PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to
The Real News Network.
I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.
And welcome to this week's edition of the
Ratner Report with Michael Ratner, who now
joins us from New York City.
Michael's the president emeritus of the Center
for Constitutional Rights.
He's chair of the European Center for Constitutional
and Human Rights in Berlin.
He's a board member of The Real News.
And he joins us.
Thanks very much, Michael.
RATNER: Paul, it's good to be with you again.
JAY: So what are you--I know you're working
on a ton of things every week, but what are
you going to talk about this week?
RATNER: You know, every week, there's so much
going on, I could spend hours on your show.
But I'm going to step back for a second, although
it's really stepping forward as well.
I want to talk about Palestine and Israel,
but particularly the issue of free speech
and dissent in the United States.
And my view for a number of years has been,
with regard to issues of Palestine, with regard
to criticism of Israel in particular, there's
what I call the Palestine exception to free
speech or the Palestine exception to the First
Amendment, which is our free speech protection
in the United States.
And when I say exception, what I mean is you
can almost speak about anything in the United
States, but the one thing that you get accused
of and they try and stop you from speaking
about is critiques of Israel with regard to
the Palestinian people.
And they call people who are oftentimes critical
of Israel, they say they're engaging in anti-Jewish
or antisemitic speech.
In my experience and what I've looked at over
the last number of years, particularly at
universities where a lot of this dissent happens
and where actually over the last month we've
had anti-apartheid week with regard to Israel,
where there's actually a lot of suppression
of free speech and there's a lot of effort
to stop critiques of Israel, and it comes
off over things that are clearly not antisemitic--you
oppose the occupation--the people who support
Israel down the line say, well, that's antisemitic.
You call Israel an apartheid state--antisemitic.
Of course, it's not.
You support BDS, boycott, divestment, and
sanction--antisemitic.
And I could go on.
So the critiques people are making, particularly
university students and others, around Israel's
behavior is often, often deemed antisemitic.
And the question I've asked myself over time
is: how do we change a policy in the United
States if the people who want to push for
change in the United States can't engage in
free speech on that policy?
If we talk about John Stuart Mill and the
idea that there's a marketplace of ideas,
assuming there was any kind of equal media
out there, which there's not, that you're
trying to remedy, you at least have to get
the ideas out there.
And they're not getting out there, because
critiques of Israel are suppressed.
And CCR, my office, Center for Constitutional
Rights, noticed this over the years and has
been trying to represent people whose speech
gets suppressed, as well as teach them their
rights.
We've set up a website called PalestineLegalSupport.org.
We give information, representation, etc.,
on that website.
But let me give people a sense of what's going
out there.
They attack free speech--they being people
who want to suppress this speech, whether
they're, you know, heavy Zionists that don't
want to hear the other side, don't want to
debate the other side.
Rather than debate it, they call it antisemitic.
And they do it politically, they do it legally,
and they do it by creating a climate of fear
on the campuses for people who want to speak
out on Israel.
We just had one a few weeks ago here in New
York when there were two speakers at Brooklyn
College who were going to speak on boycott,
divestment, and sanction.
One of them really favored boycott, divestment,
and sanction; the other one, while very critical
of Israel, didn't favor it as strongly.
And there was a huge what I call political
attack on Brooklyn College for doing it.
And what actually happened is a number of
members of our city council, eight or ten
at one time, wrote a letter to Brooklyn College,
which is a public college, saying, we will
consider withdrawing your funding if you continue
to sponsor this biased, one-sided presentation.
And, of course, yes.
Did it have a pro-Zionist on there?
No, it didn't.
But this happens at universities all the time,
as we all know.
They're not required at a university to put
both sides on every issue.
And of course the person who did the most
complaining here was Alan Dershowitz from
Harvard.
He speaks all the time as a Zionist without
anybody opposing him.
When I went to college, I heard Malcolm X
speak.
They didn't put someone on the other side
with Malcolm X.
A university doesn't have to balance every
single panel.
And that was in my view just a fig leaf or
an excuse for attacking the panel.
So here you have city councilmen saying, we're
going to withdraw funding.
To his credit, our mayor, Mayor Bloomberg,
said, I support free speech at Brooklyn College.
This is not, as he said, the university of
North Korea.
That's not what this is.
This isn't a country like North Korea where
you suppress speech.
You let it happen.
And he finally--I wouldn't say put an end
to it, because it's still going on, in the
sense that people are still now angry at the
organizers, claiming that people were kicked
out of the lecture, etc., but Bloomberg at
least said the right thing on that issue.
So it just--there's a political way in which
universities get attacked, their funding gets
threatened.
That happened recently at Brooklyn College.
There's a second, legal way, and that's something
called Title 6, which most people are probably
not familiar with.
It's being used heavily at the University
of California.
It's being used by people who object to critiques
of Israel.
And Title 6 is part of our national statutes
that prohibits discrimination based on race,
color, or national origin.
It does not say anything about prohibiting
discrimination based on religion.
But of course as this thing has heated up
and the critiques of Israel have gotten stronger,
and as obviously there's been more support
for critiquing Israel in the world and particularly
the United States, the so-called Zionist lobby
is breaking apart, to a certain extent.
There's more diversity in it.
As that's increased, the Department of Education,
which is where Title 6 complaints go to, expanded
the definitions to basically say that antisemitism
could be considered an attack, I presume,
on national origin in some way or on maybe
race.
But they call it ethnicity.
And they expanded it so complaints under Title
6 could be filed.
And why they're important is that every educational
institution in this country that gets any
federal money is subject to Title 6.
So a complaint against a university, like
University of California or its constituent
colleges, is taken seriously.
It goes to the Department of Education, and
federal funding can be cut off if it's found
to be violating Title 6.
And there's been half a dozen of these complaints
filed.
And when you look at them, the complaints
are essentially complaints that are critical,
critical of Zionism.
And, in fact, in one of these cases--in two
of these cases, the Center for Constitutional
Rights has written letters to the university,
and the ACLU did it as well.
And the ACLU looked at these complaints under
Title 6, saying, this is discrimination, and
they said what is going on on these campuses
are expressive speech and conduct that expresses
opposition to the policies and actions of
the state of Israel or the ideals of Zionism
and are equivalent.
And to say they are equivalent to anti-Zionism
[sic] and hate speech is just ridiculous,
and it should not come under Title 6.
But those are going on.
And even if they're in the end found wanting,
even if the Department of Education says,
this is just free speech, this is not antisemitism,
this does not come under Title 6, what happens
is investigations ensue, and people who are
speaking out in criticism of Israel are very
intimidated, and universities begin to get
frightened, and they begin to suppress, really,
free speech because they're afraid, afraid
of these DOE complaints.
And to give you some sense of how bad it's
been going, particularly in California, but,
as I just said, in New York as well, the assembly,
state assembly in California passed a bill
a few months ago basically trying to define
antisemitism in a very broad way and saying
that this kind of conduct constitutes antisemitism
and should not be allowed.
I'm just going to read you a couple of sentences.
It's considered to be that falsely described
Israel Zionists include--and Jews, including
that Israel is a racist, apartheid, or Nazi
state.
Okay.
Israel is a racist or apartheid state.
I think--or a Nazi state.
You can say it.
It's not antisemitic.
Or you can say Israel is guilty of heinous
crimes against humanity, such as ethnic cleansing
and genocide.
Now, it seems to me that is not antisemitic.
In fact, I read a book called The Ethnic Cleansing
of Palestine that talks about the destruction
of some almost 700 villages in Palestine.
Or to say that Jews in America wield excessive
power over American foreign policy.
Now, that's a much debated issue, but there's
a lot of evidence about that.
There's professors at Harvard who've written
major books on it.
It's considered a really important issue.
And yet this resolution in California labels
that kind of discussion as antisemitic.
So there is not just the political; there's
the legal.
And then there's the third, which is there's
a climate of hostility that's created for
people who want to speak out on Israel at
these campuses.
They're criticized by their professor.
They're given--they're yelled at and given
names.
Their speech is suppressed.
What's really happened here, if you look at
the political, the legal, and the climate
that's created is that people who don't want
to hear any criticism of Israel or its practices
have actually done the exact reverse of what's
really going on.
What's really going on here is people who
speak out on Israel, people who oppose the
occupation, people who support BDS, boycott,
divestment, and sanction, people who talk
about the Zionist lobby in the United States
as being powerful, those people's speech are
being suppressed.
The people who are speaking in favor, obviously,
of Israel without any criticism, that's the
speech that's allowed, that's the speech that's
printed.
And so they've basically turned this upside
down.
And it's--the reason that we at the Center
founded this project, the Palestine legal
support project: because we think that free
speech, particularly around contentious issues
like Israel and Palestine, is an absolute
necessity in this country.
JAY: Right.
Well, the, you know, Zionist lobby has been
able to create this idea that somehow criticizing
Israel, the Jewish state, is equivalent to
wanting genocide against Jews.
They don't quite say it, but they treat these
debates as if it's a debate whether to have
genocide or not, which of course it's not.
But that's the level it's treated at, because
I suppose if you were going to have that kind
of debate, that would be hate speech, and
one could imagine closing that kind of a debate
down, I suppose, should we have genocide or
not.
But nobody's saying those things.
But let me just go come at this from another
direction.
While I would say the vast majority of criticism
of Israel is not antisemitism, some is.
I know from our stories--we do stories about
Israel which have been very, very critical
of Israeli policy.
We get comments, especially on our YouTube
site, some of which are just virulently racist
comments, just anti-Jewish, racist comment.
In fact, some of the stories that have nothing
to do with Israel, many of our economic stories
are permeated with many, many of these comments
that are just filled with hatred of Jews and
not really critique of Israel as much.
So I think it's important to recognize that
some of this critique of Israel actually is
driven by racism.
RATNER: Obviously, if you see that kind of
stuff, that's one thing.
But what I've come at and where we've seen
over the years is what we see as really solid
criticisms of Israel or its occupation or
BDS or its human rights record, that's not
antisemitic; that's critique.
And what people have done is because there
may be a few people out there with virulent
antisemitism--just are there people with virulent
anti-Muslim, in particular, is the other area
where you see that--that does not mean you
suppress speech altogether.
And so my problem is is what's happened is
the Zionists have really equated criticism
of Israel with antisemitism.
And that's just not right.
It's not fair.
And it's really suppressing an important,
really important conversation that has to
happen in this country.
Of course there's antisemitism.
As I said, there's antisemites, there's anti-Muslims,
and anti-Christians.
There's people who hate atheists.
And they're out there, and they're virulent.
And of course there's a special history, of
course, with Jews and antisemitism because
of the Holocaust.
And so people are obviously very, very sensitive
to that, as they should be.
But to say that you can't do critiques of
Israel because of what happened to Jews during
the Holocaust seems to me completely unreasonable
and cuts off, really, as I said, a crucial
debate that's going to be necessary to actually
get U.S. policy on track with what's required
by law and human rights.
JAY: Alright.
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
RATNER: Good to be with you again, Paul.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real
News Network.
