Tlaib has the right to speak at ASU

Four Arizona lawmakers – two Republicans and two Democrats – put out a scorching press release last week.

Their target was Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to hold a seat in Congress. She would be delivering two speeches in Arizona, including one at Arizona State University. They told her to get lost. “Congresswoman Tlaib’s extremist, antisemitic views are not welcome in the state of Arizona,” they wrote.

The power of their statement was that it came from members of both parties — two Republicans and two Democrats.

And, yet, they buried the lead.

Not until the 10th paragraph did they get to the most important words in their 11-paragraph message:

“Congresswoman Tlaib is of course free to speak on ASU’s campus, and we commend our universities for supporting free speech and hosting uncomfortable conversations.”

Their praise of the universities was premature.

Before Tlaib could address students at Arizona State University’s Neeb Hall on Friday afternoon, the university had canceled her visit.

On the day of the speech, ASU announced that groups not affiliated with ASU had organized the event “outside of ASU policies and procedures.”

So, no go.

If you needed good reasons to stop this event, Tlaib and the student protesters who support her had provided them.

Pro-Palestinian protesters had earlier in the week disrupted a student government meeting at ASU’s Memorial Union and were accused of throwing landscaping rocks at the windows.

Some of the Jewish students there said ASU police had to escort them from the building for their own protection and that they endured death threats from protesters.

Tlaib, for her part, had just been censured on Nov. 7 by the U.S. House for “promoting false narratives” about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and for “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.”

After the terror strike that killed some 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians, Tlaib called for the end of “the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.”

Her colleagues perceived that as a defense of terrorism, not to mention a serious lack of empathy for the people slaughtered by Hamas.

Further, Tlaib has long embraced the phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which has roots in the Hamas charter that calls for the destruction of Israel and is used by the terrorist group as a battle cry.

Widely perceived as a call to wipe out the state of Israel and the Jews living there, the expression is perceived by many as antisemitic and eliminationist.

Tlaib defended the expression: “‘From the river to the sea’ is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” she tweeted.

That’s not credible and small comfort to Jewish students who now hear it from protesters on campuses across the United States.

And yet Tlaib should have a forum at ASU. If requested by her student and faculty supporters there, the university, on principle, should find a way to make it happen.

The ASU administration has taken enormous heat for defending free speech, in particular, controversial speakers who are conservative and were opposed by large groups of students and faculty.

They should also endure the heat for providing a forum for a far-left controversial speaker such as Tlaib.

Defending speech is hard. Mundane speech never requires defending. Only speech that infuriates and polarizes needs protection.

The sweet spot for ASU in the battle over speech is to be hated by both left and right for defending speech rights.

The irony here is that there is a creeping agenda on the political left in recent years to silence conservative speech.

It arrives under the guise of “words are violence” or “disinformation,” but it’s really about silencing the right and consolidating power on the left.

Having endured years of this, conservatives should now be defending Rashida Tlaib’s right to express her sulfurous views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Why?

Because words are the building blocks of civilized society. Civilized people work out our differences with words rather than clubs and knives and guns.

Deny people left or right the words to express themselves and we drive them underground, where they will turn to other means to solve their problems.

I sympathize with ASU officials. These are tense times with nations and peoples and families dividing over the Oct. 7 attack. Already we see violence trying to break out on the ASU campus.

But Tlaib is a member of Congress. She may have been censured, but she represents hundreds of thousands of voters in her Michigan district, many of them Muslims from Dearborn, who view this conflict far differently than the majority of Americans, who support Israel.

If people in Arizona want to give her a platform, she should have it.

I won’t like what she says, but I love the country that lets her say it.