Back in the early Aughts, we definitely didn't live in a world where people could deal with these kinds of questions. Hell, to even attempt to understand why we had been attacked was deemed support for terrorism. It was a bleak time in American history, though bleak times in American history might be most of the time in American history, so that may not be saying much.

(Oh look, more evidence just today.)

Let me also add that I think killing civilians is wrong regardless of who those civilians are, just so there's no doubt in what follows. I'm trying to get at what discourse is OK among faculty at a public university, and what discourse should result in harsh penalties for university departments, like what's happening at Columbia. That out of the way:

We know civilians are being targeted, and we know journalists are as well. It's not really up for debate, and I point you to google for the copious evidence.

But even if you don't agree that there is clear evidence Israel has targeted civilians, let's stipulate it for the moment. So, considering that Hamas argues, and has points in international law in favor of their argument, that as an occupied and/or besieged populace, it is legal for them to strike out at the people occupying besieging them. Put differently, Hamas believes they are at war, under military siege, and therefore what they did was an act of war. Many throughout the world see their actions as part of the resistance movement, even if they condemn violence against civilians and taking civilians hostage (Israel, to be clear, also regularly takes civilians hostage; and, it should be noted, regularly uses human shields).

Is this discourse, which might end up with some people arguing in support of Hamas, allowable, or do we have to ban it from universities? Who, then, gets to decide which attacks on civilians are terrorism, and which aren't? And therefore, which faculty can support, and which they can't?

Interesting. How would we classify Israel's killing of citizens in Gaza?

A related question: Should the university allow debate about who is a terrorism, and what acts are terrorism, or should the university require all faculty to adhere to the official U.S. list of designated terrorist groups?

I think Ward Churchill is a good case to think about in this context. I assume everyone here is old enough to remember how in 2005, someone discovered his 2001 essay calling the victims of 9/11 "Little Eichmanns," creating an outrage that ultimately resulted in Churchill losing his job as a tenured member of the faculty at UC Boulder 2 years later. But remember, he didn't lose his job for the 2001 essay; he lost it because of research misconduct. Would he have been fired if he hadn't written the 2001 essay, or if the article had never been brought to the general public's attention? Who knows; his scholarship, such as it was, seems to have been largely ignored even within his field until then. But the main point is, Churchill was fired because of his academic work.