[News] New attack on free speech: Pro-Israel groups wage war on campus freedom

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.salon.com/2016/09/24/new-attack-on-free-speech-pro-israel-groups-wage-war-on-campus-freedom/ 



  New attack on free speech: Pro-Israel groups wage war on campus freedom

David Palumbo-Liu - September 24, 2016

College campuses traditionally have been the sites of social and 
political protest — the combination of youth, intellectual energy, free 
speech, and academic freedom is a powerful catalyst for vibrant and 
often heated debate. Given the strain this can sometimes place on the 
equilibrium of universities, it is not surprising to see limits placed 
on speech and action. What is unusual is for pressure to come from 
groups outside the university. That’s precisely what is happening today 
when it comes to the topic of Israel and Palestine, and the overreach of 
some pro-Israel organizations into campus free speech is such that even 
those who oppose an academic boycott of Israel have condemned their actions.

A number of recent cases have come onto the scene just as the academic 
year has begun. Not only have these cases continued previous trends 
regarding the stifling of speech and the retaliation against those who 
are critical of Israeli state policies toward the Palestinians, they 
have raised such efforts to a new level.

The Amcha Initiative <http://www.amchainitiative.org/>, Canary Mission 
<https://canarymission.org/> and other groups claim that they are 
fighting anti-Semitism on campus. But because they equate criticism of 
Israel with hatred of Jews as a people, any act or speech critical of 
Israel may be construed as anti-Semitic. These groups then exert 
political pressure on administrators to punish what they call 
anti-Semitism, and administrators will often bend to their will to avoid 
bad publicity, abrogating their responsibilities to protect free speech 
and academic freedom.

In October 2014, a group of prominent Jewish scholars issued a statement 
criticizing Amcha’s tactics:

    It goes without saying that we, as students of antisemitism, are
    unequivocally opposed to any and all traces of this scourge. That
    said, we find the actions of AMCHA deplorable. Its technique of
    monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences strains the basic
    principle of academic freedom on which the American university is
    built. Moreover, its definition of antisemitism is so
    undiscriminating as to be meaningless. Instead of encouraging
    openness through its efforts, AMCHA’s approach closes off all but
    the most narrow intellectual directions and has a chilling effect on
    research and teaching.

Yet Amcha’s tactics pale before those of Canary Mission, which claims: 
“The Canary Mission database was created to document the people and 
groups that are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on college 
campuses in North America. Every individual and organization has been 
carefully researched and sourced.”

But Canary Mission is not just “documenting people and groups,” it is 
also contacting their employers and universities to smear reputations 
with distorted depictions of activities and opinions, endangering these 
activists’ careers both inside and outside the academy. Writing in the 
Academe Blog of the American Association of University Professors, 
Hank Reichman 
<https://academeblog.org/2016/08/01/another-blacklist-emerges/> calls 
Canary Mission a “genuine blacklisting site … which is potentially far 
more dangerous [than Amcha] for academic freedom.”

Some who have been targeted are speaking out, describing what it’s like 
to be targeted by Canary Mission and how it has affected their lives.

Liliana, a junior majoring in international relations who did not want 
to be identified further, said, “Canary Mission gave me the worst 
anxiety. They launched a Twitter campaign to get me fired from my job. 
Luckily, my job’s human resources called and were totally supportive. 
They recognized them as a hate group and were ultimately concerned about 
my safety. I was so thankful. However, the anxiety that doesn’t seem to 
go away is the fact that I might not be able to enter Palestine. I have 
family there and my mother especially is worried about what we will 
endure at the border crossing next time we go. When my profile first got 
put up, I had trouble eating and sleeping. I would wake up with bad 
anxiety and start gagging as if I were going to vomit … I can handle 
grade-school bullying. What bothers me is the constant worry about 
what’s going to happen to me because of it. I also feel uncomfortable 
having my pictures out there. It puts me at risk for sexual and/or 
physical violence.”

Shezza Abboushi Dallal, who graduated from Barnard College in May 2016 
with a history degree, told me that she and about 15 other organizers 
with the campus groups Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and 
Columbia Jewish Voice for Peace woke up one day to find newly published 
profiles appearing on the first page of a Google search. These profiles 
featured “dozens of quotes, photographs, and videos that had been 
collected from an array of online platforms — including our private 
social media accounts,” Dallal said. “Pictures of me accompanied by 
humiliating and inciting captions were being tweeted and retweeted … It 
was incredibly shocking to have documentation of involvement of which I 
am resiliently proud be distorted and manipulated to appear as the exact 
opposite of what it is — an effort to stand for the human rights and 
dignity of a people in the face of occupation, oppression, and gross 
violation of international law. Equally shocking was the knowledge that 
countless individuals were being empowered to contribute to such an 
initiative, while having their acts of intimidation protected by the 
site’s anonymity.”

Sumaya Awad of Williams College wrote: “My future was threatened by this 
ominous and libelous website labeling me a ‘terrorist threat.’ Canary 
Mission was created to make students like me feel atomized and 
threatened, to push us away from activism and to erode the rights of 
Palestine activists to mobilize.”

Students and faculty being profiled by Canary Mission are proud of their 
actions and have no desire to disavow them. What they object to is the 
way they say Canary Mission has taken fragments of statements and 
recontextualized them, distorting their original meaning, broadcasting 
them all over the Internet and then contacting employers, future 
employers and universities, all while operating under the cloak of 
anonymity.

An open letter opposing Canary Mission’s tactics 
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj39szewJ7PAhWDaz4KHXdsC6EQFggyMAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmlaboycott.wordpress.com%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fdefend-campus-free-speech-oppose-canary-missions-blacklisting-of-students-and-scholars%2F&usg=AFQjCNGtXhOvKHlX07M_4EyDuxT871knDg> 
will be released this week, signed by more than 1,000 scholars including 
Robin D.G. Kelley, Daniel Boyarin, James Schamus and Joan Scott. [Full 
disclosure: I am also a signatory.]

The letter reads in part:

    As faculty who serve, have served, or are likely to serve on an
    admissions committee at graduate and undergraduate university
    programs across the country, we unequivocally assert that the Canary
    Mission website should not be trusted as a resource to evaluate
    students’ qualifications for admission. We condemn Canary Mission as
    an effort to intimidate and blacklist students and faculty who stand
    for justice for Palestinians…

    Although, as individual faculty, we hold a range of viewpoints on
    Israel-Palestine, we recognize that student advocacy for Palestinian
    human rights is not inherently anti-Semitic, and that such advocacy
    represents a cherished and protected form of free speech that is
    welcome on college campuses. We reject the McCarthyist tactics used
    by Canary Mission. Canary Mission’s aim is to damage these students’
    futures, and to punish them for their principled human rights
    activism. We urge our fellow admissions faculty, as well as
    university administrators, prospective employers and all others, to
    join us in signing below and standing against such bullying and
    attempts to shut down civic engagement and freedom of speech.

In the case of faculty who are employed at public universities, another 
tactic used to harass activists has been to delve into their personnel 
records, as in the case of Simona Sharoni. As reported in Inside Higher 
Education, 
<https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/13/professor-who-advocates-israel-boycott-latest-face-demands-records-about-her-career> 
Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at SUNY Plattsburgh 
who was raised in Israel and previously taught there, is a strong 
proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). 
Recently her university informed her that a series of public records 
requests had been made to gather information on her “hiring, continued 
employment and conferences attended while at Plattsburgh.”

IHE goes on to note a strongly worded letter written on Sharoni’s behalf 
by the Middle East Studies Association, which reads in part: “It appears 
to us that these [open-records] requests are part of the continuing 
campaign to harass and intimidate Sharoni because she has expressed 
certain political views … We therefore call upon university officials to 
exercise extreme caution and responsible judgment in reviewing and 
approving [such] requests for records pertaining to Sharoni, so as not 
to be complicit in furthering the campaign of harassment being waged 
against her.” It also urges the university to “publicly and vigorously 
affirm its commitment to the principles of free speech and academic 
freedom as well as its intention to defend Sharoni and other faculty 
members against harassment and threats by politically motivated 
individuals and groups based outside the university community.”

Another case among many is that of Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi of San 
Francisco State University, who has long been the target of harassment 
due to her work as the director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities 
Diaspora program there. Outside groups have pressed administrators to 
investigate how she carries our her duties — building research and study 
opportunities for her campus with colleagues abroad is construed by such 
groups as association with “terrorists.” Recently Abdulhadi negotiated a 
Memorandum of Understanding between SFSU and An-Najah University in the 
West Bank. In this and other ventures she has gone through the proper 
procedures and secured the requisite authorization. SFSU’s 
administration has defended Abdulhadi, finding that she acted in accord 
with its rules and in order to fulfill her job.

In 2014 SFSU president Leslie Wong stated, in response to Amcha’s 
continued attacks on Abdulhadi, “Faculty can and do communicate with 
others relevant to their research, communicating by various methods that 
can involve travel. Professor Abdulhadi’s academic work in race and 
resistance studies requires examination of some of the world’s most 
challenging and controversial issues. San Francisco State University 
will continue to respect academic freedom, and we will not censor our 
scholars nor condone censorship by others.”

But Amcha and other organizations are not satisfied with leaving 
universities to manage their own affairs. Besides these acts of 
intimidation against students and faculty, sometimes reaching into their 
personal lives, organizations are also trying to influence what kinds of 
courses can be taught at the university.

At the University of California, Berkeley, a course on Palestine was 
criticized by Jewish groups, who — in a campaign organized by Amcha — 
wrote to the U.C. administration urging that the course be censored. A 
thorough report 
<https://academeblog.org/2016/09/15/berkeley-bans-a-palestine-class/> on 
this episode by John K. Wilson in Academe Blog explains how 
administrators suspended the course in midsession, a highly unusual act, 
especially given the fact that the groups protesting the course had not 
even asked for such a radical move. This can be seen as yet another 
instance where university administrators react defensively in ways that 
violate proper procedure and faculty governance.

The U.C. administration first explained that its decision to suspend the 
class was because the instructors had not received the proper 
authorization to offer it. Yet as Wilson’s article documents, the 
instructors had indeed gathered all the proper authorizations. It was 
apparently the administration that had erred in not being aware of the 
necessary procedures in the first place. Of course, there’s a decent 
chance that the administration’s rationale for suspending the course was 
simply a pretext for bending to the will of outside organizations.

As Wilson writes:

    If there was a breakdown in bureaucratic procedures (and there is no
    evidence of it), then it is the obligation of the university to fix
    those procedures in the future, not to ban a course and punish a
    facilitator and his students who reasonably followed every written rule.

    This decision sends a clear message to the campus: controversial
    speech will be punished, especially if it is critical of Israel.

    This course suspension is absolutely indefensible, completely
    unacceptable and purely motivated by politics and public relations.
    It is a violation of academic freedom, shared governance, U.C.
    Berkeley’s guidelines, the Regents Policies, and the First Amendment
    of the U.S. Constitution.

A letter from students in the class, written to the administrators who 
authorized the suspension, points out the irony of something like this 
happening at Berkeley:

    The decision to suspend Ethnic Studies 198: Palestine: A Settler
    Colonial Analysis is a violation of our academic freedom. This is an
    alarming development to have transpire on the same campus that not
    only hosted the Free Speech Movement, but which also routinely
    claims and utilizes the same Movement’s legacy to market itself as a
    world-class institution, a bastion of tolerance and diversity, and
    the site of intellectual inquiry — inquiry that is sometimes
    discomforting, but always enriching. Your decision constitutes
    nothing less than an act of discrimination against students who
    wanted to debate and discuss this contentious issue in a spirit of
    genuine sincerity, mutual respect and open-minded curiosity.

    Again: the decision to suspend our course is both discriminatory and
    a violation of our academic freedom. We demand the reinstatement of
    the course.

As a result of protests from both students and faculty at Berkeley, as 
well as elsewhere, on Sept. 19 the administration relented 
<http://palestinelegal.org/news/2016/9/19/uc-berkeley-reinstates-course-on-palestine> 
and, in a letter to the instructors, reinstated the course. As John K. 
Wilson noted in a followup piece, 
<https://academeblog.org/2016/09/19/allowed-again-but-question-remain-about-suspension-of-berkeley-class/> 
the U.C. dean involved in this case may not have had the authority to 
suspend the course in the first place, or to insist that instructors 
alter the course’s content as a condition of its reinstatement. This 
sets a dangerous precedent, when an outside group can exert such 
influence as to change the content of a course, bypassing the rights and 
responsibilities of faculty and interfering with what students can learn 
and how they can learn it.

Much of this overreach by anti-boycott groups turns out to be 
unwarranted and unnecessary. When challenged, as in the Berkeley case 
just mentioned, complaints against pro-Palestinian education and 
activism as “anti-Semitic” are often shown to be unfounded. The vast 
majority of the charges anti-boycott organizations have leveled against 
pro-Palestinian activism has failed to stick. At the University of 
California at Irvine, as reported 
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjUod6ewp7PAhWKGT4KHc9aBr8QFggeMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpalestinelegal.org%2Fnews%2F2016%2F6%2F23%2Fuc-irvine-moves-to-criminalize-student-protest-of-israeli-soldiers-again&usg=AFQjCNHZoea6GSKNi0ZgTVuUO3OFQ9d-hw> 
by Palestine Legal:

    After interviewing witnesses and reviewing extensive video footage,
    UCI’s Office of Student Conduct released a 58-page report finding
    that SJP students arrived peacefully at the event but were locked
    out by its organizers … Members of SJP, joined by students from
    other student groups, began demonstrating outside the event when
    they were locked out. The report confirms SJP’s account that their
    protest was peaceful, and found claims made by attendees of the
    event that protesters blocked the exits and threatened attendees to
    be unsubstantiated.

At San Francisco State, a study concluded 
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiws-G5wp7PAhWDNz4KHbhHBfYQFggiMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpalestinelegal.org%2Fnews%2F2016%2F9%2F2%2Fsfsu-concludes-protest-targeted-israeli-policies-not-jewish-students&usg=AFQjCNGSvVU1N6mdh2ipjVkQ1-8vOAHr6g&bvm=bv.133387755,d.cWw> 
that contrary to charges brought against demonstrators, a protest 
against Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat’s visit was not anti-Semitic: “On 
September 1, San Francisco State University (SFSU) released a report 
examining a protest of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat who visited the campus 
in April. After interviewing 20 witnesses and reviewing extensive 
documentation, the impartial investigator concluded that the protest was 
disruptive, but that it posed no safety risks and focused on the mayor 
for the policies he promotes.” As Palestine Legal reports, “Student 
protestors were accused of threatening Jewish students with violent and 
anti-Semitic messages. SFSU singled out the General Union of Palestinian 
Students (GUPS) for discipline despite the participation of many 
students from diverse groups. GUPS members were also targeted with death 
threats, rape threats, online profiling and in-person 
harassment following the protest.”

Despite the failure of these charges, such actions will continue, 
largely because part of their purpose is to tie up resources and energy, 
and make administrators act preemptively to disallow events that might 
pose a problem.

Those not involved in the debate over Israel-Palestine may not be 
concerned about Canary Mission and its methods. But these tactics can be 
used by any group. Especially in educational institutions, it is 
essential to recognize outside organizations whose goal is to interfere 
with the mission and ethos of education, and who seek to silence, smear 
and intimidate those with whom they disagree.

<http://www.salon.com/2016/09/24/new-attack-on-free-speech-pro-israel-groups-wage-war-on-campus-freedom/>
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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