A Ron DeSantis-backed “deactivation” of a pro-Palestinian group on Florida college campuses appears to run into a problem: the First Amendment.
Politico reported Tuesday:
Florida’s university system chancellor, responding to a push by Gov. Ron DeSantis, directed state universities Tuesday to disband campus groups with ties to the national Students for Justice in Palestine organization, marking the first punishments handed down to colleges here amid the Israel-Hamas war.
The report cites a memo from the chancellor stating that, after the Hamas terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, the National Students for Justice in Palestine released a “toolkit” that referred to the attacks as “the resistance.” The “toolkit,” according to the memo, was released in the lead-up to a “Day of Resistance” and stated: “Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.”
The state memo goes on to cite a Florida law that makes it a felony to knowingly provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, and then says: “National SJP has affirmatively identified it is part of the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — a terrorist led attack.” (“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” is what Hamas calls the terrorist attacks it carried out in Israel on Oct. 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.)
The memo’s implication is that the student group is providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization and therefore can rightfully be dismantled by state officials.
But the ban seems to run afoul of constitutional protections by which government actors like the DeSantis administration are bound, no matter how odious the speech in question.
Looking more closely at that state law, it defines “material support or resources” as:
any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safe houses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel, or transportation. The term does not include medicine or religious materials.
It’s unclear from the memo, which doesn’t provide the above statutory language, that the group has reached that level of material support.
Indeed, it doesn’t appear the group has been charged under that law — which, by all means, its members should be if they’ve violated it. Of course, the lack of such charges isn’t proof the law hasn’t been violated, but one imagines there has to be a prosecutor in the state who wouldn’t hesitate to bring charges if they could be proved. Surely, such a prosecution would receive support from the Republican governor who’s hoping to out-Trump Donald Trump by running roughshod over the law in pursuit of power.
Now, if you need me to tell you that it’s wrong to even implicitly support Hamas, regardless of whether such support violates the law, then there’s no hope for you. But that’s a different issue from whether the state can legally stomp out such speech. It can’t.
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