Everyone has the right to speak freely

TWO kinds of liberal politics collided at Victoria University this week, when holidaying Israeli soldiers arrived to speak about their country’s 2014 invasion of Gaza.

That war was disproportionate in every sense, from Israel’s vastly superior military power to the Palestinians’ far larger death toll (2251 Gazans died). It was also miserably familiar – one more act to prolong the hatred and bloodshed in a region already drenched in both.

On the face of it, then, the call by a group of academics and student activists to stop the event had a certain logic. Why should proponents of the war be allowed to talk while many of its victims are dead? And what might they offer that, say, a United Nations report in June, which found suggestions of war crimes on both sides, does not?

Call that one kind of liberalism, one that believes people can be disqualified from even offering their perspective, at least in an official setting, because their actions are so objectionable.

The problem is it’s completely wrong. The better, simpler liberalism is the one that insists on allowing people to say their bit, even when it offends.

This is Voltaire’s famous credo – ‘‘defending to the death your right to say it’’ and all that. It’s fundamental to a democracy, which relies on ordinary people making their own minds up. And it’s supposed to be an idea that animates a university, a place where every theory ought to be able to be debated freely.

So Victoria’s English lecturer Dougal McNeill may be right to castigate Israel for the Gazan war, or to call the soldiers’ speeches ‘‘apologetics for military violence’’, but he is entirely wrong to think either means the soldiers should be barred from talking.

There is a special irony in his praise for student protesters’ use of ‘‘free speech’’ traditions, while calling on Victoria to throw the soldiers out.

The protesters were, of course, welcome to chant; this too is part of the sifting of ideas, not to mention the colour of a university. But Victoria was right to reject the call for a cancellation.

Free speech on campus is an issue all over the world. In Britain, Israel’s deputy ambassador had to flee an Essex University lecture theatre in 2013 after protesters disrupted it. An Oxford college called off a debate on abortion last year because of feminist criticism, and another British university banned the pop song Blurred Lines because of the belief it encouraged rape.

The point is not that activists are wrong. It is that they are so convinced they are right that they are prepared to shout down anyone who disagrees. This is a grim, insidious way of thinking.

It can, of course, afflict the Right as well as the Left. David Cameron’s Conservatives have banned extremist speeches in British universities. And academic critics of Israel in the United States have been hounded out of their jobs, a neat inversion of the Wellington case.

Free speech is tested most keenly by vile ideas – by Holocaust denials or protobacco sophistry or praise for jihadists. These will always be infuriating for the vast majority of us. We should criticise them vigorously. But we must have the confidence to let them be spoken.