In 1954, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a hearing to investigate Chandler Davis (1926-2022), who was professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan. Davis refused to cooperate, arguing that the First Amendment prohibited the Committee from questioning his political beliefs.
In Barenblatt v. United States, 360 U.S. 109 (1959), the Supreme Court sided with the government’s claim of security interests and imprisoned Davis for six months. Subsequently, Davis was unable to secure stable employment in the U.S. and, after many years of temporary work, moved to the University of Toronto in 1962.
As history repeats itself, Davis’s experience points to a basic truth: the McCarthy era was not exceptional; it was ordinary.
Once again, the U.S. government is targeting dissidents at U.S. universities. Once again, most university administrators and academics are participating in wide-scale repression based on concocted security claims. Once again, young scholars are being suspended, expelled, and punished.
More than 70 years after the McCarthy era, the U.S. government is repeating an established tactic: divert attention away from the government’s transgressions by fabricating a security threat that necessitates state repression. This time, the government’s offences are much more serious: the U.S. is sponsoring the mass murder, torture, and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. In doing so, the U.S. is repeating other episodes from its bloody history—from mass murder of indigenous Americans to numerous war crimes in Vietnam. With that history in mind, many students comprehend that the U.S. is the primary patron of the Zionist settler-colony. Without the U.S.’s generous flow of weapons, funding, and support, Israel would not be able to continue to slaughter and starve Palestinians. With an expected death toll of half a million (including indirect deaths), students recognize the urgency of opposing the U.S.’s war crimes in Gaza.
While McCarthyism targeted communists, this latest version of ideological censorship targets opponents of settler-colonialism and genocide by slandering them as “antisemites.” Accordingly, the supposed security threat is not a “dangerous” ideology (such as communism), but rather sentiments, feelings of hatred towards Jews. Why is the U.S. government waging a war against hate?
Waging war is, of course, the U.S. modus operandi. Readers may recognize that the “war on drugs” empowers the state’s security apparatus, benefits the prison industrial complex, and perpetuates racism. Readers may also recognize that the war on drugs is more damaging than the drug trade itself. A parallel argument can be made about the “war on terror,” which empowers the state’s security apparatus, benefits the military industrial complex, and perpetuates islamophobia. More innocent people have been murdered in the name of the war on terror than have been killed in “terrorist” incidents. In both examples, we can appreciate that the drug trade and terrorism cause harm while also acknowledging that the state’s wars against them cause even more harm.
In this light, we should view the “war on antisemitism” as parallel to these other wars that expand state power in the name of security. As is the case with the drug trade and terrorism, antisemitism is a source of harm. However, the war on antisemitism causes far greater harm to a significantly larger number of people. Like its other wars, the U.S.’s war on antisemitism is more damaging than antisemitism itself.
When the U.S. wages war against drugs, terrorism, or antisemitism, it also defines those categories in ways that have disparate impacts. It is well known that the differentiation between crack and cocaine in the war on drugs was discriminatory (in terms of race and class). Similarly, the war on terrorism ignores state terrorism and non-state violence resulting from certain ideologies (such as white nationalism).
A similar inequality is evident in how the U.S. government classifies antisemitism. A 2019 Executive Order adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism (hereafter IHRA). As numerous scholars have demonstrated, IHRA is problematic because it perpetuates Zionist censorship strategies rather than combatting antisemitism. In 2023, the U.S. government embraced an official strategy to counter antisemitism based on IHRA. Consequently, the U.S. war on antisemitism is also a war on anti-Zionism.
The U.S war on antisemitism/anti-Zionism is primarily implemented at universities and colleges through Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which prohibits discrimination based on “race, color, and national origin.” Title VI forbids all institutions receiving federal funding from discriminating against individuals or groups based on their race, color, or national origin. Courts or the government identify Title VI violations by examining a combination of actions and speech. Discriminatory actions include disparate treatment or segregation. Identifying speech that is discriminatory under Title VI can potentially conflict with the First Amendment Free Speech doctrine. By relying on the problematic IHRA definition, the U.S. government labels anti-Zionist speech as antisemitic. Thus, the U.S. government is currently using Title VI to prohibit anti-Zionist political expression. While under the McCarthy era the U.S. government criminalized communist political expressions, today it is criminalizing anti-Zionist and anti-genocide expressions.
Punishing antisemitic expressions is a form of hate speech prohibition. Expressions are identified as “hate speech” when they convey hatred based on the categories of race, ethnicity, or religion. These categories are not self-evident or neutral; they are modern social constructs, largely (though not exclusively) defined by secularism. Secularism is a Eurocentric ideology based on the false premise that politics is distinguishable from race, ethnicity, or religion.
Secularism reflects the early modern European historical context in which it began. Accordingly, the secular notion of hate speech draws from Western Christian precursors: in early modern Europe, blasphemy was viewed as both a sin and a threat to public order. Contemporary hate speech laws incorporate both aspects of blasphemy. When hate speech limitations prohibit speech that does not directly result in violence in the public sphere, certain expressions are designated as sinful. Thus, the secular state functions like a church that categorizes speech as permitted and sinful. The notion of hate speech replicates sinful speech.
Today, the U.S. government is prohibiting anti-Zionist and anti-genocide expressions not because they cause violence in the public sphere, but rather because the government considers them sinful. The notion of hate speech is not censorship of hatred, but rather censorship of certain political expressions. Attempts to ban antisemitic hate speech unavoidably result in censoring dissident political speech.
Connecting the war on antisemitism to the McCarthy era, the war on drugs, and the war on terror illuminates a pattern: the U.S. government abuses its power to disproportionately harm dissidents and minorities. However, even when actors significantly less powerful than the U.S. government engage in the war on antisemitism, they also harm dissidents and minorities. In other words, actors with “good intentions” who try to limit antisemitic speech also oppress groups in unintended or unacknowledged ways.
For example, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (hereafter, the JDA) was issued in 2021 as a response to IHRA. The authors of the JDA endeavored to offer a definition of antisemitism that was more protective of anti-Zionist views than that of IHRA. Nevertheless, the JDA effort fails because it is based on the same underlying assumptions—specifically, the same secular confusion—as IHRA. The JDA censors anti-Zionist speech by obscuring basic and necessary distinctions between Jews, Zionists, and Israelis. Nonetheless, anti-Zionism and antisemitism cannot be fully disentangled because the distinction between (secular) political speech and hate speech is an illusion. As my article in the special issue of Political Theology elaborates, changing who defines hate speech does not resolve how it relies on the secular assumption of hate speech as apolitical. Contrary to secular assumptions, hate speech is political speech.
In between the McCarthy era and today, censorship has been the norm and free speech has been a rarely implemented aspiration. The University of Michigan admitted in the 1990s that its compliance with the U.S. government’s political repression was a violation of academic freedom. Of course, it was too little, too late.
Long after the McCarthy era had ended and mainstream opinions had shifted to viewing that period in U.S. history unfavorably, U.S. academic institutions continued to shun Davis. Shortly before his passing, during a lengthy conversation, Davis told me that his exile’s permanence surprised him. It was not only the U.S. government that persecuted him because so many of his colleagues continued to punish him with their cowardice.
One day, many U.S. universities will issue similar apologies. It will be too little, too late—not only for the students being oppressed now, but, much more importantly, for the Palestinians being murdered and tortured daily in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. They are not coming for the speakers of hate; they are coming for the opponents of settler-colonialism and mass slaughter (genocide).
* In 1946, German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (d. 1984) published a prose piece that has been translated and disseminated widely. The piece begins with “First, they came for…” and ends with the phrase, “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
