Pressure works! Yesterday afternoon, the LGBT Center reversed itself, and offered Queers Against Israeli Apartheid a meeting room for tonight's meeting. Thanks for all your very effective emails, calls and action RSVPs.
But the huge problem at the LGBT Center is not fixed.
- The Center is clearly still panicked over queer political organizing -- they jettisoned their whole space request process because they didn't like the name of a queer group.
- The Center board is still refusing to meet with queer organizers about these major accountability issues. Supposedly they've hired a consultant to "figure this stuff out" -- but they're not talking to the community!
- Board meetings are still closed-door, unlike other queer community centers.
- The right-wing gay forces who touched off this firestorm are gearing up again -- hoping to claim that allowing political groups to meet is a violation of the Center's non-profit status. It's ridiculous, but also scary.
PLEASE COME TONIGHT: It's still very useful and important to be at the Center at 6:30pm tonight.
The Center has just started to feel the pressure -- but truly, they still haven't gotten the message that they can't act this way. Filling the room (and the hallway!) tonight will help them get it.
PLEASE RAMP UP YOUR EMAILS AND CALLS TO THE CENTER.
Tell the Center's board: We refuse to have to organize actions and sit-ins in order to use our community space.
The Center must be transparently run, and be accountable to all queers.
The board must open its meetings, restore Siegebusters' right to meet there, and meet with Queers for an OpenLGBT Center.
Send your email from here: http://openthecenter.blogspot.com.
Join us tonight! Meet in Rm 412 to support Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Overflow into the halls!
The picture in this blog post makes me sad. I'm a gay, Jewish man from New York, who moved to Israel two years ago. I spent a lot of time at The Center during my 17 yrs in NYC
ReplyDelete- Monday night rehearsals for the NYC Gay Men's Chorus
- High Noon AA meetings
- working with The Center to program events like a screening of "HIV is Still a Big Deal" and "Abomination" for the Lesbian Cinema Arts Series
- attended Date Bate events
The Center is supposed to be a safe space for all LGBTIs. It's not safe for me anymore. I feel threatened and uncomfortable by the sight of men & women demanding the right to pursue boycotts, divestments and sanctions there against the Jewish state of Israel.
I'm not saying Queers Against Israeli Apartheid don't have a right to meet at The Center. I'm honestly still figuring out my opinion of that.
I am saying I'm sad that anyone would want to pursue this group's agenda. I can feel angry and/or uncomfortable and/or threatened about it, too...but mostly I'm just sad. I look at the picture at the top of this post, and I see hate.
Israel does not practice Apartheid. This link goes to a short photo album of politicians, judges, anti-Israel activists, celebrities and sports stars from Israel...who are Arabs - http://on.fb.me/j4wl5g.
Did you know that some of the most active anti-Israel Queer groups are run by LGBT Israeli Arabs; these are men & women living in freedom as Israeli citizens, working to achieve boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the country they live in.
- http://israeliqueersforpalestine.wordpress.com/
- http://pqbds.wordpress.com/
In most other Middle Eastern countries, these same anti-Israel, LGBT Arabs would be killed by their own families in 'honor killings' for being queer (Palestinian territories, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan), pulled from their homes by mobs and beaten to death for being LGBT (Iraq), or get the death penalty for being LGBT (Iran).
Here is a detailed academic report, NOWHERE TO RUN: GAY PALESTINIAN ASYLUM-SEEKERS IN ISRAEL. Queer Palestinians, rather than be killed by their own families, do their best to escape TO Israel, every day. http://bit.ly/myouMN
Here is another academic report, UNSAFE HAVEN about the The Security Challenges Facing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Turkey http://bit.ly/mlkymP.
Here are articles about what happens to LGBTs in Iran & Iraq:
- http://bit.ly/kzxZEh
- http://bit.ly/kkfoqG
- http://bit.ly/mudP6X
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Only 1 million of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East enjoy full democratic rights - those are the 1 million Arabs who live inside Israel as Israeli citizens.
ReplyDeleteThe Jewish people have lived in Israel for almost 4,000 years - including Judea & Samaria, the lands that today are called the West Bank. We want to live side-by-side peacefully with our Palestinian neighbors, in two states that are both free and secure. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech in Bar Ilan University in 2009 that he can accept a Palestinian state. He repeated this in front of the US Congress in May 2011. The President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly refused to say he will accept a Jewish state.
Instead, the Palestinian Authority signed a pact with Hamas in 2011, who The European Union, the United States, Canada, Israel and Japan all classify as a terrorist organization. Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel ("Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it") and for death to the Jews ("The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews [killing the Jews], when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews").
With Iran already supplying weapons to another terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon & Syria to Israel's north, and to Hamas in Gaza to Israel's west, there is every reason to believe they would supply weapons to Hamas in the West Bank to Israel's east.
Please think about this: if Israel negotiated to return the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority now, and the P.A. are aligned with Hamas, and Hamas will get weapons from Iran to aim at Israel - how could anyone logically expect Israel to do this?
Israel wants to make peace with the Palestinians. But the Palestinians must first accept Israel's right to exist as their neighboring Jewish state. If they don't do this, and Israel hands over all this territory to them, they will just arm themselves and try and destroy Israel. It would be suicide for Israel to do this without the Palestinians having accepted Israel's right to exist first - literally, it would be suicide. I don't understand how the people in the picture at the top of this post could not understand this, or expect Israel to do this to itself.
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Israel wants to make peace with the Palestinians.
ReplyDeleteThat's just a lie and the hasbara propaganda you've just filled this blog's comments with is textbook.
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ReplyDelete