The US House of Representatives is trying to pass a resolution making the term “Free Palestine” an official antisemitic slogan.
Republican Representative Gabe Evans from Colorado introduced the resolution in the wake of the attack on a gathering for Israeli hostages in Boulder this week. Mohammed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, has been charged for the attack, during which he yelled “Free Palestine”, according to the FBI.
“Whereas, while shouting ‘Free Palestine,’ an antisemitic slogan that calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and Jewish people, Mohammed Sabry Soliman attacked the peaceful demonstrators with home-made Molotov cocktails,” the resolution reads. House Republicans are expected to vote on the non-binding resolution next week. The term “free Palestine” has been a touchy subject among liberal and conservative Zionists alike, as they have long deemed even saying it to be antisemitic hate speech against Jews rather than an acknowledgment of the decades of displacement, destruction, death, and apartheid that Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israeli Government.
This right-wing attack on free speech clearly demonstrates the hypocrisy of these “anti-woke” Republicans who love to wax poetic about the land of the free while kidnapping students off the streets for writing op-eds.
Now this resolution seeks to further entrench the flawed logic that the Jewish religion and culture and the Israeli government that has been starving and bombing Palestinians are one and the same. Anyone who votes against this bill in an attempt to protect free speech will be labelled a terrorist sympathiser.
– The New Republic
