On Yale’s Decision to Suspend Helyeh Doutaghi In Response to an AI-generated Smear Campaign
Yale Law School’s decision to suspend Helyeh Doutaghi is a concerning escalation in the targeting of scholars for their solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. In placing Helyeh on administrative leave in response to misinformation from an AI news site, Yale has committed an egregious act of retribution that further advances the U.S.-backed imperialist campaign that Helyeh and her scholarship sought to challenge.
The surveillance state's weaponization of AI expands its punitive reach to target real or perceived pro-Palestinian speech.Jewish Onliner, the AI-backed news content farm which first published the fallacious report, is dedicated to the targeted surveillance and harassment of the Palestinian liberation movement. Helyeh Doutaghi was marked and targeted by Jewish Onliner because of her research on imperialism and her outspoken commitment to Palestinian liberation. The normalization of these campaigns risk becoming standard as U.S. academic institutions deploy even more draconian measures to suppress dissent and protect Israel’s narratives. “Free” speech is now a privilege reserved for those loyal to the imperialist logics of settler colonialism.
That Yale Law School would legitimize the scurrilous allegations of an AI-generated disinformation campaign is a further indication of what many already know: Yale is exploiting even the most baseless charges of anti-semitism and is committed to the fascist Zionist project. Yale’s capitulation to the Zionist agenda is not new; last spring, Yale allowed militarized police to arrest four pro-Palestinian student protestors, and the Yale Police Department arrested 44 students for protesting the university’s financial ties to Israel. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit filed in May 2024 revealed that the Yale Police Department collaborated with the FBI, New Haven Police Department, Zionist organizations, and a federal counterterrorism intelligence-sharing center during the course of the Student Intifada. Yale is more than complicit in the repression of pro-Palestinian speech; it has actively enabled and violently expanded this repression.
From manufactured, sensationalist smear campaigns to facial recognition technologies such surveillance has long been deployed and weaponized by Israel and the U.S to track and target pro-Palestinian students. But its use here, in the case of Helyeh Doutaghi, is a chilling indicator of what we can expect in the weeks and months to come, as U.S. institutions capitulate even further as they expand measures of repression.
While the US government pours billions of dollars to support Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, expanding the portfolio to include developing new AI to surveil the Palestinian liberation movement, the movement affirms their commitment to continue organizing for an end to the ongoing, U.S.-backed genocide and Zionist occupation of Palestine.
In Helyeh’s own statement, she wrote: “I will not be intimidated. I will not retreat. I remain steadfast in my commitment to the liberation of our peoples from U.S. imperialism, to justice, to truth, and to the unbreakable solidarity that binds us in the struggle for a Free Palestine.”
We join Helyeh Doutaghi and her lawyer Eric Lee in demanding Helyeh’s reinstatement. Until such time, we amplify her call for a boycott of Yale Law School, along with the demands first made by students at the Yale Gaza solidarity encampment in spring of 2024: disclosure of Yale University’s funds and divestment of university funds from the genocide and Zionist occupation of Palestine. In her own words: “The time for passive critique has long passed; we must act collectively to expose, challenge, and resist the role of Western academia in upholding empire and genocide.”
