We’ve Already Got an ‘Antisemitism Awareness Act.’ It’s Called the First Amendment.
by Thomas
Knapp Posted on May 13, 2024
On May 1, the US House of Representatives passed the
fraudulently titled “Antisemitism
Awareness Act of 2023.” It’s
not yet law, pending Senate passage and a presidential signature, but the
lopsided House vote (320 to 91) should worry all Americans, including the
country’s 7.6 million Jews.
In theory, the bill merely clarifies how the US
Department of Education should interpret Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion,
sex, and national origin by “federally funded programs,” including most
colleges and universities.
In fact, however, the bill – by adopting the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism” – reveals itself as just another underhanded
attempt to suppress freedom of speech by placing new conditions on federal
funding.
The bill expressly includes “the ‘[c]ontemporary
examples of antisemitism’ identified in the IHRA definition” in its own
definition of antisemitism.
Those examples include “[d]enying the Jewish people
their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a
State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” as well as “[d]rawing comparisons of
contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
“Jews” (who, by the way, are not the only “semites”)
and “Israel” are two entirely different things.
Jews are an ethnic group bound together partly by
ancestry and partly by ancestral religious beliefs.
Israel is a Middle Eastern nation-state which clearly,
unambiguously, and openly bases itself on a supremacist ideology (Zionism)
exploiting that ethnic bond. The Israeli regime treats non-Jews as, at best,
second-class citizens in Israel and as rightsless non-citizens in large swaths
of occupied territory next door. Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany or
apartheid-era South Africa aren’t unreasonable.
Most of the world’s Jews choose – in individual acts
of “self-determination” – to live outside Israel. In fact, more Jews live in
the United States than live in Israel. Many of those Jews oppose Zionism
on principle, and Israeli policies toward neighboring Arab populations in
practice.
Under the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” a university
could lose its federal funding if it allowed Jewish students and faculty to
express their political opinions. Not because those opinions are “antisemitic,”
but because those opinions don’t toe a pro-Israel line.
We already have laws against violence and harrassment,
which apply whether the victims are Jewish or not.
We also have a First Amendment which protects the
right to free speech, even if that speech criticizes Israel – and even if that
speech is ACTUALLY antisemitic – whether the speakers are Jews or non-Jews.
“If there be time to expose through discussion the
falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education,” the
late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “the remedy to be applied is
more speech, not enforced silence.”
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