[News] A guide to surviving Canary Mission

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/steven-salaita/guide-surviving-canary-mission 



  A guide to surviving Canary Mission

Steven Salaita <https://electronicintifada.net/people/steven-salaita> - 
20 December 2016

So, you’ve been profiled by Canary Mission, a group of anonymous 
stalkers who post online dossiers of students and professors they deem 
insufficiently enamored of Israel.

What should you do?

We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s examine what Canary Mission 
hopes to accomplish with these dossiers.

According to its website, the goal “is to expose those who promote lies 
and attacks on Israel and the Jewish people” for the purpose of … 
nothing, apparently: by accessing these profiles, “the public will 
become better informed about those involved in hate movements in their 
communities.”

In earlier incarnations, Canary Mission was more forthright about its 
desire to punish 
<http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Cutting-Edge/Inside-Canary-Mission-416703> 
the employed and to damage the employment prospects of those still in 
college, who dare to speak out for Palestinian rights. This intent is 
obviously unchanged despite the high-minded rhetoric about public service.

All settler-colonial movements sanitize violence with declarations of 
altruism. Canary Mission’s attempt is laughable, although, to be fair, 
Zionists have never been good at concealing their aggression.


    More than punishment

Canary Mission’s desire isn’t simply to punish. We misread the 
confluence of myth and power on campus when we reduce Zionist thuggery 
to frameworks of individual punishment. This misreading is 
understandable because getting profiled forces us into stances of 
self-preservation.

While Zionist thugs indeed aim to punish individuals, they do so on 
behalf of a greater purpose, which is to render themselves ubiquitous in 
deliberations about life and learning. By identifying anti-Zionists as 
deviant, they also identify themselves as normative to those who oversee 
and legislate campus life.

In their minds, awash with the messianic compulsions of 
settler-colonization, they alone should determine campus customs and 
cultures, ethics and etiquette, curriculums and syllabuses, inclusions 
and expulsions. They want decision-makers to constantly feel on the 
brink of being shamed. And they are aware that despite their uncivil 
language, most upper administrators are sympathetic to their cause. They 
therefore attempt to conjoin the genteel affectations of the ivory tower 
with the sleaze of political repression.

Another function of Canary Mission’s profiles is to facilitate sexist, 
racist and homophobic abuse.

The site is kind of like a navigation system for trolls. Canary Mission 
names people who run afoul of its genocidal preferences knowing that 
those people (and, with luck, their employers) will likely enjoy 
spectacular invective.

Whenever Canary Mission tweets at me, which happens regularly, my 
mentions get inundated with assholes, bullies and Roseanne Barr 
<http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/roseanne-barrs-bizarre-evolution-national-comic-sensation-racist-twitter-troll>.

In a sense, Canary Mission plays a vital role in the corporate 
university. By targeting students, the organization conditions them for 
a postgraduate existence in which dissent is fiercely opposed.

A useful skill for corporate advancement is knowing how not to offend 
sites of power. Canary Mission is contemptible for reinforcing this 
coercive system, but it isn’t crazy for suggesting that potential 
employers want to root out troublemakers.

The era of online dossiers, then, provides students a sort of 
pre-professional training extraneous to the curriculum but central to 
the spirit of preparing impressionable youngsters for the demands of 
good citizenship.


    To confront or ignore?

In some instances – when one has been libeled or antagonized in person, 
for example–it may be useful to directly confront Canary Mission, but on 
the whole I am skeptical of this strategy.

Attempting to convince Zionist thugs not to engage in thuggery seems 
pointless. Besides, asking Palestinians to interact with Canary Mission 
feels a bit like asking saplings to have a chat with the logging company.

Another strategy is to ignore Canary Mission altogether. Until now, this 
has been my approach for both philosophical and personal reasons.

Philosophically, I don’t like validating fanaticism as something that 
can be arbitrated through dialogue or debate. It’s also a bad idea to 
center Zionists in such a way that they occupy the subject position in 
conversations about Palestine.

Personally, I don’t care to spend energy on those who wish to harm 
students and colleagues. That energy is better spent protecting people 
from harm.

With Canary Mission’s increased activity, however, students and 
instructors are expressing concern about being targeted for punishment. 
They aren’t necessarily afraid of Canary Mission; they simply don’t 
trust the management at their own institutions.

Plenty of universities, after all, have admonished students and 
employees selected for abuse by outsiders. It’s important, then, to 
think together about how to do intellectual and activist work in 
difficult conditions.

We should honor the personal choices of Canary Mission’s victims and 
continue building support systems that are both inclusive and unassailable.

Whatever anybody chooses to do, it’s critical never to lose sight of the 
fact that we’re first and foremost in opposition to Israeli 
settler-colonization, the progenitor of rinky-dink groups like Canary 
Mission.


    The unity of repression

Canary Mission exemplifies the problems of the corporate university more 
broadly: donor meddling, institutional racism, adamant Zionism, 
right-wing structures, top-down governance, arbitrary decision-making, 
shadowy influences and political suppression.

Those interested in justice for Palestinians (and other colonized 
peoples) can pursue different values. Ask department heads, deans and 
provosts on your campus to release statements reaffirming our right to 
criticize Israel (or any other state) and disavowing public blacklists 
as anathema to pedagogical custom, scholarly interchange and academic 
freedom.

Given the history of successful Zionist meddling in campus affairs, 
administrative silence can rightly be seen as a form of tacit approval. 
Zionists who meddle certainly view it that way.

University administrators love discussing their devotion to open 
inquiry, campus safety and principles of community. It should therefore 
be a no-brainer for such noble characters to vocally oppose efforts to 
harm their own faculty and students.


    Anonymous known entities

Websites that profile leftists raise interesting questions about the 
role of anonymity in public debate. The proprietors of Canary Mission, 
for example, aim to publicize individuals (often with outlandish 
hyperbole) but insist on remaining anonymous.

Canary Mission has been linked 
<http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/modern-day-mccarthyists-are-going-extremes-slime-activists-fighting-israels> 
to the far-right, pro-Israel and anti-Muslim demagogue Daniel Pipes and 
other pro-Israel organizations and individuals, but no one has 
explicitly taken responsibility for it.

The obvious takeaway is that those proprietors are cowards and 
hypocrites. But we do well to move beyond the obvious and consider 
broader structures of power.

No matter how much they protest to the contrary, the basis of sites like 
Canary Mission is defamation. They identify sentient individuals and 
then transform them into fixed, sortable profiles.

The individuals are embellished and manipulated into sensationalized 
political objects under constant scrutiny, a type of surveillance, 
really. The content of the profiles can change, but the aspersions they 
generate are permanent. Anonymity entails a lack of personal accountability.

The supporter of justice in Palestine can be named, but the accuser 
purports to occupy a universal position of virtue that requires no 
identification.

Anonymity, then, is an implicit profession of establishmentarian 
principles. The colonial state makes it a point to name those who 
challenge it.

Targets of Canary Mission harassment needn’t attempt to out the precise 
individuals behind the site, though for journalists it’s probably a 
worthwhile endeavor.

Their individual identities matter less than their collective 
performance of colonial violence. Anonymity is the perfect symbol of 
their adamant commitment to dehumanization.


    Post-profile pride

Upon being targeted for recrimination, think about an ethical 
disinvestment from those who want to cause you harm.

Canary Mission’s proprietors are clearly terrible people, so accept the 
occasion to distance yourself from the organization in the concrete.

When Palestine is liberated, we want it to be better than Israel.

The very basis of our activism is creating something more just and 
humane than the Zionist state and its corollaries.

We can perform that desire by enacting an ethics of democracy and 
empathy. Doing so is a rebuke of those accustomed to getting their way 
through insult and intimidation.

It is also a reaffirmation of the values that led us to decolonial 
politics. In other words, as unpleasant as it is, getting attacked by 
Zionists is an opportunity to become an even better activist, scholar, 
and community member.

It’s a reminder to be mindful of not reproducing in our own communities 
the techniques and strategies central to Zionist organizing, which 
thrives on authoritarianism and coercion.

The very notion of a free Palestine is useless if we can’t model 
integrity and generosity in the communities that prefigure its liberation.

Canary Mission isn’t a threat to Palestine activism.

By trying to stifle individuals who represent a movement, the 
organization merely amplifies its own weakness in the presence of ideas. 
It is fully in our power to make this work more satisfying than dangerous.

What to do if you’re profiled on Canary Mission?

The same thing that got you noticed in the first place, of course: 
criticize the hell out of Israel.


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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