By John Mirisch, JNS
While the organization fights to protect immigrant rights, it is also fighting against protections for Jews during a time of unprecedented antisemitism.
When the Beverly Hills City Council recently voted to join a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Southern California, I was the lone dissenting vote.
During the council meeting, I made it clear that the main source of my opposition and reason for my “no” was that joining any American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit is wrong as a matter of principle.
I underscored my argument by reading a Zachor Legal Institute article, “The ACLU’s Antisemitism Problem,” by the group’s co-founder Marc Greendorfer. Yet, I was relentlessly heckled and harassed by a number of audience members. If I understood their outbursts correctly, they were contending that since they are Jewish, their support for the antisemitic ACLU could not itself ever be antisemitic.
And just as you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Jewish Rye bread, as an old advertisement once said, neither do you have to be non-Jewish to be antisemitic or support antisemites. Sadly, it happens all the time.
The ACLU had an antisemitism problem when Greendorfer wrote his article in 2021 and still has one today. The organization’s weaponization of selective free speech and civil rights has even gotten worse.
As a recent X post points out, the ACLU launched a promo campaign featuring Mahmoud Khalil, who led illegal and disruptive building takeovers at Columbia University, where protesters vandalized a building with swastikas and called building janitors “Jew-lovers,” and who the Trump administration was trying to deport. Yet as the X post also noted, the ACLU refused to stand up for Jewish and pro-Israel students and professors.
With apologies to author Gore Vidal, the ACLU has given hypocrisy a bad name.
Beyond hypocrisy, the ACLU is now an active agent of discrimination. It has made it clear that while it is willing to take a leading role to defend the rights of immigrants against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, it opposes protections for Jews and Jewish students against various forms of anti-Jewish racism.
The ACLU has consistently opposed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which, as the first city in the nation, Beverly Hills adopted and implemented in 2020 when I was mayor. Like other disingenuous opponents of IHRA, the ACLU continually makes the false claim that the IHRA “bans criticism of the Israeli government and Israel.”
It's simply not true.
As self-styled First Amendment experts, the ACLU must understand that (nonviolent) hate speech is protected by the Constitution. In other words, the ACLU and its supporters can continue to vilify Israel and hate on Jews to their heart’s content.
But there are no constitutional protections against being called out as racist when one spews racist drivel, including repeating blood libels in various forms. Essentially, the ACLU wants to shield Jew-hating racists from having to deal with any consequences of potentially being outed as antisemites under the IHRA definition.
According to the ACLU, “the IHRA chills speech,” as if the consequences of spouting racism shouldn’t cause people to think twice, as if there aren’t some forms of speech that should undergo the “chilling” of a little self-reflection.
What the unmannered hecklers at the Beverly Hills council meeting may not have known is that the organization, which has politicized and weaponized free speech and civil rights to the exclusion of Jews, is not their grandparents’ ACLU.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called out the ACLU on numerous occasions, including describing an ACLU tweet as “antisemitism at its most nefarious.”
ICAN, the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, for which I serve as chief policy officer, has described the ACLU as part of an “axis of antisemitism.”
Not surprisingly, the ACLU is currently opposing a California bill authored by state assemblymember Rich Chavez Zbur (D-51st District) to protect Jewish students from antisemitic ethnic-studies curricula. AB 715, which is described on the state’s website as “Educational equity: discrimination: antisemitism prevention,” is unanimously supported by the Beverly Hills City Council. The bill passed the state assembly unanimously and is now on the state senate side.
While the ACLU is fighting to protect immigrant rights, they are also fighting against protections for Jews at a time when Jews in America and worldwide are experiencing an almost unprecedented level of virulent and dangerous hatred—a form of racism that has led to the firebombing of Jewish institutions and even people, let alone outright murder.
We see who the ACLU stands with, and I don’t ever want to stand next to them, even if a broken, racist clock is right twice a day. We don’t need the ACLU’s broken, bigoted and exclusionary vision of civil rights for Beverly Hills to independently pursue justice and the enforcement of constitutional protections for our residents and neighbors.
While it is hoped that the ACLU will one day revert to the unbiased, content-neutral, free speech absolutism that characterized it in its heyday, for now, it continues to contribute to the spread of the world’s oldest extant form of racism: the pathological disease of Jew-hatred.
And as long as it continues down this dangerous path, the ACLU must be called out.
