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Geary Johansen's avatar

I agree completely with your argument on free speech, whilst disagreeing completely with the speech of the protestors. That's how free speech is supposed to work- people should be free to voice an opinion and other people should be free to respond with a counter opinion.

What I will say is that the protestors are lucky that US law does not recognise the right of sovereign states to sue for defamation, as they are not individuals with reputational interests and as such have no standing to sue. If they did then the claim that Israel has been committing genocide would quickly be exposed as a false and baseless propaganda claim. War is horrible, but it is not genocide.

What makes it worse is we now have the receipts. One would have expected that support for the ceasefire would be universal. But this is not the case, although many on the Left welcomed the news. With many others, it's obvious that sympathy for innocent Gaza civilians was merely an excuse for a pathological and unreasoning desire to see the State of Israel harmed, discredited, or even dissolved.

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Ryan M Allen's avatar

Agreed. I wrote something similar when it first started happening to our international students https://open.substack.com/pub/collegetowns/p/deporting-international-students

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