Students for Hamas

 

Private employers and citizens are free to refuse to hire or do business with someone because of his beliefs. They have that right. The question is whether they should. I think that most of the time they should not. In a free and diverse society one will find people with all sorts of opinions about all sorts of things. Tolerant acceptance of such diversity of opinion usually is a good thing. A person’s opinion one way or the other about whether to believe Rachel Levine when he tells people he is a woman or whether Donald Trump is nuts does not have much to do with what sort of worker or vendor he is and should not be disqualifying.

However there are exceptions when the beliefs and opinions are bad enough that ostracism is justified. For example I see nothing wrong with the blacklisting of communists in Hollywood in the years after World War II. I would not want to hire someone who was a supporter of and propagandist for the regime of Josef Stalin and an obedient member of an organization controlled by that regime’s secret service. Lately some employers have announced they will not be hiring students who rallied in support of Hamas’s murderous savages and the atrocities they committed. That seems reasonable to me. I would not want to spend time around people who think gang rape, purposely slaughtering infants, and torturing and intentionally murdering civilians as a tactic are good admirable activities. The excuse that the students are just kids does not work. They are young adults - older than many enlisted men and women in the armed forces – and responsible for their actions and deserving of the consequences.