The "Anti-Zionist" Exception

On the Left speech = violence until the Jews became involved, then suddenly it didn't

And we all know what means are meant, don’t we…?

---

The comrades want you to know that they’re absolutely, positively in favor of free speech—honest! Here, from Substack Notes, is one Resistance warrior, pledging his unswerving allegiance to the sacred tenants of the First Amendment:

I demand adherence to the 1st Amendment. And yes, legal permanent residents have first amendment rights. That’s been upheld by courts consistently. If you consider that such an unreasonable demand, then you’re the one who hates what our country stands for. And this fixation you have with the Jews is perverse. We don’t need your fucking “protection.” And there’s absolutely a parallel between rich white woman who hire black woman to lecture them about their privilege, and guys like you who get off on seeing dumb college girls who came here when they were 7 get snatched off the street by ICE agents and disappeared to prisons in Louisiana for attending a single rally or publishing an article criticizing Israel. Wtf is wrong with you you sick fuck? Whatever it is, you should stop using the Jews as a pretext to rationalize your own sadism.

Intemperate, none too coherent, and including an obligatory F-bomb (in case you’re wondering, the “sick fuck” referred to is me), but this simply vibrates with self-righteousness, doesn’t it? Well, why not? When you’re defending freedom of speech, you’re on solid ground.

But under the glaring spotlight of recent history, this individual’s spittle-spewing cri de coeur sheds a good deal of its credibility. For the broad Left—radicals, progressives, mainstream Democrats—has a spotty record when it comes to freedom of speech. Its devotion to the sacred tenants of the First Amendment is governed by a theory of situational ethics. The comrades go to the mattresses in defense of foreign guests of this country who employs vile antisemitic invective to harass and intimidate Jewish students on campus. But a United States senator who pens a politically offensive New York Times op-ed article is committing “violence” and needs to be silenced.

I refer, of course, to the uproar over Senator Tom Cotton’s 2020 op-ed, in which he advocated the deployment of deployment of troops to assist local law enforcement agencies in suppressing the violent urban riots touched off by the death of George Floyd. The Senator pointed out that the 1807 Insurrection Act gives the president authority to do this.

In the telling of the Left, that rioting was “mostly peaceful”: a claim that was dutifully taken up by much of the media. Even with buildings going up in flames behind them, journalists on the scene parroted that line. The death of George Floyd was alleged to justify arson, looting, toppling of offensive statues, assaults on police, etc. How dare Tom Cotton denounce these righteous activities and call for their suppression by jackbooted federal government stormtroopers?

Young Woke staffers at the NYT threw their rattles out of the crib and pitched a fit: Senator Cotton had made them feel unsafe! “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” was their absurd claim. And senior management, exhibiting all the backbone of a chocolate éclair, promptly disowned the op-ed. The paper’s editorial page editor, James Bennet, who’d initially defended the decision to publish it, abruptly reversed himself, declaring that the piece did not meet the NYT’s “editorial standards.” He even claimed—and this was almost certainly a lie—that he hadn’t read it before it was published.

But Bennet’s recantation fell on deaf ears. At the behest of the NYT’s snowflake staffers, he was given the push. A few years later, however, he got back at his cowardly former employer via an article in The Economist, detailing the paper’s slide into authoritarian po-mo progressivism.

On the whole, the media took the side of the aggrieved NYT staffers. According to Vox, “The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America’s values” against fascists like Tom Cotton. Or to put it another way, the media should toe the (Democratic) Party line—somewhat in the manner of Pravda or the Völkischer Beobachter.

I review this history by way of introduction to a question: How many of the leftists, progressives, Democrats who denounced Cotton’s editorial and lambasted the NYT for publishing it are now standing tall for the First Amendment rights of terrorist-supporting, antisemitic foreigners living in the United States? No doubt their name is Legion, for they are many.

The NYT/Tom Cotton affair was of course no isolated incident, no unfortunate failure to maintain a broadly accepted high standard. When it comes to the First Amendment, the Left’s position may be summed up in eight words: Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Recall, for example, the speech policing that was so prominent a feature of gender ideology in its heyday. A few years ago, I personally was booted from Medium for “deadnaming,” i.e. referring to the odious Chelsea Manning by his original name, Bradley Manning. Some Woke stormtrooper reported me to the Authorities, who gave me the bum’s rush with no right of appeal. Back then, “deadnaming” and “misgendering” were punishable offenses. One can understand why. When your ideology is based on an obvious absurdity, no one can be allowed to point that out.

Surely there’s no need to review in detail the sorry state of free speech on many American university campuses. But to mention one egregious and all-too-typical abuse, the number of instances in which student activists have prevented conservative or heterodox guest speakers from speaking must run into the hundreds. This “heckler’s veto” has been used against thought criminals ranging from federal judges to Ann Coulter. And as if to show their utter contempt for freedom of speech, the little horrors who employ this tactic claim that they’re exercising their rights under the First Amendment.

Then there was the behavior of government, social media outlets and much of the Left during the COVID-19 pandemic. All colluded to mute or suppress online speech that contradicted the official line: for instance, suggestions that the pandemic originated with a lab leak in China, questions as to whether masking really worked, protests over prolonged school closures. In the name of public health and public safety, such heresies had to be stamped out—and the First Amendment be damned.

But times have changed. Today, “anti-Zionism” is the epicenter of free-speech conflict. Since the bloody Hamas pogrom of 10/7/2023, the Left has embraced the First Amendment with something approaching fanaticism. All of a sudden, they’re demanding unconditional adherence to freedom of speech, even for antisemitic supporters of terrorism and genocide. A welcome development? Well, not so much. There’s nothing new here, actually; it’s just the latest iteration of the Left’s long love affair with revolutionary violence.

Again, there’s no need to review in detail the evidence supporting this indictment. From the Thirties, when Western leftists sang the praises of the Lenin and later of the Stalinist Soviet Union, to the Sixties when the New Left ran a campaign of domestic terror while the broad Left patronized violent gangbanger revolutionaries like the Black Panthers, and on to the Left’s long series of love affairs with assorted foreign revolutionary groups and regimes, the lure of political violence has beguiled the comrades. It manifested itself again, to a truly ludicrous extent, in 2020. And here it is again today, fueled by the latent antisemitism of postmodern progressivism, manifested in the Left’s defense of the free speech rights of terrorist-supporting, Jew-bashing, anti-American foreigners—who are, as we now know, following the orders of Hamas and Iranian ayatollahs.

The Left’s defense of “anti-Zionist” free speech is really the support of low-intensity domestic terrorism. Just as “speech” in 2020 was held to include looting, arson, vandalism and assaults on law enforcement officers, “speech” today is held to include open and vile manifestations of hate, directed against Jews—all in the name of “Palestine.”

Supposedly, this defense of the indefensible is motivated by pure principle, as my foul-mouthed critic claimed. But let’s assume for the moment that the current campus disorders are being perpetrated by groups of masked white students, waving Confederate flags, demanding an end to CRT and DEI on campus. To that end, they’ve established encampments on campus from which people of color are barred. They harass and intimidate faculty and students of color. They invade classrooms, disrupting CRT and DEI instruction. They occupy and vandalize university buildings, in the process assaulting university employees or holding them hostage.

Would the Left—any segment of the Left—defend such actions on free-speech grounds? Need that question even be asked?

“Your right to swing your fist stops short of my jaw”: That’s the rough-and-ready test that a liberal democracy applies to speech—a test with both informal and legal implications. Racist rhetoric that’s just that and nothing more may enjoy legal protection, though societal sanctions still apply. But in cases where racist rhetoric is accompanied by actions that violate the civil rights of others or lead to violence—send in the cops. Antisemitism in American higher education presents just such a case—as Jews on the campuses of many American universities can attest. And the First Amendment doesn’t protect this hateful “speech” that victimizes them.

The ultimate irony is that for decades now, the Left has been arguing that speech can be tantamount to violence. That was what the snowflake staffers of the NYT meant when they whined that Tom Cotton’s op-ed made them feel “unsafe.” When Ann Coulter turned up at Cornell, activist students had a tantrum and screamed at her, “Your words are violence!”

But in the case of “anti-Zionism,” where speech does indeed flirt with and often embraces violence, the comrades stick their fingers in their ears and chant: La, la, la!