When Alan Dershowitz led the charge against a forum at Brooklyn College discussing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement as a counter to Israeli aggression in the occupied territories, the pile-on from both sides of the political spectrum was quick. New York politicians from Assemblyman Dov Hikind to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Comptroller John Liu all publicly called for the College’s Political Science department to drop its support for the forum. All the forum’s detractors took issue with the fact that the forum was unbalanced, and did not represent the spectrum of views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Brooklyn College’s president has since come out strongly in support of the panel’s value as an expression of free speech, and the forum will take place as scheduled on February 7. But as Chris Hayes explains in this clip, there was something disingenuous about the cries of imbalance in the first place. 

The Brooklyn College panel will feature Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti, both of whom have written on BDS for The Nation.