British columnist accuses pro-Israel voices of suppressing Palestinian identity.
By Adam Levick, CAMERA UK
Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi recently penned a piece celebrating a new Netflix special featuring Palestinian-American comic Mo Amer, a show she praises as both funny and “groundbreaking” for its inclusion of a Palestinian Arab.
Mahdawi, however, ignores the fact that last year, Netflix announced a new Palestinian collection, titled “Palestinian Stories,” which consists of 32 award-winning films that are either directed by Palestinian filmmakers or tell Palestinian stories.
But Mahdawi devotes most of her column (“For anyone with Palestinian roots like me, Netflix’s sitcom Mo is groundbreaking TV”, Aug. 30) to complaining about what she characterizes as a dearth of positive depictions of Palestinians in popular culture and the media. For instance, she writes:
“You can’t even say the P-word without it causing problems: an anchor on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation once had to apologize for using the word Palestine (instead of ‘Palestinian territories’), for God’s sake.”
The CBC of course apologized although Palestine is NOT a country. That’s an uncontroversial fact.
Mahdawi then further complained about the “erasure” of Palestinians by certain “voices”.
“Being Palestinian means constantly being told you don’t exist or being accused by certain pro-Israel voices of being antisemitic simply because you assert that you do exist.”
This is a smear, plain and simple. Mahdawi doesn’t provide even one example of “pro-Israel” voices accusing Palestinians of antisemitism for asserting that they exist.
A competent Guardian editor would have called her out on this baseless accusation – one she used in a previous column – which is consistent with the Corbynista narrative that accusations of antisemitism are cynically used by Jews and others in order to silence Palestinians.
In fact, the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the Labour Party denounced as racist a version of that very tactic used by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone.
Finally, someone should remind the intrepid columnist that she works at a global media company called the Guardian, arguably the MSM’s English language home of pro-Palestinian commentary and news, where she has a forum to publish her views.
Mahdawi isn’t being silenced, neither by “pro-Israel’ voices nor anyone else.