FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 24 November 2024
Over the past year, our country’s political discourse has been largely dominated by discussion of the ongoing conflict in Gaza, and with good reason: the atrocities committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been apalling in their brutality and shocking in their wide scope. SCAO has, from the beginning, held its stance that solidarity with the Palestinian people against this invasion is a paramount political focus.
The right to hold this opinion under our government, and to engage with this discourse, is enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, this right cannot exist without its inverse: the right to refuse to engage in civil discourse with bad-faith conservative actors and pro-Israeli ideologues whose beliefs we find completely antithetical to our own.
This right to non-negotiation is being hotly contested by pro-Israeli political lobbyists and debaters, who seek to have their ideas platformed in the context of a debate. Refusal of a debate is a refusal to platform their beliefs, and that is why they have targeted Aisha Abdel Gawad in a defamation campaign.
Ms. Gawad is a celebrated Egyptian-American Muslim author and English teacher living in Connecticut. She has been awarded for her novel Between Two Moons (2023), which centers the American Muslim experience in the years following 9/11. She has also used her voice and platform to advocate for the end of the ongoing genocide in Gaza by the IDF.
Recently, she chose to withdraw from a public panel discussing her book. As already stated, SCAO holds the belief that this is a fundamental aspect of our First Amendment rights, and disagrees with pro-IDF critics of these actions. Ms. Gawad has come under intense scrutiny from pro-IDF conservatives for refusing to hold her panel and give a platform to their ideas, a defamation campaign which indirectly targets the right to free speech in the US.
The fact she is under attack from these groups is unsurprising. Rights enshrined in the Constitution have, historically, always been withheld and strangled for people of color in the United States by parties who regard their contributions as problematic and their victimization as easy. This is not just a campaign of targeted harassment, but they have even threatened her career, a reprisal for free speech which is fundamentally unconstitutional.
With the publishing of this statement, SCAO officially endorses and shows solidarity with Aisha Abdel Gawad and other American Muslims whose free speech in regards to criticizing the IDF and the Israeli government has been consistently under attack. Not only is her individual livelihood at stake, but this is a battleground where the First Amendment rights of our entire country are under threat.
SCAO encourages the reader to contribute to this struggle by signing the linked petition in support of her, and spreading the word about this attack on social media through the tag “#SolidarityWithAisha”.
