It’s Payback Time

Boston Herald columnists and WTKK-FM talk radio stars  Margery Eagan and Michael Graham have a slight disagreement today over Graham’s successful effort to get Boston College to reverse its decision to invite 1960s radical terrorist William Ayers to speak on-campus. Graham is under fire by Boston progressives for his anti-Ayers activism:

And that’s when the Angry Left turned their sights on me.

I attacked “free speech.” I was a talk radio hypocrite, only supporting controversial opinions from the right. My favorite is the blogger bemoaning “a verbal terrorist assault by right-wing yakker Michael Graham.”

That’s right – the guy who founded a terrorist group and said post-9/11 “I wish I’d done more” isn’t a terrorist. But the guy who reports his itinerary is.

Such is the intellectual rigor of the contemporary left.

Eagan is nowhere near as radical as the anti-Graham blogosphere bashers, but she isn’t exactly pleased by Graham’s initiative:

At BC the uproar was fueled Friday by WTKK-FM talk host and Herald opinion columnist Michael Graham, a conservative and, full disclosure, a friend and colleague. E-mails started streaming into BC. Bomb-makers have no free speech rights – that became the argument.

Too bad BC didn’t do what Columbia did in 2007 when that Israel-hating lunatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, spoke at their New York campus. They let him speak – but not before he was brutally denounced, his sadistic atrocities detailed, for 15 minutes, as he sat on stage 20 feet from his denouncer, Columbia University’s president.

How instructive for BC students, and satisfying for Ayers’ foes, might that have been?

When I heard about Graham’s efforts to shotblock the Ayers speech, I couldn’t help thinking that he was motivated in part by a desire to give the academic left a taste of its own medicine. After all, silencing conservative speech has been the left’s stock-in-trade at major colleges and universities. As Eagan herself notes,

Typically, it’s conservatives who complain, with justification, when their political brethren get the heave-ho from left-leaning academia. Right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter is drowned out by jeers at the University of Connecticut or hit by a pie at the University of Arizona.

Two weeks ago, ex-Boston Herald columnist Don Feder, a conservative, was harassed at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was invited to speak by college Republicans. Four times he began a speech arguing against special “hate crime” classifications. Four times he was cut short by catcalls and laughter. At one point students stood up and turned to sit with their backs to him. “Ironically I was talking about free speech,” Feder said yesterday. “And I wasn’t allowed to speak. So there you go.”

Even if payback did play a role in Graham’s anti-Ayers efforts, there’s a part of me that asks: so what? Maybe the academic left should know how it feels to be silenced for a change.

Progressives who are angry at Graham should ask themselves: if what happened to Ayers is wrong, isn’t it also wrong for conservatives and Republicans to be silenced, harassed or threatened when they show up to speak at a college or university? Is the “silencing of dissent” only wrong when it’s done to a liberal?

I understand the argument that Ayers should have the right to speak at BC, his evil past actions notwithstanding. However, one must ask: of the folks who support Ayers’ right to speak at BC, how many would also support, say, a conservative student group’s effort to have William Kristol speak at the school? After all, according to the antiwar left, Kristol bears some responsibility for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq because he strongly supported President Bush’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Yesterday, Eagan’s WTKK colleague Jim Braude admitted that the left’s past treatment of conservative speakers at colleges and universities has been atrocious. Well, two wrongs may not make a right–but doesn’t it make it even?