Hundreds of Chicagoans came out on short notice to protest President Joe Biden’s support for the Israeli government genocide in Gaza when he visited the city Nov. 9. PHOTO/CHRIS MAHIN
“It feels like the new McCarthyism.”
That’s how Genevieve Lakier described the mood in the United States since the Gaza crisis began in early October. Lakier is a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose work focuses on freedom of speech. In an interview with Politico in early November, she compared attacks on those who oppose Israel’s brutal attacks in Gaza to the anti-communist Red Scare campaign spearheaded by U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s.
Dima Khalidi, the director of Palestine Legal, an organization that seeks to preserve the civil rights of supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States, told The Intercept: “We are seeing people being fired from their jobs, being investigated by HR over their social media posts or conversations with colleagues, and having job offers rescinded.”
ATTACKS ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH
The attacks on freedom of speech started almost as soon as the crisis erupted on October 7. Some examples:
On October 7, at Harvard University, 34 student groups co-signed a statement calling on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.” Within days, personal information about the signers was being posted online and their family members were being threatened. Numerous CEOs from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Newman called for the list of signers to be made public so that companies could blacklist them. A truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a right-wing group — circled Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts, flashing the names and photos of the student signers under the headline “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”
On October 10, New York University Law School student body president Ryna Workman sent an intra-community message to classmates expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians.” As a result, Workman was ousted as student body president, had a job offer from a prestigious law firm withdrawn, and received many death threats online.
On October 19, the prestigious arts magazine Artforum published an open letter on its website calling for a ceasefire and suggesting that Israel is responsible for a genocide. The letter condemned all violence against civilians. It criticized the silence of cultural institutions about the Israeli bombing of residents in Gaza. The statement was signed by thousands of artists, academics, and cultural workers, including Artforum’s top editor, David Velasco. On Oct. 26, Velasco was fired by his publisher Penske Media. Velasco had been at the magazine for 18 years. After Velasco was fired, multiple top editors at Artforum quit, and some contributors announced that they would boycott the magazine.
On Oct. 20, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to appear at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, a prominent cultural hub, to promote his new memoir “A Man of Two Faces.” Earlier in the week, Nguyen had joined more than 700 other writers in signing an open letter published in the London Review of Books calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A few hours before the event was supposed to take place, a spokesperson for the Y said that the event had been “postponed.”
On October 23, Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on the social media platform X that he was being replaced as the editor- in-chief of eLife, a prominent open-access science journal, for retweeting a satirical article from The Onion critical of Israel. (As of October 25, an open letter protesting Eisen’s dismissal had been signed by more than 1,300 people.)
The attacks on freedom of speech have hit students particularly hard. On Oct. 24, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s colleges to shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Florida was the first state to outlaw the group on its campuses.
On Oct. 25, the Anti-Defamation League wrote to the presidents of almost 200 colleges and universities urgently requesting them to investigate the chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine on their campuses. The ADL claimed that these students should be investigated for “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”
On Oct. 27, the U.S. Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning what it called “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” across the country.
On Nov. 7, perhaps the most high-level attempt to silence dissent about Gaza took place. That evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 234-188 to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian-American in the U.S. Congress. (The tally included 22 Democrats voting in favor of the censure.) The censure resolution viciously distorted comments that Tlaib had made about the Gaza crisis.
REPORTS OF RETRIBUTION
In addition to the cases which have garnered widespread publicity, there have also been many others involving less prominent people. Just weeks after the crisis began, the Palestine Legal organization had received more than 200 reports of retribution against people speaking out on the Gaza crisis. A concerted effort is underway to use the Gaza crisis to further limit what people are allowed to say at work or on their workplace social media and to punish those who challenge the status quo. This is extremely dangerous and is setting a terrible precedent which will curtail discussion and debate on many issues other than U.S. policy in the Middle East.
However, at the same time that censorship is growing, so is the resistance to it. The crisis has spurred many people of good will to speak up and loudly defend freedom of speech for those advocating a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to Israeli apartheid. In many of the cases where speaking engagements were cancelled or editors fired, tremendous outrage and protest has followed. More of this is needed. We cannot allow a new McCarthyism to take root in this country!
Chris Mahin is a writer, speaker and teacher on contemporary U.S. politics and history, particularly on the significance of the American Revolutionary War and Civil war eras for today. He is the Electoral Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board.
