PEN, Penn and Poo

It’s been a rough few weeks for the spoken word. Many reminders of things better left unsaid. Cringeworthy statements uttered without rebuttal. What passes for public debate nowadays is coarsened, debased and filled with falsehoods.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in Munich showing off her foreign policy bona fides by scolding the Germans for supporting Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. Clearly, Germans needed a crash course on mass murder taught by a failed bartender.

Predictably buffoonish and tasteless, it never occurred to Ocasio-Cortez that she brought the wrong message to the one country with a moral duty to defend Jews. With the Holocaust perpetually on their collective conscience, Germans (except for nearly one million Syrian refugees with their stowaway antisemitism) saw October 7, 2023 for what it was: an attempt to finish the job that Hitler started.

Back home in the United States, the freedom-to-write human rights group, PEN America, retracted an earlier public statement condemning the cancellation of Israeli stand-up comedian Guy Hochman’s shows in New York (protesters blocked the entrance) and Beverly Hills (the venue was targeted with threats of violence). The Beverly Hills performance could have been salvaged had Hochman been willing to publicly condemn his country. He refused. PEN initially supported his stance, stating that “placing a litmus test on someone to appear on stage” violates the very essence of free expression.

Soon thereafter, however, the organization had a change of heart. Free speech absolutists are not as categorical as they once were. The absolute now comes with an all-forgiving sliding scale. Free speech takes a back seat to a social justice crusade that is principally anti-American, anti-Western Civilization, anti-white and, of course, antisemitic.

Free speech absolutists are not as categorical as they once were. The absolute now comes with an all-forgiving sliding scale. Free speech takes a back seat to a social justice crusade that is principally anti-American, anti-Western Civilization, anti-white and, of course, antisemitic.

Upon further reflection, PEN decided that before taking the stage, the Israeli comedian must undergo a thorough self-debasement and a complete disavowal of his homeland. PEN failed to comprehend the irony of its hypocrisy. Not only had it forfeited any pretense to anticensorship, but it made itself the butt of any good comic’s social commentary.

PEN’s moral and institutional downfall was clearly foreshadowed. In February 2024, 500 writers signed a letter demanding that PEN condemn Israel for “murdering writers” in Gaza. Yes, when people think of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they immediately conjure images of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Back in 2015, PEN bestowed its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the surviving cartoonists of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Several hundred PEN members opposed giving the prize—effectively siding with terrorists over cartoonists.

Nearly the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo was slain by terrorists as punishment for mocking Islam, and its Prophet, on exactly seven covers of the magazine. Over a decade and nearly 550 covers, Catholicism was satirized 21 times. And yet the Vatican didn’t issue a Christian fatwa to murder artists packing pencils and inking pens.

Imagine if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-days Saints took the same barbaric umbrage over “The Book of Mormon.”

All of this was reminiscent of the UCLA campus during the 2023 academic year. Israel had gone to war against Hamas in Gaza. Qatari-funded professors incited keffiyeh-masked, slogan-chanting, hooky-playing students into antisemitic orgies that clearly violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—if civil rights applied to Jews in America, which apparently they did not. Students “glorified the martyrs” by preventing Jews from getting to class unless they publicly renounced any fealty for Israel.

Such is the present condition of free speech, which often protects vulgarity, trounces viewpoint diversity and penalizes truth. The First Amendment has been degraded, and the censorship of Jews is an all-too-common occurrence.

Bookstores have quietly refused to carry books by Jewish authors. Speaking venues open to all authors now maintain an unspoken anti-Jewish blacklist. Neutral sites are afraid of the backlash from allowing a pro-Israel author to take its stage. I know this firsthand as the author of “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”

The marketplace of ideas has ceased to be fully stocked because all ideas are no longer welcome. So much for Jews controlling Hollywood, mass media and book publishing.

Georgetown Law School hired a new dean, Liz Magill, who lost her old job as president of the University of Pennsylvania soon after her atrocious testimony before Congress concerning allegations of antisemitism at her school. When asked whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated Penn’s anti-harassment policy, she infamously remarked that it was “a context-dependent decision.”

Translation: If one frames speech as an attack against Israel, Israelis or Zionists, and in support of Palestinians, one can say and do almost anything and get away with it at Penn—including advocating for the killing of Jews on campus.

Would calling for the lynching of Blacks also be “context-dependent”? I assume Georgetown, as a Jesuit University, asked Magill whether she now has a more humanistic understanding of the First Amendment? (She wasn’t even correct on the law, a more troubling aspect of this appointment.) Jesuits, after all, are known for their common decency, a quality apparently anathema to Magill.

With New York City digging itself out of its signature black snow—the amalgamation of urban grime and canine poo—Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian Islamist, added to the list of objections her religion has toward Western ways. This time: dogs as household pets. She wrote, “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. … Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.” She later claimed it was a joke.

Florida’s Republican Congressman Randy Fine instantly took to X and responded, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

An ugly retort if there ever was one. On the other hand, the crude congressman is referring to a woman who on October 8 glorified and justified everything Gazans had done to Israelis the day before—the gang-rapes, beheadings and torching of infants. Her entire American existence is dedicated to supporting terrorism, spreading hatred of Zionists, denouncing America and Israel, and silencing victims of sexual assault—both Jewish and Muslim.

There are vulgarities in both directions.

We are surely not living through the Golden Age of political discourse. President Trump calls his many enemies “losers.” The once high art of witty put-downs has long lost the argument to guttural trash-talkers.

We are surely not living through the Golden Age of political discourse. President Trump calls his many enemies “losers.” The once high art of witty put-downs has long lost the argument to guttural trash-talkers.

In Europe, which has fewer free speech protections, the congressman’s remark would rightly be taken as hate speech. French actress Brigitte Bardot was arrested several times for statements about Muslims, also involving animals: “They will slit the throats of . . . our sheep, they will slit our own throats one day and we will have earned it.”

Of course, nowadays, many Europeans have sympathy for Fine’s intended meaning: Wherever there is Sharia law, public streets are overtaken by “no-go zones” and calls to prayer, Sharia courts usurp secular ones, grooming gangs roam in predatory fashion, and “immodestly” dressed women are hassled.

Now we see kicking man’s best friend to the curb all because dogs, too, offend Muslims. What, specifically, doesn’t offend Muslims?

That’s the point Secretary of State Marco Rubio more elegantly made at the Munich Security Conference—a far cry from AOC’s abysmal oratorical pratfall. Rubio said that Europeans should spend less time fretting about being accused of xenophobia and Islamophobia, and more time reclaiming national sovereignty and cultural heritage.

To do otherwise is to doom Western Civilization, and honest, truthful, civilized speech.