A Closer Look at Students for Justice in Palestine

[Little Tich]

5. Here's some more info about the Canary Mission:

Shadowy Web Site Creates Blacklist of Pro-Palestinian Activists
Source: The Forward, May 27, 2015

A new website is publicizing the identities of pro-Palestinian student activists to prevent them from getting jobs after they graduate from college. But the website is keeping its own backers’ identity a secret.

“It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees,” a female narrator intones in a slick video posted to the website’s YouTube account.

Called Canary Mission, the site has posted profiles of dozens of students and recent graduates, alongside those of well-known activists like Omar Barghouti, founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Some of the students are active in Students for Justice in Palestine; others were involved in recent pro-BDS resolutions at campuses in California. Many of them have relatively thin activist résumés.

“The focus on young people and students is an effort to try to tell people that there will be a price for you taking a political position,” said Ali Abunimah, founder of the pro-Palestinian website The Electronic Intifada. “It’s an effort to punish and deter people from standing up for what they believe.”

Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, defended the tactic as a way of forcing people to understand the seriousness of their political stands.

“Factually documenting who one’s adversaries are and making this information available is a perfectly legitimate undertaking,” Pipes wrote in an email. “Collecting information on students has particular value because it signals them that attacking Israel is serious business, not some inconsequential game, and that their actions can damage both Israel and their future careers.”

Despite its dedication to documenting the identities of pro-Palestinian activists, Canary Mission seems to have gone to great lengths to keep the identities of its own members and backers well hidden. There are no names of Canary Mission staff members, volunteers, donors or allies on the site.

Read more: http://forward.com/news/308902/shadowy-web-site-creates-black-list-of-pro-palestinian-activists/

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ANTI-ANTI-SEMITIC FUNDAMENTALISM
Source: Tablet Mag, May 27, 2015

Canary Mission turns the fight against hate into a secret witchhunt

There is something undeniably humorous about Canary Mission, the new website in which unnamed people accuse unknown people of unmentionable crimes. Not intentionally so, of course. The website aims to “expose individuals and groups that are anti-Freedom, anti-American, and anti-Semitic,” which The Forward made clear in an article Wednesday. To that end, it posts photographs, short biographies, and social media information of various pro-Palestinian, pro-boycotting-Israel, and anti-Zionist campus activists. You know, so they can be flamed on Twitter. Or blackballed at their McKinsey interviews.

But, if anything, the site makes pro-Israel activism—or at least anti-anti-Israel activism—look ridiculous. And it’s not just because it capitalizes “Freedom,” as if it’s a sports drink.

For one thing, Canary Mission, whose basic accusation against many of its targets is that they have shadowy funding sources and suspect connections, has shadowy funding sources and connections itself, The Forward notes. It’s not even self-respecting McCarthyism: the good senator from Appleton, Wisc., was willing to show his face.

Second, the site’s list of suspect “organizations” lumps Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood together with lefty websites like Mondoweiss and Electronic Intifada, which are sometimes scurrilous, sometimes helpful, but rarely murderous. Plenty of pro-Israel journalists have occasion to read Mondoweiss (they just do so in secret, and tell their spouses they’re looking at porn).

In its short biographies of the enemies, Canary Mission seems willing to throw any day-old hummus at the wall and see what sticks. To take one example, the site repeats the charge that Northeastern University law student Max Geller once, “during a visit to the West Bank … posed for a photograph draped in bullets and holding a PK-class machine gun.” There is, it’s true, a photograph circulating of Geller with bullets around his neck; he looks like an idiot. But he denies that he was in the West Bank (he says he was in Egypt), and nobody has any proof otherwise. It’s just an urban legend. Elsewhere, the site damns Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rebecca Vilkomerson because she “writes extensively about Islamophobia and is far less vocal regarding anti-Semitism.” It’s as if she’s a premature anti-fascist.

Read more: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/191272/anti-anti-semitic-fundamentalism