The Meaning of ‘By Any Means Necessary’

The deranged and depraved pro-Hamas constituencies on Ivy League campuses have taken many liberties with their “higher” education over the past 20 months. What tops the list is a twisted misreading of the First Amendment. The fact that constitutional law professors never bothered to set them straight says a lot about the failed integrity of the custodians of our laws.

Remember when the three university presidents from Harvard, Pennsylvania and MIT testified before Congress in response to the alarming spike in antisemitic agitation on their campuses? Negligently advised by counsel and terrified of Jew-hating students (many of whom came from Middle Eastern countries where antisemitism is baked right into the pita bread), they were unable to say with certainty that calling for the genocide of Jews violates their policies on bullying and harassment.

It was a question with an obviously simple answer: Such threats are neither protected by principles of free speech nor academic freedom. But this unholy trinity had, as their first order of business, the avoidance of no-confidence votes at home. After all, their many antisemitic colleagues—incubated in “Humanities” departments flush with Qatari money and obsessed with anti-colonial fixations that depended on the demonization of Jews—would never forgive them had they conceded in the Congressional Record that calling for the destruction of Israel, and blaming Jewish students for a nonexistent genocide in Gaza, were both morally wrong and outside the scope of a university education.

Instead, they comported themselves as smugly superior to congressional representatives (although ironically, their fiercest interrogator, Elise Stefanik, was a Harvard graduate). The three presidents cagily replied that the answer depended on the “context.”

Wait a minute: There’s a context in which calling for the mass murder of Jews is permissible? Does the same situational loophole exist for the nostalgic lynching of African-Americans?

Advocating for the death of a people standing ten feet away from you is most assuredly not constitutionally protected. There is no “context” in which murderous threats are immune from governmental and university regulation.

Advocating for the death of a people standing ten feet away from you is most assuredly notconstitutionally protected. There is no “context” in which murderous threats are immune from governmental and university regulation.

And, yet, chants like “Globalize the Intifada!” somehow continued unabated after October 7, 2023—on both campuses and city streets.

Now we have witnessed the dangers inherent in casually downplaying the felonious loose lips of terrorist fanboys: Two Israeli Embassy employees expected soon to be engaged were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The gunman was apparently all hopped up on anti-American, anti-Israel animus. His social media postings were replete with “death to America,” “death to Israel,” and “I voted for Hamas.”

Unhinged, yes, but still to be taken seriously.

These tragic murders, and hundreds of lesser harassments, could have been avoided had we not allowed antisemites to make a mockery of the First Amendment. The more “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” “Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” “Glory to the Martyrs,” and the unrelenting slander “Genocide!” got repeated, the more such bloody passions were likely to be acted upon.

These tragic murders, and hundreds of lesser harassments, could have been avoided had we not allowed antisemites to make a mockery of the First Amendment.

These are the tragic consequences of living in a time of moral inversion. Hateful Muslims, self-hating Jews, malicious professors, Marxist elected officials, and pink-haired Queers for Palestine paraded their delusions on the campus green and public square. Thunderous gaslighting language eventually lit the match that materialized into senseless murder outside a Jewish museum.

The louder one cheers for terrorists, the more likely one will become inured to the meaning of those chants and chart his or her own lethal course.

America is far more permissive of free speech guarantees than other liberal democracies. For instance, the Supreme Court has upheld flag and cross-burnings, the use of vulgar language to express a political viewpoint, the disruption of military funerals, even marching neo-Nazis in a community of Holocaust survivors, as falling within the contours of free speech.

Ideas expressed offensively or insultingly do not forfeit First Amendment protections. But offensive and hurtful is not the same as threatening speech. The Supreme Court has held that “true threats” and “fighting words” do not receive free speech guarantees. Similarly, speech that “incites imminent lawlessness” loses all First Amendment safeguards.

Those proscribed categories of speech all occurred on campus to Jewish students and professors.

The First Amendment was ratified to disseminate ideas, not calls for murder. Universities spent the past 19 months conning America into believing that incitements such as “Globalize the Intifada!” are nothing but harmless expressions of public and moral support for Palestinians. In the truncated world of X, they are tantamount to political speech.

Did the encampments on campuses, with keffiyeh-shrouded hordes whipping each other into frenzies, barricading Jewish students from access to classrooms and libraries, in any way resemble the Lincoln-Douglas Debates? Did disruptions of Christmas tree lighting and commencement ceremonies have anything in common with tuxedo-clad debaters at the Oxford Union?

All throughout history those with wicked intentions insisted that words otherwise plainly calling for violence and mayhem meant something else entirely. Just look underneath all that shouting and spittle and you’ll discover a sanguine message of human virtue.

“The Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” anyone?

A self-motivated lunatic looking to burnish his name as a human rights crusader murdered a young couple: Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim. Soon after leaving his victims lying in their own blood, he removed his keffiyeh and shouted, “Free, free Palestine.” He was then heard to say, “I did this for Gaza.”

By all accounts he was no Islamist, but an American-born Hispanic socialist who took all that incessant chanting to heart. He apparently believed he had been given marching orders to bring the intifada to the streets of Washinton, D.C. There was no hidden meaning to globalizing the intifada: Wherever Jews are  on the globe, strike them down.

And that’s precisely what he “did for Gaza”—murdered two people without knowing whether they were Jews, or that they worked for the Embassy, or whether they worried about the plight of the Palestinians. (They happened to be all three, although Lischinsky, the product of a mixed marriage, was a practicing Christian and an avowed Zionist.)

Such added information was unnecessary because he was told to perform his tasks “by any means necessary.” That, too, was plainly understood: Vanquishing Israel demanded that this young couple be killed, just like it was “necessary” to torch Israeli infants, behead Israeli adults, and gangrape and mutilate Israeli teenagers on October 7.

These licenses to speak freely until fully absorbed into action is what Jew-haters were given under the false pretenses of the First Amendment. The only question we can already begin to presage is how long it will take before this latest assassin of Jewish dreams becomes a folk hero to antisemites everywhere.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His latest book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”