There is so much wrong about Samuel Aftel’s guest column “Northwestern Embraces Police Repression,” it is hard to know where to begin. While I respect passionate advocacy on any issue, including the decades-long Israel-Palestinian conflict, that advocacy should never come at the expense of the rights of everyone to attend school in a safe, respectful environment. Nor should it relieve the University of its obligation to protect property and guarantee the safety of all members of the NU community, particularly when demonstrators target Jewish and Israeli students for harassment in violation of the Code of Conduct that governs students, faculty, and staff.

Aftel’s assertion that the University is criminalizing “vigorous protest” could not be further from the truth. If anything, the administration bent over backwards to allow protests that, in many respects, were anything but “peaceful.” Indeed, the administration allowed demonstrators — many of whom are not even members of the NU community — to harass and threaten Jewish and Israeli students for no reason except their religion, their nationality or their belief that Israel has a right to exist and defend itself as a Jewish state.

Long after events started to get out of hand — as protesters openly violated perfectly legal content-neutral rules governing the “time, place and manner” of protests — the University Police responded to actions that crossed the line from peaceful protest to threatening others and disrupting university operations. In one such incident, a Northwestern News Network student reporter had his phone swatted away by a demonstrator while reporting on the setting up of the encampment — the video posted to X has more than 2 million views! Individuals who then interfered with police officers working to restore order and protect public safety were arrested. The arrests had everything to do with their misconduct and nothing to do with their viewpoint.

The column also exhibits a troubling double standard. Aftel condemns the University for allegedly yielding to external pressures from pro-Israel groups. Yet he neglects to acknowledge, let alone mention, how the protesters whose views he shares pressured the administration to negotiate the “Deering Meadow Agreement.” Apparently, Aftel is OK with pressure brought by people who share his views on Israel and Gaza but is offended that people who do not share his views might have a say in how the University responds to the demands of protesters who disrupt campus life.

The conflict in the Middle East is complex, with a long history, deeply held feelings and no simple answers. For some, like Aftel, the answer is simple: Israel is wrong, and the Palestinians are right. But that view is intellectually dishonest, as it deliberately ignores millennia of history and minimizes the struggles of all with a legitimate claim to the land. In this respect, he exemplifies the late American journalist H.L. Mencken’s observation, “There is always an easy solution to every problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Ultimately, Aftel fails to recognize that the rule of law is the foundation upon which all rights, including the right to protest, are built. As a student of Marxism, Aftel should know that no ideology supresses individual rights more than Marxism. When mob rule and anarchy are the order of the day, which is what Aftel seems to advocate, no one can feel safe.

In calling out NU for its supposed “craven authoritarianism,” Aftel misses the point entirely. The real threat to academic freedom and institutional integrity comes not from the enforcement of legitimate rules designed to protect the rights of everyone in the community, but from the kind of inflammatory, hateful rhetoric — repeated unquestioningly by an angry (one might say “authoritarian”) mob unaccountable for its own behavior — that he espouses. For universities to remain bastions of free thought and rigorous debate, everyone must engage respectfully, understanding that no one has a monopoly on the facts or the truth. Anything less undermines the very principles Aftel claims to defend.