New York's LGBT Community Center Caves to 'Queers Against Israeli Apartheid'

Update from my report in March: "Queers for Palestine Party to End Apartheid!"

From the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, "STATEMENT ON DECISION TO ALLOW SPACE USE BY OUTSIDE QUEER IDENTIFIED GROUP."

And from the anti-Israel side, Queers for an Open LGBT Center, "QUEER VICTORY! Today's action is still on!" And The Cahokian, "Rightwinger now calls NYC Gay Center 'an anti-Israeli nest'."

But see Phyllis Chesler, at FrontPage Mag, "NYC Queers for Jihad":

Last Friday, May 26, 2011, “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” exercised their hard-won right to hold their meetings at New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center. Their right to hate and to be grossly misinformed was, as usual, presented as a free speech right and as yet another victim-driven Intifada (uprising).

This meeting followed the long campaign to vilify City University Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for daring to dissent from Tony Kushner’s anti-Israel views; Kushner, who happens to be both gay and Jewish, is nevertheless being given an honorary doctorate this week. These two events are intimately connected to each other and have been further empowered by President Obama’s shameful and dangerous actions towards the Jewish State.

We have all seen black and white footage of people dancing the night away, even as the crematoria or the machetes did their deadly work somewhere off camera. We understand that people elsewhere continue eating, having babies, buying first homes, going on vacations, even as genocidal wars rage on camera, even as tornadoes, nuclear plant meltdowns, and savage flash floods destroy whole communities elsewhere, also on camera.

Right now, in my little neck of the planet, Manhattan, the weather has turned gloriously sunny and summery; people are enjoying this respite from the unending rains and freezing winter weather. As people amble through leafy city streets, the world is preparing to slaughter the Jews again. As if the Muslim Brotherhood and the Gama’a al-Islamiyya in Egypt were not enough, a new swastika-flying Nazi party has emerged in Egypt—Egypt, Israel’s friendly neighbor; Egypt, which on Saturday opened the Rafah crossing to admit even more weapons and terrorist fighters into Gaza in the unending Arab war against the Jews; Egypt, where many are demanding an end to the cold peace treaty with Israel.

Some say that President Obama might be touring Europe in order to gain European allies to help him pressure Israel into accepting the “pre-1967” Auschwitz borders.

Here at home in America, we continue to enjoy Gazan Intifadas on our campuses. For example, the people are getting ready to party in the streets when, on June 3, 2011, City University of New York gives playwright Tony Kushner his honorary doctorate. In my view, they are feting Kushner, not so much for his art but rather for his celebrity and for his obsessively harsh views of Israel. The playwright has not led any campaigns against genocide in Sudan or against real gender and religious apartheid in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Like the “Queers Against Apartheid,” Kushner also scapegoats Israel for the crimes of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The LGBT “queers” had threatened to storm or “surge” into the Center if they did not receive official approval for their group meeting.

“Surging” and “storming,” Arab street mob behavior, is a vision and a tactic that has been recommended by none other than journalist Tom Friedman, long adopted by international “Free Gaza” activists; it reminds me of Nazi Brownshirt behavior. Think Kristallnacht. Civilians and men in uniform breaking Jewish shop windows, breaking Jewish bones, burning Jewish books, eventually burning millions of living Jews.

But, you must understand: The German Nazis felt “victimized.” They had lost World War I and were humiliated because they should have been triumphant; they had also been unfairly economically penalized. Kushner and his supporters claim that the genuine dissent of one CUNY trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, somehow “victimized” their views because their views are supposed to triumph, not Wiesenfeld’s. His pro-Israel view is not supposed to exist and, in their view, is not protected by academic or free speech rights. Only the anti-Israel views deserve such protection.

One thousand six hundred and eighty people signed a petition to the Center on behalf of “Queers for Palestine.” Like Tony Kushner and his CUNY supporters, the aggressors first claim victimhood and protest the denial of their free speech rights; then, they “surge” forward as a mob (on petitions, on the Internet, on the streets, on other battlefields), to either murder Jews or to honor those Jews who hate Israel, and to silence gay Jews who are pro-Israel ...

More at the post, and then:

Now, in the light of what has happened, Lucas, a major financial supporter of the center, has withdrawn from it. His letter is brief, dignified, and to the point. I will give him the closing words. He writes:

Dear supporters of the state of Israel-

I just learned that tonight the Gay Center of NYC will be hosting the first meeting of the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. This organization stands for boycotts, divestments and sanctions of the Jewish state. In other words, it stands for boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Jewish men, women, children, and Holocaust survivors living in Israel.

I am a proud gay man and a proud Jewish man, but I have made my choice. I ask you to boycott, divest and sanction the LGBT Center of NYC. Today Jewish people in Israel are in incomparably greater danger than the gay people in America will ever be. This is a difficult choice and I am asking you to make the same choice.

Alienate yourself from NYC LGBT Center. Stand with Israel, stand with Israeli Jews, and defend their right to exist, their right to defend themselves, not to let the world exterminate them again.

And even if all the gay groups will condemn this letter, I will not change my mind.

Michael Lucas