Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian American writer who founded Electronic Intifada, was recently arrested in Switzerland and held for days before being deported. It is still unclear precisely what Abinumah’s alleged offense against Switzerland was. The head of the country’s Department of Security, Mario Fehr, said that “we do not want an Islamist Jew-hater, who calls for violence, in Switzerland.” Now, it so happens that it is entirely inaccurate to call Abunimah an “Islamist,” since he is not even religious, and this appears to be an instance of the racist assumption that Palestinians must be Muslims. (However, the injustice against Abunimah would have been no less outrageous if he was a practicing Muslim.) Furthermore, I have yet to see even publications that despise Abunimah produce a quote in which he expresses “Jew hatred.” Given Europe has more strict libel laws than the U.S., I personally think Abunimah should consider suing Fehr for defamation. I hope the people of Switzerland, too, will realize that if they wish to have a free country, they need to hold the government officials who barred Abunimah from their country to account. (And as for “calling for violence,” every single person who believes Israel should retaliate against Hamas is themselves “calling for violence,” so everything hinges on what specific type of violence a person has called for and under what circumstances.)

Evidently the Swiss government needs some basic lessons on the principle of free speech. Abunimah has not, as far as I can tell, been accused of any crime against anyone. He is a calm, eloquent spokesperson for the rights of Palestinians, although he deploys uncommonly harsh language and is staunchly against Zionism, meaning that he opposes the existence of a specifically Jewish state in a country that has many non-Jews living in it. Abunimah’s preferred solution is a single secular democratic state in which Jews and Palestinians are both equal citizens, and his book One Country draws on the examples of Ireland and South Africa in showing how an intractable conflict might be brought to an end. 

In a culture that values free speech and open discussion, Abunimah should obviously be heard. But sadly, the idea that “free speech is important” is not as self-evident today, in either the United States or Europe, as it needs to be. Switzerland is not the only country that has used the state to go after Abunimah over his speech. Last year, Germany prohibited him from speaking—even remotely via Zoom!—at a Palestinian conference in Berlin. (Abunimah spoke anyway.)

 The Jerusalem Post quotes a board member from an anti-antisemitism organization describing Abunimah as a “mouthpiece for Hamas,” citing the fact that “on social media, he shares content from the armed wing of Hamas, and he mourns its ‘martyrs.’” But importantly, even if this allegation is true (evidence is not presented), it still should not lead to reprisal by the state. One is allowed, after all, to share content from the IDF, which is responsible for even worse atrocities in Gaza than Hamas committed in Israel. One is allowed to mourn the soldiers invading and destroying Gaza, so it should be perfectly permissible to mourn those fighting against them. Gazans who take up arms today are doing so against attacks that are destroying their entire territory. Many of them are giving their lives for their country, which is facing destruction and ethnic cleansing. Violence against civilians is repulsive, as it was on Oct. 7, but violence against an invading army invites different moral considerations. 

Again, however, one’s assessment of Abuminah’s Twitter feed simply doesn’t matter. He is not accused of plotting violence himself. Now, it’s very easy to start doing what Israel itself is doing, and claiming that anyone who aids or furthers the cause of the enemy, even through speech, is themselves an enemy. But this kind of reasoning leads in authoritarian directions, as we can see from Israel’s ban on Al Jazeera reporting from its territory. 

I’m worried that freedoms we take for granted need to have arguments made for them anew every day. I’ve read plenty of right-wing books, and one of the common themes in them is that the United States is under threat from some kind of invasion or internal enemy, and extreme measures need to be taken to respond. (The threat varies. It could be Islamists, transgender people, Marxists, Central American refugees, Haitian refugees, China, Iran, or just Wokeness if you’re feeling too lazy to be precise.) Because the threat is existential, the argument goes, ordinary considerations of free speech and democracy must be disregarded. These same arguments were heard during the First and Second Red Scares: Communist subversion is simply too serious a threat for us to worry too much about such trivial matters as freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to subvert and destroy society, and since that is what communists/Islamists/the woke are doing, civil libertarian principles can be rejected. Just as Fehr decided that once he had concluded that Ali Abunimah was an “Islamist Jew-hater,” he didn’t need to think about free speech, the right does not see its enemies as deserving of protection against state reprisal. 

Note that the left is not immune to these same kinds of false arguments. But I have always believed that we should never abandon our commitment to free speech, even if we have the opportunity to silence our opponents, because whatever speech-policing infrastructure we erect can be seized and wielded against us by the right. And it is all too easy to decide that a set of ideas is too subversive and harmful to be heard and to exclude it from the public square. Usually the people with the power to decide what is heard are going to be people hostile to radicals and leftists, so it is important to make the case that even subversive and harmful ideas are at least entitled to a hearing. 

The Trumpian right barely pretends to care about principles of justice. Pete Hegseth, for instance, simply says that the left is a threat and so it must be crushed, even if this means rigging elections through gerrymandering. While U.S. presidents have typically covered up acts of power-seeking with propaganda about how their motives are good and pure, Trump is (almost refreshingly) open about the fact that he thinks America should get its way because it is America and not because it has a good argument. As the British political commentator Rory Stewart notes:

Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend—with Greenland or Gaza or international aid—to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering. His phone call with Denmark about acquiring Greenland is the most striking recent example—he claims no right or reason[,] just money and strength.

Indeed, Trump seems to think that America deserves Greenland because he would like for us to have it, not because there is any reason (beyond the U.S.’s considerable power) for it to be given to us. And when he discusses “cleaning out” the population of Gaza (aka  ethnic cleansing), he does not offer any explanation of how this would be just or legal. I don’t think he feels like he has to. I don’t know if concepts like justice and legality even enter Trump’s mind.

As I say, in a way, this is refreshing. I am so used to trying to expose self-serving propaganda about how U.S. actions are righteous and benevolent, so it’s a relief for a president to just say that he thinks we ought to take the Panama Canal because it would help us be more powerful. But it’s also alarming when the shared premise that “justice is important” is thrown out the window. There’s an old slogan, “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” which means that those who are doing wrong pretend to be doing good, and by doing so they at least acknowledge that there is such a thing as right and wrong and we can agree what those are. Trump is less hypocritical than, for example, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, with their crocodile tears for Palestinians. But how is one to respond when “might is right” becomes the operative principle?

Those of us who do not want to live in a society where the powerful just abuse and exploit the powerless are going to have to continue to fight for the basic principles of fairness, equality, and freedom. We are going to have to make the case for why those principles matter, why a society that ignores them is worse off, and why people should not surrender to the cynical view that power is all that matters and the world is a Darwinian jungle in which all you can do is kill or be killed. As the Democratic opposition to Trump falters, we have to show a real and appealing alternative to Trumpism—that is, a vision of a compassionate world in which free speech and economic justice are finally made real and afforded to all.