Showing posts with label pinkwashing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pinkwashing. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

The absurd charge of "pinkwashing" says that Israel promotes gay rights in order to distract the world from its treatment of Palestinians. In short, the progressive argument states, when Israel does something progressive, it must be done for evil purposes. 

But what about the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are explicitly homophobic? 

Well, they have a different take on Jews, Zionism and gays.

The Iraq-based Buratha News Agency asked 35 Muslim writers, political analysts, and academics to give their opinions on what they called "Western countries’ calls for perversion and pornography."

Several of them blame Jews and Zionists for spreading homosexuality through the world.

Writer Adnan Jawad says that the West, "led by Washington and with the Zionist mentality," spread homosexuality to help destroy the "golden billion" Muslims in order to get to their natural resources. 

Similarly, political analyst Dr. Ali Al-Taweel claimed, "The golden billion plan that floated to the forefront of the media these days through the statements of American officials and Zionists is not separate from the issue of homosexuality, which they are promoting strongly."

Political science professor Dr. Jassim Al-Hariri responded that "The Zionists encourage homosexuality, as the head of the first international group of male homosexuals was a Jew, Magnus Hirschfeld, with his Jewish assistant, Kurt Heller,  as they found spreading vice the best way to deviate humanity from its human nature."

Political analyst Sabah Al-Aqili responded, "The world is going through a period of transformation on the moral level and rebellion against the natural laws that the monotheistic religions came to establish and preserve, and we find that the West and the Jews have the biggest role in overcoming those limits under the title of liberation and freedom."

Finally, we have political analyst Majed Al-Shuwaili, who says, "The Jews, who control the largest and most international banks, use this issue to guarantee hegemony and control over the world with this steady growth in the hearts of the world and Muslims in particular."

It looks like they agree with the pinkwashers that Israel promotes homosexuality. They also agree that the Jews are up to no good. 

They just disagree on the specifics. 




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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, April 02, 2023

From Jewish Voice for Peace's Facebook page:

Nationalism is chametz, during Passover and always! 
Freedom only for some is never enough. This Passover, at a time when violence against Palestinians by the Israeli state, military and settlers continues to escalate, we gather to demand and dream liberation for everyone.
For anti-Zionist Jews, this holiday can be a challenging time. For some, it can feel impossible to separate our holiday traditions from Zionist propaganda advocating ethnic cleansing and land theft. Many of us feel reluctant to even celebrate the holiday as Zionist terror escalates in Palestine. And many of us may be facing yet another holiday where our beliefs and politics are not welcome.  
This year, bring your whole anti-Zionist self to our virtual seder! Our beloved community is coming together to set the Pesach table for you. Our seder will feature joy and rage and hope from our Havurah, BIJOCSM and student networks, our campaigns, our rabbis, and from JVP members from near and far—all gathered for collective liberation for us all. 


They never seem to have a problem with Palestinian nationalism. I wonder why.

Their latest "Haggadah" is just as twisted in its interpretations of what Passover is about. I looked at a previous version in 2012, which was 28 pages long and included an essay on "pinkwashing." 

Apparently that was way too much for the current TikTok generation that JVP wants to attract, so this new one is a mere 14 pages long, deleting nearly all of Maggid, Hallel and Nirtzah. it doesn't even describe the overstuffed seder plate of the previous editions that included an olive (for Palestinians)  and an orange (for feminists and LGBTQ+.). 

This one still includes the third cup of wine celebrating BDS, though.





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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, January 10, 2023






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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

From The Left Berlin:

Here we reproduce two draft e-mails which have been suggested by the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) coordination team of the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine (ECCP). ECCP is a network of 43 European organisations, NGOs, trade unions and solidarity groups from 18 European countries,  dedicated to the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, justice and equality.

We find that this attempt to link different struggles – to show that Palestinian rights are indivisible from the rights of women and LGBTQI+ people – is an important development in building an international movement to support the Palestinians. We therefore urge you to support the ECI initiative and to send these mails to any relevant organisations with which you are in contact.

In particular, the mails ask for support for the ongoing ECI to #StopSettlements and stop EU complicity with the oppression of Palestinians. An ECI is more than just a “normal” petition. If the initiative receives one million validated signatures, the EU Commission is legally obliged to respond to the demand for a ban on illegal trading with the occupied territories.
The cynicism is almost beyond belief. Even the language they use shows that they know that this has nothing to do with reality. 

But they know that they must "link" the "struggles." And, as a result, Palestinian women and gays remain imprisoned by laws that are explicitly against them, because their natural allies in the West are being told to concentrate their efforts against the most liberal, pro-gay, pro-woman state in the Middle East.

The draft letters are even more of a joke. For the pro-women's groups:

As Europeans fighting for gender equality, and against sexism and the patriarchal system in our countries, we bear a responsibility to support our sisters’ fights abroad. Including in Palestine where Palestinian women resists the Israeli apartheid regime and demand the fulfilment of Palestinian rights. Our Palestinian sisters are not only confronted with gender violence, femicide but also Israeli settler colonialism which constitutes a gender violence in itself. Israeli occupation and colonisation add another layer of oppression and contribute to gender-based violence within Palestinian communities.
That last sentence translates to "Palestinian men beat their wives and daughters, and we blame Israel."

For the pro-LGBTQ groups:
The Palestinian struggle is deeply committed to addressing gender violence, feminicide, queerphobia and settler colonialism, which are co-constitutive of each other. The State of Israel and its supporters use Pinkwashing as a strategy to cynically exploit LGBTQIA+ rights in order to project a progressive image of Israel while concealing its occupation and apartheid policies oppressing Palestinians.

Awareness that queer and trans-liberation cannot be separated from Palestinian liberation is growing. As Europeans fighting against sexism, patriarchy, queerphobia and all systems of oppression in our countries, we must support Palestinian people in their struggle for their rights and against the Israeli settler colonial system.
If you really support Palestinians and LGBTQ/women's rights, you would protest Palestinian policies, not Israeli policies!

Fully one out of every three married Palestinian women suffer physical violence by their husbands. Initiatives like these tell these women, sorry, you aren't important. 

By prioritizing protesting Israel over the Palestinian Authority and Hamas that have laws against gender equality and gay rights, these groups are showing that their hate for Israel takes priority over their love for their fellow LGBTQ and women in the territories!

That is the nature of antisemitism, both new and old - the hate is so powerful, that people are eager to throw their own purported allies under the bus just to have a chance at hurting Jews. 

(h/t DL)



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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Thursday, December 02, 2021

It was ten years ago when Sarah Schulman popularized the term "pinkwashing" in an op-ed for the New York Times. (I found one earlier mention, by Jasbir Puar in The Guardian in 2010.)

At the time, I noted how steeped in hate is the absurd theory that Israeli pride in its support for gay rights is merely a front to whitewash its alleged crimes. 

There is another angle, though, that points to a commonality between antisemitism from the Left and the Right: they are both often rooted in conspiracy theories.

After all, the idea that the Israeli government, Zionist organizations, gay Zionist Americans and liberal Zionist Jews all work together to push a narrative of Israeli tolerance of gays is nothing but a huge conspiracy theory. 

Not all antisemitism is based on conspiracy theory, but a great deal of it is. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood libel, the idea that Jews are behind the Plague as well as Covid, Holocaust denial, Jews controlling Hollywood - all of these are familiar antisemitic conspiracy theories of the Right. 

But the "Israel Lobby," charges of pinkwashing, Zionist control of the media, the ADL is behind US police brutality, Zionists are "silencing" pro-Palestinian voices, Israel engages in "Jewish supremacism" - these are all conspiracy theories of the Left that are no less bigoted.

Jovan Byford is an expert on conspiracy theories and wrote a major book on the topic, "Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction" (2011.) He dedicates a chapter to antisemitic conspiracy theories and segues from analyzing conspiracy theory antisemitism on the Right to that of the Left:, arguing that the conspiratorial aspect is exactly how one can distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism:

Recent years have witnessed an increased awareness of a seemingly new brand of conspiratorial antisemitism propagated mainly by sections of the left. The phenomenon, which has become known as ‘new antisemitism’, or anti-Zionism, is defined by the fact that the central object of disparagement and prejudice are not Jews as such, but Israel as the Jewish state (Chesler, 2003, Iganski and Kosmin, 2003, Foxman, 2004, Taguieff, 2004). Rather than viewing Israel as a country whose policies and actions, like that of any other, can (and indeed should be) criticised on merit, sections of the political left have come to view it as the source of uniquely harmful influence in the world. Israel’s actions, and even its very existence, are believed to be an expression of the uniquely iniquitous nationalist ideology (Zionism), which is considered to be comparable to Nazism: it is racist, imperialist, expansionist and tyrannical. Transgressions of the Israeli state – from human rights violations to military actions that are deemed, by critics, to be disproportionate – are seen as inherently more sinister than those committed by any other state in history, with the exception of Nazi Germany. Furthermore, Israel’s policies are seen as sufficiently egregious to undermine its basic legitimacy: exponents of ‘new antisemitism’ often go as far as to call for the dismantlement of Israel. This makes Israel the only member of the United Nations whose very existence is routinely brought into question and Jews the only people whose right to self-determination, it is argued, should be retrospectively revoked. Crucially, as David Cesarani (2004: 72) notes, the definitive crossing of the boundary between criticism of Israel and antisemitism occurs at the point where the former becomes articulated in language typically associated with antisemitism, that is, when it ‘intentionally or unintentionally uses or echoes long-established anti-Jewish discourse, characterising Jews inside Israel or in the Jewish diaspora as singularly wealthy, powerful, conspiratorial, treacherous and malign.’ In other words, when it is embellished with the motifs of a Jewish conspiracy.
The chapter section is an excellent summary of the new antisemitism. Here Byford shows how Leftist antisemites will even note the similarity between their theories and traditional antisemitism - as a way to defend themselves from being considered antisemites!

Accounts of ‘the Lobby’ are so blatantly conspiratorial that their exponents on occasions candidly admit that what they are alleging is essentially a Jewish plot, one that resembles the classic antisemitic conspiracy theory. Writing in the magazine Tikkun, Paul Buhle (2003) writes, for example, that when one looks at the power of the pro-Israel lobby ‘it is almost as if the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion, successfully fought for a century, have suddenly returned with an industrial sized grain of truth’. The British historian Tony Judt has also admitted that claims about the sinister power of the ‘Israel lobby’ sound ‘an awful lot like, you know, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiratorial theory of the Zionist Occupational Government and so on’ but that, while ‘unfortunate’, this cannot be helped as this is ‘just how it is’ (cited in Hirsh, 2007: 86). Such comparisons are rhetorically significant, because writers use the notoriety of the Protocols to accentuate the sinister influence of ‘the Lobby’, while at the same time forestalling any accusations of antisemitism by implying that, despite the resemblances, their claims are distinguishable from those of the right. As Tony Judt put it, ‘you can’t help it if idiots [on the right], once every 24 hours, with their stopped political clock are on the same time as you’ (ibid.). Thus, a distinction is drawn between disreputable (and false) conspiracy theories of the right and the accounts of real conspiracies uncovered by the left.
Leftist antisemites, sensitive to charges of racism, add a new layer to their conspiracy theory to forestall the idea that they are antisemitic:

The ‘slippage from criticism of American foreign policy to wild eyed conspiracy theory’ (Fine, 2006) apparent in the discussions of ‘the Lobby’ should not occur so easily, however. Left-wing thought is marked by long tradition of opposition to racism and a standing commitment to equality and social justice, which means that its contemporary exponents should be resistant to ideas traditionally peddled by their ideological opponents. And yet, as we have seen, among critics of ‘the Lobby’, this sensitivity is often lacking. This is at least in part because their ideological position is sustained by another key feature of the conspiracy theory, namely its essential irrefutability. As noted in Chapter 2, conspiratorial explanatory logic comprises a number of interpretative devices that makes the conspiracy theory immune to conventional cannons of proof and testing (e.g. by transforming disconfirming evidence into proof of the conspiracy). These devices protect the conspiracy theorist not just from challenges related to evidence or proof, but also from those made on moral grounds. Moral criticism, just like disconfirming evidence, can be attributed to the conspiracy and thus rendered invalid. This is an essential feature of the writing on ‘the Lobby’. The very reason why the idea of a Jewish plot should be resisted – namely antisemitism – is perceived as a distraction, a label deliberately manufactured, manipulated and used by ‘the Lobby’ for silencing opponents, de-legitimising criticism of Israel and controlling public opinion. Thus, antisemitism ceases to be a danger to be avoided by all those discussing the sensitive issue of Jewish influence in politics, and is perceived, instead, exclusively as a weapon of Zionist self-legitimisation. This stance towards antisemitism goes hand in hand with the so-called Holocaust industry argument, popularised by Norman Finkelstein (2000). According to Finkelstein and his followers, the Holocaust has been exploited and instrumentalised by powerful Jews to justify Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians and build a taboo around antisemitism (see Laqueur, 2006, Cesarani, 2004). The effect of this stance on antisemitism and the Holocaust, but also its underlying psychological function, is to undermine any sympathy for Jews that would normally foster resistance to antisemitic motifs. In other words, by persuading their audience, and, importantly, also themselves, that the moral standpoint from which their arguments can be criticised is consciously imposed by ‘the Lobby’ – and therefore an essential part of its sinister method – writers can pre-empt, destabilise and render unfounded any criticism of their ideological position. This places ‘the Lobby’ theory of America’s foreign policy beyond moral reproach, removes the taboo surrounding antisemitism, reinforces the believers’ conviction in the absolute truth of their views and inoculates them from any awareness of where the boundaries lie between acceptable and unacceptable opinion. The belief that everything, including the definition of what is acceptable, is manipulated by the sinister lobby not only shields the anti-Zionist worldview from the effects of disconfirming evidence, but also makes it vulnerable to the malign influence of motifs and stereotypes rooted in the conspiracy tradition.
This is brilliant analysis, describing how the Left uses the additional conspiracy theory that Jews are defining antisemitism to discredit critics as a way to make modern antisemitism palatable - and immune to criticism itself!

The entire campaign against the IHRA definition of antisemitism is based on the idea that the Zionist establishment is conspiring to define antisemitism to allow Israel to act in sinister ways.

When "criticism of Israel" crosses the line into the idea that Israelis - the most argumentative, contentious people around - unite to embrace evil, that is no longer criticism of Israel.  It is Jew-hatred, and it is something that Jews recognize quite well.








Monday, May 03, 2021



BDS celebrated its 15th anniversary last June with a list of 15 things you can do to "show solidarity with Palestinians."

Here they are:

Expose Israeli Apartheid: 
Targeted Sanctions [against Israel]
Apartheid Free Zones in your community "as spaces free of racism, sexism, discrimination"
Corporate Complicity (pressure on companies with branches in Israel)
Racial and Indigenous Justice: Support Indigenous-led and Black-led struggles for racial justice...
Environmental and climate justice
Women’s struggles: "justice in Palestine is a feminist issue"
Ethical City Councils: "Promote an intersectional motion in your local council..."
Faith Communities & Tourism: "respect the Palestinian call for ethical tourism/pilgrimage."
Cultural Boycott of Israel
Academic Boycott of Israel
Student Activism: Organize intersectional campaigns... 
Sports Boycott: Join the global campaign to boycott Puma...
LGBTQI+ Rights: "Unmask and counter Israel’s agenda of pinkwashing..."
Donate to BDS: BDS needs support from people of conscience everywhere...
Only one problem: Not one of them would actually help a single Palestinian.

Not one mention on sending money to Palestinians - only to BDS.
No request to help pay rent for Arab Sheikh Jarrah residents which would allow them to stay in their homes.
Not one mention of supporting Palestinian businesses - only boycotting Israeli businesses.
Not one mention of lobbying Israel to ease restrictions on Palestinians.
Not one mention of sending letters or tweets of support to ordinary Palestinians. 
Not one mention of working to improve Palestinian democracy or its institutions.
Not even a request for volunteers to help with the olive harvest.

This isn't a list of things to show solidarity with Palestinians. It is a recruiting list for "social justice warriors."

There is nothing positive here at all. Nothing supportive of Palestinians. Only hate for the Jewish state. 

This list shows, better than any hasbara ever could, that people who claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are nothing of the sort. They simply hate Israel with a passion that is only equaled by their Jew-hating cousins on the Right. 






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