Let the Activists Have Their Loathsome Rallies
I am grateful to call home a country where, despite illiberal criticism of open debate, freedom of expression still prevails.
Sitting on an outdoor bench at Bard College on Thursday, I watched a procession of several dozen students weave its way across the New York State campus. A young white man with a bullhorn in his hand and a kaffiyeh around his neck led the group in chants of “Long live the intifada” and “No peace on stolen land.” The protesters displayed Palestinian flags and banners that provocatively read from the river to the sea. Although some observers almost certainly disagreed with the message, others stood up and applauded the students as they passed. All of this transpired peacefully, if obnoxiously, and after five minutes the area was silent again.
Like many Americans, I am appalled by the student and political organizations that have excused or, in some cases, rallied in celebration of the October 7 Hamas attack on Jewish civilians, the deadliest single-day assault on Jews in Israel’s history. But I am also grateful to call home a country where such rallies are permissible and where, despite the illiberal criticism of open debate that became fashionable in the summer of 2020, freedom of expression still prevails.
The same day that I watched American liberal-arts students so callously miss the point, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told police, “Pro-Palestinian demonstrations must be prohibited because they are likely to generate disturbances to the public order.” He stipulated that the organization of protests would lead to arrest, and further noted that any foreigner who commits anti-Semitic acts would be “immediately expelled.”
This message might surprise Americans who think French people protest at the drop of a hat. Usually, they do. In Paris, especially the area where I have lived for years, not far from the Place de la République—I move between France and the U.S.—“manifestations” are a feature of daily life. French people demonstrate in service of just about any domestic or foreign cause you can imagine, including women’s rights in Iran and justice for George Floyd. In recent years, street protests against fuel-tax increases, retirement reform, and the shooting of a young motorist have turned spectacularly violent and led to looting. Even so the government did not categorically impede public demonstrations.
But “the right to protest is not a fundamental right in France,” Sebastian Roché, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research and Sciences Po Grenoble, told me. “The Ministry of the Interior is authorized to limit this right on the grounds of public order, and local prefects enforce prohibitions. Since 1935, we have had this system of administrative control. Furthermore, the political messages of the President (during public speeches) are taken as instructions by the prefects. If the President expresses total solidarity with the government of Israel, it is locally interpreted in terms of law enforcement: no room for criticism.”
The right to speak isn’t limitless, either. French Muslims cite interdictions against public display of the veil as a violation of their ability to express themselves freely, and hate speech is a crime. Holocaust denial carries various penalties up to imprisonment. Even merely offensive speech can be against the law, as many outside observers learned when the fashion designer John Galliano was arrested in 2011 for making anti-Semitic comments at a bar. The far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour has been convicted multiple times for violating hate-speech laws, including in 2022, when he was fined 10,000 euros for describing unaccompanied migrant children as “thieves,” “rapists,” and “murderers.”
If the speech context is different from ours, so is the situation on the ground, as it were. France is home to both the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe. In recent years, Islamist terrorists have attacked Paris and other regions repeatedly, and have targeted Jews. In 2012, a French-born Muslim of Algerian descent pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda killed a rabbi and three children outside the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse. The year 2015 saw the Charlie Hebdo killings, the attack on a kosher supermarket, and the assault on the Bataclan. These incidents spurred record numbers of French-born Jews to immigrate to Israel.
It was against this backdrop, and following a call by a former Hamas leader for a global “day of rage,” that the government banned pro-Palestinian protests. (A Muslim immigrant may have been heeding this call when he stabbed to death a high-school teacher last Friday in the town of Arras.) During a televised address, French President Emmanuel Macron urged the country to “stay united” and condemned Hamas, maintaining that France’s “first duty” was to protect French Jews. But demonstrators at the Place de la République, and in cities across the country, had their own ideas. They defied the ban, chanting “Palestine will prevail” as police dressed in riot gear fired tear gas and water cannons into the crowds.
Germany, too, prohibited public protests in support of Palestinian causes last week. But as in France, the law was disregarded and the demonstrations still took place. That latter fact “creates other tensions,” Roché explained, beginning with the appearance that the governments are either ineffectual or heavy-handed, and their official position biased.
The question of how to balance freedom of expression and assembly with legitimate security concerns is not exactly easy to answer. Protests can of course devolve into violence, as did the tiki-torch march in Charlottesville, Virginia, or the various Proud Boys clashes that reached their nadir in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As the conflict in Israel has once again highlighted, we are surrounded by opinions, arguments, and sensibilities that may strike many of us as not just vile but potentially threatening.
The writer Abigail Shrier expressed a common sentiment when she wrote on X, “The fact that college students greeted news of Hamas’s mass murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping of Jewish innocents with on-campus rallies for Hamas, is unimaginably dark. Americans have only begun to absorb this.”
Even as I’m angered by the spectacle of activists and students praising homicidal actors from afar, I’m grateful for America’s comparatively extreme free-speech norms, its formal and informal commitment first of all to personal liberty. This culture of free exchange is a privilege we take for granted at our own peril. This is what the leaders of the ACLU understood when they defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through the largely Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, in the late 1970s. And it is a core commitment too many have been willing to sacrifice in the feelings-first debates around cancel culture.
Sitting on that bench last week, watching those students march by and feeling uncomfortable with the glibness of their statements and actions—in their foisting themselves on perfect strangers who may very well have been grieving—I was nonetheless proud to be on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. In Paris those same statements might have been drowned in clouds of tear gas.