Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon is justifiably unhappy with the horrible treatment meted out to Julie Bindel, a “polarizing” lesbian feminist writer who withdrew from a debate at the University of Manchester after receiving a torrent of Internet abuse, in part for holding views similar to my own regarding so-called sex-change operations. She received, according to Ms. Williams’s report, “over 30 harassing messages,” including death threats and rape threats. Ms. Bindel, she writes, had been “bullied.”

Perhaps she should consult with her colleague Natasha Lennard, who could not muster a word of criticism for the attempted bullying of David Petraeus at the City University of New York. Ms. Bindel received ghastly threats online; General Petraeus was surrounding by a howling mob screaming obscenities at him, with the explicit goal of driving him off campus by making his life “a living hell.”

Which is to say, the goals of the mobs at Manchester and CUNY are identical, and their tactics comparable. Was one worse than the other? Anybody who has ever published a controversial sentence has received abusive or threatening messages online; fewer get the howling-mob treatment. Let us concede that rape threats are a special kind of awful. I myself tend to take threats from the physically present more seriously than those issued online, but, call it a wash, especially considering that General Petraeus has in his time presumably been threatened by people more worrisome than a slovenly selection of CUNY riff-raff.

According to Salon, the treatment given Petraeus was not an attempt at “bullying,” but a “protest.” Call it what you will, the action at CUNY had exactly the same point at the actions at Manchester: To shut down discourse rather than to further it.

My own feeling is that former members of the Obama administration, lesbian feminist activists, or, for that matter, anybody who happens to be both ought to be treated civilly when on a college campus, especially in an academic or intellectual capacity. But perhaps the high-minded writers at Salon are making some distinction that is not readily apparent to me.