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islamophobia
Pro-Israel Senators Show Their Hand By Opposing Free Speech Protections in Now-Delayed Antisemitism Bill
The Antisemitism Awareness Act has never been about countering antisemitism or protecting Jewish students from discrimination; it is about silencing pro-Palestine students and protecting the Israeli government from criticism.
May 06, 2025
When Senate Republicans brought the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act up for a committee vote last week, they were expecting an easy win. After all, the bill had the support of Senate Republican leaders, most Israel advocacy groups, and even some Democrats.
Yet the bill faced an unexpected problem that may ultimately doom its passage. During a markup hearing of the HELP Committee, two Republicans broke ranks, joining all Democrats in approving free speech amendments that undermined the true goal of the bill: requiring colleges and universities to conflate criticism of the Israeli government and Zionism with antisemitism.
The first amendment considered was HELP Chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy's (R-La.)manager amendment, which affirmed that “Nothing in this Act shall be constructed to diminish or infringe upon any right protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
While that vague reassurance passed with bipartisan support, most Republicans refused to support substantive amendments that explicitly referenced Gaza as an example of free speech, laid out examples of protected student speech, and prohibited retaliation against dissent.
If the true purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act was protecting Jewish students from illegal anti-Semitic discrimination, then none of these amendments should have been a problem.
At start of the hearing, ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned, “Unfortunately and unacceptably, the Antisemitism Awareness Act we are considering today would label speech that criticizes the Israeli government and Netanyahu’s horrific war in Gaza as antisemitic and a violation of civil rights laws, and that is an extremely dangerous precedent.”
Sanders then offered several amendments designed to reduce the risk that government agencies and educational institutions can use the bill as a new tool of censorship.
His first amendment clarified, "no person shall be considered antisemitic for using their rights of free speech or protest under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to ... oppose Benjamin Netanyahu's led war effort, which has killed more than 50,000 and wounded more than 113,000, 60 percent of whom are women and children” and "oppose the Israeli government's devastation of Gaza..."
All Democrats voted in favor, which was itself a surprise given how many Democratic politicians have desperately avoided any criticism of the Israeli government. The bigger surprise came from Senator Rand Paul. He broke ranks with other Republicans and supported the amendment, ensuring its passage.
A second Sanders amendment declared that the federal government cannot force any school, college, or university to adopt a policy that a branch of the federal government may compel a school "to violate the rights of a student, faculty, or staff member under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
In a sane world, every Republican senator would have supported such a basic amendment. Yet all opposed it except for two: Sen. Paul and Sen. Susan Collins (D-Maine).
The third Sanders' amendment clarified that speech, such as distributing flyers, inviting guest speakers, or engaging in classroom discussions, is protected unless it involves true threats or incitement of violence. Again, Paul and Collins were the only Republicans to break with their colleagues to support it.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced an amendment prohibiting the federal government from detaining or deporting students based on protected political speech. That amendment passed by a single vote, thanks again to Senator Paul. Markey stated, “When a young person writes an op-ed in the student newspaper and get whisked off of the streets of Tuffs University to a prison in Louisiana with no charges that is what we are debating today.”
If the true purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act was protecting Jewish students from illegal anti-Semitic discrimination, then none of these amendments should have been a problem. They should have received universal support, and their approval should not have derailed the bill.
Yet the fate of the legislation is now up in the air.
HELP Committee Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said during the hearing that, “Supporting these amendments is an effort to kill this bill.”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Ok.) responded the next day by telling Jewish Insider that “Rand Paul totally killed that bill.” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) also said, “These amendments are dealbreakers.”
Why? Because the Antisemitism Awareness Act has never been about countering antisemitism or protecting Jewish students from discrimination; it is about silencing pro-Palestine students and protecting the Israeli government from criticism.
The bill would require government agencies and schools to enforce federal civil rights law using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism—a vague and widely disputed standard that poses a mortal threat to First Amendment freedoms.
Kenneth S. Stern, the original drafter of the IHRA definition, has testified to Congress that, "My fear is, if we similarly enshrine this definition into law, outside groups will try and suppress–rather than answer–political speech they don’t like. The academy, Jewish students, and faculty teaching about Jewish issues, will all suffer." Stern has repeatedly stated that the definition was never meant to be enforceable law and that doing so risks unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. That is precisely what this legislation seeks to achieve.
The IHRA definition declares that any student describing the founding of Israel as a "racist endeavor" has engaged in antisemitism punishable by their school and the government of the United States—even though racist militias and terrorist groups like the Irgun subjected Palestinians to a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder during the founding of Israel.
IHRA also declares anyone “applying double standards” to Israel is antisemtiic. If someone criticizes the Israeli government's war crimes in Gaza but hasn't made time to criticize the RSF's war crimes in Sudan, they must be antisemitic. Ditto for anyone “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” comparisons that--while controversial—have even been made by far-right supporters of the Israeli government.
As Sen. Paul noted during the hearing, these and other examples establish a dangerous double standard. No other foreign government is granted this level of immunity from criticism under U.S. civil rights law. If enforced through Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, these vague and politically motivated examples would transform legitimate political critique into grounds for federal investigations, and dissent into a punishable offense.
If passed, this bill—even in its watered-down form—would open the door for the Israeli government and its supporters to misconstrue American civil rights laws.
CAIR, like many other civil rights groups, has called on congress to not pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act into law, as it would give the Department of Education—under a Trump administration already targeting, arresting, detaining, and attempting to deport anti-genocide protesters—even more power to investigate, silence, and punish speech on campus critical of Israel. We are already seeing the consequences. More than 1,700 student visas have been revoked since January. Students like Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts’ Rumeysa Ozturk remain in ICE custody for nothing more than participating in peaceful, protected protest and speech. Others face deportation for daring to speak out. This is not theoretical. This is not speculative. It is happening now.
In its original form, the Antisemitism Awareness Act would have given the Trump administration even more power to escalate its attack on free speech for Palestine. Even with the addition of Sanders' amendments, the now-contradictory bill still threatens free speech protections by including the IHRA definition.
That's still not good enough for most Senate Republicans and pro-Israel groups pushing the bill. Now that the bill cannot be so easily weaponized to silence dissent against Israeli government's war crimes in Gaza or its founding ideology, at least some of its key backers are threatening to abandon it.
Congress must reject this bill in full. No amendment can salvage legislation built on an anti-democratic foundation. Americans have the right to speak out against injustice, whether it occurs in our own country or in Gaza.
We must be absolutely clear about what is at stake. If passed, this bill—even in its watered-down form—would open the door for the Israeli government and its supporters to misconstrue American civil rights laws. That is not only a betrayal of free speech. It is a threat to American sovereignty.
Americans must unequivocally oppose antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and all forms of hate. But conflating antisemitism with opposition to Israel’s military occupation, apartheid policies, or the ongoing genocide in Gaza is not just dishonest. It is dangerous.
Congress must reject this bill in full. No amendment can salvage legislation built on an anti-democratic foundation. Americans have the right to speak out against injustice, whether it occurs in our own country or in Gaza.
Silencing speech does not stop hate. It only deepens injustice. And we should not stand by while our government attempts to criminalize moral clarity.
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Illinois Man Gets 53 Years in Prison for Vicious Hate-Crime Killing of 6-Year-Old Wadee Alfayoumi
"No sentence can restore what was taken, but today's outcome delivers a necessary measure of justice. Wadee was an innocent child. He was targeted because of who he was—Muslim, Palestinian, and loved."
May 02, 2025
A judge told an Illinois man Friday that his hate-fueled murder of six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi in October 2023 was "brutal and heinous" as she sentenced him to 53 years in prison.
The sentence was handed down three months after Joseph Czuba, 73, was found guilty of murdering the Palestinian-American kindergartner, who lived with his family in two bedrooms they rented from Czuba in Plainfield Township, Illinois.
Prosecutors found that Czuba became "paranoid and violent" after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and as Israel's bombardment of Gaza's population of 2.3 million Palestinians began in retaliation.
Alfayoumi's mother, Hanan Shaheen, testified during Czuba's trial that he had attacked her first before moving on to stab her son 26 times. Czuba told Shaheen before the attack that the family had to leave their home because they were Muslim.
Mahmoud Yousef, an uncle of Alfayoumi's father, told the court at the sentencing that no prison sentence for Czuba would lessen the family's pain.
"Together, we must build a society where no one lives in fear because of who they are, and no family mourns a loved one lost to hate."
"That's more than just hate, that went way beyond that," Yousef said of the murder. "We're talking about a 6-year-old kid whose father had plans for him."
Yousef also looked directly at Czuba and demanded that he say something to the family "for peace of mind," but Czuba did not speak during the hearing.
"Wadee Alfayoumi should still be alive today," said Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.). "While justice has been served, nothing can bring Wadee back. Together, we must build a society where no one lives in fear because of who they are, and no family mourns a loved one lost to hate."
During the trial, the jury heard Shaheen's frantic 911 call and saw crime scene photos that were so harrowing the judge agreed not to show them to the audience, where Alfayoumi's family was sitting.
"No sentence can restore what was taken, but today's outcome delivers a necessary measure of justice," said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of Chicago's chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Wadee was an innocent child. He was targeted because of who he was—Muslim, Palestinian, and loved."
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Trump Is Copying From the War on Terror Playbook—in CAPS LOCK
The deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past.
Mar 28, 2025
Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of “national security” in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done—through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort—left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law.
And—lo and behold!—now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as—if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours—the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy.
Racism
Among the numerous anti-democratic trends of this century, state-sponsored racism has been a constant concern. Of the many low points in the response to 9/11, the unleashing of government policies of racial and ethnic discrimination stands out. Fearing a follow-up attack, law enforcement targeted Muslim Americans, surveilling mosques, and casting a startlingly wide net of suspicion with a sweeping disregard for civil liberties. That approach was only strengthened by the militarization of police forces nationwide in the name of targeting Arabs and Muslims. In 2002, the government even introduced the NSEERS program, a “Special Registration” requirement mandating that all males from a list of 24 Arab and Muslim countries (as well as North Korea) register and be fingerprinted. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, the program amounted to “a discriminatory policy that ran counter to the fundamental American values of fairness and equal protection.”
A dangerous template for discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin was thereby set in place. In his first term in office, Donald Trump promptly doubled down on that Islamophobic trend, even though his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had revoked the registration requirement. By Executive Order 13769, Trump authorized a ban on the entry into the U.S. of citizens from seven Muslim countries, an order that would be reined in somewhat by the courts and finally revoked by then-President Joe Biden.
The discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Nor, in Trump’s first term, was discrimination limited to those from Arab and Muslim countries. As the Costs of War project has pointed out, the Islamophobia of the war on terror years had set a racial-profiling precedent and example for the more broadly racist policies of the first Trump administration. “The exponential surveillance since 9/11 has also intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups… and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter.” Yes, Trump did indeed go after Black Lives Matter protesters with a vengeance during his first term, even unleashing armed federal agents without insignia to tear gas, beat, and detain such protesters in Portland, Oregon.
While Obama would end the Special Registration program and Biden would revoke the Muslim ban, no preventive measures were undertaken to guard against future racist policies and, all too unfortunately, we see the results of that today.
Trump 2.0 has already escalated discriminatory policies, focusing on protecting white males at the expense of people of color and women. In fact, his very first executive orders included several measures cracking down on asylum-seekers and closing off legal avenues to citizenship, as well as a brazen decree aimed at eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the country. Executive Order 14173 (“Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”) was issued on January 21, 2025, the very day he took office. It ordered organizations and entities—from government offices and the U.S. military to schools, businesses, and more—to end their DEI policies “within 120 days” or risk losing government funding.
Recently, making good on its threats, the Trump administration canceled $400 million of federal funding in the form of grants and contracts to Columbia University as a sign of disapproval of that university’s supposed tolerance of pro-Palestinian protests, “described,” as National Public Radio reported, “as the school’s failure to police antisemitism on campus.” Nine other universities are believed to be under similar scrutiny.
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, Trump is planning to issue a new travel ban, including a “red list” of countries whose citizens will be prohibited from entering the United States and an “orange list” of those whose citizens would, in some fashion, be curtailed if not completely barred from entry. As yet, the specifics remain unknown.
In other words, the discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Disappearing the Record
Secrecy was likewise baked into the government’s response to the war on terror, often to keep what would have been obvious abuses of the law well hidden. Whether it was the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—the phrase employed by the administration of former President George W. Bush for acts of straightforward torture—or mass surveillance, the authorization for the targeted killing of an American citizen, or the implementation of other policies that deviated from accepted law and practice, all of that and more was initially kept well hidden from the American public.
Now, many have described the brazen upheavals decreed by the Trump administration as being the very opposite of secrecy—as, in fact, “saying the quiet part out loud.” In reality, however, in these first days of his second term in office, Trump and crew have taken secrecy to a new level, replacing it with a broad policy of erasure and invisibility. In fact, despite the administration’s pledge of “radical transparency” in areas like spending, a hostile onslaught against the written record has prevailed.
This determination to bury the record was apparent during the first Trump administration. He repeatedly asserted his right, for instance, not to document his meetings with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In 2017, he reportedly confiscated notes that were taken at a meeting with Putin. In 2019, at the G-20 in Buenos Aires, he met Putin without either a translator or a note-taker present. The Washington Post reported, that “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.” In other words, on a matter of top national security concern—U.S.-Russian relations—a “cone of seclusion” was created, effectively leaving it to the two presidents to make decisions in secret. (Meanwhile, in his first term in office, Trump allegedly flushed down the toilet certain records relevant to the classified documents case against him.)
In his onslaught against record-keeping and the public’s right to know, the National Archives has become a prime target. Trump’s battle with the archives had its origins in his legal struggle over the classified documents he was alleged to have kept in his possession in violation of the law after his first administration, even supposedly destroying security camera footage taken at Mar-a-Lago that showed boxes of those documents being moved. Now, the president has fired the U.S. archivist, replacing a professional academic with Marco Rubio, despite his duties as secretary of state.
His outright refusal to keep a record of his administration’s activities is also reflected in his insistence that the records of the Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) fall under the Presidential Records Act, which applies to the records of the president and vice president, and which comes with the guarantee that they can be withheld from the public for up to 12 years after he leaves office. The act also allows for the disposal of records, pending the approval of the national archivist.
In a further example of denying information as a form of politics, Trump’s Office of Professional Management ordered the removal of gender-related content from its websites (as well as the erasure of gender-identifying pronouns from e-mail signatures and an end to all gender-related programs and grants). This led to the removal of pages from the Census.gov website, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and military websites, and the replacement of the acronym LGBTQ+ with LGB. Under court order, some of these webpages have been put back up, even if with this defiant note:
Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality, and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.
In other words, the Trump administration’s claims of legitimacy for its purge of information remain strong. The legacy of state-sanctioned secrecy and a parallel burying of the record, inextricably tied to the post-9/11 era, has already found a secure footing in the second Trump presidency.
Undermining the Courts and the Law
Time and again in the war on terror, the Department of Justice and the courts deferred to the federal government in the name of national security. As a 2021 Brennan Center report noted, national security deference was apparent in decisions not to hear cases due to “states secret” claims, as well as in decisions that prioritized over civil-liberties guarantees and human-rights considerations what government lawyers argued were the constitutionally granted powers of the president in national security matters.
Under Trump, the second time around, it’s already clear that there’s going to be a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the legal system. Witness the administration’s attacks on judges whose decisions have gotten in the way of his agenda. When a judge ordered the restoration of public health data that had been removed from government websites, he was summarily castigated by Elon Musk as “evil” and someone who “must be fired.” Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has already moved to squelch independent decision-making by immigration court judges, threatening them with nothing short of dismissal should they rule against the president’s prerogatives.
Then there are the attacks on law firms that have opposed Trump. Recently, for instance, security clearances were removed for lawyers at the law firms of Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election, and Covington Burleigh, which represented Jack Smith, who investigated Trump in the Biden years. Lawyers from those firms were also banned from federal buildings. And don’t forget the all-out attempt to go after officials who investigated and prosecuted January 6 cases.
The idea of an independent Justice Department has been severely damaged, with the promise of so much more to come.
Evading Accountability
More often than not, the significant transformations of law and policy that grew out of the response to 9/11 were relegated to the pages of history with little or no accountability. The Senate, under Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) leadership, did produce a report on the CIA’s use of torture. It detailed despicable acts of cruelty, and ultimately concluded that such techniques, decreed to be legal by the Department of Justice, were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” And immediately upon taking office in 2009, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order officially ending the use of torture. But he was decidedly against holding any officials accountable for what had occurred, preferring, as he so memorably put it, to “look forward, not backward.” In addition, Obama refused to call torture a “crime,” labeling it a mistake instead.
Today, in more mundane matters, the distaste for accountability has been institutionalized throughout the government. In his first term in office, Donald Trump dismissed or replaced five inspectors general, officials assigned to departments throughout the executive branch of government to monitor waste, abuse, and fraud. Almost immediately upon taking office this time around, he dismissed “roughly 17” of them. For the moment, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which, from its creation, never included an inspector-general position, is now under review by the Department of Treasury’s inspector general.
Trump’s aversion to accountability clearly reflects a desire to protect his own efforts to totally control executive policy. It should, however, also serve as a striking reminder of the aversion to accountability that followed the legalization and uses of torture in the post-9/11 years, the fabricated decision to go to war in Iraq, the mass surveillance of Americans in that era, and so much more. All of this set in place a grim template for the second Trump era—the notion that no one is ultimately accountable for abusing the law when their actions have been ordered (or simply approved) by the president.
Lessons (Un)learned
Given the magnitude of the most recent antidemocratic actions by Donald Trump and his team, blaming them on the slippery slope created during the war on terror years may seem like a distinct overreach. Yet, given the dangerous excesses we’re now witnessing, it’s worth remembering just how vulnerable the loss of certain norms of legality and accountability in those years left this country—and how sadly little we seem to have learned from that era.
Racism, a lack of deference for the courts, the failure to hold individuals and organizations accountable for informally rewriting the nation’s laws, the pervasive embrace of secrecy, and an unwillingness to erect strict guardrails to prevent the future manipulation of both laws and norms—all those realities of the war on terror years created a distinctly undemocratic template, however different in scale, for this Trumpian moment of ours. An unwillingness to be accountable or to circumvent secrecy during the war on terror led the country straight into today’s quagmire.
Today’s horrific moment should, in fact, be considered—to return to that word of mine one last time—a true perversification of past misdeeds, made all too possible by a failure in the post-9/11 years to take measures to prevent their recurrence.
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