El-Sayed and the Anti-Anti-Discrimination Democrats

By Seth Mandel

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

JNS reports on a forthcoming Cardozo Law Review paper on the developing “anti-Zionist” exception to civil-rights law. The attempts to extend civil-rights protections to Jews on campus have been undercut by a loophole: Some courts have decided that if you just say “Zionist” instead of “Jew”—or even in addition to it—you can discriminate against Jews by claiming you are merely against Jews’ “political” opinions.

 

Jon Michaels of UCLA and Matthew Segal of Tufts will be publishing the paper next year. Their case study is Torres v. Carlson, in which Columbia University employees sued after having been taken hostage in a university building by pro-Hamas activists. The activists allegedly called Torres and Wilson “Jew-lover,” “Jew-worker” and “Zionists.”

 

A federal judge dismissed the suit, JNS notes, “reasoning in part that anti-Zionism could not establish anti-Jewish discrimination, because Jews disagree about Zionism and because anti-Zionist rhetoric constitutes political speech.”

 

The case highlights just how absurd the legal movement to withhold rights from Jews has become: Call someone a “Jew-worker,” and successfully claim you were just being “anti-Zionist.”

 

Even without the “Jew-worker” taunts, this legal blind spot was always silly. It’s usually used to keep Israelis out of various campus clubs and classes. But “Israeli” is a national origin, and civil-rights law prohibits discrimination by “national origin.” Excluding Israelis because you want their country to cease to exist is a clear violation of the statute. You don’t have to convince anyone that the bigot is an anti-Semite because they are already admitting discrimination according to national origin. And if national origin discrimination can be protected by claiming it is political, then that part of the law is a dead letter.

 

Some libertarians might oppose antidiscrimination law on principle, but the campus activists aren’t among them. These bigots want civil-rights law to remain airtight except for Jews. They believe the protections should still apply to all non-Jews.

 

That is where Abdul El-Sayed falls as well on this issue. This week, the House passed a bill, written by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer and Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, that builds on existing U.S. antidiscrimination law. This bill prohibits federal funding of colleges that discriminate against academic partnerships with Israeli institutions, though it does not penalize speech or expression. It is similar to previous legislation that enforces federal antidiscrimination law among federal contractors.

 

Most Democrats voted against it anyway. El-Sayed (who is running for the Senate, not House) commented on the bill with the following incoherent assembly of words:

 

“Today, rather than focus on the price of gas, the price of groceries, ending the war, or stopping the trade war, Congress spent its time declaring this. ‘Dear colleges that receive American taxpayer money: We will take away that American taxpayer money if you decide to keep it from going to Israel.’ Aside from being blatantly unconstitutional, it’s wild. Why is it wrong to want our taxpayer money spent here to provide for schools here instead of being sent somewhere else?”

 

Because there is no bill in existence that matches El-Sayed’s description, one can safely assume he is not a principled libertarian opponent of antidiscrimination law. He is an opponent of saying things that are true.

 

Of course this bill doesn’t force anyone to send taxpayer money to Israel, as El-Sayed alleges. But it does prohibit the use of federal dollars to discriminate against Jews as part of an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by foreign Arab governments. Specifically, much of this precedent is built on decades-old prohibitions against forcing American companies to abide by an Arab League boycott.

 

U.S. laws have been countering this violation of American sovereignty for half a century. One would think El-Sayed and his fellow America Firsters on either side of the aisle would support U.S. companies under attack from authoritarian states. One would be wrong. Because just as with the “anti-Zionism” exception, these politicians and activists believe they have a right to violate the rights of other Americans.