A Council on American-Islamic Relations (Los Angeles) press release reads:
The Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) today called on local and national law enforcement authorities to treat an arson attack on a pro-Palestinian university display as a possible hate crime.
University of California-Irvine (UCI) students reported to CAIR-LA that the display challenging the wall Israel is building on Palestinian land was torched late Thursday or early Friday morning. The display, made of cardboard boxes and built by the Society of Arab Students (SAS), was a replica of Israel’s new wall.
Display sponsors say the symbolic wall was built to demonstrate the negative impact Israel’s barrier has on the daily live of Palestinians and on prospects for peace in the Middle East. The display was one of a number of activities during a Palestine awareness week organized by the Muslim Student Union (MSU).
“Because of the ethnic and religious nature of the display and its sponsors, we urge campus police and the FBI to investigate this attack as a possible hate crime,” said CAIR-LA Public Relations Director Ra’id Faraj. “Muslim and Arab students should feel safe in exercising their First Amendment rights, free of intimidation or harassment.” . . .
Now, let me say, first, that destroying speech that you disagree with — whether it’s a display that criticizes Israeli policy, or campus newspapers put out by conservative groups — is wrong, and the legal system should certainly punish the people who did it. And second, I continue to oppose hate crimes laws generally. Though there are plausible arguments why attacks motivated by the victim’s race, religion, and the like are more harmful than physically similar attacks that are motivated by other factors, I think that on balance attempts to treat these motives differently do more harm than good.
But setting this aside, note the logic of the CAIR release: Hostility to political arguments that benefit Palestinians, and that defend Palestinian claims, is, in CAIR’s view, racial and religious bigotry. When such hostility leads to physical attacks, that makes it a hate crime. Presumably when the hostility leads to verbal criticism, that would still (even in CAIR’s view) be constitutionally protected speech, but it would still be racial and religious bigotry.
If that’s so, then under CAIR’s own reasoning, anti-Zionism would indeed be anti-Semitism. After all, one would say, “Because of the ethnic and religious nature of [pro-Zionist speech] and its sponsors,” strident criticisms of such speech should be treated as bigoted speech (or, if they lead to physical attacks, as hate crimes). “[Religiously Jewish] and [ethnically Jewish] students should feel safe in exercising their First Amendment rights, free of intimidation or harassment.”
Now I actually don’t think that anti-Zionism, in the sense even of argument that Israel ought not exist, or that Israel ought not have been created (a somewhat separate question), is inherently anti-Semitism. But I also don’t think that hostility to Palestinian opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian wall is inherently bigoted against Muslims or Palestinians.
CAIR, though, thinks that enmity towards one side in the Israeli-Palestinian debate is indeed religiously and ethnically bigoted. It seems that under their logic, enmity towards the other side is bigoted as well.
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