Pinkwashing Israel in the New York Times
November 23, 2011 12:32 by Pesach Benson
A New York Times op-ed weighs in on Israel and “pinkwashing.” That’s the simplistic idea blocking the gay community from crediting Israel’s liberal record on gay rights — as it means taking away the moral high ground from the Arabs and deliberately covering up or distracting from Israeli “crimes” against the Palestinians.
Professor Sarah Schulman writes:
Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality.
In Israel, gay soldiers and the relative openness of Tel Aviv are incomplete indicators of human rights — just as in America, the expansion of gay rights in some states does not offset human rights violations like mass incarceration. The long-sought realization of some rights for some gays should not blind us to the struggles against racism in Europe and the United States, or to the Palestinians’ insistence on a land to call home.
Is Schulman saying that Israel’s acceptance of gays means nothing to her as long as the Mideast conflict — which is not an Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender (LGBT) issue — remains unresolved? Yes, apparently.
As HonestReporting pointed out earlier this year in response to similar pinkwashing charges at Time Magazine:
Israel’s progressive and liberal policies towards its gay community are a natural outgrowth of its liberal democratic value system. Why shouldn’t Israel include this as part of its efforts to present itself to the world which tends to view the country solely through the lens of the Middle East conflict?
Indeed, Israel’s legitimate self-promotion sees gay rights as a positive value in their own right. Schulman, however, twists this into a negative. According to her, this is part of:
a nefarious phenomenon: the co-opting of white gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western Europe and Israel.
Thus, Israeli gay rights are framed purely as a means to promote an anti-Muslim agenda by drawing attention to the conservative, illiberal and sometimes openly hostile policies towards gays in neighboring Arab and Muslim states.
For example, after Qatar was awarded the 2022 football World Cup, Sepp Blatter, the president of the sport’s governing body, foolishly said that gays should “refrain from sexual activity” if they go to Qatar because homosexuality is illegal in the emirate.
The gay community needs no reminding of their situation in the Middle East, least of all from Israel, which is perfectly entitled to sell Tel Aviv as a holiday destination for anyone without having to resort to negative campaigning. The comparative lack of gay rights in Arab and Muslim states is a harsh reality and should not be ignored. This, however, should not detract from Israel’s gay rights as a positive value in itself irrespective of the policies of others.
If the international LGBT community is going to mindlessly delegitimize Israel by allying itself with people who stone women, hang gays and persecute Christians, one has to wonder about their leaders’ priorities. Schulman is also one of the ”towering moral leaders” of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
That the New York Times sees fit to publish this opinion piece perhaps indicates that the Gray Lady, like the BDS movement, is also in favor of discriminating against one country alone. The newspaper of record that attaches so much on promoting liberal values is evidently prepared to jettison those values if it means allowing the bashing, in its pages, of Israel’s own liberal values.
Send your considered comments to the New York Times – letters@nytimes.com – remembering to include your address and phone numbers and to keep within 150 words.
Denis MacEoin
12:28 am
Nov 24, 2011
Shulman needs to do something simple. She needs to speak to gay Arabs and gay Iranians and gay Pakistanis (among others) and to ask them where they would rather live: where they live now or Israel. They aren’t interested in spinning this for questionable motives, they just want to spend their lives without being beaten up or killed. Every life saved is a slap in the face of anyo.ne who makes up a lie about ‘pinkwashing’.
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Ehud
12:59 am
Nov 24, 2011
OK, so it’s best for Israel to be anti-LGBT, so that no one will think that its “modernity” is just for the sake of PR. Maybe Israel should also stop exporting agricultural know-how to needy countries, or helping disaster zones in Turkey and Haiti? OR: maybe Palestinians and Arab countries should adopt modernity, and thus bring us closer to peace in the ME, not to mention improve their quality of life (see UN report http://www.arab-hdr.org/contents/index.aspx?rid=5)?!
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NaomiB.
2:35 am
Nov 24, 2011
Oh Sarah!! What else are you going to come up with? Makes one wonder what other far fetched mysteries you came up with to write your phd papers in the first place.
If this should be the quality of supposedly sharp minds then its a Poor planet indeed!
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Gordon Strauss
5:49 pm
Nov 24, 2011
Shulman [the self hating jew] speaks as an unintelligent,misinformed, who seeks notoriety because of her dull existence. I doubt whether she has ever been to Israel, or if she has, her guide is a Palestinian from Gaza. After working on a Kibbutz in 1959, and visiting Israel almost annually,
there is not another country in the world, and certainly not in the middle east, that has achieved, both in human rights and development that Israel has. I have Palestinian friends who live in Israel,
who do not want to live anywhere else. [both gays and straight]
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Gary Katz
8:16 pm
Feb 28, 2013
People like Schulman always twist the facts to fit their pre-existing mental constructs. Thus, any good things Israel does will, in her mind, have a motive of propaganda. You can’t win with her type; she’ll just babble on.
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DAVID KAPLAN
7:38 pm
Nov 24, 2011
And, in case you missed it, she rails against the “mass incarcerations” in the USA. It’s the ultra-radical leftist view that the people in American prisons are all political prisoners who have commted no crimes.
This woman is a raving lunatic and for the NYT to give her a voice in the newspaper shows beyond a doubt that they will stoop to anything in order to promote their anti-Semitc agenda.
Beneath contempt.
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Brian
8:14 pm
Nov 24, 2011
Academics are notoriously pedantic and in not a few cases, have to take odd or controversial positions to carve a swath or notoriety. That said, and as pointed our other places here, inversely, should we assume that because Iran flogs homosexuals publically, or hangs them to be able to state the Iran doesn’t have homosexuality, that Iran is ipso facto far more ‘honest’ or representative in it’s stance on human rights. Is it illegitimate to have a stance that is more liberal in one particular facet of human behavior than another? Moreover, wherein lies the documentation that ‘mass incarcerations’ in the US have any political motives other than attempting as best possible, within an admittedly flawed judicial system, of simply getting those who perpetrate crimes off the street, for however imperfect the assumption is that it somehow protects people from those who have been judged guilty of social or economic crimes? What I have difficulty in is understand the causality in her assumptions. I do not believe that Israel attempts to ‘represent’ itself in any fashion through its legal frameworks toward people’s sexual preferences. I see their utterly liberal judicial system, an unbridled press, and an obnoxiously liberal attitude toward so many things, along with multifaceted political combinations which always seek as broad a consensus as possible as very clear indications of its democratic underpinning, and as such it’s stance on human rights. Those very institutions are guardians of human rights. Nor is it illegitimate, that being attacked by Muslim populations all around it, who in fact represent and direct their hatreds toward Jews, for the simple fact that are Jews, to feel a deep animosity and mistrust to those who have an open strategy of perpetuating war crimes against innocent civilian populations. And, any ambivalences that the professor may feel toward such opinionating toward Muslims, and crimes perpetrated by Muslims, might want to cast her gaze at Scandinavia where in one country (Denmark) 68% of all rapes and 71% of all youth crime is perpetrated by Muslims. In Norway, not one single rape in 2010 was perpetrated by an ‘ethnic’ Norwegian; all rapes were perpetrated by Muslims. Is it illegitimate to make certain assumptions based on those statistical abstracts, and is it an indication of Scandinavian attitudes toward ‘Human Rights’ that resident Muslims have accumulated these proud records of sociopathic and anti-social behavior? Moreover, is there an country on the planet earth with a perfect human rights record?
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steve mann
4:14 pm
Nov 30, 2011
Never have I heard such “Double Talk” in all my life- Is that woman for real-
She could have said Israel tends to the Gaza`an sick to show up the inadequacies of the Gaza hospitals!
So they should not help the sick- They should not have freedom for homosexuals- The orthodox might give them hassle but hey as in Gaza, the P.A and all other Islamic states Homosexuality is not illegal-
To wit I have just read to-day that Nigeria is making Homosexuality illegal with imprisonment-
So lady get off of Israels back-
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Leonard Kahn
7:22 pm
Nov 30, 2011
This Shulman woman tries to, in her gay rights concern, slide in the Palestinian insistance on a land to call home. She needs to wake up or prehaps she doesn’t know , the Palestianian have blown every chance they have had to have a land to call home. As Aba Ebam has so brilliantly , pointed out they have missed every oppertunity to miss an oppertunity.
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Don Ellis
7:43 pm
Nov 30, 2011
I thought I had encountered about all of the attempts to delegitimize Israel I could imagine. But this one takes the cake. Israel should receive no credit for its liberal democracy in any way shape or form because of its treatment of Palestinians. Of course, there is no nuanced or complex statement about the Palestinian relationship with Israel. People like Shulman must sit up late at night trying to think of these things.
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Mr. Light-Bright
6:50 am
Dec 01, 2011
Allowing gays, does not mean associating “gays” with “the good”.
Concerning Judaism… It is complicated. When angels show up, and the end of this age is apparent… please just realize you are much better off than if the Mahdi(Sort of a muslim messiah) showed up at your front door! In judaism You’ll be casted out (it’s too bad some other countries don’t give that option “deport, or death”
I bring up religious end-times to demonstrate a point, I hope it was appropriate.
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Chris McReynolds
9:48 pm
Dec 01, 2011
The real lesson is of course that Israel can never be judged realistically by its haters according to any facts. It must be concluded that Israel is conforming to the myths libels and slanders already in use for so many centuries. Facts will never matter to anti-Semites, it’s just easier to expose and fight them today.
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Jacie
8:44 am
Dec 13, 2011
That isinght’s perfect for what I need. Thanks!
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Lisbet
2:51 am
Dec 09, 2011
Sarah Shulman’s comments are so out in left field it is obvious she is grasping at straws. How can she best demonize Israel when it does something noteworthy – even praiseworthy – so as to twist it around into something negative. Exactly! Every time Israel is choosing the high road and having moral high grounds right, she must find a motive to smear them with so that the positive is not only erased but made much less noteworthy than its “evil” motive. It is so tragic when the worst accusations come from Jews or once-upon-a-time Jews, or whatever she sees herself as. She is not alone. And yet, as Jewish values go, no sin, other than killing, is greater than that of spreading gossip. The old rabbinical saying that spreading gossip is akin to letting all the feathers and down fly from a single pillow, and then retracting a falsehood is as easily achieved as gathering each and every down and feather again. What she is teaching and what the New York Times is printing is nothing more than gossip full of ill will against Israel. Shame on them.
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Gábor Fränkl
7:20 pm
Mar 07, 2012
NYT is a discredited paper published by a “fashionable” Presbyterian replacement-theology-adherent antise ite.
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