Georgetown Law Dean Defends Hosting Antisemite, Citing Previous Speakers Who ‘Find Gay Marriage Immoral’

This morning, Georgetown Law dean of students Mitch Bailin met with a group of Jewish students to discuss the growing controversy surrounding an upcoming campus event featuring Mohammed El-Kurd. The Palestinian activist and writer has claimed that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred” and “feed their warriors our own”; glorified the Second Intifada; called it “psychotic” to call for Palestinians to be peaceful; and expressed his “hope” that “every one of” the Israeli settlers “dies in the most torturous & slow ways,” and “that they see their mothers suffering (not that these conscienceless pigs would care).” He is currently scheduled to speak on campus for an event hosted by the Georgetown Law chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) this Tuesday.

According to multiple students in the meeting, and a transcript of recorded audio provided to National Review, Dean Bailin defended the event on free-speech grounds, saying: “When we have a student organization that is intending to host a speaker, one of the first principles that we have is that there is a lot of latitude…We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many. Those are things that we think are important to educational values, to promoting free speech, to promoting a free discussion of ideas, even if those ideas are deeply, deeply offensive.”

The school’s commitment to “a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community” seems to have strengthened since January, when Georgetown Law suspended Ilya Shapiro for a tweet criticizing the Biden administration’s use of racial preferences in Supreme Court nominations on the heels of an activist-led backlash. (Shapiro’s indefinite suspension, “pending an investigation” into his tweet, is now in its 13th week). But Georgetown Law has yet to respond to an inquiry about whether “the school’s free-speech guidelines have changed” since the Shapiro episode.

Bailin himself attended the February student sit-in calling for Shapiro’s termination, assuring leaders of the school’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA) that he would “find [them] a space” to cry due to the emotional burden of Shapiro’s tweet. But at this morning’s meeting with Jewish students, the dean was more circumspect, arguing that the school has a history of hosting speakers who have been “at the edge” of the law school’s anti-discrimination policy. When pushed to cite specific examples, Bailin said: “The university has had speakers who have definitely said they find gay marriage, gay practice, gay individuals, completely immoral. We have had speakers who have said the same thing about trans people.”

The comparison — drawing an equivalence between the position that Barack Obama ran on in 2008 and the call for the genocide of an entire ethnic population — prompted Rachel Wolff, a Jewish first-year law student in the meeting, to push back: “I kind of fail to see how that’s the same thing as someone who goes online and regularly calls for the genocide of Israeli Jews,” she told Bailin. “It’s not the same thing.” The interchange continued:

Bailin: “Oh I’m not saying it’s the same thing, I’m saying there have been — ”

Wolff: “But it’s not even comparable.”

Bailin: “Others disagree with you. Other students disagree with you.”

Wolff: “Calling for a genocide versus calling something immoral is comparable to you?”

Bailin: “No, it’s not comparable to me.”

Wolff: “Okay.”

Bailin: “Yeah. No, I’m not saying it’s comparable. I’m saying there are people who feel just as strongly on campus that it makes them completely unsafe here.”

Right. Well, there are people on Georgetown Law’s campus who also feel strongly that a tweet criticizing the nomination of judges on the basis of race and gender is a fireable offense. Does that mean that we should take them seriously? The reasonable, non-hysterical response would be a resounding “no.” The Georgetown Law administration, however, seems to think otherwise.

It would be one thing if Dean Bailin and his counterparts at the school applied this standard — as absurd as it is — consistently; i.e., that any speaker who students claim “makes them completely unsafe” should be viewed as a potential conflict with the school’s anti-discrimination policy. But of course, they don’t. When a right-leaning professor like Shapiro is accused of “putting students in danger,” to use the popular activist neologism, administrators were happy to waive the school’s stated commitment to free speech. But when speech that actually approaches the line of calls for mass violence come from left-wing sources, the school suddenly rediscovers the value of academic freedom, and cites absurd false equivalences regarding speakers who object to same-sex marriage on traditional moral grounds.

The entire interchange with Bailin is a revealing illustration of what happens when you conduct campus policy based on the whims of student activists: If your standard for appropriate speakers is based on what the loudest members of the student body say “makes them completely unsafe,” then a libertarian professor’s defense of colorblind equality is grounds for indefinite suspension. On the other hand, an antisemitic maniac who — among his variety of other colorful comments — threatened to “shoot” the “apartheid lovers” in the audience during an April 10 speech at Arizona State University is provided with space on campus to speak.

Georgetown Law should just be honest: It doesn’t care about “free speech,” or “justice and equality for all,” or any other principle for that matter. The leadership is terrified of a small but vocal minority of students, motivated by the raw desire for self-preservation, and — as a result — are satisfied to let school policy be dictated by a vindictive, infantile mob.