[IsraelTimes] Holding Paleostinian flags, activists spend 13 uninterrupted minutes on stage denouncing Zionism
Anti-Israel protesters took the stage unannounced at Creating Change, an LGBTQ conference that was the site of a raucous anti-Israel protest in 2016.
At the opening of this year’s conference, organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force, a group of activists holding Paleostinian flags took the stage and led a 13-minute protest for Paleostinian liberation and against Zionism. The speakers were not interrupted or asked to leave by the event organizers.
Continued from Page 2
JTA obtained video of the event, at which speakers led chants of "From the river to the sea, Paleostine will be free" and "From Paleostine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go."
The conference took place January 23-27 in bankrupt, increasingly impoverished, reliably Democrat, Detroit
... ruled by Democrats since 1962. A city whose Golden Age included the Purple Gang...
The first speaker of the protest, who did not give their name, charged that the conference did not include pro-Paleostinian programming because it could upset donors. The speaker invoked Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat who is the first Paleostinian-American woman elected to Congress.
"In a state that elected the first Paleostinian woman to the U.S. Congress, there is still a ban on Paleostine at Creating Change, because the Task Force is afraid that people are going to come here to seek their full liberation, and donors might get mad," the speaker said. "Right now, our content is being censored, our liberation is being silenced and our voices are being shut down because the Task Force is too cowardly to have a conversation on one of the leading social justice issues of our time: Paleostinian freedom."
The second speaker of the protest, Mina Aria, called on the Task Force to fight "pinkwashing, Zionism, Islamophobia
 ...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
and colonial violence." Pinkwashing is a term that connotes what critics see as Israel’s covering up of human rights
When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much...
abuses by trumpeting its LGBTQ-friendly policies.
The protest this year recalled a similar one at the same conference in 2016, when pro-Paleostinian activists tried to disrupt a Shabbat service hosted by A Wider Bridge, a pro-Israel LGBTQ group that also advocates for LGBTQ rights within Israel. The protesters chanted "Hey hey, ho ho, pinkwashing has got to go."
JTA has called and emailed the National LGBTQ Task Force for comment, and has reached out to Aria. On Sunday, the group wrote in a Facebook post that it "firmly condemns anti-Semitism. We firmly condemn Islamophobia. We firmly condemn attacks on each other’s humanity. The perpetuation of white supremacy is harmful to all. There are a number of misunderstandings and misinformation being thrown around."
Representatives of two organizations, Keshet, a national LGBTQ Jewish group, and Jewish Queer Youth said that public protests on a range of issues are a regular part of Creating Change every year. Mordechai Levovitz, Jewish Queer Youth’s executive director, said that protests in past years have advocated the Black Lives Matter movement and criticized exclusion of transgender people. The Task Force, he said, lets the protests run their course.
"The task force has developed a de-escalation tactic to deal with the protests," said Levovitz, who has attended Creating Change for nine years. "They come, they always come on stage, they let the protesters speak for about five to ten minutes, they say what they have to say, they get off the stage."
In a statement, Keshet pushed back against calling this year’s protest anti-Semitic, saying that anti-Israel protest and anti-Semitism are not always the same thing. It called accusations of anti-Semitism this year "inflammatory and divisive
...politicians call things divisive when when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never divisive, they're principled ...
"To be clear, we believe that there is no room for anti-Semitism in the LGBTQ rights movement or in any other liberation movement," the statement said. "While we believe that criticism of Israel is at times anti-Semitic, we do not believe that it is necessarily anti-Semitic."
Keshet was part of the conference’s Jewish caucus this year. James Cohen, Keshet’s senior director of development and communications, said that the Task Force is not anti-Semitic.
"We appreciate their statement that anti-Semitism has no place in the LGBTQ rights movement," said Cohen, who was not at the conference. "Both the LGBTQ movement and the Jewish community are wide enough and strong enough to hold diversity of opinion."
But Tye Gregory, executive director of A Wider Bridge, wants the Task Force to take a stronger stance against a protest that he says targeted a certain group of conference attendees. He said the Task Force’s staff "either don’t have the core competence to fix this problem or don’t care what we have to say."
"When you say Israel and Zionism are the problem, you’re directly implicating other attendees at the conference and stirring up hate," Gregory, who was also not at the conference, told JTA. "I want to make sure those in the Jewish community and those who care about Israel outside the Jewish community have a welcoming space."
The first speaker at the protest this year also criticized the Anti-Defamation League, saying it has "committed acts of severe violence against the queer and trans liberation movement." The speaker also claimed that the ADL spied on gay rights groups in the 1980s.
The ADL did not comment by publication time. 
|
