QAIA's statement on Center's banning of our event with Sarah Schulman

Statement from Queers Against Israeli Apartheid

on the NYC LGBT Center’s banning of QAIA-NYC’s Sarah Schulman reading

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is (again) appalled at the hijacking of our NYC LGBT Community Center. At this point, the Center has banned any discussion of Palestine – and the growing movement to support Palestinian queers’ calls for civil and human rights – for two full years. We’re reminded that the Center’s board enacted this ban at the instigation of an avowed Islamophobe, who uses his wealth as a megaphone, who claimed to have organized other wealthy gay men as a threat to the Center, and who is the partner of a former chair of the Center’s board. The ban is not a community decision, but an action by a few wealthy, politically-powerful people to leverage their control of a community resource. The Center’s board and administration have refused to meet with the community, talk to the media, or respond to queries about excluding so many of us.

It’s worth noting that a number of groups of queers of color, immigrants and trans people have written to the Center to report that this ban further marginalizes them in a space that’s critical to them. The Center is not interested.

In its latest reprehensible move, the Center refused QAIA’s space request for a reading by Sarah Schulman from her new book, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. Sarah is a respected author, activist, organizer and educator, and this book, like her other books, reflects critical currents in the queer community. The ban on her reading insults the integrity and intelligence of New Yorkers. The Center gave no reason for the ban, except to refer obliquely to “Center policy.”

In banning Sarah’s reading, the Center made no distinction between refusing space for Sarah’s reading and refusing QAIA’s particular request for space for that reading. That’s because there is no distinction. Sarah and QAIA are engaged in the same work. It’s that work, in which much of the queer community is engaged, that the Center has banned.

The work of QAIA and Sarah that the Center is banning is this:

1) exposing Israel's pinkwashing of the occupation, and

2) supporting the civil and human rights of Palestinian queers, which are inseparable from the civil and human rights currently denied to all Palestinians.

The Center ban covers anyone working with or in support of Palestinian queers who are trying to secure their rights.

Meanwhile, the issues of Palestine and pinkwashing – the Israeli government’s draping of itself in “LGBT rights” in an effort to obscure its gross violations of civil and human rights – have come to the forefront of queer organizing. While the Israeli government’s “Brand Israel” public relations campaign paints Israel as a gay haven, queers in Palestine are increasingly organized and vocal. Their call to queers worldwide is that Palestinians cannot begin to have “queer rights” under conditions where Palestinians have no rights at all. Worldwide, queers have increasingly responded. In fact, few issues are more front and center in queer political organizing right now than Palestine.

The Center’s claim that its ban maintains neutrality on Israel/Palestine is absurd. No reasonable person would interpret room rental as an endorsement of a position. QAIA is not neutral, but we support our community’s freedom of speech at the Center, and would of course support the right of pro-Israel groups to meet there. The Center is not neutral either: in banning Sarah Schulman, QAIA, Siegebusters and any discussion which dares to touch on Palestinians, gay or not, the Center’s board exposes its complicity with broader right-wing elements who are no friends to LGBT people. With shady maneuvering reminiscent of the recent attacks on Brooklyn College, they trample the rights upon which the Center was built.

The Center’s comportment mirrors exactly the attacks on the BDS forum at Brooklyn College. It reflects the same bias against human rights organizing by inconvenient people, the same censorship, and the same racism. It leverages the same complicity of “progressive” elected officials: with Brooklyn College, they piled on in attacking discussion of Palestinian rights. Here, they pile on with a deliberate, deafening silence in the face of racism and exclusion. The difference between Brooklyn College and the Center is integrity: Brooklyn College undertook its role as a taxpayer-supported institution to preserve free speech, while the taxpayer-supported Center sets out to undermine it.

The queer movement to expose and unravel Israel’s pinkwashing is gaining strength. In the process, we are forced to challenge the anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim hysteria in the US that pervades circles of wealth and political power, which in turn support the ugliest, most bigoted corners of the queer community. To the extent that queer institutions have pulled those queers into their boards as fundraisers and political connectors, we’re forced to challenge them too. We are not afraid of public discussion of these issues; we welcome it. Those ugly forces pulling the strings of queer communities have been hidden for too long – let’s bring them out.

For more information about QAIA:

http://queersagainstisraeliapartheid.blogspot.com

For info on the event:

http://tinyurl.com/schulman-reading

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Gay City News: LGBT Center Bars Sarah Schulman Reading

LGBT Center Bars Sarah Schulman Reading

'A leading queer community author was barred from an appearance at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center apparently because the book she was to discuss deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.' 

'“We requested space for me to do a presentation of my new book ‘Israel/ Palestine and the Queer International,’ which has gotten a good review in the Lambda Literary Review,” wrote Sarah Schulman in a February 11 email. “It is amazing to me that after all my work in the community, I could be refused a platform to present a queer book.”'

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Comic biteback: There's a checkpoint around this Center!

Check out Ethan Heitner's really beautiful exposition of Tara and Ana's throwdown at "Occupy the Center!" The full 8 panel comic is posted on mondoweiss.net today.

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Honduran queer event organizers call out LGBT Center's racism

QAIA was just forwarded this letter from NYC queer organizers working in support of Honduran queers. Go, sisters!

The Center's claim that it's "open" break down as the community excluded gets broader and broader. The Center has flatly ignored critiques about its racism, refusing to be accountable to its community, or to present any response at all. This event (on 2/12) will be held instead at the Venezuelan Consulate -- click on the image for details.

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Dear Ms. Testone:

This Tuesday, February 12, Pepe Palacios, a leader of the LGBT community in Honduras, will be in New York City to speak as part of a national tour organized by the Honduras Solidarity Network. He will report on the brutal repression against the LGBT community by the illegal coup government, and also about the heroic resistance of the Honduran people. We hope that Pepe's appearance here will raise awareness of the struggle in Honduras for democratic rights and against the U.S.-backed coup regime. We especially hope to win supporters for that struggle among the LGBT community here.

The LGBT Center would have been a natural home for this event. However, during the planning process, we heard about the Center's history for the past two years of denying meeting space to Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and other groups that support the Palestinian people in their struggle against occupation. We were disappointed to learn that the Center, which for so long had been a welcoming locus for the diverse LGBT community, now bars certain parts of the community. This ban on pro-Palestinian groups and individuals amounts to a racist affront to the Palestinian, Arab and in fact all communities of color.

In the light of this terrible, shameful policy on your part, we could not in good conscience hold our event in the Center. And so a representative of the Honduran LGBT community will speak not at the purported center of New York's LGBT community, but rather is being welcomed at the Venezuelan Consulate.

We wanted you to know this, to know that as a consequence of your reactionary ban against QAIA and its chilling effect on LGBT communities of color, New Yorkers will go elsewhere to hear the words of a brave, heroic Honduran gay leader. We expect to have a great, stirring, well-attended meeting. But not on 13th Street. Not while those who support our Palestinian sisters and brothers are barred from your premises.

Teresa Gutierrez
Teresa Gutierrez
International Action Center

Lucy Pagoada-Quesada
Lucy Pagoada-Quesada
Honduras/USA Resistencia

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Brooklyn College BDS: Judith Butler's remarks

QAIA folks who attended the Omar Barghouti/Judith Butler event on BDS at Brooklyn College were moved and strengthened by the talk. Judith Butler's remarks are archived at The Nation magazine. They cover BDS, the illogic of decrying BDS or anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and academic freedom.

http://www.thenation.com/article/172752/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds


"...When Zionism becomes co-extensive with Jewishness, Jewishness is pitted against the diversity that defines democracy, and if I may say so, betrays one of the most important ethical dimensions of the diasporic Jewish tradition, namely, the obligation of co-habitation with those different from ourselves. Indeed, such a conflation denies the Jewish role in broad alliances in the historical struggle for social and political justice in unions, political demands for free speech, in socialist communities, in the resistance movement in World War II, in peace activism, the Civil Rights movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It also demeans the important struggles in which Jews and Palestinians work together to stop the wall, to rebuild homes, to document indefinite detention, to oppose military harassment at the borders and to oppose the occupation and to imagine the plausible scenarios for the Palestinian right to return.

"The point of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is to withdraw funds and support from major financial and cultural institutions that support the operations of the Israeli state and its military. The withdrawal of investments from companies that actively support the military or that build on occupied lands, the refusal to buy products that are made by companies on occupied lands, the withdrawal of funds from investment accounts that support any of these activities, a message that a growing number of people in the international community will not be complicit with the occupation. For this goal to be realized, it matters that there is a difference between those who carry Israeli passports and the state of Israel, since the boycott is directed only toward the latter. BDS focuses on state agencies and corporations that build machinery designed to destroy homes, that build military materiel that targets populations, that profit from the occupation, that are situated illegally on Palestinian lands, to name a few.

"BDS does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of their national citizenship. I concede that not all versions of BDS have been consistent on this point in the past, but the present policy confirms this principle..."

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QAIA reportback from Brooklyn College

From Brad Taylor

Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti’s presentation at Brooklyn College on Thurs. night (Feb. 7) lived up to all the incredible hype that preceded it.  They were informative, engaging, appealing, constructive – as much as their full-capacity audience wanted and expected.  They were sometimes funny – Judith paused wryly in her remarks about hearing and listening, allowing the sound of the anti-BDS crowd chanting outside to punctuate her comments.

Both speakers mentioned the barrage of scurrilous charges of anti-Semitism, threats of funding attacks on Brooklyn College from public officials – the panoply of false accusations, character assassination and assaults on their intent and dignity - that they suffered in the lead-up to Thursday’s event.   And both were visibly tired and saddened by the pitch and timbre of the unfriendly and unsavory reception that some in New York had in store for them.   But, undaunted, they elucidated the objectives and strategies of the BDS movement, backgrounded the current moment in the campaign, and noted numerous very substantial recent successes of the boycott - among those, the recent endorsement of BDS from the African National Congress, a landmark development.

One thing about the evening’s discussion that I found particularly notable was the grace and generosity with which both Barghouti and Butler received questions from the audience members which were designed to challenge the strategic fairness or effectiveness of BDS.  These questions required tenacity of the questioners in the decidedly pro-BDS surround – and they were sometimes questions which were so blank, so generic that they were actually somewhat inappropriate in the setting.  Like one gentleman asked, essentially, what was the point of BDS? – when that had been the whole substance of the conversation which had been going on for two hours when he asked the question.  Omar and Judith fielded every question with respect, with generosity, and found a way to answer each one much more substantively than many would have felt that the questions merited. 

That’s, I think, the hallmark of a good spokesperson – the ability to cover a concept inclusively, in a way that belittles no-one and avoids the censorship and malice that, unfortunately, the speakers themselves encountered in Brooklyn.

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Paisley Currah on standing up to NYC's "Progressive Except Palestine" Councilmembers

Paisley Currah writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the furor over Brooklyn College's Poli Sci department co-sponsoring a talk on BDS.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/02/05/a-melee-grows-in-brooklyn/

"...The usual suspects—New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz—piled on, and the rhetoric escalated. “We’re talking about the potential for a second Holocaust here,” one assemblyman told The Daily Beast. I’ve gotten hate mail and a death threat. I’ve been attacked in the media—I’m a “coward,” says Hikind; I’m an expert not on government or politics but on “transgender rights” (apparently that’s an insult), writes a conservative columnist in the New York Post.
...
"But late last week, the game changed when President Gould received two letters from elected officials. The first, from Congressman Jerrold Nadler and 18 other self-identified “progressive” legislators (including three other members of Congress and leading mayoral candidates) describes the BDS movement as “wrongheaded and destructive” and calls “for Brooklyn College’s political science department to withdraw their endorsement of this event.” The second, from Lewis Fidler, assistant majority leader of the New York City Council and nine other city councilors, is even more chilling:

'A significant portion of the funding of CUNY schools comes directly from the tax dollars of the people of the State of New York. Every year, we legislators are asked for additional funding to support programs and initiatives at these schools and we fight hard to secure those funds. Every one of those dollars given to CUNY, and Brooklyn College, means one less dollar going to some other worthy purpose. We do not believe this program is what the taxpayers of our City—many of who [sic] would feel targeted and demonized by this program—want their tax money to be spent on.'"

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