A complete double standard regarding criticism of Israel and criticism of the Islamic world has been created at our nation's universities and colleges. This double standard is discriminatory and unfair. It also damages Israel greatly.

While the most vicious types of demonization of Israel and Zionism are tolerated and in some cases encouraged on campuses, criticism of Muslim leaders and movements is often met with punishment, intimidation, or threats. It does not matter how true or untrue these critical statements are. Many attempts to cite support for terrorism, xenophobia, violence, and intolerance among some Islamic leaders and Muslims have been repressed by the administrations of our institutions of higher learning. In at least several cases, students have been blocked from inviting speakers or showing films that might offend Muslims.

Conversely, students, invited speakers, and professors can freely and easily rail against Israel and accuse it, with no basis whatsoever, of the most egregious violations of human rights, including genocide, apartheid, and state-sponsored terrorism. They can, without fear of repercussions, call for a boycott of Israel or its destruction.

As a result of this situation, the Israeli fight against violent Islamicism is not and cannot be seen for what it is – just one part of a global struggle against Islamofascism. Instead, students, including tens of millions of future American journalists and voters, are being indoctrinated to believe that the Arab-Israeli struggle is based solely on Israeli "expansionism" and unprovoked mistreatment of the Palestinians.

At Pace University in New York City, the school's administrators, by their own admission, "persuaded" the university's Hillel group late last year to avoid showing a film, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. The film's sin was that it offended the school's Muslim organization by daring to document calls among Middle Eastern Muslims for violence against Americans, Jews, and Israelis. Pace Hillel president Michael Abdurakhmanov said that university officials threatened to call police if he showed the illicit film and have them investigate him for committing anti-Islamic bias crimes that had occurred at the university four weeks earlier. Pace president David Caputo wrote that a university official "tried to start a dialogue…about postponing the film to a safer time."

At Brown and Stony Brook universities, the Muslim Student Association chapters were able to persuade – or intimidate – Jewish groups from showing the movie.

Although students at several schools did manage to show Obsession, the repression of the film at other schools is reprehensible.

A professor, Thomas Klocek, formerly of DePaul University, was fired from his position as an adjunct professor at the school because he told Muslim students, outside of the classroom, that most terrorists in the world today are Muslims. The school claimed that Klocek was fired because he made a gesture, apparently of Italian origins, at the students by placing his hand under his chin and thrusting it forward. But over at Columbia University, when pro-Israel, Jewish students complained three years ago that they had been yelled at and intimidated by pro-Islamic, anti-Israeli professors, the school decided not to take any disciplinary action against the professors.

Pro-Israel, anti-Islamist activist and scholar Daniel Pipes was recently invited by a student group to speak at Brandeis University. But the president of the school – which had hosted former President Jimmy "Israel is an apartheid state" Carter in January – attempted to nix Pipes' appearance at Brandeis, according to initial reports. After Pipes publicly called on Brandeis donors to consider cutting off their funds to the school, Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz backed down from his initial reported stand.

This incident shows that pressure from the outside, particularly from donors, can break through the double-standard speech rules that are currently in place at many of our universities.

Perhaps most importantly, students are not being educated about the violence and terrorism being committed in many places around the world in the name of Islam. Rather, today's dominant view in academia is that Arab and other Islamic peoples are victims of Western (and Israeli) imperialism. This body of thought, developed by the late Columbia University English professor Edward Said, chooses to ignore or marginalize the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism altogether. Professors of the Middle East, under the sway of Said's dominant doctrine, do not teach about terrorism and Islamic-inspired violence, preferring to dwell only on Arab and Palestinian suffering – which is exclusively blamed, of course, on the United States and Israel.

The double standard currently in place at our institutions of higher learning cannot be allowed to continue. Even though I believe strongly in freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas, I can understand why universities would want to ban "hate speech."

However, if they are going to ban speech that is offensive to Muslims, they must also ban speech that is offensive to Jews, including demonization of Israel. We cannot have one set of rules for speech that offends Muslims and another set of rules for speech that offends many Jews. That is discriminatory, harmful to Israel and Jews, and unacceptable.