I am delighted to facilitate a workshop as part of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association’s Asian American pre-conference institute at Creating Change 2026 on the topic of Palestine. Allow me to suggest at least seven compelling reasons why Palestine is a queer issue and in fact a queer Asian/Pacific Islander (API) issue and why LGBTQ people in the United States and around the world should be supporting the cause of Palestinian liberation.

1) Americans live on unceded indigenous land that was home to Native Americans for millennia before the coming of the white man.

The parallel with the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians is unmistakeable and the tragic irony is that the United States is now funding that dispossession with $3.8 billion a year in US taxes + more than 7 billion in new funding; all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress support the violent ethnic cleansing of illegally occupied Palestine and Apartheid Israel’s pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

The origin of the current ‘conflict’ (as it is rather inaccurately characterized) lies in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1.3.1916) between the British and French in which they carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey, the British taking Ottoman Palestine by force and then having the League of Nations award a ‘mandate’ that legitimized the British Mandate Authority in Palestine. The French got Lebanon and Syria in exchange for British control of Palestine and Iraq; the consequences of this shabby deal have been a century of war, conflict, death and destruction. 

2) APIs should understand connections between ethnostate imperialism, colonization and fascism in Asia and the US  and that in illegally occupied Palestine; think of the parallels with China, Korea, etc.; in fact, the United States participated in the carving up of Qing China along with the European powers and Japan.

And that leads to an important point: imperialism is not the preserve of European powers or the United States: Russia and China are imperial powers and fascist Japan subjected Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, much of China and virtually all of Southeast Asia to a brutal regime of colonization in the 1930s and 1940s.

There is an enormous irony that while Korea was ruthlessly exploited by fascist imperial Japan in one of the most brutal foreign military occupations of modern times, many contemporary South Koreans support Apartheid Israel over occupied Palestine because around 40% of South Koreans are Christians and most of those are right-wing Christian fundamentalists; in fact, they form the backbone of the homophobic and transphobic political elements blocking adoption of LGBT rights legislation in the Republic of Korea.

3) And that leads to a crucially important point: the US is the biggest supporter of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the Zionist machine is the key element in maintaining US support for the occupation; a majority of Zionists are Christians and many if not most Christian Zionists are Christian fundamentalists who are the biggest support for anti-LGBTQ legislation across all of the 50 states; the enemies of the LGBTQ community in the US are the enemies of Palestinians in the occupied territories. While Democrats on the whole are better on LGBT issues than Republicans, those centrist Democrats who are triangulating around transgender issues (Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, Tom Suozzi) are also among the biggest Zionist supporters of Apartheid Israel.

4) The Zionist machine has used ‘pinkwashing’ to try to generate support within and outside the LGBTQ community for Apartheid Israel: an attempt to use Israel’s record on LGBT rights to attempt to justify its illegal occupation of Palestine; it’s a non sequitur of course because a good record on LGBT rights does not legally or morally justify a state to occupy foreign territory or subject its indigenous population to violent ethnic cleansing, dispossession or genocide. Zionist pinkwashing is a strategy to generate queer support for Apartheid Israel but it is based on entirely false notions. Palestinians are almost never given asylum in Israel based on sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact they are surveilled and blackmailed in illegally occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may be better than that of neighboring Arab countries but is inferior to that of the Western European countries with which Zionists like to compare Israel (‘the villa in the jungle’); but even if Israel’s record on LGBT issues were better, it could not possibly justify the illegal occupation, apartheid regime and genocide. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may compare favorably to that of neighboring dictatorships (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, non-Arab Iran) but is mediocre at best in comparison with the Western European countries Zionists like to classify Israel with (Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, etc.); Israel even participates in the Eurovision Song Contest even though Israel isn’t located on the European continent.

Pauline Park with Abu Rabiyah in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (1.10.12)

5) A significant proportion of Palestinians living under illegal occupation are LGBTQ and they get no special ‘pink card. While there is homophobia and transphobia in Palestinian society, there is homophobia and transphobia in American society but no American would accept that as justification for foreign occupation of the US; in fact, when the Israeli authorities discover LGBTQ people in the illegally occupied West Bank, they blackmail them into becoming agents for the Israel state, putting them in real danger if they are discovered. It is likely that a significant proportion of Palestinians killed in the Gaza genocide have doubtless been LGBTQ whether or not they were able to openly identify as such. And to the extent that Palestinians see LGBTQ support for BDS, that increases acceptance of LGBTQ Palestinians in Palestinian society. 

Pauline Park with Abu Nidal in Mas-ha (1.10.12)

6) LGBTQ people should be supporting the oppressed (Palestinians) rather than the oppressor (Apartheid Israel) on principle. As MLK would say, an injury to one is an injury to all; liberation of the human spirit must necessarily include Palestinian liberation; LGBT rights should not be separated from human rights for all; true liberation is found through global thinking informed by progressive feminist intersectional analysis. Sarah Schulman provided an example of that progressive feminist intersectional analysis when she joined me at a forum on Israel/Palestine at Queens Pride House (6.4.13); co-sponsored by New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), the forum remains (to my knowledge) the only public forum about Israeli occupation and apartheid both hosted and sponsored by an LGBT community center anywhere in the United States and the furious Zionist response to the event is a lesson in itself about both the power of the Zionist machine and the commitment to Palestinian liberation that those who stand in solidarity need to exhibit in order to make that solidarity real (Pauline Park, “Queens Pride history: the 2013 Israel/Palestine forum,” 21 July 2013). Schulman organized the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine and invited me to join; the historic venture took place in January and we spent an entire week touring the West Bank; we meet with queer and non-LGBTQ Palestinians from Hebron to Nablus to Nabi Saleh and stayed two nights in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank); at the end of the tour, we met with the founder of Zochrot, the Israeli organization attempting to educate Israeli Jews about the violent ethnic cleansing of the Nakba that was the basis for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 (Pauline Park, “Palestine: the first US LGBTQ delegation tour in pictures,” 4 April 2012).

Pauline Park & Sarah Schulman at Queens Pride House (6.4.13)

7) Those who wish to advance a progressive agenda for social justice and social change cannot accept the Zionist ‘Palestine exception’: as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, an injury to one is an injury to all. LGBT organizations that have attempted to square the circle or straddled the fence have only risked discrediting their own claims to be involved in the pursuit of social justice. It is actually the National LGBTQ Task Force that provides one of the best examples of this equivocation: at the Creating Change 2016 conference in Chicago, A Wider Bridge organized a reception for Jerusalem Open House. A Wider Bridge’s mission was to ‘pinkwash’ the occupation and generate support for Israel within the LGBT community in the United States; it was not in any real sense a genuine LGBT community-based organization but rather a front organization for the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby that supports it. AWB deliberately tried to mislead the community and the public about the nature of the event that the National LGBTQ Task Force initially cancelled and then uncancelled, insinuating that those opposed to the reception were targeting the shabbat service that is scheduled to precede it and Jerusalem Open House, which is a co-sponsor of the event. 

Cancel Pinkwashing protesters at Creating Change in Chicago

In fact, activists who spoke with Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, made clear to her that they were not objecting either to the shabbat service or to the participation of JOH, but rather to the reception and AWB’s use of it to promote the Israeli government and its illegal occupation of Palestine. Despite, this, AWB dishonestly portrayed the #cancelpinkwashing initiative as ‘anti-Semitic,’ even though several of the activists involved with it were Jewish. AWB board member Dana Beyer even went so far as to write a blog post on HuffingtonPost.com entitled, “National LGBTQ Task Force Censors the Jews” (1.17.16), in which she called the Task Force’s initial decision to cancel the AWB event “an act of bigotry against Jewish LGBTQ persons as mean-spirited as any other,” ignoring the fact that  Sue Hyde, who made that decision, is herself Jewish.

Pauline Park & Nakba survivor Abu Hassam in the ruins of Lajun (1.11.12)

In the statement issued by the Task Force on Jan. 18 announcing a reversal of its earlier decision, executive director Rea Carey wrote, “It is our belief that when faced with choices, we should move towards our core value of inclusion and opportunities for constructive dialogue and canceling the reception was a mistake,” adding, “We are aware that our original decision made it appear we were taking sides in a complex and long-standing conflict.” But in fact, by reversing its original decision and re-scheduling the pinkwashing event, the Task Force was taking sides, providing a platform for Zionists to use the conference to promote LGBT support for the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, risking making the Task Force indirectly complicit in the occupation as well (Pauline Park, “Creating Change or pink washing Israeli apartheid? A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing,” 17 January 2017).

And the reference to ‘inclusion’ rings false when LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation are not included, given that Palestinians need special permission from the Israeli authorities to leave the West Bank, rarely granted. A Wider Bridge went out of business at the end of 2025 after falling into deficit and following a scandal in which its executive director was accused of sexual misconduct. An organization cannot insist that it is on the cutting edge of the pursuit of progressive social and political change when its annual conference promotes the pinkwashing of Israeli occupation and apartheid; it is this year’s conference and this workshop in particular that confirm the Task Force’s rather belated decision to ‘allow’ for discussion of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

Pauline Park at the apartheid wall in Al-Wallejeh (1.9.12)

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. In March 2011, Park co-founded New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and in January 2012, she participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, a seven-day tour of the West Bank and Israel that included meetings with LGBT- and non-LGBT Palestinians and Israelis. Park did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pauline Park with New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani in Manhattan (7.20.23)

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BDS & the New York State Freedom to Boycott Coalition
by Pauline Park

The post BDS & the New York State Freedom to Boycott Coalition appeared first on Pauline Park.

LGBT rights & progressive politics in the age of Trump
Pauline Park
at
Kingsborough Community College
29 March 17

I’m honored by the invitation to speak to you today at this ‘Dinner & Dialogue’ event. I’d like to begin by thanking Lauren Ferguson for helping to arrange my visit here, my second time at Kingsborough Community College. And in keeping with the theme of ‘dinner & dialogue,’ I’d like to allow more than enough time for questions and comments, as I find the interaction with an audience is often as interesting to audience members as any formal presentation. So in keeping with the spirit of the evening, I’ll try to limit myself to speaking to leave lots of time for Q&A.

What I’d like to do is to think analytically and strategically about where we are right now both in terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues and the broader pursuit of progressive political change in the age of Trump.

It’s hard to believe it’s less than ten weeks since Donald Trump took office; it feels more like ten years~! So far, it’s been like a rolling stinky cheese of disaster; but I also see hopeful signs, especially in the broad resistance movement that has arisen since his election. Let me start with the new administration’s actions on LGBT issues and work outwards from there.

For well over a decade, the fight for marriage equality consumed the time and energy and resources of the LGBT movement, culminating in the Windsor and Obergefell rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the latter decision in 2015 recognizing same-sex marriage nationally. The more perceptive leaders in the religious right realize that they’ve lost that fight and I think the chances of the Supreme Court reversing itself on marriage are slim to none. And so the forces of ignorance and bigotry have since June 2015 been consumed with another issue, transgender rights, focusing their energies on creating a ‘bathroom panic,’ asserting without a shred of evidence that transgendered women pose some sort of existential threat to our society simply by using the public restroom associated with the gender with which they identify. There may be some who actually believe that, but I think that most of those pushing this bathroom panic are doing so cynically, knowing that it’s nothing but fear-mongering.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has gone so far as to say that the bathroom issue “is the biggest issue facing families and schools in America since prayer was taken out of public schools” (Caitlin Emma, “Obama transgender edict incites the right,” Politico, 5.13.16). “As a voter turnout tool for conservatives, this could be the new gay marriage,” writes Kevin Drum (Kevin Drum, “Transgender Bathrooms Might be the New Gay Marriage for Conservatives” (Mother Jones, 5.13.16). And isn’t that the point? Following the US Supreme Court rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the only obvious ‘family values’ wedge issue to latch onto is transgender inclusion, given the increasing acceptance of non-transgendered lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people in American society.

North Carolina’s enactment of House Bill 2 is a case in point: HB2 not only required transgendered people to use public restrooms consistent with their legal sex designation (the ‘gender marker’ on their birth certificates), the legislation eliminated non-discrimination statutes at the local level across the state, making it impossible to pursue legal redress for discrimination through local law not only on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but race, ethnicity, religion and disability as well. And so the ‘bathroom panic’ has been a façade behind which right-wing Republicans and the religious right have been pushing a rollback across the country of civil rights and human rights for women and people of color as well as LGBT people and people living with disabilities.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first thing that Donald Trump did after coming into office on Jan. 20 was to sign a flurry of executive orders on immigration as well as transgender rights. But significantly, courts blocked the first and the second executive orders on immigration, which the administration insisted were not an attempt to impose a ‘Muslim ban,’ even thought that’s exactly what Trump called the proposed action during the campaign. And the really hopeful sign was that the executive orders sparked a nationwide resistance, with protestors rushing out to JFK and other airports across the country to support and defend immigrants and refugees caught up in Trump’s dragnet.

Trump’s executive order rescinding Barack Obama’s guidelines on transgender inclusion in public schools also got national attention, if not quite to the extent of the travel ban(s); but what got less attention was the details of the executive order and the Obama guidelines he rescinded. And here it is important to note the political context in which the guidelines were issued in the twilight of the Obama presidency, with an outgoing president anxious to create some sort of historic legacy. The real opportunity to do so came in Obama’s first term, when he had a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives to work with until he handed both houses of Congress to the Republicans in the mid-term elections in 2010. What LGBT activists cheering Obama’s recent executive actions either have forgotten or conveniently failed to mention is the fact that he refused even to lift a finger to push the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) through Congress, instead apparently taking the advice of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in focusing on repealing the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy of discrimination signed into law by Bill Clinton, who also signed DOMA into law. Still better than ENDA, Obama could have pushed through an amendment to the 1974 Civil Rights Act or similar legislation that would have prohibited discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodations, health care, education and credit. For whatever reason, Obama refused to consider any non-discrimination legislation once he signed the DADT repeal bill into law, which only ended discrimination based on sexual orientation, not gender identity or expression.

With less than eight months left in office, and as the lamest of lame ducks and facing a hostile Congress controlled by Republicans, Obama’s options were limited to executive action, since no LGBT rights legislation would have had any chance of passage last year. LGBT advocacy organizations praised the president for what they characterized or at least wanted to believe were bold and courageous actions (National Center for Transgender Equality, “Department of Education affirms critical protections for trans students,” 5.13.16), but the time for bold action was in 2009 and 2010 when LGBT rights legislation had a decent chance of passage in Congress (Sam Levin, “Obama orders public schools to allow transgender students access to restrooms,” Guardian, 5.12.16). Here are a few important points to keep in mind when thinking about this whole brouhaha:

o The new guidelines (Ann Whalen and David Esquith, “Examples of Policies and Emerging Practices for Supporting Transgender Students“) were introduced with a cover letter from Catherine E. Lhamon of the US Department of Education and Vanita Gupta of the US Department of Justice  (“Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students,” 5.13.16). The Obama guidelines focused on compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and reference similar guidelines adopted by states and localities, including those adopted by the State of New York Department of Education (NYSED) guidelines for implementation of the Dignity for All Students Act of 2011; these salient points must be made:

o While they might be helpful in advising schools on transgender inclusion, the guidelines had no binding legal force; the only way to enforce these guidelines would have been by withholding or threatening to withhold federal funds to school districts, localities and/or states to refuse or fail to abide by them.

0 The letter was clearly an interpretation of the provisions of Title IX and did not have the force of statute law.

0 There is no significant federal case law on the interpretation of ‘sex’ in Title IX to include gender identity and expression in the expansive manner in which the March 13 letter speaks; the risk of being overturned in court is not insignificant, given that courts general hew closely to legislative intent and it would be difficult to argue that there was transgender-specific legislative intent in the drafting of Title IX.

o Women’s safety is an important issue but has nothing to do directly with gendered restroom usage; it’s probably the case that most sexual predators are conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual men; opponents of transgender rights are simply using the legitimate issue of women’s safety to undermine the safety of transgendered women & men.

o Opponents of transgender rights use the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms and changing rooms, but there is not a single case I know of of a conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual man crossdressing to gain entrance to women’s spaces. And a sexual predator can simply walk into a women’s restroom or changing room if he wants to.

o There are already laws in every state and locality in the United  States prohibiting assault and sexual assault; no transgender-inclusive statute, regulation, rule or guideline would do anything to undermine such laws.

o HB2 is based on restricting public restrooms to assigned birth sex and gender, but there is actually no way to determine conclusively what that might be in every case; the reference to birth certificates is particularly curious, because many states and localities now allow transgendered people to change the legal sex designation on their birth certificates. HB2 and similar laws are unenforceable, as they would require police and/or specially designated and authorized security guards posted at every public restroom door in the state, which would be completely unaffordable even if most states were not currently suffering significant budget deficits. Nor could policy or security guards actually demand production of a birth certificate, given Americans do not regularly carry their birth certificates with them wherever they go. Obviously, a genital check would be invasive and non-transgendered people would certainly object to being subjected to it.

o The reality is that transgendered people who ‘pass’ in the gender they identify with will rarely have problems with public restrooms while those who do not ‘pass’ will have problems even if they are post-operative and have changed the legal sex designation on their birth certificate and other government-issued identity documents.

o Public restrooms should not be an issue at all, since the only legal question of any significance here is what is referred to as ‘unavoidable nudity in sex-segregated facilities,’ which can involve public gyms, pools, showers and locker rooms but simply does not involve restrooms.

o Public restrooms are actually not regulated by statute law in most states and localities; North Carolina’s HB2, far from being ‘traditional,’ is in fact a radical break in this regard.

o The ‘bathroom panic’ here is entirely irrational because it is focused almost entirely on women’s restrooms, which have stalls but not urinals; ordinarily, there is no public nudity at all.

o Gyms, pools and other facilities with locker rooms and showers more often these days have private individual showers. Where there are open showers and changing areas, reasonable accommodation can be made; where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes. Just as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires public facilities to provide reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities (including in wheelchairs), so all public restrooms, gyms, pools and other such facilities can provide reasonable accommodation for transgendered people, and such accommodation does not require them to be viewed as having a disability based on their gender identity.

o There are more and more single-user restrooms and ‘family’ restrooms in the US, especially in airports, which are leading the way in this regard.

Significantly, Trump’s recission of Obama’s guidelines for transgender inclusion in public schools has not yet been followed up by any other initiatives, even while the new president has appointed leading figures from the religious right hostile to the LGBT community, such as Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Tom Price as secretary of health and human services.One such case in point is the executive order that Obama issued in his last year eliminating discrimination in the military based on gender identity; in his very first year in office, Obama had signed a bill into law that rescinded the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ bill that Bill Clinton had signed into law; but since DADT was focused on sexual orientation and did not include gender identity and expression, rescinding DADT did nothing to eliminate discrimination against transgendered people in the military.

But whatever the new administration does will have an impact on LGBT people, perhaps nowhere more significantly than in health care. And here, the whole debacle over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ‘repeal and replace’ bill is a case in point. While it’s true that Health & Human Services (HHS) issued guidelines and regulations interpreting the ACA as including LGBT people and prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, it is of signal importance that neither Obama nor the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of Obama’s first term ever even considered including a provision in the bill that would have prohibited discrimination in the provision of health care based on sexual orientation or gender identity; had they done so, LGBT people would now have protection from discrimination in health care that could not be eliminated by an executive order issued by Donald Trump or a directive or regulation issued by Tom Price, a notorious homophobe. But the débacle that ensued when the right-wing Freedom Caucus torpedoed the ‘repeal and replace’ bill (called ‘TrumpCare’ by some and ‘RyanCare’ by others) also shows that the new administration faces far more serious impediments in some policy arenas from Republicans in Congress than from Democrats.

There is now talk of a Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, who has a dismal record on LGBT issues. But even if Gorsuch were confirmed, he would only replace Antonin Scalia and therefore not shift the balance of power on the court; it is only when Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the court that the real battle royal will commence. But even if Trump were successful in getting two right-wing justices confirmed, I seriously doubt that the Supreme Court will overturn Windsor or Obergefell; and it is worth pointing out that a Republican justice wrote the majority opinions in both cases, a Reagan appointee in fact.

But from the panicked posts I’ve seen on Facebook since Nov. 8, some LGBT people seemed to be wondering if they would immediately be stripped of all rights once Trump took office. The simple fact is, Congress has never enacted a single LGBT rights law other than repealing DADT, and other than the Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage rights and the DADT repeal law’s recognition of the right of LGB people to serve in the military, we have no statutory rights at the federal level; what we do have is a patchwork quilt of federal case law, some good, some bad, some mixed. When Obama took office in Jan. 2009, he pursued no LGBT rights legislation, even though Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress; the candidate who promised to be a fierce advocate for LGBT rights was anything but; aside from a handful of executive orders and guidelines with extremely limited impact, the Obama administration did almost nothing for the LGBT community, and what little Obama did for us, he had to be pushed into doing reluctantly; in fact, Obama resolutely defended DOMA until nearly the end of his first term, reasserting explicitly homophobic attacks on the LGBT community in defending the Bush administration’s position on marriage.

Given that there is little chance for progress on LGBT issues at the federal level with Trump in the White House and right-wing Republicans in control of Congress, it is more important than ever to try to push a legislative and policy agenda at the state and local level. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination based both on sexual orientation and gender identity, while three more states have enacted sexual orientation-only non-discrimination laws.

The bad news is that New York (along with Wisconsin and New Hampshire) is one of those states that have yet to enact statutes to protect transgendered people from discrimination. The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) remains stalled in the Republican-controlled state Senate, but lest anyone think that the new TransPAC strategy to get GENDA passed by electing a Democratic majority in the Senate, I would simply point out that Democrats actually won a majority in the Senate in 2008, but when the Democrats controlled that body for six months from January to June 2009, they failed to bring GENDA to the floor for a vote, despite having the votes to pass the bill; I would also point out that Democrats have a majority in the Senate today, but the breakaway Democrats of the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) continue to keep Republicans in control of the Senate, with the tacit support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. While the governor’s executive order in October 2015 added ‘gender identity and gender expression’ to the State Division of Human Rights list of protected categories (“ESPA goes out with a whimper without having passed GENDA“), like Obama’s guidelines on transgender inclusion in public schools, Cuomo’s directives on transgender discrimination could potentially be reversed by a successor; and his executive order and guidelines have undermined the already slim chances for passage of GENDA in the Senate. The good news is that here in New York City, the transgender rights law enacted by the City Council in 2002 cannot be rescinded by any president or governor and we are continuing to make progress in its implementation, which is an ongoing process.

Whatever we have already achieved at the state and local level, we must continue to pursue policy change at the federal level, and it is important to point out that the impact of any president or administration on the LGBT community actually goes well beyond the arena narrowly conceived of as ‘LGBT rights.’ In this regard, it has to be noted that globally, Obama’s impact on the LGBT community around the world has been a net negative; whatever small and largely symbolic measures Obama took in favor of LGBT rights, on the whole, the policies of his administration undermined LGBT people, women and people of color in countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Obama actually deported more undocumented immigrants than any US president in history, earning his designation ‘Deporter-in-Chief’ from La Raza; many of these deportees may have been LGBT and the majority were women and children, many of them knowingly sent to violent deaths in Central America. Note that Hillary Clinton enthusiastically supported these deportations. Obama also killed more innocent civilians with drone strikes – all enthusiastically supported by Hillary Clinton – than all previous presidents combined, virtually all of them people of color and many of them women and children.

As president and secretary of state, Obama and Hillary Clinton supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras that brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and supported the junta despite its persecution of feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents; Hillary persuaded Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that it was a violation of US and international law. In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres, Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

Obama and Hillary also supported the coup d’état that has plunged Egypt into an abyss of corruption, brutal repression and despair (Yahia Hamed, ”Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14), with LGBT people being rounded up, imprisoned and tortured by the regime that the Obama administration enthusiastically supported. As in Honduras, Obama resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup. And the Obama administration authorized the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising in 2011 by the despotic Bahraini regime which even arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising. Obama also encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the support of the Trump administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and apartment buildings (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16); how many of these Yemenis are LGBT? That we don’t know, but we do know that the majority of the victims of Saudi war crimes in Yemen are women and children and all are people of color.

Perhaps most disturbing was Obama’s support for Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which a report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA) has declared an apartheid regime. And in 2014, the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilians in the Gaza Strip , killing over 2,500 Palestinians, a majority of them women and over 500 of them children; under international law, Israel’s actions in 2014 constitute genocide, and Obama and Hillary publicly supported and defended the genocide; in fact, Obama rewarded Netanyahu for it by increasing US military aid to Israel, handing Netanyahu a $38 billion check on his way out of office. Note here that there are many LGBT people living under the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and that LGBT/queer Palestinian organizations all support Palestinian civil society’s call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel. Note also that Donald Trump’s new administration has been as enthusiastic in supporting Israeli apartheid as Obama’s was, with perhaps fewer constrains in its discursive practices. David Friedman, the new US ambassador to Israel, has referred to Jewish Americans who oppose the illegal occupation as ‘kapos’ and has openly scorned the two-state solution that has been official US policy for decades.

As truly horrendous as the new administration has proven to be, Donald Trump has made one very commendable decision, which is to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the worst trade deal in history; for all that some still harbor illusions about Obama being a progressive, he worked assiduously with Republicans in Congress to push this anti-labor trade deal that would have a devastating impact on workers as well as the environment. What is not entirely clear is whether Trump will abjure the destructive neoliberal economic policy that every president from Carter through Obama has pushed. Unfortunately, if the Obama administration was an abject failure, in foreign policy even more so than in domestic policy, the Trump administration may prove to be worse. But the very bright silver lining in the dark cloud of Trumpery is the resistance movement that the election of Herr Drumpf has sparked. If Hillary Clinton’s election would have put the country into a slumber of passive acceptance of neoliberal economic policy, neocon foreign policy and creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank as well as incremental genocide in Gaza, Trump’s election has at the very least woken quite a lot of people up to the dangers of the new administration.

What is needed now is a broadly conceived, LGBT-inclusive and strategically and tactically savvy movement for progressive policy change; and as the Mahatma Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world; as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. Thank you.

Pauline Park, Ph.D., is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002; she also participated in the working group convened by the New York City Commission on Human Rights that drafted guidelines for implementation of the statute.  Park was a member of the steering committee that led the campaign for enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) and negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in that legislation, the first transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by the New York state legislation when it was signed into law in 2011.

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Creating Change or pinkwashing Israeli apartheid: A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing
by Pauline Park

I have attended 13 Creating Change conferences, but the 28th Creating Change in Chicago in January 2016, which I did not attend, will be remembered as perhaps the most controversial of them all (Matt Simonette and Gretchen Hammond, “Creating Change conference marked by controversies,” Windy City Times, 1.25.16). Creating Change is the largest annual general purpose conference of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in the United States, the flagship event of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, which in 2016 changed its name to ‘National LGBTQ Task Force.’ If the 2016 Creating Change conference is remembered for anything, it will be remembered for the enormous controversies swirling around the invitation to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the reception held by A Wider Bridge on Jan. 22.

In a statement issued on Jan. 12, the Task Force announced that it had rescinded the invitation to ICE to facilitate a session at Creating Change 2016 after a wave of outrage from LGBT activists, especially people of color (statement from the National LGBTQ Task Force regarding Creating Change and ICE), executive director Rea Carey and deputy director Russell Roybal writing,

We know the decision to accept a proposal from ICE for a session at our Creating Change Conference was the wrong decision and that it has caused hurt and pain to communities and individuals we deeply care about. The decision also could have created a situation where the conference would not have felt like a safe space — a vitally important component of what makes the conference special — for undocumented immigrants, immigration activists and allies. Our commitment to immigrant rights and reform has never wavered, but we know community trust in our commitment has been damaged. We made a mistake and we deeply regret it and with our whole hearts apologize…

Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, issued a companion statement also apologizing for the decision and providing some background on the invitation to ICE. But if Task Force staff thought they had dodged a bullet, the outrage over ICE was just the prelude to the much bigger explosion over their invitation to A Wider Bridge.

On its website, A Wider Bridge describes itself as “the pro-Israel organization that builds bridges between Israelis and LGBTQ North Americans and allies,” but this is disingenuous at best if not downright misleading. AWB ‘pinkwashes’ the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine by creating an image of Israel as a gay paradise as a justification for the increasingly brutal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that Palestinians have endured since 1967. As Jimmy Pasch, the west regional organizer for Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote on JVP’s website (“Don’t Pinkwash Apartheid: a Tochecha for the National LGBTQ Task Force“),

A Wider Bridge has a long history of ignoring and covering up Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians by touting Israel’s ‘gay-friendly’ reputation Upon learning of their participation at Creating Change, a diverse coalition of groups, with LGBTQ Palestinian organizations and leaders at the center, came together to oppose it. the coalition effectively made the case for how support of Israel’s military occupation, ethnic cleansing, racism, and colonialism [is[ incompatible with queer liberation and with fundamental human rights.’ Their organizing led to the initial cancellation of the event, but the backlash from institutional players was swift, leading to a barrage of misleading op-eds and the uncertain National LGBT Task Force, which runs the conference, reversing their decision.

The Task Force reversed its initial decision under enormous pressure from Zionists, both within and outside the LGBT community (“Group reverses decision to cancel reception with Israeli activists,” by Michael K. Lavers, Washington Blade, 1.19.16). If anything, the Task Force’s pusillanimous indecision, far from pleasing everyone, just managed to alienate both Zionists and anti-Zionists as well as make the organization’s leadership look weak and indecisive.

Jimmy Johnson reported on Black Lives Matter Chicago’s statement for the Electronic Intifada, writing, “Shortly after that statement was released, the Chicago organization Brown People for Black Power cancelled its scheduled workshop at Creating Change, adding, “Kristian Davis Bailey, co-organizer of the ongoing Black for Palestine effort, told me by email that the Black Lives Matter Chicago statement builds on the joint struggle between segments of Black and Palestinian liberation movements” (“Activists pull out of Chicago LGBTQ conference over Israel pinkwashing,” Jimmy Johnson, Electronic Intifada, 1.22.16)

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) issued a statement denouncing the Task Force (MASGD Statement on Pinkwashing Session at Creating Change 2016) on Jan. 22, on the morning of the AWB reception, declaring,

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) rejects the Task Force’s latest attempt to address current tensions at Creating Change 2016 with regard to Zionism and the military occupation of Palestine by Israel. The past two weeks have included a series of attempts to manipulate, undermine, divide, and co-opt our communities, absent any intersectional analysis of the broader oppressive dynamics at play. MASGD stands with all LGBTQ activists who reject oppressive forces at Creating Change, whether they be ICE or Zionism… this ‘dialogue’ is a naked attempt to co-opt our criticisms of the structural violence of Zionism, by making this issue one of emotions and ‘hurt feelings’ rather than one of the politics of oppression, occupation, and racism. Such attempts at window-dressing can never address structures of power, and therefore cannot serve as a fix for the decisions made by the Task Force at Creating Change 2016 that support systems of oppression. The Task Force pays a lot of lip service to being concerned about social justice, and to understanding the ways in which oppressions intersect with one another; however, their actions this year have demonstrated a clear hypocrisy and betrayal of what queer liberation truly means… By siding with the forces of oppression and occupation, the Task Force is clearly on the wrong side of history.

The Chicago-based Gay Liberation Network issued this statement on ‪#‎cancelpinkwashing‬ @ ‪#‎CC16‬, entitled, “Why We Oppose Pro-Israel Organizations at Creating Change”:

For several years the Israeli government has attempted to use propaganda about the freedoms some LGBTQs in that country have as a cover for their increasingly brutal rule over Palestinians — a process known as ‘pink-washing.’ Because of the brutal racism of the country, mimicking South Africa under apartheid – one set of laws for Jews, another for Palestinians – most Palestinian LGBTQs don’t enjoy those freedoms. Instead, they endure the anti-Palestinian racism meted out on a daily basis to gay and non-gay alike. Israel’s racist rule features widespread imprisonment of Palestinians without charges or trials, systemic torture documented by numerous human rights organizations, and the intentional, extreme impoverishment of Palestinians thru the purposeful destruction of their economic activity in Gaza and the West Bank. Nothing more succinctly encapsulates the racist nature of the Israeli state than its infamous apartheid wall, facilitating the increasing theft of land from Palestinians even as they approach a majority of people in all the areas controlled by Israel. As progressives rightly criticize the racist wall that Donald Trump proposes to build on the U.S.-Mexico border, why can’t some of them see the profoundly racist nature of the wall that Israel has already built? By allowing a pro-Israel group space at its Creating Change conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force has turned its back on its ostensible mission to oppose racism in all of its forms. We will not keep silent as the LGBTQ movement is used as a cover for this anti-Palestinian racism.

In fact, none of the protestors objected to the presence of Jerusalem Open House; the criticisms were aimed solely at AWB; and none of the protestors blocked anyone from entering the ballroom; in fact, it was AWB people who tried to block the demonstrators from entering the room, directly contrary to Creating Change policy, which makes public events such as this AWB reception open to all Creating Change attendees. And the only ‘fire storm of hate’ was that being directed by Slepian and AWB against the peaceful protestors both during and after the event, with incendiary language mischaracterizing the demonstration as anti-Jewish (despite the participation of many Jews in it). Unfortunately, editorials such as that written by Kevin Naff seriously confused the issues at stake; in his editorial for the Washington Blade (Kevin Naff, “Creating Shame: Anti-Israel protest misguided, offensive,” Washington Blade, 1.25.16), Naff repeated the nonsense that Arthur Slepian was spreading about the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” writing,

It’s not clear whether they understood the context of what they were chanting or if they were merely caught up in the moment. That genocidal chant is an overt call for the destruction of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

No one I know thinks that chant means anything of the sort; rather, it is an expression of the wish that Palestinians may one day live in freedom, liberated from the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine; far from ‘genocidal,’ it is actually the opposite: it is an expression of opposition to genocide. LGBT activist Faisal Alam wrote on his Facebook page on Jan. 23,

90% of what you’re reading about what happened or didn’t happen at Creating Change is being written by people who weren’t here. People who were here AND were involved with on-the-ground organizing are either traveling back right now or are exhausted as fuck from the insanity of the weekend! There is no way to describe what happened here and the impact that its had on those that were on the front lines. But here are three things that are facts. 1) there were 2 shabbat services held at Creating Change; neither were disrupted or canceled. 2) A Wider Bridge’s reception started without disruption. 3) The Hilton Chicago called the Chicago Police Department and the Hilton security shut down the reception. It seems that Windy city times is the only newspaper that  has any semblance of ‘balance’ in its articles right now. Every other article has extensive quotes from A Wider Bridge and absolutely zero comments by organizers of the protest.

And as Jimmy Pasch of JVP put it,

The exclusion of A Wider Bridge from Creating Change is not about excluding Jews, as some have falsely charged, but rather to make clear that our struggles for liberation are all interconnected, and that support for occupation, colonialism, and discrimination has no place in our community.

A Wider Bridge is nothing more than a front for the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and AWB’s only role is to pinkwash the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.  The invocation of the opportunity for ‘dialogue’ from both the National LGBTQ Task Force and AWB is disingenuous at best, because LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation cannot participate in it even if they wanted to. By inviting A Wider Bridge to use Creating Change as a platform to pinkwash the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Task Force implicitly endorsed the occupation and the apartheid regime used to enforce it, thus betraying LGBT/queer Palestinians as well as the organization’s own nominal commitment to progressive social and political change.  If the Task Force were really committed to social justice as its leadership claims, the organization would endorse the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which all of the queer Palestinian organizations have asked the LGBT community in the United States and throughout the world to support.

On Jan. 25, the Task Force issued a statement ‘condemning anti-Semitism’ (“National LGBTQ Task Force Condemns Anti-Semitism,” 1.25.16), though precisely what ‘anti-Semitism’ it was condemning was not at all clear from the statement, which documented nothing of the sort; instead, the Task Force seemed to be parroting Arthur Slepian’s false and almost absurdly desperate accusation of anti-Semitism to slander the progressive activists — many of them Jewish and many people of color — challenging the pinkwashing of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In its Jan. 25 statement, the Task Force seems to turn its back on people of color, youth, progressive activists and the pursuit of social justice altogether; it is difficult to read the statement in any other way, since there is not even an acknowledgement of the justice of the anti-apartheid cause or even of the right to freedom of speech and expression for those who oppose Israeli apartheid. The Task Force’s behavior in this whole episode has really shattered its pretension to being the lead organization of ‘the movement.’ An organization that would bow to money and power as the Task Force so obviously did in caving into the Zionist machine has abdicated any legitimate claim even to be progressive, let alone the lead organization of the LGBT movement.

The Task Force leadership should have realized that its craven capitulation would not appease Zionists and did not. Melanie Nathan, whose specialty seems to be vicious personal attacks on human rights activists, seemed to want to publicly ‘shame’ those who participated in the #cancelpinkwashing demonstration by naming as many participants as she could identify (Melanie Nathan, “Naming Participants in the Creating Change 2016 LGBTQ Jew Bash Fest,” 1.30.16).

Even A Wider Bridge rejected the overtures of the notorious Islamophobe Michael Lucas, who apparently proposed that the organization bring suit against the Task Force, according to a report in Ha’aretz  (Allison Kaplan Sommer, “Gay Porn Star Comes Out Against anti-Israel LGBTQ Protest,” Ha’aretz, 2.2.16). In his op-ed in Out Magazine, Michael Lucas wrote,

The 200 thugs who showed up Friday at a Jewish reception were not interested in dialogue. They comprised an enraged gang filled with Jew-hatred, bent on intimidating and silencing LGBT Jews who have any connection to the state of Israel. And the sponsor of the creating Change Conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force, knew full well the potential for violence, and did absolutely nothing to safeguard the lives of more than 100 participants at the reception (Michael Lucas, “The Creating Change Protest Was Pure Anti-Semitism,” Out.com, 1.27.16).

Lucas himself was not at Creating Change and his account of the incident is fictional. Of course, this description is as far from reality, but it is hardly surprising coming from Lucas, a notorious Islamophobic bigot whose hysterical rants even the Zionist machine finds a tad embarrassing. A far more respected figure, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York (the largest LGBT synagogue in the world), unfortunately engaged in statements just as misleading if less hysterical in tone, writing,

What Kleinbaum refers to as a chant ‘calling for the eradication of Israel’ was the chant, ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.’ But as Wendy Elisheva Somerson noted,

references the Jewish historical trauma of forced displacement and genocide in Europe in order to position Israeli Jews as victims of Palestinians. In fact, it is Palestinians who were driven from their homes in 1948 during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in order to clear the way for the state of Israel [and] says nothing about Israel… The chant itself simply promotes a vision of a liberated Palestine. Pro-occupation advocates who equate Palestinian freedom with Israeli annihilation reveal their view of the relationship between Israel and Palestine as a zero-sum game in which only one group of people, Israeli Jews, deserves liberation. But can we call it liberation if Israeli freedom comes at the cost of Palestinian freedom? Or if a handful of LGBTQ people gain individual rights, while others languish in poverty, prisons and detention centers? (Wendy Elisheva Somerson, “Widening the Frame: The connections Between Queer and Palestinian Liberation,” Truthout.org, 2.2.16)

One other claim that Kleinbaum made in her Ha’aretz op-ed requires examination:

Anyone who knows me—or Googles me—will know that I fight Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. In 2012 I participated in a national LGBT leadership trip to Palestine, and connected strongly with activists there. I have always taken a stand for freedom of speech.

I actually participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine, and as the other 15 delegates and the two tour directors as well as the camera crew can attest, Kleinbaum actually abandoned the tour halfway through the week-long itinerary and did so without explanation or even notice to the tour directors and her delegate colleagues. When the deputy tour director asked Kleinbaum why she left the tour, she told him that the tour was not what she had thought it would be, mumbling something about having expected ‘dialogue’ between Israelis and Palestinians; but this explanation is no explanation at all, because Kleinbaum like all of the delegates had been given a clear explanation of the tour in advance. One can speculate why she abruptly left the tour halfway through it, but the common consensus among the other delegates was that Kleinbaum could not bring herself to face the reality of the occupation; and in fact, at every stop along the way, she aggressively questioned our local Palestinian tour guides (we had a different one in every city, town and village) as to the veracity of their description of the apartheid regime in each such municipality or locale, implying skepticism about the extent of the oppression and repression by the Israeli authorities that they were describing.  And I am not aware of any real work that Kleinbaum has ever done to challenge the occupation; in fact, her public pronouncements have almost uniformly been harshly critical of those criticizing the occupation, especially those advocating boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting apartheid Israel, calling into question her self-description in the Ha’aretz op-ed (“I fight Israel’s military occupation of Palestine”). It seems to me that someone less intent on criticizing the occupation than on criticizing those criticizing the occupation is not really ‘fighting’ the occupation.

In any case, despite its knowingly false and absurdly histrionic account of the events at Creating Change 2016 in Chicago, A Wider Bridge did not host a reception or any programming at Creating Change 2017 in Philadelphia, explaining that absence on its website:

Following the anti-semitic, anti-Israel incident at A Wider Bridge reception during Creating Change Conference last year, there’s a demand to know what we are planning to do with regard to participating in the upcoming Creating Change Conference, set for January 18 – 22 in Philadelphia. In brief, we are sending two of our staff leaders, Tye Gregory and Quentin Hill to participate in the conference, and to represent A Wider Bridge in the discussions, especially those that might focus on issues related to Israel and anti-Semitism. While we are not presenting a program or hosting a reception at the Conference itself, we are hosting a private Lunch and Learn event in Philadelphia on January 20, that will be an opportunity for both conference attendees and others in the Philadelphia area to learn about and discuss our work. On Wednesday, A Wider Bridge will be returning to the Creating Change Conference, this year in Philadelphia, to continue engaging LGBTQ leaders and activists with the shared advancement of LGBTQ rights in the United States and Israel. (“Creating Change 2017 and A Wider Bridge,” AWiderBridge.org, 1.16.17)

It is not clear from A Wider Bridge’s statement whether the organization submitted programming proposals to the Task Force and/or a request for space for a reception and was turned down or whether AWB decided not to attempt any such direct participation altogether; and unfortunately, the Task Force is not transparent in its decision-making and has not and likely will not respond to any requests for information about AWB and Creating Change 2017.

Unfortunately, for all its talk of ‘intersectional analysis’ of multiple oppressions, the Task Force ended up excoriating progressive activists for challenging Israeli apartheid and apologizing to Zionists for allowing their pinkwashing event to be disrupted, a betrayal of the organization’s ostensible commitment to the pursuit of social justice and the empowerment of those working for its attainment. Quite the contrary: the Task Force’s statements about the incident at Creating Change 2016 and its refusal to take a principled stand against Israeli apartheid and genocide represent a capitulation to the wealthy donor class to which the organization apparently now owes its primary loyalty rather than to the social justice activists who are its ostensible constituency, the opposite of what a progressive organization would do when confronted with a conflict between such activists and the propaganda machine of the illegal occupation of Palestine.

If the name of the Creating Change conference is to have any meaning, it must be as the name of a conference at which activists either create change or are empowered to do so by programming, networking and interactions there; if however the purpose of the conference is to fill the coffers of one of our largest LGBT organizations while at the same time excluding any discussion of such gross injustices as Israel’s illegal occupation much less real action to challenge it, then perhaps the conference should be renamed ‘Stifling Creating Change in Order to Satisfy Wealthy Zionist Donors.’ Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” And so one would hope the arc of Palestinian history would. But the arc of the history of the Creating Change conference seems to be from that of a grassroots gathering of activists to an enormous and highly profitable mainstream LGBT conference to a conference that excludes discussion of one of the great issues of our time, and one with enormous implications not only for LGBT/queer Palestinians but for the LGBT community in the United States and worldwide.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012.

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Hillary Clinton & Park Geun-hye: a progressive feminist analysis of presidential politics in the US & Korea
by Pauline Park

Park Geun-hye is the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea as well as the first president of the republic to be impeached. Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be nominated by the Democratic Party to run for president of the United States and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes in November 2016 but lost the electoral college to Donald Trump because she fell 107,000 votes short in just three key ‘swing’ states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania).

The impeachment of Park Geun-hye and the defeat of Hillary Clinton have prompted some feminists to cry foul and blame sexism for these developments; but can we explain them solely or even primarily with reference to misogyny? It seems to me that this question can only be answered by disentangling various threads and re articulating the question as at least three separate interrogatories. First, did sexism or misogyny lead the South Korean parliament to impeach Park Geun-hye and lead to American voters to reject Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump? Second, are women inherently feminist and progressive? And third, is the election of a woman as the first president of the Republic of Korea or the United States necessarily a feminist victory in and of itself?

In the Korean case, we have those who point to sexist jibes being chanted in the crowds in Gwanghwamun near the Blue House demanding Park Geun-hye’s resignation; is this conclusive proof that there was no credible scandal but only an enormous wave of misogyny that led to Park’s impeachment in 2016? Difficult to believe, given that South Korean voters elected Park president in 2012 by a narrow majority of 51.6%; while there is no doubt that there are elements of misogyny in South Korean society, but such misogyny did not prevent the election of a woman as president five years ago, and Park’s fall to 4% approval in December 2016 can hardly be explained solely with reference to sexism, especially given that she had risen to a 63% approval rating as late as July 2013; ignoring the impact of the Sewol ferry disaster and the Choi Soon-sil scandal and attributing Park’s unpopularity solely to antipathy to women in Korean society is entirely unpersuasive. Rather, Park’s fall from power has to be understood in the context of the incomplete democratization of the Republic of Korea in the last three decades, following decades of military rule, including by her father, Park Chung-hee, who pursued the most successful industrialization of any national economy in the twentieth century, but at enormous cost to labor and human rights as well as the environment.

In fact, Park Geun-hye was elected precisely because of nostalgia for her father’s rule, especially by older Koreans who remembered the poverty that Korea was mired in before his taking power in a coup d’état in May 1961. Far more important than gender in understanding Park Geun-hye’s rise and fall is class: as the daughter of the dictator, growing up in the Blue House, she had the most privileged upbringing of any Korean child in the 1960s and 1970s; and her father’s symbiotic relationship with the chaebol – the huge conglomerates run by family dynasties that Park Chung-hee made enormously wealthy and powerful through his crash state-led industrialization – gave her the most effective base for gaining power through election in the post-dictatorship period. Indeed, Park Geun-hye’s relationship with Samsung and the other chaebol is a central cause of the deep resentment towards her by ordinary Koreans, both men and women, and the vast corruption revealed by the Choi Soon-sil scandal and not ‘sexism’ is what brought her down.

The Hankyoreh (the progressive Korean daily) ran this cartoon (8.14.16) to lampoon the dangerous game Park Geun-hye was playing in her foreign policy.

There are of course many differences between Park Geun-hye and Hillary Clinton, but there are also striking similarities, including the fact that they both came into office because of their relationship with the most powerful men in their families  – in Park’s case, that with her father; and in Hillary Clinton’s case, that with her husband, Bill Clinton, who was elected governor of Arkansas and then president of the United States; it is simply inconceivable that Hillary would have been considered a serious candidate for the United States Senate from New York – a state in which she had never lived when she ran for that office in 2000 – had she not been First Lady from 1993-2000, a status U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel explicitly referred to when recruiting her to run in that year.

Even more important to consider is the fact that both Park Geun-hye and Hillary Clinton have been associated with right-wing politics and policy-making that have on balance been counter to the needs and interests of women, regardless of the symbolism of the election of the former as president and the nomination of the latter as a presidential candidate. Park’s scheme to undermine labor rights by giving employers a free hand to terminate workers prompted massive protests in 2015 (“Massive crowd protest in South Korea against Park’s labor reform plans,” Reuters, 11.14.15), as did her plan to censor history textbooks in order to re-write the history of her father’s brutal dictatorship, which became notorious for human rights abuses (Agence France-Presse, “South Korea accused of rewriting history in new school textbooks,” Guardian, 11.3.15). Neither the elimination of labor rights nor the whitewashing of history textbooks through historical revisionism and censorship by the central government – a move absolutely unprecedented in the history of post-democratization Korea – strike me as being particularly ‘feminist.’

Hillary Clinton’s record is hardly more feminist thank Park Geun-hye’s. As First Lady, Hillary publicly supported Bill Clinton’s signing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (legislation that wrote into statute law discrimination in the military based on sexual orientation) and the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ (DOMA, legislation that authorized state governments to discriminate against same-sex couples in the provision of marriage licenses); she also supported the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and the welfare ‘reform’ bill that Bill Clinton signed into law that deepened the poverty of millions of women and children; and she aggressively supported the mass incarceration of people of color spearheaded by the Clinton administration that impoverished millions of families of color (Pauline Park, “Hillary Clinton: a progressive feminist perspective,” paulinepark.com).

In his eight years as president, Barack Obama has deported more than twice as many undocumented immigrants as George W. Bush and by some counts, more than all previous presidents combined, prompting La Raza to call him the ‘Deporter in Chief.’ Hillary fully supported those deportations as secretary of state and did not begin to distance herself from these deportations until she began her campaign for president (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16). As secretary of state, Hillary also supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras that brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and supported the junta despite its persecution of feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents; she persuaded Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that it was a violation of US and international law. In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres , Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

Hillary also supported the coup d’état that has plunged Egypt into an abyss of corruption, brutal repression and despair (Yahia Hamed, ”Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14). As in Honduras, Obama and Hillary resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup. In Libya, Hillary notoriously spearheaded a disastrous intervention, repeating the folly of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which she voted for), decapitating the regime and leaving a power vacuum which al-Qaeda and ISIS (‘Da’esh’) have filled.

As secretary of state, Hillary approved the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising in 2011 by the despotic Bahraini regime which teven arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising. Hillary also encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the support of the Obama administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and apartment buildings (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16).

Hillary Clinton’s outrageous support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is particularly disturbing; the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilians in its 2014 genocide in Gaza, killing over 2,500 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a majority of them women and over 500 of them children; Hillary publicly supported and defended the genocide. In short, Hillary’s public record is clearly anti-feminist and anti-progressive, though her defeat in November 2016 is attributed to her supporters as nothing but an overt expression of virulent misogyny; is this really the case? Even the most cursory glance at the facts at hand will show this to be an absurd and entirely unfounded assertion.

First of all, to the extent that Donald Trump and others threw sexist jibes at Hillary, they almost certainly helped her candidacy, generating outrage from many women and ginning up enthusiasm for her election; in fact, her campaign used such sexism to fundraise for it. Second, it is significant that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump, almost certainly in spite of his outrageous misogyny and not because of it. And no one has yet to produce evidence that the majority of American women are so consumed by self-hatred and internalized misogyny that they cannot even conceive of voting for or supporting a woman for president. The fact is, Hillary won the popular vote by nearly three million votes, so clearly, a majority of Americans did not reject the very possibility of a woman president; but many voters did not want Hillary Clinton to be the first woman elected president of the United States, especially ‘millennials’ and other  younger women, who overwhelmingly rejected Hillary’s candidacy in the primary season in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described ‘socialist’ from Vermont, prompting Gloria Steinem to make her notorious assertion that those younger women were only supporting Sanders because they wanted to get dates with ‘Bernie Bros,’ young men supporting the Vermonter’s candidacy; it is difficult to imagine a comment more demeaning to young women and more profoundly misogynist than that.

The real issue facing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was that of her character. Hillary was the only secretary of state ever to have set up a private server secretly in the basement of her house in order to evade clear State Department rules and then attempt to mislead the public about the subterfuge, violating the Federal Records Act in the process; her refusal to meet with the Inspector General of the State Department as indicated in his May 25 report is as disturbing as her violation of department policy (Julian Hattem, “Watchdog: Clinton, top aides did not comply on records policy,” The Hill, 5.25.16). Destroying government documents is a serious crime and repeatedly lying about such behavior is an indictment of Hillary’s behavior (A.J. Vicens, “State Department Inspector General Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Recordkeeping Rules,” Mother Jones, 5.25.16). By November 2016, Hillary was viewed rightly by an overwhelming majority of Americans as dishonest and untrustworthy (Amy Chozick, “Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her,” New York Times, 5.25.16). Part of that perception may be because of her corruption. Since leaving office as president and secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton have cashed in on public office in a way absolutely unprecedented in American history. Hillary alone has received more than $22 million in speaking fees, while Bill Clinton has earned more than $132 million in speaking fees, in addition to book royalties and other income (Amy Davidson, “Bill Problems: As Donald Trump attacks both Clintons, it’s like 1992 all over again,” New Yorker, 6.6.16). ‘Hillary for America’ has received $147,840 in direct contributions from 65 fossil fuel lobbyists and $2,502,740 in bundled contributions (Charlie Cray, Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ Contributions to the Clinton Campaign, Greenpeace.org, 4.22.16). In fact Hillary Clinton got more money from Wall Street than any presidential candidate in US history and far more than Donald Trump. It was the $675,000 Hillary was given in ‘honoraria’ from Goldman Sachs – the wealthiest and most powerful investment bank in the United States and possibly the world – that was a touchstone of criticism of her; no one has ever been paid ‘speaking fees’ in that amount by a Wall Street investment bank and those ‘honoraria’ appeared to many to be scarcely disguised bribes; Hillary’s refusal to release the transcripts of those speeches dogged her campaign right down to election day.

But despite all of the scandals dogging her, Hillary Clinton would have won an electoral college majority as well as the popular vote if she had simply turned out the same number of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as Barack Obama had in 2016; just 107,000 more votes in those states would have put her in the White House. Yet Democratic Party hacks blame ‘sexism,’ Russian hacking and Jill Stein for Hillary’s defeat, while an examination of the election shows that the fault lies with her. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s own campaign staffed begged her to campaign in Wisconsin, warning her that she could lose the Badger State, which she ultimately did; but she did not visit Wisconsin even once after winning the April Democratic primary there, supremely arrogant in her confidence that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were all ‘in the bag.’ Hillary’s refusal to visit Wisconsin despite pleading and urgent warnings from her own campaign staff there is particularly puzzling given that the Democratic presidential nominee won the state by less than 1% in all of the previous four elections (Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012). Hillary also refused to stand with African Americans striking in Philadelphia, which not only would have demonstrated her solidarity with the African American community as well as labor, but could have helped win her Pennsylvania. And of course, it is not Donald Trump who invented the electoral college, an institution that Hillary Clinton was more than aware of given Al Gore’s popular vote victory in 2000. In short, it was not ‘sexism’ that defeated Hillary Clinton but Hillary herself; while there is no question that misogyny remains a serious problem in American society, it is not the explanation for her defeat or Donald Trump’s electoral college victory. As the intrepid reporter Glenn Greenwald so trenchantly put it, “Because Democrats are so desperate to put the blame on everybody but themselves for the complete collapse of their party, they’re particularly furious at anybody who vocally challenges this narrative” (“Glenn Greenwald: Democrats Eager to Blame ‘Everybody But Themselves for the Collapse of Their Party,” Democracy Now, 1.6.17).

Hillary Clinton had the highest unfavorable rating of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, but anyone wishing to attribute this to her sex or gender should consider the fact that Donald Trump’s unfavorable rating was even higher. The truth is that Americans have internalized the binary opposition of our two-party duopoly, the false notion that we only have two choices in any presidential election and that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote; but given that false dichotomy upon which American voters cast their votes in November 2016, the choice facing them was between two major party candidates whom a majority of voters found unacceptable. Voters found both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump thoroughly contemptible; both were multi-millionaire oligarchs (one of whom claimed to be a billionaire), but the former represented the status quo while the latter was seen as the candidate of change; in a change election, enough voters opted for what they saw as a risky change over a continuation of an unacceptable status quo; to interpret that choice as ‘sexist’ or having anything to do with misogyny is to misunderstand the election entirely. The irony is that American voters had a woman they could have voted for in the 2016 presidential election who was both progressive and feminist: Jill Stein, the presidential nominee of the Green Party, who was running on a platform that embodies all of the values that progressive feminists espouse.

Beyond the narrower questions of sexism and misogyny is the larger issue as to whether electing women to office has anything to do with feminism at all. There seems to be an assumption in certain quarters that electing women to office helps women, but that is an assumption that appears to be based on another unspoken assumption, namely, that women are all feminists. Having spent two years living in London under Margaret Thatcher’s rule, I can assure you that the Iron Lady was neither a progressive nor a feminist; and neither were Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi; and of course, neither are Angela Merkel or Park Geun-hye. Like most women who rise to the highest office in the land, all of these women came to power through a masculinist discourse of power, one which requires a woman to prove that she can be ‘more of a man’ than the men in her own government: Thatcher proved that by launching the Falklands War contrary to the advice of her entire cabinet; Indira Gandhi proved that by going to war against Pakistan as well as by sending troops into the Golden Temple of Amritsar – the holiest of all Sikh shrines, which ultimately led to her assassination – and Golda Meir proved that by building the Israeli war machine and the apartheid regime it maintains, denying the very existence of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian women and children, whom she treated with the same contempt as her male predecessors and successors. It is noteworthy that Ronald Reagan called Margaret Thatcher ‘the best man in England.’

Real feminism means rejecting a false ideology of representationalism that holds that the mere election of women to office constitutes feminism regardless of whether the women themselves are feminist or progressive; real feminism also requires that feminists reject anti-feminist and anti-progressive women such as Park Geun-hye and Hillary Clinton. It’s not about electing women, much less any particular women; it’s about pursuing the work of social justice for all.

This is the text of a presentation given by Pauline Park at the event “Feminists Take on Presidency” on 14 January 2017 at DCTV in New York. Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. Park participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. She did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Hillary Clinton & the blame game: why Jill Stein had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s electoral college majority
by Pauline Park

Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote by the narrowest of margins, but Donald Trump won an electoral college majority in the 2016 presidential election, which has prompted howls of outrage and despair from Democrats who are looking for anyone to blame but themselves and their candidate for her shocking loss, an outcome that was so unexpected that it stunned the country and the world.

But rather than acknowledge Hillary’s faults and the enormous mistakes she made as a candidate, her supporters, including Democratic National Committee (DNC) staff and campaign aides, seem determined to blame everyone else in sight, misdirecting their anger at those who had nothing to do with Trump’s victory. Steve Benen’s Nov. 9 ‘report’ for the Rachel Maddow Show is a perfect case in point. In “Third-party voters played a key role in election results” (MSNBC.com), Benen writes, “In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost by about 1.4% of the vote – but if Jill Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Democratic, Trump would have lost the state. Benen then goes on to make similar assertions about Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, acknowledging that third party votes did not exceed the margin of Trump’s victory in North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa. But Benen nonetheless concludes that “in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, third-party voters had an enormous, Nader-like impact – had those states gone the other way, Clinton would be president-elect today, not Trump.”

First, it has to be pointed out that the claim that Ralph Nader threw Florida and the 2000 election to George W. Bush has been comprehensively discredited (Irene Dieter, California Green Party, “Dispelling the Myth of Election 2000: Did Made Cost Gore the Election?“). So even the reference to the ‘Nader-like impact’ is misleading and shows both the author’s bias and his lack of understanding of the 2000 election. Benen’s screed is entirely without merit, an argument based on baseless assumptions that collapses upon even the most casual scrutiny. But let’s just say for the sake of argument this nonsense posted to a site widely understood to be run by partisan Democrats should be taken seriously.

So once again, this is nothing but another attempt to scapegoat those who voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson for Trump’s election. Benen’s screed is part of the blame game that Hillary Clinton supporters are playing to try to absolve themselves and their candidate for her failure to win a majority of electoral votes on Tuesday. Why not actually assign blame to Hillary herself for being so ineffective a candidate that she failed to persuade these Stein and Johnson voters to vote for her…? “The fact is, Clinton lost because of overall voter turnout, down nearly 7 million. she lost because she failed to capture the African American vote, the Latino vote, or the young vote, at the levels which Obama had in 2012,” writes Dan Arel (“Don’t blame third parties for Clinton’s loss, blame Democrats who didn’t vote,” Patheos.com, 11 November 2016).

Only about 107,000 votes in just three key states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – separated Trump from Clinton nationally and gave the Republican nominee a majority in the electoral college. It is not so much that Trump voters came out of the woodwork to vote for the Republican nominee but that Democrats failed to show up in the numbers they did for Obama in 2008 and 2012; had Hillary simply won the states that Obama won in 2008 or in 2012, she would have had a modest landslide in the electoral college like he did.

Hillary fell over 75,000 votes short of Barack Obama’s totals in two key counties in three of the key swing states: in Milwaukee County  and Wayne County; had she gotten 75,000 more votes in Milwaukee and Detroit, she would have won Wisconsin and Michigan; another 100,000 in Pennsylvania and she would have won that state.  With 10 electoral votes from Wisconsin, Hillary’s 228 electoral vote total would have gone up from 228 to 238; with 16 more from Michigan, her total would have gone up to 254; and with another 20 from Pennsylvania, she would have reached 274, four more than the 270 she would have needed to get a majority in the electoral college. It was the ‘enthusiasm gap,’ not Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, that accounts for Hillary’s failure to reach 270. When unbiased historians write the history of the 2016 election, I seriously doubt they will be blaming Jill Stein and Gary Johnson for Hillary Clinton’s failure to win a majority of electoral college votes. But if Democrats continue to wallow in self-pity and play this divisive and pernicious blame game, they are only making it more likely that they will lose future presidential elections.

Pauline Park is an LGBT activist based in New York; she did a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has written widely on politics and policy.

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I want a president…
by Pauline Park
17 October 2016

I want a president who reflects my values, not the values of the Wall Street oligarchy as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do.

I want a president who stands up to Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry instead of fanning the flames of prejudice and hatred as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who will curb the military/industrial complex instead of enabling its excesses with bloated budgets as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would do.

I want a president who isn’t an enormously wealthy embodiment of class privilege as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are, multi-milllionaires who represent the interests of the oligarchy.

I want a president who doesn’t pander to voters or condescend as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do but who addresses the real issues in a serious and policy-oriented manner.

I want a president who is willing to do something about global warming and climate change, unlike Donald Trump, a global warming denialist, and Hillary Clinton, whose agenda is to promote fracking, the new energy technology that’s contributing more to global warming than any other.

I want a president who really thinks #BlackLivesMatter instead of denigrating the BLM movement like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who actually understands the corporate culture of police violence in this country like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and is willing to address this serious problem affecting LGBT people and people of color, especially LGBT people of color.

I want a president who tells the truth and isn’t a pathological liar like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will challenge and downsize the National Security agency and end its illegal surveillance of US citizens and others instead of enabling the NSA like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will end support for and subsidies to brutal dictatorships in Honduras, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and elsewhere instead of supporting and enabling them like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will challenge and downsize the military/industrial complex, unlike Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would further enable its excesses.

I want a president who will take the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people seriously, unlike Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will stop subsidizing the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do but who instead will end US subsidies to Israel’s brutal apartheid regime in illegally occupied Palestine.

I want a president who will challenge Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip instead of supporting its policy of incremental genocide in Gaza instead as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who knows where Aleppo is, unlike Gary Johnson.

I want a president like Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee, who reflects my progressive feminist values instead of embodying anti-progressive, anti-feminist politics as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president like Jill Stein, the only feminist and the only progressive in the race~!

I want all Americans to vote for Jill Stein as president and say #NeverHillaryOrTrump; #JillNotHill~!

This is a statement read by Pauline Park (without any of the candidate references) on the High Line in Manhattan on 17 October 2016 as part of a project referencing Zoe Leonard’s poem, “I Want a President.”

Pauline Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012; Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables & the politics of LGBT community co-optation
by Pauline Park

I think when pollsters, political scientists, historians & other analysts look back on 2016 & search for defining moments, one of them will be #HillaryClinton‘s LGBT ‘community’ fundraiser on Sept. 9 at Cipriani Wall Street, with tickets from $1,200 to $250,000 per plate (Gil Kaufman, “Barbra Streisand to Perform at LGBT-Focused Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton,” Billboard, 8.9.16).

The event was supposed to make news for the high profile LGBT guests (most of them wealthy gay white men from Manhattan) and the star power of its celebrities, including Barbra Streisand, but instead made news for her ‘basket of deplorables’ comment, which may well have been the 47% comment of this year, so much like the comment that helped derail Mitt Romney’s campaign four years ago. At the time, Hillary laughed off the controversy over her snobby, elitist comment disdaining a huge segment of the country, but the basket of deplorables certainly got their revenge on November 8.

But I think there are some serious issues raised by this event that go well beyond the gaffe that Hillary made with her comment.

“We’re not going to fool people any more by telling them we are with them and we want to work for them and at the same time holding so many fundraisers with people who are not working people,” Reid J. Epstein and Janet Hook quote Eirka Andiola as saying (Reid J. Epstein and Janet Hook, “The Great Unraveling: In Their Coastal Citadels, Democrats Argue Over What Went Wrong,” Wall Street Journal, 18 November 2016). The political director for Our Revolution, an organization founded by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Andiola made a point that Democrats should take seriously but no doubt will simply ignore; it has been far more convenient since the presidential election to blame everyone in sight for Hillary Clinton’s loss except for her and her campaign staff, who made countless mistakes, big and small, that helped Donald Trump win on Nov. 8.

But the most pointed question for those who participated in the Sept. 9 fundraiser is the significance of the event for the LGBT community and what it says about LGBT community members and their relations with people in the political class. To begin with, the ticket price alone – from $1,200 to $250,000 per plate  – means that an enormous segment of the LGBT community was effectively excluded from this event, even assuming those community members would have wanted to support Hillary through a donation of this sort; that would be even more true of the transgender community; while there is no good data on income and wealth in the transgender community, anecdotal evidence would suggest that very few transgendered people in New York could possibly have afforded $1,200 for a dinner and I know of no one in New York who could have afforded a donation of $250,000. It was actress Laverne Cox as mistress of ceremonies who provided the only transgender representation at the event, and of course, as MC, she would not have had to pay even the lowest donation amount of $1,200.

And so the overwhelming majority of the attendees at the Sept. 9 fundraiser were undoubtedly wealthy conventionally gendered gay white men from Manhattan, many of them lawyers and other high-salaried professionals; with few people of color and virtually no transgendered people at the event, the crowd would have been completely unrepresentative of the LGBT community of New York, the most diverse city in the United States, a city that is more than two-thirds people of color.

But even setting aside the question of demographics is the question of access: who in the LGBT community has access to the political class? The answer to this question must certainly be a tiny handful of wealthy donors and Democratic Party operatives who ‘represent’ the LGBT community to politicians and candidates for office.

The history of LGBT legislation at the state level has shown that the concerns of the most marginalized members of the LGBT community in New York are not and have never been a priority for the privileged few who have access to the state’s political class. Gov. Andrew Cuomo made enactment of New York’s marriage equality law a priority of his first term while the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) languished in the state Senate, completely unmentioned by the governor even in his speeches at the Empire State Pride Agenda’s fall dinners in 2014 and 2015 – despite the fact that GENDA was ostensibly ESPA’s top legislative priority after enactment of the marriage statute. And the Dignity for All Students Act – the intention of which was to prohibit discrimination and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state  – was rushed through the state Senate in June 2011 only as a sort of consolation prize for the LGBT community in the wake of the initial defeat of the marriage equality bill in the Senate the previous December as well as the defeat of GENDA in committee, even though DASA would potentially help far more LGBT people than same-sex marriage rights as well as helping queer youth, among the most vulnerable members of the LGBT community.

The issue of access to members of the political class was no more sharply thrown into high relief than on 4 October 2000, when Paul Schindler interviewed Hillary Clinton for Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY), now known as Gay City News (GCN) (Paul Schindler, “Hillary Clinton Talks to Paul Schindler, 2000,” Schindler City, 7 September 2007). Prior to the interview, Schindler had called me up and asked me for suggestions for transgender-specific questions that he might ask the candidate for U.S. Senate, and I suggested that he ask Hillary if she would support inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the federal hate crimes bill, which he did, as well as referencing the New York State hate crimes bill that passed the state Senate in June 2000 and was signed into law by Republican Gov. George Pataki in July 2000.

When asked, “Have you the opportunity to get feedback from members of the transgender community?” (as opposed to non-transgendered gay and lesbian people), Clinton responded to Schindler, “Yes, we have. Not as much or as frequently but some. I have a few transgendered contributors of some significance. So yes, we have gotten feedback.” When asked if Clinton would support transgender inclusion in ENDA, she responded, “I don’t see at this point that would be in the best interest of moving the agenda forward.”

Schindler then followed up by saying, “One of the things that the transgender community points to is that, for example, on hate crimes in New York State, the entire coalition for hate crimes held out to have gays and lesbians included in it. We would have had a hate crimes bill in New York long ago if it had only been for religion and so forth. But everyone hung tough on that. But what the transgender community is saying now is ‘Wouldn’t that approach be appropriate for them as well?’ In other words, don’t do it piecemeal, include everybody and then move forward.”

Clinton’s responded, “Well, no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that. I think there’s an understood recognition of the political reality. So for me it’s a priority to try to get ENDA passed, which is what I will work on.”

The Senate candidate’s answer to the editor’s statement her is highly revealing. Why should Clinton’s support for transgender inclusion in federal legislation be dependent on what gay and lesbian community members ask her? And how is having a few ‘transgendered contributors of some significance’ evidence of broad-based support from the transgender community? Significantly, Clinton’s suggestion that contributions from a few wealthy donors somehow confirmed the transgender community’s support for her in the absence of any other evidence of such support was very much in keeping with her attitude to other communities as well: personal connections with prominent members of various Democratic Party constituencies – elected officials and wealthy donors in particular – are taken as evidence of deep and abiding connection with the communities as a whole. Clinton’s failure win African Americans and others in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania proved crucial to Donald Trump’s victory in those states, which gave him a majority of electoral college votes despite her winning the popular vote nationwide by more than two million votes.

And so the LGBT ‘community’ fundraiser for Hillary Clinton at Cipriani on Wall Street in Sept. 2016 was an ironically apropos representation of her relationship with the community over the course of her entire career: an entirely artificial event with access based on wealth and class privilege, with only token transgender inclusion and no attempt to make a real connection with members of the LGBT community beyond a tiny elite of unrepresentative gatekeepers; the event was as inauthentic as the candidate herself and as ineffective as her campaign.

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Hillary Clinton’s anti-feminist & anti-progressive agenda will never have my support
by Pauline Park

Hillary Clinton’s supporters depict her as a courageous feminist trying to advance a daringly progressive agenda in the face of Republican opposition; the truth is actually quite the opposite: Hillary is an anti-feminist who has always pursued an anti-progressive agenda from her earliest days as a ‘Goldwater girl.’

To begin at the beginning: Hillary grew up in the lily-white upper middle class Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. It is important to point out that Barry Goldwater was not only the Republican nominee in 1964, he was the most right-wing Republican nominee of his day, part of a conservative movement that used his candidacy to take over the party and transform it into the GOP we know today, so far right-wing that Northeastern liberals like Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javitz and Claiborne Pell could not win nomination to run for any statewide office today, even in New York or New England. In 1964, while Bernie Sanders was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Hillary Clinton was supporting the Republican presidential nominee who was ridiculing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and calling him a ‘communist.’

Of course, the question is not where Hillary Clinton started out but where she has ended up and where she has been along the way, and her role as First Lady of Arkansas and the United States needs to be taken into account in a comprehensive assessment of her record. Hillary supporters lash out at those who would examine that record as ‘sexist,’ but as First Lady, Hillary was not a purely decorative element in her husband’s administration in Little Rock and later in Washington, D.C.; she was a very public figure and cast herself as an active policy-maker in both administrations; and in fact, the whole rationale for her campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2000 was that she had been a key decision-maker in the Clinton administration; and so what Hillary did in Little Rock and later in Washington in her husband’s administrations are very relevant.

I would just point to her crucial role in advocating for the 1994 crime law that helped accelerate the mass incarceration of people of color — especially African American and Latino men — as well as her public advocacy for the welfare reform legislation that further impoverished millions of poor women and children, disproportionately people of color. As Michelle Alexander has pointed out, the Clinton administration

capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did… Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history… He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement. Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary… not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures… In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals… Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation. If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself. (Michelle Alexander, “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” the Nation, 2.10.16)

The support that many people of color have offered Hillary Clinton in the course of the 2016 presidential campaign is all the more curious when one considers her use of language that some would call racist, as Marc Charles wrote in April 2016,

Hillary Clinton is using terms like ‘off the reservation,’ and reassuring people that ‘We don’t need to make America great again. America never stopped being great.’ This type of behavior demonstrates she does not understand the systemic racism and blatant oppression that has been endured by people of color throughout the entire history of this nation,” writes Mark Charles, adding, “Unfortunately, the dialogue that is taking place this election cycle is not about broad-based equality or ending racism. The conversation we are having today is about the type of racism we want to settle for” (Mark Charles, “A Native Response to Hillary Clinton’s ‘Off the Reservation’ Comment,” Native News On-Line, 4.30.16)

Is it sheer ignorance of the history of race and ethnicity in the United States? Or was the ‘off the reservation’ comment a racist ‘dog whistle’ as when Hillary asserted that she had a broader base of support than then-Sen. Barack Obama, citing an Associated Press article

that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again,  and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here (Richard Prince, “Hard Working… White Americans,” Maynard Institute, 5.8.08)

The pattern that many people of color saw was that of a privileged white woman casting herself as the champion of white Democrats unwilling to vote for an African American. “Was Hillary channeling George Wallace? Hillary’s reckless exploitation of racial division could split the Democratic Party over race  — a tragic legacy for the  Clintons,” wrote Joe Conason (ibid).  Hillary also aggressively pushed the Republican ‘welfare reform’ bill that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 that plunged hundreds of thousands of families  — disproportionately African American women and children — from poverty into even deeper poverty as part of a cynical attempt to out maneuver Bob Dole and the Republicans in the lead up to the 1996 election, which Clinton won handily and most likely would have easily won even if Clinton had not signed the crime bill and welfare reform bill into law.

If Hillary supporters rail at those who criticize her policy-making role in the Clinton White House, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that she would never have been considered a credible candidate for the Senate seat of the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan had she not claimed to have been a key policy-maker in the Clinton administration. Neither Clinton had ever lived in New York before, and so Hillary was rightly called a ‘carpet bagger’ for moving to Chappaqua just to be eligible to run for the Senate in 2000 with the blessing of Pat Moynihan. Whether former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani could have beaten Hillary we will never know, because he withdrew from the race after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, leaving the feckless U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio from Long Island to go down to defeat in November of that year.

My own interaction with Hillary came in the form of a request that I and a group of transgender activists made to meet with her before the election and then again after she won in November; her staff refused both requests, even declining to offer a low-level staff member to meet with us to discuss transgender discrimination issues; the second time around, of course, we were not just voters, but constituents of the newly elected Senator, whose refusal to meet with us or even explain her refusal to meet with us alienated not just me but the mostly African American transwomen who were part of our group as well. The fact that Housing Works, one of New York City’s largest social service providers to people living with HIV and AIDS, was part of the group requesting the meeting, seemed to have no impact whatsoever on the willingness of Hillary’s staff to meet with us.

Just as important in creating a lasting impression with me were Hillary Clinton’s responses to questions posed by Lesbian & Gay New York (‘LGNY,’ since renamed ‘Gay City News’) to her in an interview in 2000. Paul Schindler, the newspaper’s editor, asked me if I could suggest a transgender-specific question to pose to the Senate candidate; I suggested that he ask her if she would commit to supporting full transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the federal hate crimes bill. Taking my suggestion, in an interview on Oct. 4, Schindler (Paul Schindler, “Hillary Clinton Talks to Paul Schindler, 2000“) asked the Senate candidate,

“Do you think the goal of broadening the language for ENDA or broadening language in the hate crimes protection act to include gender expression and gender identity, do you think that’s a practical goal at this point politically?”

To which Hillary responds, “I think we need to try to move ENDA forward. I think ENDA is such an important legislative goal. I think it’s within reach and I think it’s a vehicle for widening the circle of rights and freedoms and responsibilities and I would really focus on trying to get that passed.”

“In other words, no effort at this point at amending?”

“I don’t see at this point that that would be in the best interest of moving the agenda forward.”

After another go around on this question, Schindler then asks, “One of the things that the transgender community points to is that, for example, on hate crimes in New York State, the entire coalition for hate crimes held out to have gays and lesbians included in it. We would have had a hate crimes bill in New York long ago if it had only been for religion and so forth. But everyone hung tough on that. But what the transgender community is saying now is, ‘Wouldn’t that approach be appropriate for them as well?’ in other words, don’t do it piecemeal, include everybody and then move forward.”

“Well no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that. I think there’s an understood recognition of the political reality. So for me it’s a priority to try to get ENDA passed, which is what I will work on.”

Transgendered people suffer pervasive discrimination, transgendered people of color in particular, and it was shocking to me to see Hillary dismiss transgender discrimination altogether in her comments in her October 2000 interview with LGNY; what was especially appalling was her response to the question about supporting inclusion of gender identity and expression in ENDA and the hate crimes bill: “no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that.” Well, it should not be up to gay and lesbian gatekeepers to decide whether transgendered people should be protected from discrimination and all the more so given that the gay and lesbian ‘leaders’ Hillary talks to are wealthy and powerful members of the gay political establishment, many of them millionaires and almost all of them white and at least upper middle class.

Even when she caught onto the increasingly common and more inclusive usage of ‘LGBT’ community, as senator and later as secretary of state, Hillary almost never addressed transgender discrimination as a stand-alone issue apart from the broader LGBT umbrella.

It is worth pointing out that Hillary not only supported the discriminatory bill that became known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993 but also the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that Clinton signed into law in 1996 — the only legislation specifically institutionalizing discrimination against LGBT people ever signed into law by any president in US history. And Hillary not only supported that legislation but aggressively defended it for years with language that far exceeded what was necessary to justify DOMA purely in terms of political expediency.

Hillary only came out for same-sex marriage when she began her second campaign for president and after Obama himself had come out in favor of marriage equality, and he only did some when it became clear that he would have a hard time raising money in the LGBT community for his 2012 election campaign if his administration was still supporting DOMA.

And as late as May 2016, when Hillary was almost assured of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, she refused to respond to a questionnaire from a transgender advocacy organization; as Kevin Gosztola reported on May 24,

Trans United Fund received a call from a Clinton campaign representative a full two weeks after the campaign had committed to complete the survey, explaining that the survey was ‘too long’ and the campaign did not have the appropriate resources to complete it in a timely manner. The Sanders campaign completed the questionnaire completely and on time (Kevin Gosztola, “Transgender Group ‘Perplexed’ At Why Clinton Won’t Fill OutQuestionnaire,” Shadowproof, 5.24.16).

As Gosztola put it so trenchantly, “For a ‘frontrunner’ Democratic presidential candidate, who has cast herself as the inevitable nominee, it’s hard to comprehend how the campaign could not have found time to answer some questions important to trans people.” Hillary has been at best a follower, not a leader, when it comes to LGBT rights, and for most of her career, an opponent of LGBT rights.

Of course, there are those who not only insist upon but demand that women support Hillary simply because she’s a woman, though it is difficult to see why simply being female alone should compel anyone’s support; after all, Carly Fiorina ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 but got no support from Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright, Joan Walsh or the legion of pseudo-feminists moving in lockstep behind the Clinton machine. The truth is that most women who come to power not only in the United States but in other countries around the world do so through a masculinist discourse of power, Margaret Thatcher being a case in point; Ronald Reagan famously called her ‘the best man in England.’ I lived in London for two years during a crucial period in Thatcher’s career; I was there when she declared war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands (‘las Malvinas’), with profound consequences for the United Kingdom as well as for Argentina, and the prime minister was compared by the British and world media to Boadicea (Boudicca) and other warrior queens of yore. But Thatcher’s direction of the war was far from heroic; in fact, her order to sink the General Belgrano was arguably a war crime. Thatcher also branded Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist,’ despite his heroic efforts to challenge South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime.

One could mention many other women who have risen to the highest office in the land, including the first female prime ministers of Israel and India; Golda Meir denied the very existence of Palestinians, including Palestinian women, and Indira Gandhi forcibly sterilized poor men and women, hardly orthodox feminism.  There is an ironic parallel between Hilary and Park Geun-hye, who served as acting First Lady of the Republic from 1974-79 when her father was president, the dictator Park Chung-hee, who was assassinated in 1979, later going on to become the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea in 2012. A contemporary of Hillary’s, Park alienated large sections of the Korean public with her war on labor and her authoritarian style of rule, proving through her behavior and her policies that the first woman elected president of a democracy can be both anti-feminist and profoundly anti-progressive (Hankyoreh editorial, “Democracy sorely missing from Park’s inaugural address,” 2.26.13).

Closer to home, Carly Fiorina withdrew from the Republican contest after failing to et even one percent in the New Hampshire primary in January; but before her withdrawal, neither Gloria Steinem nor any other Hillary supporter suggested that women should support Fiorina’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination despite the fact that she is just as much a woman as Hillary Clinton; Steinem’s lack of support for Fiorina speaks as much to the inconsistency and contradiction of the ‘feminists’ supporting Hillary as to the rigor of their feminism. In fact, Gloria Steinem was rebuked by feminists across the country for declaring (with no evidence whatsoever) that the only reason young women were supporting Bernie Sanders in droves was because they were looking for dates with young ‘Bernie Bros’; if Donald Trump had said that, he would have been rightly excoriating for such a deeply misogynist assertion.

The first woman elected governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin is anything but a feminist, and she became something of a national laughingstock for her bizarre pronouncements as John McCain’s Republican running mate in 2008. But Palin is a woman, and at no time has Steinem ever proposed support for Palin’s election either as vice-president or as president; it is difficult to see how either Carly Fiorina’s election as the first woman president or Sarah Palin’s would be any less ‘historic’ than Hillary Clinton’s. Nonetheless, Madeleine Albright went so far as to say that “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women,” condemning women who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries to everlasting hellfire and damnation, a curious theology to affirm; but Albright did not support Sarah Palin for vice-president in 2008 or Carly Fiorina for president in 2016, so it is difficult to see how Albright could escape eternal torment in the flames of hell any more than any other woman who supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s record on women’s issues is appalling by any standard. Hillary she supported Barack Obama’s mass deportations of Latino immigrants, deportations so enormous that La Raza dubbed him the ‘Deporter in Chief.’ Obama deported more than twice as many undocumented immigrants as George W. Bush and by some counts, more than all previous presidents combined. Hillary did not begin to distance herself from these deportations until she began her campaign for president (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16). In a March 10 Democratic presidential debate, Hillary declared that as president she would not deport children,  prompting Betsey Woodruff to write,

Clinton struggled mightly to communicate last night that deporting children is bad… Just two months ago… Clinton defended the practice of deporting children… and less than two years before that, Clinton argued passionately that undocumented children in the United States be subject to deportation… she told Christian Amanpour that children fleeing from violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala shouldn’t be able to stay in the U.S. (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16).

Speaking of Honduras, as secretary of state, Hillary supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The coup that Hillary supported brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and has made Honduras one of the most violent countries on earth, and as secretary of state, Hillary continued to support the junta despite its persecution of women, feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents of all kinds, and she persuaded Barack Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that the resumption of such aid was a violation of US law as well as a breach of international law.  In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres , Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

But the coup in Honduras was not the only one that Hillary supported as secretary of state; she also supported the coup d’état in Egypt, which has proved to be a disaster for the country (Yahia Hamed, “Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14), plunging it into a miasma of corruption, brutal repression and despair. As in Honduras, Obama and Hillary resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup.

It was in neighboring Libya that Hillary had her biggest impact as secretary of state, but it is not a legacy that she is eager to talk about. While Republican members of Congress have focused obsessively on Benghazi, which was so obviously a disaster for which Hillary was fully responsible as secretary of state, they have missed the forest for the trees. It was the Libya intervention as a whole that was the real catastrophe, and one which Hillary is primarily responsible, pushing Obama into the ill-fated war against his better judgment. The Gaddafi regime’s attacks on innocent civilians in eastern Libya certainly provided a rationale for a no-fly zone of some sort, but Hillary’s US/NATO intervention repeated the folly of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which she aggressively supported), decapitating the regime and leaving a power vacuum which al-Qaeda and ISIS (‘Da’esh’) have filled.

Other than turning Libya into a failed state, it was in Bahrain that Hillary had perhaps the biggest impact. As secretary of state, Hillary approved the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising against the despotic Bahraini regime in 2011 in which the dictatorship even arrest, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to the wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising.

Next door, Hillary encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the full support of the Obama administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and houses and apartment buildings in Sana and elsewhere in Yemen (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16). An International Business Times investigation  revealed an astonishing conflict of interest on Hillary’s part:

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IB Times analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure… represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term. The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143% increase in complete sales to those nations over the same time  frame during the Bush administration (David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” International Business Times, 5.26.15).

Not insignificant is the fact that these regimes are all undemocratic to say the least, including Saudi Arabia, one of the most despotic regimes on earth, whose record on human rights is appalling; Saudi women cannot vote in national elections and are not even allowed to drive; and LGBT people have been executed by the regime for same-sex relations and crossdressing, according to human rights organizations. One need also note that Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights not only did not improve during Hillary’s tenure of secretary of state but actually worsened.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters claim she is the most qualified person ever to run for president, but her support for Israeli apartheid and genocide disqualifies her entirely in my view. In a letter to fellow Methodists considering support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, Hillary denounced BDS as ‘anti-Semitic’ and declared, “We must never tire in defending Israel’s legitimacy” (Maggie Habermas, “Hillary Clinton Criticizes Group Advocating Boycott Against Israel,” New York Times, 5.10.16). Michelle Goldberg aptly called Hillary’s speech at the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention on March 21 ‘a symphony of craven, delusional pandering’ (Michelle Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC Speech Was a Symphony of Craven, Delusional Pandering,” Slate, 3.21.16), in which Hillary declared, “We have to be united in fighting back against BDS,” equating BDS with ‘anti-Semitism’ (Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Read Hillary Clinton’s Speech to AIPAC,” Time, 3.21.16), this, despite the fact that the governments of Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands have officially recognized BDS as legitimate and constitutionally protected speech (Kevin Squires, “Ireland latest EU state to defend BDS,” Electronic Intifada, 5.28.16).

While Donald Trump and Ted Cruz spoke at AIPAC and mouthed the usual Zionist machine talking points as Hillary, she alone among all the presidential candidates speaking at AIPAC specifically named the BDS movement as the enemy, and a candidate who specifically and explicitly slanders the movement for justice and human rights for all in Israel/Palestine with false allegations of anti-Semitism has fully disqualified herself as a candidate for any public office, let alone that of president of the United States (Steven Klein, “America Must Tell Israel: Annexing the West Bank Is Our Red Line” (Ha’aretz, 5.8.16). While Bernie Sanders’ pronouncements on Israel fall far short of what they could and should be, it is worth noting that he is the first major party presidential candidate to publicly criticize Israel at all in the course of a presidential contest (Jason Horowitz and Maggie Haberman, “A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity,” New York Times, 5.25.16); contrast that with Hillary’s shilling for apartheid Israel, her open support for the Israeli war of genocide in Gaa in 2014 and her declaration that destroying the BDS movement as a priority of her presidency, and there is simply no rational argument for any progressive to support Hillary over Bernie.

Even beyond Hillary Clinton’s colossal failure as secretary of state and her outrageous support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is the issue of her character, and her willingness to subvert the law and lie repeatedly about her many violations of it should be troubling to anyone who thinks that the character as well as the judgment of a president matters. Hillary is the only secretary of state ever to have set up a private server secretly in the basement of her house in order to evade clear State Department rules and then attempt to mislead the public about the subterfuge. On May 25, the Inspector General of the State Department issued a report, declaring,

At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act (Julian Hattem, “Watchdog: Clinton, top aides did not comply on records policy,” The Hill, 5.25.16)

Destroying government documents is a serious crime and repeatedly lying about such behavior is an indictment of Hillary Clinton’s character, even if it were the case that every single one of the 32,000 e-mail messages that she destroyed was about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding planning, which is of course a completely implausible assertion.

(A.J. Vicens, “State Department Inspector General Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Recordkeeping Rules,” Mother Jones, 5.25.16).

As Amy Chozick put it so trenchantly in her May 25 news report for the New York Times, “Voters just don’t trust her,” noting that

After months of Mrs. Clinton’s saying she used a private email for convenience, and that she was willing to cooperate fully with investigations into her handling of official business at the State Department, the report, delivered to Congress on Wednesday, undermined both claims (Amy Chozick, “Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her,” New York Times, 5.25.16)

Far from being a partisan Republican ‘witch hunt,’ the report was issued by the inspector general of the State Department, an Obama appointee and one-time subordinate to Hillary Clinton, reporting to Congress that Hillary refused to meet with him and the State Department staff conducting the review; her campaign’s statement issued after the report was widely reported on in the media was that she was waiting to be interviewed by the FBI; but that is of course absurd on its face because the FBI has never precluded her from meeting with the inspector general’s office and one would imagine would strongly support the former secretary cooperating with it.

Hillary is now viewed rightly by an overwhelming majority of Americans as dishonest and untrustworthy (Jeff Jacoby, “In Clinton, Americans Don’t Trust,” Boston Globe, 5.31.16). Part of that perception may be because of her corruption. Since leaving office as president and secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton have cashed in on public office in a way absolutely unprecedented in American history. Hillary alone has received more than $22 million in speaking fees, while Bill Clinton “has earned more than $132 million in speaking fees, in addition to book royalties and other income. The Clintons’ most recent financial-disclosure forms show that he earned nearly $2.7 million in fees for speaking to audiences that included financial-industry firms, after she announced her candidacy,” writes Amy Davidson (Amy Davidson, “Bill Problems: As Donald Trump attacks both Clintons, it’s like 1992 all over again,” New Yorker, 6.6.16). Can you imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln raking in $132 million in speaking fees after leaving office? Or Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson?

One of the most disturbing facts about Hillary is that she is bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry. As Charlie Cray wrote in a report for Greenpeace,

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign (‘Hillary for America’) has received $147,840 in direct contributions from 65 fossil fuel lobbyists and $2,502,740 in bundled contributions by fossil fuel lobbyists. Combined, the total direct and bundled contributions from 65 oil/coal/gas lobbyists to Clinton’s campaign is at least $2,650,580 (Charlie Cray, Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ Contributions to the Clinton Campaign, Greenpeace.org, 4.22.16).

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Hillary’s dishonesty and corruption as well as anti-progressive politics and sheer incompetence, her supporters insist that we all have an obligation to support her for the Democratic nomination and if she wins that, vote for her in the general election. And this is one of the most curious aspects of the Hillary Clinton campaign: is the binary opposition being constructed by her supporters as well as those of Donald Trump, both of whom use the other as a bogeyman with which to frighten wavering voters. But the fact is, we do not have a national election for president but rather fifty state elections (plus the District of Columbia, etc.) in which voters elect representatives to the electoral college. Of all the states, New York is one of the ‘bluest,’ reliably Democratic in every election since the Reagan landslide of 1984; so the argument in favor of Hillary, already weak, looks even weaker when one looks at the bluest and reddest of the states. While it is true that Trump’s unusual if not to say bizarre candidacy may well scramble the red/blue picture that we have been used to for the last few decades, the fact is that no one thinks that 2016 will be a 49-state blow-out like 1984 or 1972. In such circumstances, the demand by Democratic partisans that progressives support an anti-progressive candidate such as Hillary Clinton becomes even less persuasive for those living and voting in the ‘safest’ Democratic and Republican states.

Polls show Hillary beating Trump by margins of 80%-20% or even greater, so the notion that my vote for Jill Stein on the Green Party line would throw the election to Trump is simply absurd. One could point out the illogic of that logic by arguing that a vote for Jill Stein is not only not a vote for Donald Trump but is in fact a vote against Donald Trump as well as Hillary Clinton. I intend to vote for Jill Stein in November not merely as a ‘protest’ vote but as an expression of my values, and the principles of progressive politics that are at the heart of my own activism and life’s work. A vote for Hillary Clinton would be nothing less than a betrayal of progressive principles and the social justice that I have been pursuing for over twenty years now.

Pauline Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012; she keynoted the Queer Korea Festival preceding the Seoul Pride Parade in 2015, the largest event in the history of the LGBT community in Korea. Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Memorial Day 2016 reflections on war

I’m watching all of the media coverage of Memorial Day parades and thinking about how superficial and simplistic it all is. War is never good, but is occasionally necessary (the Civil War, World War II); but most wars are unnecessary (the Hundred Years’ War, Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, etc., etc.). Soldiers do good things and terrible things in war; some are genuine heroes while others commit horrific war crimes; many are traumatized by war; some are courageous even fighting for a bad cause; war almost always causes massive human suffering, esp. among civilians. War is possibly the most expensive as well as the most destructive human invention of all time, but human beings aren’t unique in making war; chimpanzees make war, too, as Jane Goodall discovered, so humans aren’t unique in expressing animal aggression; we’re only unique in the destructive capacity of our war-making, which now has the possibility of actually destroying the planet we live on. I’m indirectly the product of two wars; my father served in World War II and helped liberate three Nazi concentration camps; I was born several years after the end of the Korean War, which devastated the land of my birth and profoundly shaped the circumstances that would lead to my adoption & relocation to the United States; I was also only a few years short of being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Unlike Hillary Clinton, I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and predicted it would be a disaster, which it has been. The Israeli war of genocide in Gaza in 2014 is perhaps the most cynically manipulative war of modern times. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have gotten Americans used to permanent endless war and unlimited expenditure on it, at the cost of everything else; Bush and Obama have used drones ostensibly to kill terrorists but have in fact killed far more innocent civilians; drone war is the most cowardly form of war because the loss of life is entirely absent from the war maker’s calculus. War is always bad, but it’s important to avoid binary oppositions that are false dichotomies when thinking about war. We need more effective mechanisms to hold governments and leaders accountable for war crimes. We also need a more nuanced & sophisticated perspective on war. We need to take the opportunity to remember heroes, villains and victims alike…

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“Pinkwashing is an explicit strategy taken up in recent years by the government of Israel to portray Israel as a leader in gay rights and a gay tourism destination to improve its human rights image while deflecting attention away from the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Through a campaign called ‘Brand Israel,’ Israel has tried to change its public image, promoting itself as a ‘modern democracy’ – and projecting a ‘LGBT-friendly’ image is just one part of this,” wrote Sarah Schulman in 2011 (“A documentary guide to ‘Brand Israel’ and the art of pinkwashing “Mondoweiss.net, 11.30.11). Pinkwashers make a number of absurd assertions; these are among the the key claims:

1) Palestinian society is monolithically homophobic and transphobic. Pinkwashers never provide any evidence for this and in fact make false claims such as the assertion that homosexuality is illegal in the West Bank and prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority.

2) Israel is a gay paradise. Maybe for wealthy Jewish gay men in Tel Aviv, but Jewish lesbians, bisexuals, trans people and Mizrahi (Sephardi Jews of Arab origin) have very different experiences even in Tel Aviv; trans people in particular often face police harassment and brutality in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Outside of Tel Aviv and Haifa, attitudes towards LGBT people are often far from fully accepting. Israel also does not recognize same-sex marriage.

3) Palestinians find refuge from persecution in Israel. Zionist pinkwashers promote the image of queer Palestinians fleeing the West Bank to find refuge in gay bars in Tel Aviv, but in fact, Israel does not recognize or accept non-Jewish asylum seekers for political asylum, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact, the Israeli authorities often blackmail queer Palestinians into becoming collaborators, which creates a very dangerous and impossible situation for them. If LGBT people outside of Palestine actually want to help queer Palestinians, they can best do so by supporting LGBT Palestinian organizations including al-Qaws, Aswat (the Palestinian lesbian and bisexual women’s and trans organization based in Haifa) and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PQBDS).

4) Comparing Israel’s record on LGBT rights to Palestinian society helps queer Palestinians. When everyone from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to A Wider Bridge harps on Israel’s supposedly sterling record on LGBT issues actually makes things worse for queer Palestinians by pitting LGBT rights against Palestinian rights. What actually helps Palestinians is LGBT support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is the best way queer people can show support for queer Palestinians, along with direct support for their organizations.

5) Israel’s record on LGBT rights justifies the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Many non-Muslim, non-Arab countries in the world have terrible records on LGBT rights, including Russia, Hungary, Nigeria, Jamaica; no one suggests that they deserve to be subjected to foreign military occupation. Would anyone support or even propose a German invasion and occupation of Russia simply because Germany has a much better record on LGBT rights than Russia? No amount of progress of LGBT rights in Israel can possibly justify the illegal and increasingly brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the incremental genocide being pursued against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip all of which the United States subsidizes with more than $3 billion in US aid to the Israeli government a year. LGBT organizations based in Israel, Europe and especially the United States play a crucial role in advancing the discourse of pinkwashing, often directly coordinating with the Israeli government and sometimes funded directly by the Israeli government.

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Hillary Clinton is not my abuela
by Pauline Park

“7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela” has provoked overwhelmingly negative reactions from Latinos and Latinos. Within hours of the posting of the absurd piece of #Hispandering on HillaryClinton.com on Dec. 21, outraged Latinas took to Twitter to denounce Hillary with the hashtags #NotMyAbuela and #NotMiAbuela, both ‘trending’ on Twitter throughout Dec. 22 and 23.

I’d like to offer my own response by talking about my own grandmother, who was a source of unconditional love throughout my childhood and youth and until her death at the age of 99. There are so many ways in which my grandmother was different from Hillary, but I’ll just cite seven, in keeping with her #Hispandering piece:

1) My grandmother grew up without a mother, having lost her mother when she was just a baby. Hillary Clinton grew up with both parents.

2) My grandmother she grew up in poverty in rural Wisconsin, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who grew up surrounding by wealth and privilege in the all-white upper-middle-class Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. She went out into the field as a child, pitching hay and working the farm with her widower father. Hillary didn’t live on subsistence agriculture at any time in her life and never worked as a field hand on a small, struggling family farm; and she’s been a multi-millionaire for years now, controlling a foundation with assets in the billions. My grandmother died with no assets other than the radio she used to listen to Milwaukee Brewers baseball games (she was a huge fan of the great African American baseball player, Hank Aaron), her Bible, and a few pieces of costume jewelry. My grandmother never lived in the White House, though she did live in my parents’ house for many years, a small house with white aluminum siding and only one bathroom for six people.

3) My grandmother was the daughter of German immigrants from the part of Prussia that is now in Poland, unlike Hillary, who was born to an English-speaking WASP family of wealth and privilege; unlike Hillary, my grandmother did not speak English as her first language. Hillary went to Wellesley College — one of the elite Seven Sisters women’s colleges — and then Yale law school, one of the two or three top law schools in the country. My grandmother never had the opportunity to pursue formal education after high school, though she did volunteer to teach Native American schoolchildren on a nearby reservation in northern Wisconsin.

4) My grandmother never had any power over anyone other than her five children; as secretary of state, Hillary had power over the lives of many, directing US foreign policy for the first term of the Obama administration; Hillary may well be elected president of the United States, which would make her the most powerful person on earth. My grandmother died long before the Internet age, so she never had an e-mail account and unlike Hillary, never had a secret e-mail server in the basement of her mansion in Chappaqua from which she conducted State Department business in direct contravention of the rules and of all standards of ethics in government. My grandmother also did not approve the imprisonment, torture, and murder of thousands of pro-democracy activists in Bahrain and even of the doctors and nurses who attended to the wounded in hospital after the brutal crackdown by the despotic monarchical regime in Bahrain. Nor did my grandmother publicly approve of the Israeli murder of Furgan Dogan in the act of piracy committed by the Israeli military against the Mavi Marmara in international waters. Nor did my grandmother approve of the secret mass surveillance of US citizens, Europeans and others by the National Security Administration (NSA). Nor did my grandmother approve of the unprecedented deportation of undocumented immigrants by the Obama administration, or Obama’s killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan by drone strikes — including the killing of Momina Bibi, a 67-year-old midwife and grandmother in rural Pakistan. My grandmother never approved of the murder of a grandmother.

5) My grandmother made mistakes but learned from them, unlike Hillary; my aunt once made a comment to me (I was an adult by this point) to that effect, saying that my grandmother had really mellowed and was quite a different grandmother than she was a mother; whether or not she ever acknowledged the mistakes she’d made with her children, my grandmother dropped the stern German matriarch role to become a loving, nurturing grandmother to all of her grandchildren; given her Christian fundamentalist background, she became quite astonishingly non-judgmental in her old age.

6) My grandmother died in poverty, being consigned by my aunts to a nursing home in the last decade of her life, having spent down all of her limited assets, living on Social Security and Medicaid. Hillary is a multimillionaire and she continues to control a foundation with billions of dollars in assets.

7) Most important of all, my grandmother was not a self-interested, grasping, power-hungry politician like Hillary who selfishly pursues power at all costs and routinely  lies about her misdeeds. Unlike Hillary, my grandmother was not a war criminal. Though Hillary does have one thing in common with my grandmother — like her, Hillary is a Republican~!

#NotMyAbuela #NotMiAbuela #NotMyGrandmother

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