Despite there being a general consensus that free speech is a core attribute of liberal democracies, the issue has gained prominence in recent years in the US and UK because of concerns about its erosion. While the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects free speech in the US, the European Convention on Human Rights does the same for the UK. Despite legal and constitutional protections, there have been myriad instances and attempts thereof of curbs to lawful free speech and freedom of expression over a variety of issues. One of us has located three broad areas where such attempts have been particularly acute, that is: Muslims and Islam; trans and non-binary categories; and Jews and Israel (Hasan, 2025).
To counter this censorship and attempted censorship, campaigning organisations for free speech exist and have arisen in both countries. Paradoxically, however, it transpires that they invariably do not enact a principled position and so resort to selective censorship.
In this article, we draw attention to two such groups that are particularly problematic yet both have “free speech” in their names: The Free Speech Union in the UK and The Future of Free Speech in the US. Indeed, both are hypocritical given that they ignore or censor free speech concerning one of the three areas highlighted: Jews and Israel. For example, neither has challenged the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism that has been used to curtail criticisms of Israel and though not legally binding, has been adopted by a wide range of institutions in the US and UK. The IHRA definition blatantly equates antisemitism with anti-Zionism (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, 2016).
In April 2023, a coalition of 104 civil society organisations wrote to UN Secretary General António Guterres against the adoption of the definition:
Adoption of the definition by governments and institutions is often framed as an essential step in efforts to combat antisemitism. In practice, however, the IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism, including in the US and Europe (Human Rights Watch, 2023).
While Israeli organisations such as B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel were signatories to this letter, The Free Speech Union and The Future of Free Speech were not. Indeed, our conclusion is that the greatest threat to free speech in the UK and US is the Isreal Lobby and we surmise that the FSU and FFS have come under its influence.
The Free Speech Union
Regarding the Free Speech Union (FSU), one of us has previously highlighted the strong pro-Israel stance of its founder and General Secretary, Toby Young, and the FSU's abandonment by 2024 of the cause of free speech for those criticizing Israel and campaigning against the genocide in Gaza (Brunskell-Evans, 2024). Since the government proscribed Palestine Action, a direct-action group whose stated objective has been to counter Israeli war crimes and British complicity in them, as a terrorist organization in 2025, the FSU has been in a state of complete dereliction of its stated aims.
In 2018, Young describes a trip funded by the Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), a UK-based organization that promotes awareness and support for Israel through its media work (Young, 2018). He notes that the guided visit, though powerful, did not need to persuade, as he already had a lifelong admiration for the state of Israel. He self-declares as a Zionist and tells us that if the pro-Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn, then the Leader of the Labor Party, were elected Prime Minister, Israel would be his “escape route” from the UK.
Young's unconditional support for Israel was further demonstrated in 2023 through his co-creation of the October Declaration, issued after Hamas's massacre of Israeli citizens on 7 October (British Friends of Israel, 2023). The Declaration characterizes any forthcoming Israeli violence against the Palestinian population as regrettable yet justifiable. In contrast, it offers no context for Hamas's violence. Israel is sanitized; Hamas is demonized.
As General Secretary, Young is obliged, as a matter of principle, to support the right to free speech for those with different perspectives. The FSU's avowed commitment is to “freedom of speech,” “academic freedom,” “freedom of expression,” and “freedom of the press.” It is “non-partisan” and has “no political agenda beyond the belief that people should be free to speak their minds without fear of losing their jobs, their reputations, or their liberty” (Free Speech Union, 2026). Yet it falls severely short of these aims on several counts.
In August 2024, six members of Palestine Action targeted Elbit Systems, Israel's largest weapons producer, at its Filton, Bristol, site and destroyed a shipment of quadcopter drones that Israel uses to kill Palestinians in Gaza. A further 18 people were arrested in connection with this action, so the group is collectively known as the Filton 24. Though legally innocent, the Filton 24 were held on remand as terrorist prisoners, some for up to 18 months, well beyond the UK's usual six-month pre-trial detention limit, before ever being tried. Some went on hunger strike, and one attempted suicide. The FSU remained silent.
On 5 July 2025, the government retrospectively proscribed Palestine Action, a terrorist organization, marking the first time an organization has been proscribed solely for property damage rather than for injury to people. This waters down the meaning of the word “terrorism” and risks establishing a dangerously low threshold under which any politically inconvenient protest could be treated as terrorism. The decision to do so is a consequence of pressure from the Israeli lobby, including, for example, We Believe in Israel (2025). The FSU remained silent.
At the trial of the Filton 24 in February 2026, the jury responded sympathetically when the defendants explained that they were acting out of conscience and that their actions were intended to prevent violence against Palestinians, not to cause it. This led to a series of dramatic acquittals. It took great courage for the jury to ignore the judge's, government's, police's, and media's demands to convict and instead weigh the actual evidence. The FSU remained silent.
Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, then mounted a successful judicial review of the proscription. The High Court ruled that the government's decision to proscribe the group under the Terrorism Act 2000 was unlawful, inconsistent with Yvette Cooper's, the then Home Secretary's, own proscription policy, and that it breached Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR. In conclusion, the grounds for proscription were not met, given the low level of public threat and the availability of existing criminal legislation to address the offenses in question. The FSU remained silent.
The government is appealing the High Court ruling and challenging the jury's acquittals of the Filton 24. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has secured a retrial. On 13 April, six members, released after 18 months in prison following a jury's not-guilty verdict on aggravated burglary, are facing a retrial on the charge of criminal damage. The judge has urged jurors not to be distracted by the legal battle over Palestine Action's ban as a terrorist organization and to set aside any views they may have about the Israeli military operations in Gaza. Whether jurors think the defendants had some moral justification for their actions is “completely beside the point,” and that their own views on the conflict in Gaza must be “put to one side” (BBC, 2026). If found guilty, the defendants could be sentenced as terrorists and face long prison terms. The FSU is remaining silent.
The judge is leading jurors to believe they are ruling on simple criminal charges, while the defendants are being stripped of their only available defence against the charge of criminal damage. In legal terms, this is called a “lawful excuse,” meaning any criminal damage they caused can be considered lawful because it was intended to prevent the commission of a far graver crime—in this case, genocide. The UK press is under a court order not to report on this (Defend our Juries, 2026). This corrupts the jury system, which is a vital bulwark against a repressive state, and also protects the UK from charges of complicity in the genocide. The FSU is remaining silent.
The proscription also subjected anyone supporting Palestine Action to criminal proceedings under the Terrorism Act, misusing the Act to suppress protests that draw attention to Israel's genocide of Palestinians. Despite this, Defend Our Juries, a direct-action network that defends the right to trial by jury, has mobilized mass protests, challenging the government's agenda to abolish juries in most cases and arguing that it is pursuing this agenda precisely to stop juries from acquitting people the government wants convicted for political reasons. Over three thousand people have been arrested, most of whom are middle-aged and older (including priests, civil servants, retired army officers, nurses, and pensioners), for peacefully holding cardboard signs that read, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
Brunskell-Evans was arrested on the first day of the proscription, spent 12 hours in a police cell, was charged under the Terrorism Act, and awaits trial on 1 June. While British nationals returning to the UK after serving in the Israeli army and committing war crimes are free to live out their days peacefully, other British citizens are harassed and criminalized for peacefully opposing those war crimes. The FSU remains silent.
The government has just passed the Cumulative Impact Amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, which is nearly complete in parliament. It grants police unprecedented powers to ban recurring protests against Israel and the genocide of Palestinians, turning a fundamental right to protest into a privilege granted by the state. It is a direct escalation against the Palestine solidarity movement, which has brought hundreds of thousands into the streets since October 2023. This is a draconian piece of legislation that undermines the right to free assembly. The FSU remains silent.
The British government has weaponized the law to suppress protests against Israel and the UK's complicity in genocide. By staying silent about the erosion of our democratic freedoms, the FSU has made it clear that its primary commitment is to Israel. It has revealed its intellectual contradictions and moral failings in fulfilling its stated aim to champion “the right of people from all walks of life to express themselves without fear of punishment or persecution.”
The Future of Free Speech
The Future of Free Speech has similarly remained silent over the clamping down of protests in the US against the Gaza genocide including stripping away US residents’ legal status and threatening to deport them and revoking foreign students’ visas. Furthermore, punitive measures were taken out against universities for allowing such protests deeming them to be antisemitic. Thus, Trump announced the cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school's continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” (BBC News, March 2025); and followed this up by freezing more than $2bn in federal funds and tax-exempt status for Harvard University. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that Trump wanted the university to apologise for what his administration says is continuing tolerance of antisemitism (BBC News, April 2025).
Among myriad assaults on free speech in American universities include the University of Michigan arresting eleven students for expressing support for Palestinian rights, a case that was taken by the Academic Council of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) (Jewish Voice for Peace, 2025).
The assault on free speech pertaining to Israel was further evidenced in New Jersey's adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Critics at the deliberation in Trenton in July 2025, including Chris Hedges, argued that it would criminalise free speech, but their microphones were muted and they were shouted down, thus proving their point (Hedges, 2025).
These instances, and many more besides, are in direct violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution (1787) which stipulates:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
One would imagine that organisations dedicated to free speech would be in the vanguard against such egregious violations, as is the case of the American Civil Liberties Union which has vigorously argued that these laws violate the First Amendment (see, for example, ACLU, 2017). But not so with The Future of Free Speech which has strayed clear.
In August 2025 one of us (RH, who is a recipient of their newsletter) wrote to The Future of Free Speech asking them to campaign for the eleven University of Michigan students to which he received no reply. In October 2025, RH wrote to the founder of The Future of Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama, to ask that they end their 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—and start campaigning against this. Hasan further suggested that FFS should organise a conference specifically on this issue and invite as speakers some of those who have been arrested. Sadly, revealing his true colours, Mr Mchangama did not reply.
In fact, The Future of Free Speech was opposed to free speech following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In Europe and the US, Russian media outlets were soon banned—no matter one's view of the Ukraine war, this should have been of concern to free speech advocates but at The Future of Free Speech's conference in Copenhagen in December 2022 rather than dissent on this violation of free speech, there was seeming agreement.
This indicates that The Future of Free Speech is pretty much in line with establishment thinking on key foreign policy issues meaning that it is utterly hypocritical when considered by the principled and cogent preamble to its 2022 conference:
Free speech is the bulwark of liberty; without it, no free and democratic society has ever been established or thrived. Free expression has been the basis of unprecedented scientific, social and political progress that has benefitted individuals, communities, nations and humanity itself. Millions of people derive protection, knowledge and essential meaning from the right to challenge power, question orthodoxy, expose corruption and address oppression, bigotry and hatred.
One would assume that both the FSU and FFS would axiomatically champion various defences of free speech by thinkers going back centuries including, for example, this famous one by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty: “there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered” (Mill, 2008 [1859]) fn 1, p. 20).
The reality is that both The Free Speech Union and The Future of Free Speech clearly do not and so, accordingly, can be considered as free speech fraudsters.
References
BBC News (2025) March 7, Trump pulls $400 million from Columbia University over Gaza protests
BBC News (2025) April 14, Trump threatens Harvard’s tax-exempt status after freezing $2bn funding
BBC News (2026) April 13, Palestine Action group cleared of violent disorder
British Friends of Israel (2023), October, The October Declaration
Brunskell-Evans H (2024) August 10, Free-Speech Activism, Savage Minds.
Defend Our Juries (2026) April 14, X.com
Free Speech Union (2026) About The Free Speech Union (accessed April, 16)
Hasan R (2025) July 8 Free Speech and Hypocrisy, Savage Minds
Hedges C (2025) July 28, Abolishing the First Amendment, The Chris Hedges Report
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (2016) IHRA-non-legally-binding-working-definition-of-antisemitism-1.pdf
Jewish Voice for Peace (2025) University of Michigan is disciplining 11 students for free speech
Mill JS (2008 [1859]) On Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Young T (2018) March 24 “If Corbyn Wins My Escape Route is Clear,” The Spectator
We Believe in Israel (2025). It’s Time to Proscribe Palestine Action as a Terrorist Group
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JS Mill can also be considered a fraudster, due to his status as a colonial official in the British East India joint-stock corporation, as well as his writings celebrating imperialism as the white man's burden. I wish texts like On Liberty could be read as written, but history is still a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up.