A student at the University of Southern California has become the target of death threats, FBI surveillance and relentless harassment after expressing outrage and grief over Israeli colonial violence, according to a report by The Electronic Intifada.
Faraan: Yasmeen Mashayekh says that the university has only fostered the harassment, which was heavily orchestrated by StopAntisemitism.org and Canary Mission.
The two websites are known for smearing and blacklisting outspoken Palestinians.
StopAntisemitism.org reportedly began targeting Mashayekh after she voiced her anger over Israel’s attacks on Gaza last May.
She told The Electronic Intifada that, to her knowledge, Canary Mission first created a profile about her in October of this year.
“All of this has been negatively impacting my mental health,” Mashayekh told The Electronic Intifada.
The blacklist sites, and subsequently the USC administration, took particular issue with two of Mashayekh’s tweets.
One read “I want to kill every motherfucking Zionist,” and another, “yel3an el yahood,” which the sites have translated from Arabic as “curse the Jews.”
But as Mashayekh explained, neither tweet was a direct threat and both emerged from a specific context of her anger at Israel’s relentless violence and Zionism, Israel’s state ideology.
Mashayekh even clarified in a subsequent twitter thread that yahood was not intended to mean Jewish people, but rather the name by which the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime calls itself and subjugates Palestinians.
“While this is a term that can be literally translated as Jewish, Israeli law creates an apartheid regime that favors Jews over Palestinian Muslims and Christians which creates an oppressive political dimension to the term in a political context,” she stated on Twitter.
Meanwhile, in June, Mashayekh’s mother called her to say that the FBI was at the door of her family’s home. Mashayekh’s sister, who was also at home, texted Mashayekh saying agents had come with printouts of her tweets.
Unable to provide a business card, one of the agents handed Mashayekh’s mother a scrap of paper with a name and phone number written down. Zoha Khalili, an attorney at Palestine Legal, called the number on Mashayekh’s behalf and found that it went to an FBI general line.
When Khalili asked to be forwarded to the agent who had left her name with Mashayekh’s family, she was stunned when the agent refused to provide a direct number unless Khalili could promise that Mashayekh would not tweet about it.
“The conversation was bizarre,” Khalili told The Electronic Intifada. “Yasmeen is the one who was doxxed and an agent of our federal police force is afraid of her.”
The agent claimed that the FBI visit was a routine response to a report that had been filed about Mashayekh, though they would not reveal the source. They tried to set up a meeting with Mashayekh, but she declined.
