Anti-Israel protesters took the stage unannounced at Creating Change, an LGBTQ conference that was the site of a raucous anti-Israel protest in 2016. Holding Palestinian flags, activists spend 13 uninterrupted minutes on stage.
At the opening of this year's conference, organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force, a group of activists holding Palestinian flags took the stage and led a 13-minute protest for Palestinian liberation and against Zionism. The speakers were not interrupted or asked to leave by the event organizers.
JTA obtained video of the event, at which speakers led chants of "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" and "From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go."
The conference took place January 23-27 in Detroit.
The first speaker of the protest, who did not give their name, charged that the conference did not include pro-Palestinian programming because it could upset donors. The speaker invoked Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat who is the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress.
"In a state that elected the first Palestinian woman to the U.S. Congress, there is still a ban on Palestine at Creating Change, because the Task Force is afraid that people are going to come here to seek their full liberation, and donors might get mad," the speaker said. "Right now, our content is being censored, our liberation is being silenced and our voices are being shut down because the Task Force is too cowardly to have a conversation on one of the leading social justice issues of our time: Palestinian freedom."
The second speaker of the protest, Mina Aria, called on the Task Force to fight "pinkwashing, Zionism, Islamophobia and colonial violence."
The protest this year recalled a similar one at the same conference in 2016, when pro-Palestinian activists tried to disrupt a Shabbat service hosted by A Wider Bridge, a pro-Israel LGBTQ group that also advocates for LGBTQ rights within Israel. The protesters chanted "Hey hey, ho ho, pinkwashing has got to go."
Pinkwashing is a term that connotes what critics see as Israel's covering up of human rights abuses by trumpeting its LGBTQ-friendly policies.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/fresh-anti-israel-protest-roils-lgbtq-conference/
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