Academics Refuse the Label ‘Terrorism’ to Censor Palestinian Political Speech
Zooming out of the pernicious grip of corporate tech giants and universities alike, faculty members at several US campuses are courageously modeling resistance for their students.
“You do not need to be an expert to put on this webinar. USACBI will provide you with all the resources you need to put together a thoughtful, informed, content-rich 1-hour webinar. There will be a menu of options in our sample curriculum to choose from. And you should create an event that is doable and tailored to needs of your particular campus, time-frame, and political situation and needs.”
The above comes from the Call to Action October 23: We Will Not Be Silenced! Against the Criminalization and Censorship Of Campus Political Speech organized by US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).
USACBI is “a U.S. campaign focused specifically on a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, as delineated by PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).”
“We must fight back against corporate silencing of Palestinian voices like those of Leila Khaled as well as against university administrations’ complicity in the violation of the academic freedom of their faculty and students.”
The call to action is in response to what occurred on Sep 23, 2020, when “corporate tech giants Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube acted in lockstep with San Francisco State University (SFSU) to shut down an open classroom webinar entitled ‘Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,’ co-sponsored by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program (AMED) and the Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) at San Francisco State University.”
The “astonishing and, hitherto, unprecedented act” of sabotaging the SFSU event was orchestrated by Zionist Jewish organizations that have long viciously attacked academics who advocate for justice and liberation in Palestine. These included the Lawfare Project and AMCHA Initiative, as The Electronic Intifada has reported, as well as an Israeli government-sponsored app that took credit for the cancellation.
It is not illegal to host a member of a US-govt labeled “terrorist organization” as a speaker in a classroom or academic event, nor is it “material support of terrorism.”
Their modus operandi on social media is to implement an algorithmic take-down of pro-Palestine events. For example, Zionist supporters on Facebook are marshaled to manipulate the algorithm by clicking “report” on the event, which is then put on the “at risk of being unpublished” for violating standards status. Facebook then accepts the malicious Zionist reporting and take it down without including human review.
Appealing it in Facebook is important to at least force the company to perform a human review.
USACBI organizers are appalled that SFSU has refused to support the Sep 23rd webinar’s organizers, Profs. Rabab Abdulhadi (AMED) and Tomomi Kinukawa (WGS), “defend their academic freedom, or provide them with an alternative platform.”
It appears also that the administration of the University of Hawai’i is going down a similar path as that taken by SFSU. Spokesman Dan Meisenzahl distanced the university from the event when interviewed by The Jewish Journal, which signaled that Zoom had cancelled the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s webinar.
Following the above, USACBI published a statement titled “Zoom wants to censor Leila Khaled again — join us October 23 to defend academic freedom and Palestinian rights!”, in which they explained:
Just this afternoon, the webinar organized at the University of Hawai’i for this Friday, October 23, featuring a message from Leila Khaled … was suddenly cancelled, pulled from the Zoom platform after a series of complaints from pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian organizations.
… The University of Hawai’i event is one of many being organized this Friday — and these are all going forward with speakers and the message from Leila … We must fight back against corporate silencing of Palestinian voices like those of Leila Khaled as well as against university administrations’ complicity in the violation of the academic freedom of their faculty and students.
It is shameful but possible for Zionist and far right organizations to dictate to university administrations what are legitimate subjects of academic and scholarly activity because of the financial pressures they exert.
In Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money, Isaac Kamola explains how “small group of billionaire-funded actors — Campus Reform, the College Fix, Turning Point USA, Breitbart News Network, and others — manufacture these controversies as part of a much larger strategy of strengthening donor influence over universities.”
This time around, such pressure groups are using the threat of dubious legal action to achieve their political goals.
As I comment in Learning the Palestinian Revolution & The Zoomification Of Higher Education, the well-documented and outrageous repression against and silencing of Palestinian scholarship and advocacy, is “not relying just on the usual arguments of intimidation and repression such as that Jewish students would feel uncomfortable in such classrooms or even that of spurious claims of anti-Semitism. They are claiming that the company (Zoom) will be open to civil lawsuits and potentially criminal penalties under US anti-terror laws and US OFAC sanctions. Their action underlines once again the dangers of these laws and rulings, because even though the claims are dubious at best, the legal issues are more complicated and could drag on for a long time.”
Following is the short biography of Leila Khaled included in the materials USACBI prepared for the Call to Action:
BIOGRAPHY OF LEILA KHALED
Leila Khaled, one of the most iconic of figures of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli colonization of Palestine, was born on April 9, 1944, in the Palestinian port city of Haifa. At this time, Palestine was under the British Mandate and subject to mass emigration of Jewish settlers who were increasingly violent. For example, right after Khaled’s birth, Jewish militias attacked Haifa’s train yards and nearby Palestinian villages. On Khaled’s fourth birthday, Jewish militias infamously massacred more than one hundred Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin.
As a result, Khaled’s family fled Palestine shortly after her fourth birthday. Little did they know that this violence was part of the overall war that would lead to the creation of the state of Israel and prevent them from ever being able to return to their homeland.
The declaration of Israel’s independence on May 15, 1948, and the war that ensued, resulted in the flight and forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, an ethnic cleansing that Palestinians refer to as Al Nakba, or “the Catastrophe.” To this day, the Israeli regime denies Palestinians’ internationally recognized right to return to the homes and lands from which they were expelled, as specified in UN Resolution 194, issued in December 1948. As a result, Palestinians today constitute one of the largest refugee populations in the world.
Like so many other Palestinian children, the young Khaled attended school in refugee camps in Lebanon, becoming politicized as she listened to her older brothers and sisters talk about what they learned while studying at the American University in Beirut, where they joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM). Soon, as she learned the reasons for her family’s expulsion from Palestine and their inability to return, she too committed herself to the ANM, attending meetings, sometimes in secret.
However, Arab nationalism began to splinter due to internal tensions and the 6-Day War of 1967, in which Israel seized and occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
In the wake of the 1967 war, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was created as a resistance organization of Palestinians disillusioned by the war and the broken promises of Arab regimes to come to their defense.
Over her family’s opposition to a combat role for women, Khaled received military training with the PFLP in Amman, Jordan, and was selected for the unprecedented special mission of hijacking a commercial aircraft en route to Tel Aviv.
Such hijackings were designed to be spectacular media stunts to draw attention to the Palestinian cause. Their specific goal was to secure release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails; end military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; and liberate Palestine. Heretofore, reasoning with Israel and pleading with the “international community” had gotten Palestinians nothing but more occupation, settlements, and dispossession. The PFLP, and Khaled along with it, felt the hijacking of an Israeli aircraft was necessary to draw international attention to the injustices suffered by the Palestinian people, but which no one seemed interested in or willing to acknowledge.
Thus, in hijacking TWA Flight 840 on August 29, 1969, Khaled demanded that Israeli air traffic control address her as “Flight PFLP Free Arab Palestine,” and directed the pilot to fly over her hometown of Haifa, the home from which she had been expelled, and to which she would forever be prohibited from returning. No one was injured in the course of this hijacking.
In 1970, Khaled and a comrade participated in another airplane hijacking, attempting to divert an Israeli El Al flight as part of a group of simultaneous hijackings planned by the PFLP. Her comrade was killed by Israeli air marshals during the operation and she was detained by the British authorities upon the plane’s landing in London. She was held for a few weeks by the British and then released in a prisoner exchange with Jordan.
Ever since then, Khaled has continued to fight for the liberation of her people. In 1971, she moved to Beirut, where she continued to be a member of PFLP and worked to empower refugees, especially women, in the refugee camps in Lebanon to speak for themselves. She has also been member of the Palestinian National Congress and deliberated in its various meetings and subcommittees. In 1989, after the end of the civil war in Lebanon, she returned to Jordan where she has remained ever since. She visited the West Bank and Gaza only once, in 1996, to participate in the National Congress; she has never been able to visit Haifa. She was and remains a staunch critic of the Oslo peace process since she believes that Israel was never interested in peace. She continues to speak publicly about Palestinian liberation and their fundamental right to return home.
It is not illegal to host a member of a US-govt labeled “terrorist organization” as a speaker in a classroom or academic event, nor is it “material support of terrorism.”
According to USACBI’s latest update, “Campuses across North America are joining in the campaign to resist corporate and university silencing of Palestinian narratives and Palestinian voices. On October 23, join us to host a webinar via your campus’ Zoom account, including a video of Leila Khaled, to make it clear that we will not be silenced. It’s not too late for you to join us — add your event and raise your voice for Palestinian rights.”
A statement titled USACBI stands with Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi and Leila Khaled asserts:
The longstanding American and Israeli traditions of slandering people and movements advocating justice and liberation for Palestinian people as anti-Semitic, inhuman, and even “terrorist” are not simply libelous; they are poisonous and destructive. They ignore the actual, material power disparities that exist on the ground for Palestinians living under Israeli siege and occupation. Instead, these attacks mobilize an ideological politics of false victimhood and moral righteousness to condemn “terrorism” even as Israel tightens its strangleholds of racism, imprisonment, torture, segregation, dispossession, disappearance, and slow genocide on those who refuse, as Edward Said once put it, to simply “go away.” Palestinians have refused to disappear; consequently, they are punished in a thousand ways. “Terrorism” is one name for that punishment, a term used by western colonizers and Zionists to name Palestinians’ refusal to disappear and to disable, disarm, and discredit all efforts at Palestinian self-determination. “Terrorism” is the means by which Palestinian determination not to disappear has been rendered criminal, inhumane, “savage,” and evil.
The question now is: Will the faculty members engaged in the action spearheaded by USACBI succeed in asserting the right for Leila Khaled to speak and for students and faculty to hear from her without the censorship and intervention of Zionist groups, private tech companies or administrators?
Note: The following link contains a list of scheduled events related to the USACBI action on Oct 23rd below (scroll down). More will be added as they are announced:
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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
