Is Penalizing Hamas Sympathizers ‘Cancel Culture’?

C onservatives and classical liberals have long resisted “cancel culture,” which, simply defined, is the tendency to destroy people’s careers or reputations typically without due process and on spurious or exaggerated charges. Yet in the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli men, women, and children, people are debating whether penalizing those who voice terrorist sympathies constitutes “cancel culture.”

Much of the debate centers on universities. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter claiming Israel was “entirely responsible” for Hamas’s murderous rampage on October 7. (Consider the implications: If Israel is entirely responsible, then those who attacked them weren’t only justified but compelled to do so.) Naturally, such sentiments sparked widespread backlash.

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, demanded that Harvard release the names of the students in each organization “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” David Duel, CEO of EasyHealth, posted individual students’ names online, telling Fox News: “We need to make sure these students pay a price and that their neighbors, friends, and employers know that they harbor these beliefs.”

Major donors to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford publicly condemned the colleges for failing to denounce the students’ views and vowed to withdraw their financial support. Some offers of employment were also retracted from individual students. After a New York University law student wrote an open letter claiming that Israel’s “regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary,” the law firm Winston & Strawn revoked its offer of employment to the individual. Davis Polk acted similarly, retracting offers from students at Harvard and Columbia whom they identified as leaders of the groups that had made similar statements. However, the New York Times reports that employers are reconsidering their decisions in a couple of cases in which students deny having authorized the letters.

Shadi Hamid, a columnist at the Washington Post, wrote on X that it’s “even more important to call [cancel culture] out when it affects those who we disagree with.” Writing for the New Republic, Timothy Noah — who denounces “left-wing witch hunts” as well as “right-wing witch hunts” — argues that “blackballing a bunch of college students based on their political views is abhorrent” since “they’re college students, for Christ’s sake,” and “even if they weren’t, they’d have a right to express their opinions.”

In some respects, the furious response to pro-Palestinian political expression does resemble other witch hunts. A Palestinian fiction writer, Adania Shibli, had her award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair canceled because of “the war in Israel,” the organizers said. This is reminiscent of the efforts to eliminate Russian literature from college syllabi after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. As Ramesh Ponnuru noted on Friday’s episode of The Editors, now is a time for sober judgment.

Few would argue that there’s no view whose expression can justifiably alienate one from polite society. But the bar ought to be high. In 2019, after a British woman, Maya Forstater, lost her job for writing on Twitter that there are only two sexes and that men cannot become women, she sued for unfair dismissal and won on appeal. One of the criteria the U.K. judge used to evaluate whether Forstater had been treated unfairly — or subjected to “cancel culture” — was whether her views as expressed could be considered “worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

This is a useful test. The judge gave examples of what should not be worthy of respect in a democratic society, and he therefore suggested the exclusion of Nazism and totalitarianism — in other words, only the most extreme beliefs that call for violence or the rights of others to be taken away — from legal protection in the context of employment. As I wrote in my column last week, Hamas’s worldview clearly fits that description.

In the U.K., as in the United States, Hamas is designated a terrorist organization. As it demonstrated by its sheer barbarism two weeks ago, Hamas is equivalent to ISIS. The KKK promoted the murder of black Americans. Hamas promotes the indiscriminate murder of Jews, both Israeli and American. Hamas targets civilians for rape, torture, kidnapping, and murder based on race, religion, and nationality.

And yet the response of a vocal minority on American college campuses to these atrocities was to call them “exhilarating,” “necessary,” and a step toward “victory.” How can such views be worthy of respect in a democratic society when they are antithetical to the principles of democracy?

Employers are well within their rights to prefer candidates whose opposition to terrorism is not in doubt. The same is true of donors interested in giving to universities and of countries deciding which immigrants to admit.

“Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence” is an oft-repeated phrase by proponents of cancel culture. Though sometimes misapplied, the statement is obviously, on its face, true. The relevant considerations are the content of the speech, the proposed consequences for it, and the standard by which the question is adjudicated.