Conflicts of Interest: Congress Seeks to Limit Freedom of Speech to Support Israel

14 thoughts on “Conflicts of Interest: Congress Seeks to Limit Freedom of Speech to Support Israel”

1. Congress adopts a definition of antisemitism formulated by IHRA an organization that’s far from objective and unbiased.

   1. Has any legislation ever been objective and unbiased?

      1. No.

         “ In November, 2017, Kenneth Stern appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify about a bill under consideration, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. Approved by the Senate a year earlier, the bill would require the Department of Education to apply a specific definition of antisemitism when investigating alleged cases of discrimination against Jews on college campuses. Stern, a lawyer and scholar who served for twenty-five years as the American Jewish Committee’s in-house expert on antisemitism, had devoted much of his career to highlighting the hatred and intolerance that threatens Jews. He was also the lead drafter of the definition cited by the bill, a definition that he had once urged both State Department officials and foreign policymakers to embrace.…

         Yet, at the congressional hearing, Stern struck a different note. The definition, which had been written in 2004 and adopted, in 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm, was created to help governments collect data on antisemitism, he said. It “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.” Stern was particularly concerned about a section of the definition that listed eleven contemporary examples of antisemitism, among them “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” and holding Israel to “double standards” that were not expected of other nations. As this language suggests, Stern believed that antisemitism could manifest as hostility to Israel and Zionism. But he also believed that enshrining such a definition into law would have dangerous consequences, exposing schools to civil-rights investigations simply for allowing lectures, protests, or programs that cast Israel in a negative light. In fact, some groups had already complained that courses critical of Zionism, and even films about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, amounted to discrimination, based on the I.H.R.A. definition. The proposed bill was a clear threat to academic freedom, Stern warned, placing Congress in the middle of a debate that it had no business adjudicating.

         To Stern’s relief, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act failed to pass. But, two years later, in 2019, Donald Trump signed an executive order specifying that Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin, would also bar “forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism.” When enforcing such cases, the order held, federal agencies would consider the I.H.R.A. definition. Since the October 7th Hamas attack and the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, the number of Title VI cases alleging that Jewish students have been subjected to discrimination has risen dramatically. Thirty-three U.S. states and dozens of cities have now adopted or endorsed the I.H.R.A. definition. Many pro-Israel groups see this as an appropriate response to a surge of antisemitism, especially at universities, whose leaders, they claim, have failed to punish students who demonize Israel. According to a coalition of civil-rights and advocacy organizations that support Palestinian rights, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Palestine Legal, policing such expression is itself discriminatory. In a recent letter to Catherine E. Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, the coalition cited numerous examples in which outside groups had invoked the I.H.R.A. definition to lodge “false accusations of antisemitism” against schools, pressuring them to cancel events such as a Palestinian literature festival that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in September.

         https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/the-problem-with-defining-antisemitism

      2. What are you – substituting as a philosophy professor? If these Congress critters successfully fast track this AntiFree Speech abomination and Potato head, Chairman Biden,sign it. I can’t wait until a well prepared defender chews it up on legal appeal.
         The worse a law is written, the easy it is to overturn.

   2. John:

      Why don’t you write us an article here at antiwar.com.
      You have a lot to say and you say it well. (!)

2. “ The former problem is illustrated by some of the 11 examples that the IHRA then provides of what it considers ‘may serve as illustrations’ of antisemitism. Significantly, seven of these examples refer to the state of Israel, which suggests that the authors may be largely concerned with anti-Zionism that relates to Israel, as opposed to antisemitism that relates to Jews anywhere in the world.

   Whilst it is important to note that the IHRA decision-making body, the Plenary, did not include any of these examples in the definition and that its member countries were only able to reach a consensus on adopting the definition by excluding the examples, the published document that contains the definition nevertheless contains these potential ‘illustrations’. In this regard, Stern-Weiner (2021a, p. 4) finds that the ‘senior IHRA officials and pro-Israel groups’ that were involved in the publication of this document ‘have misrepresented the IHRA Plenary’s decision in order to smuggle into the Working Definition examples that can be used to protect Israel from criticism’ and pressurised governments and other organisations to adopt it.

   Such pressure has been particularly evident in the case of the UK government (2016), which formally adopted the definition in 2016. In October 2020, Gavin Williamson (2020), Secretary of State for Education in England, urged higher education institutions to follow suit in adopting the definition with its examples, writing that the ‘definition helps us better understand and recognise instances of antisemitism’. Most significantly, he threatened to suspend funding streams for universities that did not sign up to the definition (Adams 2020; Harpin 2020). The threat appears to have borne fruit, since Hazel (2021) reports that by November 2021, and after some initial hesitation, 216 higher education providers had signed up. This includes 95 out of a total of 133 universities which, on the face of it, is a remarkable increase on the 28 universities that had signed up by September 2020. However, according to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the British Committee for Universities of Palestine (PSC and BRICUP 2021), ‘a high proportion of those universities that have in some sense said “yes” to the IHRA definition have done so using forms of words that keep some distance–not “adopt”, but “acknowledge”, or “recognise”. Many have asserted the adequacy of their pre-existing policies on hate speech. Some have added caveats to their adoption to seek, however inadequately, to protect academic freedom from the definition’.

   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9092927/

3. Would the IHRA definition apply to Arabs?

   1. It doesn’t apply to actual Semites.

4. The Real News just cancelled Chris Hedges because he opposes Biden, whining they were in danger of getting their funding cut off. So cancel the UnReal News and Max Alvarez.

5. “…this absurd double standard where anyone is critical of Israel(i Government) refects on all -of-us,, but when it comes to supporters of Israel they can be as violent as they want…”, says Kyle A (timemark 21:39)
   Some Republicans are learning the value of classical liberalism. This bill is birthed by panic,vand goes against the establishment of religion clause of First Amendment.

6. Well friends, the verdict is in! If you are opposed to Israel’s slaughter of something like forty thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, or the clearly enunciated plans by that nation’s government to ethnically cleanse the rest of historic Palestine, making the developing Eretz or Greater Israel a legally Jewish state, and are prepared to protest or speak up about it, then you are an antisemite Jew-hater and probably even a holocaust denier. If you are a student demonstrating against the slaughter you are increasingly being referred to by talking heads and the media as a pro-Hamas terrorist. That you must be condemned and sanctioned or even criminalized as a consequence of the labels is only fair in a country that apparently has come to believe that Jews and Israel, uniquely, cannot be criticized due to their cited ad nauseam victimhood and their anointment by God no matter what the First Amendment to the US Constitution relating to freedom of speech might say. After all, it’s just an old piece of paper though it might strike some as a bit odd that a group of people carrying out a genocide are being given a pass while those trying to stop it are being beaten, going to jail and, in some cases, being denied that degree they earned from four years at college.
   https://columbusfreepress.com/profile/philip-giraldi-0

7. Then criticism of US support of Israel would fall under the label of antisemitism.

8. No one can say anything anymore about this only one protected group . No other group can claim such blanket protection that covers everything.

   1. There’s a hierarchy of special rights, with one group on top and the “oppressive” group on the very bottom, even though the top group looks similar.

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