Courtesy of my dearest friend, Bryan (the article he's talking about in his post below):

From the Columbia Spectator

The Free Speech Shuffle

Alex Jung

Posted: 10/20/06

Everyone, from Fox's talking heads to Mayor Michael Bloomberg to
Columbia's students and administrators, has decided that the
deadliest of sins-the silencing of free speech-occurred the night
Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist came to speak on campus. The
protesters who rushed the stage have become scapegoats, accused of
violating Gilchrist's basic American right. X caused Y. They sullied
free speech. This simplistic assumption of the sequence of events has
encouraged a debate on all the wrong questions and obscured the
unequal claims different people actually have to free speech.

What we should really ask is: "Did the protesters start the
violence?" It was the violence, after all, that forced Public Safety
to end the event-not the protest. The investigation is still pending,
but as an audience member and someone who has watched clips of the
protest ad nauseam (particularly the one by Univision), I can attest
that it was Gilchrist's supporters who leapt onto the stage and
attacked the protesters. They kicked students in the head and engaged
in tug-of-war over the banner. The event ended because the Minuteman
posse turned the protest into a brawl, not because the protesters
jumped onto the stage.

"But even so," people say, "that isn't the way to have a conversation."

What do people think protest is? It's not, as the New York Police
Department would have you believe, a free speech pen on the sidewalk.
Protest by its nature is disruptive, confrontational, and sometimes
civilly disobedient. Beyond merely condemning the disruption, isn't
it worth asking why individuals felt this was a necessary course of
action?

In the lofty realm of the ivory tower, there exists an imaginary free
speech world divorced from reality. In this fictional place, I can
tell an undocumented immigrant to send a campus-wide e-mail or go
onto a TV or radio show whenever he feels offended. It's one where I
can tell him to stage a counter-event with money from the deep
pockets of outside donors as a show of "legitimate" protest. We seem
to believe that there is a neutral free speech zone in which anyone
has the right to speak, masking the harsher reality that a person
needs a great deal of privilege and influence to even be able to come
to this table of "civil discourse." Instead, "free speech" is shaped
by those with the power to do so.

Even our esteemed free speech expert, University President Lee
Bollinger, has been shuffling his feet and inconsistently determining
what speech deserves condemnation. Twenty-four hours after Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at the World
Leaders Forum, Bollinger released a statement saying he found
Ahmadinejad's beliefs "repugnant." Regarding the invitation extended
to Gilchrist, Bollinger said nothing. He broke his silence only to
say that nobody has the right to "use the cover of protest to silence
speakers." Bollinger ignored how Gilchrist was obviously not in the
mood for a "discussion on immigration" when he race-baited the
audience and called them "maladroits." As for those outside persons
who attacked students, Bollinger merely said that they will "not be
allowed on campus again." Phew.

While I imagine Bollinger does not support the actions of the
Minuteman organization, his silence reads as complicity. Does speech
from a group of nativists patrolling the border with firearms and
harassing people at pick-up points for undocumented workers not merit
even a shred of moral outrage? Or is that a "political" position?

The inequalities run deeper. In another campus-wide e-mail, Bollinger
said he met with leaders of the student councils and governing boards
(of which I took part). The exclusion of leaders of students of color
from this meeting highlighted the irony of Bollinger's indignation
that students could act so uncivilly while continuing to exclude
students of color from discussions with "student leaders."

Can we shuffle a little more? Already certain protesters who were on
stage have received letters regarding their violations of the Rules
of University Conduct. While I appreciate that the University is
moving forward with this investigation, I'm wondering whatever
happened to those two boys, Matthew Brown and Stephen Searles. You
know, the ones who painted their fellow students' suite with racist
and homophobic graffiti. A criminal court dismissed their case over
four months ago, and the administration has apparently yet to decide
what to do. I guess they have their hands tied adjudicating
discipline to protesters.

The free speech shuffle has thrown other values to the side. Is "free
speech" the only community principle we have? What of respect for the
dignity of other human beings? The Minuteman Project is in no way the
catalyst for a "conversation." To Latinos especially, the Minuteman
militia are intimidating their people and their family. We should
have better standards than inviting a smorgasbord of violent speakers
without regard for whom they might offend.

What I've heard from administrators has largely been the same: be
patient, be calm, and the University will hear you out. Yet
organizations representing students of color are not at the same
table as the governing boards and councils; the attacks on students
of color have apparently not deserved the same defense. The
University suspends the Institute for African Studies for the year,
queer students have no LGBTQ center, and the list goes on. Now tell
me, who has free speech?

I think the article Adria posted articulates what I would like to say much better than I ever could. If refuting the Minutemen is your goal, I can certainly understand the interest in hearing them out. However, that is not the goal all of us have. Some of us want to fight the Minutemen. As Jung points out, there are actually-existing consequences to the actions the Minutement carry-out, not to mention the safe space they create for even more extremist anti-immigrant groups. Individuals risking their lives to cross the border have neither the means to nor the interest in engaging the Minutemen in critical-rational discourse. For them, this is nothing short of a life and death struggle with an organization that, itself, has demonstrated little if any genuine interest in "talking things out." While I realize that such people weren't the ones storming the stage at Columbia, I nonetheless applaud the activists' recognition that the struggle for immigrants' rights is necessarily one AGAINST the minuteman and demands something much more tangible that a fetishization of discourse.

"The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it." - Karl Marx