Duke Interrogates Arab Student Over Tweets, Memes
/Palestine Legal is calling on Duke University to apologize for and remedy an intimidating pattern of monitoring the online speech of a student who is active with Duke Students for Justice in Palestine.
Duke has questioned senior Hadeel Abdelhy three times about her social media posts since December, including during the pandemic. Abdelhy regularly posts on Twitter about topics ranging from international politics to community matters to photos of her foster cat, but the questioning only began after Duke’s settlement of a complaint filed by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
Pattern of Surveillance
On December 3, Duke University entered into an agreement with the Department of Education and the ZOA to resolve a federal investigation into the university based on a baseless complaint filed by the ZOA in April 2019. The complaint expressed the ZOA’s disagreement with an academic conference on Gaza co-hosted by the university, which the ZOA claimed fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students; it did not complain about any student activity. In the resolution agreement, Duke admitted no wrongdoing.
On December 4, Hadeel was called in for the first of three rounds of questioning by the Duke Office of Student Conduct, sparked by a complaint against her social media posts criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. At the meeting, Hadeel learned that the Duke Israel Public Affairs Committee (DIPAC), a student arm of AIPAC, had filed a complaint against her. DIPAC had compiled a dossier on Hadeel, detailing protests she supported and pro-Palestinian events she helped organize during her time on campus.
An Israel advocate claimed in the Algemeiner that some who saw this image were “shaken”
According to the Office of Student Conduct, the item that ultimately triggered the complaint was a Twitter post criticizing DIPAC for celebrating Israel’s killing of dozens of Palestinians, including a seven-year-old boy. In the post, Hadeel called DIPAC clowns by pasting clown face emojis over a photo of DIPAC members.
Rather than recognizing the wisdom of Hadeel’s move—anonymizing individual DIPAC members while criticizing the group's message—university staff responded to the complaint by monitoring Hadeel’s social media accounts and collecting a file of screenshots of many of her postings.
After the December 4 meeting, Hadeel felt anxious for days, and was nervous about even going to class.
The episode was repeated on December 18, when Hadeel was called in for questioning during winter break over a tweet in which she pasted a drawing of a gun over a picture of herself, parodying a popular meme, where people added pictures of weapons to photos of stars like Mariah Carey and Carly Rae Jepsen. New York magazine culture and entertainment site Vulture explained in a September 2018 article:
The falseness of the picture is obvious, as the source image is often recognizable as an album cover or a music-video screenshot; no one sees these memes and thinks they’re looking at a photo of a woman holding an actual gun.
Examples of the gun meme
“It felt terrifying to be vilified for a meme. And it made me consider policing myself on social media to avoid wasting my time and emotional energy going to the student conduct office when I could be focusing more on my schoolwork and graduation," Hadeel explained, describing the meeting. “I was uncomfortable walking around campus. I felt anxious and incredibly paranoid like I was being watched by someone or had a target on my back."
Hadeel’s tweets about Professor Peter Feaver
On March 28, after Duke had told students not to return to campus because of the pandemic lockdown, administrators once again demanded Hadeel explain her social media postings. This time she was questioned about a social media campaign in early February protesting a campus event featuring former national security advisor John Bolton. In the middle of a cluster of memes she had posted referencing Peter Feaver, the professor who had invited Bolton to Duke, Hadeel had posted that “Today is bully Peter Feaver day.” Six weeks later, the university asked Hadeel to explain the tweet after another student—not the professor referenced in the tweet—complained.
Complaints from a campus Israel lobby group and the university’s overzealous response caused Hadeel to feel scared, singled out, surveilled and vilified because of her identity and for expressing her political views.
"My passion for Palestinian issues is motivated by growing up in the Arab world around members of the Palestinian diaspora who have been displaced from their homelands. Since then, I have been involving myself with activism for Palestine and standing in solidarity with Palestinian students as a form of not only Arab solidarity, but also to work towards an international form of solidarity for the liberation of Palestine,” Hadeel explained. “I have no doubt that many of the attacks by Zionists and surveillance by Duke University are racially motivated by my status as an Arab Muslim woman and by my solidarity work."
Echoes at Nearby UNC
A similar story is playing out at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), which also entered into a resolution agreement with the Department of Education and the ZOA over the 2019 Gaza conference, which it co-sponsored with Duke. Elyse Crystall, a teaching associate professor in the department of English at UNC, reported that the resolution agreement has created a climate of confusion among members of the university community. Students and faculty feel pressured to self-censor because they are uncertain whether they are allowed to advocate for Palestinian rights on campus.
"The agreement has also emboldened a local woman to harass our students and to threaten their livelihood," Elyse, who is the faculty advisor for the campus's Students for Justice in Palestine club, explained. "The university seems eager to respond to complaints against pro-Palestinian students and academics and has new requirements and policies limiting their speech. But no one seems to have answers when we ask if we're still allowed to criticize Israel."
Scrutiny Amid Pandemic
“As universities continue to be shut down amid the ongoing pandemic, social media is one of the primary ways students are able to stay connected with each other and cope with the rapidly shifting and deeply isolating circumstances that they are experiencing,” said staff attorney Zoha Khalili. “In her final weeks at Duke, Hadeel has faced the added burden of knowing that she is being monitored online not only by students who disagree with her politics but also by administrators who seem to view her free speech as an acceptable sacrifice to avoid further federal investigation.”
Duke and UNC’s overzealous scrutiny of speech supporting Palestinian rights is also a sign of the kind of viewpoint discrimination encouraged by Trump’s December executive order mandating executive agencies to consider a definition of antisemitism that encompasses criticism of Israel.
Palestine Legal has called on Duke to apologize to Hadeel and to establish policies that would prevent other students from going through the same experience.
Local community groups are currently mobilizing to protect students who support Palestinian freedom and equality.