A district judge issued a preliminary injunction last week, ordering Ohio State University to revoke its expulsion of a student who made anti-Israel videos.
Edmund Sargus Jr., a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, stated the student, Guy Christensen, was expelled from the university on the grounds that his videos were incitement and risked disrupting the campus.
According to Sargus, Christensen had said in a May video that he retracted his earlier condemnation of the shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., stating, “I take it back. I do not condemn the elimination of those two Zionist officials, who worked at the Israeli embassy last night.”
He also said in that video, “Israel has murdered thousands of Palestinian civilians in cold blood without any shame, with pride, rejoicing in the streets of Israel over this, and they get no attention in this country, while this attack is being used to weaponize violence against the movement.”
Christensen added that “we will meet it with our own greater resistance and escalation.”
In a separate May video responding to a comment by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, Christensen stated that “screenshots are forever, and what you’ve said and done will haunt your family for eternity as you will eventually, if you’re still alive, end up in a Nuremberg trials for all the elected officials in America who facilitated and protected this genocide.”
Sargus said Christensen’s videos did not constitute incitement because in past ones, he advocated for nonviolence and in subsequent ones, he stated that he is nonviolent. In the judge’s view, Christensen’s use of the words “resistance” and “escalation” was meant in a nonviolent manner, and that his videos had “no specific call to action” and “were unlikely to result in the imminent use of violence or lawless action.”
As for the university’s claims that Christensen’s presence could disrupt campus activities, Sargus stated this would be unlikely given that Christensen was on summer break at the time of the videos and did not identify himself as an OSU student, nor did any students express concern to the university about it.
Sargus said Christensen’s lawsuit is “likely to succeed on the merits” and ordered the school to remove his expulsion from his academic record.
Benjamin Johnson, the university’s assistant vice president of media and public relations, told JNS that “we’re disappointed in the ruling.”
David Carey, managing legal director of ACLU Ohio, said the ruling vindicates “a student’s right to free expression” and that “universities must and should stand against efforts to silence or punish dissenting ideas, not facilitate those efforts at the expense of their students.”
