A black transgender activist ought to be a dream for liberal college students. But that’s not the case when the speaker, Janet Mock, was invited by a Jewish group. Moral Voices, for their yearly theme regarding LGBT, had invited Mock to speak at the Hillel house on Monday. The Tower reported that she has decided not to speak.
A petition circulated by Brown students 2 weeks ago only garnered 159 of 200 signers, but damage was still done. Mock decided to cancel the event all together rather than speak somewhere other than at Hillel, as the petition suggested.
The petition notes that Mock is “a prominent advocate for queer people and people of color, which stands in stark contrast with Hillel and the Israeli state’s politics in two important ways.”
Their claims include:
Hillel’s Moral Voices campaign has chosen the topic of LGBTQ rights this year. This hides the fact that for decades, the state of Israel and Israeli advocacy organizations (like Hillel) have been engaging in pinkwashing, a strategy that tries to improve Israel’s image and rebrand it as a liberal, modern, and ‘hip’ country. By shifting the focus to a very narrow definition of LGBTQ rights (exclusively for queer Israelis and not for queer Palestinians), Israel uses pinkwashing to deflect attention from Israel’s colonization and occupation of Palestine, and the violence that is being carried out against Palestinians.
The group does not take a stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which seemed to be lost on the petition.
Moral Voices shared that Mock had canceled, as well as provided their statement, on their Facebook.
Benjamin Gladstone started a counter-petition, which has received 160 signatures in three days. In addressing the claims from the original petition from Brown students, Gladstone’s notes that:
Incidents of anti-semitism on campuses have been noticeable as late. A recent study from AMCHA Initiative also includes Brown University as an having some of the highest incidents of boycotting (BDS) of Israel.
