The United States House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would expand the federal definition of anti-Semitism, despite opposition from civil liberties groups.
The bill passed the House on Wednesday by a margin of 320 to 91, and it is largely seen as a reaction to the ongoing antiwar protests unfolding on US university campuses. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.
If the bill were to become law, it would codify a definition of anti-Semitism created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
IHRA’s working definition of anti-Semitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”.
According to the IHRA, that definition also encompasses the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”.
The group also includes certain examples in its definition to illustrate anti-Semitism. Saying, for instance, that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” would be deemed anti-Semitic under its terms. The definition also bars any comparison between “contemporary Israeli policy” and “that of the Nazis”.
Rights groups, however, have raised concerns the definition nevertheless conflates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism.
In a letter sent to lawmakers on Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) urged House members to vote against the legislation, saying federal law already prohibits anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment.
“Instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism.”
Saying, for instance, that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” would be deemed anti-Semitic under its terms. The definition also bars any comparison between “contemporary Israeli policy” and “that of the Nazis”.
Lmao this is a guilty conscience talking.
Israel is like the Nazis in that the Americans are going to support them up to the moment they lose, at which point they will retcon their own history to say of course they were always against them.
The majority of Americans opposed Nazis, even before entering the war. We supported the allies with aid, and were instrumental in making the Nazi’s defeat a reality.
.
Freedom of speech. Except the speech we don’t like.
Tens of thousands of civilian casualties is the price we are willing to pay for a strategic military asset the the middle east.
After all, tens of thousands of civilian casualties is the price we are willing to pay for the 2nd amendment.
We’d be hypocrites otherwise.
– US Congress, probably.
As a Jew I have never felt less respected by Congress than them appropriating the concept of antisemitism to further their own oppressive political ends. Fuck it’s so gross.
That’s called a Nazi apologist law. That’s making a subset of Nazis accepted and censoring those against them at the same time.
I thought I won’t see such decay in my lifetime, but then life is never boring.
I claim the Hilltop Youth in Israel are not a million miles from the Hitler Youth. Am I now an antisemite?
The highest order of interference in the US comes from AIPAC, it must go
lol fuck off morons.
Ah, free speech in the land of the free
Only free for zionists and the corporations. You know, the wealthy people. Not for the silly plebes.
I guess I’m technically an antisemite then because Israel is behaving like fucking Nazis. They’re doing a genocide and they’re invading and settling. Netanyahu deserves to go to the same hell that Hitler deserved, and unfortunately also just like Hitler, I seriously doubt that America will be the ones sending him there. I hope he blows his brains out in disgrace as the walls close in on him before he can be Gaddafi’d in the street. Fuck that piece of shit to death with a bayonet. Just one itty bitty war crime in response to his katamari of war crimes, and it can serve as a deterrent against future war crimes. It’s like bombing for peace, rectal remix.
And yes, I also condemn Hamas. The victims are the civilians who didn’t ask for any of this bullshit.
This was removed for bigotry?? Are mods following that policy already?
Edit: and the comments below it too.
Edit 2: the below comments didn’t even have a call to violence. What’s going on mods?
There are already bad actors infesting lemmy mod teams.
We gotta fight back and be persistent, or else this place will become another censorship hellhole like reddit.
I can still see it on Lemmy world
The comment said “I condemn Hamas” aka the group fighting back against an occupying force and an ongoing genocide. Also said some shitty things about Gaddafi.
I condemn Hamas
Thanks for being the occupation’s little lapdog
I condemn the IDF
Both-siding with an occupation and their victims just means passively supporting their genocide. My statement remains unchanged.
Fuck the IDF. Fuck Hamas. Save the Palestinian people. It’s not that hard.
They would be condemning the Viet Cong for using the exact same strategies Hamas does (taking hostages, using tunnels and guerilla warfare, etc) and having the same goal of driving out an occupying force to reunite their country, yet they had the audacity to pretend like they’re antizionist.
Campus protests and the pigs dispersing them are also paralleling the Vietnam war.
So? Are those the magical words that justify removing any comment? Hamas isn’t Palestine or Palestinians and condemning a group that killed hundreds shouldn’t be a controversial statement, much less bigotry. And the irony of this happening in the thread about Isreal trying to pass a similar law for themselves…
I can understand you and other commenters expressing your opinions but the fact that not even the mods are keeping up the pretense of impartiality is insane
There is no impartiality for genocide.
The Viet Cong killed hundreds in the same way, and so have all successful revolutionary groups in the past. Decolonization is violent, if you don’t like it don’t colonize in the first place.
Edit: And Hamas, even with their far less precise gear and without military superiority, has done a far better job avoiding killing civilians than the occupation has. The final death toll from the Oct 7 retaliation is now thought to be 695 Israeli “civilians” (mostly unarmed IDF conscripts), 373 armed IDF members, 71 foreigners and 36 children. While Israel has killed over 30 thousand Palestinians, 2/3 of whom are women and children.
There is no impartiality for genocide.
Fuck off with hiding behind “but genocide!” whenever someone disagrees with you and double fuck you for implying that I or those other people support genocide. No matter how hard tankie politics dictates imperialsits (‘them’) and rest of the world (‘us’) are polar opposites, there are people that share some of your values and don’t share others. This includes people who see both hamas and isreali gvt as evil. If your ideology has answers ready for everything and doesn’t need you to impartially think to come to conclusions that’s a bullshit ideology.
Edit: Reminds me of religious nuts thinking atheists are evil because if they don’t follow every rule in the book they must be breaking all of the rules and you certainly can’t have your own moral compass.
Edit: And Hamas, even with …
Are you seriously arguing that killing less civilians than the isreali military somehow makes hamas good? If they hadn’t attacked much of the violence since then wouldn’t have happened and those 30 thousand Palestinians would at least be alive, even if not free. How hard is it to understand that multiple things can be correct?
I can understand why Hamas would choose to do what they did when they did it. Cornered animal lashes out. But it’s incomprehensible to me how anyone looking from the outside thinks attacking Isreal with anything less than a takeover force was a good idea, especially considering that in hindsight it was a terrible one.
“Anything I don’t like is a tankie”, Lemmy politics equivalent to the right wing’s use of woke.
Followed by the 30,000x version of “they wouldn’t have died if they just did what the police told them!”
You’re saying the people advocating to remove comments that condemn Hamas or Gaddafi, accuse people of obeying the ‘empire’ and bring up genocide to claim moral high ground aren’t tankies?
Just because one side of a conflict is evil doesn’t automatically make the other side good. Evil can fight evil, and when it does we should condemn both sides. Hamas have literally said that their goal is to genocide the Israelis, if you think that’s ok then that’s terribly hypocritical of you. The only reason Israel is succeeding in that goal and Hamas are not is because USA is tipping the scales with their arms shipments etc
Hamas have literally said
Don’t blindly believe what western outlets say.
The Hamas Can’t you see both sides are using identical arguments? Israel has also repeatedly said that their intention is to destroy Hamas, not the Palestinian people, but their actions show that that is utter bullshit of course (they even used suitcases full of cash to keep Hamas in power).
Likewise Hamas claim to only be against the Zionists in order to gain public support but their charter literally says “from the Jordan river to the sea, Palestine will be free of Jews”, and there are numerous reports of them raping and murdering innocent Israelis.
Long story short, the current government of Israel and Hamas are both terrible, and supporting either of them is supporting a group whose goal is genocide. The US government is obviously extra complicit in genocide due to continuing to sell Israel weapons, but if you didn’t already know that US foreign policy is pure evil then you haven’t been paying attention
That’s how I found out
Edit: but it’s not helpful that the one responsible is simply listed as ‘mod’
Modern Israel is not Judaism! It’s not the same theocracy described in the old testament. It’s not even religiously pure, there’s a sizeable Christian and Muslim population. It’s perfectly valid to respect Jews and and their beliefs, and to criticize Netanyahu’s government for attempting to crush Palestine and kill its civilians indiscriminately in raids. Jewish folks in the US and abroad are joining in the protests to stop the war - this isn’t about being antisemitic, this is telling a very atrocious government to stop behaving as a similarly atrocious government did 80 years ago
Even the Jewish community in Germany is against Netanjahus way of treating Palestine.
This would make more sense if Israel weren’t actively being nazis right now! Like, if they weren’t being nazis, it’d be really annoying to get called a nazi when you aren’t being a nazi, but these guys… i mean, they’re kinda just being nazis, there’s not really two ways about it. Admittedly the palestinians are hitting back harder than the jews were able to at the time, but trying to wipe people out is kinda enough to get called a nazi, and rightly so, even if they are defending themselves however poorly
Admittedly the palestinians are hitting back harder than the jews were able to at the time,
No they are not. A few Israelis killed here and there is not “harder”. Just modern weapons are different.
If the Israelis don’t want to be compared to Nazis maybe they ought to stop acting like Nazis
It would also help if more than a handful of people in the House knew semitic is a pretty archaic term and would include Palestinians in Gaza as well as Israelis and people from several other countries as well.
Protected classes are race, religion, national origin, age, pregnancy status, gender, citizenship, disability or veteran, family status or genetic information. Nobody gets protections for genocide.
Edit: genetic not generic
These people must know all this does is destroy the legitimacy of your authority. Israel is committing genocide. Its happening. Changing legal definitions will not change how many bodies are piled in Gaza. The mounds of dead children cannot be legislated into something moral.
These people must know all this does is destroy the legitimacy of your authority.
I think I know what they think - that their authority doesn’t stand on legitimacy, it stands on power. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that modern Web and mass media are better controlled by them, and modern surveillance is another world.
They don’t care about “moral”, they think we’ll just eat it and shut up.
They are fine with a few protests which won’t change the outcome.
Notice how protests in the last decade or so have become less violent, while the crimes against humanity of those governments have become more blatant.
That’s not a coincidence, it’s a strategy of controlling population bringing fruit. People more likely to lead movements are detected and neutralized without ever knowing it, maybe through connectivity, maybe through disinformation, maybe through directing their attention at wrong things, maybe through various kinds of pressure, and I’m sure in a miraculous case where these don’t work nobody will notice a sudden death here and there.
Internationalization of KGB has happened. In Soviet times that was simply a very inefficient system, so it sucked balls compared to the western ones. But now the west both gradually reduced freedoms considered normal, making such control less expensive, and also modern technologies raised its efficiency quite a lot.
Legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and IDF is being actively outlawed in the western world as governments support the brutal mass killing in Gaza.
Condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s actions in Xinjiang rings completely hollow. Western governments really are the people in glass houses throwing stones.
bro you need to chill out. I’m all for criticizing Israel but if you use a name that has a bad ring to it (for example nazi) but is defined on an entirely different era, set of crimes, and political landscape, you cannot put forward a well-reasoned argument. if people continue to get up in their feelings and stray from reality, they’ll never change anything that is based in reality
Fine fine. They aren’t Nazis. They are Ashka-Nazis
There is a world of difference between taking issue with someone making a poorly received argument and a government deciding that making that argument is inherently illegal.
Shut up nazi
everyone who upvoted this comment is a brainlet social media activist and never did anything good for Palestine 👌😂 go on and confirm by downvoting here, polls are open.
Shut up nazi
shut up idiot 😂😂 (see, got it right. all i needed to do is use a dictionary, there’s an entry for you)
Hun, your slavish devotion to optics are shackles. Worse, you’re policing your peers, prioritizing the abstract appeal of your optics to a hypothetical other over their reality anchored and literal praxis.
Kill the cop in your head, babe. We’ll be over here when you’re ready.
where’s this from?
There are governments that support Palestine, including Spain and Ireland. I guess the latter two are anti-Semite then.
