. We at EMET have long argued that this sort of rigid, unyielding orthodoxy and tyranny of “political correctness" to only one side of the debate that we are now witnessing on college campuses is deleterious not only to Israel, and to the Jewish people, but to the ability of our students to think and argue independently, to stake out their ground and be able to find the evidence to support their position. All of this conformity to the rule of the mob is inimical to what our democracy is based upon, which was laid out in John Locke’s theories, “On Liberty,” and upon which Oliver Wendell Holmes later extrapolated to a Western education as being “the marketplace of ideas.”
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