The arrest of students for peacefully voicing their views of the horrific war in Gaza is outrageous.
Police snatching students, and others who are legally in the United States, and locking them up incommunicado in detention camps and foreign gulags without due process mirrors Hitler’s Gestapo and Putin’s KGB.
The right of free speech and to peacefully assemble is the foundation of the First Amendment and the core of our democracy. These guarantees apply to even the most unpopular causes and opinions.
A remarkable Supreme Court case illustrating this point is National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. On April 27, 1977, Frank Collin, a Neo-Nazi leader, asked David Goldberger, a Jewish lawyer working for the ACLU, to represent him.
Collin wanted First Amendment protection because the heavily Jewish suburb of Skokie, Ill., had prohibited him and his followers, in uniforms displaying swastikas, carrying Nazi flags and banners, from peacefully assembling in the village of Skokie.
Skokie was 40 percent Jewish, with a significant number of Holocaust survivors.
Despite vehement criticism from friends, many of them Jewish, Goldberger represented the Nazis all the way to the Supreme Court, establishing the right of Collin and his followers to the protection of the First Amendment.
Goldberger knew that the First Amendment is foundational to our freedom.
As George Washington once told his beleaguered soldiers: “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
Al Kitching
Port Angeles