Abolishing the First Amendment

Those who testified at the state capital against New Jersey’s adoption of the IHRA, arguing that it would criminalize free speech, had our microphones muted and were shouted down, proving our point.

By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report / ScheerPost / July 29, 2025

I testified at the New Jersey state capital in Trenton last week against Bill A3558, which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Chis Hedges testimony is included in the video below. Links are also included in the text.

“This is a dangerous assault on free speech by seeking to criminalize legitimate criticism of Israeli policies,” I said. “The Trump administration’s campaign to ostensibly root out antisemitism on college campuses is clearly a trope to shut down free speech and deport non-citizens, even if they are here legally. This bill falsely conflates ethnicity with a political state. And let’s be clear, the brunt of repression on college campuses is directed against students and faculty who oppose the genocide in Gaza, 3,000 of whom were arrested and hundreds of whom were censored, suspended or expelled. Many of these students are Jewish. What about their rights? What about their constitutional protections?”

“I have had numerous relationships with Israeli journalists and political leaders,” I went on. “I knew, for example, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who negotiated the Oslo peace agreement. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist who opposed the peace accord. Rabin stated bluntly on numerous occasions that the occupation was harmful to Israel. Israeli colleagues frequently criticize Israeli policies in the Israeli press in language that would be defined as antisemitic by this bill.”

“For example,” I continued, “the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who served in the Israeli army and writes for the newspaper Haaretz, has called for sanctions to be imposed on Israel to stop the slaughter in Gaza, saying ‘Do to Israel what you did to South Africa.’”

“Omer Bartov, who served as an Israeli company commander in the 1973 war, is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University,” I said. “He stated in an article on July 15 in The New York Times that his ‘inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.’”

“These kinds of statements, and many more I can quote from Israeli colleagues and friends, would see them under this bill criminalized as antisemites,” I added.

Committee chairman Robert Karabinchak, a Democrat, muted my microphone, banged his hammer for me to stop and allowed gaggles of Zionists, who openly harassed and insulted Muslims in the room, to jeer and shout me down.

There I was arguing that this bill would curtail my free speech, at the same time I was being denied free speech.

You can see my full testimony here.

This cognitive dissonance defines the United States and Israel.

The committee chairman also muted Raz Segal, the Israeli historian and genocide scholar and, in an especially callous move, chastised Mehdi Rabee, whose 14-year-old brother Amer was killed by Israeli soldiers in April 2025.

“My 14-year-old brother who was from Saddlebrook, New Jersey, was murdered by the IDF,” Mehdi, his voice shaking with emotion, told the committee. “All he was doing was picking olives from an olive tree with his friends, which we have been doing as Palestinians for thousands of years. My brother, whom I will never see again, my brother who my parents will never watch graduate from high school or college. Assemblywoman Swain, my father and the Palestinian-American Community Center tried reaching out to you over and over. And all that we were met with was nothing but silence. Given your silence, you should not have the right to even consider voting for this bill until you meet with my family, who are under your district.”

“I am going to ask you to stick to the bill,” Karabinchak interrupted.

“This bill puts at risk my First Amendment right to criticize Israel for what they have done to my brother,” he went on. “I have a right to call Israel whatever I want to call it. When their policies mirror that of the Nazis, I have a right to call it as it is. I call on you to vote no in remembrance of my brother.”

You can see Mehdi’s statement here.

Karabinchak, angered that supporters gave Rabee a standing ovation, reduced all testimonies critical of the bill from three minutes to one minute.

“Time is down to one minute,” he told the crowd of about 400 in the committee and four overflow rooms. “I’m going to ask everybody now to speak, who wants to speak, is going to say ‘I oppose the bill’ or ‘I support the bill.’”

He paused.

“Let’s have some more claps,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Let’s be happy now, right? I didn’t throw you out like I said I was going to. So now you just stifled the other people who have a right to speak. That’s what you just did! Understand what you did! Okay? One minute. One minute. That’s it. And I’m not going to be nice and say let’s rap it up. I’m going to shut the mic off. ”

Our sin was that we dared to mention the unmentionable – the genocide in Gaza.

The Zionists in the room were verbally and physically abusive to the Muslims who had come to oppose the bill. One Zionist repeatedly shoved himself into the bodies of those outside the state capital holding a rally against the bill.

You can see his harassment here.

Amy Gallatin, who is on the commission of the West Orange Human Relations Commission, “established by municipal ordinance in 1992 in order to create and foster values of diversity, equity and inclusion among groups in the community,” pulled up pictures on her iPad in one of the overflow rooms and said to those seated around her “Look, its Mohammed!”

You can see her Islamophobic hate speech here.

When Rabbi Yitzchok Deutsch made an emotional plea to save the people of Gaza Lisa Swain of District 38 and Assemblyman Avi Schnall of District 30, both Democrats, snickered and laughed as he spoke.

You can see their reactions to Rabbi Deutsch here.

Zionists, who painted lurid pictures of Jews living under harassment and in fear for their lives, and of Nazism supposedly running amok on the streets of New Jersey, were not muted, although their statements were hyperbolic to the extreme and often a product of over-active imaginations. They openly salivated at the adoption of the bill, which they said would give law enforcement the tools to criminalize those who engage in hate speech, which, if you read the “contemporary examples of antisemitism,” that accompany the IHRA, include speech that criticizes Israeli policies.

The IHRA has been adopted by 35 states, the District of Columbia and universities such as Harvard and Columbia.

“The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes protected criticism of Israel and its policies,” writes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “For example, the definition declares that ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,’ ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,’ and ‘applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’ are all examples of antisemitism.”

“If the Department of Education were to adopt this definition, and investigate universities for Title VI complaints based on it, college and university administrators would likely silence a range of protected speech including criticism of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, analogies likening Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany, or sharing differing beliefs about the right to a Jewish state,” the ACLU continues. “People may disagree about whether such speech is antisemitic, but that debate is irrelevant to the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from censoring or penalizing core political speech.”

U.S. attorney Kenneth S. Stern — a self-professed Zionist and the lead drafter of what became the IHRA definition of antisemitism — laments that the IHRA has been “grossly abused” to “restrict academic freedom and punish political speech,” including “pro-Palestinian speech.”

The five committee members, who had clearly made up their minds before they entered the packed hearing room, unanimously passed the measure, which will go to the floor of the State Assembly for a vote. They will, like all politicians who bow before the dictates of the Israel lobby, no doubt, be compensated for their perfidy.

America, like Israel, exists in a parallel reality. It denies the stark and incontrovertible reality of the live-streamed genocide. It slanders anyone, including Israeli holocaust scholars such as Professor Segal, as antisemites.

I know, sadly, where this goes. I witnessed it in the many dictatorships I covered as a foreign correspondent for two decades in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Those of us who fight for an open society are silenced, attacked as traitors and criminals. We are blacklisted, censored and at times, locked up. If we can escape in time, we are forced into exile. As we are silenced, the sycophants, grifters, Christian fascists, billionaires, Zionists and thugs, elevated to the highest positions in the federal government by the Trump White House, are rewarded with absolute power, luxury and debauchery.

Our corporate-indentured ruling class has no genuine political ideology. Political parties are a farce, a species of entertainment to beguile the population in our pretend democracy. Liberalism, and the values it claims to represent, is a spent and bankrupt force.

The burlesque in the committee room in Trenton was another depressing reminder that there is little now that will halt our path towards an authoritarian state, not the press, not the universities, not the courts, which cannot enforce the few rulings made by courageous judges, not the political class, including the Democratic Party, and not the electoral process.

We must resist, if only to assert our integrity and dignity, if only to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, if only to slow the consolidation of tyranny, if only to revel in the small pyrrhic victories that resistance alone makes possible.

But we should not be fooled.