Dangerous Charges Brought Against Pavel Durov By France; Columbia Student Protester On Campus Free Speech And Fall Protests
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
New Details in Pavel Durov Arrest (4:13)
Interview with Columbia Student Protestor Maryam Iqbal (31:20)
Credits (57:04)
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- Good evening, it's Wednesday, August 28th, Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you can see, once again, we are not in our normal studio, just because I'm traveling in relation to a story, but we are in a studio, so we certainly expect that everything will work as good as always.
Now, to begin with tonight, There is a very alarming new set of charges that have been unveiled by French prosecutors against the Telegram founder, Pavel Durov.
As we reported on Monday night, Durov was arrested upon landing in an airport just outside of Paris on his private jet when he was taken into custody, and the French government said very little.
Other than a statement by French President Emmanuel Macron denying that this had anything to do with issues of free speech.
Today, however, the French prosecutors unveiled what is a fairly comprehensive description of the criminal charges that he is now facing.
And as a result, is blockaded from leaving France, had to spend millions of dollars in order to get out of prison.
And these charges are every bit as much as menacing and as dangerous as we suggested that that might be on Monday night.
And so we intend to tell you all about what these are now that we have a lot more information about it.
But suffice to say, It is a grave threat to Internet freedom and a clear shot against the bow against any other tech executive in the world who refuses to instantly comply with government orders to censor and to provide them full and unfettered access to the private communications of anybody using online platforms.
And then over the fall, Columbia University became ground zero for the debate and controversy involving student protests against Israel and the war in Gaza.
There has been a summer break over the past few months, which is one of the reasons why those protests have more of us dispersed.
But with students coming back, including to Columbia, we are going to interview a leading spokesperson for the Columbia group, Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been targeted with all sorts of reprisals.
Including online censorship from places like Instagram and others as well as all kinds of sanctions from that campus.
We intend to speak to that representative about things like what the plans are for fall protest, what the current situation is with regard to social media suppression, and much more in terms of what the effect might be on the 2024 election given that it's the current administration funding and arming the Israeli war in Gaza.
So I've been looking forward to this interview for quite a while and we Believe it will be very illuminating.
Before we get to all that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
On Monday night's episode, we covered what we understood right away was the very disturbing,
and from the perspective of internet freedom, very dangerous news, that the and from the perspective of internet freedom, very dangerous news, that the Russian-born founder and CEO of the privacy app platform Telegram that is used by close to a billion people on every continent around the world to speak with privacy and with was detained by the French police immediately upon landing his jet in Paris.
Now, one of the mysteries of that incident was why would he go to France, given what I'm certain had been the informed and understood risk that he might be arrested in France, given the French government's growing anger with free speech platforms, including Rumble, which is no longer available, in
France, and one of the reports from a reliable French newspaper suggested that the reason Pavel Durov traveled to France was he was invited to lunch by French President Emmanuel Macron, which certainly seems to have been a pretextual invitation designed to lure the Telegram founder onto French soil so that he could be arrested and then prosecuted.
There was a lot of speculation about what those charges were.
We covered a press release by the prosecutors that didn't make clear explicitly that it was about Pavel Durov on Monday night, but now we have confirmation that the detention was based on a series of charges that a court has in its first instance found is a plausible and reasonable set of crimes that warrant further investigation and that require Pavel Durov to remain in France, bar him from leaving France, pay millions of dollars in order to be free,
And if you look at this indictment, which we're about to show you, essentially it would be the end of internet freedom.
It would be a clear message to anyone who has any sort of tech platform, whether it be Rumble or Twitter or anything else, that they had better start immediately and unquestioningly complying with every order from every government, including Western European governments, not only about the censorship orders those governments issue, But also their demands to have full and unfettered access to the private data information of every user.
And if they even think about failing, if they don't build their system to give these governments a backdoor, they very well may end up being criminally prosecuted.
And if Pavel Jurov, a multi-billionaire, can be, obviously any of the other ones can as well.
Now let's go back up to the top a little bit and we will see the document released by the French prosecutors today, just to give you a sense for how sweeping and Deliberately dangerous, these charges are.
There's the Prosecutor of the Republic, and this is his statement.
quote, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Instant Messenger and Platform Telegram, was arrested in the outskirts of Paris on Saturday, the 24th of August, then taken into police custody at 8 p.m.
This measure comes in the context of a judicial investigation opened on the 8th of July, 2024, following a preliminary inquiry initiated by Section J3 of the Paris Public Prosecutor's Office, specifically the organ that fights against, quote, cybercrime.
The document goes on, quote, this judicial investigation was open against persons unnamed on charges of, quote, and there's a variety of charges that we told you about on Monday night called complicity in the In which it's alleged that a variety of users on Telegram, not Pavel Durov, but other users use Telegram to engage in various crimes, whether money laundering or sale of prohibited technology or the sale and transfer of child pornography.
And the charges against Pavel Durov stem from a theory that as the operator of the social media platform, he can be criminally liable for the criminal acts of anybody who uses his platform.
Which, as I said when we first reported this, would be akin to arresting AT&T executives and charging them with the crimes of allowing people to have a platform who, say, use the telephone to commit and plan criminal acts.
Obviously, the second that you bring in a prosecution like that, the telephone companies will be highly incentivized to shut down the accounts of any conceivable person who even breathes an ounce of dissent, and only allow people who are full-fledged explicit supporters of the U.S.
government or its ideological dogma to communicate.
It's the same analogy for operators of these tech platforms.
Now, in addition to all of these complicity charges, meaning if someone commits a crime using your platform, so somebody uses Twitter to spread criminal disinformation in France and then Elon Musk can become criminally liable for that or Mark Zuckerberg can be if that happens on Facebook, there's also other charges here
that are even more disturbing, including, quote, the refusal to communicate at the request of competent authorities information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law.
In other words, when the French government wants Telegram to turn over information about its users, even though Telegram is constructed with an encryption shell that makes it impossible even for Telegram to find out that data, simply building a privacy app with encryption
That cannot have a backdoor, that does not have a backdoor, that allows the government or even telegram to enter is itself now a criminal offense that can not only result in prosecution of the corporation or fines of the corporation, but arrest of the individuals who are running that corporation.
Now, if we go down a little bit, we will see there's a bunch of complicity charges, but then there's also this charge that is unbelievably alarming, quote, providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration.
In other words, anybody who provides encryption...
Which was the technology that really became popular after the Snowden reporting as a way for people to protect their communications from government intervention.
Simply providing encryption, and the second charge here is quote, providing a cryptology tool, not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.
Any kind of encryption that doesn't allow the government to have a backdoor to have full access to it is now a criminal offense that can subject the heads of these technology companies to prison.
Now, as we're about to show you, Paul, Pavel Durov explaining it just a little bit, but this is going back to the Snowden reporting and even back to the controversies of the 1990s when the Clinton administration tried to exploit the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City to say, look, there are these dangerous domestic elements that we cannot allow to use the Internet.
Using encryption and hiding behind encryption, we need to monitor what they're saying.
And so we have to have a backdoor into the Internet.
And the reason why that's so dangerous is the minute that you build a backdoor into any kind of encryption service, you can't just have a backdoor that can be used by the government.
Once you have a backdoor, it can be used by anybody.
Imagine if at your house you have extreme amounts of security at the front of your house.
And then he said, let's build a backdoor that's very easily accessible because we want our neighbors to be able to come in when we're traveling, or we want our kids, if they come home when we're not here, to be able to enter our house.
You can build a backdoor that will allow that, but that backdoor can be used by anybody else.
They can circumvent all the security measures you put in the front.
And so criminals or people who have extremely malicious intentions against you, government agents without a search warrant, everybody can use that backdoor.
Once you have a backdoor to encryption, it's not encryption any longer.
It now has an opening for terrorist groups, for non-state actors, for governments all over the world to invade the system and cryptology.
Encryption is basically an illusion.
Now, if we go down to the next document, just to get a sense here for how it's being reported by the New York Times today, quote, the Telegram founder is charged with, just go back a little bit, is charged with a wide range of crimes in France.
Quote, Pavel Durov, who was arrested near Paris over the weekend as part of a broad investigation into criminal activity on the platform, was also barred from leaving the country.
Durov, the entrepreneur who founded the online communications tool Telegram, was charged on Wednesday in France with a wide range of crimes related to illicit activity on the app and barred from leaving the country.
It was a rare move by legal authorities to hold the top technology executive personally liable for the behavior of users on a major messaging platform, escalating the debate over the role of technology companies in online speech and the limits of their responsibility.
Mr. Duroff, 39, Who was detained by French authorities on Saturday, was placed under formal investigation on a range of charges, including complicity in managing an online platform to enable various crimes and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement.
Laura Bacot, the French prosecutor, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that Mr. Girod had been ordered to pay a bail of 5 million euros and was released, but must check in at a police station twice a week.
If Mr. Girod was eventually convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison.
The prosecutor said 10 years in prison, not for committing any crimes, but providing a social media platform designed to enable privacy and free expression that were used by other people to commit crimes.
Here's the European version of Politico today.
Adding a few details, there's the headline, France charges the Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, releases him on $5 million in bail.
Quote, the Russian-born tech tycoon faces six charges and is barred from leaving France.
French authorities on Wednesday indicated Telegram CEO, Durov, indicted him with six charges related to illicit activity on the app.
The charges included complicity and managing an online platform for illegal transactions and organized groups.
and refusal to cooperate with law enforcement authorities, the Paris prosecutor's office said in a press release.
Quote, the only statement I'd wish to make is that Telegram is in conformity with every aspect of European norms on digital matters.
It is absurd to think that the head of a social network is being charged, Duraab's lawyer, David Oliver Kaminsky, said after the announcement.
I just want to stress here how dangerous of a precedent this is.
And you don't have to use some sort of far-fetched, extreme extrapolation of some kind of extreme case that might come from this precedent.
It's not a case.
It's designed to do exactly this.
If Elon Musk allows free speech on Twitter, or on X as he has been doing, and the EU concludes that some of the views that Musk allows to be expressed on X constitutes criminal disinformation.
As EU officials or Brussels bureaucrats decide those views are false and therefore disinformation, then Elon Musk and X itself can be criminally liable for allowing a platform to be used to spread or express political opinions that the EU government has wanted to make unconstitutional.
That's the purpose of this indictment, is to create a precedent where exactly that can happen.
Now if you go down a little bit to the next article from the New York Times, it explores, another one does, the article from today, what the precedents are.
Under the title, quote, can tech executives be held responsible for what happens on their platform?
Quote, the arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, as part of an investigation into illicit activities on the messaging app set off worries.
About the personal liability of tech executives.
This month, X closed its Brazil operations after one of its executives was threatened for not taking down certain content.
Last year, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Biance, the parent company of TikTok, pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations that took place on his cryptocurrency platform.
Yes, sorry, that's not the parent company of TikTok, but that is a cryptocurrency, and that was the charge brought against him.
In 2021, Twitter executives in India faced arrest over posts that the government wanted removed from the site, and on Wednesday, Jirov, who founded the online communications telegram, was indicted in France as part of an investigation into the platform's complicity Including crimes, possible distribution of sexual abuse imagery.
For years, internet company executives rarely faced personal liability in Western democracies for what took place on their platform.
But as law enforcement agencies, regulators, and policymakers ramp up scrutiny of online platforms and exchange, they are increasingly considering when to hold company leaders directly responsible.
That shift was punctuated by the charges against Mr. Durov, raising questions over whether tech executives like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg also risk being arrested when they next set foot on European soil.
And remember, the Rumble CEO, Chris Pavlovsky, was in Europe at the time this happened, and he immediately got out of Europe out of fear that they could do the same thing to him, particularly since France already bans Rumble from that country for the crime of refusing following French particularly since France already bans Rumble from that country for the crime of refusing following French orders to remove Russian state media such as RT
The article goes on, quote, Mr. Durov made himself a target.
Mr. Durov made himself a target by his anti, but with an anti-authoritarian ethos.
Let me say that again.
Mr. Durov made himself a target with his anti-authoritarian ethos that government should not restrict what people say and do online, except in rare instances, experts say.
Unlike Meta, Google, and other online platforms that typically comply with government orders, Telegram was also called out by French authorities for failing to cooperate with law enforcement.
Tech companies are paying close attention to the legal liability that their executives may face.
This year, Meta successfully fought to have Mr. Zuckerberg, its chief executive, removed as a named defendant in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico's Attorney General against the company for child protection failures.
If China, Russia, and other authoritarian countries U.S.
tech companies have sometimes pulled out their employees to prevent them from being arrested.
Let's just think about that.
All the evil countries that we're told about, the tyrannical bad countries like China and Russia, U.S.
tech companies have had to pull out their executives from Russia and China based on threats of arrest of those tech executives from failing to comply with censorship orders of the Russian or the Chinese government.
And once again, we have exactly in the West But we're told only the repressive bad countries do.
The article goes on, quote, the concern is employees will be used as a leverage.
As leverage, like hostages, to force companies to do things like remove content unfavorable to the government.
This is the key part.
If we can just highlight that again.
This is the real game being played.
They're going to throw around all kinds of allegations about child pornography and other harmful content being distributed on the platform.
And as we talked about on Monday night, I have no doubt that's true.
Just like if you allow free speech, some people are going to say hateful and damaging things.
It's the price we pay for freedom.
But this has always been the government's pretext.
For saying they need control of the internet, they need to protect you from predators, they need to protect you from terrorists.
And in order to do that, they need to have full and unfettered access to all of your communications online, which the core of the Snowden reporting was that that is the goal of the NSA, is the complete elimination of privacy in the digital age.
And what even the New York Times is saying here, if we can go back to that last sentence just a little bit up, is that the concern about what these prosecutions are really about, is that tech executives and employees of these companies will be used as leverage, meaning hostages, to force companies to do things like remove content unfavorable to the government.
This is why I say that the dangers and menaces to internet freedom from this incident cannot be overstated.
So many of these laws were implemented that were designed to empower the government to control the flow of information over the internet because of how scared they are about the proliferation of anti-establishment sentiments that can only now be heard on the internet.
And they set out, especially after 2016, to institute a very systemic campaign to control the flow of information.
And this imprisonment of a multi-billionaire tech executive in France, not in Saudi Arabia or in Qatar or in Egypt, but in France, in the herd of Western Europe, is designed to create a massive climate of fear among other tech executives to force them to immediately comply Few more details from the Wall Street Journal article today.
Quote, French authorities charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov.
Quote, the move opens up a deeper probe into whether the tech entrepreneur failed to counter the spread of illegal content on the app.
Durov has a murky history with governments around the world which have sought to both target the entrepreneur and win him over.
In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Durov to move Telegram to Paris during a lunch meeting, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
They wanted, the French did, to get Telegram into France as a way of getting it under their control.
And when he refused, they turned him into their enemy to be imprisoned.
Quote, a year earlier, French spies had joined their counterparts from the United Arab Emirates to hack into Durov's phone.
Time to hear about a extremely security-conscious multi-billionaire whose entire business is protecting privacy, and yet the French and their EUA allies hacked into his phone and monitored his communications.
The article goes on, quote, At the time, French security officials were concerned about ISIS's use of Telegram to recruit operatives and plan attacks.
For years, Durov imposed few, if any, restrictions on content shared on Telegram despite mounting concern, particularly in Europe, that big online platforms were enabling illegal activity, spreading misinformation, and fueling racism and authoritarianism and anti-Semitism.
This is the heart of the matter.
They're not really concerned with Child porn or drug trade, this is a tiny little problem that you would never subvert internet freedom to combat.
What they're concerned about is what the Wall Street Journal just said, what the New York Times just said, namely they want to make sure that they can criminalize the spread of what they regard as either disinformation or hate speech to be determined in the sole and exclusive discretion Of governments around the world, and obviously governments around the world are going to characterize as fake news or disinformation any reporting or any commentary that criticizes them.
That's what this is really about.
The Wall Street Journal article goes on, quote, The company ignored subpoenas and court orders sent by law enforcement authorities, which piled up in a rarely checked company email address, according to a person close to Jurov.
Telegram said it now complies with the European Union's Ironically, this is all happening, this French crackdown on internet freedom, and obviously France is not acting alone, they're acting in concert with their European allies as well as the American allies who have the problem of the First Amendment, but the French do not.
This is all happening at exactly the same time that the French government, the upholders of democracy and the rule of law, have decided to ignore the results of the French election.
You may remember we covered extensively the first parliamentary elections for the EU in France, followed by the domestic elections for the parliament in France, where a left-wing coalition won.
Macron's coalition came in second.
And Marine Le Pen's populist right-wing coalition came in third.
And the Macron sector not only didn't get a majority, they didn't even get the most votes, and yet they've just ignored this election.
Macron's hand-picked protege, Gabriel Attal, continues to be prime minister.
They just continue in power as though these elections never happened.
Here is our friend of the show, Arnaud Bertrand, who we hope to have on this week to talk about this, who says the following, quote, it just keeps getting weirder.
France's most renowned investigative newspaper reveals that Pavel Durov told the policeman who arrested him when he landed that he came to have dinner with Macron.
Did Macron himself set up a trap to lure Dureb to his arrest?
Now, Arnaud Batron has also been covering how the French election results have been just ignored.
The Macron government just goes on governing, including in the French Parliament, as though these elections never happen.
These people who continuously claim that they have to control the internet to save democracy are the biggest subverters of it.
Now we have our guest on the line who I'm very eager to talk to, but before I do, I just want to show you this clip of Pavel Dura being interviewed in 2016 by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.
In which he presses him about why it is that Telegram built an encryption system that governments can't enter, and why he doesn't just build the back door to allow governments to enter, which of course is the view of 60 Minutes, and here's what he had to say.
Is there anything in your mind that says, gee, we have to allow law enforcement to get in because what's going on is just unacceptable?
You know, the interesting thing about encryption is that it cannot be secure just for some people.
ISIS and other terrorist groups, they just push a button on an application like yours, specifically yours, an application and it's gone around the world.
Well, again, this is the world of technology, and it's impossible to stop them at this point.
ISIS could come up with their own messaging solution within a month or so, if they wanted to, because the... You mean create their own telegram?
Exactly.
Since Paris, Dorov has been purging ISIS propaganda from Telegram, but says if asked to unlock any private messages, he would tell the authorities that the encryption code makes it mathematically impossible, using a similar argument as Apple.
So you're basically saying that even if you wanted to, your hands are tied?
Yes.
You can't do it?
We cannot.
So this is one of the great debates of our time.
Which is more important?
Is it more important to shut down this kind of terrorism or preserve privacy?
I'm personally for the privacy side, but one thing that should be clear is that you cannot make just one exception for law enforcement without endangering private communications of hundreds of millions of people because encryption is either secure or not.
That has always been the point.
You can either have an internet That protects privacy, that makes it difficult if not impossible for the government or other non-state actors to spy on what it is that you're doing and saying online.
Or you can have an internet that allows backdoor access to governments and therefore backdoor access to everybody and therefore the end of privacy in the internet era.
And whenever people ask me what is the primary most important revelation of the Snowden reporting, I would always say it was that the NSA's aspiration Not their pipe dream, but their very explicit goal that they became extremely close to fulfilling is the full-scale elimination of privacy, individual privacy and communicated privacy in the digital age.
We published documents saying that that was the NSA goal, and their ubiquitous surveillance provided that.
There are very few platforms left to try and preserve internet freedom online.
Rumble is one.
X under Elon Musk is another.
Telegram is certainly one.
And you see these very systemic attacks on each of them with this major escalation with Pavel Durov.
And the question is, is do you think that the Internet should be what it was promised to be, which was a tool of liberation to permit human beings to communicate without prying eyes being cast upon them and without governments dictating what can and can't be said, which would degrade the Internet into the most severe weapon of coercion and control ever in human history, or do you think it should fulfill its promise of being a tool, a weapon in the hands of people around the world to liberate them to speak and organize freely
Without centralized government control, France's indictment of Pavel Durov is a major escalation to creating the model where the internet is nothing having anything to do with privacy, but instead is another weapon in the hands of establishment power and status quo ruling class elites to use the internet to fortify but instead is another weapon in the hands of establishment power and status quo
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We spend a lot of time on this show covering the controversy around the various student protests that erupted over the U.S.-funded and armed Israeli war in
Gaza, as well as the continuous crackdown since October 7 on the free speech and free organizing and free protest and free assembly rights of people in America, the United States, who have every constitutional right available to them to protest the U.S. Constitution.
government's policy, to protest this foreign government's war.
One of the places that became ground zero for those controversies and for the severely brutal crackdown under Mayor Eric Adams, who is a hardcore pro-Israel fanatic and always has been, I suppose that's how he got elected to become mayor of New York, has been Columbia University and specifically the student group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine.
Mariam Iqbal is a rising sophomore.
She was actually, I believe, suspended through the fall currently, which we'll talk about with her.
She's one of the lead organizers of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, majoring in Middle East and South Asian Studies at Barnard.
And we are very delighted to welcome her to the show.
Mariam, thanks so much for taking the time to be here.
It's great to have you.
So I don't know if she's talking, but I don't hear the guests.
So maybe we can just figure that out.
Sorry, can you hear me now?
Yeah, now I can hear you.
I was about to blame everyone at the studio, but maybe you just had your microphone muted.
But welcome to the show.
It's great to talk to you.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely.
So let me talk first about your current status at Barnard and Columbia.
My understanding is that there was a large group of students who actually got suspended for their role in campus protests and you were one of them.
What is your current status at Barnard or Columbia as a result of those actions?
Yeah, so when the first encampment happened, there was mass suspensions that took place at both Barnard and Columbia.
Just to clarify, Barnard is the women's college at Columbia University.
Right.
And a lot of these suspensions were reversed, including mine, but I was later re-suspended as the administration went back on their initial deal with students and our attorney.
So, I mean, they violated their own policy, but essentially I am suspended just for participating in the Gaza Solidarity encampment.
When the school announced your suspension and then your reinstatement and now your resuspension, what rationale did they give as far as what student rules or campus rules you were alleged to have violated?
Yeah, so the first time I was suspended it was because of just participating in the encampment despite their repeated requests that we leave and obviously that resulted in the mass arrests of students first and we all got out of jail just to find out that we had all been suspended.
And I think I was unsuspended about two weeks after, only to be resuspended again, this time for protesting outside of my own campus, so I wasn't even on campus.
I was outside the gates of my campus.
I got arrested, and it is a rule in Barnard's Code of Conduct that if you're arrested, they can suspend you even if they haven't found you guilty of anything.
And just to be clear, in all of these proceedings that resulted in your suspension and the suspension of your fellow protesters and students, I presume, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that there was never any hint of any kind of allegation that you engaged in any sort of violence against other students, that you threatened violence against other students, is that correct?
Not at all.
There was no allegation of violence.
Alright, so...
One of the reasons why I was interested in covering the SJP at Columbia, well, there are a lot of reasons we've been covering it for a while, but one of the reasons I wanted to cover it this week is because of this announcement by the official SJP Twitter account that says the following, quote, as the school year is just about to begin, Columbia SJP has been permanently banned from Instagram.
Our account was permanently deleted at 124,000 followers at the same time as our backup account.
And when we made a new page, It was deleted within two days.
What was the rationale given by Metta, which is the parent company of Instagram, if any, for why your group account had been suspended as well as your attempt to create a new one?
We were given absolutely no rationale whatsoever.
We just got this notification that said that our account was permanently deleted with absolutely no way of regaining access or appealing the decision.
And we tried making a third account, actually, because we had a backup, as we had been suspended by Instagram a couple other times, and this backup was also immediately deleted.
And so the third account, it stayed up for two days and then it was also deleted.
So it appears that there is a ban on our organization as a whole, not just a specific Instagram account on Meta.
So I know whenever I talk about student groups in general who are protesting the Israeli war in Gaza and the U.S. policy of funding and arming that horrific attack on basically that has destroyed most civilian infrastructure in Gaza has made Gaza uninhabitable by design.
has killed at the very least 40,000 people, but we know the number is far higher than that.
Whenever I talk about any people who are protesting, I immediately hear, oh, well, these are terror supporters.
These people have no rights.
It reminds me a lot about early war on terror climate where I think a lot of people came to regret what the Bush administration did to civil liberties, but this was exactly the same mindset.
Oh, these people are all terrorists that were putting in prison with no charges, that were kidnapping up the streets, that were torturing.
A lot of them turned out to be actually quite innocent.
Can you tell me in your own words what the belief system and the agenda is of the Columbia student group Justice for Palestine?
Yeah, of course.
So, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine has existed on campus since 2016, and there has been a divestment referendum that was initially passed in 2020 at Columbia and Barnard College, where the students voted whether they wanted Columbia to divest from Israel.
And it did pass at both colleges, but what happened was the president at Columbia at the time sent an email out saying that they won't take into account the divestment referendum because it's too complicated.
And this has just been the goal of Columbia SJP.
It's just that we don't want our college having stakes in Israel and we don't want our tuition dollars going to genocide.
That's it.
Which I should note was very similar to the protest movement on college campuses in the mid 1980s to object to U.S.
support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.
And most of those students were never criminalized, they were never arrested, a few were, but in By and large, that was considered to be a very noble student group, both at the time and in retrospect.
Let me ask you about the composition of the group.
I know that we interviewed several times people at Columbia who are participating in this protest.
I remember one interview in particular with two students who were leading, who were part of the leaders of the protest.
One was John Ben Menachem, who's a Jewish student at Columbia and a PhD in sociology.
The other one was Mohamed Hamida, who is a Muslim undergraduate student who is also on our show together.
I think there is this propaganda, this deliberate propaganda designed to smear the people in your group that, oh, these are just all foreigners from The Arab world are all Palestinian and who hate Jews.
And by the way, even if that were true, people who are in the United States for a student visa have every right in the Constitution, including free speech, as anybody else does.
So even if that were true, that still wouldn't justify any of these repressions.
But can you tell me the type of student, the range of people who form this student group and have been participating in the protests?
Yeah, I think it's so misleading to claim that everyone in these groups is just like international students or specifically that they're Palestinian.
I would say that the majority aren't Palestinian, actually, because we... I mean, I myself, I'm not Palestinian.
I'm an American citizen.
And people in SJP, for example, are Irish, Armenian, Haitian, Palestinian.
Like, there's so many different backgrounds in SJP and so many different backgrounds among the students who support our movement.
And it's intentionally being portrayed that way.
I mean, even during the encampments, there was so much misinformation going around in mainstream media about us being violent and anti-Semitic.
But if you actually visited our encampment and talked to the Jewish students, who are arguably overrepresented in our encampment, They felt safe in our encampment.
They had their celebrations and gatherings and religious rituals, and we all did them together.
And this is not something that we saw represented in mainstream media.
This is one of those things that we saw represented on Instagram and other social media platforms where we are able to share this narrative that isn't normally going to be shared by mainstream media outlets.
Yeah, I mean, obviously in the United States and around the world, among the leading critics of the Israeli government are people who identify as Jews, who grew up in Judaism, both culturally and religiously, in large part because they're so angry that all of these atrocities are being carried out in their name.
I remember there being Seder dinners inside of the protest encampment at Columbia at the same time that I was hearing that no Jews were permitted to cross the boundary, that there were no Jews welcome.
We were talking to Jewish students all the time.
Let me ask you about what the plans are because I think people forget that college students are on the schedule where you have the spring semester, you then have a college break, and then you come back for the fall.
Students are now, I'm not sure exactly what the date is at Columbia, but returning to campus or imminently going to return to campus.
What is the intention of SJP or just protesters in general as far as the intention to protest the Israeli war, which obviously has not stopped in many respects.
It has intensified once everybody returns from the fall.
Yeah, so classes start in about a week at Columbia, and even before classes have started, there have been so many teach-ins already to engage the first years that are incoming.
There have already been multiple protests.
We've been using tabling a lot, which is like standing outside of campus at a table and giving out flyers and political education.
Because this is one of the ways that we can actually talk to students without being disciplined, since it's technically not on campus.
So we've been finding ways to circumvent these disciplinary proceedings and all these arbitrary rules that Columbia has made in order to stop us.
And we're not going to stop until Columbia divests and until this genocide ends.
Let me ask you, it's really an amazing thing, if you think about it, what has happened in the United States and free speech rights and civil liberties since October 7th in defense of this foreign country.
College presidents are among the most powerful actors in society.
I remember when I was in college, I mean, the college professor, the president of the university was considered an extremely powerful position, very prestigious, influential, and yet since October 7th, All as a result of this one issue, we have seen the firing-slash-pressured resignation of three different presidents of major Ivy League American schools.
First, Liz McGill at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by Claudine Gay at Harvard.
And then a couple of weeks ago, the president of Columbia, Nimit Shafiq, was also resigned.
I think she was forced out.
There was, interestingly, a lot of cheering about that, both from the right, who felt like she was insufficiently harsh on anti-Israel protesters, but also a lot of cheering from protesters who were correctly observing that she led the crackdown on a lot of these campus protests that had been fully nonviolent and legal.
What is your reaction to the announcement that she will no longer be the president of Colombia?
Yeah, so the reality is I honestly believe that she was pressured out by Zionists.
I don't think it's actually a victory on our end.
However, I was still happy that she resigned because we do all associate her with the crackdown.
Calling the cops on Columbia students twice, even that wasn't enough for a lot of the pro-Israel Donors and the Board of Trustees, you know, like, they wanted a worse crackdown.
And I'm not sure what people, I don't think people realize that, I mean, Manoush Shafiq sufficiently did crack down.
Like, it's really just about the fact that Columbia students don't stop, no matter what.
There's literally nothing you can do to stop us from protesting.
They've tried everything against us and it's just not going to work.
And Manoush Shafiq got blamed for that.
So I really believe that university presidents, they don't have a lot of power.
It's the Board of Trustees that are making the decisions.
In these cases.
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of how Joe Biden has said from the start of the war that he will provide Israel with all the money and all the weapons that they need to carry out this war until the very end.
He has done exactly that.
And somehow pro-Israel activists, including the most fanatic, suggest that, oh, he's not been a good friend for Israel.
He hasn't done as much as he should.
And the question is, like, other than turning over the Pentagon and the American Treasury to the Israeli government, like, what more could he have done?
And I think that's a similar question for the Columbia president.
What more could she have given?
Pro-Israel activists in terms of what they were demanding.
Speaking of the Biden administration's ongoing, essentially absolute, arming and funding of the IDF's destruction of Gaza, and now their incursions increasingly even into the West Bank, There's obviously a lot of sentiment or questioning around the replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris and this sense that I think a lot of
Let's say left liberals who are against the war but sort of try to perpetrate this notion that Kamala is better on this issue, that she's more likely to be open-minded to the demands of protesters, she's more empathetic to Palestinians.
Do you think there's any substantive difference between the Israel and Gaza policies of Joe Biden on the one hand and Kamala Harris on the other?
Well, I think the first thing to note is that Kamala is the vice president under the current administration.
So to separate her from Biden in this sense, it's very misleading from the very beginning.
However, I do believe, for example, the Uncommitted Movement, which is a group of Arab Americans who are trying to pressure the Democratic Party to call for a ceasefire and push for an arms embargo on Israel, they had hope for Kamala.
And I think that she showed her response at the DNC, where they requested—all they requested was to have a Palestinian speaker, as there was an Israeli speaker, at the DNC, and Kamala refused.
She refused this basic, very reasonable request that a Palestinian-American who endorses Kamala can come speak in front of the crowd of the DNC.
And I think it's very clear that Kamala doesn't care about the Arab-American vote.
She doesn't care about the vote of people who are against the war, against the genocide.
And she's trying to appeal more to moderates or conservatives by emphasizing her, for example, her harsh immigration policy or other aspects of her campaign that might appeal to them.
And we've given her lots of chances.
I would say, like, there are many Arab Americans who want to vote Democrat.
There are many Muslim Americans who want to vote Democrat and have voted Democrat their entire lives.
But your platform cannot run simply on I'm not Trump.
And a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump.
I mean, that's not a sufficient platform.
So I don't think that she's, I think she's made it quite clear that she's not very different from Biden.
As I alluded to earlier, we've seen in this week, some major escalation in terms of Israeli attacks, not only on Gaza, but also on the West Bank, which the entire world regards as Palestinian terrorists.
Territory regards Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal.
There's no reason why Israel should even be in the West Bank, and yet Israelis have been escalating their attacks, obviously on Lebanon, in order to provoke a war with Hezbollah, but now this very serious attack on the West Bank, this bombing campaign, this killing of at least 10 Palestinians in the West Bank, It's all happening under the Biden-Harris administration.
They're obviously completely unafraid of anything that the government might do.
What do you make of Israel's expansion of their aggression?
And obviously, it's not the first time, but there's a pretty serious escalation of what they're doing in the West Bank.
I mean, this is just the result of being able to act with complete impunity and for all those in power to shut down any criticisms of Israel's actions.
The ICJ ruled back in January that Israel's plausibly committing genocide.
The UN has been constantly putting out statements against what's happening in Gaza.
I mean, it's an atrocity upon atrocity.
The entire world, I mean, the masses are saying, like, put an end to this.
But those in power are so, so insistent on continuing to arm Israel and shut down all criticism.
And it's, I mean, it's obscene at this point.
It's just the result of being able to act with complete impunity.
Let me ask a little bit of a personal question in the time we have left.
Not a deeply invasive personal question, but a personal question nonetheless.
You know, I think there's this attempt to sort of celebrate in the United States people who are supposed dissidents.
And I think a lot of times people get celebrated as dissidents or they cast themselves as dissidents, when in reality they're just expressing views that are likely to advance their career, who since so many people claiming to be quote unquote canceled, who cancellation ended up being the best thing for their careers and reputation and bank accounts.
But in your case, you're a sophomore at an Ivy League school, You have had hedge fund billionaires who have organized with big law firms to say that anyone who participates in any of these protests will be on a hiring blacklist.
So you're talking about people who want to go into law or go into finance, talent being told as undergraduates that just expressing their political rights Will have a very serious and damaging effect on their careers before they even get started.
You personally, there's a group called the Canary Project that is incredibly sinister, that basically keeps a public dossier on people who In any way criticize Israel or organize against you a support for Israel.
You have your own page on that website where you're accused of all sorts of crimes like celebrating Hamas terrorism and being a Jew hater and everything else.
Feel free to contest whatever you want about that.
But my bigger question is, why are you so willing to risk what are very real potential implications to your future, to your career, in order to continue to pursue this cause so relentlessly?
Well I think the first thing is my goal is to go into journalism and I hope to report specifically on the ground in conflict zones like Palestine and I would never ever want to work for a publication or a news outlet that censors me or I think it's actually doing me a service.
this kind of smear campaign against me.
I want to be able to report with integrity and I don't think that that's something that's found in a lot of mainstream media outlets right now.
So I consider this almost a filter of sorts for my future career.
I think it's actually doing me a service.
And the other thing is that I can't comprehend being willing to stay silent in the face of this genocide that is being funded by my tax dollars and my tuition.
And I mean, this is arguably the most televised genocide in history Everything is available to see on Instagram.
You can see beheaded Palestinian babies on Instagram in actual footage of it.
We're seeing actual footage of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian detainees.
There's footage of every single thing that Palestinians are alleging is the case.
Everything is proven, and to have to bear witness to that?
To expect us to bear witness to that, being done by my tax dollars, it's unreasonable for me to stay silent.
That's not an expectation that I can be held to.
Yeah, I have a lot of respect for people who are willing to sacrifice careers and ambitions in pursuit of a cause, whatever that cause might be.
The fact that this cause is so obviously just makes it even more admirable.
The fact that you wanted to go in journalism is music into my ears because that's exactly the sort of thing journalism, more than anything, is missing.
But let me ask you in terms of your classmates, your fellow protesters, have you seen any kind of chilling effect?
That obviously is intended by these campaigns of vilification, these threats of being put on a career blacklist.
Have there been students who have expressed concerns about what this the impact might be on their future to get a job or to enter certain professions?
Absolutely.
I mean, back in October, when the doxing trucks started at Harvard, I'm not sure if you know about that, but there was these massive trucks going around with the faces and names of students, and they were titled, Harvard's Leading Anti-Semites, and they went around and were just driving around campus with absolutely zero consequences.
They ended up coming to Columbia, as expected, and students were terrified.
I mean, even we as organizers were terrified back then of the idea of doxing.
But now I've fully moved past any fear of doxing because I'm, I mean, I'm not ashamed of the cause that I support.
I think that, like, I wouldn't even say history will absolve me because I believe I'm being absolved right now.
It's just a very small minority, a small, powerful and vocal minority that is constantly doing this smear campaign against us.
And I don't think it's sustainable.
It's not going to last because But the reality is a lot of Columbia students were radicalized by seeing their peers on these doxing trucks, by seeing the way that Zionists conduct themselves with those who disagree with them, because pro-Palestine students aren't the ones putting people on doxing trucks and physically assaulting them and chemically attacking them and all these other things that have happened at Columbia.
There's clearly a power imbalance, and it's very clear what Zionists are trying to do in order to silence students.
Yeah, we interviewed two African American students at Harvard who were among the people whose faces were put on among those first trucks as Jew-hater, anti-Semites, and they were similarly resolute about their intention to continue and not allow those intimidation tactics to deter them.
Last question I have for you.
You've used the term Zionist several times in our discussion.
Recently, there has been an attempt to suggest that the word Zionist is really just code for Jew, so that when people talk about the influence of Zionists or the evil ideology of Zionists, what they're really saying is, oh, Jews are the ones who are evil, Jews who are in control.
Now, it's kind of a bizarre thing because the word Zionist didn't exist until the early 20th century.
It was an ideology that was created.
and was very controversial at the time, including among Jews, and still is.
There are a lot of religious Jews who believe Zionism is a violation of God.
But when you use the term Zionist, is that code for Jews, or are you talking about something else?
Absolutely not.
And I think it's actually very insulting to even suggest that.
Because, I mean, if you read the work of the founders of Zionism, such as Theodor Herzl, he's an actual anti-Semite.
The kind of stuff that he wrote about Jewish people, I mean, it's actually mind-blowing.
I mean, I didn't even know about it before this year.
I did a lot of reading into what the founders of Zionism wrote themselves about Jewish people, and it's appalling that they were able to write these things and actually create a whole movement behind this ideology.
And I think it's doubly insulting because of the presence of Jewish anti-Zionists.
I mean, so many of my friends are Jewish anti-Zionists who got arrested at both of these, like the encampment and the Hamilton Hall occupation.
And I think it's just like, it's a very intentional coordinated campaign to just silence anybody who disagrees with Zionism.
I mean, even at NYU, they just declared Zionists a protected class, which means that anybody who speaks out against Zionists, they can be disciplined for doing so.
And at this point, it's just scrambling, because Jewish students are actually quite overrepresented in the pro-Palestine organizing movement.
Yeah, it's you're exactly right.
And it's been quite astounding and Quite disgusting to watch so many people who have draped themselves in the free speech flag over the last decade or so not only turn a blind eye to what is among the most egregious attempts to silence and censor free speech on campus in the name of protecting this foreign government, but actually actively applaud it and look for justifications as to why things like an Instagram ban of your organization is somehow justifiable.
Miriam, I'm so appreciative of your willingness to take the time to come on our show.
I hope you'll do so again.
I consider your work, like I said, and your group's work to be extremely honorable.
I want to say I hope you keep it up, but I know it's pointless because I know you're going to.
And whatever happens at Columbia or with this movement, we will continue to report on.
