US. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday repeated a falsehood that it is illegal to burn an Israeli flag in the United States, a statement highlighting how disinformation spread online can reach the halls of power and a broad audience.
The Times of Israel reported last week that a judge in a federal court in Washington, DC, in a civil lawsuit had equated the Israeli flag with Jewish identity.
The headline of the article was shared widely by right-wing influencers online, who falsely claimed that the judge had made it illegal to burn the Israeli flag.
“It’s now illegal to burn an Israeli flag in the United States but still legal to burn an American flag. We’re an Occupied nation,” the right-wing commentator Stew Peters said on X, echoing a claim made by an array of influencers, many with hundreds of thousands of followers.
The assertion is false. The judge’s opinion did not create new criminal law, and does not apply to legitimate protest protected by the First Amendment. The judge’s statement, and the article, made no mention of burning Israeli flags, which remains legal.
“The case law is clear that burning any flag is perfectly legal with the exception that, like anything else, it cannot be done with the purpose of threatening someone with violence,” Matthew Mainen, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiff in the case, told The Times of Israel. “You can’t burn any flag, including the American flag, if it could be considered a true threat or incitement of imminent lawless action.”
The judge in the case, Trump appointee Trevor McFadden, equated the flag with Jewish people because the flag bears the Star of David, a symbol of Judaism.
“What McFadden’s ruling does accomplish is that if you burn a Jewish person’s Israeli flag with the requisite intent to intimidate — and it is clearly illegal to burn someone else’s property without their permission — that would be correctly labeled as an antisemitic hate crime,” Mainen said.
The false claims online still garnered millions of views, and corrections posted alongside their assertions gained little traction.
After the claim circulated for several days, Greene, a far-right Republican from Georgia, repeated the assertion in an interview with Megyn Kelly, a conservative media personality with millions of followers.
“Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues and it is — I don’t know how to explain it,” Greene said.
“This just came from Judge McFadden — he just had a ruling that you can burn any flag in the United States of America, including our own American flag, except you can’t burn the Israeli flag in America,” she said.
“That’s a violation of the First Amendment, blatant, and it will be struck down as soon as it goes up on appeal. What a ridiculous notion,” said Kelly, who was unfamiliar with the case.
Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The rhetoric echoes antisemitic tropes that claim Israel holds sway over the American government, a common charge among the far right. The claims are similar to age-old antisemitic conspiracies that a cabal of Jews pulls the strings of power from the shadows, a notion popularized by the antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in the early 1900s.
The disinformation was also shared, to a lesser extent, by leftist and pro-Palestinian activists in an example of the so-called horseshoe theory. The theory says the political spectrum is less of a straight line than a horseshoe shape in which the far left and far right move toward each other as they get away from the center.
“In the United States, you can burn the American flag — the Supreme Court has said so for decades. But now, according to this ruling, burning or tearing the Israeli flag could make you guilty of racial hatred. The one national flag protected in American law today isn’t our own. It’s Israel’s,” the leftist activist Shaun King wrote.
The discourse came as American conservatives appeared to become more critical of Israel as the Gaza war drags on.
“Whether it realizes it or not, Israel has made itself the villain of the world in letting this [Gaza war] go on so long,” Kelly said during an interview last month with Israel-defender-turned-critic Piers Morgan.
“They have lost support among their dearest friends, the entire Democrat party here in the United States has turned against them, and they’re losing Republicans by the day here in America,” she said.