Alan Dershowitz, a renowned professor at Harvard University, has expressed his disappointment after the university's student newspaper, The Crimson, declined to publish his op-ed.
The piece was a critique of President Claudine Gay's congressional testimony concerning antisemitism on campus.
Dershowitz's op-ed was a response to an article published by The Crimson on December 12. In the said article, Professor Charles Fried defended Gay's assertion that "context matters" in addressing calls for genocide against Jews.
In a piece for the New York Post on Thursday, Dershowitz expressed his surprise at the rejection of his op-ed. "I think this is the first time in my 65 years of writing letters to the editor that one has been turned down," he wrote, adding that he has been a faculty member at Harvard for 60 years and has had numerous articles and letters published in The Crimson.
Dershowitz pointed out the irony of the situation, noting that the newspaper, which claims to uphold free speech as its guiding principle, refused to publish his letter advocating for less censorship and viewpoint discrimination on campus. He suggested that this refusal mirrors Harvard's inconsistent approach to free speech, which he described as "contextual free speech for the enemies of Jews and their state; censorship for supporters of Israel and critics of Harvard."
In his rejected op-ed, Dershowitz contended that Fried's defense of Gay was flawed. He argued that Fried failed to recognize that "context apparently matters only for genocidal threats against Jews" in Gay's perspective. He further criticized Fried for overlooking "the broader context of the double standard employed by so many universities including Harvard against Jews and other minorities that DEI excludes."
Dershowitz concluded his piece with a hopeful note, expressing his desire for Gay's "new contextual standard" to be universally applied to all speech at Harvard. He also called for the DEI bureaucracy to be stripped of its power to censor and cancel expression against protected minorities.
In his New York Post piece, Dershowitz criticized Harvard for its inaction as the university becomes increasingly unsafe for Jewish students. He cited several instances demonstrating how The Crimson has "become the megaphone for anti-Israel and antisemitic extremism on campus."
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