The First Amendment Was Not Meant to Protect Bigotry in Robes

There is something deeply obscene about the way elite American universities have learned to weaponise the First Amendment—not to protect truth, nor to guard minority rights, but to cloak ideological warfare in the comforting folds of academic freedom. The latest theatre of this intellectual charade is Princeton University, where the Department of African American Studies is preparing to host a 2025 event titled “The Antizionist Idea: History, Theory, and Politics.” An event that would be unthinkable if the target were any people but the Jews.

In no other instance would a university permit, let alone platform, a forum dedicated to exploring the supposed philosophical richness of denying a people’s right to national self-determination. One cannot imagine a panel on “The Anti-Palestinian Idea” or “The Anti-Kurdish Tradition.” Yet when it comes to Zionism—the political and spiritual expression of Jewish peoplehood—the red lines disappear. Academic decorum steps in. And what is, in reality, a call for erasure becomes a matter for polite debate.

This is not intellectual rigour. It is selective moral collapse. And it reveals how American academia has become complicit in mainstreaming a form of ideological bigotry under the banner of scholarship.

To speak of antizionism as though it were an abstract school of thought is to fundamentally misrepresent its function in history and in politics. Zionism is not a theory. It is the practical, national expression of a people who survived exile, dispossession, and industrialised annihilation. It is the movement that gave form to the right enshrined in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the right to a nationality. A right that is universally upheld—except, apparently, for Jews.

To present the negation of that right as an intellectual “idea” is not just dishonest; it is dangerous. It moves the debate away from policy and into ontology. The antizionist, after all, does not oppose Israeli government action; they oppose Israel’s very being. They are not critics—they are abolitionists, committed to a singular political outcome: the end of the Jewish state.

Yet this is the discourse Princeton wishes to examine with sober detachment. To historicise it. To theorise it. To dignify it.

It is the triumph of form over substance, of posturing over principle.

And while the university frames this event as a matter of free academic inquiry, it is in fact an abdication of moral responsibility—and a contradiction of the very civil rights doctrines that American institutions claim to hold sacred.

The United States prides itself on its civil rights legacy. The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity in federally funded institutions—including universities. Title VI of that same legislation obliges schools to protect students from racially or ethnically motivated harassment. How, then, can a university justify hosting an event that undermines the core identity of its Jewish students? How can it champion dignity and inclusion while promoting a worldview that calls their national narrative a colonial myth and their statehood a crime?

The truth is, it can’t.

But Princeton is not alone. It is merely the latest in a growing line of elite institutions where the academy has become a refuge for ideologues who seek not dialogue, but the deconstruction of Jewish legitimacy itself. From Columbia to Harvard, from Stanford to NYU, antizionism is being smuggled into public discourse under the guise of intersectionality and decolonisation theory—stripped of its historical roots in antisemitic conspiracy, cleansed of its record of violence, and rebranded as a principled rejection of oppression.

This is an astonishing act of intellectual laundering. Because the fact remains: wherever antizionism has flourished, Jewish lives have been made more vulnerable. It was antizionist dogma that saw Soviet Jews silenced, spied on, and imprisoned. It is antizionist rhetoric that fuels violent antisemitism in Europe’s migrant communities today. And it was antizionism that animated the slaughter of civilians on 7 October—children burned alive, women raped, entire communities wiped out.

Yet at Princeton, these consequences are nowhere in the framing. There is no mention of the antisemitic pogroms of 1929, or the rejection of partition in 1947, or the massacres carried out in the name of “liberation.” Instead, antizionism is given the dignity of history, theory, and politics—as though it were the moral heir to the Enlightenment, rather than the ideological descendant of every movement that sought to make Jews stateless and vulnerable.

Let us be clear: antizionism does not emerge from concern for Palestinian rights. It emerges from the same dark well as every form of eliminationism. Its lexicon may have changed—it now speaks of “settler colonialism” and “global resistance”—but its objectives are depressingly familiar. The goal is not justice. It is negation.

And nowhere is that negation more comfortable than in the lecture theatres of the West’s finest universities.

How did we get here?

Part of the blame lies with the academy’s perverse romance with radical chic. The postmodern turn in the humanities has produced a generation of scholars for whom all narratives are equal, and all power is suspect—except their own. Zionism, in this schema, is reclassified as whiteness, as dominance, as imperial guilt personified. Jews, once the world’s quintessential victims, are now recast as global oppressors. The facts of history are irrelevant. The identity card trumps all.

But part of the blame lies with our silence. For too long, defenders of Israel and Jewish dignity have assumed that the academy was simply misguided. That better facts, clearer context, and open debate would win the day. But this is not about facts. It is about ideological capture. About a worldview that begins with the assumption that the Jewish state is uniquely illegitimate, and builds an entire intellectual edifice atop that assumption.

And now, that edifice is bearing down on young Jewish students—many of whom walk onto campuses like Princeton believing they will be safe, only to discover that their very identity is up for debate.

This must stop.

Universities must be held to account. Donors must ask hard questions. Alumni must withdraw support. Civil rights law must be invoked. And faculty members who know better must speak—not in murmurs, but with the force of moral conviction.

Because Princeton’s event is not just an academic embarrassment. It is a moral scandal. A symptom of a deeper rot. A test of whether Western liberalism still has the strength to defend its own.

The First Amendment was not meant to protect the systematic delegitimisation of a people’s right to exist. Academic freedom was not meant to be the handmaiden of hatred. And a civil society that cannot distinguish between critique and annihilation will not survive the century.

Antizionism is not an idea. It is a weapon. And no university should be proud to sharpen it.