From today’s “you just can’t win sometimes” department comes a campaign to stop Ed Murray from speaking at a gay rights conference overseas.
The problem is that “overseas” in this case is Israel.
Israel is pretty good on gay rights issues, and Tel Aviv is home to a vibrant gay community. So much so that in the mayoral elections a few years ago, the candidates were trying “out-pink” each other with their entreaties to the gay community. Considering that Israel sits in a region where many countries still consider homosexuality a criminal offense, Israel’s record looks all the better.
HOWEVER, on human rights, Israel is more suspect on account of … well, on account of too
much
stuff to chronicle in this humble blog post.
Which leads us to today’s Liberal Buzzword of the Day: “Pinkwashing.”
Some LGBT groups say Israel uses its gay rights record as cover to make liberals sympathetic to their cause. As in, “If you think we’re bad on human rights, just wait till Hamas has the run of this place.” Murray, by agreeing to be a keynote speaker at a conference held by a group whose express purpose is to build support for Israel amongst LGBT people in North America, stands accused of aiding this “pinkwashing.” In the Seattle Times today, Murray said he wasn’t going to change his itinerary on account of the campaign (he also said he’s a supporter of a two-state solution, in case that’s a factor in your decision come next municipal election.)
The term “pinkwashing” seems to be pretty new in the LGBT context (it had been used before to call out organizations that talk a good talk about breast cancer but profit off the illness). The Wikipedia page describing the phenomenon was created in December of last year. It doesn’t apply strictly to Israel. Corporations, too, have been accused of the practice. The most egregious case may have been supporters of the Keystone XL arguing that the pipeline would hurt OPEC nations, which is largely made up of countries with poor gay rights records.
The debate Murray is now having with groups like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is easy to sit back and chortle about (like I kinda did in the lead of this post). Just like the debates over indigenous whale hunts, this is liberal-on-liberal violence; when you heart bleeds for everyone, the blood will run together sometimes. But it’s important to remember that not chortling, most likely, are Palestinians being driven off by Israeli settlements. Or gays living in Riyadh.
