Earlier this month, Harvard law student Husam El-Qoulaq posed a question at a public conference to Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister. “How is it that you are so smelly?” Mr. El-Qoulaq wanted to know. “It’s regarding your odor—about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.”

Harvard went out of its way to try to keep the questioner’s identity a secret, including by deleting the comment from its video of the event—a privilege, one suspects, the school would not have afforded a student asking a similar question of...