{"id":102291,"date":"2023-02-21T17:05:02","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T15:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=102291"},"modified":"2023-02-20T14:09:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T12:09:33","slug":"26-05-81","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=102291","title":{"rendered":"Free Speech as Hate Speech: The James Cavallaro scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Free Speech as Hate Speech: The James Cavallaro scandal<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

BEN COHEN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Commissioner James Cavallaro, March 2014. Credit: Daniel Cima via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Either the U.S. State Department doesn\u2019t know about the social-media antics of its nominees, or it doesn\u2019t care.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

.<\/p>\n

Another vocal anti-Zionist claimed free-speech martyrdom last week in the latest example of an individual harboring visceral hatred of Israel being rewarded with a prestigious position.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Professor James Cavallaro, an expert on human rights in Latin America, had been nominated the previous week to a three-year term as a commissioner with the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, a body within the Organization of American States (OAS<\/a>). It was a position that Cavallaro had held before, having been previously nominated by President Barack Obama\u2019s Secretary of State, John Kerry. He certainly had no reason to doubt that he was a shoe-in who would bring, in the words of a U.S. State Department press release, \u201cvaluable expertise to the commission\u2019s work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Either the State Department doesn\u2019t know about the social-media antics of its nominees, or it doesn\u2019t care. When a colleague at The Algemeiner<\/em> news outlet, Andrew Bernard, began sifting through Cavallaro\u2019s Twitter feed, he discovered a cesspool of abuse directed at several targets, including the good professor\u2019s ostensible boss, U.S. President Joe Biden. In one April 2020 tweet, he referred to Biden as \u201cNasty MFer Joe.\u201d In another tweet the previous month, he opined sarcastically that Biden\u2019s electoral success in the U.S. South \u201cmust mean he is no longer a senile gaffe machine.\u201d For someone who professes to loathe former President Donald Trump, Cavallaro sure sounds a lot like him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Similar treatment was dished out to other politicians. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) was dismissed as a \u201cshameless mother*****.\u201d Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was told she was a \u201cpedantic, pompous and self-righteous individual\u201d who would be well-advised to \u201clearn from the Palestinian people\u201d (this was in reply to Collins\u2019 tweet urging Israel to ignore Trump\u2019s advice to bar left-wing Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from visiting the country). Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) was excoriated as a \u201cracist imbecile.\u201d And so on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once Cavallaro\u2019s tweets were exposed, the State Department speedily withdrew his nomination. At a press briefing, spokesman Ned Price emphasized that Cavallaro\u2019s social-media attacks on Israel (more on those in a moment) were not the only factor behind the decision to pull him out of the running. \u201cI know that [Israel has] been the focus of much of the commentary, but it went well beyond that,\u201d explained Price. \u201cSome of his commentary \u2026 was deeply inappropriate. Once that information came to light, we lost confidence in this individual and his ability to serve as a successful nominee.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

True, calling your boss a \u201cNasty MFer\u201d in your Twitter feed isn\u2019t exactly going to make you a \u201csuccessful nominee.\u201d But assisted by the fact that the majority of Cavallaro\u2019s tweets consisted of attacks on Israel, his supporters have portrayed his canceled nomination as one more instance of the unaccountable power of the Israel Lobby in the United States, which has allegedly subjected him to the same treatment as former Human Rights Watch chief Ken Roth, whose offer of a fellowship at Harvard University was rescinded (and then placed on the table again once the school conceded it had made an \u201cerror.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

Rising to Cavallaro\u2019s defense, Agn\u00e8s Callamard\u2014the secretary-general of Amnesty International\u2014complained that the U.S. government was \u201cattacking a brilliant human-rights lawyer\u201d for his insistence that Israel is an apartheid state, fretting that instead of engaging with the \u201clegal and empirical\u201d evidence for this claim, it was \u201ccensoring, shutting down debates and threatening.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet in all of Cavallaro\u2019s countless tweets, there is not one shred of reasoned, evidence-based argument that Israel is the reincarnation of the racist regime that ruled South Africa for most of the last century. What there is, however, is a lot of shouting and finger-pointing. \u201cDid they say anything about high-level, US Congressional delegations legitimating and praising the Israeli apartheid state?\u201d he tweeted at Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) after the latter posted a photograph of himself meeting with Palestinian students in Ramallah. Another tweet, directed at OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro, questioned why that organization had declared Hamas to be a terrorist group. \u201cIf you\u2019re promoting global solidarity, how about supporting human-rights instead of U.S. foreign policy?\u201d wrote Cavallaro, inadvertently spotlighting why someone with his views should not be representing this country in any international forum.<\/span><\/p>\n

On social media, at least, Cavallaro singularly fails to prove the false contention that Israel is an apartheid state. Instead, he uses the hoary technique of repeating something often enough that people start to believe it. And that, in turn, opens the path to even more outlandish claims.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, Cavallaro seems quite taken with Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s propaganda about Ukraine being governed by \u201cneo-Nazis.\u201d Replying to an Anti-Defamation League briefing pointing out that neo-Nazis are a marginal force in Ukraine, Cavallaro once more turned on the sarcasm, writing that \u201cbeing a Ukrainian neo-Nazi is fine, but supporting the rights and dignity of Palestinians is antisemitism. Got it.\u201d Again, we have to ask whether someone willing to legitimize the favorite talking point of a U.S. arch-enemy is best placed to represent this country at an international agency.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most heinous tweet of all was a blatantly antisemitic one. \u201cBought. Purchased. Controlled,\u201d Cavallaro posted above a link to a Guardian <\/em>article on the support given by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to U.S. House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. Doubtless, he believes that the same shadowy network backing Jeffries is responsible for booting him from his nomination.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact remains that if the State Department had carried out due diligence on Cavallaro, this scandal would not have emerged. In that sense, this whole debate feels contrived, especially as the warning about Cavallaro was sounded by a Jewish news outlet, which is pretty much all the evidence that anti-Zionists need when they falsely claim they are being \u201ccensored.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There are no new lessons to be drawn from the Cavallaro episode. We have witnessed similar situations many times before, all of which follow a similar script: An appointment is announced, the appointee is held up as beyond reproach, the appointee\u2019s social-media feeds give the lie to that claim, and the appointment is scotched, thereby inviting accusations of the truth being smothered by an outside body\u2014be it \u201cZionists,\u201d \u201cthe Israel Lobby\u201d or a related nomenclature. Those who buy this interpretation do so because they are already predisposed to it. As for the rest of us, we can breathe a sigh of relief that, as Cavallaro\u2019s fate demonstrates, not everyone is taken in.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ben Cohen<\/strong> is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Free Speech as Hate Speech: The James Cavallaro scandal BEN COHEN The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Commissioner James Cavallaro, March 2014. Credit: Daniel Cima via Wikimedia Commons. Either the U.S. State Department doesn\u2019t know about the social-media antics of its nominees, or it doesn\u2019t care. . Another vocal anti-Zionist claimed free-speech martyrdom last week […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102291"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102327,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102291\/revisions\/102327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}