On Feb. 1, Columbia University hosted a debate titled “Friendly Fire.” The topic of the debate was the Oct. 4, 2006 student protest against anti-immigrant Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist. Students took the stage and unfurled banners in that protest, with Gilchrist cutting his speech short and leaving the stage.
On one side of the debate was New York City’s Village Voice journalist Nat Hentoff. Hentoff had published a Nov. 3, 2006 article called “Mugging the Minutemen at Columbia,” criticizing the student protest for infringing on Gilchrist’s “free speech.”
On the other side of the debate was Karina Garcia, who was one of the organizers of the protest.
The following is an abridged version of Garcia’s opening remarks.
Mr. Hentoff projects himself as a man of principle. He is a strict adherent to the principle of free speech, and from his summit, he projects himself as consistently neutral. He would have us believe that he carries out this noble and sacred mission to defend free speech against all its attackers, whether they come from the left, the middle, the right or the ultra-right.
According to Hentoff’s argument, anyone—regardless of how odious or destructive their speech might be—has the absolute right to express that speech. The remedy to “bad speech,” the argument goes, is more speech. Meaning that in the course of the debate, in the course of dialogue, bad speech can be overcome by good speech.
Based on this eminently reasonable position, Mr. Hentoff asserts that the Minutemen were denied their right to free speech. Not only were they denied this right, they were actually “mugged.” That, in fact, is the title of his article: “The mugging of the Minutemen.” That phrase seems to fortify a particular version of what happened on Oct. 4.
Will Hentoff’s eminently reasonable position withstand serious examination? To the contrary, we find that his recounting of the Minutemen protest is based on incorrect facts. His line of argument knocks down a straw man and not a real enemy. His legal arguments relating to the First Amendment are hollow and without substance.
His political arguments are based on the comfort of a person who does not have to suffer the bloody consequences of hate speech. Most shocking of all, Mr. Hentoff’s own record on free speech is far from consistent.
Free speech—for anti-women thugs?
Despite his neutral veneer, Mr. Hentoff does indeed like some groups and not others. What did he have to say when Operation Rescue, a group of anti-women bigots, used tactics far more disruptive, far more abusive, far worse than holding up banners and chanting anti-racist slogans like we did at the Minutemen protest, to intimidate women going into health clinics?
In a Feb. 6, 1989 article in the Washington Post, he compared the right-wing goons of Operation Rescue to the abolitionists for bravely challenging unjust laws. In his analogy, pregnant women are like slave-owners, and “like the slave, the fetus is property and its owner can dispose of it.” He wrote, “Operation Rescue, and similar demonstrations, are not violent. Entrances are blocked, and so they were in some nonviolent civil rights demonstrations. There is shouting, some of it not very civil, back and forth across the lines, but so there was in the 1960s.”
Mr. Hentoff wrote approvingly of the organization that harassed and intimidated women who were trying to get their health care needs from a doctor, including their right to terminate their pregnancy.
So for Mr. Hentoff, it’s okay for Operation Rescue to blockade doctors’ offices, surround the cars of pregnant women and yell, “Murderer! Murderer!” in their face—women going through intense personal trauma. Why is it alright to do that, Mr. Hentoff, to women, minding their business, controlling their bodies?
These women aren’t leaders of armed vigilante organizations, like Jim Gilchrist—far from it. He supports these anti-abortion thugs but publicly attacks students who stand up for their families during the speech of one of the country’s leading anti-immigrant vigilantes.
What happened on Oct. 4
Is Mr. Hentoff a man of principle? His principles are not consistently applied.
Mr. Hentoff has in fact created a straw man, a fiction, and then proceeded in the course of his argument to knock down the straw man. It is my contention here that we must arrive at a perspective regarding what happened on Oct. 4 based on a more solid foundation.
First, just to be clear, the only people attacked on stage that day were the student protesters. Video clearly shows who’s kicking whom. It clearly shows Mr. Gilchrist smiling and waving and engaging in other acts of ridiculous bravado. More accurate media reporting in the last several weeks has made this point explicit, even if Mr. Hentoff can’t seem to acknowledge it. I’ll leave it to him to explain how I can “mug” someone without touching them.
On the issue of free speech, we can reference the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Does this apply to what happened on Oct. 4? The First Amendment mentions Congress. It has nothing to do with speaking up loudly. It is meant to prevent the government from abridging people’s rights—it doesn’t mean every fascist and racist can speak without interruption. I am not the government—I am the daughter of immigrant parents.
The Minutemen were not denied their right to speak at Columbia, nor did we request that the administration bar them from speaking. The government certainly did not step in, so in no ways were Mr. Gilchrist’s First Amendment rights violated. He was neither mugged nor deprived of his Constitutional liberties.
Does free speech protect racism?
Now to the issue of why we were protesting—which is the thing Mr. Hentoff wants the least to deal with. He would like to again rip the issue of free speech from associated issues regarding basic freedom, basic democracy and social justice. We cannot disassociate the issue of free speech from other issues. The law recognizes free speech as something organically connected to its context.
For instance, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination based on race, ethnicity and national origin illegal. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act also recognizes the impermissibility of allowing racism and discrimination in an educational institution that receives any kind of federal funding from creating a hostile learning environment.
Racism and discrimination, as is recognized in Title VI, can become so repugnant and obstructive to students that it inhibits their participation and their learning. It’s on this basis that universities have declared that hate speech, extreme and vicious racism, sexism and homophobia lend to the creation of a hostile learning environment for Black, Latino, LGBT and women students.
This principle of civil rights law, very closely associated with the issue of free speech, is also recognized in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as amended, which prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, gender and national origin, Title IX Education Amendments of 1972, which makes it illegal to discriminate against women and girls in education including subjecting them to a hostile learning environment as a consequence of expressions of extreme sexism and other forms of anti-women bigotry.
I have to tell you Mr. Hentoff, you may not have felt threatened in your illustrious career, but I’ve felt it.
When I saw the Minutemen—an armed vigilante group whose sole purpose is to chase and hunt down Mexicans and other Latinos at the U.S.-Mexico border, I made a decision then and there that I was going to be there to challenge them.
Mr. Gilchrist was not prevented from coming to Columbia. What he wants is a pristine environment free of challenge. When I debated him one-on-one a few days later on Pacifica radio, he brought a lawyer with him and stopped speaking after a couple of minutes. He ended the debate by storming out of the studio, because he couldn’t stand to have an honest argument on the radio. He wants to be free to spew his anti-immigrant garbage without anyone challenging him.
Free speech does not mean that fascists can go around and promote their violent message of hate without being interrupted. Did he leave the debate because we mugged him there? No, he left because Mr. Gilchist has no interest in having a debate. He wants an environment provided to him by Fox News, which presents him—like you do, Mr. Hentoff—as a victim of student mugging.
I challenge Mr. Hentoff at the very core of his argument. History has proven that good speech doesn’t always conquer bad speech. Instead of being annihilated in dialogue, bad speech finds itself promoted through the mainstream media, bad speech is promoted by the established authorities, bad speech leads to recruiting in the thousands.
In those periods, whom does history condemn? It condemns those who remained inactive, those who refused to stand up, and above all, it condemns the dilettantes who self-righteously protected that “bad speech” from challenge, and thereby served as the accomplice of the violent, racist organizations who use it as a cover.
“Stop the war against immigrants,” Los Angeles, Aug. 29, 2006.
Photo: Ian Thompson
