[News] AP finds new ways to smear Palestinians over same-sex rights
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Jul 31 12:26:15 EDT 2015
*https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ap-finds-new-ways-smear-palestinians-over-same-sex-rights*
AP finds new ways to smear Palestinians over same-sex rights
Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> Media
Watch <https://electronicintifada.net/blog/media-watch> 30 July 2015
Earlier this month, after being contacted by The Electronic Intifada,
the Associated Press retracted the false claim
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ap-corrects-story-falsely-claiming-homosexuality-illegal-palestinians>
that same-sex sexual relations are illegal under Palestinian law.
No longer able to disseminate this fabrication, AP has seemingly come up
with new tactics to smear Palestinians and put a positive gloss on Israel.
In a story
<http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ac2c17ec67bc4b06bcea760248fc33a9/new-film-highlights-struggles-gay-palestinians-israel>
today on a documentary profiling a Palestinian citizen of Israel who
lives in Tel Aviv as a gay man, AP states:
The liberal Israeli city is considered a gay refuge in an otherwise
largely intolerant Middle East, where in some places, gays are
persecuted and sometimes killed. Same-sex relations are punishable
by death in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen. Some
gay Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have fled their
conservative homes to come out in Tel Aviv. Even in Jerusalem, the
same gay friendly climate does not always thrive.
This paragraph from a news story does an immense amount of propaganda
work on behalf of Israeli pinkwashing
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/pinkwashing>.
Pinkwashing, as I explained in a 2013 lecture (watch video
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/pinkwash-greenwash-hogwash-ali-abunimah-israels-use-sex-and-marketing-distract>),
is a public relations strategy that deploys Israel’s supposed
enlightenment toward LGBTQ issues
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/lgbt> to deflect criticism from its
human rights abuses and war crimes against Palestinians and to seek to
build up support for Israel among Western liberals and progressives.
No refuge
First, there is the claim that Tel Aviv is a “liberal Israeli city” that
provides a “refuge” to gay Palestinians. As I’ve noted
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ap-corrects-story-falsely-claiming-homosexuality-illegal-palestinians>,
this claim, often based on unverifiable anecdotes, is a staple of
Israeli pinkwashing.
But a 2008 Tel Aviv University study of the handful of known cases –
“Nowhere to Run: Gay Palestinian Asylum-Seekers in Israel
<http://www.law.tau.ac.il/heb/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/NowheretoRun.pdf>”
– found that Israel subjects Palestinians to particularly atrocious
treatment, expelling them precisely because they are Palestinian. There
is no legal framework that allows any Palestinian from the occupied West
Bank or Gaza Strip to seek asylum in present-day Israel.
Israel’s foundational laws and policies are designed precisely to keep
Palestinians out, as they are considered a “demographic threat
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/demographic-threat>.”
The man profiled in the AP story, Khader Abu Seif, can live in Tel Aviv
because he is one of the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestinians-israel> who, though
citizens, face multiple forms of systemic discrimination and violence.
But he is not there because of any Israeli policies offering “refuge.”
The AP story is sure to note that Abu Seif “is critical of Israel, his
country of citizenship, over its policies toward Palestinians but also
criticizes the Palestinian society, where homosexuality remains taboo
and where there is little tolerance for gays.”
Everything has to be “balanced” – but why does the report not note that
large segments of Israeli Jewish society – pretty much everywhere
outside “liberal” Tel Aviv – consider homosexuality taboo and offer
little tolerance for gays?
Killings and stabbings
Six people were stabbed
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33726634> at a gay pride
march in Jerusalem today, leaving two in serious condition. The
attacker, who was arrested unharmed, has been identified
<http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Police-Man-stabs-four-people-at-Jerusalem-gay-pride-parade-410687>
as Yishai Schlissel, a resident of Modiin Illit, an Israeli settlement
in the occupied West Bank.
Schlissel had published a pamphlet last week stating that it was a
religious duty for Jews to stop the “parade of sins” at all costs.
He carried out a similar attack on the 2005 march when he wounded three
people. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison but Israel’s high court
reduced the sentence <http://www.haaretz.com/beta/.premium-1.668832>.
Tel Aviv – which is built over the mass graves of ethnically cleansed
Palestinians
<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/06/20136104317486359.html> –
is, moreover, the only city in the region where an LGBTQ center was the
target of an anti-gay terrorist attack
<http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2013/07/prosecutor-shooter-in-attack-on-tel-aviv-youth-center-motivated-by-anti-gay-bias/>
that killed two people and injured 10 in 2009. Other regional cities,
including Amman and Beirut, have establishments identified with gays and
lesbians, but none, thankfully, has ever been subjected to such horror.
Tel Aviv is not only hostile territory for the vast majority of
Palestinians, whether they engage in same-sex relations or not. It has
been the site of the most violent and racist demonstrations, pogroms and
attacks
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-video-israeli-racism-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-see>
against refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers from countries in Africa
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/africans-israel> especially, Sudan
and Eritrea, as journalist David Sheen
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/david-sheen> has long documented.
What’s Iran got to do with it?
Then there is this tricky sentence:
Same-sex relations are punishable by death in Iran, Mauritania,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen. Some gay Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip have fled their conservative homes to come out
in Tel Aviv. Even in Jerusalem, the same gay friendly climate does
not always thrive.
Instead of using the report as an opportunity to dispel the myth that AP
and others have spread for years that same-sex sexual relations are
illegal for Palestinians, the AP report remains silent on that.
But it gratuitously adds sweeping claims about countries as far away as
Iran and Mauritania.
Yet there is no explanation whatsoever of why Iran or Saudi Arabia are
relevant to a story on a Palestinian in Tel Aviv. Was Abu Seif
considering moving to Tehran or Riyadh?
One should wonder what sort of arbitrary definition of the “Middle East”
AP now employs: Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott is more than 4,500 miles
from Tel Aviv and hundreds of miles /west/ of London.
The only link appears to be that the inhabitants of the countries
mentioned are predominantly Arab or Muslim or both – broad labels that
do not do credit to the vast differences among them.
This again reflects a key Israeli pinkwashing strategy which is to
subsume Palestinians into a mass of presumably indistinguishable Arabs
and Muslims as if there are not vast differences in histories, practices
and legal regimes in each of these places.
Israeli “liberalism”
But if the situation in Iran or Mauritania is supposedly relevant in a
story about Palestinians, then why doesn’t AP mention the repressive
situation in Israel in counterpoint to the claims of tolerance?
Israel does not have same-sex marriage – the new standard for measuring
the “liberalism” of countries around the world.
But the AP report makes no mention of the fact that Israel does not even
have any form of civil marriage and does not allow interfaith marriages
<http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2010_5/168266.htm>. Even Jews can
only marry each other according to a strict government-sanctioned
version of their religion.
In other words, the propaganda image of Tel Aviv in particular, and
Israel in general, as welcoming and “liberal” is never tested in this
kind of propagandistic reporting against lived reality.
And if the assertion that “gays are persecuted and sometimes killed” in
Iran, Mauritania or Sudan is relevant to a story on Palestine, then why
shouldn’t AP mention sexual repression and even abuse in Jewish Hasidic
communities, whether in Israel or elsewhere
<http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.640659>, as a
counterpoint to Israeli “liberalism”?
I am not arguing for making such associations or generalizations. I am
making a point about AP’s double standard.
Israel, after all, purports to be the “Jewish State.” Therefore if
anything “Muslim” – even as far away as Iran or Mauritania – can be
invoked to reflect on the experiences of Palestinians, then surely
anything and everything that is “Jewish” and “repressive” should be
mentioned in any story on Tel Aviv!
The AP would of course never adopt such a strategy when it comes to
Israel. And if it did, it might rightly be accused of bigotry or even
anti-Semitism.
But such considerations do not apply when it comes to Palestinians,
where AP’s agenda has always been to endorse and serve Israeli
propaganda by all means.
--
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