From DC to California, Pro-Israel Censorship Is Getting Worse
Jenin Younes of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee sits down with The American Conservative to talk censorship, the Israel lobby, and life in the West Bank.
When President Donald Trump announced earlier this year that he would “restore free speech,” many civil liberties advocates believed the government’s censorship apparatus constructed under the Biden administration would finally be dismantled. Ten months later, it is difficult to find any civil libertarian who still feels that way.
I spoke with attorney and podcaster Jenin Younes about free speech under Trump as well as her work as the new national legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, an organization which recently filed a major lawsuit in California challenging a new state law that restricts “antisemitic” speech without defining the term.
You made a name for yourself as an opponent of the Biden censorship regime. That was a well-financed, government-backed effort to control the information system, to censor dissidents of official orthodoxies around COVID's origins and the government responses to it, the war in Ukraine, Hunter Biden's laptop, and much more than that.
So, it's fair to say that you're not a fan of the Democratic Party or its censorious behavior. You must have been very excited then, when Trump announced in January that he was going to restore free speech. He made this big executive order. Well, it's been about ten months since that happened. How are you feeling about this free speech restoration? Are things better?
No, it’s worse. It's worse than anything Biden did. I think that was pretty evident early on. So, along with that executive order, which I was slightly optimistic about, he signed another executive order basically saying that the administration would find ways to remove people from the country if they don't like Israel. I was very concerned when I saw that. Given what some members of his administration had been saying along those lines, I thought, “Oh, what they're gonna do is start deporting people who are critical of Israel,” which then started happening in March. It began with Mahmoud Khalil.
Since then, it's been a multifaceted effort. It's not just the deportations, but also pressuring universities, threatening to withhold or withholding funds unless they stamp down on “antisemitic” activity (which clearly means criticism of Israel and pro-Palestine protests), scouring people's social media posts before letting them into the country, which is unprecedented, threatening to revoke people's green cards, or denying them adjustment of status if they've been "antisemitic." It's very clear, based on what this administration has done and said in the past, that they consider criticism of Israel to be antisemitism, or at least they pretend to consider it that. So, it's really the opposite of free speech.
Right, there has been this whole slew of censorship measures, as you said, organized around criticism of this foreign government. And I want to get into some of your efforts as a principled free speech advocate to combat some of it.
Most recently, you filed a lawsuit as the new director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It is against California Governor Gavin Newsom and the government of California over this new hate speech law that they created last month. It's called AB 715 and it compels California public schools to adopt new hate speech codes banning one type of speech—antisemitism—and protecting one specific identity group—Zionist Jewish students. This new law, as your organization points out, does not even provide a definition for what that “antisemitism” is. It just kind of relies on the Biden administration's guidelines, which uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Can you talk about what is really in Gavin Newsom's AB 715? And what about it does your lawsuit challenge?
So, the law does not define antisemitism itself, which I think is a big red flag, and also extremely problematic. It has all these requirements for how schools are supposed to combat antisemitism, but never defines the key term. I don't know that I've ever seen anything like that, especially when the key term is very contested.
There are people who think criticizing Israel or Zionism is antisemitism and there are quite a few people, like me, who think it's not. There's a doctrine called “Void for Vagueness” under the 14th Amendment due process clause which says that people have a right to have laws be clearly defined so that you know what conduct or speech is prohibited. I believe it was the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that struck down a law that prohibited abusing or insulting a teacher on school grounds and said that was too vague. What's abusing or insulting in front of students? What does that mean? You have to define those terms. And I would say not defining antisemitism is a much, much graver problem when the amendments to the education code are predicated on this concept. So that's a huge problem.
Another problem is it prohibits use of written materials that subject a student to unlawful discrimination. The pre-existing law actually had the same provision, but now that we've incorporated this new antisemitism component without the definition, that again, makes it even less clear. And before, there was no provision saying that teachers could be punished for this, for subjecting a student to unlawful discrimination by adopting written materials.
I mean, what does it mean to subject a student to discrimination through written materials? What if you assign The Great Gatsby or The Merchant of Venice, which have stereotypical Jewish characters? Is that subjecting a student to unlawful discrimination? Extremely problematic. It also requires teachers to be factually accurate in their instruction. A teacher got in trouble for saying that Israel is colonizing the West Bank. That is factual. Most international organizations and bodies agree with that, but she got in trouble for it. Her accuser said it was antisemitic. So how are teachers supposed to walk both lines?
The final point I'll mention is that while it doesn't define antisemitism, it says schools are to follow the Biden administration white paper on combating antisemitism. It's a 60-page document that frequently conflates notions of criticizing Israel with antisemitism and it refers to the IHRA definition (without directly stating it). It says it's the most prominent definition. It falls short of saying we're following it, but I think that's the implication. That also incorporates criticism of Israel. The person who wrote that definition said it's not meant to carry the force of law.
What they're trying to do is make it so people don't really know what the law is but get the strong impression that if they criticize Israel or Zionism they could be punished, so they just don't say anything.
Last week there was a major victory for the First Amendment. A federal court dismissed one of the various lawsuits that's been filed by Zionist Jewish students who attempt to weaponize Title VI anti-discrimination laws to claim that anti-Israel discourse on campus is some kind of a threat or discrimination against their personal identity. This case was filed against MIT, and the court sided with the university.
There's a quote from the judge that you pointed out on X. It was this: "plaintiffs are entitled to their own interpretive lens, equating anti-Zionism as they define it, and antisemitism. But it's another matter altogether to insist that others must be bound by the plaintiff's view.” Zionist organizations have already announced their intentions to bring more Title VI lawsuits against schools like Harvard and MIT on these same grounds. So, what are the implications of this decision?
It’s a pretty significant opinion and I think it really was very important that the court parsed the specific claims. One thing that these groups have been doing with some success, is lying about what's going on and acting as though these campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism. Anybody who's been to a campus knows that's not what's going on there.
What they do, of course, is they conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism and they rely on statistics that also conflate that. The law that I challenged earlier this week is based on ADL-linked statistics which counts anti-Israel behavior as antisemitic incidents. So, if someone marches down the street saying Israel's committing genocide, that counts as an antisemitic incident. But I think a lot of judges have had the wool pulled over their eyes. I mean, federal judges are on average older. That's just how it works: You have to be pretty experienced to become a federal judge. They grew up in a different time. A lot of them are Boomers or even older than that and the Holocaust is very heavily imprinted on their mind.
I think younger generations grew up seeing Jews as being, for the most part, pretty well off in this country, not really discriminated against in education or the workplace or anything like that, not in any significant danger as a group. But I think some of the judges are waking up, and that this decision was really emblematic of that.
One last question, not about free speech, but about Israel. Your family, unlike mine, has actually lived in Israel for centuries in the West Bank. Your grandparents, your uncles, your cousins, they all live there, but you can't visit them. How are they doing and what is their experience like living under what Israeli human rights group B'Tselem calls a "Regime of Jewish Supremacy" in Israel?
Well, they're not doing that well. My father grew up in the West Bank and he left because of the occupation. Really the occupation is very brutal. It started in '67 and it's just been escalating in oppressive tactics. It’s very, very difficult to travel now from one village to the other. You can be thrown in administrative detention forever if you're a Palestinian. I have a cousin who's been in there for almost two years now without any charge or even being told what he did wrong. You can be held in administrative detention just on the allegation that they suspect you might do something wrong in the future. What’s happening to people is very scary, dystopian sci-fi stuff; it's really awful.
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I actually might be able to go there. I don't know. I went when I was 13, but it was really scary because the Israelis held us at the airport for a long time because we're a Palestinian family. It was my dad and my brothers and me. Checkpoints were very, very scary. They could just shoot you and everybody knows there will be no consequences. Maybe when I went in 1997 there would have been consequences, because things were a little bit less insane. But now there wouldn't be, certainly not under this administration.
So, my dad doesn't go anymore either. He used to go visit his mother, but she died. After that he said, “I'm not gonna subject myself to the humiliation.” They strip-searched him at checkpoints. He said that "you have this 18 year old with a gun in your face, and I wanna go visit my mother, and I have to strip, and he humiliates me. They're very racist against Arabs. I'm just not doing this anymore." So he no longer goes and sees his siblings who are there, and the irony, the great irony, is that my mom’s father was a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany because of increasing antisemitism in the 30s. I could have gone, I could have, when I was younger. I would have gone and done birthright because of that, while as a Palestinian, they make it almost completely impossible or at least extremely challenging and scary to go.
I think that kind of illustrates this two-tiered system. Based on my mom's heritage that had nothing to do with Palestine, I could go. But not based on my dad’s, even though he grew up there. It's just so odd.This is a partial transcript, edited for clarity and conciseness. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.
