If there were any doubt that the vicious, censorious politics of the September 11 era have returned in force after Hamas’s October 7 massacre and Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza, the recent actions of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have removed it.
An “urgent” open letter issued last Thursday by the ADL—which, lest we forget, promotes itself as one of America’s leading defenders of civil rights—and the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law urged college and university administrators to “immediately investigate” their campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.” They claim to have sent the letter to nearly 200 schools.
The ADL provided not a shred of evidence for that incendiary, potentially life-ruining accusation. It instead cited overheated rhetoric at pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations post–October 7, including from some who defended Hamas. It interpreted references to “resistance” to the siege, bombardment, and invasion of Gaza exclusively as support for terrorism—not, say, as a rejection of the Israeli stranglehold around a densely packed area of 2.3 million people.
Terry Albury, a former FBI counterterrorism special agent turned whistleblower, said that when the ADL talks, the FBI tends to take what it says seriously. Asked how college administrators, who lack subpoena power for bank records, could conduct material-support investigations, Albury replied, “[They] can’t.” But campuses can easily enlist law enforcement via the Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country that unite state, local, and federal police.
Campus police “can offer their services to the local FBI office and say they received a referral about radical students,” Albury said, “and they will work in concert with the FBI to initiate investigations of those students.”
Joshua Dratel, a prominent national-security defense attorney, added that he has had clients over the past decade who were referred to the FBI by people who were monitoring students’ social media posts. “Campus authorities wield considerable authority through campus discipline mechanisms to launch investigations,” Dratel said.
Source: The Nation