Pro-Palestinian speech is routinely punished in the liberal Western world — in the name of democracy, of course. Now, the memories of German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt and German writer Heinrich Böll have been violated in a way that both would despise.

Masha Gessen (pronouns they/them), the Russian-Jewish émigré best known for in-depth reporting on their former country, has been denied the honor of a ceremony after receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize from Germany’s Heinrich Böll Stiftung (foundation).

Why? In the December 9 issue of The New Yorker, Gessen wrote:

Cue the predictable blowback. Gessen wasn’t factually wrong; instead, the outrage was driven by context. It is culturally verboten in Germany (and the US) to equate any aspect of the Holocaust to the suffering endured by any other people – especially when that suffering is being inflicted by Israel. As others have noted, Arendt faced similar attacks over her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was based on reporting for the same New Yorker magazine.

What’s important is the idea that evil can seem ordinary, and that totalitarianism... can make a monster of almost anyone.

The Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s statement is a masterpiece of deflection and the use of the passive voice. It says that Gessen’s essay “led to heated debates in many places,” and that:

The city’s decision is disgraceful but hardly surprising, given the German government’s expressed determination to crack down on pro-Palestinian voices. In fact, several Muslim countries have already brought complaints against Germany before the United Nations human rights forum over that issue.

In an attempt to deny the obvious, the foundation says:

Why “different”? The foundation could have found another venue. Or it could have held the ceremony in a bus station some other public place, which would have made a dramatic statement against censorship. It would also have been very much in the spirit of its namesake, the writer and pacifist Heinrich Böll.

Böll was president of P.E.N. International, a group dedicated to protecting writers’ freedom of speech, and was fearless in expressing unpopular opinions of his own. Most famously, Böll defended the right to a fair trial of the much-loathed Red Army Faction (the so-called “Baader-Meinhof gang”) rather than trial by tabloid headline and mass media. For that, he weathered a firestorm of criticism that equaled Arendt’s.

Any organization bearing Böll’s name might be expected to defend unpopular speech. But the Stiftung is a political institution, not a moral or literary one. It is a wing of Germany’s Green Party, a formerly left-leaning and pro-environmental group that has become increasingly hawkish, tacking to the right of even the “centrist” Social Democrats on military matters.

But then, what’s in a name? The Greens have even pushed to re-open coal plants.

Like other elite-led ‘liberal’ institutions, the Greens have an organizational imperative to spout the language of inclusion, even when (as in this case) they suppress dissenting voices. This is how they presented their decision not to honor Gessen:

We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them. And, of course, Geffen won’t be allowed to give a speech. But we do hope to permit a ‘nuanced dialogue,’ wherein Gessen will no doubt be forced themselves against a tribunal of hostile interlocutors. That’s ‘dialogue,’ Star Chamber-style.

Does anybody think this would have happened if that recent New Yorker article had not been published? And does anyone think the Greens would have refused Gessen a ceremony and a speech if the article had praised, rather than criticized, Israel?

We aren’t distancing ourselves from Masha Geffen, says the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. We just won’t honor them.

Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates. Why? For criticizing a country (Israel) that denies basic freedoms to millions and where same-sex (and interfaith) marriages cannot be performed, by law.

There’s no time to adjudicate all the arguments surrounding Eichmann in Jerusalem but, whatever the criticisms, it is clearly the spiritual sibling of Gessen’s essay. The onslaught of accusations against Arendt was front page news at the time, resulting in what Israeli journalist Amos Elon likened to an “excommunication.” For one thing, as Elon writes, Arendt had fallen away from the Zionism of her youth and concluded that,

A “living ghost” … that was heretical in 1963. It still is today.

Elon writes that Arendt also foresaw “the difficulty of confronting, morally and politically, the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians.” As he puts it, “The Palestinians bore no responsibility for the collapse of civilization in Europe but ended up being punished for it.”

Irony upon irony: A nonbinary Jew who was forced to leave illiberal Russia for its anti-LGBTQ environment is being punished by establishment liberals acting in the name of two free speech advocates.

Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem, as I did recently, it was more striking than ever to consider the courage it took to write it. Less than two decades after the Holocaust, Arendt was challenging an already-established orthodoxy, one which Elon describes this way:

Arendt saw the role that this orthodoxy played in the conduct of the trial, writing of the prosecutor:

This........

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