(EOZ) received a lot of feedback about an essay on the sheer hate that Sarah Schulman exhibited in the New York Times this week, where she downplayed Israel's gay rights achievements as mere "pinkwashing" of Israeli crimes, which she believes is the real reason Israelis are more accepting of gays than their neighbors.
One correspondent, Scott Piro, wrote another excellent response to her essay on Ray Cook's blog. He points out that one of the Palestinian Arab gay groups that Schulman extols, AlQaws, has held its parties in Tel Aviv.
Sure enough, a Google search of "AlQaws Palestinian Queer Party" finds that this is a bi-monthly event, and has been held for the past year at the Comfort 13 club in Tel Aviv. The next event is on December 2:
In fact, alQaws'
headquarters is in Jerusalem, on the western side of the Green Line.
Even so, they also argue against so-called "
pinkwashing" and
support Sarah Schulman's organization, "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. "
The hypocrisy is stunning. They are
against events such as "Out in Israel," a celebration of Israeli LGBT culture in San Francisco last year, because they dislike the politicization of their cause in ways that make Israel look good. But QuAIA's entire reason for existing is as a politicization of their cause to demonize Israel! Their hate trumps any desire they have for gays to be treated equally worldwide.
Even their arguments are silly. This is the
pinnacle of their logic, used by Schulman as well as at the alQaws site:
It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the Soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not....The apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.
In other words, Israelis, as opposed to Palestinian Arabs, have a concept of equal rights. Terrorists are treated the same whether they are straight or gay, and so are soldiers.
Would Al Qaws prefer that such a discriminatory magic door exists? Are they saying that they should be treated better by Israel than their straight neighbors?
Apparently, they want to be treated as special, to use their cause specifically to demonize Israel. (Al Qaws at least tries to work to fix Palestinian Arab society, QuAIA has no interest in that.)
In a perfectly equal society, gays would not be considered more or less special than any group of people, like stamp collectors or fans of Twilight. If people created an organization called, for example, Quilters Against Israeli Apartheid, it would be blatantly obvious that the group is not pro-quilter but simply haters of Israel. And that is what QuAIA is, as they hijack the very real issues that gays face and try (very unconvincingly) to shoehorn them into their own loathing of the Jewish State.
(By the way, the Goldstone Report used the exact same bizarre logic in accusing Israel of violating the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women during Cast Lead - as if Israel was specifically targeting and discriminating against Gaza's women! When one wants to attack Israel, apparently no argument is too crazy.)
