Censorship of Leila Khaled's SFSU Webinar Was Wrong, but the Sponsors Still Need to Tell the Truth about Her [UPDATED]

[UPDATE: In response to a call from the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, webinars featuring Leila Khaled have been scheduled at five universities on Friday, October 23, under the heading "We Will Not Be Silenced -- National Day of Action."  The USCACBI call to action does not mention Khaled's membership in the PFLP Political Bureau, nor do any of the five six scheduled programs (as far as I can tell without registering for them). As with the previous event at San Francisco State University, described below, Zoom has evidently refused to allow its platform to be used for the Khaled event at the University of Hawaii. I have not been able to determine whether the other four five webinars -- at San Francisco State, UMass Boston, NYU, Loyola New Orleans School of Law, and the Claremont Colleges -- will be able to proceed.

As I explain below, I believe that these events should be allowed to be held without censorship, either by their universities (which have thus far upheld academic freedom), or by Zoom and other social networking platforms. On the other hand, the academic sponsors need to stop obscuring Khaled's background as a two-time airplane hijacker and member of the PFLP. The announcement for the University of Hawaii program, for example, says "This webinar explores -- and refuses! -- the use of the label 'terrorism' to censor political speech and criminalize resistance."

Finally, it is significant that the USCACBI's call for nationwide webinars has been answered by only five six campuses, which must surely be disappointing to them.]

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No living person has done more to romanticize terrorism than Leila Khaled. As an operative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she participated in two airplane hijackings in 1969 and 1970, threatening the lives of hundreds of people, including children. Her photograph taken after the first hijacking – a young woman in a keffiyeh, smiling broadly while holding a Kalashnikov automatic rifle – became a symbol of Palestinian resistance. That image has since been displayed all over the world, on posters, murals, and tee shirts, for over fifty years, leading The Guardian, in a 2001 profile, to call her the “international pin-up of armed struggle.” Fascinated by her daring, many of Khaled’s enthusiasts no doubt have had little understanding of the role she played in inspiring later acts of PFLP terrorism, such as the Entebbe hijacking and the massacre at the Munich Olympics. Others, however, have celebrated her for it.

It was therefore bound to be controversial when San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies program (AMED) scheduled a presentation, to be held on Zoom, titled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.” With two SFSU professors as co-moderators, the roundtable discussion promoted Khaled only as a “Palestinian feminist, militant, and leader.” In an Arabic language tweet, however, the director of AMED  called Khaled a “great fighter.”

Numerous Jewish and other organizations objected to the presentation, although stopping short of calling for its cancelation. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, noted that “it is bitterly ironic that a notorious hijacker and admitted terrorist will be welcomed at an institution of higher learning,” while stating nonetheless that the “ADL respects and defends academic freedom.” A coalition of 86 pro-Israel groups went further, condemning the event as an abuse of academic freedom that “foments a divisive and toxic atmosphere,” and calling on SFSU president Lynn Mahoney to “clarify” her position on the Khaled invitation.

Mahoney never budged. In a campus-wide statement, she “emphatically” affirmed “the right of our faculty to academic freedom and to conduct[] their teaching and scholarship without censorship,” adding, without naming Khaled or the PFLP, “and I say this while also condemning the glorification and use of terrorism and violence, particularly against unarmed civilians.”

A group called the Lawfare Project took a different approach, bypassing the SFSU administration and appealing directly to Zoom itself. In a letter to Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan, the Lawfare Project pointed out that hosting the Khaled event would potentially violate section 2339A of the U.S. Criminal Code, which prohibits providing “material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” Khaled is an acknowledged member of the “Political Bureau” of the PFLP, which has been on the state department’s list of designated terrorist organizations since 1997. (The PFLP is also on the European Union’s list of terrorist organizations, which led to Khaled’s exclusion from Italy in 2017.)

Zoom flinched.

With no existential stake in protecting absolute academic freedom, Zoom’s leaders decided that the Khaled appearance would violate its terms of service, due to “the speaker’s reported affiliation or membership in a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization, and SFSU’s inability to confirm otherwise.” AMED attempted to switch the presentation to Facebook, which also refused to carry the program. AMED did manage to livestream the webinar on YouTube for about 23 minutes before that too was shut down for violating terms of service.

The organizers of the thwarted event were suitably outraged. They condemned the “vilification and smearing by an Israel lobby that is troubled by and seeks to silence Palestinian narratives and scholarship, teaching and advocacy for justice in/for Palestine,” and demanded that the university “seriously and publicly challenge Zoom’s attempt to control higher education and the content of our curriculum and classrooms.”

SFSU President Mahoney disagreed strongly with Zoom’s decision, having done what she believed she could to get it reversed. “We worked hard to prevent this outcome and have been actively engaging with Zoom,” she said in a statement to the campus, adding that “Zoom’s cancelation of the event will be deeply wounding to some members of our community who will feel themselves and their dissent silenced once again.”

That was not quite enough for the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, which soon issued an open letter protesting the cancellation as  “a dangerous precedent of censorship, which will no doubt lead other governments and political groups to demand they cancel other events, classes or content that they oppose.” Thus, the CUCFA called upon university leaders “to publicly demand that Zoom, Facebook, YouTube (Google/Alphabet) and other increasingly important social media-related educational platforms immediately agree never to cancel or otherwise censor university-related teaching, lectures or other events.”

The CUCFA letter was forceful but naïve, and not only because it misleadingly described Khaled only as a “Palestinian feminist and militant.” Unlike university departments, for-profit enterprises such as Zoom and YouTube are not in a position simply to elide Khaled’s multiple airplane hijackings, which were terrorist acts by every legal definition. Nor can they discount her leadership role in the PFLP, in which she has declared her abiding commitment to “taking up arms.”

The National Coalition against Censorship later sent its own open letter, joined by the AAUP and eight other organizations, to the CEOs of Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube. In contrast to AMED and the CUCFA, the NCAC letter accurately described Khaled as a two-time hijacker, and noted that the PFLP has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Even so, the NCAC protested the cancelation of Khaled’s presentation, stressing Zoom’s own claim to support “the free and open exchange of thoughts and ideas,” and similar statements by Facebook and YouTube. “If support for free speech means anything,” said the NCAC, “it means allowing unpopular people to speak, unless it is clear that their speech is unprotected.”

But like it or not, U.S. law makes it a crime to provide communication support to designated foreign terrorist organizations.  The NCAC letter argues that the law should not apply to Khaled’s webinar, because “no court has ruled that merely allowing a member of a terrorist group to participate in an academic forum constitutes support of terrorism,” which is correct only as far as it goes. In fact, the leading U.S. Supreme Court case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, held, in a 6-3 majority opinion, that the material support statute may indeed apply to “advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization,” a muddled standard that could plausibly include a presentation by a member of the PFLP’S Political Bureau.

As a law professor and civil libertarian, I think that the “material support” precedents sweep far too broadly and are liable to misuse. If it had been up to me, the Khaled webinar would have been allowed to proceed without interruption, although I would also have joined a silent protest against legitimizing her. I agree with Mahoney’s statement that “We cannot embrace the silencing of controversial views, even if they are hurtful to others,” and I would like to see that position adopted more fully across the political spectrum. Should the occasion ever arise, I would urge my own university to resist censorship by tech companies, and probably even to risk prosecution in order to challenge restrictions on academic freedom.

The NCAC demands the same expansive commitment from social media companies: “Knowing that no precedent exists for punishing an academic forum for allowing a member of a terrorist group to speak,” one of the companies should have “hosted the panel and dared the government to come after it.” That is a lot to expect of Zoom, YouTube, Facebook, and other networking platforms. As publicly traded, for-profit enterprises, they owe fiduciary duties to their shareholders, so it is understandable that they would shy away from potential law-breaking. Commitment to the “open exchange of thoughts and ideas,” does not require hosting absolutely every speaker. Companies may honorably decline to host illegal organizations, just as they attempt to prevent election interference by Russian bots, remove QAnon conspiracy theories, and block propaganda by Covid-19 deniers and white supremacists.

If social media companies are to support the broadest conception of academic freedom, there will need to be a reciprocal commitment to candor on the part of universities. Zoom and the other companies could fairly complain that they were blindsided by the Khaled event, which was disingenuously promoted as featuring a “feminist, militant, and leader,” with no mention of hijacking or even the PFLP. In the last-minute negotiations with Zoom, the AMED faculty speciously claimed that Khaled, a longstanding member of the PFLP Political Bureau, was “not speaking as a member, representative, spokesperson, or surrogate for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”

Given the lack of upfront notice from AMED, it was rational for Zoom and the others to “play it safe,” as the NCAC described it. Social media companies may ultimately be willing to accept the NCAC’s appeal to allow “a member of a terrorist group to speak,” but only if academic departments are equally willing to be forthright about whom they are sponsoring.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to be happening. In conjunction with AMED, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Organizing Collective has called for “anyone with access to a university Zoom account to hold a webinar of your own featuring a message from Leila Khaled on October 23, 2020.” Such an event is a creative and appropriate response to censorship, but AMED and the cosponsors have once again failed to include Khaled’s background as a hijacker and PLFP operative, thus depriving Zoom account holders of an opportunity to make a fully informed hosting decision.

It is deeply regrettable that the Covid-19 pandemic has compelled so many colleges and universities to “subcontract” their communications to Zoom and other social media platforms, run by business executives rather than academics. Internet censorship presents a serious dilemma for higher education, which thrives on robust free speech but has become increasingly dependent on risk-averse tech companies, but the problem is not going to be solved by obscuring information about the PFLP and refusing to call a hijacker a hijacker.

[Note: A typo has been corrected in this post. H/t Eugene Volokh.]

Comments

[Stan Nadel]

High jacket AND attempted mass murderer. Remember that she attempted to fire a hand grenade inside an airplane in mid flight.

[Stan Nadel]

Hijacker— damn auto spell check

[Prof. Kevin Heller]

Academic freedom is the one area in which I almost always agree with you, especially given your willingness to condemn anti-Palestinian censorship. So I'm disappointed that you have not weighed in on the ever-growing scandal at the University of Toronto, whose Dean unilaterally rescinded an accepted offer to Valentina Azarova to run the law school's human rights programme after a sitting tax judge whose family has given tens of millions to the university complained about Azarova's past work on behalf of Palestinians.

[STAN NADEL]

We can add attempted mass murderer to Khaled's description given her attempt to set off a hand grenade in a passenger airplane in mid-flight. A comment that I agree with was And what would Mahoney have said about a speaker who called for segregating non-white Americans and moving them to closed reservations or concentration camps? Would cancelling that have won her sympathy for those who would feel deeply wounded by the cancellation? Once again we see an implicit double standard at work.

[STAN NADEL]

the comment I agreed with that didn't appear in my last post was:
President Mahoney did nothing. She's no Bollinger. As for “Zoom’s cancelation of the event will be deeply wounding to some members of our community who will feel themselves and their dissent silenced once again”, I bet that this is not a standard she would apply to a speaker whose text is, "Jews, you won't replace us." Frankly I don't care about deeply wounding some people. Plus, her comment dog-whistles "all powerful Israel lobby".

[Steve L.]

Sorry about the delay posting your comment, Kevin. It was stuck overnight in the spam folder for some reason. I'd been thinking of posting something on Toronto's Azarova case, so thanks for the reminder.

[A non]

Yes, please do, Steve. The Toronto case is fascinating. How, for example, does anyone know what (and how) was communicated - if anything - by the judge to the dean, or to anyone else? Were there emails handed over to the press to people at Toronto FROM the judge? (We know about Vincent Wong's emails: do these include communications from the judge?) Other forms of written communication? And from who to who? The Canadian press, for example, has quoted the CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM, which is calling for an investigation into this debacle) that the allegations may be wholly spurious.

Is there any information that this was a hit job by those interested in perpetrating imperialistic lawfare - such as what Professor Heller does for a career - including the hiring panel members? (The usual suspects are "worried" about the judge harboring biases, which, rather amusingly, rather betray their own prejudices and hatreds.)

Further, did the provocateurs throw the postdoctoral fellow, Vincent Wong, under the bus by having HIM be the transmitter of emails to the press?

[Prof. Kevin Heller]

Here are some publicly available facts for readers who are interested in what actually happened:

1. The Dean has never denied being contacted by the judge about Azarova's past advocacy on behalf of Palestinians. His "defense" is that the phone call did not affect his decision to rescind Azarova's accepted offer almost immediately after he spoke to the judge.

2. Every email in the public record was released either by Azarova herself (the ones that were sent to her) or by the hiring committee members who received them from the administration.

3. As widely reported, every member of the hiring committee has denounced the decision and every member of IHRP's faculty advisory board has resigned in protest.

4. Vincent Wong, who has been one of the Dean's fiercest critics, resigned his paid position in protest of the decision. In other words, he threw himself under the bus.

[A non]

Thank you, Professor Heller. However, none of that really answers the important questions about what ACTUALLY happened.

How was it determined that there was phone call in the first place, such that the Dean was to be challenged accordingly for rescinding the offer on that basis? Did the Dean TELL the Committee, or others, that he'd been telephoned by someone - by a sitting judge - who didn't think the hire was a good idea, and so was rescinding the offer on that basis? What in the Azarova-Hiring Committee-Admin email exchange could otherwise possibly prove that information? Did they tap the Dean's phones, hack his emails, etc.? Did the Dean subsequently WRITE about the call in an email?

It's not for nothing that the NCCM qualifies its view by noting that this may ultimately be a spurious allegation.

Did Wong resign before or after providing the emails to the press? Was he prompted to provide them by his colleagues? Isn't it odd that the least powerful member of the group handed them over?

Please enlighten us on these matters.

Of course the Hiring Committee denounced the decision. They wanted their ideological hire to help their racist imperialistic lawfare project.

[Leora Freedman]

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