Israel Matzav

Some gays starting to get it

Some members of the gay community have finally understood that 'Israel apartheid week' is not exactly in their best interests.

“When Israel is accused falsely of being an apartheid society, there is an agenda – and that is the delegitimization of the Jewish state. And that is anti-Semitic,” Stuart Appelbaum, the first international trade union leader to announce he was gay, wrote in an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post last week.

"When Israel is singled out and held to a different standard than so many countries where people are actually oppressed because of race, that is anti-Semitism, too,” added Appelbaum, who is president of the New York-based 100,000-member Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

Until late February, academics and activists, particularly gays and lesbians, who compare Israel with the former apartheid regime in South Africa might not have expected that action against their blasting of Israel was in the cards. Michael Lucas, a columnist for the gay US magazine The Advocate and a producer of adult entertainment films, was the game-changer. He launched a public relations and financial boycott campaign targeting New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center for its plan to host an IAW event entitled “A Party to End Apartheid” with the anti-Israel group Siege Busters. Siege Busters was also slated to fundraise at the center for a new flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

According to Gay City News, the leading US publication on LGBT, the center’s executive director, Glennda Testone, justified the denial of space to Siege Busters, saying at a charged public forum last week that the group’s activities were not “LGBT-focused” and that its planned IAW meeting was “an incredibly controversial and contentious event.”

While Lucas’s efforts garnered a rare victory in a battle arena where anti-Israel forces have gained traction over the years, he told the Post that “I think we still have not succeeded in getting across our key point. We are not fighting ‘criticism of Israel’... We are fighting the delegitimization of the State of Israel. The stated goal of these groups is a united, multiracial Palestine. That’s inevitably a Palestine with a growing Muslim majority and the end of the Jewish homeland.”

Read the whole thing. While it's slowly changing, it's amazing how much of the gay community continues to maintain politically correct opposition to Israel despite the fact that Israel is the only country in this region that does not hang gays on a regular basis.

Labels: gays, Israeli apartheid week

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:32 AM