BY JOHN K. WILSON
Earlier today, an event at San Francisco State University was banned by leading tech giants after a campaign to censor it was led by a large number of pro-Israel groups. It is an example of the growing power of conservative cancel culture, and this censorship reveals the threat to academic freedom posed by tech companies who are under intense pressure from the right to ban controversial ideas.
The virtual discussion, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance,” featured Leila Khaled, who is most famous for hijacking an Israeli flight over fifty years ago. The event was organized by SF State’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies department, and was organized and moderated by AMED associate professor Rabab Abdulhadi (who was also a recipient this year of the AAUP’s Georgina M. Smith Award for outstanding faculty activism).
After Zoom banned the event yesterday in response to a protest in front of the company’s headquarters due to claims that Zoom would be violating federal law against supporting terrorism, the event was moved to YouTube, which censored it twenty-three minutes into the livestream today.
Earlier today, Facebook had removed the page promoting the event, declaring that “We’ve removed this content for violating our policy prohibiting praise, support and representation for dangerous organizations and individuals, which applies to Pages, content and Events.”
For those on the left who demand that tech companies censor speech they think are wrong or offensive, this is a chilling reminder that censorship is a dangerous weapon that can be turned against progressives. It’s also a reminder of how vulnerable online learning is under corporate control. All colleges that use Zoom ought to demand that Zoom commit to protecting free expression of academic classes and events on its platform.
The administration of San Francisco State University deserves credit for refusing many demands to censor the event, and for objecting to the tech censorship. President Lynn Mahoney wrote to campus today:
“We learned late yesterday that Zoom will not allow the virtual class to go forward on its platform because Zoom believes that the event may violate its terms of service with the University and possibly the law. Although we disagree with, and are disappointed by, Zoom’s decision not to allow the event to proceed on its platform, we also recognize that Zoom is a private company that has the right to set its own terms of service in its contracts with users.“
As Mahoney noted, “We cannot embrace the silencing of controversial views, even if they are hurtful to others.”
The pressure on SFSU to ban the event has been intense. At least 86 organizations signed a “Letter to SFSU President Lynn Mahoney Concerning Upcoming Leila Khaled Event and Academic Freedom Abuse.”vThe letter asked, “what if an invitation to speak to a class—in fact an entire event—is an endorsement of a point of view and a political cause?” What if that’s true? Here’s the answer: Then freedom of expression on campus will be destroyed. If every speaker on a college campus is the endorsement of a point of view by the administration, then only positions endorsed by the administration will be allowed. All dissent will be suppressed. And the same logic will then apply to all faculty and students, whose expression of any idea is also an endorsement and opposing views must be prohibited.
The letter also wondered, “And what if the intention of the faculty member who extended such an invitation and organized such an event was not to encourage students ‘to think critically and come to independent, personal conclusions about events of local and global importance,’ but rather to promote the faculty member’s own narrow political view and to weaponize students to be foot soldiers in the faculty member’s own political cause?”
The dehumanization of students reflected in this argument is simply repulsive. To claim that students are “weaponized” by hearing an idea you don’t like is both condescending and an absurd misunderstanding of how students think.
The letter asked, “does academic freedom protect faculty who intentionally use their classrooms or other academic platforms not to educate their students but to indoctrinate them with propaganda consistent with their own political causes and to encourage their students to engage in political activism consistent with those causes?” Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, in a free university academic freedom must protect the right to encourage students to engage in political activism. You can toss around “indoctrinate” and “propaganda” to describe the discussion of any idea you don’t like, but you are simply demanding censorship and repression.
The letter concludes by announcing that not only should the event be banned, but that Abdulhadi is a criminal who should be prosecuted for inviting a controversial speaker:
“Prof. Abdulhadi’s blatant politicization of her classroom, conference hall and other professional spaces violates state laws prohibiting the misuse of SFSU’s name and resources for personal or political purposes, including for the promotion of a boycott (e.g. CA Government Code §8314 [12] and CA Education Code §89005.5 [13]); deprives her students of access to vital information about complex topics of global importance, as well as their fundamental right to be educated and not indoctrinated; foments a divisive and toxic atmosphere, both inside and outside the classroom, that incites hatred and harm towards Jewish and pro-Israel students; and seriously erodes the public trust in your university to uphold its academic mission and ensure the safety and well-being of all of its students.”
In this Orwellian approach, Abdulhadi is literally guilty of a thoughtcrime. She “deprives her students of access to vital information” by allowing them to hear a speaker, and she should be criminally punished for “politicization” of a public university conference hall. .
The censorship of this San Francisco State University event portends an ominous future for conservative cancel culture, and even more alarmingly reveals how easily tech companies can be manipulated to silence free speech on campus.
The indoctrination thesis was ratified by the charge of terrorism sympathy against Zoom, which has its basis in the Muslim terror construct created by the Global War on Terror program, which has become an official academic area study on many campuses, and aggressively defended and propagated especially by Left members of the law academy, sympathetic to Israel. The anti-BDS agenda has a similar pedigree. Moreover, the Big Tech sector in the Bay area is overwhelmingly Left, many radical and several prominent founders, Jewish. According to UChicago’s political science professor, John Mearsheimer, author of “The Israel Lobby,” the degree of intimidation to silence any criticism of Israel is systematic, institutional, and often with implied threats, including professional. This is not of conservatism cancel culture; it has its basis in an extremism that transcends the traditional political spectrum. As for propaganda, the University of Chicago regularly hosts members of the IDF as lecturers in its College. Students objected based on humanitarian oppression against Muslims. Their appeal failed. SJP members or their invitees are not officially accommodated in classroom teaching. Is this Left or Right? Zoom, Facebook and Youtube are otherwise institutionally and financially aligned with the DNC and are corporate donors to BLM. Their cooperation in censorship is eagerly accommodated or championed based on Left ideology, or, ethno-religious solidarity. “Conservatism” has nothing to do with it, except by a misunderstanding of the actual cultural nature of the tech corporations.
Leila Khaled is a member of PELP, a US-designated terrorist organization, who has committed crimes in the international arena, and for these reasons could not be hosted by Zoom, Youtube, or Facebook without their violating American anti-terrorist laws. On Khaled’s vita is the hijacking of TWA Flight 840, undertaken in the mistaken belief that Yitzak Rabin, then Israeli ambassador to the US, would be on board. Khaled and the other hijackers forced the pilot to go to Syria, where two of the six Israeli passengers on board were held captive. After having had six (6) plastic surgeries, she went on to hijack EL Flight 219 with partner, Patrick Arguello, which didn’t quite go as the two had planned. Through the intercom, a flight attendant told Uri Bar-Lev, the pilot, that two people armed with a gun and grenades were threatening to blow up the plane if they were not allowed into the cockpit. The pilot, knowing that the passengers had their seatbelts buckled, yelled to the flight attendant, and put the plane in a nosedive. Before passing out from the shift in altitude, Khaled rolled a grenade down the aisle, which did not detonate. When the plane was level again, one of the two security officers on board, Afihu Kol, who had been in the cockpit with Bar-Lev, shot Arguello dead. The flight attendant was unharmed, and the passengers were safe again. This is Leila Khaled’s “narrative.”
Thank you for posting this comment. If one did not know that Khaled is a member of an officially designated terrorist organization, and that this is the reason why her appearance is legally problematic, one would never guess it from the original post.
Discussions of certain minorities (usually those which are relatively powerful) are often accompanied by the idea ‘never about us without us’. I think the underlying concept is sound, whatever weight you wish to put on the expression of experience by insiders it is essentially evidence you cannot access without including the group. But the group does matter, I can see why someone would be much more uncomfortable with applying that principle to a terrorist than to a member of the deaf community. So obviously once Zoom had made the decision it was pointless approaching anyone else (YouTube is notoriously quick to respond to any legal threat).
In any case this is not a ban or censorship. If I own a meeting hall and encourage its use for educational talks it would be entirely reasonable for me to refuse to allow a flat-earther, an anti-vaccine campaigner, some who claimed race was real, or someone who argued that the violent overthrow of governments was necessary for social improvement. And the last of those is an intellectually credible Marxist position. I am not obligated to give platforms to those I disagree with, and I do make a statement about my understanding of a position if I allow it a platform.
This post is hyperbole, it treats something which is clearly a matter of judgement as if it were an attack on a fundamental principle.
This should be a matter of judgment: Faculty should get to judge whether they want to invite a controversial figure to speak to a class and invite the public to witness it. As for the notion that private companies can’t censor, that’s clearly wrong. If Harvard or Liberty or Facebook decided to ban supporters (or opponents) of Donald Trump, that would be a terrible act of censorship. I would oppose allowing the government to control that decision, but we should still call it what it is: Censorship. However, this case is very different. Zoom and YouTube and Facebook are not freely making their own judgment; they are fearful that the government will come after them if they allow this speaker on campus, and that is why they did this.
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I believe Zoom, Facebook and YouTube are correct to not aid terrorists. You have not said anything about the speaker who was appropriately, in my opinion,denied use of these tools.
“In light of the speaker’s reported affiliation or membership in a US designated foreign terrorist organization…we determined the meeting is in violation of Zoom’s Terms of Service and told SFSU they may not use Zoom for this particular event.”
Terrorist = someone who opposes Israeli or US domination of their land. The US and Israeli governments are the biggest sponsors and purveyors of terrorism in the world today.
Should all events be banned if it’s possible that someone supporting group opposed by the US government might say something during the activity? Should the Chinese Community Party be able to designate pro-democracy forces as a terrorist group and ban them from all tech platforms and college campuses? I believe in free speech for all supporters of terrorism, whether it’s Leila Khaled or Oliver North, the criminal who provided weapons to terrorists in Iran and Nicaragua.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/zoom-admits-cutting-off-activists-accounts-in-obedience-to-china
So a grand dragon of the KKK could be invited to speak about his favorite lynchings and a guard from Aushwitz talk about his gratification in leading undesirables to the gas chamber?
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That is a great blog, John Wilson. The Israel-identified groups who demanded Khaled’s exclusion as a “terrorist,” never acknowledge that their own governments commit far greater acts of terror on a regular basis than anything Ms. Khaled did 50 years ago. Censorship is used to protect the powerful; rarely does it protect the weak, and the Left should fight it, not embrace it.
That letter to President Mahoney, the one signed by 86 organizations and focused on in this blog post, did not ask the university to “ban the event,” at least not explicitly. The letter asks President Mahoney to clarify their position on academic freedom, challenging the University’s framing of the issue. The letter acknowledges that faculty members like Prof. Abdulhadi have the right to express anti-Zionist views and engage in anti-Zionist activism *as private citizens*, but disagrees with the idea that engaging in such political activism is what the university hires and pays a professor to do, which, according to the letter, Abdulhadli has stated and embraces.
If a sociology or criminology professor brought in a group of police officers as guest speakers in their course on race and crime this semester, and if one of those police officers was widely known to have beaten or shot a person of color or was a member of an official organization known to commit and/or advocate violence against a minority group, you can bet there would be outcry, including demands that the panel of guest speakers be cancelled and that the professor be suspended, investigated, and fired. Would that also be described as Orwellian?
So, as I acknowledge the seriousness and significance of the specific issues and events at SFSU for those struggling through them, this blog post has me wondering, more broadly, when we will defend a professor who is being criticized, cancelled, attacked or mobbed–for crossing a line, for offending students politically, for making students feel unsafe, or for being politically activist in and through their teaching–and when we will defend the people or “cancel culture” attacking that professor. I appreciate this post for helping me gain clarity on my questions about AAUP principles with regard to scholars’ political activism and to the activism to stop scholars because of their political views.
I have defended many conservatives on this blog, and I would defend the right of a professor to bring in any controversial speaker, including someone who has committed violence. What makes this Orwellian is the group of 86 organizations (who definitely were calling for censorship of the event) declaring that a professor who expresses political views in class or who invites a controversial speaker for an extracurricular event is violating the law–in my view, that is a thoughtcrime, which is the Orwellian aspect of this. There’s also something Orwellian in seeing tech companies censor a campus event out of fear that the Trump Administration might punish them. When Big Brother says you’re not allowed to hear someone speak, that sounds a bit Orwellian.
I appreciate that about your work, Prof. Wilson. I just don’t think most faculty would do what you do.
“That letter to President Mahoney, the one signed by 86 organizations and focused on in this blog post, did not ask the university to ‘ban the event,’ at least not explicitly.”
Groups wanting to ban academic events, which this was-I happen to know, read and have taught Prof. Abdulhadi’s scholarship; those who wanted the event not to take place have done none of the above-are sophisticated enough to try to put on an appearance of liberalism. They know that in an age of electronic communication that there is a contest going on over what counts as censorship; they’re intelligent enough to want to be perceived as “liberal,” unlike those “leftists” they charge with promoting “cancel culture.”
Luckily, the incoherence of their position is transparent-this is yet another version of “free speech for me but not for thee” 2.0
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