RUTHFULLY YOURS

Brandeis University junior Khadijah Lynch who tweeted she has “no sympathy” for slain NYPD officers, shown here on “Wake Up With Tayla Andre, “Dec. 24, 2014.
Photo Credit: mixcloud.com

There’s an ugly tempest brewing at Brandeis University and it’s based, at least in part, on free speech, tolerance and student safety. The storm grew out of a more generalized anger with the state of public discourse and of the safety of individuals in our society at large.

But at this point, one black self-described revolutionary and one Jewish conservative journalist, both Brandeis students, are the figureheads in a battle for the soul of an institution.

That institution, Brandeis University, was founded so that Jews, barred from most colleges by anti-Semitism, could find an open door to attain the education they desired. The school was named after the Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, whose distillation of the essence of freedom of speech has stood for decades as the lynchpin for America, and, in turn, much of the western world.

It was also Louis Brandeis, in an earlier incarnation as a lawyer, who brought humanity into the justice system. His famous “Brandeis Brief” for the first time opened the way for courts to consider human facts, not just legal doctrine, when making decisions about the lives of those people.

DEATHS BY POLICE OFFICERS FOLLOWED BY DEATH OF POLICE OFFICERS

The deaths of black unarmed men at the hands of police officers, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City this summer led to days of protests which increased in fury and exploded in violence after grand juries in both cases declined to indict the police officers involved.

Those deaths were followed by the execution-style murder of two random New York City police officers by a man pledging vengeance for the murders of Brown and Garner.

In response to the death of  the two officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu on Dec. 20, a Brandeis junior, Khadijah Lynch, tweeted the following: “i have no sympathy for the police officers who were murdered today.” She followed that bleet with another, the next day: “lmao, all[,] i just really don’t have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist f[expletive deleted]ing country.”

Justice Brandeis might have been first in line to offer to defend Lynch if she were threatened with expulsion for expressing her views publicly. But no one made any such threats. Instead, another Brandeis student took what Lynch placed in the public arena, and wrote and published an article about it for his site that same day. Daniel Mael, a Brandies senior and journalist for the site TruthRevolt.com, merely sent out further what Lynch had already launched.

What Mael wrote was little more than a description of Lynch and what she tweeted. All facts. All taken from public information. All fair game. And then some commenters to Mael’s article posted some seriously ugly talkbacks. Also free speech. Also fairly common in the world of Internet websites with any political orientation.

PUBLIC REACTION BY BRANDEIS COMMUNITY

It was at this point that certain members of the Brandeis community decided to rally ’round Lynch, raising the issue of “community” and “safety.” But it was too late for such hamishe invocations. Once Lynch chose to make her views public by using social media (one that could have been set on private, but was not), she left the cocoon of the university; her righteous defenders were unlanced. But that did not stop them.

No Brandeis Lynch defenders publicly praised her lack of sympathy for the murdered police officers, but one student, Michael Piccione, sent an email on Dec. 22 to more than 200 members of the Brandeis community. Piccione’s statement condemned Mael for “compromising” Lynch’s security and for continuing to endanger her. What Piccione demanded, in his own and in the name of others, was that “action [be] taken to hold this student accountable for his actions.”

Piccione either was ignorant of or merely ignored the difference between Lynch’s decision to put her views out on the public stage, and what Mael did with those views once placed there. His mass email demonized Mael, conflating the journalist’s words and actions with those of misguided and cretinous commenters on Lynch’s tweets. He also took the opportunity to state, as if fact, that the news site for which Mael writes is largely followed by “white supremacist[s]” thereby smearing Mael with the same brush.

Another email was sent out later that evening to the Brandeis community by the leaders of the Brandeis University Undergraduate Student Union. This group issued a full-throated defense of Lynch and condemnation of her attackers, while distancing itself very gingerly from the substance of her tweets. But not one word about Mael and his free speech rights.

When asked, Mael told The Jewish Press: “It is sad that the Brandeis Student Union failed to condemn Ms. Lynch’s vicious rhetoric. I believe that the leaders of the campus community should have the moral courage to take a stand in favor of humanity and against her utter lack of empathy for the murder of American police officers.”

Neither the student government leadership nor, not surprisingly, Michael Piccione mentioned Daniel Mael’s right of free speech and opinion. This disappointed Mael as well. He commented to The Jewish Press:

It is unfortunate that not a single member of the faculty or student administration has condemned the derogatory and abusive language used online that was often libelous. The campaign of grotesque language has created an atmosphere is incitement and intimidation. The silence of campus leaders in this situation is deeply saddening and worrisome.

Attempts by The Jewish Press to obtain a comment from Brandeis University went unanswered.

An email petition campaign, however, was started by an external “Coalition for A Safe Brandeis” asking for signatures calling on Brandeis University to secure Mael’s “safety and free speech rights.” Many alumni have signed the petition, expressing disgust over the contretemps and dismay that the administration has been absent without leave.

Perhaps most troublesome in the student response is that Piccione’s email cites various ways in which Mael may have violated certain aspects of Brandeis University’s Student Conduct Code.

Had Mael scooped up Lynch’s private handwritten notes, Piccione may have had a leg to stand on. But to claim that anything Mael did violated the student conduct code is at the very least preposterous. Still worse, Piccione, as the Daily Caller first noted, is a member of the Student Conduct Board. Whether his emphatic declarations that Mael’s conduct violated the school conduct code, given his role, constitutes an abuse of position, it surely was intended to invest his words with additional weight. The idea that Mael “stalked” or “endangered the health, safety or welfare” of Lynch by simply amplifying her own words is, well, sophomoric.

Most of what Lynch’s defenders excoriate Mael over is making public what Lynch and they claim were her private views. That claim, of course, fails utterly because Lynch chose to publicly share her lack of sympathy for the cold-blooded murder of two completely random police officers.

Not one Mael critic has come up with any errors or inaccuracies in his articles. Some parroted a groundless claim of Lynch’s that Mael slandered her, but that was made in writing and easily dismissible as an improper invocation of the term. Lynch wrote in an email to Mael, who wrote her before publishing his article:

“I do not want my personal opinion publicized and if you do not abide by my wishes I constitute [sic] your disregard as slander.”

LYNCH ON A PUBLIC RADIO SHOW CONTINUES EXPRESSING HER HATRED OF THE POLICE

But this privacy claim is even more ridiculous given Lynch’s subsequent appearance on a public radio station to discuss her views about the tweets and the response to them. Lynch said she wanted to put her tweets in context, and her appearance on the “Wake Up with Tayla Andre” show allowed her to do just that.

The context she demanded people know is what she understands to be the “rampant and explicit and very, very visible acts of violence against black and brown bodies that has been happening.” She spends more than an hour expressing her fury about the complacency surrounding the deaths of unarmed blacks at the hands of police officers. Never mind that violent protests and riots followed the killings by the police officers. And never mind that there were no riots or any violence following the killings of the police officers.

Lynch stood her ground, refusing to backtrack on what she tweeted. Not even when asked whether she felt any differently, given that the two police officers who were killed were both minorities. Nope. Lynch said that minority members of police departments have an obligation “to speak up against their own institutions,” and those who are not “are just as guilty as the ones who are committing violence against black or brown bodies.”

Here are just some of the statements Lynch made during the interview:

America is a racist institution which relies and thrives on anti-blackness. American law enforcement is attacking black people. There are quotas that have to be reached [for arresting black people]. The American Law Enforcement today are the descendants of the slave overseers, who have a legacy of protecting capitalism. You’all are killing my people every single day. The police are shooting blacks on sight.

The radio show host congratulates Lynch on her heroic stand:

“I am very and thoroughly impressed,” Andre said to Lynch. “You stand by your words! You didn’t say, ‘oh, they were minorities, I take that back,’ no, ‘I stand by my word, I had no sympathy, as many of ours that have been taken  away, I have no sympathy.’”

To which Lynch replies: “I don’t.”

LYNCH CLAIMS SHE DID NOT STEP DOWN FROM LEADERSHIP ROLE AT BRANDEIS AAAS

The interviewer was bothered by one thing, however. She wanted to know why Lynch agreed to step down as a student leader in Brandeis’s African and African-American Studies Department. Lynch ended up saying that she had not actually resigned, despite what members of the Brandeis administration said publicly. Lynch said she was told that it might be best if she resigned, but she never officially resigned. Both Lynch and Andre ended up concluding that Lynch still held her position in the AAAS department. That will be news to the department and the university.

One of the callers to the show warned Lynch that appearing on the show and making the kinds of comments she has made publicly may harm her in terms of future employment or in other ways. He told her that putting it out on social media and in other ways would put it out there for everyone to discuss. Lynch rebuffed the caller’s concern. She said, “I’m alive and here for it.”

As a young black woman, Lynch clearly sees current events through the prism of her own pain, which is understandable. What is harder to understand is her inability to see that her fury at targeting “all black and brown bodies” as criminals, as guilty, as bad or as wrong should enable her to see that it is also wrong to target all police officers or all whites or all Jews as “rich white rapists, racists, colonialists, Zionists, capitalists,” which is exactly what she does, at the end of her radio interview, when she reads aloud a poem she wrote.

LYNCH LUMPS RICH WHITE RAPISTS, CAPITALISTS, ZIONISTS AND COLONISTS AS THE HATED ONES

Here is a segment of that poem:

I am not as vicious or rapacious as those racists how dare they ask of me to love my enemy, I owe them nothing, not even my cordiality, they have colored my reality with grief and pain drowned me in a peculiar shame.

I laugh at the sick joke because if ‘blessed are the poor’ then surely the wretched are those rich white rapists, yes, those capitalists, those Zionists, those colonists, the ones we celebrate for their hatred the ones who carved their ugly faces in the sacred mountains of the natives.

Respectability, humility, rigidity, let me be whimsical and carefree… All those white males protecting Lynch at Brandeis? She really does not need your help. But Brandeis University may.

Hana Levi Julian contributed to this article.