Summary
The Nixon administration’s large-scale, multi-agency surveillance program directed at Arab and Muslim populations in the United States, which Feldman treats in chapter 4 of A Shadow over Palestine as a central object of the AAUG’s research and public education (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 895-899).
Details
- Feldman presents Operation Boulder as a practice scholars in the Association of Arab American University Graduates made central in their research: the Nixon administration used the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics to intensify policing, surveillance and intimidation of specifically Arab and Muslim populations within the United States, practices first begun in the wake of the June 1967 war and calibrated through COINTELPRO, the FBI’s “secret war against Black Power activists” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 895).
- The operation was coordinated across the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Customs, the Internal Revenue Service and the State Department; President Nixon directed it to investigate “any alien who is ethnically Arab, who was born in an Arab country, and whose parents were born in an Arab country regardless of their present nationality or residence” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 895).
- A primary target was the AAUG, especially its cofounder and by 1972 president Abdeen Jabara, whose FBI file was first opened in 1966; surveillance of Jabara continued even after the FBI determined he did not pose a risk to national security (A Shadow over Palestine, line 897).
- Over three years the program produced dossiers on over 150,000 people, including photographs, fingerprints and documentation of political beliefs, emphasising any political activity “of an anti-Zionist character”; agents used visa violations to justify numerous deportations and unwarranted arrests, and intelligence generated by the program was shared with Israeli intelligence services (A Shadow over Palestine, line 899).
- The program was shut down in 1975 because, according to one State Department official, “it cost a lot of sweat and overtime. It was a tremendous extra workload and a source of heartburn” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 899).
- Research on the program by M. Cherif Bassiouni was circulated in an AAUG monograph, and Elaine Hagopian’s findings were printed in the Journal of Palestine Studies (A Shadow over Palestine, line 899).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Association of Arab American University Graduates, Racism, U.S. imperial culture