I've been a target for surveillance and suppression for at least 24 years. The question is, a target of whom?
I first learned I was on some kind of international watch list in 2002, thanks to a uniformed officer for Canadian immigration at the Montana-Alberta border who showed me what it said on his computer screen about me, before he told me I wouldn't be allowed into the country, and if I tried again at another border crossing, I'd be held there until the G8 meetings were over.
Contrary to some people's opinions, I'm actually not inclined towards assuming there's a conspiracy going on, generally. Until I was shown the "all points warning" about me on the officer's screen, I had figured that my many problems with trying to cross the Canadian border were related to generally increased levels of security on the border since the rise of the global justice movement in the late 1990's.
I knew that the increased security, and my problems with the border, were not just attributable to the increased security post-9/11, because it all started before then.
Around the turn of the 21st century there were so many overlapping events all happening at more or less the same time. The rise of the global justice movement, which seemed to be very threatening to the neoliberal capitalist status quo then, was happening in North America and around the world at basically the same time as other events that were also very threatening to various elements of the ruling elites, such as the election of Hugo Chavez to power in Venezuela, the beginning of the Second Intifada in the occupied Palestinian lands, and then the 9/11 attacks, all in fairly rapid succession.
Since that time it's been a quarter century. I've been touring, performing, and recording all that time, trying to maintain and maybe even build a career, while facing many obstacles along the way. Some of those obstacles have been related to the rise of Big Tech, and the enshittification of the platforms which have effectively taken over the internet. For example, when legal, free streaming became the dominant way most people got their music, untold numbers of musicians lost half their income, which for so many meant they effectively had to find another line of work. This happened to musicians regardless of their politics or lack thereof.
What's happened to me, however, can't just be attributed to those kinds of developments. On the other hand, almost everything that's happened to me -- aside from at that border crossing in 2002 -- could be attributed to a variety of possible factors.
There are all sorts of reasons why I might have trouble crossing a border, for example. I fit a certain kind of suspicious profile, whether I'm on a list or not. There are all kinds of reasons someone expressing opinions like mine about sensitive issues like whether Israel has a right to exist as an ethnonationalist state or not would have problems with things like censorship. Such opinions often violate the laws of many different countries these days, after all.
One of the things about being targeted for surveillance and suppression by evil forces is no one wants to inflate one's sense of self-importance, or most of us don't. If we can attribute our experiences to a less conspiratorial, more common sort of explanation, that often seems preferable.
For someone like me, a US citizen with some kind of involvement with the left dating back to my early childhood, I naturally have been inclined to think about things like Cointelpro, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program. Partly because I knew about it, and partly because I'm a US citizen with a history of being involved with various social movements that have all been heavily targeted for suppression by US authorities here -- such as the global justice movement, the antiwar movement, the environmental movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement that was very prominent around the world during the slightly less than twelve months between Ariel Sharon's invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28th, 2000, and the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
But my ruminations in more recent times -- and also after reading a big chunk of Ilan Pappe's recent history of the Zionist lobby and its massive and longstanding program to dominate the global narrative around Israel, and looking at what we're learning about the vast network of surveillance and influence that Mossad seems to have established with the Jeffrey Epstein project -- leads me to wonder, what if there is one particular agency targeting me all this time, and what if it's not a US-based one, like I had always assumed? Whether or not this knowledge would make any difference is another matter. But what if it's Mossad that is targeting me?
As I process this question myself, I find it makes the most sense. Given my relatively low profile as an artist in the first place, with never more than 2 million songs streamed in a given year in my entire career, I have often wondered how much sense it could possibly make for me to have had so many problems in so many different countries. Are they all run by people who are really that concerned about me and my music? It feels unlikely. But if there's someone in Israel, or working for Israel, who decided a long time ago that I was deserving of being a target for surveillance and suppression, then it all seems at least slightly more logical.
The folks who run Israel have a long history of understanding the vital importance of artists in the resistance, which is why Israel has a long history of assassinating, imprisoning, and otherwise in less violent ways suppressing the careers of artists who speak out against the crimes of the Zionist state.
Assassinating your critics can draw a lot of attention, so most artists targeted for suppression don't get to meet the fates of people like Ghassan Kanafani, Wael Zuaiter, Kamal Nasser, Naji al-Ali, Refaat Alareer or Saleem Al-Naffar. There are many other ways to suppress an artist's career that don't turn them into martyrs.
My guess at the moment is I got on the radar of the Israelis when what was to be my second tour of Israel was canceled in the fall of 2000, just after the beginning of the Second Intifada, which had coincided with me writing a song called "Children of Jerusalem."
The song resulted in me having most of my gigs canceled in Israel, and being labeled a fascist and/or an antisemite by most of my would-be Jewish gig organizers there (despite my Jewish lineage). It then resulted in a flood of attention and praise from the Palestinian diaspora around the world, and many years afterwards of being featured as a performer at pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the world and being interviewed occasionally on platforms like Al-Jazeera.
I'll just go through notable things that happened in the years and decades since that time.
The first major thing that I remember was being turned away at the Canadian border in 2002. The border official had been instructed to turn me away without telling me why he was doing so. He was so uncomfortable with this order that he showed it to me. Then he turned me away, because he didn't want to lose his job, and he told me that that was the real reason he was turning me away.
In 2002, after the Israeli military's invasion and destruction of the Jenin refugee camp and resulting deaths of scores of Palestinians, I wrote the song, "Jenin." In the UK, Andy Kershaw began playing that song about once a month on his weekly, nation-wide world music program.
As a result of playing this song, Andy was called to an interview with the BBC Board of Governors, for the first time in his three decades at BBC. They questioned his journalistic neutrality and criticized his choices of guests. He lost his job at BBC not long after that, supposedly for unrelated reasons. I have met some of his former producers since then, who have all apologized for never playing me since he was fired, saying that they don't want to lose their jobs, too.
In 2002 I was gaining a much bigger audience in Germany as well, performing at an antiwar demonstration for a hundred thousand people in Berlin that spring. Soon after that, I began to be targeted by a group called the Antideutsch, the Anti-Germans, a bizarre but influential political tendency coming out of some of the more academic and convoluted corners of the German left that aligns themselves strictly with anything the self-proclaimed Jewish State of Israel does, up to and including crimes against humanity -- and that aligns themselves rigidly against anyone who is opposed to Israel's crimes.
The Antideutsch began leafleting at some of my gigs, and threatening with other ones to do physical violence at venues if gigs went ahead. This kind of thing has kept up in Germany ever since then. It hasn't stopped me from playing in Germany fairly regularly, but it has had a tremendous impact in terms of the functioning of the rumor mill, and how I have to swim through a morass of false allegations and misunderstandings in Germany everywhere I go since then, especially if anyone is online at all.
When I was barred from entering Canada for a full year, in 2006 or so, what I was mainly going to Canada to do was to receive an award from a Palestinian community center in Vancouver. There was also a work visa question around another gig, which I figured at the time was the real problem. The Palestinians at the community center thought otherwise. A year ban seems excessive either way.
When I received a phone call in Tokyo before boarding my flight to New Zealand in 2013 and I was told by New Zealand Immigration that I could not board the flight and was not welcome in New Zealand, I thought this time as well that maybe it was related to not having a work visa organized yet. But it turned out that there was no mention of that, only of things Immigration had been reading on my blog, that made me an undesirable element as far as visiting New Zealand went.
I was hooked up then by a criminal lawyer I knew with an immigration lawyer, who took my cause to the appropriate government ministers, and was told that my case would not be reconsidered, I was not welcome in New Zealand. The lawyer had never seen anything like this in all his decades of experience.
I have never made it back to New Zealand since then, but my strong suspicion about what got me on the radar there as far as being an unwanted character was that the year before, in 2012, I played at a benefit concert folks in New Zealand organized for the purposes of buying a printing press for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, to use. The PFLP is not a proscribed organization under New Zealand law, but it sure is as far as Israel is concerned.
Soon after I was turned away from New Zealand, in the capital of Australia, Canberra, a worker in one department happened to be walking past the open door of a couple of people talking in the department that addresses things like war crimes. According to this man's story to me, in that room there were two people discussing me. He didn't stick around to hear more than that.
At the beginning of 2021, allegedly because I interviewed a controversial guest on my YouTube channel, a campaign began, that has never stopped since that time, to spread false rumors about me being antisemitic, pro-Nazi, transphobic, and other things. Systematic efforts have been made to get my gigs canceled. While these efforts are often unsuccessful, they always succeed in creating or maintaining the toxic atmosphere that follows me wherever I go, and wherever anyone says anything nice about me online.
For years I assumed that the people behind this incessant trolling and cancellation campaigning were adherents to the intolerant philosophy represented by groups like Rose City Antifa here in Portland, that believe in physically shutting down book talks they find offensive, and who believe that cancellation campaigning is a great way to "demand accountability" from those who have allegedly lost their antifascist way.
Being targeted from the left and the right seemed ridiculous, but also like par for the course. Cointelpro is a great, lengthy illustration of the kinds of divide-and-conquer techniques that have successfully been employed in the past, that have seen groups form on the left that are doing the work of the right, whether with witting agents or unwitting activists who have been successfully misdirected by the efforts of the agents. What was and is especially maddening about this particular kind of campaign is how well it fools so many people who are too innocent to understand what is going on here, who are ready to believe any nonsense they hear from someone who claims to be a victim of my bigotry.
But then came the fall of 2023, and the winter and spring following, when the cancellation campaigning and trolling was very explicitly coming from supporters of Israel. The volume was astronomically greater than any of the trolling that was supposedly coming from the Antifa end of the political spectrum. But what was shockingly identical was everything else -- the techniques of attacking anyone who speaks up in my defense; the quick resort to attacking me and others in ways that were sexist, homophobic, or racist, all the while supposedly being offended by my antisemitism; the use of macho language and certain kinds of macho vocabulary. It was all the same -- identical. Almost as if it were all or mostly, all along, the same people.
Things moved from trolling and algorithmic suppression online to vast troll farms unleashed on my Facebook page in early 2024, with 27,000 comments per month for a while, all hateful ones. My first album about the Gaza genocide, Notes from a Holocaust, mysteriously disappeared from the world's biggest music streaming platform, Spotify. On YouTube, various songs the censors disliked were being removed, and I was receiving warnings that I faced worse fates if I didn't shape up and stop supporting unnamed criminal organizations.
In early 2024 a group called UK Lawyers for Israel began writing venues in England and warning them that they were hosting an antisemite and could face a lawsuit if they didn't cancel the gig. Other anonymous people also wrote venues to tell them they should cancel gigs, on the same basis, but they presented themselves as people of the left. Same stuff as in the US, but happening in the UK. The same efforts were then made to get gigs canceled all over Scandinavia, where allegations around me became a subject for discussion at various venues and within various groups.
As if they were coordinating with these various efforts to get gigs canceled and suppress turnout to them, Facebook started disabling the use of the "Invite" feature on Events for me about 95% of the time I tried to use it. This almost-total disabling of the most useful feature on Facebook continues. Unlike with other times they do this to people, with me there has never been a notification that this is happening, or for how long it is to happen. It just happens, and never stops happening.
In January, 2025, my YouTube channel was demonetized. In November, 2025, the world's second-biggest music streaming platform outside of China, YouTube Music, removed me as an artist, and all of my albums, from their platform. In January, 2026, YouTube deleted my channel.
For an artist today, YouTube deleting your channel and YouTube Music deleting all your albums is akin to cutting your potential global audience in half, along with your streaming revenues, which in my case started declining well before the channel removal, because of YouTube's actions prior to that. The only thing that could be as bad as this is having my music deleted from Spotify, at which point my effective disappearance from most people's online reality will be pretty well complete.
Needless to say, the vast majority of the offenses I committed on YouTube that led to songs being removed prior to my channel being deleted revolved around Israel and Palestine, and my musical support for various forms of resistance to Israel's aggressions, with songs like "I Support Palestine Action" and "Song for the Houthi Army" being singled out by the censors.
Stay tuned, dear reader, for the next chapter in my disappearance.
