Horowitz's Provocation.

• Author: Reed, Adolph L. Jr.

Readers of The Progressive know that I do not support attempts to generate a movement around the demand for reparations for injustices perpetrated against black Americans through slavery and its legacy. In fact, among the reasons that I don't is that couching demands for justice in those terms opens space for exactly the kind of demagogy and sophistry that David Horowitz displays in the obnoxious ad that he has placed in several college newspapers. So, predictably, we now find ourselves engaged in a debate not over the realities of racialized inequality and injustice but over whether his right to free speech has been violated, a debate that resurfaces all the Reagan vintage canards of "political correctness."

At the same time, I disagree with those, including many on the left like our own Matt Rothschild, who say that those who object to newspapers publishing Horowitz's screed are inappropriately calling for censorship. I support those papers that refused to carry Horowitz's ad, and I do not oppose the demonstrations and other protests that publication of the ad has generated, including calls for boycotts and the efforts by students at Brown University and elsewhere to confiscate the issues of papers that contained it. I know that this position may seem irresponsible or intolerant to many people of good will and sound political judgment. I will defend it, but first I should explain why I reject the view that refusal to publish the ad--or objection to its having been published--expresses a dangerous form of censorship.

At issue is not simply whether Horowitz has the right to express his opposition to the demand for reparations. Of course he does. No one is preventing him from doing so, and no one ever has. His complaint that he is being silenced is hardly credible when he appears ubiquitously and incessantly in the most visible outlets of the mass media and denounces a supposed liberal tyranny that keeps him from being heard. He has never had any difficulty gaining access to those venues, and he's all over the place now. And surely no one would argue that a newspaper must print anything and everything that is submitted as an ad.

The more important question is what criteria determine editorial decisions to publish or reject. On a recent CNN segment on the subject, the editor of the Brown Daily Herald said that his paper's policy is not to accept ads that it judges "illegal, libelous, or obscene, or something like that." A few days earlier, on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, the editor of The Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin, which also had published Horowitz's ad, indicated that his paper's criteria for rejection included determining whether an ad contains claims that are "clearly false." The host then asked whether the paper had had to decide on accepting ads from groups or individuals who deny the existence of the Nazi Holocaust. It turned out that the paper had been confronted with that decision and had chosen not to publish a Holocaust deniers' ad because it failed on the criterion of clear falsity. This...