Anti-Israel/Anti-Zionist Speech Doesn’t Violate School Board Members’ Ethics Obligations, When Said in the Member’s Personal Capacity as Professor
From yesterday’s decision in Siegel v. Aziz (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div.) (by Judges Ronald Susswein and Lisa Perez-Friscia):
Defendant was elected and sworn in as a member on the Westfield Board of Education in January 2021. Her term ended in April 2024. Defendant is also a law professor at Rutgers Law School and her scholarship includes topics such as “Islam, Secularism [and] Human Rights, religion and race, Critical Race Theory, and Middle Eastern law and politics.” …
[D]efendant and various professors throughout the country signed a letter titled “Palestine and Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom” (Letter). Plaintiff alleged in her complaint that the Letter advocates, inter alia, boycotting and imposing sanctions against Israel for its treatment of Palestinians as well as supporting student activism on university campuses.
On March 15, 2023, defendant “retweeted” a social media post stating, “Israeli protestors take to streets to safeguard master-race democracy[.] ‘The protestors seek to beautify an Isreal that has always been nothing more than a predatory settler-colony that grants privileges to Jewish colonists[.]’ [-]Joseph Massad” and included a link to an article from “middleeasteye.net” titled “Israeli protestors take to streets to safeguard master-race democracy.”
On November 30, 2022, defendant retweeted a social media post stating:
Today, @alhaq_org and a coalition of Palestinian human rights organizations are launching a new landmark report that reclaims the current discourse on Israeli apartheid and examines its reality and origin as an integral part of Israel’s settler-colonial regime.
Israeli #apartheid is a tool of Zionist settler #colonialism. What does this mean & what are the origins, logic & institutions of Israeli oppression of the Palestine people as a whole? All of this & more are discussed in our new report for @alhaq_org [website link][.]
On February 27, 2023, defendant retweeted a social media message and website link from the “Center For Security, Race and Rights” which stated “‘[StandWithUs’] interest isn’t in student well-being but rather to slander…Galvanizing racist, anti-#Arab and anti-#Palestinian tropes is not difficult in a post-911 era. StandWithUs just had to redact every name but mine and let racism/sexism do its job[.]'” Defendant added her own text, stating “Vilifying #Arab and/or #Muslim women has become the new strategy of #Zionist groups. #Islamophobia and #Orientalism is pervasive. For more, read The #RacialMuslim @BernieSanders @AOD @IlhanMN @RepRashia[.]”
On August 23, 2022, defendant tweeted a website link to an article titled “She was fired for being publicly pro-Palestine. One year later, no one is hirin[g].” Defendant added the text: “[a]thletic trainer was fired from Philadelphia’s Agnes Irwin School for her pro-#Palestine stance.”
Plaintiff filed an ethics complaint with the School Ethics Commission, which the SEC rejected:
[Defendant’s] statements, while controversial and likely perceived as offensive and hurtful to members of the [d]istrict’s Jewish community a
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