What is the role of “Project Canary” in targeting American students who oppose the war on Gaza?
Al Jazeera reported that the arrest of dozens of students at Columbia University during the past few days due to demonstrating in protest against the US administration’s continued support of Israel during its aggression against Gaza was not only caused by the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, but rather it is a Zionist project launched in 2014 under the name “Project Canary” (Canary Mission) Zionist.
Since 2014, the project’s website has been collecting files on student activists and professors at North American universities accused of “anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism.” These files are used to seek to expel students from school, and if they graduate, potential employers are notified to prevent them from being hired.
The files of students and professors who are active in supporting the Palestinian cause are also sent to the security authorities in Israel, which arrest these activists if they travel to Israel and interrogate them, mainly because these activists include Jews and Palestinians.
According to the official website of the Canary Project, activist files are created using detailed information, some of which is extracted from social media networks. The project’s website contains a “blacklist” that includes thousands of personal files of students and professors who participated in pro-Palestinian activities, and the site also includes a section for articles that activists can write if they wish to issue an apology to remove their files from that list.
An informed source told Arab media – who requested anonymity – that what happened during the past few days against Columbia University students was the culmination of the work of the “Canary Project.” He explained that the project had previously targeted students and professors at other American universities, including universities like Georgetown and McMaster, over the past years.
Those in charge of the project impose a veil of secrecy on the headquarters from which they work and information related to financing under the pretext of insurance procedures, and they refuse to respond to questions sent via email.
Although it receives donations as a non-profit organization—as appears on its website—no organization bearing the name “Project Canary” is found in US IRS records, as local law requires.
The American newspaper “Forward” – which is considered the mouthpiece of American Jews opposed to Israel’s policies against the Palestinians – had revealed that the leading donation that launched this organization came from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which is a charitable endowment supporting the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco, and that the operations that the project is carried out by a Jew named Jonathan Bash, through an Israeli charity called Megamot Shalom. In the wake of this revelation, the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation announced it would stop funding the project.
The newspaper also revealed that the Los Angeles Jewish Community Federation, the second major donor to the Megamot Shalom organization that is donating money to the project, suspended its funding after information emerged about the organization’s role in the “Canary Project.”
The source concluded by saying, “Although the Jewish Federations in San Francisco and Los Angeles announced the suspension of their funding, it is clear that funding is still in place, whether from them or other donors, whether inside Israel or in the United States.”
