Podcast appearances and mentions of Pamela Geller

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists.   A teach-in by Queer Crescent in collaboration with Palestinian Feminist Collective – Palestine is a Queer Issue: Resisting Pinkwashing Now and Until Liberation. Featuring guest speakers Rabab Abdulhadi from Palestinian Feminist Collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, Shivani Chanillo from Lavender Phoenix, poetry by Mx Yaffa from Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD). Moderator by Shenaaz Janmohamed of Queer Crescent. Important Links and Resources: Sign on to Queer Crescent's Ceasefire Campaign for LGBTQI+ organizations and leaders Queer Crescent's Pinkwashing Resources  Queer Crescent Website Palestinian Feminist Collective Website ASWAT Instagram (@aswatfreedoms) Lavender Phoenix Website Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) Website Purchase Blood Orange by Mx. Yaffa Transcript Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you all so much for being here today. Welcome to the “Resisting Pinkwashing Now Until Liberation” teach-in. Queer Crescent is honored to host this teach in in partnership with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Lavender Phoenix, The Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity or MASGD, Teaching Palestine, and Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies   Thank you all so much for joining us and for tuning in. My name is Shenaaz Janmohamed. I use she and they pronouns. I'm the executive director of Queer Crescent.  Queer Crescent is really thrilled to offer this Teach-in and to be in learning with you all for the next hour and a half on Pinkwashing in particular, as we hold grief and rage and mourn towards healing, towards resistance, towards a free Palestine. Joining the resounding people all across the world who have been calling for a permanent ceasefire. To not let the violence and the destruction of Gaza go without our clear and determined voice to say that this is not okay, that we, our tax dollars should not be paying for this, that we do not consent to genocide. And as queer people, as trans people, it is very much a queer issue to be in solidarity with Palestine. For the next hour and a half we will take time to learn from Palestinian organizers. in Palestine, in the U. S., around the ways in which this moment can be used to understand our relationship to pinkwashing in particular and to Palestinian solidarity in general. And so thank you again for being with us today. We're going to start our Teach in with poetry, because we deeply believe as a queer Muslim organization in the power of cultural work, cultural change, and imparting our shine as queer people into the culture. That is the way that our people have survived. That is the way that people share their histories their survivalship is through culture. And so, before I bring up Yaffa, who's a dear friend and comrade, and also the executive director of MASGD, the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, let me introduce Yaffa. Yaffa is a trans Muslim and displaced indigenous Palestinian. She is sharing poetry from her new book, Blood Orange, shout it out, please get a copy if you haven't already, which is an emotional, important, and timely poetry collection. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of Indigenous people. Join me in giving some shine, energetic shine to Yaffa, and I'll pass to you. Mx Yaffa: Hi everyone. It's so nice to be here with you all. So excited to share space with all of you, with all the incredible panelists, with the entire Queer Crescent team, y'all are just incredible. Right before this, me and one of the other panelists realized we could potentially be related. So that's the beauty of having spaces like this, where you connect with people that you've kind of been missing your entire life, but you didn't even know that they were missing. I'm excited to recite some poetry for you all from my new collection. Just a little bit about the collection before I recite some poetry.  This collection was written for the most part, on the weekend of October 13th to the 15th. Some of y'all might remember that there was an eclipse during that weekend. And I really wanted to find something that would really center queer and trans Palestinian experience in particular, and also would just support me in navigating my own processing of everything that's going on.  I have family both in Gaza and the West Bank still. I'm originally from Jaffa and Jenin, but I've kind of lived in nine different countries. So when I say I'm displaced, it's displacement from various different wars, various genocides, various everything. And the result of that was Blood Orange.  I tried to get it out as quickly as possible and here we are. The first poem that I'll read is called “Healthy”. And I'll talk a little bit about each of these poems after I read them. It's called “Healthy”. We are not meant to be okay, when genocide is our neighbor that is funded by our labor. We are meant to be a mess, our sleep tearing into reality, anxiety brewing, wondering what is hope. We are meant to tear at the seams of reality, realizing a reality built on oppression is bullshit. We are meant to realize and demand all we are worth. Self actualization, wholeness. Things systems built off of genocide can never. Our response labeled by western capitalism as wrong is healthy. We move to wholeness always, they move to pain attempting to drag us with them. So this was actually the very first poem that I wrote for this collection and it was in that first week of the genocide immediately following October 7th when so many people were really struggling with what do we do with all of this, right? We're witnessing an entire genocide right before our eyes. And what do we do? There was a lot of hopelessness going around and a lot of narratives, at least in what's known as the United States and the global north that's always told us that all of that is wrong. That we're not supposed to be overwhelmed by things. But for me, with all the practices that I have, it's actually healthy to be overwhelmed right now. We're not supposed to know how to let genocide live in our bodies with ease. We still show up, we still do the things, and yet at the same time, we honor it. That it is a large experience. This is not normal. This is not something that should be happening all the time or ever. And so really wanted to honor that of the world that we live in is not what we deserve. For us to be overwhelmed right now is actually healthy, is where we should be. So the second poem I will read kind of goes into the conversation of today around pinkwashing.  This one's called “At Odds”.  My transness and a colonized perception of Palestine are at odds. They think it's because of lack of modernity. I say I have only received death threats targeting my transness from white people, Zionists, and other various political affiliations. I say only white people around me have ever disowned their own. Yet I do not talk to sisters who choose to buy into imperialist transphobia, claiming it as their own. My parents do not understand how some of their children could hate anything any of their children could be, why anyone would hate what they do not know. I won't talk much about pinkwashing because I know we'll get to that today. But in particular, most queer and trans Palestinians over these last eight weeks have been receiving such immense violence from the broader LGBTQ community telling us that our people are the ones who are going to kill us. I've been receiving death threats my entire life in particular as an organizer since I was 19, and I have literally never received a death threat from anyone from our region from any Muslim person. It has always been white people who have sent me death threats specifically for my queerness and my transness. Let alone everything else. And so that, that poem just kind of honors that experience.  I'll read one more, and I'll say just a few words before I read this last one. For me, the arts are so important. Not just as a tool for resistance, but also as a tool for world building. Often we think of the world is what creates art, rather than art is what creates the world. If you look at literature, even with Zionism, Zionism was in literature 100 years before it was ever named. I think about that of what is the world that we are building, what is the world of tomorrow that we get to write about and paint about and do all different kinds of art forms about today. And so this last poem kind of brings a little bit of that into it. The collection goes into the topic of utopia as we're exploring all of these other things. and as we're experiencing this genocide. So this last poem is called “Land Back”. I do not know names wiped from time in Gaza Like I do not remember the names Of great uncles and aunts Who have been reclaimed by our land To say they were murdered Is to claim loss that our land will never feel For we are made of her And regardless of how many layers of phosphor fill the air We return to her in our deaths They may exacerbate the process of our return, but return we shall. Standing thousands of miles away, I know even here she will take me back for distance is a creation that is buried with bodies that were never ours. We are not the ones who take land back, it is land that takes us. There will come a day when the sun sets on a world and rises in another, when indigenous sovereignty is honored. Where queerness no longer exists, where transness is no longer an identity, where humanity means something genuine. So I wanted to end with that, on a note of everything that we're doing right now, all of the resistance is world building. We're building the world that we have always deserved. So I'll leave you all with just one final thing about the book, like I mentioned, the reason I wrote this book in the first place and published it is to raise awareness about queer and trans Palestinians in particular and our experiences, and also to fundraise for queer and trans Palestinians both on the grounds in Gaza and in the diaspora. So 100 percent of all the proceeds from Blood Orange go directly towards that.   As we're getting deeper and deeper into this, the needs of the queer and trans Palestinian community is getting so immense, both on the ground in the region and in the diaspora. Over just the last few days, I've received over $20,000 worth of requests from individuals because people are being doxed, people are receiving death threats, people are losing their jobs. In one case, people are losing their children. There's a lot happening. And so just wanted to leave with that. I want to invite you all to pay attention to those needs and honor them, especially as we go into next year and into the elections. Thank you again for having me. It was such a pleasure to be here. And I'm so excited for the rest of this. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Yaffa. It's so wonderful to have you here. And it feels so important to start our teaching with the ways in which poetry, culture, moves and inspires us. It opens our hearts in ways that feel both healing and necessary as part and parcel to our organizing and our deep learning. As my comrade and partner Saba says, to growing our empathy to be able to show up with more depth, more commitment, and more resolve towards these issues because we are deeply interconnected. So thank you again, Yaffa..  Before I turn to introduce our other panelists, I wanted to just ground us for a moment in why Queer Crescent, along with the many partners that I named at the beginning felt it was important to host this teach in. Back on November 3rd, Queer Crescent in collaboration with the Palestinian Feminist Collective drafted and released a letter calling upon LGBTQI organizations, leaders, and influencers to join Queer Crescent and Palestinians in calling for an immediate ceasefire. And in particularly to take up understanding and resisting pinkwashing as a queer issue. The frame ” Palestine is a queer issue” is very much an homage of Palestinian Feminist Collective who tirelessly make the links around gender justice, bodily autonomy, self determination, sovereignty to the project of Palestinian liberation. Seeing them as part and parcel of the same project of liberation, and we very much are inspired and in deep gratitude to PFC and all the tireless folks who make those links so clear and apparent to us. We are also in deep gratitude to organizations like Al-Qaws, based in Palestine, who have been telling us about pink- washing for a long, long time, and we are finally doing our part to answer the call as an organization as Queer Crescent. Since we shared this letter, over 350 individuals have signed on, over 65 organizations have joined us in a commitment to calling for permanent ceasefire. This teach in is part of our commitment to moving those who have signed, ourselves included, and the many others who have joined us today. To deepen our shared resolve to a free Palestine through learning about pink watching as a propaganda tool of Israel and settler colonial state violence, and to allow this moment to transform us so that the grief is not in vain, towards a more fierce committed and clear stance of solidarity with Palestinian liberation movement. As queer and trans people and within LGBTQI organizations, we have a distinct role to play to organize to undermine pinkwashing. Because pinkwashing works and functions on the backs of racist tropes of Palestinians, Arabs, SWANA, and Muslims more broadly. We cannot let our vulnerabilities as trans and queer people be exploited in the pursuit of colonial violence and the genocide against Palestinians and all indigenous people. It was not surprising that some of the first folks who signed on to our letter were trans led organizations like the Transgender Law Center, like El/La, and indigenous organizations. It's not surprising because I think for folks who are leading trans led organizations, Trans and indigenous organizations, the relationship of self determination of bodily autonomy and to state violence and colonization is clear, right? Because ultimately colonization uses gender injustice and creating these wedges within our communities as a way to dampen our resistance and to keep us apart. So, I don't want to say more because our amazing speakers will speak and illuminate so much more of these issues. But I wanted to just state why it was important for Queer Crescent to support advancing these conversations. So, our first speaker today is Ghadir Shafie ( she and her). She is a Palestinian queer activist and the co founder of ASWAT, Palestinian Feminist Queer Center for Sexual and Gender Freedoms. A passionate advocate for the intersectionality of the struggle of Palestinian queer women, fighting multiple forms of oppression as Palestinians in the context of Israel's system of apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism, as women in a militaristic and imperialistic male dominated society, and as queers in the context of pinkwashing and homophobia. Ghadir promotes active solidarity for Palestine through global feminism and with queers. Thank you, Ghadir. Pass it to you.  Ghadir Shafie: Thank you so much. Hello from Palestine. Thank you so much for organizing this teach-in on pinkwashing. I am grateful for your presence here with me, witnessing in this horrible, horrible time. I will speak today for about 15 minutes, and I want you to bear in mind that since October 7th, Israel has killed over 18, 000 Palestinians. That is one Palestinian every 15 minutes. Imagine how many queer people are being killed daily by Israel. The scenes from Gaza are beyond description. They defy comparison, even for Palestinians, jaded by decades of occupation and settler colonial violence. Devastated landscape filled with craters and the blackened ruins of what were once people's homes, dead bodies or pieces of them. Orphaned children screaming in terror and incomprehension. Desperate survivors crying for food and water. Doctors despairing at the ever growing influx of wounded people they know they cannot treat. As a queer Palestinian watching these images of horror, one stood out as particularly revolting in a rather different way. It shows an Israeli soldier in the middle of the rubble of one of the many residential neighborhoods in Gaza, flattened by the Israeli indiscriminate military strikes. In the distance, smoke from Israel's carpet bombings hang in the air. The soldier is surrounded by Israeli tanks and demolish everything in their way. It is a scene of death and destruction The soldier stands holding a bright new rainbow flag. and Described it as a message of hope.  What hope can there be for 2.3 million Palestinians trapped over 16 years in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Gaza has become a graveyard for Palestinians. They have no water. No food and no electricity as Israel has cut off what little it allowed in through its already suffocating siege. They seek shelter from Israeli bombings in hospital, UN schools, mosques, and churches, only to find these sites targeted by Israeli strikes. Those who can flee their homes along Israeli designated safe corridors only to have their vehicles shelved by the Israeli IDF soldiers. It seems incomprehensible that an Israeli soldier would pose a photo with a rainbow flag while participating in his army's mass slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of half of Gaza's homes. The truth is more sinister yet. This stunt, which was shared online by the Israeli state official social media accounts, is a textbook. example of obscene colonial pinkwashing. More than that, it is a pinkwashing on steroids. For years, Palestinian queers have denounced Israel's pinkwashing, a cynical strategy designed to use self proclaimed support for LGBTQIA plus rights as a pink smokescreen to conceal its 75 years regime of apartheid, which oppresses all Palestinians, no matter of our gender. or sexual orientation. All the while singling out queer Palestinians for persecution and blackmail. It is an attempt to falsely depict Israel as modern and a liberal country while diverting attention from its alignment with far right homophobic regimes and groups around the world and its current fundamentalist, racist, and homophobic government. In addition, Israel's pinkwashing agenda is a colonial tool that has the racist aim to misrepresent Palestinians as backwards, homophobic, and thus not deserving of human rights. It also tries to convince us, as queer and trans people, that we are somehow foreign in our society, and tries to turn us against our Palestinians brothers and sisters. I think there couldn't be any better example of Israeli pink washing than the photo that the Israeli soldier with the rainbow flag in the rubble. Israeli pink washing has always been dishonest and dangerous. It has always been racist and colonial. It has allowed Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing, besiege, imprisonment, and murder of Palestinians, queer and non queer alike, for decades. Now it's being used to cover up for genocide. In these dark times, Palestinians in besieged Gaza are bearing the brunt of Israel's full blown genocidal war and ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank, meanwhile, are also facing escalating waves of killing, torture by both Israeli military and illegal sectors. Apartheid, for Palestinians like myself inside Israel, is reaching new peaks as Israeli forces are targeting and suppressing any expression of sympathy with the oppressed. As hard as it is, we still maintain hope. We have no other choice. That hope comes from the grassroots mobilization that are forcing complicit governments and institutions to finally call for the bare minimum that is nevertheless the absolute priority: a ceasefire that will put a stop to Israel's carpet bombing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Queer groups have been extremely instrumental in our struggle for liberation. Queer groups have been an important part of the mobilizations. Nearly 40 LGBT, QA plus groups across Southwest Asia and North Africa called for the immediate ceasefire stating ” we stand with justice, equality, progress, and liberty.” Throughout my life as a queer activist, I have proudly held the rainbow flag high as a symbol of queer inclusion, queer struggle, queer liberation, queer equality, and queer joy. The Israeli soldier participating in Israel's genocidal war on my people in Gaza has desecrated the flag, has disgraced the flag, and made it a mockery for all it stands for. Queer and trans people and groups are increasingly seeing through the pink smokescreen and rejecting Israel's pinkwashing and its war crimes and crimes against humanity. We will not stand by as our flag and our identities are co opted and used to justify a genocide. I call upon queer allies around the globe to remember none of us is free until we are all free. What can we do right now in these terrible times? Since 2005, Palestinians have proposed to you, our friends around the world, an entirely nonviolent method of ending Israel's power over our lives. An academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This strategy is known as BDS, Boycott, Digestment and Sanctions. BDS means boycotting all Israeli state sponsored institutions. This is not aimed at individuals, but at institutions financed by the state and that serve as extensions of the government that occupies us and keeps us under siege. We ask academics, staff and students not to speak at Israeli state funding organizations, including universities. We ask artists and cultural workers not to perform in apartheid Israel. Make sure that your universities are divested from Israeli money. Do not take israeli money for your conferences or film festivals. Do not accept deceptively free propaganda trips to Israel. End complicity with the government of Israel by among other things, cancelling all joint projects activities that are complicit with Israeli universities. Right now, the main demand is to stop the genocide. Stop the genocide and ask for ceasefire now.  So how can queer groups and queer people support queer liberation in Palestine?. One effort that is happening right now around the world is Queer Cinema for Palestine. Queer cinema for Palestine is a vibrant event that happens globally, established in 2021 to support queer art and queer cinema around the world. Today, there are more than 270 filmmakers and artists who signed our pledge to boycott Israeli film festival, to boycott Israeli institutions, and support queer liberation in Palestine. Queer Cinema for Palestine is happening online in more than 15 locations around the world from the 2nd until the 10th of December. Under the title, There's No Pride in Genocide, we gather together as artists to support, Queer Cinema for Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There's not much to say. I think you've seen the image from Gaza. You've seen what is happening right now. This is not a regular panel on pinkwashing. It's happening during a genocide, where pinkwashing is also used to promote genocide. So, may I ask you as a Palestinian and as a queer Palestinian, please keep talking about Palestine. Palestine is a queer issue. Gaza is a queer issue, and there's no queer justice until we are all free. Thank you so much for organizing this and thank you so much for your work and activism on Palestine. You are saving lives right now. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Ghadir. Thank you so much for your passion, your commitment, reminding us that hope is an active choice that you're engaging in every day, despite all the odds, because that is the story of survival. Thank you for reminding and being so clear in the link to BDS boycott, divestment and sanction movement as tangible ways that we could be in solidarity with Palestine and to chip at the far reaching power of the Israeli state and settler colonial project. Thank you for showing the ways in which queer folks and queer organizations. use culture and art to tell different stories of survival with the Queer Cinema for Palestine. And thank you for showing up and being here with us. Thank you for all the ways that you hold communities, your fullness, and time to share and to lead us today. Wishing so much protection and safety to you and yours. Next we have Rabab Abdulhadi. Rabab Abdulhadi (she/her) is an internationally known scholar and distinguished professor and researcher. Her scholarship, pedagogy, and public activism focus on Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities and their diasporas, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director and Senior Scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies, and a Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies at the Historic College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. She is also a treasure, a beloved teacher, organizer here in the Bay. I feel really grateful that you're here with us today for all the work, all the times that you've taught me. It's really such an honor to be able to host you and invite you in, Rabab.  Rabab Abdulhadi: Thank you so much Shenaaz, and I begin by acknowledging that my own university, San Francisco State University, sits on stolen indigenous Ohlone people's land, and I'm now on the east coast of the United States, where I am also present on the Lenape people's land that has been stolen and people have been displaced, just like it is in Palestine. I also want to thank Queer Crescent for organizing this with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and actually joining with Palestinian Voices. I'm very happy that my colleague, my sister, my sibling, Ghadir, was able to join us and has actually taken a lot of the things that I was going to focus on, and thank you, Yaffa, for especially naming even the poetry, Blood Oranges, because we know what oranges mean and how they have been used. And many Palestinians can't even eat oranges because it reminds them of the orchards that they've lost back home. So I start, if you don't mind, just Putting the first slide on. Yeah. And this is a slide if people can see it. This is actually was done in 2013 and it was organized by a group of underground artists, called themselves cultural jammers, to remake all the campaign that was at the time by Pamela Geller and other Zionist groups doing all this smearing and buying sides on the buses and so on. And the reason I mentioned because there is a connection between the cultural jammers and also the whole naming of pink washing because pink washing, some people say, emerged in Palestine. Some people say it emerged in the U. S. Some people talk about the whole question of washing and then the question of pink and so on. And I think for me as a researcher, a scholar, it's very, very interesting because there are so many origins of every single way that we are having the struggles. And so the colonial boundaries and borders that the colonialists and settler colonists try to impose upon us don't really work because we cross these borders at least maybe imaginary, maybe in our networks and so on. But why is it that pinkwashing persists? Ghadir spoke a lot about it. I'm just going to just emphasize a couple of things. It is necessary, very important for Israel public relations. Public relations is a very important project for it. This is why Israel consistently demands of the Palestinians and the Arab countries and the world, not only to recognize Israel's right to exist, but to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, which in itself a very racist notion. And this is very much connected with the genocide that we're seeing now in Gaza, that also we have seen for 75 years of Nakba and for over 100 years of colonization of Palestine, because , the slogan by the Zionist movement was “a land without people, for a people without the land.” We can talk about “for people without the land” a little bit later, but let's talk about “a land without people”. In order to accomplish that and legitimize it, you have to arrest the people. You have to erase them. You have to erase their presence. You have to also discredit their discourse, their work, their culture, their interaction, their social relations, in order for you to present yourself as Israel does. And as Ghadir mentioned, as a modern state that is making the desert blue, which we know is not true, and by contrast, is the best friend of women and queer people, as a gay haven, as opposed to quote unquote the backward, savage. excessively homophobic, excessively misogynist, Arab world, Arab and Muslim world, and in which Arab men and Arab and Muslim and Palestinian men are presented as irrational, bloodthirsty, misogynist, haters of women and Queer people, and as women as being docile, as being only oppressed constantly, and need to be rescued by the colonists who will come in and basically realize what Gayatri Spivak spoke about I don't know, 30 years ago, the colonist project of trying to save brown people from brown communities and queer people from their own queer communities. And so in order for this to work, it has to be presented in all of these things that it is necessary. And it's very important for Israel to focus on its public relations. And this is something that has been actually very part and parcel of since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, a task that was assigned to the military, to the security of interior affairs to the Mossad, which is the CIA, outside intelligence, Shambit, the internal intelligence to everybody. And now we see more and more the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and other is, and the whole question of quote unquote branding, which I put it in parentheses because branding also refers to the ways in which people engage in slavery actually used to quote brand people whose lives they owned. So I put it in parentheses. I question it. But Israel is very big on that to brand Israel as a gay haven. Israel as a best liberator of women and so on.  This is also what we see today in the sense of Israel actually making a very public relation campaign and a very, very intensive campaign to claim that Palestinians have chopped off the head of children, which was even reiterated by the president of the United States without even thinking about it because he was quoting Israeli Officials who we know are not really known for telling the truth and then they had to retract it the second day but yesterday he repeated the same thing again and said there is the rape of women and so on which we do not have any evidence until now. We know that a lot of Israeli groups and Zionist groups like this group Bonat Alternativa and others are alleging, but we haven't seen any evidence of that. If there is any evidence of that, we will not stand for it. We condemn any kind of violations of gender and sexual, justice because we believe that gender and sexual justice is part and parcel with indivisibility of justice. So this is not something we are trying to cover, but this is very much part and parcel of the Israeli propaganda and it's churning machine, the Hasbara machine is everywhere and they keep changing their stories. And if we have time we can actually go over how each story has developed and moved from one place to the other. I'm also talking about the ways in which colonial feminisms or colonial quote unquote feminism, because feminism is supposed to be about the liberation of women as part of liberation of everybody, have been very much engaged in. But within that, there is also notion of blaming the victim. It is a very important aspect of it. So in order for the Israeli and the Zionist narrative to work, you have to blame people. And one of the very well known cases, for example, was the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the young Palestinian teenager who was kidnapped from in front of his house on July 2nd, 2014, right around the big, big 2014 war on Gaza we talked about, and kidnapped by Israeli settlers who took him to a forest in Jerusalem that was built on the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, where the massacre on April 8th, 1948 happened in order to facilitate the creation of the Israeli state. And they made him drink kerosene and set him on fire and burned him alive, which was a clear case of lynching. Now, what Israeli police tried to do was to actually say that Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by his own family to quote unquote salvage family honor. And they killed him because he was queer. And now if it wasn't for his father who had videotapes of the security cameras outside of the house and showed it– the Israeli police tried to confiscate it and basically destroy it– showed that these people came and kidnapped him. The relative would still be among colonists, among racists, among white supremacists, Zionists, that Palestinians are killing Palestinians and they are doing this all the time. So it's not only blaming the victim, but it also instilling and reinforcing the narrative of people, not only Palestinians, this happens with all indigenous and all colonized communities and all communities of color from time immemorial. You look at the history of the United States, this is something, this is a trope that keeps getting repeated again and again and again. And it's not an easy trope because It is not something that's only being said. It's not only a discursive issue. It's not a discursive issue that we need to deconstruct in the classroom because we know the history, including that. But recently, many people started learning more about the case of Emmett Till, the young Boy who was killed and the woman who actually accused him came out and said that she lied, but he was killed and he was lynched. And then his mom insisted on having open casket so everybody could see the crime. And there's so many more examples that we don't have time to get into all of them now, but this is part of the colonial narrative, the colonial strategy in order to discredit the people who are colonized and discredit their struggle.  And this is definitely a part in Gaza and it is, but the other thing is that it depends on the narrative of saying that our communities in particular as exceptionally sensitive and exceptionally traditional. And this is something that we saw in Abu Ghraib for example.  When they were talking about, we're not going to show the images of iraqi men are particularly insensitive. But we were raising the question, which men are okay with it, which women, which anybody, which non gender binary person, who would be okay with being subjected to sexual and gender violence; to being displaced like this and so on. Nobody will be. But the imaginary that it is trying to instill that's built on Orientalist, Islamophobic, anti Arab, anti Palestinian, anti Muslim racism as part and parcel of all kinds of racism basically makes it possible to do a little dog whistle in order for you to enforce all of this. We saw this also at the US Social Forum when Zionist groups stand with us, which now everybody knows what it is, tried to do a workshop around queer communities in the Middle East, and many of us objected to it. And the reason that it got through because the organizers thought that this would be something that would be actually really wonderful, bringing everybody together. They did not really investigate who this group was and what it was doing and did not coordinate with the many organizations that were at the U. S. Social Forum in 2010 in Detroit from our own community to see what is happening, what's going on, are you part of this unparceled hat? Even though the Palestinian queer organizations have existed for a very long time, and I think it was by then, if I'm not mistaken, Ghadir you can correct me that we organize a national tour and for all calls throughout the U S in order for people to speak and you all came and spoke in my own classroom. This is part of the stuff that keeps going back. And this is also the same thing that we hear around this group that I've mentioned now, and this propaganda that's happening, and also in terms of the ways when we passed the resolution on BDS in the National Women's Studies Association 2015, many Zionist groups came out and basically came with the whole question is there a place for Zionism and feminism? Many of the feminist groups have been targeted, including the International Women's Strike and so on. This is a continuous, systemic, persistent thing. This is not something that is out of random or accidental. And so what do we do about this? In addition to what Ghadir said, I think it's really, really important for us to say, how do we fight back? We fight back with multiple ways. One of the ways we do for example, organizing this in the classroom. So one of the things that we do in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies program ever since we were founded in 2007 is every single year we were partnering with the Pride Month at San Francisco State to organize sessions on the whole question of queer justice, and this is one of them. Even after San Francisco State stopped funding pride month, we continue doing it again and again. We believe that it's really important to connect the knowledge within the classroom with the knowledge outside and with the activism and advocacy. We do not separate what happens in the classroom, what happens in the academy from outside. So the academy is not producing knowledge that is divorced from reality. The people who are organizing are part and parcel of that. And so we've been doing this again and again. The other thing that is really, really important to think about is how do we work here, and I'm talking here in the diaspora, with groups on the ground, Palestinian queer groups who are working? So one of the examples that I would like to cite from our own experiences is when Al-Qaws was attacked by Palestinian police in Nablus trying to hold an event. My hometown Nablus. We were going to rush and say something, but we waited and we coordinated with Al Qaws and we asked, what should we do? And we did not do anything until Al Qaws came out because we were objecting to the whole question of saving queer people from queer communities, saving brown people from brown communities, the whole question of the colonial notion. And we were also taking leadership from the people on the ground who are day in and day out struggling. Once Al-Qaws came out with it, what we did is we published in one of the newspapers in the Bay Area, along with Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, which is a group that has been doing a lot of work for a very long time, and whose founder actually was chosen to be the Grand Marshall at Gay Pride Parade at San Francisco. And she turned down this honor and said, because I am here in Palestine struggling with the International Solidarity Movement at the time to oppose the apartheid world to oppose the repression by Israel and so on. So we organized together. And that's when we said we endorse. We support. This is really important sometimes to think about how do we take a back road and when is it we go public with things. At this point, we really need to go public and we need to defy all this propaganda that is happening.  This is part of what the solidarity mean. But this is not free. When we do something like this, there is punishment. And these are some of the flyers I'm showing from the Queer Liberation March that took place in 2019. This was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall, Uprising. The Queer Liberation March at that time actually decided to refuse any corporate funding, to refuse to allow the police to go march in their own uniforms and so on, rejected the policing, rejected the state apparatus that represses people, rejected the corporate money and so on. As a result, there was space for us to be there. So we were organizing, we organized a big contingent under the banner of QAIA, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and also Queers A gainst Islamophobia.  So we participated and I took this banner and I put it on my Facebook page. This led to the another Zionist attack, which is trying to silence Palestine and were trying to criminalize Palestine in the curriculum, and especially targeting us and our program in particular. And they took it and didn't say what was on the banner. They just said that I'm spreading hate, and thus I should be– they had 86 organizations, some of them fake organizations– sign it, send it to the university, to the chancellor of California State University to the president of San Francisco State, saying that I'm spreading hate. This for them is hate. Palestine is a queer issue. BDS Zionism is racism. Silence means death. For them, this was something that was very problematic, and it was something that is undermining the Zionist propaganda, and Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and eliminating the Palestinian people like the genocide that we are seeing here, and trying to continue pushing the pink washing without having it exposed.  As a result, our program has been attacked again and again. The Lawfare Project executive director got on the TV, on Fox and friends, and made a lying statement. They sued me. And they sued San Francisco State and they sued California State University. But we defeated them. It was thrown out of court. It was dismissed with prejudice. But she lied about that. And she said that I'm spreading hate; that I'm one of the leading anti Semitic– Horowitz every single year pushes out a formula about the top anti-Semitic scholars, and they always give me number one. And I think they do it in May because this is the fundraising season for them. As a result, I started receiving death threats. However, and including to my own university and the threat voicemails on my office mail that said Muslims will die, which is the same phrase that the guy who killed Wadiah Al-Fayyumi in Chicago, stabbing him 26 times. He said Muslims will die. The university does not believe that this is actually a viable threat. And so they protect the right wing speech, which is white supremacist and Zionist is a protected speech protected that they can do whatever they want, put up hateful posters, do whatever they want against us, but we are not allowed to say so. And the university is not investigating death threat letters that actually came to me through the University President's office to my own office. However we refuse to be silenced. We refuse to lie down. And so we continued organizing. And one of the main events that we organize, and we do it every year, is this panel Queer Open Classroom that everybody can attend and come in. Queer justice against pink washing, exposing it, bringing scholars and activists, Ghadir was one of the people who spoke at that, in order for us to support liberation for Palestine as part of liberation of all, and to support gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of the indivisibility of justice. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Oh, Rabab. I hope that you can feel all the tremendous. gratitude and love that you're getting in the chat. I think that there is such a clear longing to be hearing stories from elders, folks who have been in this fight for so long. Thank you for bringing in the long arc of queer Palestinian organizing. Thank you for bringing the long arc and history of queers being in solidarity for Palestine. It's so important that we understand that while this moment is so important for us to study, learn and act. It rests upon such a long arc and such a long history of organizing in solidarity with Palestine. Thank you for also speaking to Mohammed Abu Khdeir, thank you for speaking him into the space. Thank you for both of you reminding us to follow the lead of queer Palestinians. What we're trying to do with you all today with this teach-in is to really pull us together, circle around and invite us all to be following the lead of queer Palestinians so that we can take on this work as inextricably linked to our own liberation; to advance the work of undermining pinkwashing and Zionism as part and parcel to our queer liberation. So thank you so much, Rabab. Our last speaker, Shivani Chanillo with Lavender Phoenix. Shivani (they/them) is a trans non- binary second generation Indian American organizer. Shout out to the baddy Indian organizers out here, myself included. Their experience of active solidarity with Palestinian folks came in 2017 through exchanges they facilitated between their high school students in Baltimore, and students at Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. These powerful exchanges stoked Shivani's passion for developing young people as critical thinkers grounded in revolutionary values and politics. As a leadership development coordinator at Lavender Phoenix, an organization that Queer Crescent deeply loves and feels deeply supported by and in deep siblingship with. Shivani continues this work by facilitating opportunities for trans and queer Asians and Pacific Islanders to practice values based organizing and contribute to intersectional movements. In particular, I just want to really say that we were so excited to invite Shivani and Lavender Phoenix in to our teach in as the final speaker, because Lavender Phoenix is one organization that really models, going back to the initial motivation of this teach in with our letter calling for a permanent ceasefire, calling on LGBTQ organizations and leaders to sign on to understanding pink washing and to support Palestinian liberation. Lavender Phoenix is one such organization that has really demonstrated such values align solidarity with Palestinian liberation. And so I'm really excited to bring you in Shivani to close us out to talk about how queer people, queer organizations can really double down on our solidarity.  Shivani Chanillo: Thank you so much Shenaaz for that introduction and to Queer Crescent for organizing this event. I just want to take a moment and just, I feel so deeply moved by the sharing from Rabab and Ghadir in this workshop and just sitting with the lineage within all of us as we take up Palestine as a queer issue. We have generations of lessons and decades of work and such powerful leaders here in this space, but all across the world to follow, and I feel so grateful and so excited to be joining in on this work and sharing a little bit about what Lavender Phoenix is doing in this moment. If you haven't heard of Lavender Phoenix, we build trans non binary and queer Asian and Pacific Islander power here in the Bay Area. We are a base building organization training grassroots leaders to build intersectional movements. As we witness an escalation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine I can say that our base is firmly grounded in the understanding that Palestinian liberation is part of our struggle and our responsibility as trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander people. And so I want to start by sharing a little bit about what we're doing in this moment, before sharing about how our members arrived to this point. Since October 7th we have shifted our work accordingly. We have dedicated time to mobilize our members and our broader communities to action. We have educated each other to stay politically grounded. We have and will continue to support each other to process the grief of this moment and to remember hope, optimism, and commitment. In so many facets of our work, we are stepping into deeper leadership and responsibility to support our Palestinian comrades to win. And more tangibly across our six member led committees, this looks like offering healing support, coordinating our members who are trained in protest and digital security to support our comrades, coordinating contingents at in person and online actions, moving financial resources and funder attention to our Palestinian partners, and uplifting pro Palestinian messaging and calls to actions using our social media reach. Responding to Palestine and challenging pinkwashing is not a shift in our priorities, but it's actually a sharpening of our focus as an organization. We've organized our base over the years to recognize our interconnected struggles, and across our membership, we so deeply understand that the Palestinian struggle is our struggle. And Palestinian futures are our futures. All of the actions we are taking right now to support Palestine, to challenge pinkwashing are the result of so many tests, experiments, and trials that have helped us deepen our political purpose and grow our power. Many of these experiments and trials that we've conducted over the years really informed our current theory of change. And this is really critical to how we're organizing in this moment. Our emergent responses to sharpen contradictions in our world like we are witnessing with Palestine, are only possible because we organize within a consistent theory of change. A key part of our theory of change and a key part of my role as Leadership Development coordinator, is that we are committed to developing leaders who are rooted in our values, in our history, in emotional intelligence, and compassion, because we know that is how our movement will be sustained and will be effective. So we're not just developing members and masses who care about single issues, we're developing holistic, critical thinkers who care about solidarity with all oppressed people so that in moments like this, solidarity with Palestine is a natural choice in our larger fight for liberation. One of the really important ways we do this, and this workshop is a critical example, is we educate our base, our trans and queer API base, on our history. We dig into how systems of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy impact all of us across our identities in the past and in the present. Right now, the tools and tactics being wielded by fascist leaders to criminalize and punish trans people here in the U. S. are rooted in the same white supremacist, colonial, and imperialist ideologies used to justify the dehumanization and murder of Palestinians, particularly trans and queer Palestinians. As part of our theory of change, we've also spent intentional time educating our base about revolutionary politics like abolition and healing justice, and developing our skills for safety, for healing and resource mobilization that are applicable in moments all across our movement. We spent so much time since we implemented this theory of change in 2021 to build our base and grow our power so we can show up for our partners who are organizing for Palestinian liberation in this moment. We have spent so much time cultivating our skills and knowledges so we can support our movements beyond just trans liberation.  I want to end just by sharing a little bit of a story. A few weeks ago, our members participated in a direct action that asked many of them to step into higher risk than they had before. Prior to the action, we met to get grounded together. Folks shared their fears, but they also countered those fears with a really rooted sense of purpose. So many of our members talked about how they wanted to look back on this moment and know that they and we as an organization did everything in our power to support Palestinian liberation. And they spoke about the sacred responsibility and duty we have in this moment to show up in solidarity. I feel so moved, even now, just thinking back to that moment and feel so much gratitude to our members for taking new risks, to the generations of leaders in our organization and our movement who have led us to this point, and I feel immense admiration and gratitude to the long lineage of Palestinian queer and trans resistance, and current day organizers who are guiding us right now. For Lavender Phoenix, this moment is really helping us clarify our power, and for many of our members, this moment is helping them clarify their political purpose. The things all of our Palestinian siblings are fighting for, self determination, safety, healing, community, decolonization, these are the things that we as trans and queer API people here in the Bay Area so desire for ourselves as well. We refuse to let our transness and our queerness be co opted for violence and displacement and genocide, and we know that our struggles and our futures are united, and we're committed to fighting alongside our Palestinian comrades until we are all free. Thank you so much for letting me share. I'll pass it back to Shenaaz. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Shivani, thank you so much for bringing all of it. Lavender Phoenix, I just can't swoon on y'all enough. You model that clarity of purpose and power and grace. There's also such deep humility and grace to be in constant learning. As an emerging organization, an emerging queer organization, I just have to say Queer Crescent feels so deeply held by y'all and really inspired with the path that you are leading and inviting us all towards.  This piece around letting this moment sharpen the focus. It's not a pivot. I think I've even said, we're pivoting, we're in rapid response. Part of our political principles as an organization is understanding anti Zionism as part and parcel of the white supremacist project. And so this is not a pivot, it's not a rapid response, but to your point, it's a sharpening and it's a double down of our commitments, principles and priorities. So thank you for naming that.  Cheryl Truong: And that's the end of our show. Tonight's show was a broadcast of the Resisting Pinkwashing teach-in co-led by Queer Crescent and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. It was moderated by Shenaaz Janmohamed, executive director of Queer Crescent and featured poetry by Mx. Yaffa of MASGD, and guest speakers, Rabab Abdulhadie from the Palestinian feminist collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, and and Shivani Chanillo from AACRE Group Lavender Phoenix. Learn more about the incredible work of these incredible organizations and sign on to Queer Crescent's cease fire campaign through the links in our show notes.  Apex express is produced by Miko Lee, Paige Chung, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preeti Mangala Shekar. Shekar, Anuj Vaidya, Kiki Rivera, Swati Rayasam, Nate Tan, Hien Nguyen, Nikki Chan, and Cheryl Truong   Tonight's show was produced by me, cheryl. Thanks to the team at KPFA for all of their support. And thank you for listening! The post APEX Express – 05.30.24 – Resisting Pinkwashing appeared first on KPFA.

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists.   A teach-in by Queer Crescent in collaboration with Palestinian Feminist Collective – Palestine is a Queer Issue: Resisting Pinkwashing Now and Until Liberation. Featuring guest speakers Rabab Abdulhadi from Palestinian Feminist Collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, Shivani Chanillo from Lavender Phoenix, poetry by Mx Yaffa from Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD). Moderator by Shenaaz Janmohamed of Queer Crescent. Important Links and Resources: Sign on to Queer Crescent's Ceasefire Campaign for LGBTQI+ organizations and leaders Queer Crescent's Pinkwashing Resources  Queer Crescent Website Palestinian Feminist Collective Website ASWAT Instagram (@aswatfreedoms) Lavender Phoenix Website Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) Website Purchase Blood Orange by Mx. Yaffa Transcript Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you all so much for being here today. Welcome to the “Resisting Pinkwashing Now Until Liberation” teach-in. Queer Crescent is honored to host this teach in in partnership with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Lavender Phoenix, The Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity or MASGD, Teaching Palestine, and Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies   Thank you all so much for joining us and for tuning in. My name is Shenaaz Janmohamed. I use she and they pronouns. I'm the executive director of Queer Crescent.  Queer Crescent is really thrilled to offer this Teach-in and to be in learning with you all for the next hour and a half on Pinkwashing in particular, as we hold grief and rage and mourn towards healing, towards resistance, towards a free Palestine. Joining the resounding people all across the world who have been calling for a permanent ceasefire. To not let the violence and the destruction of Gaza go without our clear and determined voice to say that this is not okay, that we, our tax dollars should not be paying for this, that we do not consent to genocide. And as queer people, as trans people, it is very much a queer issue to be in solidarity with Palestine. For the next hour and a half we will take time to learn from Palestinian organizers. in Palestine, in the U. S., around the ways in which this moment can be used to understand our relationship to pinkwashing in particular and to Palestinian solidarity in general. And so thank you again for being with us today. We're going to start our Teach in with poetry, because we deeply believe as a queer Muslim organization in the power of cultural work, cultural change, and imparting our shine as queer people into the culture. That is the way that our people have survived. That is the way that people share their histories their survivalship is through culture. And so, before I bring up Yaffa, who's a dear friend and comrade, and also the executive director of MASGD, the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, let me introduce Yaffa. Yaffa is a trans Muslim and displaced indigenous Palestinian. She is sharing poetry from her new book, Blood Orange, shout it out, please get a copy if you haven't already, which is an emotional, important, and timely poetry collection. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of Indigenous people. Join me in giving some shine, energetic shine to Yaffa, and I'll pass to you. Mx Yaffa: Hi everyone. It's so nice to be here with you all. So excited to share space with all of you, with all the incredible panelists, with the entire Queer Crescent team, y'all are just incredible. Right before this, me and one of the other panelists realized we could potentially be related. So that's the beauty of having spaces like this, where you connect with people that you've kind of been missing your entire life, but you didn't even know that they were missing. I'm excited to recite some poetry for you all from my new collection. Just a little bit about the collection before I recite some poetry.  This collection was written for the most part, on the weekend of October 13th to the 15th. Some of y'all might remember that there was an eclipse during that weekend. And I really wanted to find something that would really center queer and trans Palestinian experience in particular, and also would just support me in navigating my own processing of everything that's going on.  I have family both in Gaza and the West Bank still. I'm originally from Jaffa and Jenin, but I've kind of lived in nine different countries. So when I say I'm displaced, it's displacement from various different wars, various genocides, various everything. And the result of that was Blood Orange.  I tried to get it out as quickly as possible and here we are. The first poem that I'll read is called “Healthy”. And I'll talk a little bit about each of these poems after I read them. It's called “Healthy”. We are not meant to be okay, when genocide is our neighbor that is funded by our labor. We are meant to be a mess, our sleep tearing into reality, anxiety brewing, wondering what is hope. We are meant to tear at the seams of reality, realizing a reality built on oppression is bullshit. We are meant to realize and demand all we are worth. Self actualization, wholeness. Things systems built off of genocide can never. Our response labeled by western capitalism as wrong is healthy. We move to wholeness always, they move to pain attempting to drag us with them. So this was actually the very first poem that I wrote for this collection and it was in that first week of the genocide immediately following October 7th when so many people were really struggling with what do we do with all of this, right? We're witnessing an entire genocide right before our eyes. And what do we do? There was a lot of hopelessness going around and a lot of narratives, at least in what's known as the United States and the global north that's always told us that all of that is wrong. That we're not supposed to be overwhelmed by things. But for me, with all the practices that I have, it's actually healthy to be overwhelmed right now. We're not supposed to know how to let genocide live in our bodies with ease. We still show up, we still do the things, and yet at the same time, we honor it. That it is a large experience. This is not normal. This is not something that should be happening all the time or ever. And so really wanted to honor that of the world that we live in is not what we deserve. For us to be overwhelmed right now is actually healthy, is where we should be. So the second poem I will read kind of goes into the conversation of today around pinkwashing.  This one's called “At Odds”.  My transness and a colonized perception of Palestine are at odds. They think it's because of lack of modernity. I say I have only received death threats targeting my transness from white people, Zionists, and other various political affiliations. I say only white people around me have ever disowned their own. Yet I do not talk to sisters who choose to buy into imperialist transphobia, claiming it as their own. My parents do not understand how some of their children could hate anything any of their children could be, why anyone would hate what they do not know. I won't talk much about pinkwashing because I know we'll get to that today. But in particular, most queer and trans Palestinians over these last eight weeks have been receiving such immense violence from the broader LGBTQ community telling us that our people are the ones who are going to kill us. I've been receiving death threats my entire life in particular as an organizer since I was 19, and I have literally never received a death threat from anyone from our region from any Muslim person. It has always been white people who have sent me death threats specifically for my queerness and my transness. Let alone everything else. And so that, that poem just kind of honors that experience.  I'll read one more, and I'll say just a few words before I read this last one. For me, the arts are so important. Not just as a tool for resistance, but also as a tool for world building. Often we think of the world is what creates art, rather than art is what creates the world. If you look at literature, even with Zionism, Zionism was in literature 100 years before it was ever named. I think about that of what is the world that we are building, what is the world of tomorrow that we get to write about and paint about and do all different kinds of art forms about today. And so this last poem kind of brings a little bit of that into it. The collection goes into the topic of utopia as we're exploring all of these other things. and as we're experiencing this genocide. So this last poem is called “Land Back”. I do not know names wiped from time in Gaza Like I do not remember the names Of great uncles and aunts Who have been reclaimed by our land To say they were murdered Is to claim loss that our land will never feel For we are made of her And regardless of how many layers of phosphor fill the air We return to her in our deaths They may exacerbate the process of our return, but return we shall. Standing thousands of miles away, I know even here she will take me back for distance is a creation that is buried with bodies that were never ours. We are not the ones who take land back, it is land that takes us. There will come a day when the sun sets on a world and rises in another, when indigenous sovereignty is honored. Where queerness no longer exists, where transness is no longer an identity, where humanity means something genuine. So I wanted to end with that, on a note of everything that we're doing right now, all of the resistance is world building. We're building the world that we have always deserved. So I'll leave you all with just one final thing about the book, like I mentioned, the reason I wrote this book in the first place and published it is to raise awareness about queer and trans Palestinians in particular and our experiences, and also to fundraise for queer and trans Palestinians both on the grounds in Gaza and in the diaspora. So 100 percent of all the proceeds from Blood Orange go directly towards that.   As we're getting deeper and deeper into this, the needs of the queer and trans Palestinian community is getting so immense, both on the ground in the region and in the diaspora. Over just the last few days, I've received over $20,000 worth of requests from individuals because people are being doxed, people are receiving death threats, people are losing their jobs. In one case, people are losing their children. There's a lot happening. And so just wanted to leave with that. I want to invite you all to pay attention to those needs and honor them, especially as we go into next year and into the elections. Thank you again for having me. It was such a pleasure to be here. And I'm so excited for the rest of this. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Yaffa. It's so wonderful to have you here. And it feels so important to start our teaching with the ways in which poetry, culture, moves and inspires us. It opens our hearts in ways that feel both healing and necessary as part and parcel to our organizing and our deep learning. As my comrade and partner Saba says, to growing our empathy to be able to show up with more depth, more commitment, and more resolve towards these issues because we are deeply interconnected. So thank you again, Yaffa..  Before I turn to introduce our other panelists, I wanted to just ground us for a moment in why Queer Crescent, along with the many partners that I named at the beginning felt it was important to host this teach in. Back on November 3rd, Queer Crescent in collaboration with the Palestinian Feminist Collective drafted and released a letter calling upon LGBTQI organizations, leaders, and influencers to join Queer Crescent and Palestinians in calling for an immediate ceasefire. And in particularly to take up understanding and resisting pinkwashing as a queer issue. The frame ” Palestine is a queer issue” is very much an homage of Palestinian Feminist Collective who tirelessly make the links around gender justice, bodily autonomy, self determination, sovereignty to the project of Palestinian liberation. Seeing them as part and parcel of the same project of liberation, and we very much are inspired and in deep gratitude to PFC and all the tireless folks who make those links so clear and apparent to us. We are also in deep gratitude to organizations like Al-Qaws, based in Palestine, who have been telling us about pink- washing for a long, long time, and we are finally doing our part to answer the call as an organization as Queer Crescent. Since we shared this letter, over 350 individuals have signed on, over 65 organizations have joined us in a commitment to calling for permanent ceasefire. This teach in is part of our commitment to moving those who have signed, ourselves included, and the many others who have joined us today. To deepen our shared resolve to a free Palestine through learning about pink watching as a propaganda tool of Israel and settler colonial state violence, and to allow this moment to transform us so that the grief is not in vain, towards a more fierce committed and clear stance of solidarity with Palestinian liberation movement. As queer and trans people and within LGBTQI organizations, we have a distinct role to play to organize to undermine pinkwashing. Because pinkwashing works and functions on the backs of racist tropes of Palestinians, Arabs, SWANA, and Muslims more broadly. We cannot let our vulnerabilities as trans and queer people be exploited in the pursuit of colonial violence and the genocide against Palestinians and all indigenous people. It was not surprising that some of the first folks who signed on to our letter were trans led organizations like the Transgender Law Center, like El/La, and indigenous organizations. It's not surprising because I think for folks who are leading trans led organizations, Trans and indigenous organizations, the relationship of self determination of bodily autonomy and to state violence and colonization is clear, right? Because ultimately colonization uses gender injustice and creating these wedges within our communities as a way to dampen our resistance and to keep us apart. So, I don't want to say more because our amazing speakers will speak and illuminate so much more of these issues. But I wanted to just state why it was important for Queer Crescent to support advancing these conversations. So, our first speaker today is Ghadir Shafie ( she and her). She is a Palestinian queer activist and the co founder of ASWAT, Palestinian Feminist Queer Center for Sexual and Gender Freedoms. A passionate advocate for the intersectionality of the struggle of Palestinian queer women, fighting multiple forms of oppression as Palestinians in the context of Israel's system of apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism, as women in a militaristic and imperialistic male dominated society, and as queers in the context of pinkwashing and homophobia. Ghadir promotes active solidarity for Palestine through global feminism and with queers. Thank you, Ghadir. Pass it to you.  Ghadir Shafie: Thank you so much. Hello from Palestine. Thank you so much for organizing this teach-in on pinkwashing. I am grateful for your presence here with me, witnessing in this horrible, horrible time. I will speak today for about 15 minutes, and I want you to bear in mind that since October 7th, Israel has killed over 18, 000 Palestinians. That is one Palestinian every 15 minutes. Imagine how many queer people are being killed daily by Israel. The scenes from Gaza are beyond description. They defy comparison, even for Palestinians, jaded by decades of occupation and settler colonial violence. Devastated landscape filled with craters and the blackened ruins of what were once people's homes, dead bodies or pieces of them. Orphaned children screaming in terror and incomprehension. Desperate survivors crying for food and water. Doctors despairing at the ever growing influx of wounded people they know they cannot treat. As a queer Palestinian watching these images of horror, one stood out as particularly revolting in a rather different way. It shows an Israeli soldier in the middle of the rubble of one of the many residential neighborhoods in Gaza, flattened by the Israeli indiscriminate military strikes. In the distance, smoke from Israel's carpet bombings hang in the air. The soldier is surrounded by Israeli tanks and demolish everything in their way. It is a scene of death and destruction The soldier stands holding a bright new rainbow flag. and Described it as a message of hope.  What hope can there be for 2.3 million Palestinians trapped over 16 years in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Gaza has become a graveyard for Palestinians. They have no water. No food and no electricity as Israel has cut off what little it allowed in through its already suffocating siege. They seek shelter from Israeli bombings in hospital, UN schools, mosques, and churches, only to find these sites targeted by Israeli strikes. Those who can flee their homes along Israeli designated safe corridors only to have their vehicles shelved by the Israeli IDF soldiers. It seems incomprehensible that an Israeli soldier would pose a photo with a rainbow flag while participating in his army's mass slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of half of Gaza's homes. The truth is more sinister yet. This stunt, which was shared online by the Israeli state official social media accounts, is a textbook. example of obscene colonial pinkwashing. More than that, it is a pinkwashing on steroids. For years, Palestinian queers have denounced Israel's pinkwashing, a cynical strategy designed to use self proclaimed support for LGBTQIA plus rights as a pink smokescreen to conceal its 75 years regime of apartheid, which oppresses all Palestinians, no matter of our gender. or sexual orientation. All the while singling out queer Palestinians for persecution and blackmail. It is an attempt to falsely depict Israel as modern and a liberal country while diverting attention from its alignment with far right homophobic regimes and groups around the world and its current fundamentalist, racist, and homophobic government. In addition, Israel's pinkwashing agenda is a colonial tool that has the racist aim to misrepresent Palestinians as backwards, homophobic, and thus not deserving of human rights. It also tries to convince us, as queer and trans people, that we are somehow foreign in our society, and tries to turn us against our Palestinians brothers and sisters. I think there couldn't be any better example of Israeli pink washing than the photo that the Israeli soldier with the rainbow flag in the rubble. Israeli pink washing has always been dishonest and dangerous. It has always been racist and colonial. It has allowed Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing, besiege, imprisonment, and murder of Palestinians, queer and non queer alike, for decades. Now it's being used to cover up for genocide. In these dark times, Palestinians in besieged Gaza are bearing the brunt of Israel's full blown genocidal war and ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank, meanwhile, are also facing escalating waves of killing, torture by both Israeli military and illegal sectors. Apartheid, for Palestinians like myself inside Israel, is reaching new peaks as Israeli forces are targeting and suppressing any expression of sympathy with the oppressed. As hard as it is, we still maintain hope. We have no other choice. That hope comes from the grassroots mobilization that are forcing complicit governments and institutions to finally call for the bare minimum that is nevertheless the absolute priority: a ceasefire that will put a stop to Israel's carpet bombing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Queer groups have been extremely instrumental in our struggle for liberation. Queer groups have been an important part of the mobilizations. Nearly 40 LGBT, QA plus groups across Southwest Asia and North Africa called for the immediate ceasefire stating ” we stand with justice, equality, progress, and liberty.” Throughout my life as a queer activist, I have proudly held the rainbow flag high as a symbol of queer inclusion, queer struggle, queer liberation, queer equality, and queer joy. The Israeli soldier participating in Israel's genocidal war on my people in Gaza has desecrated the flag, has disgraced the flag, and made it a mockery for all it stands for. Queer and trans people and groups are increasingly seeing through the pink smokescreen and rejecting Israel's pinkwashing and its war crimes and crimes against humanity. We will not stand by as our flag and our identities are co opted and used to justify a genocide. I call upon queer allies around the globe to remember none of us is free until we are all free. What can we do right now in these terrible times? Since 2005, Palestinians have proposed to you, our friends around the world, an entirely nonviolent method of ending Israel's power over our lives. An academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This strategy is known as BDS, Boycott, Digestment and Sanctions. BDS means boycotting all Israeli state sponsored institutions. This is not aimed at individuals, but at institutions financed by the state and that serve as extensions of the government that occupies us and keeps us under siege. We ask academics, staff and students not to speak at Israeli state funding organizations, including universities. We ask artists and cultural workers not to perform in apartheid Israel. Make sure that your universities are divested from Israeli money. Do not take israeli money for your conferences or film festivals. Do not accept deceptively free propaganda trips to Israel. End complicity with the government of Israel by among other things, cancelling all joint projects activities that are complicit with Israeli universities. Right now, the main demand is to stop the genocide. Stop the genocide and ask for ceasefire now.  So how can queer groups and queer people support queer liberation in Palestine?. One effort that is happening right now around the world is Queer Cinema for Palestine. Queer cinema for Palestine is a vibrant event that happens globally, established in 2021 to support queer art and queer cinema around the world. Today, there are more than 270 filmmakers and artists who signed our pledge to boycott Israeli film festival, to boycott Israeli institutions, and support queer liberation in Palestine. Queer Cinema for Palestine is happening online in more than 15 locations around the world from the 2nd until the 10th of December. Under the title, There's No Pride in Genocide, we gather together as artists to support, Queer Cinema for Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There's not much to say. I think you've seen the image from Gaza. You've seen what is happening right now. This is not a regular panel on pinkwashing. It's happening during a genocide, where pinkwashing is also used to promote genocide. So, may I ask you as a Palestinian and as a queer Palestinian, please keep talking about Palestine. Palestine is a queer issue. Gaza is a queer issue, and there's no queer justice until we are all free. Thank you so much for organizing this and thank you so much for your work and activism on Palestine. You are saving lives right now. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Ghadir. Thank you so much for your passion, your commitment, reminding us that hope is an active choice that you're engaging in every day, despite all the odds, because that is the story of survival. Thank you for reminding and being so clear in the link to BDS boycott, divestment and sanction movement as tangible ways that we could be in solidarity with Palestine and to chip at the far reaching power of the Israeli state and settler colonial project. Thank you for showing the ways in which queer folks and queer organizations. use culture and art to tell different stories of survival with the Queer Cinema for Palestine. And thank you for showing up and being here with us. Thank you for all the ways that you hold communities, your fullness, and time to share and to lead us today. Wishing so much protection and safety to you and yours. Next we have Rabab Abdulhadi. Rabab Abdulhadi (she/her) is an internationally known scholar and distinguished professor and researcher. Her scholarship, pedagogy, and public activism focus on Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities and their diasporas, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director and Senior Scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies, and a Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies at the Historic College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. She is also a treasure, a beloved teacher, organizer here in the Bay. I feel really grateful that you're here with us today for all the work, all the times that you've taught me. It's really such an honor to be able to host you and invite you in, Rabab.  Rabab Abdulhadi: Thank you so much Shenaaz, and I begin by acknowledging that my own university, San Francisco State University, sits on stolen indigenous Ohlone people's land, and I'm now on the east coast of the United States, where I am also present on the Lenape people's land that has been stolen and people have been displaced, just like it is in Palestine. I also want to thank Queer Crescent for organizing this with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and actually joining with Palestinian Voices. I'm very happy that my colleague, my sister, my sibling, Ghadir, was able to join us and has actually taken a lot of the things that I was going to focus on, and thank you, Yaffa, for especially naming even the poetry, Blood Oranges, because we know what oranges mean and how they have been used. And many Palestinians can't even eat oranges because it reminds them of the orchards that they've lost back home. So I start, if you don't mind, just Putting the first slide on. Yeah. And this is a slide if people can see it. This is actually was done in 2013 and it was organized by a group of underground artists, called themselves cultural jammers, to remake all the campaign that was at the time by Pamela Geller and other Zionist groups doing all this smearing and buying sides on the buses and so on. And the reason I mentioned because there is a connection between the cultural jammers and also the whole naming of pink washing because pink washing, some people say, emerged in Palestine. Some people say it emerged in the U. S. Some people talk about the whole question of washing and then the question of pink and so on. And I think for me as a researcher, a scholar, it's very, very interesting because there are so many origins of every single way that we are having the struggles. And so the colonial boundaries and borders that the colonialists and settler colonists try to impose upon us don't really work because we cross these borders at least maybe imaginary, maybe in our networks and so on. But why is it that pinkwashing persists? Ghadir spoke a lot about it. I'm just going to just emphasize a couple of things. It is necessary, very important for Israel public relations. Public relations is a very important project for it. This is why Israel consistently demands of the Palestinians and the Arab countries and the world, not only to recognize Israel's right to exist, but to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, which in itself a very racist notion. And this is very much connected with the genocide that we're seeing now in Gaza, that also we have seen for 75 years of Nakba and for over 100 years of colonization of Palestine, because , the slogan by the Zionist movement was “a land without people, for a people without the land.” We can talk about “for people without the land” a little bit later, but let's talk about “a land without people”. In order to accomplish that and legitimize it, you have to arrest the people. You have to erase them. You have to erase their presence. You have to also discredit their discourse, their work, their culture, their interaction, their social relations, in order for you to present yourself as Israel does. And as Ghadir mentioned, as a modern state that is making the desert blue, which we know is not true, and by contrast, is the best friend of women and queer people, as a gay haven, as opposed to quote unquote the backward, savage. excessively homophobic, excessively misogynist, Arab world, Arab and Muslim world, and in which Arab men and Arab and Muslim and Palestinian men are presented as irrational, bloodthirsty, misogynist, haters of women and Queer people, and as women as being docile, as being only oppressed constantly, and need to be rescued by the colonists who will come in and basically realize what Gayatri Spivak spoke about I don't know, 30 years ago, the colonist project of trying to save brown people from brown communities and queer people from their own queer communities. And so in order for this to work, it has to be presented in all of these things that it is necessary. And it's very important for Israel to focus on its public relations. And this is something that has been actually very part and parcel of since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, a task that was assigned to the military, to the security of interior affairs to the Mossad, which is the CIA, outside intelligence, Shambit, the internal intelligence to everybody. And now we see more and more the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and other is, and the whole question of quote unquote branding, which I put it in parentheses because branding also refers to the ways in which people engage in slavery actually used to quote brand people whose lives they owned. So I put it in parentheses. I question it. But Israel is very big on that to brand Israel as a gay haven. Israel as a best liberator of women and so on.  This is also what we see today in the sense of Israel actually making a very public relation campaign and a very, very intensive campaign to claim that Palestinians have chopped off the head of children, which was even reiterated by the president of the United States without even thinking about it because he was quoting Israeli Officials who we know are not really known for telling the truth and then they had to retract it the second day but yesterday he repeated the same thing again and said there is the rape of women and so on which we do not have any evidence until now. We know that a lot of Israeli groups and Zionist groups like this group Bonat Alternativa and others are alleging, but we haven't seen any evidence of that. If there is any evidence of that, we will not stand for it. We condemn any kind of violations of gender and sexual, justice because we believe that gender and sexual justice is part and parcel with indivisibility of justice. So this is not something we are trying to cover, but this is very much part and parcel of the Israeli propaganda and it's churning machine, the Hasbara machine is everywhere and they keep changing their stories. And if we have time we can actually go over how each story has developed and moved from one place to the other. I'm also talking about the ways in which colonial feminisms or colonial quote unquote feminism, because feminism is supposed to be about the liberation of women as part of liberation of everybody, have been very much engaged in. But within that, there is also notion of blaming the victim. It is a very important aspect of it. So in order for the Israeli and the Zionist narrative to work, you have to blame people. And one of the very well known cases, for example, was the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the young Palestinian teenager who was kidnapped from in front of his house on July 2nd, 2014, right around the big, big 2014 war on Gaza we talked about, and kidnapped by Israeli settlers who took him to a forest in Jerusalem that was built on the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, where the massacre on April 8th, 1948 happened in order to facilitate the creation of the Israeli state. And they made him drink kerosene and set him on fire and burned him alive, which was a clear case of lynching. Now, what Israeli police tried to do was to actually say that Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by his own family to quote unquote salvage family honor. And they killed him because he was queer. And now if it wasn't for his father who had videotapes of the security cameras outside of the house and showed it– the Israeli police tried to confiscate it and basically destroy it– showed that these people came and kidnapped him. The relative would still be among colonists, among racists, among white supremacists, Zionists, that Palestinians are killing Palestinians and they are doing this all the time. So it's not only blaming the victim, but it also instilling and reinforcing the narrative of people, not only Palestinians, this happens with all indigenous and all colonized communities and all communities of color from time immemorial. You look at the history of the United States, this is something, this is a trope that keeps getting repeated again and again and again. And it's not an easy trope because It is not something that's only being said. It's not only a discursive issue. It's not a discursive issue that we need to deconstruct in the classroom because we know the history, including that. But recently, many people started learning more about the case of Emmett Till, the young Boy who was killed and the woman who actually accused him came out and said that she lied, but he was killed and he was lynched. And then his mom insisted on having open casket so everybody could see the crime. And there's so many more examples that we don't have time to get into all of them now, but this is part of the colonial narrative, the colonial strategy in order to discredit the people who are colonized and discredit their struggle.  And this is definitely a part in Gaza and it is, but the other thing is that it depends on the narrative of saying that our communities in particular as exceptionally sensitive and exceptionally traditional. And this is something that we saw in Abu Ghraib for example.  When they were talking about, we're not going to show the images of iraqi men are particularly insensitive. But we were raising the question, which men are okay with it, which women, which anybody, which non gender binary person, who would be okay with being subjected to sexual and gender violence; to being displaced like this and so on. Nobody will be. But the imaginary that it is trying to instill that's built on Orientalist, Islamophobic, anti Arab, anti Palestinian, anti Muslim racism as part and parcel of all kinds of racism basically makes it possible to do a little dog whistle in order for you to enforce all of this. We saw this also at the US Social Forum when Zionist groups stand with us, which now everybody knows what it is, tried to do a workshop around queer communities in the Middle East, and many of us objected to it. And the reason that it got through because the organizers thought that this would be something that would be actually really wonderful, bringing everybody together. They did not really investigate who this group was and what it was doing and did not coordinate with the many organizations that were at the U. S. Social Forum in 2010 in Detroit from our own community to see what is happening, what's going on, are you part of this unparceled hat? Even though the Palestinian queer organizations have existed for a very long time, and I think it was by then, if I'm not mistaken, Ghadir you can correct me that we organize a national tour and for all calls throughout the U S in order for people to speak and you all came and spoke in my own classroom. This is part of the stuff that keeps going back. And this is also the same thing that we hear around this group that I've mentioned now, and this propaganda that's happening, and also in terms of the ways when we passed the resolution on BDS in the National Women's Studies Association 2015, many Zionist groups came out and basically came with the whole question is there a place for Zionism and feminism? Many of the feminist groups have been targeted, including the International Women's Strike and so on. This is a continuous, systemic, persistent thing. This is not something that is out of random or accidental. And so what do we do about this? In addition to what Ghadir said, I think it's really, really important for us to say, how do we fight back? We fight back with multiple ways. One of the ways we do for example, organizing this in the classroom. So one of the things that we do in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies program ever since we were founded in 2007 is every single year we were partnering with the Pride Month at San Francisco State to organize sessions on the whole question of queer justice, and this is one of them. Even after San Francisco State stopped funding pride month, we continue doing it again and again. We believe that it's really important to connect the knowledge within the classroom with the knowledge outside and with the activism and advocacy. We do not separate what happens in the classroom, what happens in the academy from outside. So the academy is not producing knowledge that is divorced from reality. The people who are organizing are part and parcel of that. And so we've been doing this again and again. The other thing that is really, really important to think about is how do we work here, and I'm talking here in the diaspora, with groups on the ground, Palestinian queer groups who are working? So one of the examples that I would like to cite from our own experiences is when Al-Qaws was attacked by Palestinian police in Nablus trying to hold an event. My hometown Nablus. We were going to rush and say something, but we waited and we coordinated with Al Qaws and we asked, what should we do? And we did not do anything until Al Qaws came out because we were objecting to the whole question of saving queer people from queer communities, saving brown people from brown communities, the whole question of the colonial notion. And we were also taking leadership from the people on the ground who are day in and day out struggling. Once Al-Qaws came out with it, what we did is we published in one of the newspapers in the Bay Area, along with Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, which is a group that has been doing a lot of work for a very long time, and whose founder actually was chosen to be the Grand Marshall at Gay Pride Parade at San Francisco. And she turned down this honor and said, because I am here in Palestine struggling with the International Solidarity Movement at the time to oppose the apartheid world to oppose the repression by Israel and so on. So we organized together. And that's when we said we endorse. We support. This is really important sometimes to think about how do we take a back road and when is it we go public with things. At this point, we really need to go public and we need to defy all this propaganda that is happening.  This is part of what the solidarity mean. But this is not free. When we do something like this, there is punishment. And these are some of the flyers I'm showing from the Queer Liberation March that took place in 2019. This was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall, Uprising. The Queer Liberation March at that time actually decided to refuse any corporate funding, to refuse to allow the police to go march in their own uniforms and so on, rejected the policing, rejected the state apparatus that represses people, rejected the corporate money and so on. As a result, there was space for us to be there. So we were organizing, we organized a big contingent under the banner of QAIA, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and also Queers A gainst Islamophobia.  So we participated and I took this banner and I put it on my Facebook page. This led to the another Zionist attack, which is trying to silence Palestine and were trying to criminalize Palestine in the curriculum, and especially targeting us and our program in particular. And they took it and didn't say what was on the banner. They just said that I'm spreading hate, and thus I should be– they had 86 organizations, some of them fake organizations– sign it, send it to the university, to the chancellor of California State University to the president of San Francisco State, saying that I'm spreading hate. This for them is hate. Palestine is a queer issue. BDS Zionism is racism. Silence means death. For them, this was something that was very problematic, and it was something that is undermining the Zionist propaganda, and Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and eliminating the Palestinian people like the genocide that we are seeing here, and trying to continue pushing the pink washing without having it exposed.  As a result, our program has been attacked again and again. The Lawfare Project executive director got on the TV, on Fox and friends, and made a lying statement. They sued me. And they sued San Francisco State and they sued California State University. But we defeated them. It was thrown out of court. It was dismissed with prejudice. But she lied about that. And she said that I'm spreading hate; that I'm one of the leading anti Semitic– Horowitz every single year pushes out a formula about the top anti-Semitic scholars, and they always give me number one. And I think they do it in May because this is the fundraising season for them. As a result, I started receiving death threats. However, and including to my own university and the threat voicemails on my office mail that said Muslims will die, which is the same phrase that the guy who killed Wadiah Al-Fayyumi in Chicago, stabbing him 26 times. He said Muslims will die. The university does not believe that this is actually a viable threat. And so they protect the right wing speech, which is white supremacist and Zionist is a protected speech protected that they can do whatever they want, put up hateful posters, do whatever they want against us, but we are not allowed to say so. And the university is not investigating death threat letters that actually came to me through the University President's office to my own office. However we refuse to be silenced. We refuse to lie down. And so we continued organizing. And one of the main events that we organize, and we do it every year, is this panel Queer Open Classroom that everybody can attend and come in. Queer justice against pink washing, exposing it, bringing scholars and activists, Ghadir was one of the people who spoke at that, in order for us to support liberation for Palestine as part of liberation of all, and to support gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of the indivisibility of justice. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Oh, Rabab. I hope that you can feel all the tremendous. gratitude and love that you're getting in the chat. I think that there is such a clear longing to be hearing stories from elders, folks who have been in this fight for so long. Thank you for bringing in the long arc of queer Palestinian organizing. Thank you for bringing the long arc and history of queers being in solidarity for Palestine. It's so important that we understand that while this moment is so important for us to study, learn and act. It rests upon such a long arc and such a long history of organizing in solidarity with Palestine. Thank you for also speaking to Mohammed Abu Khdeir, thank you for speaking him into the space. Thank you for both of you reminding us to follow the lead of queer Palestinians. What we're trying to do with you all today with this teach-in is to really pull us together, circle around and invite us all to be following the lead of queer Palestinians so that we can take on this work as inextricably linked to our own liberation; to advance the work of undermining pinkwashing and Zionism as part and parcel to our queer liberation. So thank you so much, Rabab. Our last speaker, Shivani Chanillo with Lavender Phoenix. Shivani (they/them) is a trans non- binary second generation Indian American organizer. Shout out to the baddy Indian organizers out here, myself included. Their experience of active solidarity with Palestinian folks came in 2017 through exchanges they facilitated between their high school students in Baltimore, and students at Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. These powerful exchanges stoked Shivani's passion for developing young people as critical thinkers grounded in revolutionary values and politics. As a leadership development coordinator at Lavender Phoenix, an organization that Queer Crescent deeply loves and feels deeply supported by and in deep siblingship with. Shivani continues this work by facilitating opportunities for trans and queer Asians and Pacific Islanders to practice values based organizing and contribute to intersectional movements. In particular, I just want to really say that we were so excited to invite Shivani and Lavender Phoenix in to our teach in as the final speaker, because Lavender Phoenix is one organization that really models, going back to the initial motivation of this teach in with our letter calling for a permanent ceasefire, calling on LGBTQ organizations and leaders to sign on to understanding pink washing and to support Palestinian liberation. Lavender Phoenix is one such organization that has really demonstrated such values align solidarity with Palestinian liberation. And so I'm really excited to bring you in Shivani to close us out to talk about how queer people, queer organizations can really double down on our solidarity.  Shivani Chanillo: Thank you so much Shenaaz for that introduction and to Queer Crescent for organizing this event. I just want to take a moment and just, I feel so deeply moved by the sharing from Rabab and Ghadir in this workshop and just sitting with the lineage within all of us as we take up Palestine as a queer issue. We have generations of lessons and decades of work and such powerful leaders here in this space, but all across the world to follow, and I feel so grateful and so excited to be joining in on this work and sharing a little bit about what Lavender Phoenix is doing in this moment. If you haven't heard of Lavender Phoenix, we build trans non binary and queer Asian and Pacific Islander power here in the Bay Area. We are a base building organization training grassroots leaders to build intersectional movements. As we witness an escalation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine I can say that our base is firmly grounded in the understanding that Palestinian liberation is part of our struggle and our responsibility as trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander people. And so I want to start by sharing a little bit about what we're doing in this moment, before sharing about how our members arrived to this point. Since October 7th we have shifted our work accordingly. We have dedicated time to mobilize our members and our broader communities to action. We have educated each other to stay politically grounded. We have and will continue to support each other to process the grief of this moment and to remember hope, optimism, and commitment. In so many facets of our work, we are stepping into deeper leadership and responsibility to support our Palestinian comrades to win. And more tangibly across our six member led committees, this looks like offering healing support, coordinating our members who are trained in protest and digital security to support our comrades, coordinating contingents at in person and online actions, moving financial resources and funder attention to our Palestinian partners, and uplifting pro Palestinian messaging and calls to actions using our social media reach. Responding to Palestine and challenging pinkwashing is not a shift in our priorities, but it's actually a sharpening of our focus as an organization. We've organized our base over the years to recognize our interconnected struggles, and across our membership, we so deeply understand that the Palestinian struggle is our struggle. And Palestinian futures are our futures. All of the actions we are taking right now to support Palestine, to challenge pinkwashing are the result of so many tests, experiments, and trials that have helped us deepen our political purpose and grow our power. Many of these experiments and trials that we've conducted over the years really informed our current theory of change. And this is really critical to how we're organizing in this moment. Our emergent responses to sharpen contradictions in our world like we are witnessing with Palestine, are only possible because we organize within a consistent theory of change. A key part of our theory of change and a key part of my role as Leadership Development coordinator, is that we are committed to developing leaders who are rooted in our values, in our history, in emotional intelligence, and compassion, because we know that is how our movement will be sustained and will be effective. So we're not just developing members and masses who care about single issues, we're developing holistic, critical thinkers who care about solidarity with all oppressed people so that in moments like this, solidarity with Palestine is a natural choice in our larger fight for liberation. One of the really important ways we do this, and this workshop is a critical example, is we educate our base, our trans and queer API base, on our history. We dig into how systems of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy impact all of us across our identities in the past and in the present. Right now, the tools and tactics being wielded by fascist leaders to criminalize and punish trans people here in the U. S. are rooted in the same white supremacist, colonial, and imperialist ideologies used to justify the dehumanization and murder of Palestinians, particularly trans and queer Palestinians. As part of our theory of change, we've also spent intentional time educating our base about revolutionary politics like abolition and healing justice, and developing our skills for safety, for healing and resource mobilization that are applicable in moments all across our movement. We spent so much time since we implemented this theory of change in 2021 to build our base and grow our power so we can show up for our partners who are organizing for Palestinian liberation in this moment. We have spent so much time cultivating our skills and knowledges so we can support our movements beyond just trans liberation.  I want to end just by sharing a little bit of a story. A few weeks ago, our members participated in a direct action that asked many of them to step into higher risk than they had before. Prior to the action, we met to get grounded together. Folks shared their fears, but they also countered those fears with a really rooted sense of purpose. So many of our members talked about how they wanted to look back on this moment and know that they and we as an organization did everything in our power to support Palestinian liberation. And they spoke about the sacred responsibility and duty we have in this moment to show up in solidarity. I feel so moved, even now, just thinking back to that moment and feel so much gratitude to our members for taking new risks, to the generations of leaders in our organization and our movement who have led us to this point, and I feel immense admiration and gratitude to the long lineage of Palestinian queer and trans resistance, and current day organizers who are guiding us right now. For Lavender Phoenix, this moment is really helping us clarify our power, and for many of our members, this moment is helping them clarify their political purpose. The things all of our Palestinian siblings are fighting for, self determination, safety, healing, community, decolonization, these are the things that we as trans and queer API people here in the Bay Area so desire for ourselves as well. We refuse to let our transness and our queerness be co opted for violence and displacement and genocide, and we know that our struggles and our futures are united, and we're committed to fighting alongside our Palestinian comrades until we are all free. Thank you so much for letting me share. I'll pass it back to Shenaaz. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Shivani, thank you so much for bringing all of it. Lavender Phoenix, I just can't swoon on y'all enough. You model that clarity of purpose and power and grace. There's also such deep humility and grace to be in constant learning. As an emerging organization, an emerging queer organization, I just have to say Queer Crescent feels so deeply held by y'all and really inspired with the path that you are leading and inviting us all towards.  This piece around letting this moment sharpen the focus. It's not a pivot. I think I've even said, we're pivoting, we're in rapid response. Part of our political principles as an organization is understanding anti Zionism as part and parcel of the white supremacist project. And so this is not a pivot, it's not a rapid response, but to your point, it's a sharpening and it's a double down of our commitments, principles and priorities. So thank you for naming that.  Cheryl Truong: And that's the end of our show. Tonight's show was a broadcast of the Resisting Pinkwashing teach-in co-led by Queer Crescent and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. It was moderated by Shenaaz Janmohamed, executive director of Queer Crescent and featured poetry by Mx. Yaffa of MASGD, and guest speakers, Rabab Abdulhadie from the Palestinian feminist collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, and and Shivani Chanillo from AACRE Group Lavender Phoenix. Learn more about the incredible work of these incredible organizations and sign on to Queer Crescent's cease fire campaign through the links in our show notes.  Apex express is produced by Miko Lee, Paige Chung, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preeti Mangala Shekar. Shekar, Anuj Vaidya, Kiki Rivera, Swati Rayasam, Nate Tan, Hien Nguyen, Nikki Chan, and Cheryl Truong   Tonight's show was produced by me, cheryl. Thanks to the team at KPFA for all of their support. And thank you for listening! The post APEX Express – 01.25.24 Resisting Pinkwashing Teach-In appeared first on KPFA.

On today's show, Author and free speech advocate Pamela Geller joins the Joe Hoft Show to discuss the events in the Middle East and their implications across the world and in the US. “We've reached a tipping point”, Geller says, noting that the far-left Islamic alliance is all about the destruction of free speech across the world. GUEST OVERVIEW: Pamela Geller is the Founder, editor and publisher of The Teller Report and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

World Anti-Communist League (WACL), Far West Ltd., private military companies (PMCs), private intelligence companies (PICs), the breakdown of Obama's détente with Russia, global strategy of tension, Syrian War, ISIS, terrorism, Anders Behring Breivik, Norway, Breivik's possible links to Far West, Boston Marathon bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Ibragim Todashev, Ruslan Saidov, Graham Fuller, Sibel Edmonds, Halliburton, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Fethullah Gulen, Gulen movement, Sufism, Turkey, Chechen War, American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, Adnan Khashoggi, Sir James Goldsmith, Pamela Geller, Todashev's death in FBI custody, Reddit, social media's role in the Boston Marathon bombing, Elisa Lam, parallels with social media's role in Lam's death in 2013, Anton Surikov, the breakdown of US-Russian relations in 2013-2014, the Far West death roll circa 2014Music by: Keith Allen Dennis:https://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/Additional Music by: Matt Baldwinhttps://psychicarts.bandcamp.com/ Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Kara McKinney as she sits down with Pamela Geller, Naomi Wolf, Mike Puglise, and Jeffrey Anderson to talk about the issues of the day.

Today I revisited interviews from five years ago and from this year. Conversations that featured Pamela Geller, Milo Yiannopoulos, Doug Giles, and Traci Fenton. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past.Tapp into the Truth: https://tappintothetruth.com/Patriot Music: https://patriotmusic.com/ 

Today I revisited interviews from five years ago and from this year. Conversations that featured Pamela Geller, Milo Yiannopoulos, Doug Giles, and Traci Fenton. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past. Tapp into the Truth: https://tappintothetruth.com/ Patriot Music: https://patriotmusic.com/ 

On March 25, 2022, bioarchaeologist Pamela Geller (University of Miami) met with a panel of CIAMS students (Amanda Domingues, Sophia Taborski, Grace Hermes, Anna Whittemore, and Emily Sharp) and faculty host Matthew Velasco to discuss the politics of human remains, the objectification of bodies in anatomical collections, and the importance of studying the historical contexts that shaped these collections. The conversation centered on two works by Dr. Geller: a 2020 article in the journal "Historical Archaeology” titled “Building Nation, Becoming Object: The Biopolitics of the Samuel G. Morton Crania Collection,” and a chapter from her 2021 book “Theorizing Bioarchaeology,” titled, “What is Necropolitics?” published by Springer Press. This RadioCIAMS podcast was recorded in-person. Please note that this episode contains isolated references to genocide and the Holocaust.

We cover the week of August 2nd to August 6th, we talk about Richard Feynman (yes, the physicist), and then talk about Pamela Geller, who, for some unknown reason, is Ezra's guest to discuss Andrew Cuomo. Check out my interview with Dirka Prout! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7McH-SrdK4 Tell your MPs or future MPs to take as many Afghan refugees as possible! Vieno's Reading Recommendation: Canada hasn't reckoned with its bloody legacy in Afghanistan https://breachmedia.ca/canada-hasnt-reckoned-with-its-bloody-legacy-in-afghanistan/ FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WEAR A MASK! GET VACCINATED! Watch our live streams! https://www.twitch.tv/imperialnewz Check out the music by Mason, who makes the transition beats. https://striatum.bandcamp.com/ And his new project Head In A Box https://www.facebook.com/thisheadinabox Donate on Patreon! And check out our social media! https://compiled.social/imperialnews

Join Kara McKinney as she sits down with Abby Johnson, John Lott Jr., Auron MacIntyre, Pamela Geller, and Fred Fleitz to talk about the issues of the day

Join Kara McKinney as she sits down with Paula Bolyard, Dr. James Tour, Pamela Geller, Matt Locke, Gavin Mario Wax, and Mike Gonzalez to talk about the issues of the day

Mark Goodwin calls in to discuss how the media and the left are ruining their creditability by creating stories based on a bias agenda and by also spreading incorrect information. Joyce talks about how democrat run cities are some of the worst cities in America right now. Pamela Geller calls in to talk about the normalizing Jewish hatred and how Jewish people are being targeted all of the US. Joyce discusses mass illegal immigration in the U.S.

The Leftist Plan For 2020 Election Riots and The Parallels Between The Arab Spring and What is Happening in America Today. (Part 2) Guests: Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, Arabic speaking Egyptian Usama Dakdok & Former Iranian Muslim Shahram Hadian. Topic: Hold The Line is the name of a group that is organizing to defeat President Trump by organizing a resistance movement and what they call civil resistance. Two of the players of this organization include Marium Navid and Kifan Shah that both wear an Islamic Hijab which is a flag of Sharia. Shah has worked with Muslim Brotherhood proponent and Islamic Jihadist Linda Sarsour. Navid is reported to have worked with the Los Angels chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that is another name for Muslim Brotherhood. Topic: Robert Spencer tells us how the FBI in 2015 encouraged the attempted assassination of himself and Pamela Geller by working with known Islamic Jihadis. How has the FBI facilitated, encouraged and grown the Marxists-Islamic axis in America that is now openly writing reports on how they will carry out a violent revolution in America? Topic: While the corruption of the FBI seemed unbelievable in 2015, now in 2020 we know that the FBI turned a blind eye to reported child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and broke countless laws when the FBI leadership on the seventh floor worked to carry out a coup on a sitting President of the United States as well as ran cover for the Biden, Clinton and Obama Crime syndicate. Topic: Brannon reads from one of the reports by the progressives entitled Stop the Coup. Their plan describes how they plan to shut down highways and vital routes in American cities to stop commerce which also means groceries. Their report states that they plan to carry out their campaign of disruption and civil resistance against the coup of President Trump for weeks and even months. Topic: Usama and Shahram share their views on what is to come in earnest starting on election day. 

Chelsea Blackmore and Megan Springate join the show to talk about queer archaeology how they're "queering" the field. We explore what queer archaeology is, why it's important, and how to be an ally. LINKS - "How to Queer Identity Without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms, and the Archaeology of Identity" by Chelsea Blackmore https://www.academia.edu/199628/How_to_Queer_Identity_Without_Sex_Queer_Theory_Feminisms_and_the_Archaeology_of_Identity - NPS LGBTQ Heritage Initiative https://www.nps.gov/heritageinitiatives/LGBThistory/ - Book - 'The Bioarchaeology of Socio-sexual Lives' by Pamela Geller http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319409931 - Early Hominid Footprints at Laetoli (Tanzania) http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/footprints/laetoli-footprint-trails - NPS LGBTQ Theme Study https://www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/lgbtqthemestudy.htm - SAA Archaeological Record Vol. 16, No. 1, "Towards an Inclusive Queer Archaeology" http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/Jan_2016_Record.pdf - Queer Archaeology on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/QueerArch/ & Twitter http://www.twitter.com/queerarch - SAA Queer Archaeology Interest Group http://www.saa.org/ForMembers/InterestGroups/QueerArchaeologyInterestGroup/tabid/1511/Default.aspx - Go Dig a Hole on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/godigahole

Pamela Geller, is author of the new smash hit, FATWA: HUNTED IN AMERICA. Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of The Geller Report and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).

Enjoy the first of my series of interviews with special guests over the Christmas season... Tonight, Pamela Geller joins me to look back at her history as an outspoken anti-Islamification activist, a journey that began on 9/11.

Pamela Geller, is author of the new smash hit, FATWA: HUNTED IN AMERICA. Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of The Geller Report and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).

My guest today on RIGHT IN DC is Matt K. Lewis, senior columnist for the Daily Beast, a CNN political commentator and author of the book, “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump” (Hachette Books, 2016). Our discussion includes: • Why he thinks his book is ahead of the curve • The main thesis of the book • His autopsy on the midterms • Why he cares about the Republican party • The dangers of policing his own side • Why he wants to save conservatism • Why 9/11 awakened/created many new conservatives, like the Tea Party, but they lacked the intellectual knowledge of the conservative movement • Pamela Geller as an example of the zealotry of the new convert • The October 2013 shutdown of the government by Sen. Ted Cruz supported by the Tea Party • How and why President Reagan was rooted in conservative philosophy, was a deep knowledgeable thinker, yet why he purposely wanted to be underestimated • Why politicians no longer cultivate friendships with people on the other side, include the press that cover them • How Reagan attempted to co-opt the press • The conservative movement's strange fascination with celebrities • Practical solutions/insights for people who care about the conservative movement • How much should conservatives try to change culture? Being a conservative writer versus a writer with conservative tendencies • Why the liberal media don’t even realize how biased they are How liberals say even more outrageous statements in the green room at TV studios because they assume everyone around them agrees • Why the news media have the short-term thinking problem of beating the competition rather than trying to save the reputation of their industry More about Matt: Matt K. Lewis is a senior columnist for The Daily Beast, and his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, GQ, The Washington Post, The Week, Roll Call, Politico, The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Guardian. He previously served as senior contributor for The Daily Caller, and before that, as a columnist for AOL’s Politics Daily. He records a weekly podcast, "Matt Lewis and the News." In 2011, Business Insider listed him as one of the 50 "Pundits You Need To Pay Attention To," and in 2012 the American Conservative Union honored Matt as their CPAC "Blogger of the Year." He lives with his family in Alexandria, VA. WEBSITE: http://www.mattklewis.com/ TWITTER: @mattklewis PODCAST: "Matt Lewis and the News" on iTunes --- Gayle Totter's Website: https://gayletrotter.com/ Twitter: @gayletrotter Support Gayle's RIGHT IN DC Podcasts: www.patreon.com/gayletrotter

Teri, Kira, and April are tackling the tough questions this week. Are the Norks giving up their nukes? Will Trump be president for life? Do people actually regret voting for Trump? Does Joe “Roaming Hands” Biden stand a chance in 2020? Why is the left shaming Pamela Geller’s daughters? And don’t miss Kira’s rant about her home state of California! Sponsors: FabFitFun, quip

On Wednesday, “The Daily Beast” published an article titled, “The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller,” highlighting the great lengths the sisters and social media sensations take to avoid disclosing their relationship to their mother. "The Instagram-famous family have gone to great lengths to conceal the identity of their Islamophobic mother," writes The Daily Beast. "[Their mother is an] anti-Islam activist, hate-monger, and diehard Trump supporter."After being outed, Claudia Oshry, one of the sisters, apologized to her fans on Instagram for comments she made when she was 16, and said her and her sisters’ views “are separate from” their mothers.“We want to be clear to our audience and fans that our political and cultural beliefs are not anti-Muslim or anti-anyone,” she said. “Our views are separate from our mother’s. Being raised by a single parent, we were taught to make our own choices based on our personal beliefs. We are inspired to think for ourselves and we do. We do not condone discrimination or racist beliefs of any kind."But that didn’t stop tech platform Oath from canceling their show, raising the question of whether children (who are now adults) should be held responsible for their parents’ political perspectives, and whether they should be allowed to have jobs because of them. But more importantly, in its piece The Daily Beast failed to mention that Geller has been the subject of multiple terror attacks. In 2015, for example, CNN reported an Islamist extremists plotted to behead their mother. So might these sisters also been going to “great lengths” to conceal their identity for security reasons? We discuss in this week’s edition of “Problematic Women,” co-hosted with Bre Payton of The Federalist.We also address the Mona Charen controversy at CPAC, Jennifer Lawrence surprisingly criticizes Hillary Clinton, and speak with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., the highest-ranking woman in Congress. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Deze week is hét feestje voor ronservatief Amerika: CPAC. Op het programma staat onder meer het thema 'hoe bevecht ik de deep state?' en op de gastenlijst staan onder meer Nigel Farage en Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Geen Péévéévéé dus, of Forum for Democracy. Maar wel Pamela Geller, die nauwe banden onderhoudt met Wilders.

Pamela Geller weighs in on the PC judge dropping Sexual Assault Charges in the female genital mutilations by a Muslim doctor in Michigan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We speak to Pamela Geller about what inspired her to become politically active. And Rachel Alexander of The Stream joins us with the latest on the Virginia gubernatorial election.

There's a continuous wave of terror attacks across our nation and across the world, but it's not being reported on like it should. Jason Hartman talks with Pamela Geller, defender of the freedom of speech against attempts to force the West to accept Sharia blasphemy laws, and against Sharia self-censorship by Western media outlets. Pamela and Jason discuss her new book, Fatwa: Hunted in America, and what people need to know about FBI investigations, online censorship, and how people still have the power to enact change. Key Takeaways: [1:42] What caused Pamela to write Fatwa: Hunted in America [3:59] Defining what Pamela is referring to when she mentions 30,000 attacks, and where you can find a list of them [6:31] People are being slaughtered in order to violently intimidate people into adhering to Sharia [9:44] The media in Europe is refusing to report stories of terror attacks, and Jason believes it's a precursor to America [13:19] The story of why the attack in Las Vegas happened has some questionable elements, and why the FBI isn't the organization to trust about this [16:41] ISIS has claimed responsibility for the Las Vegas shooting 4 times but we won't accept it. Trump needs to drain the swamp in the FBI [19:10] Google and Facebook's online censoring [23:56] Why Pamela's YouTube channel was shut down, and how she got it reinstated Website: www.FatwaBook.org www.TheReligionofPeace.com

Pamela Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of The Geller Report and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). She is the author of Fatwa: Hunted in America (foreword by Geert Wilders) (Dangerous Books), The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (foreword by Ambassador John Bolton) (Simon & Schuster) and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books). She is also a regular columnist for numerous publications.

7AM Hour 10-16-17, Pamela Geller founder editor and publisher of The Geller Report by AM 970 The AnswerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today I'll be talking with Pamela Geller about her newest book Fatwa: Hunted in America, and with Brian Maloney to discuss Jemele Hill's suspension.

Coming up this week, we'll chat with Pamela Geller, author of 'FATWA: HUNTED IN AMERICA.' She is also president of AMERICAN FREEDOM DEFENSE INITIATIVE. Jason Delgado, a Marine scout sniper, will describe his memoir 'BOUNTY HUNTER' and give his assessment of the Middle East and North Korea. And the brilliant climate scientist, Roy Spencer, talks about his new book, 'AN INCONVENIENT DECEPTION.' Looking forward to your call this Sunday at 1pm on AM 740 KVOR!

Pamela Geller is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Geller Report and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America as well as author and columnist. Her activism on behalf of human rights has won international notice. She is a major defender of the freedom of speech against attempts to force the West to accept Sharia blasphemy laws, and against Sharia self-censorship by Western media outlets. Her free speech event in Garland, Texas led to the capture or killing of several murderous jihadists, smoking out terror cells, and to the consequent arrests of jihadists in several states. Today Pamela Geller stops by to talk about her new book, Fatwa: Hunted in America  (foreword by Geert Wilders) in which Geller tells the whole extraordinary story of how she began chronicling her take on news events at her groundbreaking website Atlas Shrugs, then moved into activism, at first on behalf of Muslim girls who were being brutalized and victimized at home for not following the misogynistic rules of Islamic law, and then to stand against the advance of jihad and sharia on numerous fronts -- above all for the freedom of speech, which is increasingly embattled in this age of jihad. Brian Maloney is Editor-in-Chief of Media Equalizer and has been a frequent guest on cable talk channels including Fox News Channel, CNN, the former CourtTV. He is dropping in to discuss Jemele Hill, the controversial ESPN anchor who labeled President Trump a "white supremacist" on Twitter, has been suspended for two weeks by the network. 

Pamela Geller is one of the foremost activists for the freedom of speech, individual rights, and equality of rights for all. She is also the author of the new smash hit, "FATWA: HUNTED IN AMERICA." In addition, Ms. Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of The Geller Report and president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).

Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), stops by discuss her new book. Also, we speak with Bhu Srinivasan, author of "Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism."

Southern Sense is conservative talk with Annie "The Radio Chick" Ubelis, as host and "CS" Bennett, co-host.  Informative, fun, irreverent and politically incorrect, you never know where we'll go, but you'll love the journey! Southern-Sense.comKris Saucier: While Hillary Clinton is free to run for the White House, sign multi-million dollar book contracts & take selfies with adoring admirers in the woods of her upscale neighborhood despite egregious use of a private server that exposed classified and even TOP SECRET communication, US Naval Petty Officer Kristian Saucier was financially destroyed over a few cell phone pics taken in a restricted area of a 40 year old US submarine. Other sailors were given fines for the same infraction while Kristian was jailed for nearly a year as his home went into foreclosure & his vehicles were repossessed. Is this justice, America?  helpkrissaucier.com/James Lafferty is the president of the Policy Communications Group and also serves as Executive Director of Christians Against Radical Islam. He serves on the board of Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative and is the founder of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force. He is a former Press Secretary and Communications Director for the House Majority Whip and worked as a top appointee in both the Reagan and Bush Administrations. He lives with his family in Alexandria, Virginia.  virginiaantishariaDedication: Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott Cooper Dayton, Died November 24, 2016 Serving During Operation Inherent Resolve

Southern Sense is conservative talk with Annie "The Radio Chick" Ubelis, as host and "CS" Bennett, co-host. Informative, fun, irreverent and politically incorrect, you never know where we'll go, but you'll love the journey! Southern-Sense.comKris Saucier: While Hillary Clinton is free to run for the White House, sign multi-million dollar book contracts & take selfies with adoring admirers in the woods of her upscale neighborhood despite egregious use of a private server that exposed classified and even TOP SECRET communication, US Naval Petty Officer Kristian Saucier was financially destroyed over a few cell phone pics taken in a restricted area of a 40 year old US submarine. Other sailors were given fines for the same infraction while Kristian was jailed for nearly a year as his home went into foreclosure & his vehicles were repossessed. Is this justice, America? helpkrissaucier.com/James Lafferty is the president of the Policy Communications Group and also serves as Executive Director of Christians Against Radical Islam. He serves on the board of Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative and is the founder of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force. He is a former Press Secretary and Communications Director for the House Majority Whip and worked as a top appointee in both the Reagan and Bush Administrations. He lives with his family in Alexandria, Virginia. virginiaantishariaDedication: Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott Cooper Dayton, Died November 24, 2016 Serving During Operation Inherent Resolve

President George W. Bush, speaking at a mosque on Sept. 17, 2001: "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace." Donald Trump, campaigning for president on March 9, 2016: "I think Islam hates us." David Yerushalmi was living in an Israeli settlement near Jerusalem speaking on the phone with his father when the planes hit the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. "We got it wrong," Yerushalmi remembers telling his father. Before Sept. 11th, Yerushalmi thought terrorism was about nationalism, a fight over land. Afterward, he decided terrorism committed by Muslim extremists was driven by Islam itself -- and underpinned by Islamic Shariah law.   Pamela Geller and David Yerulshami (Pamela Geller) So he packed up his family and moved to New York to become part of a fledgling community of conservatives who would come to be known as counter-jihadists. They had an uphill battle to fight: In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush and most Americans, according to polls, did not equate Islam with terrorism.  But 16 years later, even though there hasn't been another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil committed by a Muslim, America's perspective on Islam has changed -- evidenced most notably by the election of a president who believes the religion itself hates the country. Yerushalmi is a big reason for this change of heart. He's a behind-the-scenes leader of the counter-jihad movement, filing lawsuits pushing back against the encroachment of Islam in the public sphere and crafting a series of anti-Sharia laws that Muslims and civil rights groups decry as Islamophobic. "Do I think that the United States is weak enough to collapse either from a kinetic Jihad, meaning war, or even a civilizational Jihad that the Muslim Brotherhood talks about? No. At least not in my lifetime. But do I think it's an existential threat that allows for sleeper cells and the Internet-grown Jihadist that we see day in and day out wreaking so much havoc here and in Europe? Yes. Do I see it as a threat to our freedoms and liberties incrementally through their so-called civilizational Jihad where they use our laws and our freedoms to undermine our laws and our freedoms? Absolutely." Matt Katz speaks to Yerulshami about what he thinks is the creeping threat of Sharia law. Episode Contributors Kai Wright Matt Katz Karen Frillmann Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Normalcy Bias is a mental state for people in a crisis.  It makes people underestimate the crisis and the effects of the crisis by thinking things will always be normal.  This keeps people from preparing… Wayne Black has provided security protection details for several high powered clients including the former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and Pamela Geller who was the target of the first ISIS attack in the US.  Wayne also worked Narcotics in Miami in the 80s during the Cocaine Cowboys era living Miami Vice.  His current company Wayne Black and Associates handle security, investigations and assessments for not only individuals but churches, synagogues and several US Sea Ports. Links mentioned in the episode: http://www.wayneblack.com/ Visit.. Click here for the 2016 Shooter's Summit shooterssummit.com And don't forget you can connect with Firearms Nation or just stop by and say hi on these social media links: Facebook  www.facebook.com/firearmsnation Twitter  twitter.com/Firearms_Nation YouTube http://www.youtube.com/c/firearmsnation Instagram http://www.instagram.com/firearms_nation Or on the web at: www.firearmsnation.com JOIN THE NATION!

While Sean continues his tour of Israel, Guest Host Mark Simone walks the audience through the tragedy of a terrorist attack in Paris that left a police officer dead on Thursday.  Mark is joined by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to give context to the growing threat of terror.  "Many are calling this attack a lone wolf attack," explained Geller, "But there are no lone wolf attacks in this day and age."  Is there a growing global strategy to expand terror?  How safe is America?! The Sean Hannity Show is live from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

While Sean continues his tour of Israel, Guest Host Mark Simone walks the audience through the tragedy of a terrorist attack in Paris that left a police officer dead on Thursday. Mark is joined by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to give context to the growing threat of terror. "Many are calling this attack a lone wolf attack," explained Geller, "But there are no lone wolf attacks in this day and age." Is there a growing global strategy to expand terror? How safe is America?! The Sean Hannity Show is live from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Don't miss this important episode. Dr. Jasser takes on a growing number of pundits like Stephen Kirby, Diana West, Robert Spencer, John Guandolo, Pamela Geller, and others who have lately been increasing their attempts to apostate reformers like Dr. Jasser as "dead on arrival" in their efforts towards reform. Zuhdi coins the term "alt-jihadists" to define them. Zuhdi explains how they become the useful idiots of the global Islamist establishment tyrants and theocrats when they proclaim reform is an exercise in "futilility". In this must listen episode, Zuhdi shows how those who may appear to be bold and politically incorrect by attacking reformers as "abject failures" are actually useful idiots for the global jihadist Islamist establishment. Zuhdi explains how the most American thing to do is support the underdogs of Islamic reform around the world against the Islamist establishment. Anything short is in-American jihadist takfirism (apostasy/ excommunication). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't miss this important episode. Dr. Jasser takes on a growing number of pundits like Stephen Kirby, Diana West, Robert Spencer, John Guandolo, Pamela Geller, and others who have lately been increasing their attempts to apostate reformers like Dr. Jasser as "dead on arrival" in their efforts towards reform. Zuhdi coins the term "alt-jihadists" to define them. Zuhdi explains how they become the useful idiots of the global Islamist establishment tyrants and theocrats when they proclaim reform is an exercise in "futilility". In this must listen episode, Zuhdi shows how those who may appear to be bold and politically incorrect by attacking reformers as "abject failures" are actually useful idiots for the global jihadist Islamist establishment. Zuhdi explains how the most American thing to do is support the underdogs of Islamic reform around the world against the Islamist establishment. Anything short is in-American jihadist takfirism (apostasy/ excommunication). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining Audrey for this week's REELTalk - Does the EU have a death wish…with the rampant crime wave by Muslim migrants; are they prepping for another wave of Muslims…and will Europe survive this? The British people have decided to Brexit the EU…will this restore some of their sovereignty…and will they finally get truth about Islam from their leaders? We'll discuss this and more with author & human rights activist PAMELA GELLER! Plus, So, the FBI investigation has concluded. The evidence was clear to many…but the verdict by Dir. Comey has left most Americans confused and angry. Was the verdict just? And, in a free society, security can be difficult. BUT, if our government refuses to even NAME the ideology that is targeting free people…we are far more vulnerable than ever. Author & Columnist ANDREW McCARTHY will clue us in to the facts! AND, The British people have decided, to the chagrin of the elite, that they want to leave the EU…their greatest consideration and lament was the unabated Muslim migration into the UK…which is destroying this once great Christian nation. Will this first step be the road back to autonomy? We'll get answers, direct from South Africa and author Dr. PETER HAMMOND! In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately." Come hang with us...

Hey Everyone! We’re back with another show! Our Christmas present wrap up. Star Wars: The Force Awakens Accidental Fur?? Dumbest laws in NH. Pamela Geller being sued by 2 Muslim inmates? Tyson Fury gets ripped off. Should anyone care what celebrities say? Two terrorists caught crossing our southern border, why doesn’t anyone seem to know? New Years Drinking! Great DWI ...

Exposing Terrorism. The real powers behind Terrorism are the "Terror Triangle" of Moscow, Beijing and Washington D.C. Hear true words from Art Thompson, CEO of the John Birch Society.And the FBI/CIA was behind the mosque at Ground Zero. Pamela Geller's opposition to the ground zero mosque was a fraud.Here the naked truth that the mass, and even most alternative, media isn't telling you.Also, hear how Utah gadiantons are destroying the constitution right here, as the Assembly of State Legislatures plans to rewrite the document.We also take your calls.

Stalwart free-speech advocate and high-profile opponent of Sharia law, Pamela Geller, talks taking on terrorism, preserving freedom and more. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thechurchboys/message

Erik Wemple And Erin Burnett call Pamela Geller a provocatuer and she's getting what she has coming to her. Really? Sounds like slut shaming, or blaming rape victims for dressing or acting like they're asking for it.

Pamela Geller vs Bruce Jenner. Why is Pamela Geller demonized in the media, while Bruce 'Caitlyn' Jenner is glorified?Pamela Geller Warns CNN’s Chris Cuomo: ‘They’re Going to Come for You, Too, Chris’https://youtu.be/4WJVt3vYJy0

Pamela Geller vs Bruce Jenner. Why is Pamela Geller demonized in the media, while Bruce 'Caitlyn' Jenner is glorified?Pamela Geller Warns CNN’s Chris Cuomo: ‘They’re Going to Come for You, Too, Chris’https://youtu.be/4WJVt3vYJy0

Notes on Memorial Day, with a review of the Clint Eastwood-directed movie American Sniper, now released on DVD. Should Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle be considered an American hero? Further thoughts in context on the Iraq War. Have Obama's policies towards ISIS failed? A caller questions the legitimacy of Patrick Buchanan as a political commentator. Other callers defend Buchanan. Further notes on Donald Trump, Pamela Geller and the bold stand taken this week by Sen. Rand Paul. Concluding sentiments via "American Solider" by Toby Keith. With music and listener calls.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Darrell Castle talks about Pamela Geller, the bravest woman in American, and her Mohammed Cartoon Contest held in Garland, Texas last week.

The news outlets had a heyday with Pamela Geller's "Draw Muhammad" contest. This event, not long after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, is seen as hate speech by some and an excercise of the right to free speech by others. How should Christians respond to events like these and does condemning such an event constitute a rejection of freedom of speech? Theme Music by: Nobara Hayakawa – Trail Sponsor Music by: Drunk Pedestrians – Mean

Pamela Geller discusses the importance of her event in Texas and the attackers who tried to thwart it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Carly Fiorina discusses her campaign launch and Hillary with Hugh Hewitt. Michael Medved has Mike Huckabee on to talk about his presidential announcement. Paul Ryan and Hewitt on the up-and-coming presidential campaign and the Clinton bubble. Mike Gallagher and Pamela Geller, the key organizer for the deadly "draw Mohammad" event in Garland, TX. Dennis Prager and terror expert Steven Emerson on the latest acts of terrorism committed by Islamic fundamentalists. Bill Bennett and Marc Thiessen on Baltimore and the political ideology that has been leading this city for scores of decades. Michael Medved and Peter Schweizer, author of "Clinton Cash," discusses the Clintons and Bill's latest foot-in-the-mouth comment.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Teachers treated like dirt; Pamela Geller gets her war on. And in Science Fiction University, what three books would go with you in The Time Machine? More at ProfessionalLeft.blogspot.comSupport the show (https://www.paypal.me/proleftpodcast)

ISIS HAS DECLARED WAR ON PAMELA GELLER THE PROMOTER OF DRAW MUHAMMAD CARTOON CONTEST THAT WAS ATTACKED BY TWO GUNMAN IN GARLAND TEXAS. BALTIMORE POLICE INVESTIGATION DOES NOT SUPPORT SOME OF PROSECUTION'S CHARGES. ACTRESS MADE TOP APOLOGIZE TO POLICEMAN SHE ACCUSED OF RACISM.

Activist Pamela Geller vows to keep holding "Draw Muhammad" contests even after the attack on the event in Garland, Texas, and postings ostensibly by ISIS to continue to attack her and anyone who protects her or hides her. Is this free speech as the Constitution intended?

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Anders Breivik killed 74 of his fellow Norwegians who supported the rights of Palestinians.  In his 1500 page manifesto, Breivik wrote that he admired such radical anti-islamists as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and others who fan hate against Muslims through their writings and seminars.    Chuck Carlson asks the question,  "Should a class-action suit by the parents of the slain, young people be filled against those persons who inspired Breivik to murder them?"

Today's guest, Pamela Geller, is a brave woman indeed! Despite threats to her life for speaking out about the threats to America from within its borders that others are ignoring, if not hiding, she takes us behind closed doors and exposes the plots being hatched for our demise. Ms. Geller is the author of Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.

Ernie Rea is joined by three guests who discuss how their own religious tradition affects their values and outlook on the world, often revealing hidden and contradictory truths. In this programme Ernie Rea and his guests explore the history and place of Islam in America, following recent tensions over plans to build an Islamic cultural centre close to Ground Zero in New York. Confusion over whether the building will be a mosque or a community centre have fuelled suspicions over the motivation of those behind the plans and given rise to a wave of Islamophobia across the USA. In the countdown to the mid-term elections in November, is such anti-Muslim rhetoric politically motivated or are Americans having a long overdue conversation about the place of Islam in their society? Joining Ernie to discuss this are Robert Salaam a former US Marine who converted to Islam and is now the editor of The American Muslim: Dr Hussein Rashid, Lecturer at Hofstra University in New York and associate editor of Religion Dispatches; and Daniel Pipes Director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. The middle interview comes from Pamela Geller, editor of the blog, AtlasShrugs.com and author of "The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America." Producer: Karen Maurice.

Ernie Rea is joined by three guests who discuss how their own religious tradition affects their values and outlook on the world, often revealing hidden and contradictory truths. In this programme Ernie Rea and his guests explore the history and place of Islam in America, following recent tensions over plans to build an Islamic cultural centre close to Ground Zero in New York. Confusion over whether the building will be a mosque or a community centre have fuelled suspicions over the motivation of those behind the plans and given rise to a wave of Islamophobia across the USA. In the countdown to the mid-term elections in November, is such anti-Muslim rhetoric politically motivated or are Americans having a long overdue conversation about the place of Islam in their society? Joining Ernie to discuss this are Robert Salaam a former US Marine who converted to Islam and is now the editor of The American Muslim: Dr Hussein Rashid, Lecturer at Hofstra University in New York and associate editor of Religion Dispatches; and Daniel Pipes Director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. The middle interview comes from Pamela Geller, editor of the blog, AtlasShrugs.com and author of "The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America." Producer: Karen Maurice.

The plan to build an Islamic Centre near Ground Zero has polarised the United States and become a key political issue, playing heavily in the mid-term elections. Does it point to a rise in Islamaphobia as some people claim? And what could be the repercussions for America's relationship with Muslims at home and in the rest of the world? In The Report, Linda Pressly traces the development of a controversy that has engulfed New York, and more widely, the nation. Protestors against the development two blocks from where the World Trade Centre once stood voiced their opposition against the proposal on the anniversary of 9/11. They claim it is insensitive to the families who lost loved ones on that day and some go so far as to equate it with another attack on America. President Obama has stepped in to defend the principle of religious freedom and been the target of attacks from the former Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin and the popular conservative movement known as the Tea Party. Muslims in the USA have watched as the story has been all over the talk shows, generated columns of newsprint and been covered all over the world. They are concerned by what they see as a rise in Islamophobia, but don't want to give up on the project because they fear it could lead to mosques being banned elsewhere. The Report hears from some of the main protagonists - including the controversial blogger Pamela Geller who's led the fight against what she insists will be a 'mega mosque'. Members of the Muslim community in New York worry that the ordinary American's view of their religion has been eclipsed by al-Qaeda, a concern which is borne out, in part, by a visit to the site of another proposed mosque around ten miles away from Manhattan in Sheepshead Bay.

Pamela Geller talks about Capitalism with Michael Moore

Pamela Geller talks about Capitalism with Michael Moore

An hour lonng interview with Rifqa's dear friendJamal Jivanjee, on the terrible development on Thirsday. Rifqa Bary's parents CAIR appointed attorney hase renaged and they are dragging her back to court to enforce sharia law.

An hour lonng interview with Rifqa's dear friendJamal Jivanjee, on the terrible development on Thirsday. Rifqa Bary's parents CAIR appointed attorney hase renaged and they are dragging her back to court to enforce sharia law.

Join me and Robert Spencer for an hour on the Rifqa Rally, Fort Hood, and The Infidels Guide to the Koran

Join me and Robert Spencer for an hour on the Rifqa Rally, Fort Hood, and The Infidels Guide to the Koran

Brave apostate, Wafa Sultan, sits down with Pamela Geller

Brave apostate, Wafa Sultan, sits down with Pamela Geller

A six-month penetration of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that resulted in the collection of thousands of pages of smoking-gun documents from this terror-supporting front group for the dangerous, mob-like Muslim Brotherhood.

A six-month penetration of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that resulted in the collection of thousands of pages of smoking-gun documents from this terror-supporting front group for the dangerous, mob-like Muslim Brotherhood.

Conservatives in Hollywood and Pet legislation

Conservatives in Hollywood and Pet legislation

Listen in on Pamela Geller and Evan sayet talking about his show Ocotober 7th and 8th in NYC

Listen in on Pamela Geller and Evan sayet talking about his show Ocotober 7th and 8th in NYC

An Interview with Rifqa Bary's pastor.

An Interview with Rifqa Bary's pastor.