Hate Mail, Threats, and Intimidation: the Backlash From Supporting Palestinian Human Rights
TW: Racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, explicit hate speech, everything bad
On April 10th we braced ourselves. We celebrated the victory of the Senate divestment but we knew that when you support Palestinian human rights, backlash is nearly inevitable.
We braced ourselves for the hateful social media comments and threats, the online and on campus attacks by hate groups, and the scary, unknowable new tactics that opponents to Palestinian human rights might utilize. We have experienced it before and we knew we would again.
It happened before we even left the meeting. The Senate meeting had banned video recording and the naming of senators and students in the room to protect student safety, and someone who identified themselves with the Tufts pro-Israel Jewish community began to video record us against the rules of the space. When asked by Senators to delete the video he purportedly refused unless Senate agreed to table the resolution, trying to overturn the democratic process through intimidation and blackmail.
It didn’t take long for the intimidation to continue once we left the TCU Senate meeting. The social media threats and messages came almost immediately.
Tufts SJP members have in the past received death threats via social media as a result of their activism. After the resolution we have received ambiguous threats as well as racist and Islamophobic messages. Genocidal language is frequent such as calls to “exterminate” all supporters of BDS.
Some of these messages came from profiles of Jewish Defense League (JDL) members. The JDL is a State Department designated terrorist organization that throughout the 1980s terrorized Arab- and Muslim-Americans, and are known to be responsible for the murder of Alex Odeh, a Palestinian poet and American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) West Coast regional director. In recent months, the JDL has reemerged appearing at the AIPAC conference in Washington, DC where their members brutalized and assaulted Palestinian protesters, sending one Palestinian professor to the hospital. Members of the JDL have since been charged with hate crimes.
Jewish members of SJP, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) at Tufts, and Senate have faced unique targeting, referred to by some right-wing Zionists as “worse than Kapos.” (Kapos refer to Jews that were selected to serve as administrators in the Nazi concentration camps, a cruel method of maintaining Nazi power by turning victims against victims. This is an especially hurtful statement for Ashkenazi Jewish students to endure, many of whom are grandchildren of Holocaust refugees). Emails sent to some Jewish members of the Senate and Judiciary included graphic images of concentration camps, or ahistorical and offensive claims that “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it ended in the gas chambers. It began with discussions and actions similar to those that occurred in the Tufts senate on Sunday night.”
There were also messages sent to student senators with explicit threats. One such email attempted to blackmail student senators into responding to an email with their vote on the resolution. The email stated: “If you do not wish to have your academic records and online profiles recording you as casting a pro-BDS Yes vote, then you are advised to step forward and identity yourself as a No voter or an Abstain voter. In lieu of this type of self identification, your votes will all be recorded as Yes.”
The threat of being added to a “blacklist” or to have “online profiles” created, are references to McCarthyist lists that already exist. One such list, Canary Mission, has accumulated profiles for over a dozen Tufts students. These profiles are frequently racist and islamophobic, riddled with blatant falsities and manipulations of facts. While Canary Mission would like the world to know who we are, it remains unclear who they are. The site is anonymously managed.
Canary Mission and other lists, like those compiled by the AMCHA Initiative, seek to stop student activists from being employed or accepted for graduate education. While these goals do not appear achievable, and over 1,000 graduate admissions professors and faculty have signed a petition against Canary Mission, the list certainly provides information to Israeli forces. Israel has recently passed legislation barring entry to those who support BDS. This is a clear attempt to prohibit Palestinians to enter. But it also applies to foreign nationals including diaspora Jews, calling into question what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state. As a result of Canary Mission, many of us may not be able to enter Israel ever again, cutting us off from family and friends.
With the help of McCarthyist databases like Canary Mission, right-wing Zionist organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a designated hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), target SJP Tufts students. In October 2016, posters appeared on campus with the names of SJP and JVP students at Tufts, accusing us of being “terrorists.” In an interview with the Daily, Horowitz admitted that he had used Canary Mission to target students at Tufts. Horowitz later harassed a student journalist at the Tufts Observer, and threatened to sue students at other universities who wrote Op-Ed responses to the postering in their school newspapers.
While many at Tufts have likely never heard of Horowitz and his hate group others certainly have, like the Tufts Republicans who in 2009 hosted David Horowitz on campus. We don’t know if these flyers glued to campus signs in October were posted by Tufts students or outsiders to the Tufts community. Regardless of who posted the posters, the effects were distressing for the students who were named on them. And just this Sunday, as students were enjoying Spring Fling, new posters from the Horowitz Center were posted.
This is the reality of advocating for Palestinian human rights. This is the reality of engaging in activism on this campus. While it is nothing like the repression, violence, and oppression faced by Palestinians, it is part of the same machine of violence and intimidation to uphold these systems of oppression.
To our friends and Tufts administrators who questioned why Senators might want to remain anonymous: we hope this serves as an injection of compassion and reality into your analysis.
To our friends in J Street, who are part of a coalition that ostensibly includes the student who videotaped us, we ask: Who are you willing to be in coalition with and at what cost? When will you remain silent and what will move you to speak?
To our friends at Tufts Hillel who quickly responded against our resolution, yet have nothing to say about the backlash from the pro-Israel communities they support and house we ask: To which Jewish students on this campus are you accountable, all or some?
To administrators so quick to chastise SJP: Why remain silent when intimidation and repression threaten “dialogue”?
To our friends and allies on this campus and beyond who have fought for justice and human dignity in the face of repression and intimidation: we thank you for all of your support these past weeks and we continue to stand in solidarity with you.
