Florida is set to adopt a new series of “anti-terrorist” legislative bills passed by the State Legislature earlier this week. Chief among them is House Bill 1471, “Systems of Law and Terrorist Organizations”, which gives the Governor the power to designate terrorist organizations and to force any students deemed as ‘providing material support’ to designated groups to be expelled from public schools in the state.
Shane Miller | Staff Writer
The bill, spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis and State Representative Hillary Cassel (R-Dania Beach), also gives the Governor power to immediately expel students from public state universities if they make a statement or take an action “that supports, approves, or encourages a terrorist organization’s extralegal violence”.
This speech has been left undefined, with the Governor given discretion to determine what constitutes speech supporting ‘extralegal violence’.
HB 1471 is one in a long series of legislative attempts to suppress Pro-Palestinian student demonstrations at Florida universities amid Israel’s invasion of Gaza after terrorist attacks on October 7th, 2023, led by Hamas, a pro-Palestinian militant group based in Gaza.
The war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, and displaced the Strip’s entire population, with much of Gaza itself being destroyed by Israeli bombing campaigns.
Pro-Palestinian campus organization Students for Justice Palestine’s UF and USF branches were both central focuses of DeSantis’ campaign against pro-Palestinian activism in Florida. Other SJP chapters led a series of widely publicized occupation protests at universities across the United States in April of 2024, most notably at Columbia University in New York.
SJP UF and USF were targeted by DeSantis, whose administration demanded that all public universities in the state deactivate their SJP chapters after October 7th, claiming they violated state terrorism laws. UF’s SJP chapter sued the state with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a federal judge barred DeSantis from deactivating the club.
FIU has also been the center of several pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the October 7th attacks. At one protest reported on by PantherNOW, an FIU student was arrested for ‘battery on an officer’ during a protest march from the GC Lawns to the President’s Offices at PC. The student was accused of “yanking the arm of an FIUPD officer so hard that his watch almost came off of his wrist.”
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