Pinkwashing hits the New York Times!

Queers have known about pinkwashing for a good while. But because queers are now the sacred darlings of liberals (or at least, nice queers are) it's been hard to crack through the well-meant mainstream's idea that Palestinian queers are better off with Israel.

Sarah Schulman's op-ed in the New York Times finally gets pinkwashing the huge exposure it deserves. She hits not just the pinkwashing of Israeli apartheid, but the use of queers to demonize Muslims and Arabs far beyond Palestine. And not too soon: QAIA's battles in NYC have been framed nearly as much by the general Muslim-hating of powerful New York institutions as by pro-Israel drum-beating. It's the logical extension of the post-911 freakout: not only are Muslims terrorists who are always a step away from procuring bombs, but they're homophobes all the time!

"...depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

That connection is at the heart of many QAIA folks' willingness to focus on fighting the LGBT Center and the bigots who turned human rights organizing into a "controversy" in the queer community, even though it's something of a distraction from more direct Palestine anti-apartheid work.