Speech codes aren’t good for anyone but they present a real challenge to pro-Israel students.

From the Jerusalem Post.

How campus speech codes silence the pro-Israel community

The infamous Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns and “apartheid week” displays on college campuses are not the only threat to Jewish students. A much greater threat looms: the inability for students to publicly defend their beliefs. While universities claim to be havens of open debate and intellectual curiosity, they are in reality black holes of political correctness. On campus, only certain ideas are worthy of consideration and Zionism is definitely not one of them. This culture doesn’t just threaten members of the Jewish community, who are terrified to challenge those who accuse Israel of the most heinous crimes. Rather, it threatens all of us who value free speech and its ability to encourage criticism, debate, and original thought on college campuses.

While speech codes are thought to be a thing of the 90s, the truth is that college students today are facing the most serious threats to their civil liberties. From “trigger warnings” to “free speech zones,” universities are slowly training students to become hypersensitive and incapable of deviating from ideologies that are in vogue…

The problem for Jewish students is that showing support for Israel on campus can be very offensive to anti-Israel students. Despite being the only progressive democracy in its region, many college students are absolutely convinced that Israel is to blame for all the problems of the Middle East. University departments, professors, and student groups are all actively pushing an anti-Israel agenda through divestment campaigns, apartheid week protests, and bigoted propaganda. They create a colonialist narrative that depicts Israelis as powerful white Westerners taking over an indigenous and vulnerable Arab population. As such, students regularly accuse Israel of crimes against humanity and label her supporters as promoters of those crimes.