The IHRA’s definition of #antisemitism is being brought to court in the UK for being incompatible with the grounds of free speech in a modern democracy.
You are welcome to send a donation on CrowdJustice to cover the legal costs of this trial.
The IHRA definition is, by its own admission, a non-legally binding working definition.
You can’t detain people nor limit their freedom of expression on the grounds of a non-legally binding working definition.
It was first published in 2005 by the European Monitoring Centre of Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a EU agency, but the EUMC’s successor, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), removed if from its website in 2013, as it’s basically a non-official document with no legal validity.
It is a definition strongly pushed by the same Israeli far-right groups that are perpetrating a genocide in Gaza right now, and by all the Zionist think-tanks that keep casting their lobbying shadows over European and American political institutions.
It is a very problematic definition because, out of the 11 illustrative examples of antisemitism attached to it, 7 related to criticism of Israel as a country rather than prejudice against Jews.
It is so controversial that it split Jewish academics along partisan lines. Many Jewish lawyers and academics have proposed the Jerusalem Definition of Antisemitism (JDA) in response to the IHRA. They want to keep the definition of antisemitism focused on prejudice and hatred towards Jews, rather than towards an allegedly democratic political entity that, as such, should be called accountable for its actions.
Take this example of antisemitism reported in the IHRA:
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.
Notice how it squarely focuses on the right for Jews to have their own State, but deliberately omits any reference to self-determination for the indigenous Arab populations, and it omits the fact that expelling people out of their lands on the basis of their ethnicity is, objectively, a racist endeavor.
Or:
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation
Notice how it characterizes an act of political criticism towards a democratic country, no matter if legitimate or not, as an act of antisemitism.
Assume that I criticize the Italian government, and that perhaps I have expectations about its actions that are higher than those I’d expect from another democratic country. Does it mean that I’m a racist anti-Italian? Are Jewish academics who criticize the political acts of Israel and call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide also antisemitic?
Or:
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Notice how this prevents any objective historical comparison. If you establish an apartheid State and perpetrate a genocide like a Nazi, we can’t say that it’s something that a Nazi would do too - because that definition prevents you from saying that even when it’s objectively true.
In general, the IHRA definition suppresses political dissent by placing the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic.
Antony Lerman, the former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, went as far as saying that “the case against IHRA is so strong that the fundamental principle is that IHRA is so flawed it should be abandoned“.
The list of academics who openly criticized the IHRA definition is so long to deserve 5 pages on Wikipedia.
We can’t even say that the IHRA definition is bad because it doesn’t have sufficient academic consensus. It’s so bad that the academic consensus over it is actually very strong. Most of the actual academic experts in the matter consider it a piece of pseudo-legal garbage.
Yet, such a controversial, polarizing and non-legally binding definition is the one that the politicians of most of the countries in the EU and the US, often without going through a process of Parliament ratification, have formally or informally adopted.
Some of its corollaries can also be found here on the Fediverse, in the form of memes that anonymous Hasbara accounts and propaganda pages like the Movement Against Antizionism keep posting.
Those memes and those acts of harassment have a very precise political purpose.
To lobby or pressure instance admins into applying the IHRA definition in their moderation activities, hence suppressing any speech that is critical of Israel and about the most uncompromising Zionist policies.
To create a sense of de facto validity around a non-legally binding definition that academics consider a piece of extremist propaganda garbage.
Those arrested in the UK because of their pro-Palestine activism were arrested on the basis of a non-legally binding definition with no academic nor political consensus.
It is time to ditch the IHRA and call it for what it is - a sophisticated act of nationalist propaganda that actually does more harms than good to the Jews because it misses the point on actual antisemitism, while fostering grudge towards an illiberal political entity that claims to speak in their name, while conflating political criticism and objective reporting with racism and prejudice.
It is time to call the IHRA something worth of the propaganda body of a fascist regime and not of a democratic country.
It is time to acknowledge that the IHRA definition is incompatible with America’s First Amendment and with the Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and it poses unacceptable dangers to the tenure of our democratic fabric, all while providing a blanket excuse for a genocidal regime to pursue their colonial activities with impunity.
It is time to start taking this definition to courts, and make sure that there’s no space for this garbage in a civilized society.
