Weeks after participating in a pro-Palestinian protest, Egyptian-American student Laila Sayed received a text message from a friend directing her attention to a website listing people it says encourage hatred of Jews and Israel.
Laila’s friend wrote to her in her phone message, saying, “I think they found you during the protest.”
When Laila visited the website called “Canary Mission,” she found a photo of herself at a protest she participated in on October 16 at the University of Pennsylvania, with red arrows pointing to her among the protesters. The post included her name, the two cities in which she lives, details about her studies, and links to her social media accounts.
Canary Mission later published a picture of Laila on its accounts on the Israeli statistics indicate that it caused the death of about 1,200 people and the holding of 253 hostages.
Following this attack, Israel launched an aggression against the Gaza Strip, which has so far resulted – according to the health authorities in Gaza – in the death and injury of about 113,000 in the besieged Palestinian Strip.
Comments on the post poured in from social media users.
“There is no future for this piece of shit,” one person wrote on the X platform. Another wrote: “A candidate for deportation to Gaza.”
Laila has long supported Palestinian causes, but she said it was her first time participating in a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Pennsylvania, and the website did not mention any other activities of hers.
Laila (20 years old) told Reuters, “My reaction was great shock at first glance. I was not there to say that I support Hamas. I was not there to say that I hate Israel. I was there to say that what is happening in Palestine is wrong.”
She added that she did not realize at the time that the chant presented by the “Canary Mission” website, which included the phrase “When people are occupied, resistance is justified,” would be considered by some to be an expression of “support for the killings committed by Hamas.”
The American-Egyptian student said she chanted the slogans to show support for the protests.
In response to an inquiry sent via “Canary Mission,” Elijah Cowland, spokesman for the Tel Aviv-based public relations company Jova 10, stated that the site is “working around the clock” to combat what he described as the “wave of anti-Semitism” that has been sweeping universities since October 7. /October, including revealing those who support Hamas.
Cowland did not respond to questions about Laila’s profile or the online abuse directed at people targeted by the site.
Although the site relies on reports about pro-Palestinian supporters, Cowland said that the site verifies what it publishes and relies on publicly available sources. It displays links to the targets’ posts on social media, their speeches at public events, and their interviews with journalists.
University of Pennsylvania officials did not respond to questions related to Laila’s case.
“The university is focused on what is in the best interest of all individuals,” university spokesman Steve Silverman told Reuters, adding that officials reach out to provide support when there is something of concern.
“Canary Mission” is considered one of the oldest and most prominent digital support groups that has intensified its campaigns to detect those who criticize Israel since the beginning of its current aggression against Gaza, which often leads to these people being subjected to harassment similar to what Laila was subjected to.
The people responsible for managing the site hide their identities, locations, and sources of funding.
Reuters reviewed some of the offensive messages and online attacks directed at dozens of people who have been targeted by the site since October 7.
The website accused more than 250 American students and academics of supporting terrorism or spreading anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel since the beginning of the current aggression on Gaza, according to a Reuters review of what was published on the website.
Those targeted include prominent members of Palestinian rights groups and people detained on charges such as disrupting traffic and punching a Jewish student. Others, like Laila, said they had just started participating in campus activities and had not been charged with any crimes.
Reuters spoke to 17 male and female students, in addition to one researcher from 6 American universities that the site referred to since the October 7 attack.
They include students who chanted slogans during the protests, leaders of groups that supported statements saying that Israel bears sole responsibility for the violence, and people who said in social media posts that armed resistance by Palestinians is justified. All but one of them said they had received hate messages or seen vitriolic comments posted about them online.
The letters seen by Reuters called for their deportation or expulsion from the university, and some called for their rape or murder.
In the past few months, several pro-Palestinian groups have emerged seeking to identify people defending Israel.
Among these groups is an account on the Continued atrocities against Palestinians.
The Raven Mission website did not respond to requests for comment. The Stop Zionist Heat account said it wanted to “make sure that American public opinion is aware of the danger posed by Zionist extremism.”
Masks to prevent identities from being revealed
Tensions escalated in American universities, with the increase in the student movement opposing the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.
The US Department of Education has opened investigations into dozens of universities since the October 7 attack, noting a “worrying nationwide increase” in the number of reports of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim behavior, and other forms of discrimination and harassment.
The Ministry declined to provide details about these investigations and whether they related to any of the incidents covered by the “Canary Mission” and “Raven Mission” websites or the “Stop Zionist Heat” account.
Pro-Palestinian student groups are advising their followers across the United States to wear masks during protests, so that no one will recognize them.
Canary Mission and its advocates believe that those who encourage hatred and intolerance must be held accountable. The site displays data on the employers and academics it draws attention to, and calls on its tens of thousands of followers to ensure that “today’s extremists are not tomorrow’s employees.”
Ten of the students interviewed by Reuters fear that their careers will be negatively affected by their appearance on the site. “Canary Mission” often appears at the top of search results for people targeted by the site on the Google search engine, and hundreds of people can interact with the site’s posts on social media.
Lawyers and advocacy groups say that for those targeted, there are few options for reparation. Three lawyers told Reuters that most of what the Canary Mission website publishes is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which stipulates freedom of expression.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the law generally does not make it a crime to publish information about someone without their consent when the information is accurate and obtained legally from the public domain.
Dylan Saba, a lawyer at the Palestine Legal Organization, which represents pro-Palestinian activists, said that the legal standard for defamation is high, as the burden falls on the plaintiffs to prove that the website made false statements about them. He recalled only a few cases in which students had succeeded in forcing Canary Mission to remove their profiles or change the data contained therein by threatening defamation suits.
The ambiguity surrounding those responsible for managing the site represents an additional obstacle.
“If you want to sue someone, you have to know where you’re going to file the lawsuit,” Saba said.
Canary Mission says it will remove profiles of people who “admit their past mistakes” and reject what it describes as “latent anti-Semitism” within groups calling for a boycott of Israel over its policies in the Palestinian territories. The site publishes what it says are apologies to individuals on one of its pages, but does not identify them.
The site was created in 2015 to confront growing anti-Semitism on campus, Cowland said. He did not answer questions about his leadership and sources of funding.
Links to an Israeli organization
A 2016 tax return filed by the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a prominent American Jewish philanthropic organization, revealed a financial connection between Canary Mission and an Israeli non-profit named Megamot Shalom.
That year, the Diller Foundation granted $100,000 to the Central Fund for Israel, which it allocated under the heading “Canary Mission Ligamot Shalom,” according to the document first published by the American Jewish news outlet The Forward and seen by Reuters.
The Central Fund is a US-based group that acts as a conduit for Americans to make tax-deductible donations to Israeli charities. The fund’s president, Guy Marcus, told Reuters that his organization only supports registered charities, but he did not confirm whether Megamot Shalom or Canary Mission were among them, attributing this to the privacy of donor and recipient information.
Despite several attempts, Reuters was unable to reach a representative of the Diller Foundation.
The entity that oversees the Diller Foundation’s donations, the Jewish Community Federation and the San Francisco Endowment Fund, referred Reuters to a statement issued in 2018 confirming that the donation was to support the work of “Canary Mission” and said that the two institutions would not provide further funding for the site.
The statement stated that the federation concluded that the Central Fund did not adhere to donation guidelines, but did not respond to requests for further clarification. Cowland did not respond to questions about Megamot Shalom or its relationship with Canary Mission.
Megamot Shalom was founded in 2016 to “preserve and strengthen the national strength and image of the State of Israel” through media initiatives, according to documents obtained from the Israeli corporate registry.
As of 2022, the latest year for which records are available, the organization employed 11 people, including 4 content writers. Records show that the only donor mentioned in the registration documents is the Central Fund, from which it received 13.2 million shekels ($3.5 million) between 2019 and 2022.
Reuters was unable to reach Megamot Shalom founder Jonathan Bash, or any of the other employees on the list. When Reuters visited the organization’s registered address in Beit Shemesh, a city located 23 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, it found a closed, one-story building with no sign of activity.
The suffering of Laila and Yousra
Canary Mission has targeted at least 30 students and academics at the University of Pennsylvania since October 7.
The University of Pennsylvania is one of several prestigious universities at the heart of the protests against the Gaza war. Its former president, Liz Magill, resigned last December after being criticized for her handling of accusations of anti-Semitism at the university.
After finding her profile on the Canary Mission website, Leila consulted the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil liberties organization.
Ahmet Tekelioglu, executive director of CARE’s Philadelphia branch, said the organization had offered to help it delete information from the Internet, but explained to it that it would be difficult to take legal action against an organization that is not registered in the United States.
He told Reuters that despite the “blatant negative distortion”, the comments on “Canary Mission” were considered quotes or opinions, and could not be evidence of defamation charges.
Laila said that she had to take off the Palestinian keffiyeh that she had tied to her backpack for fear of her safety, as she felt like “a target on my back.”
She avoided walking alone on campus, and hid her LinkedIn profile so that it would not appear in search results.
Canary Mission also published information about seven Georgetown Medical School students after they appeared in a December 21 article published by the conservative Washington Free Beacon news site under the headline, “At Georgetown Medical School, tomorrow’s doctors don’t hide their support.” “For terrorism.”
One of them, Yusra Rafiqi (22 years old), said that the sites published a screenshot of a post that she said she had shared privately with her followers on Instagram, showing a man on top of an Israeli tank waving the Palestinian flag on October 7. The picture was accompanied by a comment saying, “No more condemnation of the Palestinian resistance. Radical change requires radical movements.”
One of them wrote on “X” in a comment on a post by “Canary Mission” in which he mentioned her university and a clinic where she volunteers to work: “Fire her immediately,” referring to Yousra.
Yousra told Reuters that she re-published the photo to support the resistance against what she described as the Israeli “brutal occupation forces,” and indicated that she did not comment on Hamas’ killing of Israelis.
A Georgetown University representative referred Reuters to a statement issued by Edward Hilton, executive dean of the school of medicine, in which he called the leak of students’ private information and reports of retaliation against those believed responsible “unacceptable.”
Hilton said the university denounces anti-Semitism and hatred of Muslims, and encourages students to report potential threats.
Yousra expressed her “deep concern” about how this would affect her ability to practice medicine and continue to advocate for Palestinians.
The student, the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, said, “I no longer feel safe in this country that I once considered my homeland.”
Cowland and the Washington Free Beacon did not respond to questions related to Yousra’s case.
