 Founder of current affairs magazine Nathan J. Robinson recently put out a tweet where he was joking about the US government's aid to Israel And he wrote did you know that the US Congress is not actually permitted to authorize any new spending unless a portion of it is directed toward buying Weapons for Israel. It's the law or if not actually the written law Then so ingrained in political custom as to functionally be Indistinguishable from law So I think it's pretty obvious that he's making a joke, but joke or not What are you saying here is pretty accurate? I think that it's valid for US citizens to question the aid that they're giving to foreign governments So if we can question Whether or not we should be giving Saudi Arabia Money and weapons that they use to commit genocide in Yemen Then of course we should be able to question the aid that we give to an apartheid regime That is suppressing Palestinians and brutalizing Palestinians denying them human rights However, even though Nathan J. Robinson is a columnist at the magazine that he founded He also writes for the Guardian However, after putting out this tweet He received a letter from the editor-in-chief of the Guardian saying this Nathan Hi there as you partly present yourself as a Guardian columnist allow me to express my concern when you make an assertion such as this No such law exists in which this is as one might say Fake news irrespective of the later tweet when you say that it is indistinguishable from law It's not law end of Given the reckless talk over the past year and beyond of how mythical Jewish groups and alliances yield power over all forms of US Public life, I'm not clear how this is helpful to public discourse And I am not sure why singling out financial aid to Israel in a tweet and devoid of any context and without mention of aid To other countries either currently or historically is a useful addition to public discourse You are free of course to use Twitter in whatever way you choose But it dismayed me that someone who presents themselves as a guardian colonist would make such a clearly erroneous statement without as I note any Context or justification now Nathan responded by apologizing and it seemed as if everything was okay some time passed and then Nathan learned that he was fired He was literally fired Because he put out a tweet where he criticized the Israeli government now I do think it is important for us to combat anti-semitic tropes, right? The Jewish cabal trope is extremely harmful, and it does increase anti-semitism But what Nathan is doing here is he is critiquing the Israeli government? Critiquing a group of people is not the same thing as critiquing a government It is completely legitimate for us to call into question the actions of government because if we can't do that then They can get away with anything imagine if it was racist to criticize an African country Imagine if it were racist to criticize Saudi Arabia. You're Islamophobic. I Mean, do you understand why this is problematic and nonsensical? So this is very clearly a way to suppress criticism of Israel That's all it is and Nathan J. Robinson wrote about this because this actually is a real issue of censorship And it's not just Nathan J. Robinson. Who's the victim of this censorship? Mark Lamont Hill was fired from CNN in 2018 for criticizing the Israeli government and standing up for Palestinian rights He wrote yesterday. I gave a speech at the UN in which I critiqued Israel's policies and practices Towards Palestinians. It's baffling how people are not responding to the critique, but instead responding to things I didn't actually say and what he's referring to is the accusations lobbed against him that he's anti-semitic So in other words What's happening is any and all criticisms of the Israeli government its practices its treatment of other citizens That's conflated with anti-semitism and this is very clearly a brazen attempt to shut down criticism when it comes to The Israeli government now. What's interesting is that all of the free speech warriors on the right they never talk about this ever They'd rather use some superficial, you know Anecdote related to cancel culture of some leftist being too politically correct and trying to tone police someone rather than calling out a real threat To freedom of speech and it's not a threat to freedom of speech in the sense that Nathan J. Robinson's first amendment right was violated However, he's going to write about how this is bigger than just the Guardian now It's enshrined in laws across the country where you cannot criticize Israel and people are losing their jobs because of it This happened with a school teacher in Texas not too long ago now in a column about this Nathan J. Robinson writes It is widely recognized that critics of Israel no matter how well-founded the criticism are routinely punished by both public and private Institutions for their speech the American Civil Liberties Union has documented a pattern by which those who seek to protest Boycott or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced a trend that manifests on college campuses in state contracts And even in bills to change federal criminal law and suppresses the speech of people on only one side of the Israel Palestine Debate the Center for Constitutional Rights has shown that Israel advocacy organizations universities government actors and other institutions have targeted pro-Palestinian activists with a number of tactics including event cancellations baseless legal complaints administrative disciplinary actions firings and false and inflammatory accusations of terrorism and Antisemitism and concludes that there is a Palestine exception to free speech the effort to keep critics of Israel quiet sometimes takes the form of Explicit government action. There is an open campaign to criminalize speech critical of Israel And some states even require oaths from government employees Promising to not boycott Israel But as Israeli journalist giddy and levy notes in the Middle East I it often comes in the form of baseless and offensive Accusations that criticisms of Israel are definitionally Antisemitic in the United States academic critics of Israel have had job offers rescinded or been otherwise kept from teaching and CNN fired academic Mark Lamont Hill over his call for a free Palestine in Britain There has been a years-long absurd campaign to tar former labor leader and critic of the Israeli government policy Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite human rights watch notes that the United States government has wielded unfounded accusations of Antisemitism against it and against other human rights groups like amnesty and oxfam that have exposed Israel's shoddy human rights record Within Israel itself the free speech rights of Palestinians are brutally suppressed and even Jews supportive of Palestinian rights are regularly harassed by the state A beer on the horror of open democracy wrote last year about how major mainstream news media outlets are Sensitized against any reference to Palestinian rights or international law and any criticism of Israel or its policies I have noticed that a lot of people who are ostensibly pro-free speech have little to say when critics of Israel are met with Professional consequences still my case is a relatively trivial one and focus should remain on the Palestinians Who have been massacred and named by Israeli military aggression the lives of these Palestinians mean? Absolutely nothing to those who voice more outrage over my tweet than over the actual uses of weapon systems We are buying Israel the real problem with censoring critics of Israel is that it makes it easier for that country's government to keep murdering protesters and maintaining a blockade that the United Nations says denies basic human rights in Contravention of international law and amounts to collective punishment in 2018 hundreds of Palestinians including children and medics were shot By Israeli snipers at the Great March of return protests according to the Middle East monitor on just one day the 14th of May The Israeli army shot and killed seven children and over 1,000 demonstrators were shot with a live ammunition But Israel has never been held to account and the United States continued to supply it with arms So everything that Nathan J. Robinson says here is a hundred percent correct and he goes a little bit deeper He explains how our government is giving Israel more aid than other countries and why this really is a serious issue Why it is valid to question what our government does in response to regimes that are doing harm to others? Like it shouldn't be controversial to criticize the actions of a government If I criticized the American government and any time I brought up something. I don't like I'm deemed anti-American Doesn't that just shut down dissent? Isn't that a very obvious attempt to silence my criticism? It's just this is obvious, right? This is obvious. This is the political correctness. This is the censorship This is the cancel culture that Republicans have been warning everyone about except they don't talk about things like this real Issues related to censorship. They'd rather focus on superficial issues Where somebody in the huff post wrote a column about how like you shouldn't do your hair a certain way or Somebody said something bad a couple of years ago like this is the issue that Serious people who care about free speech are going to actually look into They're gonna advocate for people like Mark Lamont Hill and Nathan J. Robinson and teachers who have lost their jobs But they never do that because these people are frauds So to all of the Dave Rubens of the world the Steven Crowders of the world the Ben Shapiro's of the world The Tim pools of the world ask yourself this why is it that they never talk about this issue? They seem ostensibly concerned with freedom of speech issues related to censorship and the First Amendment But they only seem to care as it pertains to them So if they were demonetized or one of their friends was banned from Twitter That is something that we should all care about but an actual issue that threatens freedom of speech in the United States Something that has led to censorship and firings what I'm told it's cancel culture. Why don't they talk about this? Why aren't they addressing this? It's almost like they don't actually care and they only bring up issues related to censorship when it's convenient for them This is a serious issue This is the hill that leftists should die on if we're genuinely concerned About freedom of speech because nine times out of ten It is not Republicans who are the victims of freedom of speech Contrary to what folks like Ted Cruz or Diamond and Silk will say it's actually leftists it is actually leftists and I think that the fact that Conservatives have basically monopolized discourse with regard to Censorship and freedom of speech. That's a failure on our part as leftists so we need to use examples like this and Call out the folks who purport to support freedom of speech and be against censorship Make up talk about this ask them why they're not talking about this And if they don't want to talk about this then that tells you that they're not consistent and that they're frauds