A federal judge just decided what “antisemitic” is. Clooney should read the order.

On Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival, a reporter asked George Clooney about Mark Ruffalo, and Clooney said this: “I support Mark Ruffalo’s ability to speak freely. It’s ridiculous. We’re not going to ban speech.”

Nobody had proposed a ban on speech.

I know what a real attempt to punish speech looks like, because I spent the past thirteen months defending two people from one. A Jewish couple from Pennsylvania left two comments on an Instagram post that flagged a Miami lawyer’s writing about Israel. One comment said where she worked. The other wondered how her Jewish clients would feel about her posts. She sued them. Last week, a federal judge in Miami threw out the whole case, and the sentence she used to do it is the one I want everyone in this story to read.

Count the Government Officials

I have written about Ruffalo twice already, so the short version. On August 21, he posted that Larry Ellison is a “classic Oligarch” and that Oracle’s Safra Catz revels in “what we now have come to see as a genocide,” all of it somehow inside a media merger. Paramount answered within a day that it was “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute.” Days later, nearly a thousand industry people signed a statement calling the post antisemitic. Ruffalo called the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.”

Then the defense arrived. Jane Fonda, through the Committee for the First Amendment she revived last fall, issued a memo: “Mark Ruffalo has a First Amendment right to speak out about politics, powerful corporations and this dangerous merger—full stop.” Ilana Glazer said calling him antisemitic is “a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)