Opinion by Kenneth L. Marcus in The Washington Post, May 13, 2022 . One day before Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the Georgetown University Law Center hosted a well-attended event featuring notorious antisemitic conspiracy theorist Mohammed El-Kurd. El-Kurd is infamous for promoting the modern-day “blood libel” against Jews. He cloaks his antisemitic rants as criticism of Israel, claiming Israeli Jews “harvest organs of the martyred” and “feed their warriors our own.” . In light of El-Kurd’s reputation, some have urged that he be banned, while others insist that he be given a platform. Both are wrong. . Censorship is bad policy. But any American university that gives such bigotry a platform is due for a reckoning. . On the same day as the Georgetown event, the Anti-Defamation League announced that antisemitic incidents had reached a frightening all-time high in the United States, with 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism reported the prior year. Other groups recently reported similar findings in the United Kingdom, as well as in Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere. This is the backdrop against which the Georgetown University Law Center held its event. . El-Kurd claims Zionists have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood” and describes the Jewish state as “blood thirsty and violent.” Speaking at Arizona State University earlier in April, El-Kurd promoted the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews control the media and threatened to shoot his Israeli Jewish critics if they tried to heckle him. This is nothing if not blatant antisemitism and racism. When Jewish students expressed outrage over the El-Kurd event, the administration defended the event on free-speech grounds. “We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many,” said Mitch Bailin, Georgetown Law’s dean of students. “Those are things that we think are important to educational values, to promoting free speech, to promoting a free discussion of ideas, even if those ideas are deeply, deeply offensive.” . The problem with this argument is not that free speech is bad but rather that it is not Georgetown’s policy. Only about three months ago, Georgetown constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro challenged President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. At that time, the law school’s administration applied a very different standard. Georgetown Law’s dean, William M. Treanor, castigated Shapiro’s comments as being “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law” and placed Shapiro on administrative leave. . Nor was the Shapiro incident anomalous. Last year, when two Georgetown Law instructors described the performance of the school’s African American students in ways that the administration found offensive, Georgetown fired one and placed the other, who soon resigned, on administrative leave, instituted nondiscrimination training for other faculty and announced the enhancement of the school’s bias reporting process. . By canceling certain academics, Georgetown has placed itself in a double bind. Either it treats all controversial speech harshly, even when aligned with progressive politics, or it maintains free speech for all. If Georgetown makes an exception for some, it reveals that its harshness toward others has more to do with their politics than with Georgetown’s supposed commitment to inclusivity, civility and respect. . To escape this double bind, Georgetown must listen, learn and lead. As a world-famous university, Georgetown cannot tolerate the ignorance its law school has put on display. It is incumbent upon the university to look deeply into how its law school has lost its moral compass. It should educate itself and the community about the world’s oldest form of hatred and the one that has been given the keys to the law school. And it should examine how the law school has become susceptible to this pathology. . This work could also be aided by the establishment of a task force, ideally with participation from the university’s governance board. Its task should include a full review of not only the university’s free-speech policies, especially with respect to Shapiro, but also its approach to antisemitism and Jewish student life. It should consider the extent to which the university complies with the Education Department’s policy guidance, which incorporates the executive order on combating antisemitism. . Armed with this knowledge, Georgetown’s leadership must lead. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has long admonished that “university leadership should set a moral example by denouncing anti-Semitic and other hate speech, while safeguarding all rights protected under the First Amendment and under basic principles of academic freedom.” Georgetown’s own speech policy recognizes that “more [discourse] is better” and maintains that “the remedy for silly or extreme or offensive ideas is not less free speech but more.” The university has its own free-speech rights — and those rights encompass the freedom to condemn racism, antisemitism and discrimination in all its forms. And Georgetown must do just that. . However, as Treanor acknowledged, in response to a previous incident, “words alone will not … be enough to move [the Georgetown community] forward.” Serious leadership, action, education and introspection are required. This would be important for any college but especially for one whose mission is to graduate students “to be responsible and active participants in civic life and to live generously in service to others.” . In a free society, even vile speech would not be banned; but in a good society, it would not garner an audience, either. Whether we permit this nastiness or not, we should be ashamed when our communities encourage it, and we should think deeply about how we have arrived at a place where we are forced to choose between raw bigotry and blunt censorship.