Palestinian literature festival behind anti-Israel boycott whitewashes Hamas attacks on culture ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Palestinian literature festival behind anti-Israel boycott whitewashes Hamas attacks on culture

There are two kinds of social crimes committed by anti-Israel fanatics.

One is that they lie about Israel - incessant, constant, wall-to-wall lies that gain currency by their sheer volume and repetition.

The other, which is far less noticed, is the crime of omission - their refusal to say anything bad about Palestinians, about Hamas terror (except to support it), about Hamas' cynical use of civilians as human shields, about comparing Israeli actions and policies with those of any other Western state at war.

The crimes of omission are in many ways just as insidious as the crimes of commission, because the world simply has no context as to what is going on. When the only news sources only talk about imaginary Israeli crimes without context, the result is the massive wave of antisemitism that we are seeing.

Here is a small but telling example of how a group leading the cultural war against Israel covers up Hamas crimes - even against that group itself.

PalFest, the annual Palestinian Festival for Literature, has organized a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that is being eagerly embraced by a flock of anti-Israel writers and artists.

The letter that they and others have written insist that they will not work with any Israeli organizations that do not pass their purity test of having forcefully denounced the very existence of Israel (as they put it, "Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law" and Palestinians consider all of Israel to be "illegally occupied territory.")

Let's look back upon how morally pure PalFest is in defending Palestinian cultural rights.

In 2012, as always, their annual festival was held in various Palestinian cities, including Gaza City. One of their meetings in a Gaza castle was shut down by Hamas:

Following the opening of the colloquium, a security officer wearing civilian clothes arrived at the place and introduced himself as a member of the Palestinian police investigation department. He cut off the electricity and requested the attendees to leave the place. Shortly after this occurred, a number of security officers were deployed to the place when attendees refused to leave. They confiscated cameras that had filmed the colloquium, chaos spread and the colloquium was broken up.

Egyptian participants were too frightened of Hamas to speak to reporters until they left Gaza, but when they returned to Cairo for the closing ceremony, they slammed the terror group:

Most of the writers who visited Gaza had one opinion with respect to cultural activities in Gaza: “deplorable.” They say the aim appears to be to erase the Palestinian character and culture, which gave the world thinkers and poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said.
Professor of English Literature Sahar El-Mougy said that there’s a deplorable condition of cultural hunger. There aren’t even cinemas, libraries, or shops that sell books on the arts, philosophy or literature. The only available books are those on Islamic Sharia (Islamic jurisprudence) and Fiqh (thinking).
“There’s a conspiracy against the Palestinian character, to destroy its beauty. Hamas is erasing Palestinian culture, replacing it with an extremist version of Islam. They don’t even allow men and women to be in the same place!” El-Mougy objected.

One would think that PalFest would have condemned Hamas for its raid on their colloquium and in general on Hamas' strangehold on Palestinian culture in Gaza.

Yet in their 16 page report on the 2012 festival, PalFest did not say a word about this incident. PalFest never condemned Hamas for attacking their own colloquium. They also did not say a word about the participants' criticism of Hamas, nor about Hamas repression in Gaza altogether. Their description of the Cairo closing ceremony merely says it was "a report from festival participants to the Cairo audience – telling them what they had seen, [and] what they had heard."

Indeed, throughout the PalFest website I cannot find a negative word about Hamas, even though Hamas has repressed all forms of culture - literature, film, and even meetings - in Gaza.

We learned more about Hamas' repression of Gazans from Egyptians who briefly visited Gaza than from the supposed Palestinian culture warriors.

The same PalFest downplayed the murderous October 7 Hamas massacres this way: " On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza."

The same people who deliberately whitewash Hamas crimes against culture and Jews are spearheading a boycott of the Jewish state pretending to defend Palestinian culture.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!