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Remember the Satanic Verses controversy? Remember “Je suis Charlie”? Remember the constant invocations of Voltaire and Orwell? The great irony of our age is that many of the cadre of politicians who spent years anointing themselves as champions of free speech have become its most enthusiastic enemies when the subject turns to one issue: Palestine.
For decades, western governments lectured the world about liberal values. They declared freedom of expression the hallmark of a liberal democratic society. Protest was deemed patriotic while the right to offend was considered sacred. Then came Gaza. Suddenly, the principles that we were once told were non-negotiable became highly negotiable indeed.
In Britain, where I was born and raised, the government proscribed the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – with the shameful support of 385 votes in parliament from across the political spectrum. We have since witnessed priests and elderly and disabled people grabbed by the police for holding signs that simply said, “I oppose genocide; I support Palestine Action”. Their real crime was daring to speak out against a UK-enabled genocide.
Last week, the British state took another extraordinary step in its campaign of repression against pro-Palestine figures, blocking US commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from entering the UK. The Home Office did not explain its reasoning, simply saying their presence in the UK was not “conducive to the public good”. The Guardian reported that it was “understood that both men have been blocked because of concerns that they could exacerbate antisemitism”.
The actions are opaque, the message unmistakable: there are political causes the British establishment welcomes but also political causes it very much fears.
This isn’t even about Uygur or Piker’s views. Whether one agrees with everything either man has ever said is irrelevant. Piker, for example, referred to some Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and once said the US “deserved” 9/11, both offensive comments for which he has since expressed regret. Defending free speech is most crucial when that speech is controversial. You cannot show your support for free expression only by defending opinions you already share.
In the US, where I now live and vote, the situation is even more alarming.
The Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian voices and, in particular, foreign students should be seen as one of the most severe assaults on free expression in modern American history. Don’t take my word for it. Even a rightwing, Ronald Reagan-appointed judge denounced the crackdown on student protesters as a “full-throated assault on the first amendment across the board under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of antisemitism”.
Foreign students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk have found themselves investigated, arrested and detained, not for acts of violence but for their speech. What was Öztürk’s “crime”? Co-authoring an op-ed in her student newspaper calling for Tufts University to divest from companies connected to Israel.
This assault on free speech is not confined to non-citizens. On Wednesday, Republican congressman Randy Fine said Piker, a US citizen by birth, “shouldn’t be allowed into America” and called him a “terrorist”.
Congress, meanwhile, keeps proposing and passing resolutions designed to stifle criticism of Israel. At the state level, laws opposing the boycott of Israel are spreading fast. Universities have come under massive pressure from politicians, donors and lobbying groups to punish pro-Palestine protesters. Careers have been destroyed. Events have been cancelled. Speakers have been disinvited. Academics have been targeted. Journalists have been smeared.
How can any of this be justified in a democracy? No foreign government should be granted immunity from criticism. Not China. Not Saudi Arabia. Not Israel.
And yet the self-proclaimed Jewish state occupies a uniquely and weirdly protected place in our political discourse. Criticism that would be considered routine in any other context – don’t bomb hospitals! Don’t kill kids! – is cynically rebranded as anti-Jewish bigotry.
To be clear, this goes far beyond mere censorship. It is an open and ongoing assault on liberal democracy itself. Because a society that cannot honestly debate government policy – be it domestic or foreign – cannot meaningfully govern itself. A society that punishes dissent on one issue only emboldens those authoritarians who want to crack down on every issue. The speech restrictions justified against one group are always, inevitably, ultimately, applied to other groups.
Some of my liberal friends have urged the rest of us on the left to stop obsessing over distant foreign wars, stop lambasting the Democratic and Labour parties for their (clear) complicity in war crimes. They want us to focus instead on the very real threat from rising authoritarianism in the US and the UK. But the opposition to the destruction of Gaza – and now also Iran and Lebanon – cannot be separated from the defence of our democratic freedoms at home. They are part and parcel of the same struggle.
A genocide abroad is helping usher in fascism at home. Poll after poll shows the UK and US publics have switched their support from the Israelis to the Palestinians. And the response from the pro-Israel people in power, having seen that they cannot win the argument on Palestine, is to now prevent the argument from happening.
The question confronting Britain and the US, therefore, is no longer whether free speech is under attack. The evidence is in front of our eyes. The question now is whether citizens of these two great democracies, both of which I call home, will continue to tolerate the erosion of liberties that previous generations – from the Levellers and the Chartists in the UK to the abolitionists and the civil rights movement in the US – fought so hard to secure.
Because once we give our governments the power to decide which political opinions are acceptable, why on earth would you assume that they will stop at Palestine?
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Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo
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The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
At 7.30pm BST on Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi at a joint Zeteo/Guardian event to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Only livestream tickets are now available.
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