Paul Haeder, Author

The scheme would work only if Israel could destroy all evidence of its own guilt. USS Liberty June 8 1967

by Paul Haeder / June 7th, 2026

NOTE: I was part of the racket. The academic racket, though I was a freeway flyer, precarious, adjunct, road scholar, who fought like hell against exploitation of adjunct faculty, who fought like hell for students to be free and critical thinking students (not customers) and who fought like hell give some micro-shade of radical thinking and radical action in the midst of those Upton Sinclair folk — It’s difficutl to get a man or woman to know or see the truth when he or she depend on not knowing the truth for their pieces of eight, their mortgage, rent, utility bill, car payment, disposable income, even for disposable faculty.

That racket also posited that we teaching writing, lit and journalism keep that false balance, equivocation, and absolute foolish “say the right things correctly” credo in our briefcases. You know, there is the language of the professional-professional, versus that of the street, that crude discourse, all that mean and over-the-top polemical stuff which shall be verboten.

It’s not ironic that that shifting baseline disorder (accepting hybrid and then Zoom and then fully remote classes; accepting Chat GPT in English classes, accepting the protest zone permission slips, and of course, accepting the Jewish State of Rape and Murder and Deception and Theft’s version of their depravity vis-a-vis language and law and dictates and legislation) has brought those chickens home to roost, or some of them at least.

So forget about the nanny-ing of language, and forget about attacking those of us who use the term “Jews” or “The Jews” as descriptors of a fake nation and those almost hands down Jews who support the Nakba, i.e., Jewish Fake Homeland.

ANTISEMITISM? Everything is now, according to the chosen people. Entire armies of blood and bones people attacking people like me, but they now have satellites, exploding pagers, applications that scan all data on Dissident Voice or Substack, and alas, we all are ANTISEMITES in their book of blood libels.

+–+

Let it rip, DV. All thoughts, punctuation marks, sentence structures, word usages, paragraphing, sentiments, ideas, expressions, all of it is not necessarily those of the editors of DV, or its readers!

Ahhh. The Jews running Camera will tell you what you see and what you feel when the bombs go off, and torpedoes hit you was just in your fucking mind:

CAMERA on Campus
Increasingly, campuses have been the scene of propagandistic assaults on Israel. Distorted literature, extreme speakers, and false, inflammatory images are all too common, creating harmful misperceptions of Israel. This hostile environment can be intimidating to students seeking fair and objective information on Middle East issues.

CAMERA’s campus website, Camera on Campus, and its affiliated blog, give students access to specialized information useful in countering misinformation. CAMERA also provides one-on-one assistance to students who encounter Middle East distortions in campus publications, flyers, rallies, and classroom teaching.

K-12 Education

Anti-Israel activists have increasingly turned to K-12 schools to target students with slanted accounts of the Middle East. CAMERA is confronting the problem with its K-12 work.

A History Channel program to be broadcast on the evening of August 9 will reportedly charge that the US and Israel have covered up the facts behind the attack by Israeli jets and torpedo boats on a US intelligence-gathering ship during the 1967 Six Day War. The USS Liberty was steaming more than 10 miles off the coast of El Arish on June 8, 1967 when Israeli jets, responding to reports of shelling from the sea, attacked the ship with cannon and napalm. Soon afterwards Israeli torpedo boats arrived at the scene and also attacked after first being fired upon by the Liberty. The Israeli seamen later explained they mistook the Liberty for an Egyptian ship, the El Quesir, but when they realized their target was a US ship, they ceased fire and offered assistance. Tragically, thirty-four US personnel were killed in the attack, and another 171 were wounded.

The cover-up —

At the height of the six-day war in 1967, Israel attacked a US spy ship, killing 34 men and injuring many more. The Israelis claimed it was an accident; the Americans backed them up. But, as James Bamford reveals in his new book, both governments concealed the horrific truth

Jews are the worst kind of deceivers, and they have a long line of monsters, from Oppen-Monster-Heimer to Roy Cohn to Blinken to Fink to Eddy Bernays to Schumer to Dershowitz to Bill Mahr to Leibowitz to Kusner to Zuckerberg to Altman to Ackman to Karp to Ellison to Weiss, and that list, man, is long when you count the deceivers in lower and higher ed:

Extracted from Body of Secrets by James Bamford, published by Century at £20 © 2001 James Bamford

At that moment in Washington, President Johnson was at his desk, on the phone, alternately shouting at congressional leaders and coaxing them to support his position on several pieces of pending legislation. But four minutes later, he was interrupted by Walt Rostow, national security adviser, on the other line. “The Liberty has been torpedoed in the Mediterranean,” Rostow told Johnson excitedly.

The NSA’s worst fears had come true. “After considerations of personnel safety,” said deputy director Tordella, “one of my immediate concerns, considering the depth of the water and the distance of the ship off shore, had to do with the classified materials on board.” Tordella got on the phone to the Joint Reconnaissance Centre (JCS) and spoke to the deputy director, a Navy captain named Vineyard. “I expressed my concern that the written material be burned if at all possible, and that the electronic equipment be salvaged if that were possible,” he said.

But Tordella was not prepared for what he heard. According to NSA documents – classified top secret- he was told that some senior officials in Washington wanted above all to protect Israel from embarrassment. “Captain Vineyard had mentioned during this conversation,” wrote Tordella, “that consideration was then being given by some unnamed Washington authorities to sink[ing] the Liberty in order that newspaper men would be unable to photograph her and thus inflame public opinion against the Israelis. I made an impolite comment about the idea.” Almost immediately, Tordella wrote a memorandum for the record, describing the conversation, and then locked it away.

A cover story for the Liberty was then quickly devised. “She was a communications research ship that was diverted from her research assignment,” it said, “to provide improved communication-relay links with the several US embassies around the entire Mediterranean during the current troubles.”

On the Liberty, black smoke was still escaping through more than 800 holes in the hull, and the effort to hush up the incident had already begun. Within hours of the attack, which left 34 men dead and two-thirds of the rest of the crew wounded, Israel asked President Johnson to quietly bury the incident. “Embassy Tel Aviv,” said a highly secret, very limited distribution message to the state department, “urged de-emphasis on publicity since proximity of vessel to scene of conflict was fuel for Arab suspicions that the US was aiding Israel.” Shortly thereafter, a total news ban was ordered by the Pentagon. No one in the field was allowed to say anything about the attack. All information was to come only from a few senior Washington officials.

Later that morning, Johnson took the unusual step of ordering the JCS to recall its fighters while the Liberty still lay smouldering, sinking, fearful of another attack and with its decks covered with the dead, dying and wounded. On board the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, Rear Admiral Lawrence R Geis, who commanded the carrier force in the Mediterranean, was angry and puzzled at the recall and protested to the Secretary of Defence, Robert S McNamara.

Geis was shocked by what he heard next. “President Lyndon Johnson came on with a comment that he didn’t care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies.” Geis told Lieutenant Commander David Lewis, head of the NSA group on the Liberty, about the comment but asked him to keep it secret until after Geis died. It was a promise that Lewis kept.

“AN ISRAEL-CENTRIC FOREIGN POLICY”

Twenty-five years ago, Condoleezza Rice, now President George W. Bush’s secretary of state and then his national security adviser, unwittingly explained in a remarkable burst of candor: “We have an Israel-centric foreign policy.” Rice’s statement was profound and accurate. Although she spoke nearly four decades after the assault on the Liberty, her words explain why the cover-up began and why it continues to this day.

Since 1967, many people in and out of government have learned the truth about the cover-up. Why were they silent? Why did reporters ignore tips that would surely lead to top news stories?

The sad and simple truth is that most Americans, especially those in public office and even those in the presidency, have a deadly fear of being labeled anti-Semitic. No matter how well documented the charges, they will neither utter nor write anything critical of Israel, for fear it will draw that unwarranted and unwelcome charge. Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. George W. Ball once stated that the most powerful instrument of intimidation employed by Israel’s U.S. lobby is the “reckless charge of anti-Semitism.”

The fear is endemic, but rarely mentioned. It reaches all government offices and intimidates all levels and sections of our society—business, education, academia, preachers, publishing and other media.

Israel attacks USS Liberty

8 June 1967

USS Liberty, listing after the attack, a helicopter takes killed and wounded people from the vessel

Credit: National Archives and Records Administration

On 8 June 1967, Israeli forces attacked the US Navy research ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 and injuring 171 people.

The Liberty was off the coast of El Arish, Egypt, operated by the National Security Agency. It was tasked with monitoring communications during the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states, including Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.

First, the ship was attacked by air, then by torpedoes and artillery. Badly damaged, the crew launched three lifeboats but these were also attacked, which is considered a war crime under international law.

While official investigations by the US and Israel concluded that the attack was accidental, as Israeli forces believed the ship to be Egyptian, others disagree. Journalist James Bamford in his book Body of Secrets argued that the Liberty’s ability to intercept Israel’s communications could have been the motivation for the attack, in order to cover up war crimes such as the massacre of unarmed Egyptian prisoners in El Arish.

NSA Deputy Director, Louis Tordella, described the preliminary inquiry by the Israeli military as “a nice whitewash”, and US Secretary of State Dean Rusk stated: I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation… I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.”

The US inquiry into the incident was held in secret, and survivors were issued gag orders banning them from ever speaking about what occurred. Despite the gag orders, survivors of the attack, who set up the Liberty Veterans Association, continue to demand a transparent investigation into the incident.

The president of the organisation told The Intercept:

“We now know that the Navy Court of Inquiry was merely for show, as the officers were told to come to the conclusion the Liberty did [its] job and the attack was accidental.”

Some survivors of the attack were accused of antisemitism for talking about their experiences.

At the time of writing (2024), the NSA still keeps its files on the attack secret.

Sources

• James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (Knopf, 2002).
• Pensack M. 2017 Jun 6. Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel’s USS Liberty Attack Secret. The Intercept. [accessed 2024 Jun 8]. https://theintercept.com/2017/06/06/fifty-years-later-nsa-keeps-details-of-israels-uss-liberty-attack-secret/.
• The Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty: Intelligence Memorandum. Central Intelligence Agency. June 13, 1967, accessed June 8, 2024, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001359216.pdf.
• Samuel J Cox, H-007-1 Attack on USS Liberty. Naval History and Heritage Command. June 8th 2017 [accessed 2024 Jun 8]. https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-007/h-007-1.html.
• Dean Rusk, Richard Rusk, As I Saw It (Penguin, 1991).
• Sullivan M. 2010 Feb 9. Israel attacks USS Liberty. HISTORY. [accessed 2024 Jun 8]. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/israel-attacks-uss-liberty.

“It is a reasonable conclusion that the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2021 was an inside job arranged by the highly placed neoconservatives led by vice president Dick Cheney. The purpose of the attack was to produce the “New Pearl Harbor” that the Zionists said was necessary to deceive the American people into a quarter century of war destroying the Arab countries in the way of Greater Israel.” – Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Oh, all those Jewish college professors, and lawyers and Ellison Clansmen and Weiss Clanswomen:! Does it never shock them about the optics here?

Photo: Palestinian refugees fleeing villages captured in the Latrun area. The IDF expelled them, and the JNF built Canada Park over the ruins. Credit: Benia Ben-Nun

“At first I wasn’t prepared to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting. Then we reached the conclusion that we had to kill them. We went through a process of stopping seeing them as human beings.” — First soldier

“In Gaza, human life had no value. You could kill, and there was no law. No one would say a single word to you, but it’s a bad feeling. It kills your humanity.” — Second soldier

“We carried out punitive raids in small villages in the Gaza Strip, not once or twice. We would round up the men, line them up, and liquidate them. Looking at it now, it seems like murder.” — Third soldier

“We roamed refugee camps in Gaza and carried out cleansing operations. Every man we saw we considered a fighter. There’s no way to prove it. Maybe the dead were prisoners or civilians. Every soldier there established something like a ‘detention camp’ that he ran, and they didn’t hesitate to kill anyone who caused the slightest disturbance.” — Fourth soldier

“Trying to distinguish between ‘the desire to kill and the desire for entertainment’ — that’s a philosophical debate.” — Fifth soldier

Nah, Oct. 7 wasn’t a righteous prison break!

In the weeks following the war, thousands of Palestinian refugees attempted to return to the West Bank after fleeing east across the Jordan River. But the Israeli army ambushed the returnees and massacred them. These killings were not widely publicized, but they reached the ears of Knesset Member Uri Avnery. A shocked soldier he encountered told him that he and his comrades had been ordered to shoot even at women and children. After collecting a second soldier’s testimony, Avnery asked IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin to open an investigation and issue an order to stop the killings.

Avnery did not publish the details in his newspaper Haolam Hazeh, nor did he speak about them from the Knesset podium. Like others, he maintained silence and waited five decades before giving his testimony in his autobiography:

“Every night, Arabs attempted to cross the Jordan River from the east bank to the west bank. We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without warning. And indeed, shots were fired every night at men, women, and children — even on moonlit nights where it was possible to distinguish between men, women, and children. In the morning, we went out to survey the area, and by explicit order of the officer present, we killed those who were still alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we buried the bodies with earth until the bulldozers arrived.”

Another soldier testified:

“They explained to us that if convoys of returning refugees from Jordan to the West Bank passed before us, we were to shoot them. I asked the officer: And if I hear children crying, do I shoot them too? The answer was: Don’t be like a girl.”

Some claim that many Jews are the pathogen of the globe:

In late April, a federal judge in São Paulo sentenced Zé Maria to two years in open prison for a speech in which he called for the liberation of Palestine. Zé Maria is a 69-year-old metalworker and union activist who was imprisoned under Brazil’s military dictatorship alongside Lula. The lawsuit was filed by the Israeli Confederation of Brazil using the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and his case is not isolated. Blanca Missé documents how the IHRA definition is being deployed in a coordinated offensive across Latin America to criminalize Palestine solidarity, with its primary targets drawn from the backbone of the region’s social movements.

This is what Israel Day represents motherfuckers: Among the participants was Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu and Knesset member Yitzhak Wasserlauf, who was recording calling on Israeli soldiers to “dash” Palestinian babies “against the rocks”.

Israel has been withholding Palestinian customs revenues indefinitely, and the effect on the West Bank’s public health system is now showing up in hospitals. Public hospitals have slashed workers’ salaries, cut their hours, and left patients navigating a system running on interns and labs operating at half-capacity. Healthcare workers have gone on strike. Qassam Muaddi reports from inside the Ramallah Medical Complex on what Israel’s financial siege is doing to Palestinian healthcare in the West Bank.

On May 31, the director of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al-Balah announced that the facility was once again on the verge of closing after its fourth generator failed. Half a million people depend on it for medical care. Gaza’s electrical grid was destroyed in October 2023, and the generators that replaced it have been running continuously for over three years. Health officials say Israel has calibrated its restrictions on fuel and supplies deliberately, allowing just enough in to prevent total collapse while ensuring hospitals cannot recover. Tareq S. Hajjaj reports on what staff and officials describe as a deliberate effort to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system through the calibrated denial of fuel and supplies.

Ahh, those pedophile FILES: Cold Case, Case Closed? The Legal Loopholes That Let Epstein, Maxwell, and Many Others Traffic Children in New Mexico For Decades Were Deliberately Awful & Specific to This State

For the first twelve years Epstein operated at Zorro Ranch — from 1993 through July 2008 — New Mexico had no human trafficking statute. Zero. Zip. Zilch. The law that finally criminalized trafficking in New Mexico took effect the same month Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida, almost like New Mexico didn’t need it anymore since its favorite kidfucker was in jail. Even after he got out of prison in Florida, that new law was never used against him, because if it had been then how would Gary King have gotten those big fat donations from Epstein in his run for governor, huh?

When Epstein came back to New Mexico after 2008, as a convicted sex offender, New Mexico’s creepy piece of shit pedophile registration law — written in 1995 with gaps wide enough to fly a private plane through — did not require him to register. Everywhere else did. We did not. Epstein’s lawyers used New Mexico’s tolerance for child-fuckers as evidence that Jeffrey wasn’t all that dangerous, in other places: “What he did wasn’t that bad. Look. If it were, would New Mexico be, all, ‘hey, dude, no need to register. We gotchu.’?”

Darren Indyke, […has strong professional and transactional connections to various Jewish organizations and philanthropies through his decades of work managing Epstein’s financial network. While public biographical records do not explicitly detail his personal religious upbringing or identity, his career frequently placed him at the center of prominent Jewish institutions] who worked as Epstein’s attorney for roughly two decades, told the House Oversight Committee in his opening statement that he “had no knowledge whatsoever” of Epstein’s abuse and would have quit working for him if he had known he was trafficking women and underage girls.

Other associates of Epstein, including his former accountant Richard Kahn, one of his largest clients, Les Wexner, and former President Bill Clinton, have also told the committee in sworn depositions that they didn’t know about Epstein’s abuse.

[Richard Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime accountant and co-executor of his estate, has a Jewish background. Public records and his professional circle confirm his Jewish heritage, which has occasionally been noted in discussions surrounding Epstein’s close network of associates]

Democrats on the committee aired their frustration during a break from Indyke’s deposition, saying that the lawyer had taken a “defensive” posture in the face of questioning.

Indyke, along with Kahn, is an executor of Epstein’s estate, and lawmakers had hoped they would provide details about Epstein’s abuse that would bring accountability. So far, though, lawmakers have struggled to uncover substantive details about the associates of Epstein, who died in 2019 in a New York jail cell while he faced charges for sex trafficking.

The bumblers: Ambassador Chas Freeman discusses how Greater Israel is coming to an end. Ambassador Freeman was a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, earning the highest public service awards of the Department of Defense for his roles in designing a NATO-centred post-Cold War European security system and in reestablishing defence and military relations with China. He served as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Sure, real proper men, Ambassador, Professor? What  losers:

Shortly before they reached their family home in Hebron, they encountered Israeli troops in Wadi al-Hariya area near Tel Rumeida. Fahd immediately stopped the car, but that did not stop the Israelis from opening fire at them.

“The soldier signaled me to stop, I stopped the car completely and raised my hands on the steering wheel. Immediately afterwards, fire opened at the car,” Fahd told Haaretz.

The terrorist Israeli army claimed that a soldier felt threatened by the car that prompted the shooting. However, Fahd father rejected the claim. “The soldier was about ten meters away from me. He saw me, he saw my wife and the children. The car windows were not dark, it was daylight and everything was clear. You can’t say he didn’t see that it was a family.”

The Jews have had Cuba and want it back, too:

So is Trump, America’s least popular president in his second term since G.W.Bush, going to invade Cuba? With Trump it’s hard to know, but his recent actions and threats are ominous. First, to provide a pretext for his threatened assault and kidnapping in Cuba, he has had his ever-compliant Department of “Justice” indict 94-year-old Raúl Castro, the frail and ailing younger bother of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel. Raúl was vice president 2008 when Fidel stepped down as Cuba’s president for health reasons. Raúl became acting president and then president until stepping down himself in 2018.

The US indictment lodged against Raúl, who is no longer a Cuban leader, is based upon the dubious allegation that as Minister of Cuba’s armed forces he “gave the orders” to two Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets to down two civilian US Cessna aircraft violating Cuban airspace, killing all four men in the downed planes from an organization called “Brothers to the Rescue.” (One of the pilots who died, murder José Basulto, a right-wing Cuban exile who co-founded “Brothers to the Rescue,” owner of the planes and one of the downed pilots who died, was known by Havana to have been trained and slipped onto the island ahead of ther Bay of Pigs invasion, tasked with committing acts of sabotage to draw away Cuban defenders from the planned invasion landing area. Later, in 1962 he took a speedboat to the island and fired a cannon at a beach hotel, the Paquita de Hornedo, known to be frequented by foreign technicians, mostly from the Soviet Union and some Warsaw Pact countries. He gave a press conference about his action on his return to the U.S.)

[Some of the crew of the sunken Dena being prepared in Iran for a mass public funeral.]

Some might use this comparison, that of a disease: The first Jewish presence dates back to 1492 with Luis de Torres, a Jewish interpreter who accompanied Christopher Columbus. The community grew following the Spanish-American War in 1898 and expanded significantly in the 1920s when U.S. immigration quotas stranded European refugees on the island.

• Community Life: Prior to 1959, Cuban Jews were largely merchants and peddlers who established a successful middle class, built multiple synagogues, and opened kosher establishments in Havana.

U.S. mobster’s heirs to Cuba: “You owe us – so pay up”

For Meyer Lansky, a mobster and casino impresario known for his business savvy, Cuba was the worst bet of his life.

In the 1950s, Havana was America’s favorite playground. Gambling, sex shows, and rum were plentiful. Lansky’s hotel, the Riviera, was one of Havana’s swankiest.

[Trafficking in lies, deception, and lawyered up upside and down their Jewish Chosen Bodies?]

“I mean it was a great spot,” Lansky’s grandson Gary Rapoport told CNN of the Riviera. “Any businessman would be terribly crushed if someone just came along and took it.”

That “someone” was Fidel Castro. After taking power, the Cuban revolutionary took away all Americans’ property, targeting with particular vehemence the mafiosos who paid off Cuban officials to flout the law and turn the country into a den of vice for foreigners.

[When the Mob Owned Cuba — Best-selling author T.J. English discusses the Mob’s profound influence on Cuban culture and politics in the 1950s]

Old Ben NEVER EVER calls it Jewish Threat!

Go ask Jew-oogle: “all the laws that unfairly call people antisemitic” — Vomit bag necessary!

No laws explicitly penalize individuals by name for being “antisemitic.” However, there is an intense legal and political debate surrounding legislation that adopts specific definitions of antisemitism. Critics argue these laws create a “chilling effect” that unfairly labels legitimate political criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitic. Proponents assert these measures are necessary to identify and combat rising discrimination against Jewish people.

Accordingly, the Center for Security, Race and Rights offers two policy recommendations:

1. Reject codification into law or policy of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism has no place in law. The analysis presented here makes clear that the IHRA definition reproduces anti-Palestinian racism, exacerbates antisemitism, and serves as a tool of censorship of political speech, academic work, and civic engagement on matters of public importance, including criticism of Israel. A recent letter, organized by the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network and signed by more than 1100 scholars – working in all fields, from doctoral students to senior professors, in universities large and small, public and private, around the world – calls for the rejection of the IHRA definition in law or policy. Furthermore, the original IHRA document explicitly notes it is a “non-legally binding” definition. That the IHRA definition has nevertheless been weaponized through legislation caused Kenneth Stern, a lead drafter of the text of the definition, to repudiate ongoing legislative efforts to codify it into law.

Existing anti-discrimination laws already protect Jewish people, as well as other minority groups, from discrimination. For that reason, there is no equivalent definition for anti-Muslim racism, anti-Black racism or racism against Indigenous people (to note just a few examples) in any state or federal law. Singling out antisemitism as the only form of racism deserving of a separate definition is not only unnecessary to protect Jews from discrimination, but also may give rise to antisemitic conspiracies about Jews controlling the government.

2. State legislatures and the U.S. Congress should rely on existing anti-discrimination laws to combat antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and Islamophobia; and adhere to constitutional prohibitions against viewpoint-based regulation of speech.

State legislatures and the U.S. Congress should reject pending or future legislation that codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism into law. Existing statutes that adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism should be amended to remove the definition in adherence to the constitutional prohibition of regulation of speech and expressive conduct based purely on content or viewpoint.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government or public institutions from regulating speech based on content or viewpoint, unless a legally specified exception applies. Three legally prescribed exceptions include 1) speech or expressive conduct that pose a clear and present danger, 2) regulations of speech or expressive conduct that are content and viewpoint neutral, and 3) restrictions on the time, place and manner of the expression of speech or expressive conduct that are viewpoint and content neutral. None of these exceptions protect the laws codifying the IHRA definition from meritorious constitutional challenges.

The federal Antisemitism Awareness Act as well as state laws that adopt the IHRA definition are unconstitutionally prohibiting viewpoints whether explicitly in the law, in its “design” or by “operation,” because these laws favor pro-Israeli points of views while disfavoring views critical or opposed to Israel. That is, these laws intentionally regulate speech or expressive conduct based on the speaker’s content. The U.S. Supreme Court makes it clear that even valid justifications, such as combating antisemitism, cannot save a law “that is in fact based on the desire to suppress a particular point of view.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism, if codified into law or enforced as policy by state actors, violates these constitutional prohibitions by imposing a legal penalty for speech and expressive conduct based on viewpoints that are critical of Israel in specific ways and the political ideology of Zionism. Attempts to codify it into law or policy should be rejected. Existing anti-discrimination law is sufficient to allow for the fact-specific and context-based analysis necessary to effectively combat hateful acts.

Read the Issue Brief Threats to Free Speech and Palestinian Civil Rights: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism here.

We invite you to support our programming and research on Palestine in ways that center Palestinians’ lived experiences by donating to the CSRR Humanizing Palestine Endowment here.