Free speech must beat censorship in anti-Semitism debate

It’s painful to see President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio smoke people who say censorship is needed to protect against the evils of anti-Semitism.

This is the president who told Congress and the world last month that he “stop all government censorship and regained free speech in America.” Despite hypocrisy (or total deceit), the target du Jour is a university student expressing Palestinian sympathy. Foreign students are arrested and set up for deportation.

However, criticism of the government and Israel’s policy are not anti-Semitic. Beware of the Israelites who regularly take you to the streets of thousands.

Trump is crudely alleviating the understandable unease of the Jewish community about the rise of anti-Semitism. However, operational strategies are designed to achieve the larger goal of controlling the university. The university is forced to abandon its role as a forum for airing and investigating all ideas.

I come to this argument as an American Jew who has, as long as I can remember, embraces the value of civic libertarians. The value that crystallized in my first few weeks on university campus.

I recall being drawn to the lawns of the New York City Council (according to news accounts) protesting the ban on communist speakers by the sound of a rally of 1,000 students.

I reached the meeting as chairman of the Faculty of Political Science. The chair of the Faculty of Politics said he represents the American Civil Liberties Union and denounced the speaker’s ban by reciting arguments against censorship from John Stuart Mill’s classic essay, “Liberty.”

I was locked into the power of ideas.

Less than a decade later, I was teaching Mill’s essays to the next generation of lawyers at Midwest University. By then, I had found an intelligent home at the ACLU. This is the country’s leading expert, the defender of freedom of speech.

A few years later, I am the director of the ACLU state defending freedom of speech at synagogues across Michigan, and in retrospect, I’ve been called “ACLU’s best time.” The Illinois ACLU lawyer was, not surprising, Jewish.

I have the name of the head of the European branch of my family that the Nazis murdered. But I was trying to convince the audience that in America, the US (and other minorities) would ultimately benefit from our system of freedom of expression.

Trump and Rubio allege that university student protesters expressing sympathy for the Palestinian cause “distribute Hamas propaganda” or “acting by raising and raising funds for terrorist activities and terrorist organizations.” They also use the horror language of McCarthy era when public unrest over communism led to the destruction of freedom of the First Revision.

University protesters certainly may have confused campus and harassed Jewish students, especially those who were remorseful. However, these are violations of the university rules that universities should handle.

More discussion about the war in Gaza is less and much needed. There is a lot of responsibility to go around. On October 7, 2023, Hamas was cruel and persistent, killing around 1,200 innocent Israeli and American Jews, and the fate of the hostages remaining in captivity under horrifying conditions remains unknown. However, the war also caused the deaths of tens of thousands of women and children who had nothing to do with the Hamas’ October 7 attack (and destroyed schools, schools and hospitals).

Many Jewish families like me are passionately committed to the vision of the 12th and 12th generation of Jewish homelands of the world, but Netanyahu has reduced Israel’s security by hampering the solution of the two states, threatening the annexation of the land, and putting a full war on the people of Gaza.

If there is a beacon that will guide us from this moras, it is a First Amendment warning to distinguish between lewd ideas and illegal activities.

Supreme Court Judge William Brennan briefly stated when he overturned the ban on sending communist literature through the post office.

So my appeal, especially to fellow Jews, is that we are doing our best by quickly retaining the value of free speech and entrusting power over what we are allowed to say and think to the government.

Silencing anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian voices to quell anti-Semitism may be a satisfying, short-term sugar height. But if federal and state leaders allow the United States to replicate Victor Orban’s Hungary, we lament the loss of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Dr. Howard L. Simon was executive director of the Michigan ACLU from 1974 to 1997 and executive director of the Florida ACLU from 1997 to 2018. He lives in Gainesville, Florida and is president of the Clean Okeechobee Waters Foundation.