On October 23, 2020, over 10 universities and academic groups hosted webinars featuring a message from Leila Khaled, as part of We Will Not Be Silenced: National Day of Action Against the Criminalization and Censorship of Campus Political Speech organized by USACBI. Of those events, three of them – at the University of Hawai’i, New York University and the University of Leeds – were again censored by Zoom. Another event, at the University of Western Ontario, was censored by Facebook. Nine of the events went forward in full, despite multiple threats of censorship.
The Day of Action was organized by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in response to the censorship by Big Tech companies Zoom, YouTube and Facebook of the September 23 Open Classroom organized at San Francisco State University by Profs. Rabab Abdulhadi (Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas – AMED Studies) and Tomomi Kinukawa (Women’s and Gender Studies). SFSU administration was fully complicit in the censorship of this important event featuring a live discussion with Leila Khaled alongside Palestinian, Jewish, Black and South African liberation strugglers and former political prisoners.
Read the report from these events.
University of Massachusetts – Boston
New York University
California Scholars for Academic Freedom – University of California, Santa Cruz
Claremont Colleges
Western University
Leeds University