No non-Jewish person my age has a longer or clearer record of support for Israel, sympathy with the Jewish people, or opposition to antisemitism than I do. I regularly refer to antisemitism as a "lie from the pit of Hell," because it is. But I have to disagree with Amb. Friedman here.
The First Amendment and our strict freedom of speech is one of America's greatest rights and sets us apart from every other country in the world. One of the central promises of Trump's 2024 campaign was to restore and protect American freedom of speech.
Five years ago, our elites tried to destroy free speech in America in order to stop "racism." Immediately and predictably, stopping "racism" became a justification for wrecking our cities and wrecking the lives of people who did nothing wrong. Simultaneously, in the name of stopping "transphobia," they tried to make it impossible to dissent against the mutilation of children or radical gender propaganda in schools.
The criminal witch hunts against President Trump by Fanni Willis and Jack Smith both tried to criminalize President Trump's speech, indicting him for making tweets or delivering speeches.
Racism and antisemitism are both evil and must be opposed. But a government organized around jailing, impoverishing, or silencing people based on "racism" is what our enemies wanted. We should not repeat their mistakes just because some keffiyeh-wearing communists are protesting on campuses.
If you don't like a person's opinion that doesn't mean they are an antisemite. But once "antisemitism" becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as antisemitic — the same way the left labeled all kinds of statements as "racist" to justify silencing their opposition.
Not only that, but all of this won't even work: A legal crackdown won't make antisemitism go away. In the long run, it would make it worse!
America's free speech tradition is our birthright. We should never get rid of it.