Counterpoint: There's no defense for defending terror

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The commentary "Coverage of antisemitism charge is reckless" (Opinion Exchange, Dec. 28) mischaracterizes what former University of Minnesota Regent Michael Hsu and I said in our complaint to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and completely misses the point.

First, it is true that criticism of Israel's military policies is not to be conflated with antisemitism. But legitimate criticism of Israel also should not be combined with justification or excuse for terrorism.

There simply are not two sides to what happened on Oct. 7, 2023, any more than there are two sides to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. Many Americans, including professors and students at the University of Minnesota, were very critical of the way President George W. Bush responded to 9/11. But nobody, or almost nobody, tried to justify or excuse the attack.

No professors at the university said the United States provoked the attack or that we were a "settler colonial power" or that Osama bin Laden was somehow engaged in self-defense by slaughtering civilians. Anyone who said such things after 9/11 would have been laughed off campus, and certainly would not have been allowed to use a University of Minnesota departmental website to say it.

One can call for a cease-fire in Gaza without justifying, excusing or ignoring the inherent evil in the attacks of Oct. 7. But these University of Minnesota faculty statements on Palestine that we reported to DOE seem unable to do that.

Israel is a Jewish country in a region where Jews have lived for a very long time. But people feel free to justify terrorists' attacks on Jewish civilians living in Israel in ways nobody ever thought of justifying attacks on the United States or any other country. Even the most pernicious regimes are not met with calls to abolish the country over which they rule.

Russian aggression, for example, has been blamed on Russian leaders, not on the very existence of Russia and the Russian people. But Jews are thought of differently by people who don't want Jews living anywhere, whether in Israel or anywhere else. We forget that lesson of history at our peril.

Second, none of this belongs on University of Minnesota websites. The collective "faculty statements" can be posted elsewhere so long as the faculty members are speaking in their personal capacity. They have no right to commandeer departmental websites for purposes of justifying terrorism or categorically attacking Israel and implicitly the many Jewish students here who support Israel.

The Minnesota Legislature would be furious if a university website were to be used to promote the political platform of the GOP or the DFL. Neither should a university website be used to promote the political platform of Hamas. That's not what the Minnesota taxpayers who fund our university are paying for.