University of Pennsylvania Hosts Antisemitism Festival

The Palestine Writes Literature Festival will include a number of speakers whose unsavory histories deserve to be better known, and some that are well known, such as Roger Waters. Waters has released a video saying he has been banned from UPenn’s campus, but UPenn president Liz Magill has reportedly declined to bar Waters from attending, so it appears at this point that Waters is just grandstanding. More on this witches’ coven can be found here: “UPenn to host slew of ‘antisemitic’ speakers at Palestine Writes literature festival,” by Sam Halpern, Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2023:

The Palestine Writes Literature Festival, to be hosted at the University of Pennsylvania between the 22nd and 24th of September, is slated to feature a number of speakers who have made antisemitic remarks.

On its website, Palestine Writes describes itself as “the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.”

The festival will largely be conducted in person across multiple facilities on the UPenn campus. Speakers to feature at the Palestine Writes festival.

Among the speakers to be featured at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival are individuals who have made anti-Jewish statements or support terrorist organizations or activity against Israel and Jews.

Among these individuals is British musician Roger Waters, the former frontman of the rock band, Pink Floyd.

Waters has made comments such as suggesting that more artists don’t oppose Israel because “the Jewish lobby is extraordinarily powerful” in the US. The artist has also held concerts that have been condemned as antisemitic in the past. One 2013 Waters concert featured a large, inflatable pig with a Star of David on it.

And not only in 2013, but in many of his concerts since, Waters has had a large inflatable pig with a Star of David as a floating accompaniment to his caterwauling.

In another concert in 2023, Waters wore a uniform resembling that of a Nazi SS officer and compared Anne Frank to Shireen Abu Akleh.

Yes, what fun for Roger to dress up as an SS officer, with the long leather coat and cap, stomping about on stage in the very uniform that used to terrify Jews (and Resistance fighters) all over Europe. Waters has a thing about Nazis — they fascinate him — but of course he will be quick to assure you that he hasn’t a pro-Nazi bone in his body. Yet that continued fascination is just as disturbing as someone who tells you he collects Nazi memorabilia and has it on display in his home. No wonder that officials in several German cities tried to have Waters’ scheduled concerts cancelled; they understood perfectly well that he was not mocking, but sympathetically identifying with, the Nazis whom they utterly reject. There was particular fury over Waters’ obvious attempt to equate the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist shot by mistake by an Israeli soldier, with that of the 14-year-old Dutch girl, Anne Frank, deliberately murdered by the Nazis at Bergen-Belsen.

Another speaker to appear at the UPenn Palestine Writes festival is former CNN commentator, Marc Lamont Hill, who praised the terrorist who attempted to bomb the Zion Cinema in downtown Jerusalem in October 1967.

Marc Lamont Hill was widely criticized for his speech at the UN denouncing Jews. At the time he gave that speech he was teaching at Temple University, whose Board of Trustees issued a statement expressing its “disappointment, displeasure, and disagreement with Professor Hill’s comments” and “reaffirm[ing] in the strongest possible terms the President’s condemnation of all antisemitic, racist or incendiary language, hate speech, calls to violence, or the disparagement of any person or persons based on religion, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, or identity.”

Hill has a longstanding history of anti-Israel animus. On June 7, 2016, he tweeted: “Israel is very much, by definition, an apartheid state.” An avid supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, he criticized New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s initiative to stop boycotts of Israel, and simplistically defended the movement by insisting that it does not seek Israel’s destruction. Never mind that Hill once called for a state of Palestine from “the river to the sea,” which can only mean the destruction of the Jewish state. When Hill calls for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” that is another way of saying that Israel should be eliminated, and replaced by the Muslim Arab state of “Palestine.” The Jews will just have to go. Oh where? Back to wherever they came from. But the Jews “came from” the Land of Israel some 3500 years ago. Don’t try to fool Professor Marc Lamont Hill with such fake history. He wasn’t born yesterday, you know.

When Hill called Israel “an apartheid state,” he failed to provide any examples of its “apartheid” policy. And in the seven years since, he has not produced a single example of that “apartheid.” For there are none. In Israel, Arabs sit on the Supreme Court, serve in the Knesset, go abroad as ambassadors. The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs work in the same factories and offices, play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras, act in the same films, are treated in the same hospitals by both Jewish and Arab medical personnel, attend the same classes in the same universities. Jews and Arabs own restaurants and start high-tech businesses together. The only difference in their treatment is that Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the military. I doubt that Marc Lamont Hill knows any of this, or if he did, that it would make any difference. About Israel’s wickedness, his mind is made up. Don’t confuse him with facts.

Hill, who is quite active on social media, says that “Blaming the Palestinian Authority for violence in the region is dishonest and unproductive,” claiming that Jerusalem is occupied. Hill advocates the “return” of third- and fourth-generation descendants of Palestinian Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and 1967 — a position that could lead to the demographic destruction of the State of Israel.

Hill is apparently unaware of the many claims made by the PA of being responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians, especially “settlers.” The PA doesn’t want to appear any less of a “resister” to Israeli oppression than Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Nor does Hill know about the PA’s “Pay-For-Slay” program, which provides generous lifetime payments to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists who were killed while carrying out their attacks. “Pay-For-Slay” both rewards past, and incentivizes future terrorism.

In a remarkable denial of accepted facts, he denies that Islam or religion is a major issue between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

Now a Presidential Professor of Urban Education at CUNY, as well as a journalist with Al Jazeera, Marc Lamont Hill apparently has not noticed that the many imams at Al-Aqsa and at other mosques in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, who incessantly preach hatred of Jews, rely solely on passages taken from the Qur’an and hadith.

Hill hasn’t read the Hamas Charter, steeped as it is in the texts and teachings of Islam. He’s failed to hear the cries of “jihad” from members of Hamas, PIJ, and the PFLP at their rallies and marches. He is unaware of the antisemitic passages, based on Islamic teachings, found ithroughout the Palestinian schoolbooks. He in unaware that it is the Qur’an that teaches the Palestinians, as it does all Muslims, that they are the “best of peoples,” while non-Muslims, with the Jews of Israel given pride of place as the “worst enemies of Islam,” are “the most vile of created beings.” The religion of Islam is at the very heart of the endless Palestinian war — the jihad — waged against Israel.

During a CNN appearance on August 4, 2014, Hill complained that Israel’s defensive Iron Dome weapon “takes away Hamas’s military leverage” over Israel.

How intolerable it is, Marc Lamont insists, for Israeli weapons scientists to have found a way to successfully defend Israeli civilians against rocket attacks by Hamas. The Iron Dome anti-missile defense system now manages to intercept 96% of the rockets launched against Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas from Gaza. How unfair of those diabolically clever Jews to figure out a way to take away Hamas’ “military leverage.”

Why is Marc Lamont Hill so obsessed with “Palestine”? Or is it really that he is obsessed with Jews, and the most acceptable way to channel one’s antisemitism nowadays is by attacking the Jewish state?

Marc Lamont Hill, the self-described “anthropologist of education,” formerly a Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple, now both a journalist for Al Jazeera and, to cap it all, a Presidential Professor of Urban Education at CUNY, described in a 2023 report as “the most systemically antisemitic university in the United States,” will of course be the star attraction at the Palestine Writes Festival.

Hill is surely next in line to become, after Cornel West retires, the World’s Greatest Authority. No wonder he’ll be part of a star line-up, a veritable Murderers’ Row of antisemites who will take the stage at the Palestine Writes festival to be held at the University of Pennsylvania.

Along with Roger Waters — will he wear his keffiyeh, or his SS uniform? — and Marc Lamont Hill, other speakers at the festival will include Wisam Rafeedie, who praised the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre in which 26 civilians, including 17 Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims, one Canadian, and eight Israelis, were killed, and 80 people wounded.

Another participant will be Salman Abusita, who, in an article published just this June, anticipated Mahmoud Abbas’ recent, widely-denounced speech about the Holocaust and Hitler. Abusita claimed that Jews were hated in Europe not because of “antisemitism,” but because of their role in the destruction of the economy in some countries — a charge similar to Abbas’ claim that Hitler hated Jews because of the “social role” in dealing with “money and usury.”

Another participant will be Nadia Tannous, the General Coordinator of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Here is how the rebarbative Ms. Tannous describes that movement: “PYM is a transnational, independent, grassroots movement of young Palestinians in Palestine and in exile worldwide as a result of the ongoing Zionist colonization and occupation of our homeland. Their belonging to Palestine and their aspirations for justice and liberation motivate them to assume an active role as a young generation in their national struggle for the liberation of our homeland and people. Irrespective of their different political, cultural and social backgrounds, they strive to revive a tradition of pluralistic commitment toward their cause to ensure a better future, characterized by freedom and justice on a social and political level, for Themselves and subsequent generations.” “Pluralism”? In a Muslim polity? When has there ever been such pluralism?

The University of Pennsylvania was snookered into allowing this noxious event to take place on its campus. Not all of its alumni will be delighted, and they have ways to make their unhappiness known In a few months, just ask the university’s Development Office how things are going.