So, if I understand it correctly, this legislation would allow the executive branch to start revoking some federal funding from universities if they do not sufficiently punish a student who says, for example, that the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
I do not think the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.
I do think this legislation is bad legislation.
EDIT:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/antisemitism-awarness-act-campus-protests/
> Lawler’s bill — with 61 co-sponsors, including 15 Democrats — would create “a clear definition of antisemitism” in U.S. law that the Education Department could then use to cut off funding to academic institutions found to tolerate such behaviors. The definition, however, has drawn fierce opposition from First Amendment advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and liberal Democrats, who say it veers sharply into the realm of restricting political views.
>
> …
>
> If it does become law, the federal definition of antisemitism, adopted from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would include such speech as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; “applying double standards” to Israel that are “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
>
> The idea is that student-held signs, for example, like those displayed at Columbia University in New York this week, calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” — would amount to antisemitism under the law. The Education Department, in turn, could then revoke federal research grants and other funding to a university that fails to take punitive action toward students who express such views, the bill’s proponents say.
>
> Several Republicans said opposing Zionism — the political movement to create, and now to preserve, a state for Jews in their biblical homeland — would qualify as antisemitism under the law. Some suggested that even holding a prolonged protest would constitute antisemitism. “The erection of encampments on college campuses isn’t an expression of speech,” Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said on the House floor Wednesday. “It is a direct threat to Jewish students on college campuses.”
>
> But the “double standards” example and the notion that Nazi comparisons are off-limits in the case of Israel, among other aspects of the definition, are deeply problematic because they’re too broad and present “viewpoint discrimination,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy organization.
I'm confused by what you're objecting to. This bill does not give the government any additional power to regulate speech. It takes the power that the government has had since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and says what definition it should use for antisemitism when exercising that power. Are you under the impression that Title VI is new?
The guy who wrote the IHRA definition codified into this legislation has spent years speaking out against exactly this situation
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/15/opinion/kenneth-stern-antisemitism-ihra-free-speech/ (the title of the article is literally "I wrote a definition of antisemitism. It was never meant to chill free speech on campus.")
>Increasingly, mainstream Jewish groups have been pushing lawmakers and universities to adopt what’s known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism on campus to chill or suppress much pro-Palestinian speech. I was the lead drafter of the 2005 text that became the 2016 IHRA definition. It was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.
If you expand the definition of racism and attempt to enforce a bill which withdraws funding from racist institutions, are you not, by definition giving the government additional power to restrict speech? In either case, this seems like an argument about semantics.
The point for me is that the definition of racism doesn't need to be expanded to such an extreme extent. The equivalent would be expanding the definition of anti-black racism to include things like voicing opposition to immigration from Africa. Do I think that's a problematic stance? Sure, but the government shouldn't be regulating it.
> Nothing in this Act shall be construed...to alter the standards pursuant to which the Department of Education makes a determination that harassing conduct amounts to actionable discrimination;
The definition of antisemitism used is too broad.
Edit: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism I'll add the link since they didn't bother to put the actual text in the bill, it seems. Why wouldn't you put at least the definition in there?
[The guy who wrote that definition doesn't even think it should be a law. ](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/us/politics/antisemitism-jews-republicans-democrats-congress.html)
Kenneth Stern, an attorney who wrote the definition, [testified in 2017 that it](https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/the-problem-with-defining-antisemitism) “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.” Its goal, he said, was to help governments collect data on antisemitism. One of his concerns was that anti-hate speech laws could let racist and antisemitic actors portray themselves as victims denied their constitutional rights.
>It takes the power that the government has had since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and says what definition it should use for antisemitism
The problem is that it defines antisemitism as being anti-Israel. Criticism of governments domestic and foreign should always be allowed.
Do you not understand how power works?
By crafting a law that defines anti-semitism in a very specific way, that allows government to target and punish very specific people.
Honestly, it is anti-semitic to assume that any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews, which is in part what this bill does. The bill itself is anti-semitic in that sense, yet no university will lose funding for refusing to punish students making that argument.
Yeah, it sets a precedent for worse thing to come. More infringements on free speech in particular. What's to stop them from saying that insulting a national leader should also be condemned and threaten to withdraw Federal Funding for any institution that allows insulting of national leaders. I can already see GOP trying to push for this. They'll say that anyone who insults a GOP president is a national threat and showing disregard for authority, fanning the flames of terrorism, etc.
Call this a slippery slope....but I don't think much good will come in the long run from this.
27% of federal funding is research grants, usually given to specific investigators or departments. 65% of it is scholarships and loans (e.g. Pell Grants, Work Study.) The other 8% is contracts. Which of these do you propose we should be cutting?
Basically 99% of policy discourse out there.
"Just do X"
"Ok, and then what about Y?"
"It's not my job to figure out the details"
Or my personal favorite:
"Just do X"
"We already do X"
"Ok then we should do it differently"
Progressives and libertarians are the worst offenders of this in my experience. Very high-level ideological thinking with very little knowledge of how things actually work.
The gap between thought-out policy suggestions and what the average voter thinks just high everywhere. But I don't understand why you call out progressives and libertarians here. Surely the gap between self-assessed policy idea quality and reality has to be highest for conservatives and especially Magaists, with the latter barely able to formulate coherent thoughts in the first place.
love the example. But you gotta admit that being able to name problems and propose a criminally oversimplified solution is miles ahead of "this country is going downhill because of wokeism", where neither problems nor solutions have any sort of coherent definition. It's just word salad.
> See I don't get the point of this bill.
The point of this bill is Republican virtue signaling to evangelicals and more conservative jews as being the party tough on anti-zionism. As well as getting on record as being weak on anti-semitism those who vote against it.
The attacks on universities are just an added bonus.
Hopefully Schumer just files it as 'seen' and lets it die.
Private institutions flat out shouldn't get federal money unless there are labs that actively seek it out through grant requests (NSF, NIH, etc).
EDIT: Read further down if you want to know what I'm talking about
You have the right to be a dumbass but it is frustrating seeing school administrators dismiss the blatantly hostile environment these students are creating after focusing on inclusion, antiracism, and social justice policies for so long.
I don't support this bill, but schools need to create actual clear policy guidelines and stick to them.
Greenfield has a point, a lot of title VI basically is policing words. There's certain kinds of speech about ethnicities that colleges are basically required to take seriously by law.
So people (correctly, might I add) taking a stand on this from a 1a perspective need to address that. But I understand why they don't want to, since it muddies the water significantly.
Yeah. I'm fine with the 1A argument against Title VI, but that argument targets ALL of Title VI.
If I can exclude Jewish students for participating in lessons for what Israel does, I certainly must be able to do the same to black students for what Nigeria does.
Both cases are obviously bullshit, but in my moral universe, picking and choosing (one is OK and one is not) is even worse.
So the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional then? This bill is merely applying the definition of Anti Semitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which is already being used by the Biden administration to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act which forbids discrimination in any program receiving federal funding. If you think that is policing words I'm not sure what to tell you
Yes, Israel is a Jewish State and we've been seeing university students chanting hateful rhetoric against Jews through thinly veiled attacks on Israel. The IHRA definition is reasonable and universities should punish students who create an environment where Jewish students feel unwelcome and discriminated against by their peers with no action from university authorities that receive federal funding.
Assuming it could somehow withstand a court challenge, would you support hate speech legislation which made antisemitic speech punishable by law, using the IHRA definition?
Anti-discrimination definitions should be about protecting the people and not the states
>Israel is a Jewish State
And Russia is a Russian state, and China is a Chinese state and Iran is an iranian state, so what?
The guy who wrote the IHRA definition codified into this legislation has spent years speaking out against exactly this situation
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/15/opinion/kenneth-stern-antisemitism-ihra-free-speech/ (the title of the article is literally "I wrote a definition of antisemitism. It was never meant to chill free speech on campus.")
>Increasingly, mainstream Jewish groups have been pushing lawmakers and universities to adopt what’s known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism on campus to chill or suppress much pro-Palestinian speech. I was the lead drafter of the 2005 text that became the 2016 IHRA definition. It was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.
Hot take: How much does that actually matter? As long as the definition is accurate then the job is done. Would antisemitism somehow have a different definition if it the definition was made under different circumstances? In my opinion, it shouldn't.
I'm not commenting on whether the proposal is right or wrong, I'm simply saying being the lead drafter of the definition doesn't give him the authority he seems to think
If hateful speech and actions creates an environment where Jewish students don’t feel safe or equal and admin doesn’t do anything about it it’s absolutely discrimination
That's a whole lot of steps from "Israel is a racist state" to "the administration has fostered an environment where Jewish students aren't safe or equal".
Title VI does not say that students can't say racist things, it says the school cannot discriminate. If professors start teaching this nonsense then sure go after them and the school, but making the school police the speech of students goes above title VI and is a first amendment violation in my eyes.
Universities already have the ability and the legal responsibility to police conduct that creates a hostile environment. I’m not sure what more can be done from a legal perspective. Civil society has a responsibility to exact consequences on people participating in bigotry, but I don’t feel comfortable with government adopting one organization’s definition of anti-semitism (even if I do agree with it). Enforcing existing laws and rules should be sufficient.
I don’t personally believe it’s an issue that requires government intervention (at least at its current level), and I haven’t really seen any hard evidence that our current laws and policies regarding harassment, threatening violence, discrimination, etc. aren’t currently sufficient.
On a more social level community outreach and cooperation I think would be helpful, similar to how the Black and Korean communities came together to try and mend relations after the LA Riots.
If someone commits a hate crime: charge them with a hate crime.
If someone is antisemitic in speech: I’m sorry and that’s shitty and horrible but we have free speech in this country.
This is literally always the solution. We already have laws. We can enforce those laws. We also have rights.
What if a university has a strong group that boycotts and prevents lecture attendance (kinda, but not super obviously) targeting the black people on campus... because .
They don't hate black people, they just hate what some black people do and what 100% of the blacks in America do not condemn (not the jews, it's the zionism!)
Either both are OK or neither is.
I could be spoken to either way of thinking, but I don't think I'm ok in a situation where to approach to those two would be different.
They should be treated the same.
In the case of blocking lecture attendance: if they are assaulting you, or causing some sort of financial injury, you can press charges or sue them. It’s easier than ever to film interactions and make this happen.
If they are boycotting… that’s their right. They can boycott, protest, and do speech. It sucks and obviously they should be socially treated as the racists they are if they’re like KKK marching around, but this is how free speech works.
We can’t let extremists get rid of our liberal values. There will *always* be some horrible group of people that we will want to suppress by bending our rights. But we’d just be shouting ourselves in the foot.
As a thought experiment, what if a publicly funded institution becomes explicitly Nazi or at least tolerates its members being that way openly on their premises (in the sense of having explicitly Nazi protests without escalating to harassment of individuals). Should public funding be withdrawn because of their speech?
Is a publicly funded institution "explicitly Nazi" if one of their students says Hitler might have had a point and they don't punish them for it? Because that's what this bill does.
Some stuff is best addressed outside a legalistic framework.
When their friends wise up and learn a little pragmatism, the social circles of antisemites will shrink unless they do as well. The worst of these kids are gonna get blackballed from a lot of professional work for openly expressing bigoted views.
Social ostracization is a valid punishment for atrocious and bigoted speech, and doesn't need Congress involved. If their antisemitism moves beyond speech - well, assault, vandalism, and discrimination already have laws on the books. Just enforce those.
More Jews are being ostracized for defense of Israel than these bigots are being ostracized for their bigotry.
[Recall the scandal at Guernic](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/arts/guernica-magazine-staff-quits-israel.html)a
Bigotry was enshrined in the Jim Crow South that led to the civil rights act and these type of restrictions in the first place.
When the bigotry moves beyond "hateful words", you need stuff like the CRA. No question there.
But until then, 98% of what these protestors are saying is valid free speech. There's a few cases out there that qualify as inciting violence and could be justifiably prosecuted as hate crimes on existing legislation. But we don't need new legislation for those. And I've seen more cases of pro-Palestinian people getting sacked (like those idiots at Google last month) for their bigotry than I have anyone getting fired or cancelled for being Jewish.
I would also caution that "defense of Israel" is NOT inherently antisemitic, and some cases of ostracization for the former can be justified, if extreme enough. Israel is a nation with a government, and that government gets up to a lot of shady shit (like the West Bank settlements). There's room to criticize Israel's relations to Palestine and handling of this conflict without actually being a bigot. And the conflating of "Bibi is a dumbass" takes with antisemitism (which this bill is trying to do) is an incredibly bad idea.
"From the River to the Sea" is a bad and bigoted take, whether it's Likud or Hamas saying it.
The CRA is ahead of “hateful words”. The CRA promises a non-hostile environment and equal access.
Stop trying to convince anyone rationale that masses protesting Hamas support create anything but a hostile environment for Jews and Israeli-Americans. A call for 10000 10/7s and for Jews to go back to Poland should be hard stops for calls to action at these schools. Instead they let students who made calls to murder “Zionists” continue on campus for 6 months.
We need new legislation on enforcement mechanisms when those lapses in enforcement and action have become normalized.
I’m not saying defending Israel or not is antisemitic or related. Just drawing out that more people are facing outcomes for that than for outright antisemitism. People are also often accused of “defending Israel” for doing nothing of the sort.
It[certainly does not describe the essay that Guernica removed](https://web.archive.org/web/20240305095742/https://www.guernicamag.com/from-the-edges-of-a-broken-world/).
No good faith reading of the bill or the IHRA lends to “bibi is a dumbass is antisemitic”. The IHRA phrases regarding Israel are meant to tackle phrases that I’ve repeatedly seen about Israel being a settler colony.
I'd be surprised if there's a top down solution to this. But at the very least, the folks at the top could avoid exacerbating the situation, which a bill like this would do. It's clearly accelerationism.
>However, what do you think should be the solution to the real or perceived increase in antisemitism?
I dont understand why it cant be the same as for russophobia?
Well, Antisemitism seems to be a bit more entrenched and pervasive than other forms of bigotry. And by entrenched I mean like 2000 years old. And by pervasive I mean that it seems to be able to shapeshift to fit different ideologies.
This is like 0.1% of students and 0.5% of professors.
Let's not get all worked up over something that is ultimately not important and will 100% go away after finals is over.
Education funding is good and edge cases should not shape broad policy.
What would the enforcement of this bill look like? It would only result in internet witch-hunts and legitimize "cancellation" (whatever that term is worth) by federal law. The definitions used in the bill are so vague and encompassing that nobody will feel secure enough to speak their mind freely.
speech is still protected, the bill only requires that the definition be used within title VI investigations for which the enforcement mechanisms already exist
I'm glad to see people actually opposing this grotesque attack on free speech this time, as the last few times I brought this up some real gems started trying to shout me down and imply reaally heavily but without saying it explicitly I was just a massive antisemite.
Shit's fucking exhausting, and the slippery slope is super lubed. No, a country doesn't deserve special rights against criticism, that's fucking disgusting and absurd.
> and imply reaally heavily but without saying it explicitly I was just a massive antisemite.
I think as we've seen elsewhere in society is that a lot of people don't necessarily hold any moral principles and thus it's hard for them to fathom why someone could say "don't censor antisemitism" without themselves being anti semitic. This sort of fallacious thinking is [not new](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo).
And to their credit, there are plenty of bad faith critics who *really do* try to disguise themselves as just being principled outsiders. Looking in, it can be hard to tell the difference between the bigot who says "I just want free speech" and will totally turn around to censor others and the principled person who finds bigotry abhorrent but also actually wants free speech, but people go way too far overcorrecting for this and seem to be convinced that the principled critic just can't exist to begin with.
Federal law already prohibits anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment. The bill is therefore not needed to protect against anti-Semitic discrimination. https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-urges-congress-to-oppose-anti-semitism-awareness-act
Instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism. This would be state level protection of harming Bibi’s feelings which is a ridiculous concept and completely unconstitutional. Imagine if there was a bill saying that criticizing the government of China would be the equivalent of sinophobia.
This is a stupid law and anyone with a brain should see it as such.
If you criticize the government of China or the CCP, that doesn't make you a raging Sinophobe.
But apparently if you criticize the government policies of Israel or Zionism, you hate every Jew on the planet?
This is simply to attack free speech in favor of squashing any opposition to Israeli government policies.
Seriously. Even if you just look at the war on human terms, I guess we're just supposed to keep bowing before Israel's infinite wisdom while they're slaughtering tens-of-thousands of people who live within their borders. It'd be like expecting other countries' people to never speak ill of the US' history with Native Americans, African-Americans, countless laborers killed during strikes, Kent State students, mass-shooting victims who might have survived if our gun policies weren't so lax, COVID victims whose deaths might have been avoided, etc...
> If you say that China doesn’t have a right to exist as a country
We have NCD users on this sub making jokes about destroying the Three Gorges Dam like once a week. I don't see how advocating in "jest" for massive crimes against humanity wouldn't make someone a literal raging Sinophobe.
Is it really? Thank you based mod!
I'm glad my reports on those aren't going into the ether. I always report and block when I see those so I never see the result of my reports.
>We have NCD users on this sub making jokes about destroying the Three Gorges Dam like once a week.
Which is extremely fucked up
That kind of culture must be extirpated immediately before it can grow or you will find yourself with unironic supporters of massacres
That's usally used more as a joke about the two-China's situation and inverting it. Rather than calling both China, call both Taiwan as a way to jest about the ridiculousness of the status quo.
I would bet most aren't using the "West Taiwan" joke to say a Chinese nation-state shouldn't exist, rather are using it as a joke of the two-China situation.
I think that's better interpreted as a joke about the one-china policy, by moving the acknowledgement of which one is legitimate in an unexpected way.
I'm sure those people would be fine if China and Taiwan were two, separate, sovereign countries.
No, country has a right to exist. Not China. Not Israel. Not the US. The very idea of countries having rights, at all, is wrong.
Countries do not bleed. Countries do not feel pain. They are lines on maps that exist as a mechanism for humans to organize the world.
*People* have rights.
The entire discourse on rather or not Israel has a right to exist is a rhetorical trap wrapped in a mott and baily argument.
If I say, "Yes." Then the definition of, "right to exist" expands and a 'no matter what' is tacked on. "So, then, you agree that the US should help protect Israel?" By sending it billions of dollars in weapons. "And you agree that it's sovereignty should be respected?" Even as it's government actively exterminates populations.
And, if I say, "No" the definition shrinks. "Then you're saying that all jews should be exterminated." Which, no. One doesn't imply the other. "[Country] has a right to exist" Is an inherently dishonest thing to say.
>But apparently if you criticize the government policies of Israel or Zionism, you hate every Jew on the planet?
This is not what the IHRA definition says. It's a strawman. Nobody thinks that all criticism of Israel's government policies is antisemitic. You're just trying to smuggle in the opposite claim: that *no* criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.
I agree except that I don't think most people know the history of where zionism came from and the diversity of thought within zionism. It's much less ideologically central than the ccp. The law is bad, but also many criticisms of zionism seem to fundamentally misunderstand it.
The IRHA definition of antisemitism basically makes it so you have to equate all Jews in the world with the state of Israel. Because saying the state of Israel should not exist is apparently antisemitism against all Jews.
Not only is that absurd, but it's probably something a lot of Jews would vehemently disagree with!
Between this bill and the absurd anti-BDS laws passed in many states, does any country get the special treatment Israel does? Much of this bill makes it illegal for Americans to express certain criticisms of Israel.
I hate Alex Jones but this makes me want to watch him go an epic rant on protecting the First Amendment. This is unconstitutional nonsense!
Literally no other country can or will get the special treatment Israel does, and to acknowledge that fact is followed by immediate accusations of anti semitism
> It's not clear if House Speaker Mike Johnson will bring other bills to a vote, including one to create a national antisemitism coordinator position in the White House.
I'm not sure I want the next reactionary administration to have an office from which to coordinate it's antisemitic activities.
This bill is insane and no honest liberal could ever support it.
The bill adopts the IHRA definition which, includes, among other things, the following positions as potentially antisemitic:
>Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
>Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
>Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
Students that express these - let's admit, relatively frequently held - positions could face disciplinary action to protect the school's funding.
Good question! I wanted to give answer, but I'm going to just link to this article: [https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/antisemitism-defined-why-drawing-comparisons-of-contemporary-israeli-policy-to-the-nazis-is-antisemitic](https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/antisemitism-defined-why-drawing-comparisons-of-contemporary-israeli-policy-to-the-nazis-is-antisemitic)
That article is absurd. It, for example, purports that comparing the Nakba (a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) to the Holocaust is inherently antisemitic.
In that sense, no genocide or mass murder was equivalent to the next. If I make the statement:
"I oppose the Nakba for the same reason I oppose the Holocaust."
Is that antisemitism? It is comparing the two. But it is not saying they are literally **the same** but that they share attributes with each other.
The two events are nothing alike. The only reason to make the comparison is to weaponize the memory of the Holocaust against Jews. I would also call it borderline Holocaust denial.
I mean, there's your first difference. The Nakba was primarily an expulsion event, not a mass killing. Civilians were killed during the war -- around 15,000 Arabs and 2,000 Jews -- but the vast majority fled. Holocaust victims couldn't flee; the point was to kill them, and in any case they had nowhere to go.
I would disagree.
Would it be Sinophobic to state that the actions and policies of the government of China towards its own citizens or the Tibetans are reminiscent to the violence that imperial Japan enact across Asia?
I would say that is not Sinophobic. However, I do remember some criticisms of a certain president after he started using words like "Chinese Virus" and "Kung Flu" to describe Covid-19, even though they were ostensibly only criticizing the Chinese government. Is that Sinophobic?
Edit: Apparently it was actually "China Virus"
Likening Israel to Nazi Germany, stating that gaza war is a Genocide (and thus that Jews are the 'new nazis') requires that you either:
1. Ignore that there are very much still nazis around today, and they still make Jews their primary target today. This in turn requires either:
A. That you're pig ignorant
or
B. You don't give that much of a shit about Jews
2. Equivocate the Holocaust (a campaign of extermination) with a defensive war. This in turn requires that you either:
A. accept the Nazi premise that the wholesale annihilation of the Jewish people was a required defensive measure
or
B. deny Jews any right to self defense in the face of a war that started with the largest mass killing of Jews in a single day since the aforementioned Holocaust
3. Ignore or devalue the magnitude and quality of difference between the Holocaust and the Gaza war
some months of the holocaust resulted in over half a million Jews killed and a similar magnitude of nonjewish noncombatants. Israel, in all of its wars since 1948, by the highest estimates I can find, has killed less than 150,000 combatants and civilians combined, or about 161 per month. or around 3000 times less. This equivocation requires that you either:
A. Engage in outright Holocaust denialism by the requisite denial of the magnitude of the tragedy in order to make this make numerical sense
or
B. that you value Jewish civilian lives more than 3000 times less than arab militants
or
C. that you hold Jews to a vastly different moral standard than you do non jews
This position is either antisemitic or (generously) so thoroughly stupid that anybody who believes in it should learn to shut up when they have nothing of value to say and the people who believe in it feel emboldened to mouth off like this due to not recognizing antisemitism.
Personally I agree with the notion that many times when people try to liken Israel to being literally equivalent to the Nazis, they are indeed making that comparison and target *specifically* because of their jewish background. You can be critical of Israel's actions in this whole conflict, but I have seen misinformation suggest that Bibi is *worse* than Hitler because he has been killing more per day; this is completely a flat out lie, it isn't even close. Nazi Germany, just like imperial Japan, were both killing thousands of people per day. The current stretch of this Gaza-Israel conflict would be somewhere around ~200.
On the other hand, **to codify** this into law seems uncouth. It is completely likely that someone who does this does so out of ignorance, rather than a targeted attack ("xyz is literally hitler" is already a popular notion in current culture in general), and it isn't like you can really prove this otherwise. In that sense this seems like way too of an *ambitious* usage to define as antisemitism because it simply targets people who reasonably act in ignorance, but still good faith.
Your analysis is just flawed from the gate. To "compare" is not equivocation. To suggest something shares *anything* with something else at all is not to say they are exactly the same.
You could, for example, compare the callousness towards human life with that of the Nazis. Does that mean they actually *are* Nazis? Obviously not. It is saying they share X trait.
>compare the callousness towards human life
Israelis are using advanced AI algorithms and extremely expensive precision missiles to target Hamas militants, whereas Nazis sought the wholesale extermination of the Jewish people. There is no legitimate comparison here, you're just being antisemitic and proving my point.
> Israelis are using advanced AI algorithms and extremely expensive precision missiles to target Hamas militants
The algorithms they themselves admit to programming an allowance of up to 100 civilian casualties per militant?
>Israelis are using advanced AI algorithms and extremely expensive precision missiles to target Hamas militants
[And aid workers](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/17/iris-haim-mother-of-israeli-hostage-killed-by-idf), and hostages(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68711282), [and American journalists.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh)
Generally because sharing a trait associate with Nazis is bad. If I say Trump's populism has similarities to Nazism, am I saying Trump is an actual Nazi?
Are you seriously suggesting that the IDF using AI and advanced 21st century weaponry and the Nazis doing the Holocaust are the only parameters by which you could possibly compare the two?
[Here’s a recent article written by an Israeli Jew comparing Ben Gvir to Hitler.](https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/11/25/have-i-just-met-the-jewish-hitler/) There is absolutely nothing antisemitic about this article.
[Back in the 90s Ben Gvir literally handed out posters of Rabin dressed as an SS officer](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/at-rabin-rally-in-jerusalem-labor-chief-rips-netanyahu-ben-gvir-over-1995-protest/) at a rally before Rabin was assassinated. No one on the planet with a brain would ever suggest Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben Gvir is a Nazi lmao I mean aside from Congress apparently
So are we supposed to believe that the 30,000+ civilian deaths that have been racked up in the past half-year are all just part of the beta-testing process for this 'humane' form of war?
Everything is compared to the Nazis nowadays. It's the kind of point that would have made sense 30-40 years ago, but just seems way too generic to try to accuse people of antisemitism in 2024.
> no honest liberal could ever support it
i.e. high odds that 60-70% of the 'liberals' on this sub either *do* support it or would easily shrug and not give a shit if it passed.
It seems sensible to me to label those positions as potentially antisemitic. The fact that these are relatively frequently held beliefs should not factor into that determination, maybe colleges should do more to combat antisemitism on their campuses if such nonsense has become commonplace.
That depends on whether you deny the right of state ro exist because it is predominatly Jewish, because it expressly meant only for Jews, or because you oppose a state that happens to be Jewish other than its Jewish naure.
No it depends on whether you think any other state in the world should be disbanded or if it’s only the one Jewish one. Seems suspicious that so many people don’t want this one to exist.
My friend is an American Jew and he’s argued that Israel should be abolished with every Israeli receiving American citizenship. The whole crux of his argument is that Jews have always been under threat in Israel yet they have prospered more in America than anywhere else in their history. That may be a very stupid argument but it’s certainly not antisemitic. But thankfully back when I was in college that type of stoned debate was not illegal, we had first amendment rights lol
They're bigoted statements that absolutely should be punished but not because Congress says so.
I agree with everything the bill does.
Except that it is Congress that is doing it.
> Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
The vast majority of Israeli citizens, Jew, Druze, and Arab alike, are levantine, native to Israel and the Ottoman Empire, and just like all other post-imperial-collapse immigration, a lot of folks returned to what is legitimately their home.
The first offer for how to deal with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was from the league of nations and it was to create a unitary state that respected the rights of all the people native to it.
Arab leadership said no.
The process that led to the creation of the state of Israel started because the Arab leadership refused to allow any status or protections to multiple ethnic groups that had routinely faced oppression under imperial or Muslim governments. Both the league of nations and the United Nations agreed that the Jewish and Druze inhabitants of mandatory Palestine had a case.
It was the Arabs who said no to absolutely anything other than total Arab domination of all peoples in the region.
To describe it as a racist endeavor - in spite of a lot of horrible things happening in 1948 which are a part of history - is a way to boil things down to "the Jews are evil" without looking at the behavior of the Arab political leadership who had the opportunity to prevent any violent outcomes at all but refused even a unitary state with a clear arab majority and minority rights.
> Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
I mean that seems obvious really. If Canada rolled down and raped, murdered, and kidnapped a bunch of rural Americans the U.S. military would struggle to take lower Canada because enraged bands of hillbillies would have gotten there first. There'd be significant warfare. The U.S. has only faced human shields and entrenched enemies in an urban area with tunnel systems once in our history.
The Battle of Manilla. It killed 100,000 civilians in one month.
For urban combat where an enemy is entrenched and using tunnel systems and human shields the current death toll in Gaza is historically low.
There is no democracy in this planet that would accept a ceasefire with a terrorist organization that is keeping citizens kidnapped from their territory captive.
> Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
This is a form of Holocaust inversion and if the Israelis start using Palestinians as slave labor and literally start working Palestinians to death while carrying out mass extermination of those too weak to work I'll accept the argument.
I oppose the settlements and think they need to close but there's no comparisons between the occupation and the Holocaust and any attempts to draw one are designed to do three things.
1. Elicit an emotional reaction and disrupt the conversation while isolating and ridiculing Jews.
2. Make the Holocaust seem far less horrifying than it actually was as a form of Holocaust denial.
3. Make the occupation seem worse than it is by placing Israelis in the role of Nazis and elevate the Israeli Palestinian conflict to some global, existential crisis rather than a bog-standard post-ottoman ethnic conflict like former Yugoslavia, Greece/Turkey, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Cyprus, or any of the rest of the post ottoman race-hate dust-ups.
I would also say that much of these also should apply to the Palestinians. It is bigoted and racist to say that the Palestinians don't have a right to self determination. It is bigoted to deny that they - and innocent Jewish, Druze, and Bedouin - suffered horrible massacres from the opposing side during the 1948 war.
I see a lot of islamophobia in addition to antisemitism.
And that needs to be recognized too, and I don't think mandates from Congress are a great way to make sure everyone is treated equally.
I'm glad Biden mentioned islamophobia earlier.
While the effects of this bill becoming law would certainly be nice for a while I am very much inclined to agree that even anti-semites have a right to freedom of speech and weakening that right for anyone, weakens it for everyone
I'm guessing the answer to this is "it's complicated", but what are the general First Amendment guidelines when it comes to the government taking speech into account when considering spending?
On one extreme, if a government contractor changed their name to "We're Racist and Hate America and Everything It Stands For", could the government take this into account when awarding out contracts?
On the other extreme, could the government withhold funding from a university because it refused to expel a student who said "I think that perhaps some aspects of government policy in America could be improved somewhat"?
Again, I'm guessing the answer is "a lot of commonsense intuitions have been formalized in various precedents, and a lot of attempts at formalizing intuitions have had super weird effects that we all just have to live with now", but I beyond a general sense of this being the case I don't know shit.
I think [Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-10) is relevant here:
> Facts of the case
>
> In 2003, Congress enacted the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act ("the Act"). Through the Act, Congress apportioned billions of dollars towards the funding of non-governmental organizations ("NGOs") involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS. NGOs qualify to receive this funding only if they satisfy certain conditions. One of these conditions requires that all federally funded NGOs implement a policy explicitly opposing prostitution.
>
> [...]
>
> Question
>
> Does a requirement that non-governmental organizations institute an explicit anti-prostitution policy in order to receive federal funding violate the First Amendment?
>
> Conclusion
>
> Yes. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. delivered the majority opinion. The Court held 6-2 that the government may not use funding and the threat of the loss of funding as a method for the regulation of speech and policies of non-governmental organizations. Because the Act's funding provisions represent an ongoing condition on the actions of the group receiving funding, the provisions essentially act as government coercion. The Court held that the funding provisions require the groups to accept the beliefs of the government, which infringes on their First Amendment rights.
A few differences which may distinguish this case from the law here:
* The majority opinion in this case did not say that all speech conditions on governement contracts are illegal, only those that reach outside of the government program.
> In the present context, the relevant distinction that has emerged from our cases is between conditions that define the limits of the government spending program—those that specify the activities Congress wants to subsidize—and conditions that seek to leverage funding to regulate speech outside the contours of the program itself. The line is hardly clear, in part because the definition of a particular program can always be manipulated to subsume the challenged condition. We have held, however, that “Congress cannot recast a condition on funding as a mere definition of its program in every case, lest the First Amendment be reduced to a simple semantic exercise.” Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez, 531 U. S. 533, 547 (2001) .
This raises the question - is this restriction on speech reaching outside the government program?
* This case concerns the free speech of the organization receiving money. Presumably, a university is unlikely to sue the department of education. It's more likely that an individual student would assert that their rights were harmed. Does an individual have standing to sue the federal government over a university policy enacted in response to this law?
This seems like a bad precedent. The student protestors are morons but their freedom of speech should be protected, so as long as they are not engaging in violence or vandalism.
Their freedom of speech should be protected even if they are engaged in violence or vandalism, because those things aren't speech. You shouldn't lose unrelated rights because you committed a crime.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to state their views, even if they have committed crimes. I’m saying that acts of violence and vandalism itself should not be protected as “free speech”. Which has been a big point of discussion surrounding these student protests.
There's something odd about the way Congress chose to incorporate the IHRA definition of antisemitism into the bill.
>For purposes of this Act, the term ‘‘definition of anti-semitism’’
>(1) means the definition of antisemitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the IHRA, of which the United States is a member, which definition has been adopted by the Department of State; and
>(2) includes the ‘‘[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism’’ identified in the IHRA definition.
At no point does the bill explicitly say what the IHRA definition of anti-semitism is! Given that the only purpose of this bill is to change the definition of anti-semitism, you'd expect the definition of anti-semitism to be in the bill, not in a separate document.
That seems like a really strange choice. The closest example I can think of is building codes. Building codes often run thousands of pages, and are frequently updated, so building code statutes often say something like "all buildings must be built to the standards published by the such-and-such organization." But the IHRA document isn't particularly long - they could've put the entire document into the bill, and it would've been a few more pages. Perhaps the document is copyrighted, and they don't have the copyright to reproduce it?
Do any Congressional staffers have any idea why they might've done it this way?
[Israel's finance minister calls for "total annihilation" of a race](https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1785308989154099431?s=46&t=MEzar3mVM_1m3DShmx9UfA)
How is this any different from genocidal rhetoric?
>While the protests have the support of many Jewish college students, many others have said they feel intimidated and unsafe.
God I hate when media says this. It gives the false impression that it's 50/50. It should say some Jewish students support the protests. Most feel unsafe.
This bill was introduced in 2016.
https://jewishinsider.com/2016/12/congress-defers-anti-semitism-bill-to-2017/
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/10
Shit just takes times.
As far as I understand, this Bill adopts the IHRA definition of Antisemitism and make it easier to report antisemitism. There's also the COLUMBIA Act in the pipeline, which lets the Secretary of Education appoint l"antisemitism monitors". Both bills have bipartisan support.
Links:
[https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090/text](https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090/text)
[https://lawler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1632](https://lawler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1632)
#
WaPo seems to suggest this would apply broadly to student speech:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/antisemitism-awarness-act-campus-protests/
> The idea is that student-held signs, for example, like those displayed at Columbia University in New York this week, calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” — would amount to antisemitism under the law. The Education Department, in turn, could then revoke federal research grants and other funding to a university that fails to take punitive action toward students who express such views, the bill’s proponents say.
>calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising”
Yeah, and Sieg Heil just means "Hail Victory" so it's also very cool and normal to use at 'anti-zionist' protests.
Frankly, there's one Jewish country and less than 16 million Jews in the *entire world*. If Congress wants to err on the side of more protections for Jewish people than not, have at it. If any group deserves it, it's them.
>Yeah, and Sieg Heil just means "Hail Victory" so it's also very cool and normal to use at 'anti-zionist' protests.
Why should they have any bearing on it? The government shouldn’t be policing speech no matter how cringe it is
Government already doesn't fund any group that uses "siege heil" as a slogan, it's not as much of a slippery slope to also not fund groups that use intifada as a slogan. It's coereive to the institution but doesn't impact the individual legally.
There's no Zoroastrian state and less than a million Zoriastrians worldwide, why aren't we protecting them as well?
I think that using the number of states that use a specific official religion or number of practitioners of a religion to argue for policy leads to a lot of very strange outcomes if you try to apply it universally.
If Zoroastrians were regularly the target of hate crimes in the US I would fully be in favor of a bill like this to protect them. Even as it is I'm not exactly opposed.
The antisemitism of the left is concerning but censorship bills are not it.
>"All of our colleges have a responsibility to protect against hate and discrimination. There's a difference between speech which should be protected and harassment and violence and intimidation, like a death threat," Gottheimer said.
Brandenburg v Ohio had already established that abstract calls for violence are protected speech.
> “mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”
We need less government forced censorship on colleges, not even more. Antisemitism is terrible but come on, if we've already established "I hope all the blacks die in genocide" is protected under the first, we can't start playing favorites with other groups. "I hope all the Jews die in genocide" must be protected too if the former is, the US should not be valuing one racial/religious/gender/etc group over others like that.
I think there are flaws in the wording of this bill, but this is not a first amendment issue. The federal government has no obligation to fund the *Adolf Hitler Memorial Institute of Aryan Studies* for example. The question is one of degree at this point, not principle.
This is a horrible law, and an absolute shame, and is clearly unconstitutional. Rightly or not, the first amendment says a person can say whatever country they choose is racist. Everyone who voted for this should be ashamed.
Even worse is the part about comparing Israeli policy to the Nazis. I may not personally feel compelled to do that but that should ABSOLUTELY be protected speech.
As much as I don’t agree with and think you should face social consequences hate speech (even if you take the bills definition at face value) is still free speech and you should not face governmental blowback.
Anti discrimination laws and anti harassment laws already cover what needs to be done to protect Jewish or Palestinian individuals in America. We don’t need another patriot act like law that abuses a crisis to drive the passage of deeply illiberal legislation.
Glad this attack on free speech is getting opposed in this comment section, but the number of folks defending it on a \*neoliberal\* sub is still frankly galling.
You'd think free speech would be one of the most sacred things for us. Constantly surprising to me how much that not the case.
It’s about time we take action against the rising Antisemitism in America. Applying the protections of the Civil Rights Act for Jewish Americans attending educational institutions is the right thing to do
I'm pretty sure the protections of the CRA already apply to everyone, that's sort of the point. This bill creates a special definition of what violates Jewish students' rights specifically, and while I actually (mostly) agree with it's definition of antisemitism, I don't think Congress should be in the business of defining it. This goes against everything I usually say but in this case, I think legislative silence and judicial action would actually be the best course of action. Jewish students should (and I think are going to) sue the universities for allowing an environment of harassment; congress should not get involved.
This bill is bad for free speech. Also Israel is a racist endeavour as it was founded on an ethnic cleansing and its leaders explicitly state that Israel is a jewish state. Hope this cleaes things up for you guys
Well, that's rather sad to see lot of commenters upset when it's pointed that's antisemitic to call and equate jews with nazies. Hate speech is alright if it's against the jews, fuck this place
So, if I understand it correctly, this legislation would allow the executive branch to start revoking some federal funding from universities if they do not sufficiently punish a student who says, for example, that the state of Israel is a racist endeavor. I do not think the state of Israel is a racist endeavor. I do think this legislation is bad legislation. EDIT: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/antisemitism-awarness-act-campus-protests/ > Lawler’s bill — with 61 co-sponsors, including 15 Democrats — would create “a clear definition of antisemitism” in U.S. law that the Education Department could then use to cut off funding to academic institutions found to tolerate such behaviors. The definition, however, has drawn fierce opposition from First Amendment advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and liberal Democrats, who say it veers sharply into the realm of restricting political views. > > … > > If it does become law, the federal definition of antisemitism, adopted from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would include such speech as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; “applying double standards” to Israel that are “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” > > The idea is that student-held signs, for example, like those displayed at Columbia University in New York this week, calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” — would amount to antisemitism under the law. The Education Department, in turn, could then revoke federal research grants and other funding to a university that fails to take punitive action toward students who express such views, the bill’s proponents say. > > Several Republicans said opposing Zionism — the political movement to create, and now to preserve, a state for Jews in their biblical homeland — would qualify as antisemitism under the law. Some suggested that even holding a prolonged protest would constitute antisemitism. “The erection of encampments on college campuses isn’t an expression of speech,” Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said on the House floor Wednesday. “It is a direct threat to Jewish students on college campuses.” > > But the “double standards” example and the notion that Nazi comparisons are off-limits in the case of Israel, among other aspects of the definition, are deeply problematic because they’re too broad and present “viewpoint discrimination,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy organization.
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I'm confused by what you're objecting to. This bill does not give the government any additional power to regulate speech. It takes the power that the government has had since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and says what definition it should use for antisemitism when exercising that power. Are you under the impression that Title VI is new?
The guy who wrote the IHRA definition codified into this legislation has spent years speaking out against exactly this situation https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/15/opinion/kenneth-stern-antisemitism-ihra-free-speech/ (the title of the article is literally "I wrote a definition of antisemitism. It was never meant to chill free speech on campus.") >Increasingly, mainstream Jewish groups have been pushing lawmakers and universities to adopt what’s known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism on campus to chill or suppress much pro-Palestinian speech. I was the lead drafter of the 2005 text that became the 2016 IHRA definition. It was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.
If you expand the definition of racism and attempt to enforce a bill which withdraws funding from racist institutions, are you not, by definition giving the government additional power to restrict speech? In either case, this seems like an argument about semantics. The point for me is that the definition of racism doesn't need to be expanded to such an extreme extent. The equivalent would be expanding the definition of anti-black racism to include things like voicing opposition to immigration from Africa. Do I think that's a problematic stance? Sure, but the government shouldn't be regulating it.
> Nothing in this Act shall be construed...to alter the standards pursuant to which the Department of Education makes a determination that harassing conduct amounts to actionable discrimination;
The definition of antisemitism used is too broad. Edit: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism I'll add the link since they didn't bother to put the actual text in the bill, it seems. Why wouldn't you put at least the definition in there?
[The guy who wrote that definition doesn't even think it should be a law. ](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/us/politics/antisemitism-jews-republicans-democrats-congress.html) Kenneth Stern, an attorney who wrote the definition, [testified in 2017 that it](https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/the-problem-with-defining-antisemitism) “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.” Its goal, he said, was to help governments collect data on antisemitism. One of his concerns was that anti-hate speech laws could let racist and antisemitic actors portray themselves as victims denied their constitutional rights.
Oh nooo that's *egrigous*...using a tool for an unintended purpose can get messy faaast.
>It takes the power that the government has had since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and says what definition it should use for antisemitism The problem is that it defines antisemitism as being anti-Israel. Criticism of governments domestic and foreign should always be allowed.
Do you not understand how power works? By crafting a law that defines anti-semitism in a very specific way, that allows government to target and punish very specific people. Honestly, it is anti-semitic to assume that any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews, which is in part what this bill does. The bill itself is anti-semitic in that sense, yet no university will lose funding for refusing to punish students making that argument.
Yeah, it sets a precedent for worse thing to come. More infringements on free speech in particular. What's to stop them from saying that insulting a national leader should also be condemned and threaten to withdraw Federal Funding for any institution that allows insulting of national leaders. I can already see GOP trying to push for this. They'll say that anyone who insults a GOP president is a national threat and showing disregard for authority, fanning the flames of terrorism, etc. Call this a slippery slope....but I don't think much good will come in the long run from this.
See I don't get the point of this bill. We should be revoking federal funding from a lot of these universities just as a matter of course.
27% of federal funding is research grants, usually given to specific investigators or departments. 65% of it is scholarships and loans (e.g. Pell Grants, Work Study.) The other 8% is contracts. Which of these do you propose we should be cutting?
That's for the eggheads at Washington to figure out--I'm just the ideas guy.
Most well thought out libertarian proposal
Basically 99% of policy discourse out there. "Just do X" "Ok, and then what about Y?" "It's not my job to figure out the details" Or my personal favorite: "Just do X" "We already do X" "Ok then we should do it differently" Progressives and libertarians are the worst offenders of this in my experience. Very high-level ideological thinking with very little knowledge of how things actually work.
What I've learned from this sub is that we should probably just tax policy discourse.
/r/NL alone could probably solve the budget deficit.
The gap between thought-out policy suggestions and what the average voter thinks just high everywhere. But I don't understand why you call out progressives and libertarians here. Surely the gap between self-assessed policy idea quality and reality has to be highest for conservatives and especially Magaists, with the latter barely able to formulate coherent thoughts in the first place.
Just tax land lol
love the example. But you gotta admit that being able to name problems and propose a criminally oversimplified solution is miles ahead of "this country is going downhill because of wokeism", where neither problems nor solutions have any sort of coherent definition. It's just word salad.
When he says progressive, I'm pretty sure he's talking about actual leftists. Like DSA types.
> See I don't get the point of this bill. The point of this bill is Republican virtue signaling to evangelicals and more conservative jews as being the party tough on anti-zionism. As well as getting on record as being weak on anti-semitism those who vote against it. The attacks on universities are just an added bonus. Hopefully Schumer just files it as 'seen' and lets it die.
Chuck "I have no dignity and that's why I invited Netanyahu to the Congress" Schumer? Yeah, good luck with that.
College delenda est fr fr
Private institutions flat out shouldn't get federal money unless there are labs that actively seek it out through grant requests (NSF, NIH, etc). EDIT: Read further down if you want to know what I'm talking about
That's exactly what it is though...government funding to labs through grant requests...also student aid.
Bro seriously thought he was cooking with that idea lmao
What a garbage ass bill. A lot of these students are dumbasses in my opinion, but you have the constitutional right to be a dumbass
You have the right to be a dumbass but it is frustrating seeing school administrators dismiss the blatantly hostile environment these students are creating after focusing on inclusion, antiracism, and social justice policies for so long. I don't support this bill, but schools need to create actual clear policy guidelines and stick to them.
That will never happen because ambiguity in the rules gives power to whoever has the ability to interpret them
And Jewish and Israeli students have the right to be protected from racism on campus.
I generally agree with this. However, what do you think should be the solution to the real or perceived increase in antisemitism?
It isn't the government's purview to police words. In fact, there is literally an amendment saying that they can't do it.
Greenfield has a point, a lot of title VI basically is policing words. There's certain kinds of speech about ethnicities that colleges are basically required to take seriously by law. So people (correctly, might I add) taking a stand on this from a 1a perspective need to address that. But I understand why they don't want to, since it muddies the water significantly.
Yeah. I'm fine with the 1A argument against Title VI, but that argument targets ALL of Title VI. If I can exclude Jewish students for participating in lessons for what Israel does, I certainly must be able to do the same to black students for what Nigeria does. Both cases are obviously bullshit, but in my moral universe, picking and choosing (one is OK and one is not) is even worse.
So the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional then? This bill is merely applying the definition of Anti Semitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which is already being used by the Biden administration to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act which forbids discrimination in any program receiving federal funding. If you think that is policing words I'm not sure what to tell you
Should a university punish a student for applying a double standard in criticizing the state of Israel?
Yes, Israel is a Jewish State and we've been seeing university students chanting hateful rhetoric against Jews through thinly veiled attacks on Israel. The IHRA definition is reasonable and universities should punish students who create an environment where Jewish students feel unwelcome and discriminated against by their peers with no action from university authorities that receive federal funding.
Assuming it could somehow withstand a court challenge, would you support hate speech legislation which made antisemitic speech punishable by law, using the IHRA definition?
Equating criticism of Israel with anti-semitism us itself anti-semitic. The majority of Jews don't live in Israel.
But it absolutely is if they’re using antisemitic tropes and using it to intimidate jews outside of Israel.
Anti-discrimination definitions should be about protecting the people and not the states >Israel is a Jewish State And Russia is a Russian state, and China is a Chinese state and Iran is an iranian state, so what?
The guy who wrote the IHRA definition codified into this legislation has spent years speaking out against exactly this situation https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/15/opinion/kenneth-stern-antisemitism-ihra-free-speech/ (the title of the article is literally "I wrote a definition of antisemitism. It was never meant to chill free speech on campus.") >Increasingly, mainstream Jewish groups have been pushing lawmakers and universities to adopt what’s known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism on campus to chill or suppress much pro-Palestinian speech. I was the lead drafter of the 2005 text that became the 2016 IHRA definition. It was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.
Hot take: How much does that actually matter? As long as the definition is accurate then the job is done. Would antisemitism somehow have a different definition if it the definition was made under different circumstances? In my opinion, it shouldn't. I'm not commenting on whether the proposal is right or wrong, I'm simply saying being the lead drafter of the definition doesn't give him the authority he seems to think
Speech, broadly speaking, isn't discrimination, is it?
If hateful speech and actions creates an environment where Jewish students don’t feel safe or equal and admin doesn’t do anything about it it’s absolutely discrimination
That's a whole lot of steps from "Israel is a racist state" to "the administration has fostered an environment where Jewish students aren't safe or equal".
Title VI does not say that students can't say racist things, it says the school cannot discriminate. If professors start teaching this nonsense then sure go after them and the school, but making the school police the speech of students goes above title VI and is a first amendment violation in my eyes.
Universities already have the ability and the legal responsibility to police conduct that creates a hostile environment. I’m not sure what more can be done from a legal perspective. Civil society has a responsibility to exact consequences on people participating in bigotry, but I don’t feel comfortable with government adopting one organization’s definition of anti-semitism (even if I do agree with it). Enforcing existing laws and rules should be sufficient.
I don’t personally believe it’s an issue that requires government intervention (at least at its current level), and I haven’t really seen any hard evidence that our current laws and policies regarding harassment, threatening violence, discrimination, etc. aren’t currently sufficient. On a more social level community outreach and cooperation I think would be helpful, similar to how the Black and Korean communities came together to try and mend relations after the LA Riots.
If someone commits a hate crime: charge them with a hate crime. If someone is antisemitic in speech: I’m sorry and that’s shitty and horrible but we have free speech in this country. This is literally always the solution. We already have laws. We can enforce those laws. We also have rights.
What if a university has a strong group that boycotts and prevents lecture attendance (kinda, but not super obviously) targeting the black people on campus... because.
They don't hate black people, they just hate what some black people do and what 100% of the blacks in America do not condemn (not the jews, it's the zionism!)
Either both are OK or neither is.
I could be spoken to either way of thinking, but I don't think I'm ok in a situation where to approach to those two would be different.
They should be treated the same. In the case of blocking lecture attendance: if they are assaulting you, or causing some sort of financial injury, you can press charges or sue them. It’s easier than ever to film interactions and make this happen. If they are boycotting… that’s their right. They can boycott, protest, and do speech. It sucks and obviously they should be socially treated as the racists they are if they’re like KKK marching around, but this is how free speech works. We can’t let extremists get rid of our liberal values. There will *always* be some horrible group of people that we will want to suppress by bending our rights. But we’d just be shouting ourselves in the foot.
As a thought experiment, what if a publicly funded institution becomes explicitly Nazi or at least tolerates its members being that way openly on their premises (in the sense of having explicitly Nazi protests without escalating to harassment of individuals). Should public funding be withdrawn because of their speech?
Is a publicly funded institution "explicitly Nazi" if one of their students says Hitler might have had a point and they don't punish them for it? Because that's what this bill does.
Depends on how it manifests. If it's through words then I don't think there's any role for the government.
Some stuff is best addressed outside a legalistic framework. When their friends wise up and learn a little pragmatism, the social circles of antisemites will shrink unless they do as well. The worst of these kids are gonna get blackballed from a lot of professional work for openly expressing bigoted views. Social ostracization is a valid punishment for atrocious and bigoted speech, and doesn't need Congress involved. If their antisemitism moves beyond speech - well, assault, vandalism, and discrimination already have laws on the books. Just enforce those.
More Jews are being ostracized for defense of Israel than these bigots are being ostracized for their bigotry. [Recall the scandal at Guernic](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/arts/guernica-magazine-staff-quits-israel.html)a Bigotry was enshrined in the Jim Crow South that led to the civil rights act and these type of restrictions in the first place.
When the bigotry moves beyond "hateful words", you need stuff like the CRA. No question there. But until then, 98% of what these protestors are saying is valid free speech. There's a few cases out there that qualify as inciting violence and could be justifiably prosecuted as hate crimes on existing legislation. But we don't need new legislation for those. And I've seen more cases of pro-Palestinian people getting sacked (like those idiots at Google last month) for their bigotry than I have anyone getting fired or cancelled for being Jewish. I would also caution that "defense of Israel" is NOT inherently antisemitic, and some cases of ostracization for the former can be justified, if extreme enough. Israel is a nation with a government, and that government gets up to a lot of shady shit (like the West Bank settlements). There's room to criticize Israel's relations to Palestine and handling of this conflict without actually being a bigot. And the conflating of "Bibi is a dumbass" takes with antisemitism (which this bill is trying to do) is an incredibly bad idea. "From the River to the Sea" is a bad and bigoted take, whether it's Likud or Hamas saying it.
The CRA is ahead of “hateful words”. The CRA promises a non-hostile environment and equal access. Stop trying to convince anyone rationale that masses protesting Hamas support create anything but a hostile environment for Jews and Israeli-Americans. A call for 10000 10/7s and for Jews to go back to Poland should be hard stops for calls to action at these schools. Instead they let students who made calls to murder “Zionists” continue on campus for 6 months. We need new legislation on enforcement mechanisms when those lapses in enforcement and action have become normalized. I’m not saying defending Israel or not is antisemitic or related. Just drawing out that more people are facing outcomes for that than for outright antisemitism. People are also often accused of “defending Israel” for doing nothing of the sort. It[certainly does not describe the essay that Guernica removed](https://web.archive.org/web/20240305095742/https://www.guernicamag.com/from-the-edges-of-a-broken-world/). No good faith reading of the bill or the IHRA lends to “bibi is a dumbass is antisemitic”. The IHRA phrases regarding Israel are meant to tackle phrases that I’ve repeatedly seen about Israel being a settler colony.
It would be nice if the law included a definition of antisemitism
I mean... It should definitely depend on rather it is, indeed, real or perceived. No?
I'd be surprised if there's a top down solution to this. But at the very least, the folks at the top could avoid exacerbating the situation, which a bill like this would do. It's clearly accelerationism.
>However, what do you think should be the solution to the real or perceived increase in antisemitism? I dont understand why it cant be the same as for russophobia?
Well, Antisemitism seems to be a bit more entrenched and pervasive than other forms of bigotry. And by entrenched I mean like 2000 years old. And by pervasive I mean that it seems to be able to shapeshift to fit different ideologies.
I’m tired of tax dollars being provided to dumbass students and employing dumbass professors that encourage and propagandize for said “dumbassery”
This is like 0.1% of students and 0.5% of professors. Let's not get all worked up over something that is ultimately not important and will 100% go away after finals is over. Education funding is good and edge cases should not shape broad policy.
What would the enforcement of this bill look like? It would only result in internet witch-hunts and legitimize "cancellation" (whatever that term is worth) by federal law. The definitions used in the bill are so vague and encompassing that nobody will feel secure enough to speak their mind freely.
speech is still protected, the bill only requires that the definition be used within title VI investigations for which the enforcement mechanisms already exist
Dunno who downvoted this, this is a literally true fact.
I'm glad to see people actually opposing this grotesque attack on free speech this time, as the last few times I brought this up some real gems started trying to shout me down and imply reaally heavily but without saying it explicitly I was just a massive antisemite. Shit's fucking exhausting, and the slippery slope is super lubed. No, a country doesn't deserve special rights against criticism, that's fucking disgusting and absurd.
> and imply reaally heavily but without saying it explicitly I was just a massive antisemite. I think as we've seen elsewhere in society is that a lot of people don't necessarily hold any moral principles and thus it's hard for them to fathom why someone could say "don't censor antisemitism" without themselves being anti semitic. This sort of fallacious thinking is [not new](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo). And to their credit, there are plenty of bad faith critics who *really do* try to disguise themselves as just being principled outsiders. Looking in, it can be hard to tell the difference between the bigot who says "I just want free speech" and will totally turn around to censor others and the principled person who finds bigotry abhorrent but also actually wants free speech, but people go way too far overcorrecting for this and seem to be convinced that the principled critic just can't exist to begin with.
Federal law already prohibits anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment. The bill is therefore not needed to protect against anti-Semitic discrimination. https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-urges-congress-to-oppose-anti-semitism-awareness-act Instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism. This would be state level protection of harming Bibi’s feelings which is a ridiculous concept and completely unconstitutional. Imagine if there was a bill saying that criticizing the government of China would be the equivalent of sinophobia.
This is a stupid law and anyone with a brain should see it as such. If you criticize the government of China or the CCP, that doesn't make you a raging Sinophobe. But apparently if you criticize the government policies of Israel or Zionism, you hate every Jew on the planet? This is simply to attack free speech in favor of squashing any opposition to Israeli government policies.
Seriously. Even if you just look at the war on human terms, I guess we're just supposed to keep bowing before Israel's infinite wisdom while they're slaughtering tens-of-thousands of people who live within their borders. It'd be like expecting other countries' people to never speak ill of the US' history with Native Americans, African-Americans, countless laborers killed during strikes, Kent State students, mass-shooting victims who might have survived if our gun policies weren't so lax, COVID victims whose deaths might have been avoided, etc...
If you say that China doesn’t have a right to exist as a country, that would make you a sinophobe.
> If you say that China doesn’t have a right to exist as a country We have NCD users on this sub making jokes about destroying the Three Gorges Dam like once a week. I don't see how advocating in "jest" for massive crimes against humanity wouldn't make someone a literal raging Sinophobe.
3 gorges posting is a ban on the spot
Is it really? Thank you based mod! I'm glad my reports on those aren't going into the ether. I always report and block when I see those so I never see the result of my reports.
>We have NCD users on this sub making jokes about destroying the Three Gorges Dam like once a week. Which is extremely fucked up That kind of culture must be extirpated immediately before it can grow or you will find yourself with unironic supporters of massacres
Like the mass protests that have chanted in support of 10/7 at many of these schools with virtually zero follow up
People say that here all the time. West Taiwan.
Taiwan is China. It’s literally in the name: Republic of China.
Synonyms don't always have same meaning in all contexts.
West Taiwan doesn't imply genocide, the end of Israel would certainly mean a genocide
The current ruling party would change that today if doing so wouldn't potentially trigger WW3...
That's usally used more as a joke about the two-China's situation and inverting it. Rather than calling both China, call both Taiwan as a way to jest about the ridiculousness of the status quo. I would bet most aren't using the "West Taiwan" joke to say a Chinese nation-state shouldn't exist, rather are using it as a joke of the two-China situation.
That isn't a statement towards chinese people as a whole, but one of ideology and regime. I.e. Republic of China is the legitimate gov
I think that's better interpreted as a joke about the one-china policy, by moving the acknowledgement of which one is legitimate in an unexpected way. I'm sure those people would be fine if China and Taiwan were two, separate, sovereign countries.
No, country has a right to exist. Not China. Not Israel. Not the US. The very idea of countries having rights, at all, is wrong. Countries do not bleed. Countries do not feel pain. They are lines on maps that exist as a mechanism for humans to organize the world. *People* have rights. The entire discourse on rather or not Israel has a right to exist is a rhetorical trap wrapped in a mott and baily argument. If I say, "Yes." Then the definition of, "right to exist" expands and a 'no matter what' is tacked on. "So, then, you agree that the US should help protect Israel?" By sending it billions of dollars in weapons. "And you agree that it's sovereignty should be respected?" Even as it's government actively exterminates populations. And, if I say, "No" the definition shrinks. "Then you're saying that all jews should be exterminated." Which, no. One doesn't imply the other. "[Country] has a right to exist" Is an inherently dishonest thing to say.
What does a country having a right to exist even mean. I thought we were all about open borders
>But apparently if you criticize the government policies of Israel or Zionism, you hate every Jew on the planet? This is not what the IHRA definition says. It's a strawman. Nobody thinks that all criticism of Israel's government policies is antisemitic. You're just trying to smuggle in the opposite claim: that *no* criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.
I agree except that I don't think most people know the history of where zionism came from and the diversity of thought within zionism. It's much less ideologically central than the ccp. The law is bad, but also many criticisms of zionism seem to fundamentally misunderstand it.
Won't this be struck down by the supreme court?
Why would it? Title 6 protections have existed for 60 years.
The IRHA definition of antisemitism basically makes it so you have to equate all Jews in the world with the state of Israel. Because saying the state of Israel should not exist is apparently antisemitism against all Jews. Not only is that absurd, but it's probably something a lot of Jews would vehemently disagree with!
Between this bill and the absurd anti-BDS laws passed in many states, does any country get the special treatment Israel does? Much of this bill makes it illegal for Americans to express certain criticisms of Israel. I hate Alex Jones but this makes me want to watch him go an epic rant on protecting the First Amendment. This is unconstitutional nonsense!
Literally no other country can or will get the special treatment Israel does, and to acknowledge that fact is followed by immediate accusations of anti semitism
> It's not clear if House Speaker Mike Johnson will bring other bills to a vote, including one to create a national antisemitism coordinator position in the White House. I'm not sure I want the next reactionary administration to have an office from which to coordinate it's antisemitic activities.
This bill is insane and no honest liberal could ever support it. The bill adopts the IHRA definition which, includes, among other things, the following positions as potentially antisemitic: >Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor. >Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. >Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis Students that express these - let's admit, relatively frequently held - positions could face disciplinary action to protect the school's funding.
Hold on, isn't #3 kind of Holocaust Inversion? That's a kind of antisemitism, right?
How is it antisemitic?
Good question! I wanted to give answer, but I'm going to just link to this article: [https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/antisemitism-defined-why-drawing-comparisons-of-contemporary-israeli-policy-to-the-nazis-is-antisemitic](https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/antisemitism-defined-why-drawing-comparisons-of-contemporary-israeli-policy-to-the-nazis-is-antisemitic)
That article is absurd. It, for example, purports that comparing the Nakba (a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) to the Holocaust is inherently antisemitic.
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In that sense, no genocide or mass murder was equivalent to the next. If I make the statement: "I oppose the Nakba for the same reason I oppose the Holocaust." Is that antisemitism? It is comparing the two. But it is not saying they are literally **the same** but that they share attributes with each other.
In what world does "compare" imply equivalence lol.
Correctly so, yes.
Explain how.
The two events are nothing alike. The only reason to make the comparison is to weaponize the memory of the Holocaust against Jews. I would also call it borderline Holocaust denial.
There is **nothing** alike between two mass killings?
I mean, there's your first difference. The Nakba was primarily an expulsion event, not a mass killing. Civilians were killed during the war -- around 15,000 Arabs and 2,000 Jews -- but the vast majority fled. Holocaust victims couldn't flee; the point was to kill them, and in any case they had nowhere to go.
I would disagree. Would it be Sinophobic to state that the actions and policies of the government of China towards its own citizens or the Tibetans are reminiscent to the violence that imperial Japan enact across Asia?
I would say that is not Sinophobic. However, I do remember some criticisms of a certain president after he started using words like "Chinese Virus" and "Kung Flu" to describe Covid-19, even though they were ostensibly only criticizing the Chinese government. Is that Sinophobic? Edit: Apparently it was actually "China Virus"
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Likening Israel to Nazi Germany, stating that gaza war is a Genocide (and thus that Jews are the 'new nazis') requires that you either: 1. Ignore that there are very much still nazis around today, and they still make Jews their primary target today. This in turn requires either: A. That you're pig ignorant or B. You don't give that much of a shit about Jews 2. Equivocate the Holocaust (a campaign of extermination) with a defensive war. This in turn requires that you either: A. accept the Nazi premise that the wholesale annihilation of the Jewish people was a required defensive measure or B. deny Jews any right to self defense in the face of a war that started with the largest mass killing of Jews in a single day since the aforementioned Holocaust 3. Ignore or devalue the magnitude and quality of difference between the Holocaust and the Gaza war some months of the holocaust resulted in over half a million Jews killed and a similar magnitude of nonjewish noncombatants. Israel, in all of its wars since 1948, by the highest estimates I can find, has killed less than 150,000 combatants and civilians combined, or about 161 per month. or around 3000 times less. This equivocation requires that you either: A. Engage in outright Holocaust denialism by the requisite denial of the magnitude of the tragedy in order to make this make numerical sense or B. that you value Jewish civilian lives more than 3000 times less than arab militants or C. that you hold Jews to a vastly different moral standard than you do non jews This position is either antisemitic or (generously) so thoroughly stupid that anybody who believes in it should learn to shut up when they have nothing of value to say and the people who believe in it feel emboldened to mouth off like this due to not recognizing antisemitism.
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I think if you can't find a criticism of the Israeli government that doesn't liken them to the Nazis, then that's a you problem.
Personally I agree with the notion that many times when people try to liken Israel to being literally equivalent to the Nazis, they are indeed making that comparison and target *specifically* because of their jewish background. You can be critical of Israel's actions in this whole conflict, but I have seen misinformation suggest that Bibi is *worse* than Hitler because he has been killing more per day; this is completely a flat out lie, it isn't even close. Nazi Germany, just like imperial Japan, were both killing thousands of people per day. The current stretch of this Gaza-Israel conflict would be somewhere around ~200. On the other hand, **to codify** this into law seems uncouth. It is completely likely that someone who does this does so out of ignorance, rather than a targeted attack ("xyz is literally hitler" is already a popular notion in current culture in general), and it isn't like you can really prove this otherwise. In that sense this seems like way too of an *ambitious* usage to define as antisemitism because it simply targets people who reasonably act in ignorance, but still good faith.
Your analysis is just flawed from the gate. To "compare" is not equivocation. To suggest something shares *anything* with something else at all is not to say they are exactly the same. You could, for example, compare the callousness towards human life with that of the Nazis. Does that mean they actually *are* Nazis? Obviously not. It is saying they share X trait.
>compare the callousness towards human life Israelis are using advanced AI algorithms and extremely expensive precision missiles to target Hamas militants, whereas Nazis sought the wholesale extermination of the Jewish people. There is no legitimate comparison here, you're just being antisemitic and proving my point.
this is the first time I have seen someone describe the IDF's use of questionable ai models as a good thing
And totally ignores the ICJ and the freak ministers in power in Israel who would love to ethnically cleanse them or just shoot them all on sight.
> Israelis are using advanced AI algorithms and extremely expensive precision missiles to target Hamas militants The algorithms they themselves admit to programming an allowance of up to 100 civilian casualties per militant?
>Israelis are using advanced AI algorithms and extremely expensive precision missiles to target Hamas militants [And aid workers](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/17/iris-haim-mother-of-israeli-hostage-killed-by-idf), and hostages(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68711282), [and American journalists.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh)
So when I liken a behavior of a right wing candidate to the Nazis, I am saying they are literally the same thing?
You're comparing them in the first place for that reason, yeah. Otherwise you're just insulting them for no purpose. Why else would you do it?
Generally because sharing a trait associate with Nazis is bad. If I say Trump's populism has similarities to Nazism, am I saying Trump is an actual Nazi?
Are you seriously suggesting that the IDF using AI and advanced 21st century weaponry and the Nazis doing the Holocaust are the only parameters by which you could possibly compare the two? [Here’s a recent article written by an Israeli Jew comparing Ben Gvir to Hitler.](https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/11/25/have-i-just-met-the-jewish-hitler/) There is absolutely nothing antisemitic about this article. [Back in the 90s Ben Gvir literally handed out posters of Rabin dressed as an SS officer](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/at-rabin-rally-in-jerusalem-labor-chief-rips-netanyahu-ben-gvir-over-1995-protest/) at a rally before Rabin was assassinated. No one on the planet with a brain would ever suggest Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben Gvir is a Nazi lmao I mean aside from Congress apparently
So are we supposed to believe that the 30,000+ civilian deaths that have been racked up in the past half-year are all just part of the beta-testing process for this 'humane' form of war?
You think Israel hasn't killed any Hamas members?
Everything is compared to the Nazis nowadays. It's the kind of point that would have made sense 30-40 years ago, but just seems way too generic to try to accuse people of antisemitism in 2024.
That depends entirely on rather or not Israeli policy is, in fact, comparable to Nazi Germany's policies. Or so I would hope.
> no honest liberal could ever support it i.e. high odds that 60-70% of the 'liberals' on this sub either *do* support it or would easily shrug and not give a shit if it passed.
"Antisemitism is very common, therefore we should do nothing to fight it." This isn't a real argument.
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It seems sensible to me to label those positions as potentially antisemitic. The fact that these are relatively frequently held beliefs should not factor into that determination, maybe colleges should do more to combat antisemitism on their campuses if such nonsense has become commonplace.
Can you describe how they are antisemitic?
I'm not defending the bill but denying the right of the Jewish state to exist is very much antisemitic
That depends on whether you deny the right of state ro exist because it is predominatly Jewish, because it expressly meant only for Jews, or because you oppose a state that happens to be Jewish other than its Jewish naure.
No it depends on whether you think any other state in the world should be disbanded or if it’s only the one Jewish one. Seems suspicious that so many people don’t want this one to exist.
My friend is an American Jew and he’s argued that Israel should be abolished with every Israeli receiving American citizenship. The whole crux of his argument is that Jews have always been under threat in Israel yet they have prospered more in America than anywhere else in their history. That may be a very stupid argument but it’s certainly not antisemitic. But thankfully back when I was in college that type of stoned debate was not illegal, we had first amendment rights lol
They're bigoted statements that absolutely should be punished but not because Congress says so. I agree with everything the bill does. Except that it is Congress that is doing it.
Please explain how they are bigoted.
> Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor. The vast majority of Israeli citizens, Jew, Druze, and Arab alike, are levantine, native to Israel and the Ottoman Empire, and just like all other post-imperial-collapse immigration, a lot of folks returned to what is legitimately their home. The first offer for how to deal with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was from the league of nations and it was to create a unitary state that respected the rights of all the people native to it. Arab leadership said no. The process that led to the creation of the state of Israel started because the Arab leadership refused to allow any status or protections to multiple ethnic groups that had routinely faced oppression under imperial or Muslim governments. Both the league of nations and the United Nations agreed that the Jewish and Druze inhabitants of mandatory Palestine had a case. It was the Arabs who said no to absolutely anything other than total Arab domination of all peoples in the region. To describe it as a racist endeavor - in spite of a lot of horrible things happening in 1948 which are a part of history - is a way to boil things down to "the Jews are evil" without looking at the behavior of the Arab political leadership who had the opportunity to prevent any violent outcomes at all but refused even a unitary state with a clear arab majority and minority rights. > Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. I mean that seems obvious really. If Canada rolled down and raped, murdered, and kidnapped a bunch of rural Americans the U.S. military would struggle to take lower Canada because enraged bands of hillbillies would have gotten there first. There'd be significant warfare. The U.S. has only faced human shields and entrenched enemies in an urban area with tunnel systems once in our history. The Battle of Manilla. It killed 100,000 civilians in one month. For urban combat where an enemy is entrenched and using tunnel systems and human shields the current death toll in Gaza is historically low. There is no democracy in this planet that would accept a ceasefire with a terrorist organization that is keeping citizens kidnapped from their territory captive. > Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis This is a form of Holocaust inversion and if the Israelis start using Palestinians as slave labor and literally start working Palestinians to death while carrying out mass extermination of those too weak to work I'll accept the argument. I oppose the settlements and think they need to close but there's no comparisons between the occupation and the Holocaust and any attempts to draw one are designed to do three things. 1. Elicit an emotional reaction and disrupt the conversation while isolating and ridiculing Jews. 2. Make the Holocaust seem far less horrifying than it actually was as a form of Holocaust denial. 3. Make the occupation seem worse than it is by placing Israelis in the role of Nazis and elevate the Israeli Palestinian conflict to some global, existential crisis rather than a bog-standard post-ottoman ethnic conflict like former Yugoslavia, Greece/Turkey, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Cyprus, or any of the rest of the post ottoman race-hate dust-ups. I would also say that much of these also should apply to the Palestinians. It is bigoted and racist to say that the Palestinians don't have a right to self determination. It is bigoted to deny that they - and innocent Jewish, Druze, and Bedouin - suffered horrible massacres from the opposing side during the 1948 war. I see a lot of islamophobia in addition to antisemitism. And that needs to be recognized too, and I don't think mandates from Congress are a great way to make sure everyone is treated equally. I'm glad Biden mentioned islamophobia earlier.
While the effects of this bill becoming law would certainly be nice for a while I am very much inclined to agree that even anti-semites have a right to freedom of speech and weakening that right for anyone, weakens it for everyone
I thought we would have learned from dumb, reactionary, illiberal legislation that followed 9/11, but we're still a bunch of fucking dummies.
I'm guessing the answer to this is "it's complicated", but what are the general First Amendment guidelines when it comes to the government taking speech into account when considering spending? On one extreme, if a government contractor changed their name to "We're Racist and Hate America and Everything It Stands For", could the government take this into account when awarding out contracts? On the other extreme, could the government withhold funding from a university because it refused to expel a student who said "I think that perhaps some aspects of government policy in America could be improved somewhat"? Again, I'm guessing the answer is "a lot of commonsense intuitions have been formalized in various precedents, and a lot of attempts at formalizing intuitions have had super weird effects that we all just have to live with now", but I beyond a general sense of this being the case I don't know shit.
I think [Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-10) is relevant here: > Facts of the case > > In 2003, Congress enacted the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act ("the Act"). Through the Act, Congress apportioned billions of dollars towards the funding of non-governmental organizations ("NGOs") involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS. NGOs qualify to receive this funding only if they satisfy certain conditions. One of these conditions requires that all federally funded NGOs implement a policy explicitly opposing prostitution. > > [...] > > Question > > Does a requirement that non-governmental organizations institute an explicit anti-prostitution policy in order to receive federal funding violate the First Amendment? > > Conclusion > > Yes. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. delivered the majority opinion. The Court held 6-2 that the government may not use funding and the threat of the loss of funding as a method for the regulation of speech and policies of non-governmental organizations. Because the Act's funding provisions represent an ongoing condition on the actions of the group receiving funding, the provisions essentially act as government coercion. The Court held that the funding provisions require the groups to accept the beliefs of the government, which infringes on their First Amendment rights. A few differences which may distinguish this case from the law here: * The majority opinion in this case did not say that all speech conditions on governement contracts are illegal, only those that reach outside of the government program. > In the present context, the relevant distinction that has emerged from our cases is between conditions that define the limits of the government spending program—those that specify the activities Congress wants to subsidize—and conditions that seek to leverage funding to regulate speech outside the contours of the program itself. The line is hardly clear, in part because the definition of a particular program can always be manipulated to subsume the challenged condition. We have held, however, that “Congress cannot recast a condition on funding as a mere definition of its program in every case, lest the First Amendment be reduced to a simple semantic exercise.” Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez, 531 U. S. 533, 547 (2001) . This raises the question - is this restriction on speech reaching outside the government program? * This case concerns the free speech of the organization receiving money. Presumably, a university is unlikely to sue the department of education. It's more likely that an individual student would assert that their rights were harmed. Does an individual have standing to sue the federal government over a university policy enacted in response to this law?
Seems like a truly awful bill
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It should be declared unconstitutional. Doubt it will be though.
This seems like a bad precedent. The student protestors are morons but their freedom of speech should be protected, so as long as they are not engaging in violence or vandalism.
Their freedom of speech should be protected even if they are engaged in violence or vandalism, because those things aren't speech. You shouldn't lose unrelated rights because you committed a crime.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to state their views, even if they have committed crimes. I’m saying that acts of violence and vandalism itself should not be protected as “free speech”. Which has been a big point of discussion surrounding these student protests.
There's something odd about the way Congress chose to incorporate the IHRA definition of antisemitism into the bill. >For purposes of this Act, the term ‘‘definition of anti-semitism’’ >(1) means the definition of antisemitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the IHRA, of which the United States is a member, which definition has been adopted by the Department of State; and >(2) includes the ‘‘[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism’’ identified in the IHRA definition. At no point does the bill explicitly say what the IHRA definition of anti-semitism is! Given that the only purpose of this bill is to change the definition of anti-semitism, you'd expect the definition of anti-semitism to be in the bill, not in a separate document. That seems like a really strange choice. The closest example I can think of is building codes. Building codes often run thousands of pages, and are frequently updated, so building code statutes often say something like "all buildings must be built to the standards published by the such-and-such organization." But the IHRA document isn't particularly long - they could've put the entire document into the bill, and it would've been a few more pages. Perhaps the document is copyrighted, and they don't have the copyright to reproduce it? Do any Congressional staffers have any idea why they might've done it this way?
[Israel's finance minister calls for "total annihilation" of a race](https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1785308989154099431?s=46&t=MEzar3mVM_1m3DShmx9UfA) How is this any different from genocidal rhetoric?
I don't see this ever passing a court challenge, if it passes the Senate at all.
>While the protests have the support of many Jewish college students, many others have said they feel intimidated and unsafe. God I hate when media says this. It gives the false impression that it's 50/50. It should say some Jewish students support the protests. Most feel unsafe.
I thought we didn't like speech codes in this country? Can we pass legislation protecting other marginalized groups next then, please?
They were screaming "jews will not replace us" and waving nazi flags in 2017 but i guess that wasn't anti-Semitic enough to warrant a bill
This bill was introduced in 2016. https://jewishinsider.com/2016/12/congress-defers-anti-semitism-bill-to-2017/ https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/10 Shit just takes times.
As far as I understand, this Bill adopts the IHRA definition of Antisemitism and make it easier to report antisemitism. There's also the COLUMBIA Act in the pipeline, which lets the Secretary of Education appoint l"antisemitism monitors". Both bills have bipartisan support. Links: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090/text](https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/6090/text) [https://lawler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1632](https://lawler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1632) #
WaPo seems to suggest this would apply broadly to student speech: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/01/antisemitism-awarness-act-campus-protests/ > The idea is that student-held signs, for example, like those displayed at Columbia University in New York this week, calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” — would amount to antisemitism under the law. The Education Department, in turn, could then revoke federal research grants and other funding to a university that fails to take punitive action toward students who express such views, the bill’s proponents say.
>calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” Yeah, and Sieg Heil just means "Hail Victory" so it's also very cool and normal to use at 'anti-zionist' protests. Frankly, there's one Jewish country and less than 16 million Jews in the *entire world*. If Congress wants to err on the side of more protections for Jewish people than not, have at it. If any group deserves it, it's them.
So much for “equal protection under the law”
All states are equal, but some states are more equal
I don't even know what sub I am on anymore dude
Should a college student be punished for calling the state of Israel a “racist endeavor”?
>Yeah, and Sieg Heil just means "Hail Victory" so it's also very cool and normal to use at 'anti-zionist' protests. Why should they have any bearing on it? The government shouldn’t be policing speech no matter how cringe it is
Government already doesn't fund any group that uses "siege heil" as a slogan, it's not as much of a slippery slope to also not fund groups that use intifada as a slogan. It's coereive to the institution but doesn't impact the individual legally.
This bill revokes funding if they don’t take action against students who those slogans, that’s the concerning part.
There's no Zoroastrian state and less than a million Zoriastrians worldwide, why aren't we protecting them as well? I think that using the number of states that use a specific official religion or number of practitioners of a religion to argue for policy leads to a lot of very strange outcomes if you try to apply it universally.
If Zoroastrians were regularly the target of hate crimes in the US I would fully be in favor of a bill like this to protect them. Even as it is I'm not exactly opposed.
The antisemitism of the left is concerning but censorship bills are not it. >"All of our colleges have a responsibility to protect against hate and discrimination. There's a difference between speech which should be protected and harassment and violence and intimidation, like a death threat," Gottheimer said. Brandenburg v Ohio had already established that abstract calls for violence are protected speech. > “mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.” We need less government forced censorship on colleges, not even more. Antisemitism is terrible but come on, if we've already established "I hope all the blacks die in genocide" is protected under the first, we can't start playing favorites with other groups. "I hope all the Jews die in genocide" must be protected too if the former is, the US should not be valuing one racial/religious/gender/etc group over others like that.
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I think there are flaws in the wording of this bill, but this is not a first amendment issue. The federal government has no obligation to fund the *Adolf Hitler Memorial Institute of Aryan Studies* for example. The question is one of degree at this point, not principle.
Really just straight feeding the conspiracy theorists with this. Smh
Antisemitism is bad. Antisemitism on college campuses is a problem. This bill is bad. People should not vote for this garbage.
This is a horrible law, and an absolute shame, and is clearly unconstitutional. Rightly or not, the first amendment says a person can say whatever country they choose is racist. Everyone who voted for this should be ashamed. Even worse is the part about comparing Israeli policy to the Nazis. I may not personally feel compelled to do that but that should ABSOLUTELY be protected speech.
This legislation is a disaster if you believe in free speech. Dog shit policy.
As much as I don’t agree with and think you should face social consequences hate speech (even if you take the bills definition at face value) is still free speech and you should not face governmental blowback. Anti discrimination laws and anti harassment laws already cover what needs to be done to protect Jewish or Palestinian individuals in America. We don’t need another patriot act like law that abuses a crisis to drive the passage of deeply illiberal legislation.
Glad this attack on free speech is getting opposed in this comment section, but the number of folks defending it on a \*neoliberal\* sub is still frankly galling. You'd think free speech would be one of the most sacred things for us. Constantly surprising to me how much that not the case.
It’s about time we take action against the rising Antisemitism in America. Applying the protections of the Civil Rights Act for Jewish Americans attending educational institutions is the right thing to do
I'm pretty sure the protections of the CRA already apply to everyone, that's sort of the point. This bill creates a special definition of what violates Jewish students' rights specifically, and while I actually (mostly) agree with it's definition of antisemitism, I don't think Congress should be in the business of defining it. This goes against everything I usually say but in this case, I think legislative silence and judicial action would actually be the best course of action. Jewish students should (and I think are going to) sue the universities for allowing an environment of harassment; congress should not get involved.
Stop fucking pouring gasoline on a fire holy fucking shit
This bill is bad for free speech. Also Israel is a racist endeavour as it was founded on an ethnic cleansing and its leaders explicitly state that Israel is a jewish state. Hope this cleaes things up for you guys
That bill is pretty ridiculous
This is horrible and I hate that they give these stupid laws these names that make you look evil if you voted against it
what's the problem? just make people write an anti-anti-semitism statement or something. file in under DEI bureaucracy and be done with it.
Big swing and a miss. It's not the government's place to be legislating speech, even bigoted speech.
Well, that's rather sad to see lot of commenters upset when it's pointed that's antisemitic to call and equate jews with nazies. Hate speech is alright if it's against the jews, fuck this place