Monitored, Defamed and Terminated: Teaching and The Perils of Internet Activist Writing

 

By Michael Lopez-Calderon

At 9:10 a.m. on the morning of Friday, Feb. 23, I met with both the dean and president of the Jewish day school where I have taught high school social studies for the past five years. When I received notice of the meeting on Thursday, and was told it would involve the dean, I immediately assumed it was related to my letter critical of Israel that was published in the Jan. 6 Miami Herald’s Readers’ Forum.¹ I wasn’t terribly worried, as 47 days had passed since its publication and, although a few faculty members were perturbed, no serious complaints had been lodged.

Instead, what was said in the initial moments of that Friday morning meeting completely caught me off-guard. Both the school’s dean and president each affirmed their strong support for my First Amendment right of free speech, political expression and academic freedom. The president’s next comment, however, had a chilling effect: “We know that you have written in the past about the Palestinian cause. It has come to our attention that you have since become more deeply involved with the Palestinian cause and have made statements supporting the use of violence against Israeli soldiers.”

Tracked Down on the Internet

Nowhere in my published articles had I made such an assertion. How, then, had they come across this information? I was to learn that an anonymous person or organization had monitored a particular, subscriber-only e-mail service through which I communicated to other subscribers. The unknown monitor became aware that I taught at a Jewish day school—which I happened to mention in a Feb. 19 posting²—then contacted my employers.

Only in the subscriber e-mail service of Dr. Ahmed Bouzid’s Palestine Media Watch³ could my statements be found supporting Palestinians’ right to resist with violence Israel’s unrelenting military assault. I knew the Web site’s e-mail messages were public, but in order to receive and exchange messages one had to subscribe to the service. These e-mail messages tend to be extemporaneous, occasionally heated, and less formal than, say, academic writings or words written for a general audience rather than a specific readership. This holds true for the overwhelming majority of Internet chat-rooms, message boards, and postings.

Using this subscriber-only service, I wrote a few e-mails that were out of character, i.e., lacking cautionary discretion. In the heat of the moment, I offered a passionate, at times poetic, but ultimately unprofessional number of comments defending Palestinian bus driver Khalil Abu Elba’s decision to plow his bus into a crowd of Israeli soldiers.⁴ On Feb. 14, I wrote:

To all:

Well, what did they expect? After yet another assassination, another round of tank and rocket fire into a refugee camp in Gaza, and after two unarmed Palestinian workers were shot dead at IDF checkpoints, it should come as no surprise that a father of five children, all of them the same age as those whom the IDF has murdered these past several months, decided to deliver bitter medicine to a group of IDF soldiers waiting for their morning bus ride. We regret the death of the civilian, but the soldiers are fair game as long as the murderous, racist (re: Apartheid) occupation continues. You reap what you sow. Bury your dead warriors today, Israel, for many such funerals wait.

Ten minutes later, after scouring through the Ha’aretz Web site for the latest developments in Israel, I came across a disturbing AFP report of an Israeli shooting, and simply “lost it”:

To all:

Lest you think I’m cold-blooded, here is what I found off the AFP wire:

“A 14-year-old Palestinian boy was also shot dead in disputed circumstances as he walked home from school near a Jewish settlement in Gaza, raising the death toll in the past four and a half months of violence to 402.”—Feb. 13, 2001

And the Palestinians are supposed to react to this like some kind of insensate creatures? Roll, buses, roll!

A number of Palestine Media Watch subscribers took me to task over the tone of these unfortunate remarks. On the defensive, I offered a series of politically and philosophically grounded arguments:

•Fight or flight? This is a problem that always emerges during times of repression: When do the victims have the right to resort to violence? Apparently for some, never. For others, mostly comfortable Westerners, only when taxes are too high or unfairly imposed, for example, the Puritan Members of Parliament facing off King Charles I in the mid-1600s and, a century later, those irreverent British-American subjects who disliked “taxation without representation.”

•I endorse and fully support both peaceful and violent means to achieve liberation, with the latter being the last resort when all else has failed.

•To cite Christopher Hitchens, … “One cannot afford to be an antifascist Pacifist.”

•Evidently, you [a PM Watch member] are not much of a Nelson Mandela fan. You do not recall how the ANC avoided armed struggle, what those in the West whose very governments were created by bloodshed (English Civil War, 1642-1649, American Revolution, 1775-1783, and the French Revolution, 1789-1795) call “violence and terrorism,” until after the Sharpsville Massacre.

•There comes a point at which I would rather see spontaneous instead of premeditated acts of “violence.” At least the bus driver did not pre-plan his action. Rather, he reacted from his own conscience after the endless escalation of violence in Gaza drove him to a point of no return. ⁵

I would argue that my “anonymous monitors” took my final comment about “spontaneous violence” out of context.

More ominous, however, was the fact that, since the opening volley of this covert operation, word of my comments and political expressions had spread through the Jewish community. The still-anonymous “monitors” contacted a number of parents, faculty and parental board members, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, the dean and school president—reaching a new low—my students. These censors threatened to demonstrate in front of the school until I was removed. They intimated that I posed a “security threat” to the students in my care. And these Internet-era Myrmidons initiated a defamation campaign, with the result that a few faculty members began calling me an anti-Semite—but not in my presence.

On Friday morning, March 2, 2001, I was terminated from my teaching position at the school.

 

A Tenuous Balance

For the past four years I had managed to achieve a tenuous balance between externally imposed classroom neutrality and the social criticism I engaged in in my private life. Indeed, I was scrupulous in not mixing the two. Despite highly explosive comments made by students who, in turn, were parroting remarks uttered by adults—often, and regrettably, by faculty—I never interjected my personal political views into the classroom.

A drizzle of racist anti-Arab remarks and near-genocidal statements regarding the “Palestinian Question,” and a peculiar hostility to the United States⁶ that in a few cases bordered on the absurd, turned into a deluge last fall. A maudlin self-pitying rhetoric belied a tough-minded militaristic response that apparently troubled few as, one by one, Palestinian bodies piled up. Rationales and excuses fluttered around the teachers’ lounge. No one seemed bothered or took the time to reflect critically about the direction of Israeli policies. Instead, arguments of victimization floated in the same swamp with calls for “transfer,” “expulsion,” and segregation (called “separation” by so-called Israeli liberals⁷).

The backbreaker came Oct. 2, when I witnessed what I had feared that morning: a small group of Judaic faculty gathered about a computer monitor, mocking the media’s coverage of the previous Saturday’s infamous IDF murder of 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Durrah. Some faculty members were even going so far as to blame the child in derisively insensitive tones. I knew then my silence could not hold; my relationship to the school would never be the same.

 

Into the Breech

I made my foray into the maelstrom of the Arab-Israeli conflict with my aforementioned letter to the Miami Herald. Around Jan. 8 of this year I joined Palestine Media Watch’s e-mail subscriber group discussions. Never in my wildest nightmare did I anticipate that I would be “exposed” by such a vicious and immoral process. All who believe in the First Amendment, and who have ventured into the Brave New World of cyberspace activist writing should reflect on my experience. Who knows how many Americans have been “downsized,” “let go,” or “released” by an employer for posting critical remarks about the State of Israel —or worse, advocating justice for the Palestinians?

¹The letter was in response to a Dec. 19, 2000 letter by Morton A. Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. A copy of my letter can be viewed and/or obtained at Media Monitors Net: <http://www.mediamonitors.net> (my article is archived at: <http://www.mediamonitors.net/calderon3.html)> and the Miami Herald: <http://www.miamiherald.com/content/today/opinion/letters/digdocs/083908.htm>. The Herald’s version is heavily edited. Also, you may have to go to the archives, because letters are posted for a limited time only.

²Readers can find this statement at the Palestine Media Watch’s message archive, <http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/pmwatch/message/1048>.

³Dr. Ahmed Bouzid of Wayne, PA created Palestine Media Watch in October 2000 to counter pro-Israeli media bias. His website I found professional, rational and, though committed to the Palestinian cause, balanced. See Palestine Media Watch at <http://www.pmwatch.org>.

⁴See Barbara Demick and Nomi Morris, “Palestinian driver kills 8 Israelis with bus,” Miami Herald, Feb. 15, 2001, p. 1A.

⁵A clarification as well as retraction for these comments was later offered and posted on Friday, Feb. 23, 2001. See PM Watch archives at: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pmwatch>. Search until you find my posting for Feb. 23, 2001, listed as e-mail from Agrippa.

⁶Frequent calls for the “liberation” of American traitor-cum-Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, almost always are backed by denunciations of the United States. Another favorite, of course, is the charge that the U.S. did “nothing to stop the Holocaust.” One student last fall advocated “nuking” the United States. And in recent years, the U.S. has been excoriated for “pro-Arab” policies.

⁷See Yosse Klein Halevi, “Separate Jews and Palestinians,” Miami Herald, Oct. 20, 2000, p. 9B, and Uri Dromi, “It’s time to become two separate states,” Miami Herald, Feb. 23, 2001, p.9B.