Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the Gaza First Amendment Alert for the October 18, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: There is other news, of course, but we cannot avert our eyes from the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the spreading effects of that murderous effort—including the silencing of criticism or concerns from US citizens on US soil about actions being carried out in our name.
Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He’ll join us to talk about the things we’re not supposed to say and the lives we’re told not to care about—and why we must never stop saying and caring.
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Democracy Now! (10/16/24)
The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases.
In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, one of very few humanitarian organizations working still in the region. A real accounting would also include, not just those that we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.
Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that
Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head. When a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.
The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print—too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, they make sense or, minimally, they’re not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.
As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to other people somewhere else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like antisemitism—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.
Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)
Defending Rights & Dissent, online at RightsAndDissent.org, have started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He’s a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He joins us now by phone.
Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.
Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me back. I always say CounterSpin is one of my favorite shows to do, and it is so vital, with the sorry state of corporate media in this country, that we have outlets like yours, because we would never get our message out. Occasionally, occasionally, we break through, and BBC or the Guardian or whoever will call us up, but it’s pretty bleak out there.
Like everyone else, every day I see the horrible images and news coming out of Gaza, now Lebanon and, who knows, maybe Iran next. Pictures of people being burned alive while they’re hooked to an IV. Stories about people being forced to flee or be bombed, then bombed while they flee, then corralled into a refugee center, and then bombed some more. It’s really, really horrific.
And in the midst of this horror show, this genocide that is quickly spiraling into a regional war, with obviously Israel as the aggressor and our government as the financier of it, we’re witnessing this global tidal wave of repression against people who are saying, “Hey, wait a moment. Let’s not drop bombs on children.” Journalists who show us what it looks like to drop a bomb on children are being assassinated.
Defending Rights & Dissent (8/10/23)
The young people on college campuses who want to simply peacefully raise their voice are hit with police batons, or have false charges against them. Journalists who report on the ground are killed by snipers and drones in their house. They get text messages telling them that their families will be killed.
And every day, our Congress votes to spend more money to fuel this, and sends these ridiculous letters to the IRS or the DoJ or the FBI, whomever else, telling them to crack down.
And I do want to note that this is a global problem. On October 17, 2024, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, presented to the UN General Assembly her new report on the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression globally. And Defending Rights & Dissent submitted testimony, and is cited in it. So this is a global problem, and you wouldn’t really know it from much of the corporate media.
Chip Gibbons: “”We cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.”
We started the Gaza First Amendment Alert as a project to compile together in one place—I won’t say all of the political repression in the US, because there’s so much it’s impossible to include it all, but the vast majority of it. So attacks on press freedoms, attacks on protest rights, attacks on civil society and attacks on transparency, we are documenting in one place in a biweekly newsletter.
Every congressional office on the Hill received an invitation to subscribe to this letter. I think the only thing more dismal in this country than our corporate media is our Congress offices. I’m sorry, I’m laughing out of despair. And we sent it out to journalists to receive. But there’s also been a really strong outpouring of support from people who work on these issues, from activists who have signed up to receive this newsletter, and have talked about how valuable it is.
And, for the most part, it is focused on the repression in the US. The one exception is we are—because Israel uses US weapons to do so—continuing to monitor Israel’s killing, detention, maiming of Palestinian journalists and international journalists.
The Nation (8/16/24)
And as you know, Janine, because FAIR endorsed this project this summer, Defending Rights & Dissent led a call of over 100 journalists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, to call on [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel, because we cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.
So the bulk of this newsletter focuses on domestic oppression in the US, but we will, every biweekly period, for as long as that happens, monitor the killing of journalists. I would love to have an issue that doesn’t have that in there because no journalists were killed. But in working on the first issue, I had to keep going back and updating the section on the killing of journalists, again and again, because Israel just keeps doing it.
We have seen college students engaging in protests. One of the big things we intended to cover on the inaugural issue was what took place on the anniversary of the war. On October 7, many college students and others who wanted to show their sympathy for the Palestinian victims, their opposition to the war, wanted to hold a protest or vigils. And there was a coordinated effort, that we show in the newsletter, to suppress this.
Campus Crisis Alert (10/23/24)
I get the Anti-Defamation League Campus Crisis Alert newsletter, which is a great resource on political repression in the US. They don’t intend it as such, but I use it as such. And police departments get that. I know, thanks to a FOIA request filed by Iain Carlos at Noir News, that the Chicago Police Department gets this newsletter.
And like every day for a month, they encourage you to call colleges and send them letters and tell them, “We know colleges love free expression”—I’m not sure we know that anymore—but “even protected expression can create a hostile environment. Even permitted protests can create a hostile environment.”
And they are abusing civil rights law, which is very important. Abusing antisemitism to claim they have to clamp down on political speech, and then telling them you need to put in place a policy for October 7 on how or if—”if” was a big one—you permit protest. And then, of course, encouraging them to cooperate with law enforcement when campus policies are broken about expression.
And many of these campuses have put in very draconian anti-speech policies, policies that would be unconstitutional in any other context, and, if they are public schools, are unconstitutional.
Guardian (9/18/24)
And I think one of the big victories the ADL got was they got the University of Maryland to try to prohibit an interfaith vigil of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, an interfaith vigil mourning the Palestinian victims of this genocide. And the school initially approved it, there was mass public pressure against it, and then the school put together a policy that stated that you could only have “expressive events”—this is a new phrase that we hear a lot: “Expressive events.” “Expression policy…”
JJ: Right—what?
CG: Yes, events where people are expressing themselves. And some people have noted, some of these policies, when you start talking about expression, could be really rather broad.
But you couldn’t have any “expressive events” that were not initiated by the school. And, of course, that is unconstitutional. And Palestine Legal and CAIR took them to court, and the court allowed the vigil to take place. I saw pictures of it. I read news reports that there were a hundred or so students having an interfaith vigil, recognizing people who were slaughtered in a genocide.
An the interesting thing to me was that same day, there was a pro-Israel vigil as well, to mark the Israeli victims and civilians killed on October 7. And there was a member of Congress speaking at it, Steny Hoyer. And we hear again and again about outside agitators on the college campuses, Hillary Clinton, and I think Mike Johnson, basically in agreement that these kids wouldn’t be upset about people being burnt to death in tents with US weapons if it wasn’t for outside agitators, or nefarious Iranian influence. Or one place I saw was Cuban influence. You really are bringing out all of the bad guys.
Wall Street Journal (5/12/24)
JJ: Castro from the grave.
CG: Castro’s ghost, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Putin, China. Really, all of the evil-doers, maybe, are behind it, apparently.
And yet, when I looked at the vigil, it looked like—I didn’t do an investigation of everyone’s identity, but it looked like University of Maryland students. Whereas the counter vigil seemed to have a lot of pro-Israel advocates and a member of Congress at it.
So I don’t like the idea of outside agitators. You are allowed to invite prominent figures to your school to speak in solidarity with you. But if there’s outside agitators on the campus, who are they, right? Is it the college kids, or is it the members of Congress coming to call for their repression and champion a genocide? I think I know the answer to that.
And so, again, we’ve seen schools like Cornell suspend international students, and put them at risk of being deported. Right before we were about to go to print—not print, it’s an email newsletter; I’m using print in the figurative sense—that decision was reversed, and the student had a victory. But another student at the University of South Florida had to return to Colombia, because they were suspended for political speech.
So that’s where we’re at as a country. And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have any shortage of news two weeks from now. In fact, we already have multiple stories that we are considering for the next issue, including the fact that—you’ll love this—the Heritage Foundation yesterday announced Project Esther, named after Queen Esther from the Bible, to allegedly combat antisemitism. But when you read the opening section of it, they’re talking about a network of “anti-Zionist,” “anti-American” Hamas supporters. So they really mean, as you know—I think most listeners know—they mean pro-Palestinian speech.
Intercept (2/21/24)
And we have members of Congress calling for—I mean, every week in Congress they send a new letter to a new agency, proposing some new bonkers act that they should take against Students for Justice in Palestine. This week, they want them to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is, I mean, FARA is a very broad law. It’s a law I’ve thought a lot about, but it makes zero sense in this context. SJP are not agents of a foreign power. And if you’re claiming that they’re agents of Hamas, which is what this letter claims, from Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, they’ve got a lot bigger problems than the FARA statute.
So if someone were an unregistered agent of Hamas, which no one we’re talking about is, they would not even be indicted under FARA, or asked to register to FARA. They would be charged under the Material Support statute, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction.
Earlier this week, we saw a Palestinian prisoner-support NGO sanctioned under OFAC, which has for decades been used to punish people for giving humanitarian aid in the Occupied Territory, to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism; has not been used in many cases against actual terrorism, but against people who have views the government doesn’t like, cases like Holy Land Foundation, Sami Al-Arian; Muhammad Salah, the grocer from Illinois who was tortured by the Israelis when he was giving aid, and then became the first person ever sanctioned by the US as a terrorist within the US, a US citizen, he had all his assets frozen.
You’ll like this, Janine. Judith Miller participated in his interrogation, and talked about it in one of her books, because the Clinton administration denied the Israeli government’s claims that Hamas was essentially based in Chicago, and she believed Israel. So in order to help them out, she went and met with this American citizen they were torturing, and she gave the interrogator questions. And then the interrogator asked them And then she later testified at his trial that he wasn’t tortured by the Israelis, because she was there, and Judith Miller would have noticed the torture.
JJ: She understood.
Well, listen, as I get older, I recognize that there is a value in simply collecting the harms. You think that everybody knows and everyone will remember, and it’s just not true. There is a value in collecting the harms that are being done, and in showing their coherence and their purposiveness. It’s not random, it’s targeted and it’s principled, in a way that we understand that term.
And there is also tremendous value in lifting up the dissent, the resistance, so that we can never think, later or right now, that everyone is complicit, that no one is speaking out, even if not everyone feels really comfortably placed to do so. Propaganda is weakened when we have other avenues of information and communication. And that seems to be what your work, and particularly this new project, is about.
CounterSpin (2/26/16)
CG: And the flip side of the “everyone is complicit” argument is, people use it later to evade accountability. I mean, how many times can people say, “Oh, that or this politician or journalists supported the Iraq War, but there was no one against the Iraq War.”
I went to my first protest against the Iraq War in September 2005. I was a sophomore in high school. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. And we were all more right than the New York Times and MSNBC and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. Well, I think Dick Cheney knew what he was doing, but you know what I mean?
JJ: Yes. I was there too. Yeah…
CG: I know you were, I know you were. That’s, as I mentioned before, I first started reading FAIR back during the Bush years. Which we’re back in.
JJ: But the point is that some folks might say, “Oh, you’re doing a newsletter and you’re collecting instances of censorship and firing and repression, and that’s useful,” but it’s not just a collection, it’s also a tool. It’s also a way of speaking, yeah?
CG: Yes. And we’re definitely trying to get this newsletter to be a tool for journalists, to be a tool for congressional staff, to be a tool for other advocates. I mean, anyone can subscribe to it, and I think everyone can benefit from it. But we are doing extremely hard work behind the scenes to try to put it in front of people in the press, to try to put it in front of congressional offices, so they can’t say, “We didn’t know.”
Or they can use it as a resource. Because I know they’re getting the ADL stuff. I know they’re getting the Heritage Foundation stuff. We know police departments get that sort of stuff.
Al Jazeera (1/19/14)
And the other side is extremely well organized. I’ll never forget when I was in college, after the 2009 massacre/bombing/war in Gaza. I mean, I went and met with my congressman’s office, with just a staffer, with some other pro-Palestine activists. And the very first thing he says is, “We hear from AIPAC all the time. We never hear from you guys.”
JJ: Wow. That’s incredible. And that speaks to the need for organization and activism in this case.
And at the same time, we know that when we get organized, when we speak out, elite media will not necessarily hear that voice, or platform that voice.
And I’ll just ask you a specific question: FAIR and CounterSpin, we’ve noted a lot that corporate media cover election issues as though elections were something that happened to politicians, and not something that happens to all of the people that were affected. And with Gaza, with Palestine, with the genocide, the stakes can’t be higher. But how are you seeing Palestine covered as a campaign issue, and what would you do different there? What would you see differently there?
CG: I had to tune out most of the corporate media about a year ago, when I was watching CNN, and they ran this ad about Jake Tapper speaking truth to power. He says, “I have the greatest job in the world. I have powerful people on and ask them questions.” And then he came back from commercial break, he had a member of Congress on, and he goes, I don’t remember what member of Congress. He goes, “Oh, congressman so-and-so, students at Harvard just posted this on Instagram. Do you condemn it?” And I was like, “oh…”
JJ: And that’s news. Yeah.
CG: Speaking truth to power: When you have a member of Congress on, “will you condemn college students at Harvard?”
So it is interesting, because the way the media covers elections in its own right is its own problem. It’s just constantly pushing the candidates to be more warmongering. Maybe you saw that debate where the first question was, “Will you support a preemptive strike on Iran?”—a war crime. Will you support a war of aggression? Not a candidate answered it, I don’t believe. I believe they both gave nonsensical answers, because they had prepared opening remarks and they gave them.
Washington Post (10/22/24)
But again, there’s a real chance, and I say this because I’ve worked for a nonpartisan organization, but with that caveat, there’s real questions about how Biden’s blanket support for Israel will impact Harris’s electability. At the end of the day, the murder of Palestinian children is not merely an electoral calculation for the Democratic Party.
And I’ve seen some people in liberal and left circles sort of talk about this, it’s like, “Oh no, Biden’s making a bad electoral calculation,” and had zero humanity towards the Palestinian people, when the murder of the children should be stopped because we shouldn’t be murdering children. It’s not this sort of horse race. The horse race approach to genocide is just something I can’t stomach.
JJ: When I talk to people, they almost offer a Hail Mary, like: The students, the children will save us all; but who’s looking out for the students? Who’s looking out for the kids that somehow are going to save us from this war nightmare that we’re in? There are laws, there are policies, there are things that we can do besides saying, “Well, gee, I hope those kids aren’t too scared of going to jail. I wish ’em well.” Thoughts on that?
CG: Yeah, it is troubling. And if the students are all suspended and arrested and beaten up, they won’t be there to save us. So the student protestors need our solidarity, even if we don’t always agree with the choice of words, or always the choice of tactics. I mean, I was a college student once. I didn’t always make the best decisions.
But they’re out there trying to stop a genocide, in a society where 9/10ths of our Congress, 9/10ths of our local politicians and like 9.9/10ths of our media are all on board and fueling the flames. And they are getting beaten with batons. They’re getting arrested, they’re getting suspended, they’re getting deported. They don’t need our armchair expert analysis, they need our solidarity and our support, and they need us to get out on the streets too.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org, and that’s the place where you can get their Gaza First Amendment Alert. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us once again on CounterSpin.
CG: Thank you for having me.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2024-10-24T19:47:55+00:00) ‘We’re Witnessing This Global Tidal Wave of Repression’: CounterSpin interview with Chip Gibbons on Gaza First Amendment Alert. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/24/were-witnessing-this-global-tidal-wave-of-repression-counterspin-interview-with-chip-gibbons-on-gaza-first-amendment-alert/
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