FEATURING:

Professor Jason Hill – Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University

About this webinar: In the spring semester of 2019 Professor Jason Hill,  professor of philosophy at DePaul University had the courage to write and publish an article for The Federalist arguing that Israel has the moral right to annex the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), that Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable, and that Israel has the right to unilaterally apply Israeli law over the entirety of its nation state.

Within the article, Professor Hill argues that Israel made an altruistic mistake toward the Palestinian people after the 1967 defensive war with Jordan. Rather than regard them as “war settlers” or refugees or, after legally occupying conquered territory, as “illegal occupants,” they made the Palestinian people their political and moral problem. He also examines the nature of Palestinian governance and wrote that the Palestinians, “constitute a national security threat to Israel because a core feature of their identity is a commitment to destroying Israel as a Jewish state.”

Whether or not one agrees with this position, any normal human being should be outraged at the amount of opprobrium that this article had engendered. The students at DePaul university demonstrated and called for his immediate removal from the faculty. Although Jason is a tenured professor, he has been the subject of unremitting social isolation and vicious personal attacks. Thousands of students have called him “racist” and “xenophobic” and launched a petition to have him censured and removed from the faculty.

All of this is a product of the prevalent “Cancel Culture”  that  exists within American academia today, where only certain socially-acceptable ideas seem to enjoy first amendment rights. We at EMET have long argued  that this sort of rigid, unyielding orthodoxy and tyranny of “political correctness” to only one side of the debate that we are now witnessing on college campuses is deleterious not only to Israel, and to the Jewish people, but to the ability of our students to think and argue independently, to stake out their ground and be able to find the evidence to support their position. All of this conformity to the rule of the mob is inimical to what our democracy is based upon, which was laid out in John Locke’s theories, “On Liberty,” and upon which Oliver Wendell Holmes later extrapolated to a Western education as being “the marketplace of ideas.”

Dr. Jason Hill was educated at Purdue University. His areas of specialization are Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Cosmopolitanism, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Education and Race Theory. Areas of Competence are: 20th Century Analytic Philosophy, Comparative Literature. Dr. Hill is a pioneer in the field of strong cosmopolitanism known widely as post-human or species cosmopolitanism. He has lectured and taught extensively on the subject in the United States, Europe and Asia. From 2010-2012, a consortium of four universities in England held a series of conferences devoted to Dr. Hill’s post-human cosmopolitanism and adopted the moral vision contained therein as part of their mission statements.