Addressing False Claims about Our Work

A response to the charge that we've been "silent" on free speech issues related to Israel-Palestine — and a tour through the published record the critics overlooked.

At The Future of Free Speech, we welcome robust debate, open dialogue, and good-faith criticism. Our commitment to defending free speech on principle, rather than partisan or ideological agendas, means we take it seriously when someone calls us out for falling short on consistency.

So we were puzzled by a recent essay by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Rumy Hasan that argues that we are not principled defenders because we have been “silent” on important free speech issues.

But their argument rests on several false and misleading claims that overlook a substantial record of our published work on the very issues the essay says we have ignored. In the spirit of open discussion, we believe it is worth addressing these claims and setting the record straight.

False Claim #1: We never wrote about Europe’s ban on Russian media after the Ukraine War.

A quick Google search would have found a piece by Jacob Mchangama from early March 2022, when Europe was considering a proposal to ban Russian media outlets called “Banning RT is a Soviet — not western — tactic.” After the ban was enacted later in March, he wrote about the ban in The Daily Beast in an article titled “The Problem With Banning Russian Disinformation.”

In an August 2022 TIME magazine article called “In A War of Ideas, Banning Russian Propaganda Does More Harm Than Good,” Jacob argues, “when modern democracies censor, they provide legitimacy to censorship by authoritarian regimes,” noting that Russia used the ban to cut access to Western media.

We have since written about the ban in a negative light, for instance, in a 2024 article about why fighting misinformation or disinformation with censorship is the wrong approach. Jacob wrote, “legitimate concerns about disinformation from hostile states have incentivized democratic governments to adopt illiberal regulations, which weaken the very values they are supposed to protect.”

False Claim #2: We have remained silent on “stripping away US residents’ legal status and threatening to deport them and revoking foreign students’ visas.”

Again, we have written about this issue on numerous occasions in outlets that would have been easily accessible to the authors.

In an April 2025 piece published on The Bedrock Principle called “The Deportation of Dissent,” Jacob and FoFS research assistant Hirad Marami writes about the screening of immigrants’ social media by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the detention of visa and green card holders, the arrest of a Turkish student at Tufts University, and the arrest of a Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil.

After going through several historical examples of why policies like this undermine liberal democracies, they conclude, “societies that welcome dissenting outsiders tend to flourish — intellectually, culturally, and politically. Those that silence them in the name of vague security grounds or ideological purity often decay.”

A few weeks later, Jacob followed up with an essay in The Dispatch called “A New McCarthyism.” He again chronicles attacks on the free speech rights of legal residents by the current administration. Jacob, a green card holder from Denmark, concludes:

As a European who owes my freedom in life thus far to the America that fought Nazism and defeated communism, I feel a responsibility to speak out when this country strays from its founding ideals. I came to America for its freedom, not just to enjoy it, but to defend it — even if that puts me at risk.

In a Tweet thread from June 2025, Jacob again chronicled the attacks on immigrants’ speech and noted how many of the administration’s actions were being overturned in the courts on First Amendment grounds.

In October 2025, Jacob appeared in a mini-documentary produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression about how the Trump administration was deporting and revoking the visas of students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.

We can forgive the authors for not having the opportunity to read the newly released book by Jacob and Jeff Kosseff, but if they had, they would find that it documents, in detail, “the screening of immigrants’ social media,” arrests and visa revocations targeting students for pro-Palestinian advocacy, and the “wave of self-censorship among noncitizens, particularly students and university faculty” that followed.

The book also traces the origins of these pressures to congressional hearings in late 2023, when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania were questioned about campus speech on Israel.

We have also recently written about how the Department of Homeland Security has weaponized administrative subpoenas to go after online critics of immigration enforcement.

False Claim #3: We have not challenged the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

Campus free speech is not one of our primary issue areas. Even still, in the paperback version of Jacob’s first book, which was released in March 2025 with a new epilogue, Jacob wrote about how the “response to the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel was anything but principled.” He wrote, specifically citing the IHRA definition:

“[I]n March 2024, Governor Abbott issued a sweeping executive order requiring public colleges to punish antisemitic rhetoric, using a broad definition of “antisemitism” from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Under this framework, criticism of the state of Israel’s policies is considered antisemitic and would be prohibited. Even the expert who drafted the definition cautioned against using it in legally binding rules, warning that such rules would ‘chill speech.’ This didn’t deter US House Republicans from passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act, mandating that colleges adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism or risk losing federal funding.

We have also made multiple explicit arguments in other places opposing the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act in the United States, which incorporates an IHRA-style definition into federal law and would sweep in substantial criticism of Israel as actionable discrimination in education.

In their new book, Jacob and Jeff write about how the U.S. House of Representatives ultimately passed the Act and how the IHRA contained a “vague definition of anti-Semitism.” They note how free-speech groups like FIRE rightly warned that the law would “leave students and faculty unsure about expressing statements and opinions that could get them into trouble, causing many to stay silent rather than risk investigation and discipline.”

Our position — consistent with FIRE, PEN America, and the ACLU — is that the First Amendment must protect political speech about Israel, Zionism, and Palestine, including speech that many Americans find offensive or wrong.

False Claim #4: We ignored calls to “end [our] silence over the egregious repression of free speech for those protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza—with mass arrests on both sides of the Atlantic.”

As a global free speech organization, our focus is not just on the United States. Much of our writing has been about the significant crackdown on criticism of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism in both Europe and Australia.

In the new epilogue of Jacob’s first book, he writes about how France and Germany “adopted broad bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations and scores of protesters were apprehended.”

Jacob and Jeff’s new book chronicles more examples of how European governments have used expansive definitions of antisemitism and “glorification of terrorism” to prosecute Jewish Israelis and others who criticize Israeli policy.

One notable example that they discuss is Iris Hefets, a Jewish woman born in Israel who has been repeatedly detained in Berlin for a solo protest sign reading “As an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.” The book also specifically criticizes the German prosecution of demonstrators for chanting “from the river to the sea,” noting that “though the phrase predates October 7 and has been used by groups ranging from peaceful activists to violent terrorists like Hamas,” German courts have treated its use at a protest as inherently unlawful. Between October 7, 2023, and mid-February 2024, German prosecutors “registered more than 2,000 possible criminal cases and opened over 380 investigations involving pro-Palestinian activists.”

In “Beyond U.S., Democracies Weaponize Free Speech in Immigration Crackdowns,” Jacob and FoFS researcher Nick Queffurus detail how the UK government, after October 7, declared it would remove visitors whose conduct falls “below the criminal standard” of inciting antisemitism; how pro-Palestinian activist Dana Abuqamar had her visa revoked for comments after October 7; and how France deported the Tunisian imam Mahjoub Mahjoubi less than twelve hours after his arrest, without allowing his case to be heard before a judge. The article draws explicit parallels to the Trump administration’s treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and others. Its conclusion is unambiguous: “American free speech exceptionalism begins to look less exceptional under Trump’s tough immigration crackdown.”

In “Why France’s Far-Left Proposal to Repeal ‘Apology for Terrorism’ Laws Isn’t Radical Enough,” Jacob argues that France’s “apology for terrorism” statute has been systematically abused since October 7 to target peaceful political speech. He notes that “between October 7, 2023, and April 23, 2024, the Paris prosecutor’s office recorded 386 referrals related to the Israel-Palestine conflict,” and that “prominent members of civil society, including politicians, academics, journalists, and trade union leaders, have found themselves under investigation — not for inciting violence but for speech that falls well short of this threshold.”

The same episode is covered in greater depth in Jacob and Jeff’s book, which cites the 386 cases and chronicles the investigation of former Charlie Hebdo journalist Zineb El Rhazoui for describing Hamas as a “resistance movement” and calling Israel a “terrorist state.”

In January 2026, Jacob and affiliated scholar Samantha Barbas warned in MS NOW that the rush to clamp down on antisemitism after the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia risks silencing legitimate dissent. They conclude:

If liberal societies are serious about preventing hate crimes, they should resist the temptation to criminalize speech and instead recommit to the harder work of defending free expression, confronting violence directly and fighting hate crimes through law enforcement, education and solidarity — not censorship.

Of course, our focus has never just been on government policy. We have also pushed back on tech platforms that have flirted with censoring pro-Palestinian speech.

In May 2024, we submitted a public comment to Meta’s Oversight Board advising against the blanket removal of the phrase “from the river to the sea” from Meta’s platforms unless it is accompanied by direct incitement to violence or hate. Our submission argued that “restrictions on such political speech should be narrowly tailored,” that “the specific context in which the phrase is used is crucial,” and that “without additional elements that clearly incite violence or hatred, the phrase alone does not meet the threshold for hate speech.” The Oversight Board ultimately agreed.

False Claim #5: The Future of Free Speech has come “under the influence” of the “Israel Lobby.”

This is a wild accusation unsupported by any evidence. Our work is supported by various foundations and individual donors, and we reject the framing of a shadowy “Israel Lobby” that captures civil society organizations.

Additionally, none of our funders directs how we conduct our research, advocacy, or other work. They support our work because they believe in what we do. In all cases, we retain full independence and final authority for our work, including research pursuits, methodology, analysis, conclusions, and presentation.

But there is also no circumstantial evidence to support this claim either. As pointed out above, we have consistently opposed vague and overbroad definitions of antisemitism that sweep in protected political speech, including criticism of Israel and Zionism.

A Final Note on The “Silence” Framing

The essay suggests that because our Executive Director did not personally respond to an email requesting that he campaign for specific named defendants or organize a particular conference, he was “revealing his true colors.”

We would simply note that a small think tank cannot take on every individual issue brought to its attention, and that declining to adopt a specific campaign is not evidence of “silence” when the organization’s published record on the same underlying issues is as extensive as ours.

We also do not sign onto every petition presented to us, since many include overtly political or ideological agendas that go beyond the scope of our mission. We invite readers and the authors to examine that record.

We also write about these issues in our weekly newsletter, The Free Flow. If it is included in the newsletter, it means that it is something free speech advocates should pay attention to and speak out about.

Principled free-speech advocacy requires defending speech we may disagree with as vigorously as speech we endorse. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and we welcome criticism when we fall short of it.

We do not believe the authors of the essay in question have shown that.

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Justin Hayes is the Director of Communications at The Future of Free Speech and the Managing Editor of The Bedrock Principle.