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<h1 id="reader-title"><small>AP finds new ways to smear
Palestinians over same-sex rights</small></h1>
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<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ali Abunimah</a></span>
<span class="field field-blog"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blog/media-watch"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Media Watch</a></span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2015-07-30T16:37:33+00:00">30 July 2015</span></span><br>
<br>
</p>
<p>Earlier this month, after being contacted by The
Electronic Intifada, the Associated Press <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ap-corrects-story-falsely-claiming-homosexuality-illegal-palestinians">retracted
the false claim</a> that same-sex sexual relations are
illegal under Palestinian law.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In a <a
href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ac2c17ec67bc4b06bcea760248fc33a9/new-film-highlights-struggles-gay-palestinians-israel">story</a>
today on a documentary profiling a Palestinian citizen
of Israel who lives in Tel Aviv as a gay man, AP states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This paragraph from a news story does an immense amount
of propaganda work on behalf of Israeli <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/pinkwashing">pinkwashing</a>.</p>
<p>Pinkwashing, as I explained in a 2013 lecture (<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/pinkwash-greenwash-hogwash-ali-abunimah-israels-use-sex-and-marketing-distract">watch
video</a>), is a public relations strategy that
deploys Israel’s supposed enlightenment toward <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/lgbt">LGBTQ
issues</a> 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.</p>
<h2>No refuge</h2>
<p>First, there is the claim that Tel Aviv is a “liberal
Israeli city” that provides a “refuge” to gay
Palestinians. As I’ve <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ap-corrects-story-falsely-claiming-homosexuality-illegal-palestinians">noted</a>,
this claim, often based on unverifiable anecdotes, is a
staple of Israeli pinkwashing.</p>
<p>But a 2008 Tel Aviv University study of the handful of
known cases – “<a
href="http://www.law.tau.ac.il/heb/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/NowheretoRun.pdf">Nowhere
to Run: Gay Palestinian Asylum-Seekers in Israel</a>”
– 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.</p>
<p>Israel’s foundational laws and policies are designed
precisely to keep Palestinians out, as they are
considered a “<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/demographic-threat">demographic
threat</a>.”</p>
<p>The man profiled in the AP story, Khader Abu Seif, can
live in Tel Aviv because he is one of the 1.5 million <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestinians-israel">Palestinian
citizens of Israel</a> who, though citizens, face
multiple forms of systemic discrimination and violence.
But he is not there because of any Israeli policies
offering “refuge.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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?</p>
<h2>Killings and stabbings</h2>
<p><a
href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33726634">Six
people were stabbed</a> at a gay pride march in
Jerusalem today, leaving two in serious condition. The
attacker, who was arrested unharmed, <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Police-Man-stabs-four-people-at-Jerusalem-gay-pride-parade-410687">has
been identified</a> as Yishai Schlissel, a resident of
Modiin Illit, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West
Bank.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/beta/.premium-1.668832">reduced
the sentence</a>.</p>
<p>Tel Aviv – which is <a
href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/06/20136104317486359.html">built
over the mass graves of ethnically cleansed
Palestinians</a> – is, moreover, the only city in the
region where an LGBTQ center <a
href="http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2013/07/prosecutor-shooter-in-attack-on-tel-aviv-youth-center-motivated-by-anti-gay-bias/">was
the target of an anti-gay terrorist attack</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-video-israeli-racism-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-see">most
violent and racist demonstrations, pogroms and attacks</a>
against refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/africans-israel">from
countries in Africa</a> especially, Sudan and Eritrea,
as journalist <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/david-sheen">David
Sheen</a> has long documented.</p>
<h2>What’s Iran got to do with it?</h2>
<p>Then there is this tricky sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But it gratuitously adds sweeping claims about
countries as far away as Iran and Mauritania.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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 <em>west</em> of London.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Israeli “liberalism”</h2>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Israel does not have same-sex marriage – the new
standard for measuring the “liberalism” of countries
around the world.</p>
<p>But the AP report makes no mention of the fact that
Israel <a
href="http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2010_5/168266.htm">does
not even have any form of civil marriage and does not
allow interfaith marriages</a>. Even Jews can only
marry each other according to a strict
government-sanctioned version of their religion.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.640659">whether
in Israel or elsewhere</a>, as a counterpoint to
Israeli “liberalism”?</p>
<p>I am not arguing for making such associations or
generalizations. I am making a point about AP’s double
standard.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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