WASHINGTON, Saturday, November 4, 2023 (WAFA) - A letter sent yesterday by 11 US-based legal organizations to the leaders of more than 650 US colleges and universities urged them to safeguard the civil and human rights of all of their students, protect the crucial role of campus debate within our democracy, and reject the repression of political speech and the policing, surveillance, and criminalization of students speaking out against the mass atrocities Palestinians are suffering and for their safety and human rights.
The letter follows a dangerous call to US colleges and universities from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters for “material support for terrorism,” which has no applicability to the independent advocacy of SJPs, whose speech is protected by the First Amendment.
“The undersigned legal organizations write to urge you to protect your students from the ongoing campaign to harass, defame, and silence supporters of Palestinian human rights—a campaign embodied in a joint letter that the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent en masse to colleges and universities on October 25, 2023. The Joint Letter substitutes repressive reflexes for an even remotely plausible legal analysis, going so far as to demand investigations of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for ‘material support for terrorism’,” said the letter.
The organizations said that “we have come to understand all too well how the law can be leveraged and often abused to target and silence voices of racialized and historically marginalized communities across the United States,” adding, “To cast as anti-Semitic the criticisms that human-rights advocates globally have of Israeli state policy, which is infused with racist and genocidal rhetoric, lacks rigor and cheapens the serious dangers of bona fide anti-Semitism - an undeniably real and present danger that all of the undersigned take seriously and uniformly decry.”
They called on the US “to honor its foundational commitment to freedom of speech embodied in the First Amendment. Both public universities bound by the First Amendment and private universities bound by their own free-speech codes and academic-freedom principles have a duty and compelling interest to preserve free expression on their campuses. Indeed, the bar for speech to fall below First Amendment protection is very high, particularly speech on matters of public concern.”
The legal organizations said “SJP is a longstanding and fully independent student association within a nationwide landscape of campus student groups. Across the U.S., student groups are the beating heart of essential dissent and demands for social justice that have punctuated US history and hastened watershed advances in social justice for all of us. The critical role of all student political speech within our democratic system cannot be overstated, and neither can the dangerousness of the McCarthyist attack of it in the Joint Letter.”
They urged the leaders of the colleges and universities “to safeguard the civil and human rights of all of your students, protect your campuses’ crucial role within our democracy, and reject the repression of political speech and the policing, surveillance, and criminalization of your students who are speaking out against all odds for freedom and justice.”
M.K.
