The Daniel Pipes incident at York University brought out the true colours of many academics and students.
Their opposition to Pipes and their rationalized defence of groups that routinely promote violence is hardly based on moral principles beneficial to all people. This and the willingness of these academic protesters to ban the speech of those who disagree with them disqualifies them as scholars. Sensible political freedom is the right to live without experiencing initiated physical force from others, not the right to act on others by whatever whim one wishes. To promulgate their whimsical view of the world, these scholars count on our sensible understanding of freedom, while demanding restrictions on the freedom of those who disagree with them. They are “stealing” the concept of freedom to use it in a manner that destroys freedom, a manipulation identified by Ayn Rand as the fallacy of the stolen concept. The reliance of these people on false reasoning further disqualifies them as scholars and raises serious concerns about what students are learning at our higher educational institutions. By contrast, Daniel Pipes is a paragon of rationality