Rania Khalek Dispatches from the Underclass
/ June 22, 2014 / 2 Comments

Dahr Jamail: What's Happening in Iraq Is the Legacy of the US Invasion and Occupation

For this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure, Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail about Iraq’s continued descent into chaos. (Download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here)

Back in March, Jamail came on the show to discuss war crimes being committed by the US-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki against Sunnis in Fallujah with US arms, a development the mainstream US media had virtually ignored.

The media’s widespread neglect of Iraq changed almost instantly with the takeover of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a militant group so extreme that even al Qaeda has distanced itself. With US interests at stake and the Obama administration weighing airstrikes, Iraq is once again worthy of the spotlight. But as Jamail explains, there is more to Iraq’s current woes than the US media is letting on.

“What is happening in Iraq is the legacy that the US invasion and occupation have left there,” said Jamail.

Sectarianism was deliberately woven into the fabric of Iraq by the United States following the invasion. “The Iraqi Governing Council set up on under the Coalition Provisional Authority was set up strictly along sectarian lines and that started happening in the first month of the occupation,” explained Jamail. Next came US-trained Shia death squads that were used to suppress the mostly Sunni insurgency fighting the US occupation. Later, when the US withdrew, the Obama administration continued to train and arm Maliki despite well-documented evidence of his sectarian war crimes against Sunnis, which ISIS has exploited.

Jamail spoke of his trip to Iraq in 2013, where he witnessed weekly protests against Maliki. “The US has backed since his installation many years ago and has sold him now over $25 billion of arms and training and counting,” said Jamail. “Sunnis were protesting against him because he was sending the military into Sunni towns, Sunni enclaves and killing people, detaining people and then once they were detained, torturing them. There was all kinds of rampant reports of detaining women, them being raped while they were in prison.” The protests, which began in 2012, were nonviolent “until the military at one point decided to start killing people at protests.”

Jamail described “seething anger” among protesters, particularly young people. ISIS groups, who were in the crowd, “tapped into the disenfranchised youth of the mainstream Sunni community in these targeted areas as well as a lot of the Baathist leadership has remained in Iraq and a lot of ex-military guys, they’ve all teamed up,” explained Jamail. This is why ISIS has been so successful; it has support from a significant portion of Iraq’s Sunni population.

Jamail also noted that the US and its allies have contributed to the growing power of ISIS by arming them both directly and indirectly in Syria. “We have literally a catch-22 situation play out on the ground where on the one hand the US has provided unbridled support in the form of weapons and funding to ISIS in Syria and on the other hand they’re providing unbridled support to Maliki in Baghdad and now of course both sides are fighting each other,” said Jamail.

While the Bush administration is largely responsible for Iraq’s unraveling, President Obama is culpable. “There’s been a seamlessness in the policies between the Bush administration and the Obama administration,” explained Jamail. “That withdrawal date was set during the Bush administration and Obama simply carried forward with plans that were already made. So there really hasn’t been a change. There were already massive amounts of military hardware and training being sold to the government of Iraq. Obama continued that and in fact escalated it…and of course now they’re rushing even more funding into Maliki and talking about drone strikes.”

As for the Iraq war architects reappearing on cable news to offer Iraq analysis, Jamail advised, “The only thing instructive about what they say is you can pretty much rest assured that the opposite is true.”

In the discussion portion of the show, Kevin and I talk about Hillary Clinton’s desire to deport immigrant children who are fleeing violence in Central America, the terror Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in its search for three missing Israeli teens, and recent court cases that demonstrate a disturbing erosion of our civil liberties.

Below is a full transcript of our interview with Jamail. Read More

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/ June 8, 2014 / 10 Comments

Podcast: Max Blumenthal On Israel's Continuing Shift Toward Fascism

Kevin Gosztola and I celebrated the 20th episode of Unauthorized Disclosure by interviewing our very first white male guest, award-winning journalist and author Max Blumenthal. (Download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here)

We spoke with Max about Israel/Palestine, segments of the American left that have yet to endorse BDS and Israel’s continuing rightward shift toward fascism, which he documents in his latest book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

We also discussed his recent article for The Nation on hunger strikers in immigration detention. Here’s Kevin with the highlights”

While there has been a lot of focus on the backlash to his book, Blumenthal notes that he has “gotten a lot of support for the book” in the months since it was published. “That’s something that’s been overlooked.”

“One of the most favorable reviews of the book was by Akiva Elder, who covered politics for Haaretz, one of the four main newspapers in Israel, for thirty-five years and said this book describes the reality that I’ve been living in for my whole life, which I forgot existed around me because I’d become so immune and inured to it,” he explains. “If you look at Haaretz’s reporting and some of their columns, [it’s] almost like a mimeograph or very condensed dissemination of the key themes in my book of Israel veering toward fascism under the control of an authoritarian government that’s dictated by the imperatives of a lawless occupation.”

Blumenthal notes the many screeds that were written by The Nation’s Eric Alterman to attack him but says they largely failed because the left rose to the occasion and pushed back. “They’re sick of seeing these kinds of books and critiques be suppressed.” In the end, it amounted to “a lot of free publicity.”

Blumenthal supports the overall progressive mission of The Nation and notes he still has a good professional relationship with the publication but criticized the magazine for failing to take a position on BDS as a tactic.

“They told me they were going to debate BDS and kind of take a position on it and I haven’t seen that magazine take a position,” Blumenthal says. “And they continue hosting debates between people, who support it because they support equality for Palestinians, versus opponents of Palestinian equality, who are Zionists like Bernard Avishai who lives in an Arab home in Jerusalem whose residents were ethnically cleansed.”

“I just don’t understand how a progressive magazine, which takes really strong positions on other issues and doesn’t say, let’s have a debate between someone who believes climate change is real and someone who believes climate change is a hoax,” he adds. “They would never do that but they continue to do this on BDS and won’t take a position and I think that’s one of the failures of the left.”

Rep. Alan Grayson introduced a bill prohibiting federal funding to higher institutions of learning that participate in a boycott of Israel.

On Grayson’s attack on free speech, Blumenthal states, “My understanding of Grayson is that he’s taking the initiative personally on things like this and boasted that he is one of the Jewish members of Congress, who supported Israel during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, because he is personally passionate about Israel and Zionism and he just believes in Israel as a progressive and will not listen to critiques from the outside.”

Blumenthal continues, “What he’s done is something I think every liberal no matter what they think about BDS should reject and condemn which is to sanction an academic institution for expressing the democratic will of its members.”

“It is the pinnacle of neo-McCarthyism what Grayson is doing and we’re still not hearing much. I think that the word needs to get out that he’s done this. That’s he’s issued this bill to sanction the American Studies Association for supporting boycott of Israeli academic institution but we still haven’t heard much from his liberal supporters.”

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/ June 1, 2014 / 4 Comments

Podcast: Revolving Door Turns Human Rights Watch Into Propaganda Tool for US Foreign Policy

For this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure, Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Washington, DC-based activist and writer Keane Bhatt about the revolving door between Human Rights Watch and the US government. (Download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here)

Earlier this month Bhatt co-authored a letter addressed to HRW executive director, Kenneth Roth, calling into question the organization’s independence and credibility in light of its cozy relationship with members of the US foreign policy establishment.

Examples cited in the letter include, “Miguel Díaz, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst in the 1990s, sat on HRW Americas’ advisory committee from 2003-11. Now at the State Department, Díaz serves as ‘an interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.” Another is “HRW’s Washington advocacy director, Tom Malinowski, previously served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton and as a speechwriter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In 2013, he left HRW after being nominated as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor under John Kerry.”

Bhatt argued that this revolving door is influencing HRW’s priorities, leading to outrageous double standards in service of a destructive US foreign policy agenda. One case in point is HRW’s relentlessly negative portrayal of Venezuela, whose leftist government has been the target of US-backed overthrow since the late Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1998.

Referencing our interview with HRW’s Mary Wareham on the last episode of Unauthorized Disclosure, Bhatt added, “I don’t mean to diminish the importance of some of [HRW’s] critical coverage and advocacy around the kinds of questions that you focus on quite correctly—drones and automated drones and the kinds of prospects for a much less accountable form of warfare. But the letter was basically conceived to promote greater independence and greater accountability on behalf of Human Rights Watch because what I have discovered is the tendency to implement the double standards in the kind of advocacy and policy priorities that Human Rights Watch engages in.”

“The letter is very simple,” explained Bhatt. “If Human Rights Watch characterizes itself as an independent global organization, then it should strengthen those credentials and it should live up to those credentials by closing what we call its revolving door.”

The letter’s signatories, which include several Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and more than 100 scholars, are urging HRW to mandate a five-year cooling off period between leaving the government and working for HRW, and vice versa.

“It’s a very straightforward and, in my opinion, unassailable request,” Bhatt told us. “Unfortunately Human Rights Watch has yet to respond in any official way so I am going to be continuing to raise the pressure through a number of op-eds, through increased signatures at our petition at RootsAction.org and increase publicity.”

You can support the effort by signing the RootsAction.org petition here. And follow Bhatt on Twitter (here) for updates as he continues to make noise around this issue.

In the discussion portion of the show, Kevin and I talked about the Isla Vista shooting, the US government using proxies to enforce US imperialism, sanctions on Venezuela, the Obama administration’s cruel deportation machine, a positive California Supreme Court decision on police secrecy around shootings, a lawsuit against the mass detention of innocent people following a bank robbery in Aurora, Colorado, and NBC’s interview with Edward Snowden.

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/ May 29, 2014 / 7 Comments

‘Process of settler colonialism in the US is largely completed. In Palestine it’s ongoing.'

Last week in Canada journalist Max Blumenthal and Carleton University political science professor Mira Sucharov participated in a lengthy debate about whether it’s possible for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic. I highly recommend watching the debate in its entirety given how extremely rare it is for Zionists to publicly debate this issue, especially when it means taking on a person as knowledgable and articulate as Max. It’s also very likely the last time you will see a liberal Zionist debate an anti-Zionist in public, so enjoy it. (You can watch it here)

I could probably fill a book with Max’s most memorable remarks, but there’s one in particular that stood out for me.

At around the 87:25 mark Max addresses why he devotes so much time to reporting on settler colonialism in Palestine when settler colonialism has been taking place in his own country, the United States, for a lot longer and on a much larger scale. I’ve often wrestled with this same question, which is usually posed by people who genuinely feel that what’s happening in Palestine shouldn’t overshadow what’s happening in our own backyard. And they are right. But other times, this question is sandwiched in between accusations that Palestine solidarity is intentionally derailing conversations about settler colonialism in this country. In any case, Max does a wonderful job addressing this and I couldn’t agree more with his response:

When people ask me, “Why are you as an American covering this situation and focusing on it 5,000 miles away? Isn’t the United States a settler colonialist state and what are you doing about that?” That’s a legitimate question, it’s a legitimate challenge. Of course I have written about abuses of indigenous rights and immigrant rights in this country but I feel like I’m not doing enough.

One of the issues though is that the process of settler colonialism that brought the United States and Canada into being is largely a completed project which has left the First Nations, the Aboriginal people, the Native Americans, on reservations—the kind which Palestinian population centers increasingly resemble. And the Native people have been turned into a mascot for North America’s fun and games. They’ve had attack helicopters named after them and sold to the Israeli military. They’ve had precision guided missiles named after their weapons. It’s a reflection of the fact that they have been disappeared from the lives and the view of the white man.

The Jewish population of Israel—although they’ve probably never been able to ignore Palestinians more, especially in Tel Aviv thanks to the separation wall and the whole policy of Hafrada or separation—still considers the Palestinians to be a major threat to their existence. Palestinian resistance is ongoing and the process of settler colonialism is ongoing. And so Beitar Jerusalem, the main soccer team in Jerusalem, you don’t see them with Palestinian or Arab logos on their shirts. Instead you hear the cry of “death to Arabs” from their fanatics after every goal. You feel the sense of eliminationism in Israeli society because the process of 1948 is unfinished and as I’ve said again and again, the goal of the rightwing rulers of Israel is to ‘finish ‘48’ and that’s why they’re popular.

They want to finish that project that began in 1948 and I as a journalist feel like it’s my obligation to document what’s happening and to get in the way. If I were a journalist in the 1880s, I would hope that I would have been in the American West documenting these final massacres of the Lakota Sioux.

It’s no coincidence that we see so much solidarity growing between Palestine solidarity activists and Native American and Aboriginal activists in Canada and the United States. It’s because they both recognize a common process that they’ve been victimized by.

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/ May 18, 2014 / 1 Comment

Podcast: Who Would Be Responsible if a Killer Robot Committed a War Crime?

On this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure, Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch about autonomous killer robots.

(You can download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here)

Wareham is the advocacy director of HRW’s arms division, where she leads the global coalition to stop killer robots. She recently co-authored the report, “Shaking the Foundation: The Human Rights Implications of Killer Robots.”

Speaking to us from a meeting on lethal autonomous weapon systems convened by the United Nations in Geneva last week, Wareham described the ethical and legal challenges posed by killer robots, which are in development now.

“Our concern is what happens when you take the human out of the loop, out of that decision-making loop, and the system decides for itself what to target and how to fire,” explained Wareham. “Plus there’s this bigger issue when the human is removed from the loop as to what is the command and control over it. Is the sergeant still responsible for the device? Is the manufacturer responsible for the device? Is there product liability there? Is it the programmer’s responsibility? And that’s not really resolved yet.”

For the discussion portion of the show, Kevin and I talked about the growing demands for transparency around lethal injections, overwhelming American support for the death penalty, a survey that found 4 in 10 people around the world believe they would be tortured by their government if detained, updates about Guantanamo force-feedings and the mainstream media’s shameful distortion of the Palestinian Nakba.

Below is a partial transcript of our interview with Wareham. Read More

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/ May 11, 2014 / 2 Comments

Podcast: How the Immigration Detention Bed Quota Fuels Deportations and Traumatizes Families

On this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure, Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Carlos Garcia, the director of Puente Arizona, a grassroots organization fighting for migrant justice, about the congressionally-mandated immigration detention bed quota that requires 34,000 people be held in immigration detention at all times. (You can download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here.)

As Carlos explained in the interview, bed quotas are contributing to record high detentions and deportations, which are “breaking up families, destroying communities, and….leaving gaps in our society.” Describing the trauma this creates for immigrants and their loved ones, Carlos said, “It’s a constant fear. It’s a constant doubt of people, not knowing if their family members are going to be picked up that day.”

Carlos added that the immigration reform bill in Congress does nothing to alleviate bed quotas. In fact, if passed into law, detentions will intensify.

“A lot of the reasons why we are in this situation and people are being detained is because of previous immigration reform laws in 1996,” said Carlos. “In this last immigration bill that was proposed, it was also proposing more criminalization, more expansion of programs such as the Streamline program, which is a program in Arizona and Texas, a border program that gives people criminal sentences for having re-crossed the border.”

Carlos also updated us on hunger strikes that have taken place in immigration detention facilities across the country and offered examples for ways people are successfully fighting back.

When asked about the most difficult part of organizing around migrant justice, Carlos responded, “We have no friends,” since both the Democrats and Republicans to varying degrees are united against immigrant communities.

In the discussion portion Kevin and I talked about the need to be wary of US involvement in Nigeria, Yemen’s troubling deportation of a US journalist, Israel’s aggressive spying on the US, the Obama administration’s latest gag rule for government officials, and more.

I didn’t have a chance to post last week’s episode, which featured an interview with Rachel Meeropol, a senior staff attorney for CCR, about federal prisoners being isolated in Communications Management Units or CMUs. Fortunately, Kevin recapped and posted it here.

Below is a partial transcript of our interview with Carlos: Read More

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/ April 27, 2014 / 6 Comments

Podcast: What We're Not Hearing About The US Drone War Terrorizing Yemen

On this week’s epsode of Unauthorized Disclosure, Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni American activist who co-founded the Support Yemen media collective based in Sanaa. (You can download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here.)

Last week, US media outlets reported that upwards of 55 Al Qaeda militants in Yemen were killed in US air strikes, echoing the unverified claims of unnamed Yemeni officials. But, “What you’re not hearing,” said Rooj, “are the names of people who were killed.” And if the past is any indication (like drone bombing weddings and the massacre in al-Majala), it’s likely that many of those killed were civilians.

We’re also not hearing about the blowback from these strikes in the form of kidnappings and assassinations of Yemeni officials by militants, a cycle of violence that has “forced [Yemeni civilians] to live in between the terrorism of the state and the terrorism of al Qaeda,” said Rooj.

Still, most of the violence against civilians is coming from the targeted killings carried out by the US and backed by the Yemeni government. As a result, “People are too afraid to leave their homes, too afraid to go to schools, too afraid to visit each other, too afraid to even go to a funeral because they don’t know when a drone is going to strike,” explained Rooj.

On top of terrorizing people on the ground, drone strikes are pushing those impacted into the arms of al Qaeda. So in essence, US policy is creating the very terrorists it claims to be fighting.

“Many folks I spoke to actually said if the US is actually interested in countering al Qaeda then they would be building schools. They would be building hospitals. Look around. We have absolutely nothing,” said Rooj. “But I don’t think the US is interested in countering al Qaeda. I think this is something they want to keep doing to justify their presence in the Middle East.”

In the discussion portion of the show, Kevin and I talk about Kwadir Felton, the Alabama prisoner strike against slave labor and the FBI placing American Muslims on the no-fly list for refusing to become informants.

Below is the transcript of our interview with Rooj, who you can follow on Twitter at @Rooj129. Read More

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/ April 20, 2014 / 7 Comments

A Message from Gaza: 'Palestinian Refugees Will Never Give Up Their Right To Return'

“Palestinian refugees will never give up their right to return,” said Yousef Aljamal, a 24-year-old Palestinian writer from the Gaza Strip.

On this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure I spoke with Yousef while he was in Washington, DC, as part of the book tour for Gaza Writes Back, a collection of stories written by young Palestinians from Gaza in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military assault that killed killed 1,400 people including over 300 children in December 2008 and January 2009.

The only way to end the conflict, says Yousef, is to “Give equal rights to all and allow Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes.”

It’s not often that we hear directly from people who live in Gaza due to the Israeli siege by land, air and sea that cuts Gaza off from the outside world with the help of Egypt and the United States, which has turned Gaza into an open-air prison. Many of the Palestinians who contributed to Gaza Writes Back can’t even access a copy of the book because, like most basic everyday items, the book is prevented from entering the strip. The same goes for people. Despite securing a visa from the US embassy to accompany Yousef and two other writers on the book tour, contributer Sarah Ali was prevented from leaving Gaza by Israel. Such is life for those in the tiny coastal enclave, where Israel controls everything, even the number of calories Palestinians eat.

Yousef is a remarkable person who has lived a difficult life. Israel has taken the lives of two of his siblings, which he talks about in the interview.

Like 80 percent of the 1.7 million Palestinians living in Gaza, Yousef is a refugee. His family was expelled from the village Aqir in 1948 as part of a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians by Zionist colonizers. He and his family, like all Palestinian refugees, are banned from ever returning to their village simply because they’re not Jewish.

“I think [boycott, divestment and santions (BDS)] is the best way to help Palestinians,” he told me. “We are calling for equal rights for all people, Muslims, Christians and Jews. And I don’t think that anyone here in [Washington, DC] has a problem with equal rights. The problem is that we have some Israeli leaders who have a problem with equal rights. They don’t want to give Palestinians equal rights.”

Yousef has zero faith that the peace process can bring about a just end to the conflict.

“The peace process is used by Israel to further advance its colonial project and land confiscation and house demolitions and killings, airstrikes,” he said.

To keep up with Yousef’s work, check out his website (here) and follow him on twitter @YousefAljamal.

In the discussion portion of the show my co-host Kevin Gosztola and I talk about the white nationalist who shot and killed three people at a Jewish community center and an assisted living community in Kansas last week, the Bundy Ranch saga, Edward Snowden’s question to Putin and more.

You can download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here.

Below is a transcript of my interview with Yousef. Read More

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/ April 13, 2014 / 3 Comments

Podcast: CCR Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei On Court's Dismissal Of Lawsuit Against Drone Killings

On the this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Pardiss Kebriaei, lead staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), about the recent decision by a federal district court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the due-process-free drone killings of three US citizens. Kevin wrote a great summary of the interview here.

In the discussion portion Kevin and I share unverified and evidence-free claims that anonymous US officials have been whispering in our ears because that’s what serious journalists do.

Then we discuss the terrifying revelations about the FBI working with JSOC (the military’s not so secret assassination squad), the DOJ investigation finding Albuquerque police to blame for the majority of that city’s police killings, Cuban Twitter and the Obama administration’s out-of-control war on undocumented immigrants.

You can download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here.

 

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/ April 6, 2014 / 2 Comments

Podcast: War On Palestine Activism Threatens Free Speech On Campuses Across The Country

This week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure is devoted exclusively to the intensifying war on college campuses against Palestine solidarity activism, where pro-Israel groups are using their vast resources and influence to curtail free speech and academic freedom of those advocating for equal rights for Palestinians. (You can listen to the episode here or you can subscribe for free on iTunes here.)

Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with several people on the frontlines of this battle, beginning with Iymen Chehade, a professor at Columbia College.

Chehade teaches a popular course on the Israel-Palestine conflict that has predictably attracted outrage from Zionist students. One of these students complained anonymously to the school that Chehade’s course was biased because he screened the Academy Award-nominated Palestinian film 5 Broken Cameras.

“When I asked why the student hadn’t come to me or why they hadn’t asked the student to come to me, the response was that when he was in college he had been intimidated by an African-American professor that apparently did not like the white students in the classroom,” explained Chehade, who is Palestinian-American.

The administration responded by canceling one of Chehade’s courses and schooling him in the need to be more “balanced.”

“There has been a push on campus to try to stifle and try to muzzle and try to create at the minimum what has been called ‘balance,’ which is a word that has been thrown around a lot,” Chehade told us. “And it’s a word that can be misleading because on the surface it sounds pretty. Balance as a word sounds pretty. But the reality of it is you cannot balance the Israeli-Palestinian conflict especially when you are dealing with a nation state that has all the power that is derivative of a state occupying millions of people who do not have civil rights. It’s like presenting the civil rights movement and those who were against rights against human beings as balance. It’s like giving them a forum to counter why African-Americans, for example, shouldn’t have rights and dignity and so forth.”

After investigating the incident, the Illinois chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) determined that Chehade’s academic freedom had been violated and in a letter implored Columbia College to reverse course.

Next we spoke with Farah Erzouki and Suha Najjar, co-chairs of the University of Michigan Students Allied For Equality (SAFE). Last month, SAFE introduced a resolution for divestment from US companies profiting from Israeli occupation to the central student government but a well-coordinated campaign by Zionist groups managed to derail the vote indefinitely.

“We were all really frustrated because we came in there, ready to have the conversation, ready to have a discussion about divestment on our campus and we were just completely shut out. We were silenced by them and out of that frustration, out of that desire to hold them accountable we held a sit-in,” explained Erzouki.

The sit-in lasted a week until the student government agreed to vote on the resolution. In the end the resolution failed to pass but it was still a success for bringing attention to Israel’s horrific and decades long colonization of Palestine.

Journalist Max Blumenthal was at UM the night the resolution was being voted on and gave a powerful speech in favor of divestment. He later wrote about the racist smears and baseless allegations of anti-Semitism that SAFE students were forced to endure throughout the ordeal.

This did not deter Erzouki and Najjar from engaging in their activism but they are concerned by the lack of response from university administrators against the racist vitriol directed at them from Zionist students, one of whom was recently elected student government president. They also worry about the effect this could have on younger student activists.

“We don’t want [freshmen] to fear they are going to be called names like this,” said Erzouki. “We don’t want them to fear that they are not going to be able to freely express themselves without fear of this type of backlash.”

In our final interview, we spoke with Tori Porell, President of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Northeastern University, where the most intense suppression efforts against Palestine activism have taken place.

At the behest of Northeastern’s Hillel, the university suspended SJP last month for distributing mock eviction notices in student dorms with information and statistics about Palestinian home demolitions routinely carried out by Israel.

“It’s a little exercise in giving people a small tiny taste of what it might be like to come home one day and find your entire residence and entire existence criminalized arbitrarily,” explained Porell, noting that the biggest text on the flyer specified that the notice was not real.

About a week later, SJP received a letter from the university informing them that they were suspended. “We could no longer access any university resources, bookrooms and this was effective through the end of the year and then they would think about potentially reinstating us in the future with none of the same members.”

SJP students faced police harassment as well.

“Two days after we did this leafleting, those of us that were involved started getting calls on our private cell phones from the Northeastern police,” said Porell. “Several students were pulled in for interrogations and the police showed up at some people’s homes unannounced. And they just had all kinds of questions about SJP, mostly as an organization, not even necessarily regarding the flyers. The students who were interviewed first and actually the only students interviewed have very obviously-sounding Arab-Muslim names whereas students without Arab or Muslim-sounding names were not interviewed, even though some of us are on record with the university as being leaders in the group.”

Suppression of Palestine solidarity activism isn’t necessarily working but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a lasting impact on academic freedom and free speech that goes beyond the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Bills have surfaced in state legislatures across the country (Illinois, New York, Maryland) seeking to punish university organizations that support the academic boycott of Israel. There is a similar bill in the US Congress.

So as you listen to this episode, consider the damage to free speech that the pro-Israel forces behind these efforts will leave in their wake if they have their way.

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