Dylan Saba on censorship of pro-Palestinian positions

I work for Palestine Legal.  We're a legal non-profit representing folks who speak out, Palestinian rights, and we were founded in 2014 and we've never seen anything remotely like this.  We've had hundreds of requests for legal assistance over the past several weeks, completely eclipsing the total number of intake requests we've had for the entirety of all of last year.

So it's an exponential surge.  It's reaching students, employees, professors, folks in all different industries.  We've seen a wave of retaliatory firings for posts made on private social media accounts supporting Palestinian rights.  We've seen student groups surveilled, suppessed from levels ranging from the federal government to state government to individual campus administrations.  We've seen professors had classes cancelled, being locked out of emails.  The range of political expression that is being targeted is wide from very banal calls to a ceasefire to more radical statements, and it is widespread.

I think it's important to note a couple of things.  One is that this is a response to a massive upsurge in pro-Palestinian support in the United States, that the [Palestine solidarity] movement has made major gains...  And more and more you have folks who are willing to speak out for Palestinian freedom.  Now, of course, this is met with suppression that this growing movement is a threat to the Israel lobby, it's a threat to Israel advocacy organizations, and folks who have the interests of the U.S. government and U.S. imperial interests, who share those interests as well.

I think that the comparison to the post-9/11 era, though I was only a child then, is probably apt.  We have been describing this as a McCarthyite level of suppression.  But I do want to raise a key distinction here.  This is now happening in the era of social media and that has particular concerns and implications for regular individuals who may not be famous or notable names, and that's the introduction of doxxing as a particularly heinous tactic, and you mentioned this with reference to the trucks on campuses.  What we're seeing is college students, individuals who are speaking out or even for an action as benign as removing a poster are being filmed.  That footage is being sent then to major media outlets like Fox News, and you have folks on the internet who are digging into it, finding out who these students are, publicizing their names, releasing their names, and then those individuals are being hit with a torrent of disciminatory comments, threatening texts, emails, phone calls, dealth threats, heinous remarks, and are basically being bullied into silence.  

This is a widespread tactic that we're seeing and it has the negative consequence of chilling speech.  Folks are scared to speak out because they worry that they're going to be smeared, that they're going to lose their job or future employment offer.  The doxxing tactic is something that the Israel groups have been using for a while.  Folks are probably familiar with Canary Mission, stopantisemitism.org, which are some online blacklists that have really honed in on this tactic of online smears and doxxing, but we are seeing it at an unprecedented level right now.

~ Dylan Saba, lawyer for Palestine Legal, "Zionist anti-Palestine censorship is surging," The Chris Hedges Report, 4:45 mark, November 24, 2023