Campus administrators are trying to calm down students after a week of outrage over DePaul University professor Jason Hill writing in The Federalist to support Israel’s right to create defensible borders and repel Islamist attempts at genocide.
“Jason Hill, you can’t hide, we know you want genocide!” shouted students throwing papers over bannisters during a protest last week. The protesting students demanded that the university formally censure Hill, require him to take “racial sensitivity training,” and him to publicly apologize for writing that Israel has a “moral right” to annex the West Bank because it is territory it won during a war initiated by enemies who believe Israel and Israelis should be wiped from the earth.
Several student groups have denounced Hill’s praise for Jewish and Western civilization’s achievements as “racist, anti-Palestinian, xenophobic, sexist and Islamophobic,” characterizing his criticisms of Sharia law as “uncivilized,” “barbaric,” and “primitive.” More than 3,000 have signed an online petition denouncing him.
So far, the Catholic university has refused to censure Hill, with President Gabriel Esteban telling students in an email their institution supports academic freedom and free speech for tenured faculty.
“Should faculty be allowed to express a provocative position?” Esteban wrote. “The short answer is yes. Yet, DePaul aspires to be a community marked by mutual respect, always aware of the potential impact of our words and actions. Both of these outcomes are achievable.”
WE THE STUDENTS DEMAND @DePaulU TO CENSURE PROFESSOR JASON HILL NOW!! We will not stop until our demands are met! #WhatMustBeDone #DePaulDumpHill #HereWeDo pic.twitter.com/kc61I3Qg3E
— SJP DePaul (@SJPDePaul) April 24, 2019
“We the students of DePaul demand the administration censure Jason Hill” // “Hey hey! Ho ho! Racism on campus has got to go!”#DePaulDumpHill #WhatMustBeDone pic.twitter.com/P4kadTUin1
— DePaul Democrats (@DePaulDems) April 24, 2019
“We weren’t calling for DePaul to fire him, we just wanted them to say that this was unacceptable,” student Hadyia Afzal told the campus newspaper, which labeled The Federalist a “right-wing” publication. “The administration hasn’t really learned how to take students seriously when it comes to these debates, which is disappointing.”
“I don’t feel safe as a Muslim student knowing that someone like this is on our campus,” Afzal said. “It’s ridiculous that my tuition is going to the salary of an Islamophobe, of a transphobe, of a very sexist man.”
Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul, is gay and a naturalized immigrant to the United States from Jamaica. In the Federalist article, he wrote:
the [Palestinian Authority] has destroyed the freedom Palestinians enjoyed under Israeli rule and their economy through kleptocracy, corruption, nepotism, and authoritarian forms of governance subject to none of the checks and balances that characterize Israel’s Knesset. …
Not all cultures are indeed equal. Some are abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles—or lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens.
Given the voting patterns of Palestinians—towards Islamicism and terrorist organizations for the most part—that openly advocate and work for Israeli and Jewish destruction and annihilation, a strong argument can and ought to be made to strip Palestinians of their right to vote—period. The regional hostilities towards Israel in the Middle East are such that Israel must take those threats seriously.
You can read it all here. He has been called a purveyor of “hate speech” and “genocide” while explicitly in the article opposing genocide, affirming universal human rights, and endorsing the humanity of Palestinians and Islamists while forcefully rejecting their majority support for terrorism and genocide.
https://twitter.com/BlairImani/status/1121162790092328961
“We live in an age where there is an abysmal lack of intellectual and moral leadership,” Hill told Newsweek. “I take myself to be such a leader, and I have no intentions of issuing any apologies. I’ve spoken what I believe to be the truth, and I stand firm in what I believe in.”
