Author Archives: News Sources

Guantanamo burns through $900,000 a year per inmate

Reuters reports: It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 (£577,886) per prisoner annually.

The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.

By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.

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Sidelining Palestinians in Israel will doom prospects for peace

Ben White writes: In mid-April, the United States state department published its annual human rights review – and the country report for Israel makes for interesting reading. An ally praised in public as the embodiment of liberal democratic values in a “tough neighbourhood” is described as practising “institutional discrimination” against its own Palestinian citizens (the so-called Israeli Arabs).

Even in a far-from-comprehensive summary of Israel’s systematic racism, the report notes discrimination in the education system, the land regime and housing, and the legal restrictions on a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza living with his or her spouse in Israel.

These were not unprecedented observations – previous state department reports have said similar things – but the study provides an opportune moment to think through some important, neglected questions.

Palestinians in Israel continue to get far less attention from the international community than those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, even though this omission makes for bad history, poor analysis and even worse long-term peacemaking.

By coincidence, at the same time the US government published its report, Amnesty International called on the Israeli government to “scrap plans to forcibly evict Bedouin” in the Negev. The so-called Prawer Plan would involve Israel expelling tens of thousands from communities that it refuses to recognise and moving them into approved shanty towns.

Amnesty says that the plan for “house demolitions and forced evictions” is one that “blatantly violates international law”. It is criticism echoed by other human rights groups and not least by the Bedouin community itself.

But it is not just discrimination and segregation that raise concerns. There are those in Israel who would like to be rid of Palestinian citizens altogether – and see an opportunity to do so in the context of the “peace process”. [Continue reading…]

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As Israel bombs Syria the U.S. weighs its own pptions

Following reports of the latest Israeli air strike on Syria, the New York Times says: The Israeli attack came as the Obama administration — as part of its examination of possible responses to obtaining conclusive proof that Mr. Assad has used chemical weapons — is considering military options with allies. Those options include attacking Syria’s antiaircraft systems, military aircraft and some of its missile fleet, according to senior officials from several countries.

Those officials say that attacking the chemical stockpiles directly has been all but ruled out. “You could cause exactly the disaster you are trying to prevent,” a senior Israeli military official said in an interview last week in Tel Aviv.

But attacking Mr. Assad’s main delivery systems, the officials say, would curtail his ability to transport those weapons any significant distance. “This wouldn’t stop him from using it on a village, or just releasing it on the ground, or handing something to Hezbollah,” said one European official who has been involved in the conversations. “But it would limit the damage greatly.”

The topic was alluded to on Thursday, when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with his British counterpart and talked about “the need for new options” if Mr. Assad used his chemical arsenal, the officials said. But while the military has been developing and refining options for the White House for months, the discussion appears to have taken a new turn, officials say, in the struggle to determine whether the suspected use of sarin gas near Aleppo and Damascus last month was a prelude to greater use of such weapons.

“There are a lot of options on the table, and they’re generally carrying equal weight at the moment,” a senior administration official said Friday. He declined to discuss the others, though Mr. Hagel talked on Thursday about arming rebel groups

So far, President Obama has been reluctant to get involved in the Syrian conflict. He has ruled out placing American forces on the ground, a stance he reiterated on Friday at a new conference in San José, Costa Rica, where he was meeting with Latin American leaders.

Mr. Obama told reporters he did not foresee a situation in which “American boots on the ground in Syria would not only be good for America but also would be good for Syria,” adding that he had consulted with leaders in the Mideast who agree.

When asked in recent days whether recent evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria crossed the “red line” he set in August, Mr. Obama described questions he would need to have answered — including when and how chemical weapons were used — before he would take action. Even then, he made clear, he may choose something well short of military action.

By Israeli estimates, Syria has 15 to 20 major chemical weapons sites, many near airfields that would make transport by plane relatively easy. Military planners say they would want to avoid hitting the chemicals for fear of creating toxic sites that could injure or kill civilians.

Ideally, one American commander said, the stockpiles would be surrounded, protected and then incinerated, much as the United States has done with its chemical arsenal. But that takes years, and as one official said, “We don’t have years, and we can’t keep troops there.”

That is why attacking the delivery systems seems like the next best option to many in the administration. Israel was believed to be behind an attack on some Syrian missiles in February as they were about to be transported, presumably to Hezbollah. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers that a Hezbollah missile attack, using chemical weapons, was one of his chief concerns. [Continue reading…]

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Israel confirms airstrike inside Syria

Al Jazeera reports: Israeli officials have confirmed that the country’s air force carried out a strike against Syria and say it targeted a shipment of advanced missiles.

The officials said on Saturday the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of “game changing” weapons bound for the Lebanese Hezbollah group.

They claimed, speaking on condition of anonymity, that the airstrike was early on Friday, but no mention was made of where it took place.

Following the strike, Defence Ministry strategist, Amos Gilad, said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retains control of Syria’s reputed chemical weapons and they are not sought by his Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

“Syria has large amounts of chemical weaponry and missiles. Everything there is under (Assad government) control,” Gilad said in a speech.

“Hezbollah does not have chemical weaponry. We have ways of knowing. They are not keen to take weaponry like this, preferring systems that can cover all of the country (Israel),” he said.

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Hezbollah leader defends involvement in Syria

Following a speech by Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah this week, Jean Aziz writes: Beirut circles familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking said that Nasrallah addressed his supporters to assert that the war he is waging — in Sayyeda Zeinab’s shrine, Qusayr, and of course in south Lebanon — is legitimate. That legitimacy rests on three grounds:

First, that the war on Syria aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause and thus the war falls within Hezbollah’s doctrine of fighting Israel.

Second, that some Lebanese parties are directly involved in the Syrian conflict, as Nasrallah asserted. That involvement indicates that there has been a decision to use the Syrian arena to strike at Hezbollah. According to Nasrallah, that involvement preceded the Shiite involvement in Syria.

In effect, Nasrallah said to both his supporters and opponents that when former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri started arming the Syrian opposition, and when Hariri appointed one of his MPs to represent him with the jihadist and takfiri groups in Syria, and when Lebanese Shiites returning from a religious pilgrimage in Iran were kidnapped in Syria on the Turkish-Syrian border last year, and when the arms shipments to the Syrian opposition were coming through the Tripoli port, and when dozens of Lebanese Sunni fundamentalists were ambushed when infiltrating Syria from northern Lebanon to fight alongside Jabhat al-Nusra, Hezbollah was not yet involved in Syria, as it is today in a limited way. So Nasrallah was telling his supporters that he is in a position of self-defense and is defending his people, or at least was counterattacking a push to eliminate Hezbollah.

The third ground is purely religious: to defend Sayyeda Zeinab’s shrine. Zeinab was the daughter of Imam Ali, who is revered by Shiites, and Fatima, who was the daughter of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. Zeinab also played a key role in the Battle of Karbala, which happened in 680 and is central to Shiite consciousness. It is that battle that split the Muslims into Sunnis and Shiites. [Continue reading…]

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Jabhat al-Nusra’s ties to Syria seem stronger than its allegiance to Al Qaeda

Scott Lucas writes: You know that a media narrative has been established when Reuters puts it into its boilerplate text.

For example, the standard reference for the Islamist faction Jabhat al-Nusra is now “the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group“.

Other news outlets have joined in — or go even farther. Associated Press also uses “Al-Qaeda-linked group“.

The New York Times chooses “aligned with Al Qaeda“. Then, after declaring, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of”, it asserts: “Among the most extreme groups is the notorious Al Nusra Front, the Qaeda-aligned force declared a terrorist organization by the United States.”

But what if that narrative is only part of the story, based on a repetition of a distorted interpretation of a Jabhat al-Nusra statement, which misses crucial points and nuances?

How does that affect our understanding of the Syrian conflict, and our responses to it?

While the US Government established the “extremist” label for Jabhat al-Nusra late last year when it designated the faction as a terrorist group, the “Al Qa’eda-linked” mantra was fostered last month after a statement by JAN head Abu Mohammad al-Golani.

Responding to an attempt by the Islamic State of Iraq to claim leadership of JAN, al-Golani emphasised the autonomy of the movement, stressing that it is a local faction that is working and fighting with other local groups.

However, that part of the message was lost — at least in the Western press, who rather than analyzing the nuances of al-Golani’s statement and placing those within a wider context, focussed entirely on a reference to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of Al Qa’eda after the death of Osama bin Laden.

However, the full text of al-Golani’s statement, translated by EA, is far different from the simplistic, reductionist “allegiance to Al Qa’eda” soundbite presented and re-presented in media outlets, few (if any) of which actually read al-Golani’s full statement in English, let alone Arabic. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian voices — conservative and progressive — clamour to be heard

The Guardian reports: Last weekend, the owners of the 4Win hotel in Hurghada uncorked the entire contents of their drinks cabinet, and poured it down their stairs. Attended by a Salafi sheikh, and by supporters chanting “Allah is great”, the event was a first for Hurghada. It marked the opening of the first hotel in the Red Sea resort – a westernised tourist town where much of the signage is in English and Russian – that promises to cater for religiously conservative guests.

“At the moment, many Middle Eastern men won’t come to Hurghada because they won’t get the privacy they require,” said 4Win’s manager and co-owner, Abdelbasset Omar. “We’re trying to fill that gap in the market.”

Omar said female guests will stay on a segregated, women-only floor guarded by female security personnel, and will also have the option of swimming in a segregated pool. The bar is alcohol-free, while images of musicians Elvis Presley and Shakira – the residue of the hotel’s previous life as a conventional establishment – have been removed from the walls. But the transformation is not entirely complete: paid-for pornography channels have not yet been removed from the hotel’s televisions.

“It gives me the chance to enjoy tourism in my own country in a way that does not contradict my beliefs,” said one of the hotel’s first guests, Abdel Rahman – an electronics engineer from Cairo. “Especially the privacy for women – they can enjoy swimming now with no problems.”

“I’m very glad that this hotel has been opened,” said Sheikh Khaled Saeed, who spoke at the hotel’s opening. “It helps better reflect a real image of Egyptian society.”

Western tourism in Egypt has fallen since the 2011 uprising – one local hotelier said his hotel’s occupancy was down by 50%, while nationwide numbers have fallen by over a fifth in the past two years. In this light, 4Win’s existence is partly seen as a clever attempt to make up for the shortfall with a different kind of tourist. “It’s a smart move,” said Adel Ibrahim, the owner of Canary Hotel, another Hurghada inn. “It’ll attract conservative guests – both from the Gulf countries and from Egypt.” [Continue reading…]

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The death of Egypt Independent

Jenna Krajeski writes: In 2010, I moved to Cairo to try something new. I had taken a job with an education N.G.O., and saw the work—which I knew from friends to be frustrating but fulfilling — as a fresh start. Development, I thought, was useful; I wasn’t sure I could say that about journalism. It took about a week in Cairo for me to change my opinion. I quit the N.G.O.

For the next year, and through months of the revolution in Tahrir Square, I was on the staff of Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition, the online-only version of a local Arabic-language newspaper. The papers shared a name and the same management, but they didn’t have a lot else in common. The staffers of the English edition were young — mostly under thirty — and around a quarter of them were foreign; their paper was both a platform for news and a protest against the journalistic old guard. They saw the established Egyptian media as rife with flaws—a rigid hierarchy, sexism, laziness, nepotism, and self-censorship among them — which impeded the free society they wanted to live in.

What the journalists at the English Edition lacked in mentors, they made up for with camaraderie, determination, and optimism. Earlier this month, when the management of Al-Masry Al-Youm announced that the English Edition (now called Egypt Independent, and weekly in print) was closing, they derided that optimism as naïveté.

Egypt Independent’s bosses cited a lack of resources—a believable claim, given the business situation for most newsrooms today. But there was more to it. A letter signed the “Al Masry Al Youm Institution” (the media company, Al-Masry Al-Youm, owns both the Arabic paper of the same name and Egypt Independent) and posted on Egypt Independent’s Web site reads “…the false hopes that the print version of ‘The Egypt Independent’ will create the desired impact on the Egyptian society were nothing but a huge waste of financial resources, labor, and time.”

For the young journalists, it was a blow. Since January, they had been learning to keep themselves afloat. They raised money, courted investors and advertisers, and canvassed for subscribers. The management “disregarded everything we’d done and completely killed the operation,” said the editor Lina Attalah, when I reached her on Monday via Skype. “The facade is financial, but there are politics in economic moves.” Attalah was tired; she had spent the day arguing for severance pay for the staff. (Al-Masry Al-Youm maintains that the decision is purely financial, and plans to publish English translations of their Arabic content online under the name Egypt Independent.)

Egypt Independent isn’t just a newspaper in English; it’s a crucial, local voice at a time when Egypt needs trustworthy representatives. An article intended for the last issue of Egypt Independent, by Dina K. Hussein and Dalia Rabie, explains the value of “allowing Egyptian journalists to tell Egypt’s story to the world, not as fixers who might or might not get their due credit, but as primary storytellers.” They speak the language and know the customs; they have sources. Perhaps most important, they truly — not just intellectually — care. When one of these news sources closes, it’s not only Egyptian society that rocks off balance. Independent, reliable news on Egypt will be harder for English-speakers in the rest of the world to find. [Continue reading…]

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Hezbollah’s role in Syria

Hassan Hassan writes: Last week, Moaz Al-Khatib [who recently resigned as head of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces] recorded a video in which he addressed Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in relation to the party’s involvement in Syria. Al-Khatib’s speech was moving and powerful. But Al-Khatib seemed convinced that Nasrallah was a virtuous person who could be dissuaded, through emotive words, from partnering with the Assad regime in slaughtering Syrians.

On Tuesday, Nasrallah addressed his party’s involvement in Syria in a Qaddafisque long speech — major Arabic channels aired only part of the speech. Nasrallah snubbed Al-Khatib’s calls for withdrawing forces from Syria, even refraining from mentioning Al-Khatib by name when he spoke about his peace initiative. He said when the “‘resigned head” of the National Coalition spoke of a political solution, he was severely attacked by outside countries and his colleagues. In their videos, both Al-Khatib and Nasrallah spoke of a catastrophic fitna (sectarian strife) in the offing but each from his own vantage point.

Nasrallah’s speech is still shrouded with mystery. There area few points to make about it.

The first one is whether he needed to make his party’s involvement in Syria so public. The party previously benefited from denial and vagueness to maintain its image as a non-sectarian resistance party. His announcement has now made the party nakedly sectarian.

That is a huge development and will change the way Hizbollah is viewed across the region. Even though Hizbollah had always been exclusive to Shia members, many in the Arab world showed understanding and gave the party the benefit of the doubt. I remember a Lebanese Palestinian friend of mine, in Damascus, saying that Palestinians were urging Hizbollah to allow them to join its ranks. The idea that Hizbollah is a Shia party that fought for Lebanese, Palestinians and the Arab world led many to ignore its ideological background. [Continue reading…]

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The bad joke called ‘the FISA court’ shows how a ‘drone court’ would work

Glenn Greenwald writes: In the mid-1970s, an investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the US government of its eavesdropping powers: listening in on the telephone calls of civil rights leaders, reading the mail of political opponents, spying on anti-war groups. The supposed lesson learned from this was that political leaders will inevitably abuse their surveillance powers if they are permitted to exercise them in the dark and without meaningful oversight. The “solution” was the enactment of a law – the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) – that made it a criminal offense for government officials to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from the newly created Fisa court.

From the start, the Fisa court was a radical perversion of the judicial process. It convened in total secrecy and its rulings were classified. The standard the government had to meet was not the traditional “probable cause” burden imposed by the Fourth Amendment but a significantly diluted standard. There was nothing adversarial about the proceeding: only the Justice Department (DOJ) was permitted to be present, but not any lawyers for the targets of the eavesdropping request, who were not notified. Reflecting its utter lack of real independence, the court itself was housed in the DOJ.

And, and was totally predictable, the court barely ever rejected a government request for eavesdropping. From its inception, it was the ultimate rubber-stamp court, having rejected a total of zero government applications – zero – in its first 24 years of existence, while approving many thousands. In its total 34 year history – from 1978 through 2012 – the Fisa court has rejected a grand total of 11 government applications, while approving more than 20,000. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon upgrades ‘bunker buster’ to appease Israelis

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Pentagon has redesigned its biggest “bunker buster” bomb with more advanced features intended to enable it to destroy Iran’s most heavily fortified and defended nuclear site.

U.S. officials see development of the weapon as critical to convincing Israel that the U.S. has the ability to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb if diplomacy fails, and also that Israel’s military can’t do that on its own.

Several times in recent weeks, American officials, seeking to demonstrate U.S. capabilities, showed Israeli military and civilian leaders secret Air Force video of an earlier version of the bomb hitting its target in high-altitude testing, and explained what had been done to improve it, according to diplomats who were present.

In the video, the weapon can be seen penetrating the ground within inches of its target, followed by a large underground detonation, according to people who have seen the footage.

The newest version of what is the Pentagon’s largest conventional bomb, the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, has adjusted fuses to maximize its burrowing power, upgraded guidance systems to improve its precision and high-tech equipment intended to allow it to evade Iranian air defenses in order to reach and destroy the Fordow nuclear enrichment complex, which is buried under a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. The upgraded MOP designed for Fordow hasn’t been dropped from a plane yet.

The improvements are meant to address U.S. and Israeli concerns that Fordow couldn’t be destroyed from the air. Overcoming that obstacle could also give the West more leverage in diplomatic efforts to convince Iran to curtail its nuclear program. [Continue reading…]

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As long as it stays open, Guantánamo is a stain on America’s reputation

Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo, writes: I am going to say something I have not said as often as I would have liked: I agree with President Obama. Despite indications to the contrary – such as fighting me tooth and nail in court the past three years (and counting) over my firing by the Library of Congress for writing op-eds critical of his and President Bush’s detainee policies – he apparently came to the same realization I had several years ago that, in his words, “we’ve got to close Guantánamo.”

At a press conference on Tuesday, the president said that Guantánamo is unnecessary to keep America safe; it is expensive and inefficient; it diminishes the standing of the United States in the international community; it hampers cooperation with allies on counterterrorism efforts; and it serves as a recruitment tool for extremists. He is right on all counts. How, then, could anyone find an upside to perpetuating the Guantánamo fiasco?

Well, some see advantage in pandering to fear, particularly politicians on the far right of the ideological spectrum. They argue that anyone who would consider moving the “crazy bastards” out of Guantánamo and closing it is soft on terrorism. They are wrong: they are the ones who are soft … in the head and the spine. American law enforcement agencies, prison systems and judicial processes have proven themselves quite capable of dealing with “crazy bastards” of all types. They can handle a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It is time to stop wasting the taxpayers’ money and squandering what credibility America has left keeping a folly afloat. [Continue reading…]

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How to close Guantanamo

Laura Pitter writes: President Barack Obama finally broke his long silence on Tuesday on the need to close Guantanamo. Echoing comments he made four years ago — when, on his second day in office he promised to close the facility within a year — he said “Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient…. It needs to be closed.”

Welcome words, but it’s unlikely they will brighten the day of the 100 men currently on hunger strike at the facility. Twenty-one are currently being tube-fed, a procedure that entails being put in a restraint chair while a lubricated plastic tube is inserted down a detainee’s nose and into his stomach. (Detainees are then held in the chair for approximately two hours to make sure the liquid supplement fed into the tube is digested.) Obama’s words might carry more resonance with those who have been lobbying for closure of the facility for the better part of a decade, though perhaps more so if he didn’t seem so keen to apportion blame elsewhere.

In his remarks, made in response to questions at the White House press briefing, Obama pointed the finger at Congress saying it had been “determined” not to let him close the facility, and that he promised to “re-engage with Congress” on the issue. While it’s true that Congress has certainly placed obstacles in the way of closing the facility, such as restricting the use of funds to transfer detainees to the United States for trial, there are still a number of steps the Obama administration could have taken — and can still take now — to begin closing the facility and ending indefinite detention without trial. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. drone strikes being used as alternative to Guantánamo, lawyer says

The Guardian reports: The lawyer who first drew up White House policy on lethal drone strikes has accused the Obama administration of overusing them because of its reluctance to capture prisoners that would otherwise have to be sent to Guantánamo Bay.

John Bellinger, who was responsible for drafting the legal framework for targeted drone killings while working for George W Bush after 9/11, said he believed their use had increased since because President Obama was unwilling to deal with the consequences of jailing suspected al-Qaida members.

“This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida [at Guantánamo] they are going to kill them,” he told a conference at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Obama this week pledged to renew efforts to shut down the jail but has previously struggled to overcome congressional opposition, in part due to US disagreements over how to handle suspected terrorists and insurgents captured abroad.

An estimated 4,700 people have now been killed by some 300 US drone attacks in four countries, and the question of the programme’s status under international and domestic law remains highly controversial. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s rogue operations

Following the New York Times’ revelation earlier this week that the CIA has been regularly delivering shopping bags full of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Sarah Chayes writes:

Karzai’s relationship with the CIA is believed to long predate the tense days in late 2001 when CIA officers joined him and his followers in the mountains north of Kandahar as the Taliban regime was falling. In a 2003 conversation, the most renowned commander of anti-Soviet resistance fighters in southern Afghanistan, where I lived at the time, told me that in the late 1980s Karzai introduced him to CIA officials so he could obtain some of the all-important Stinger missiles that helped the Afghan fighters neutralize Soviet helicopters. U.S. support of the anti-Soviet resistance was covert. Very few Afghans had direct contact with the CIA. Most received U.S. money or military equipment by way of Pakistani intermediaries. Karzai, according to this commander, was one of the early exceptions.

Given this long relationship with the CIA, Karzai may believe that the agency somehow represents the true voice of the U.S. government. Indeed, the competing and often contradictory exhortations and demands transmitted by ambassadors and special envoys who come and go, the successive commanders of international forces with their different approaches, the congressional delegations who troop through his office, even secretaries of State or Defense, must start to sound like a lot of cacophonous noise to the man on the receiving end. Amid the din, CIA money can ring a clear note.

The tendency to read CIA signals as conveying the “real” intent of the U.S. government is not limited to Afghan leaders. In his book The Arab Center, for example, former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher describes a tense episode in 2004 when Jordan was promoting a broad-based Arab initiative to break the deadlock in the Middle East peace process.

A meeting between President George W. Bush and King Abdullah II was hanging in the balance, with the king awaiting the result of fraught negotiations between Muasher and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice over the contents of a letter of intent from Bush to Abdullah. A full day of talks resulted in a mutually agreeable formulation.

But in the meantime, a CIA official had been speaking back channel with Jordan’s intelligence chief, waiting on the West Coast with the king; the CIA official urged the delegation to fly home to Jordan, and it did. In the end, the king and his advisors concluded that it was the CIA, not the national security advisor, that really counted in the U.S. government, and the Middle East peace process remained stalled. [Continue reading…]

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Delegitimizing pro-Palestinian queer voices

Brandon Davis writes: In the last eight years, the Israeli government has sought to rebrand Israel as a “liberal haven” for gay rights in an otherwise-homophobic Middle East as a means of increasing tourism and international goodwill. Critics refer to the campaign as “pinkwashing,” an attempt to whitewash the Israeli occupation by focusing on gay and lesbian issues. Many of these critics are queer people themselves, and their movement against Israeli policies is building within the LGBT community. But recent pro-Israel initiatives hope to change that; rather than simply promoting Israeli gay images in the international sphere, these Israel advocates are actually attempting to sanitize LGBTQ spaces of pro-Palestinian activism entirely.

The most recent battleground is Toronto, where Councilman James Pasternak has proposed offering extra money to the Pride parade if the organizers prevent pro-Palestinian group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) from marching this June. Pasternak had previously attempted to withdraw funding from Pride altogether, claiming QuAIA’s use of the phrase “Israeli Apartheid” constituted hate speech; when that failed, he proposed granting what he calls a “diversity bonus” if Pride keeps QuAIA off the roster. Pasternak’s idea is simple: we straight people will only support you if you exclude any dissenting voices.

Unfortunately, this thinking isn’t limited to straight people, and many in the gay community — especially gay Jews — are also attempting to keep LGBT spaces clear of any pro-Palestinian sentiment. Two years ago, a small group of gay Jews successfully campaigned the New York Gay and Lesbian Center from allowing Siege Busters, another pro-Palestinian group, to hold an event, claiming the group’s politics made them feel “unsafe.” As they see it, Israel is a natural “ally” to the gay community — so what does that make pro-Palestinian gays? [Continue reading…]

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