Your Turn
If history does indeed repeat itself, then Florida is failing an open note test.
The State University System chancellor has banned Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters across the state, echoing the same repression faced by students organizing against apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and ‘80s.
These bans are not simply attacks on free speech; they are an attack on dissent. And they are only possible because freedom of speech disappears when it’s needed most, by those who need it most. Contrary to right-wing myths, it is often leftists that have their speech suppressed most often.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are not being shut down over false claims of supporting terror, they are being shut down for not complying with US foreign policy.
Campus groups have long been the heart of fruitful, systemic change in this country because students are not beholden to the world as is. Their education allows them to see a world of possibilities beyond the confines of US foreign policy, Zionism, or anti-Arab and Islamaphobic bigotry.
Student organizations led the divest South Africa movement, which was instrumental in ending US support for apartheid. While Nelson Mandela remained on the US terrorist watch list until 2008, radical students recognized the cheap politicization of this label and joined his cause. Our government backed apartheid, our universities invested in it, but it was our students who fought it.
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