The Birmingham Holocaust Education Center must apologize to Angela Davis

This is major! You don’t mess with the likes of Professor Angela Davis lightly. I am not asking here only for the reinstatement of her award. I know that she and her local Alabama supporters will do that better than I ever can. What I find unbelievable is that the party that objected to conferring the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award on her is no other than The Holocaust Education Center in the city of Birmingham. How more completely can a group abandon its moral responsibility or misunderstand it?! What I am compelled to do is to shout out my anger and disgust at the groups unbecoming behavior. I want the group to apologize for its ill-considered misstep.

The ethics of educating the world about the Holocaust obligates, prima facie, respecting the rights of all human beings, especially the rights of the downtrodden and the subjugated minorities who are targeted for displacement and genocide. Needless to say, the Holocaust’s logic of “never again” is universal and not the property of any specific ethnicity. It is not any group’s proprietary slogan. I hereby declare to the offending group that we, the Palestinian common folk, share in the rebellious outrage of “never again” as much as any other downtrodden human group. It is yours, ours and the Rohingyas’ equally. From where I stand, we own and must defend its purity for us and for you. I hereby call you out for overstepping your bounds as the self-assigned guardian of the memory and of educating the world about the lessons of the Holocaust. You owe us as much as we owe you: If we do not rise and defend ourselves together, we are destined to suffer separately and to inflict accusations, insults and misery at each other.

You must apologize to Professor Angela Davis and call for the reinstatement of her award. And let me see you stand up and demand from Israel to stop its crimes against humanity in Gaza. That should be your self-assigned duty as well.

When two million people, regardless of skin color, nationality or religion, are facing slow and systematic extermination as the Palestinians in Gaza are, logic dictates that respecting the memory of the Holocaust requires you to side with their right to life. As to all the rest of humanity, the Rev. Martin Luther King’s words come to mind: “In the end, what will hurt us the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” That is doubly true when those silent friends finally open their mouth and turn out to support the oppressor.

“Hamas!” I can hear you shouting. It is the willful termination of a human life that is at stake again and again here. Civilized humans who take a stand against capital punishment don’t make their objection conditional on the positive thoughts of the condemned. It is the barbarity of the act of execution that is objectionable, regardless of the outrage of the thoughts and actions of which the condemned are accused. In Gaza less than 3% of water resources are fit for human consumption and food supplies are allowed to trickle in at a rate calculated to approximate but to be no higher than human survival requirements. Even Gaza’s zoo-keeper has deported his wild animals because conditions are no longer suitable for them. Israeli state-licensed arms dealers advertise their deadly wares with the promotional slogan of “field-tested in Gaza.” Gazan mothers and fathers of terminally ill children at the border are forced to bargain with their honor and to turn informers on relatives and neighbors to access facilities that may save their children’s lives. Israeli snipers shoot to kill clearly identified medical personnel and target body parts of demonstrating civilian youth selectively to cause specific life-long disabilities.

When all of that has becomes daily routine, it is your duty as much as it is mine to condemn such systematic atrocities, and not to disparage me and my supporter, Angela Davis, for doing it.

Show the world the courage of your convictions as the self-assigned guardian of the memory of the Holocaust. Let me see you sidestep the Zionists’ minefield of misappropriations. Give Professor Angela Davis the apology you owe her. Pick up the damned phone right now!

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RE: “The Birmingham Holocaust Education Center must apologize to Angela Davis”

A COUPLE OF RELATED ARTICLES:

Backlash Grows After Civil Rights Institute Reneges on Angela Davis Honor
LINK – https://www.theroot.com/backlash-grows-after-civil-rights-institute-reneges-on-1831646405

Angela Davis alternative event, organized by broad coalition, will be ‘grassroots,’ open to public
LINK – https://www.al.com/news/2019/01/angela-davis-alternative-event-organized-by-broad-coalition-will-be-grassroots-open-to-public.html

“Israeli snipers shoot to kill clearly identified medical personnel and target body parts of demonstrating civilian youth selectively to cause specific life-long disabilities.

When all of that has becomes daily routine, it is your duty as much as it is mine to condemn such systematic atrocities, and not to disparage me and my supporter, Angela Davis, for doing it”

Also I wonder could the stalwarts of anti-anti-semitism explain why

the world wide Holocaust education trusts are touting Paul Kagame a current genocidaire?

why charges of anti-semitism have historically been the tip of the spear of white backlash ( along with charges of misogyny and homophobia and backwardness) against anti-racists?

if they can spare a moment from policing the threat black of women talking ( all this emerged because liberal Zionists now find they no longer have a welcome on the anti-racist left because of the traction gained by patient Palestinian argument and engagement and because LZs are raving racists lost in self aggrandising delusions and dedicated supporters of the scourge of American imperialism)

well that’s what occurs to me in my fishbowl with my ideological blinders on drawn tight and while i have no redeeming features i am not a racist because that shit is idiotic as are these anti-semitism moral panics, starting to backfire at long last. We get it, just don’t mention the Zionism and let’s hope for ‘peace’…non-violence…it is a sad sad truism people don’t want to look at themselves critically but it is the only way to cleanse yourself still probably people not going to do it…samsara after all.

HATIM KANAANEH- ”Needless to say, the Holocaust’s logic of “never again” is universal….”

Surely you jest. The essence of Zionism is the rejection of the universal and the (successful) restoration and maintenance of Jewish peoplehood. And neo-Zionism informs the Mondo narrative.

Angela Davis : ” I think this ideological effort to equate anti-Semitism with much-needed critiques of the policies and practices of the state of Israel and the expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people should be revealed for what it is. And I am hoping that we will hear more Jewish people speaking out. I know that Jewish Voice for Peace has done an amazing job over the last period, and I’ve done work with JVP. But I think this is a period when, as Jews were the first white people to step up during the civil rights era, to speak out against racism, I think that we need to engage in the kind of conversation that will reveal the true meaning of anti-Semitism and help us to extricate ourselves from this McCarthyite effort to equate boycott strategies and solidarity strategies with anti-Semitism.

I should say that I know that previous recipients of the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award are very angry about what has happened. I received a call from Danny Glover, I received a call from Harry Belafonte, both of whom indicated that they will be contacting the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in protest.

I think these protests have to involve serious conversations about the meaning of anti-Semitism and how to disarticulate charges of anti-Semitism from civil rights and human rights strategies that are designed to protect the people of Palestine”

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/11/exclusive_angela_davis_speaks_out_on

As regards Kagame and the “Rwandan Genocide” there have been some developments:

The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication
by Christopher Black
I first wrote this in 2005 and it was published by Sanders Research Associates in the UK. Since then the information in it has been deliberately ignored by writers in Canada and the US (apart from David Peterson and Ed Herman who supported me in my fight with the New York Times to get the truth out, and Mick Collins) who write on the subject and to whom I have sent this information and of course by the major media. Even those willing to criticise Dallaire on some level seem to want to protect him on this. I have the copy of the fabricated fax as sent into the UN for anyone to see and I have the transcripts of the cross-examination of the Belgian Army Colonel Claeys during which it was shown to be a forgery by the British Army. Why writers and media continue to ignore the facts they will have to explain. But such, shall we say, negligence seems to be normal these days. Of course since this article was written, the trial in which we proved the fax to be a forgery went on for several more years and this fax was never again mentioned by the Prosecution either during the case or in their arguments and General Ndindiliyimana, the man I was defending was acquitted on all charges.
December 1, 2005

https://off-guardian.org/2019/01/11/the-dallaire-genocide-fax-a-fabrication/