In Could 2013 I resigned from PEN America over the appointment of former State Division official Suzanne Nossel. A decade later, PEN America has develop into a propaganda arm of the state.
PEN America, as soon as an vital defender of rights for writers, editors and artists, has, below the route of former State Division official Suzanne Nossel, deserted its mission, destroyed its credibility and provoked a revolt amongst its members.
Its refusal to sentence the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s focused killings of writers, teachers and journalists, has seen quite a few writers withdraw from the annual PEN World Voices Competition in New York and Los Angeles, scheduled for April and Could. PEN America has not solely didn’t denouce the genocide however supplies platforms to Israelis who use racist and dehumanizing language to explain Palestinians. It blacklists those that assist the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions motion. PEN America features as a propaganda arm for the Biden administration and Ukrainian authorities — together with the banning of Russian writers from a PEN occasion final Could. It has repeated false accusations in opposition to Julian Assange and refused to categorise him as a journalist.
PEN America peddles agitprop. It’s our model of the Union of Soviet Writers. The human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our personal, and people of our allies, are ignored or whitewashed. Writers and editors, reminiscent of Assange, who expose the lies and crimes of the state, are discredited, whereas propagandists for U.S. imperialism and the apartheid state Israel – even because it carries out genocide – are fêted.
Angela Flournoy and Kathleen Alcott canceled their participation in PEN’s “New 12 months, New Books” occasion in January due to PEN’s invitation to Mayim Bialik who Flournoy defined engages in “dehumanizing anti-Palestinian propaganda and rallying her 5 million followers to the reason for the Israeli army.” On the Bialik occasion in Los Angeles in February, Palestinian-American author Randa Jarrar was forcibly eliminated from the room for protesting.
Alcott wrote in an e mail to PEN America “..if I squint I can discover maybe two mentions [on PEN America’s twitter feed] of the phrase Palestine, one in reference to an op-ed in Newsweek which inspires a very impotent and ahistorical neutrality (in addition to, arguably, some internalized Islamophobia).”
Over 600 writers, together with Roxane Homosexual and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, signed an open letter final month, demanding that “PEN … take an precise stand in opposition to an precise genocide.”
PEN America is a sock puppet of the U.S. and Israel. Nossel accepted funding from the Israeli authorities — which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Financial institution and assassinates them and their households in Gaza — for the literary group’s annual World Voices pageant in New York. This funding solely stopped in 2017 when greater than 250 writers, poets and publishers demanded an finish to the group’s partnership with the Israeli authorities. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
PEN America, like different human rights organizations, has been hijacked by apparatchiks like Nossel and their company backers, surrendering its independence and integrity.
The group’s tepid makes an attempt to deal with the revolt — it issued a response stuffed with banalities reminiscent of expressing “our sorrow and anguish on the struggling endured by so many Palestinian civilians in Gaza” — is additional proof of its ethical vacuity.
Nossel repeats slanderous tropes used to discredit Assange, the WikiLeaks writer who faces extradition to america to doubtlessly serve a 175-year sentence below the Espionage Act.
“Whether or not Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out right here,” Nossel has stated.
Nossel, an legal professional, served as a member of the State Division job pressure shaped to cope with the WikiLeaks publications. She is effectively conscious that the difficulty of whether or not Assange is a journalist is just not immaterial. It’s essential. The U.S. effort to extradite Assange is constructed round denying him the standing of a writer or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the standing of a press publication. If he’s extradited and located responsible, the precedent will criminalize any journalist that possesses or publishes categorised materials.
Nossel parrots the U.S. authorities’s fees in opposition to Assange, together with that he endangered lives by not redacting paperwork, hacked right into a authorities laptop and meddled within the 2016 elections — fees which might be false. PEN America, below her route, despatched out information briefs with headlines reminiscent of: “Safety Experiences Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy right into a Command Put up for Election Meddling.”
PEN America, after heavy stress, ultimately stated Assange shouldn’t be extradited. Advocating for his extradition was tough after The New York Occasions, The Washington Put up, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País printed a joint assertion demanding fees in opposition to Assange be dropped. PEN facilities world wide have additionally denounced the extradition proceedings. Nossel, nonetheless, was lengthy a part of Assange’s lynch mob.
Nossel stated on the Brian Lehrer Present on WNYC in Could 2019 that Assange went “past what a mainstream information outlet would do.” She blasted WikiLeaks’ publications as “large and indiscriminate” and blamed Assange for not redacting names.
Assange, in reality, contacted the State Division to warn them that the whole unredacted cables had been on the verge of being printed by a 3rd occasion, urged the State Division to take motion and provided to help them in doing so. It was the U.S. authorities which finally determined to do nothing.
PEN America was as soon as run by writers devoted to defending these persecuted across the globe — no matter which authorities carried out the persecuting. I knew a few of these writers, together with Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Russell Banks. They had been fierce critics of U.S. militarism, champions of freedom of expression and fiery advocates for the persecuted and the oppressed.
Nossel stands for none of those beliefs. She is a former company lawyer, listed as a “contributor” to the Federalist Society, who labored for McKinsey & Firm and as vice chairman of U.S. enterprise improvement for Bertelsmann. Her disastrous one 12 months tenure because the Govt Director of Amnesty Worldwide noticed her flip the human rights group right into a cheerleader for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Could 2012, when NATO held its “Summit Assembly” in Chicago, she sponsored a “Shadow Summit” and dotted town with bus cease billboards studying “NATO, Preserve the Progress Going. Human Rights for Ladies and Women in Afghanistan.” That was apparently an excessive amount of, even for Amnesty Worldwide, and she or he was reportedly pushed out.
Nossel at PEN America, nonetheless, has efficiently hollowed out the group and topped herself with the ludicrous title of CEO of PEN America, emblematic of the soulless corporatism she embodies.
A 2004 Overseas Affairs article by Nossel titled “Sensible Energy: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism” requires “liberal internationalism” and an “assertive management” by the U.S. that’s “diplomatic, financial, and never least, army [my italics] — to advance a broad array of targets: self-determination, human rights, free commerce, the rule of regulation, financial improvement, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction.”
I withdrew from a scheduled talking occasion on the 2013 World Voices Competition in New York and resigned from PEN America – which that very same 12 months had given me its First Modification Award – to protest Nossel’s appointment. PEN Canada provided me membership, which I accepted. I wrote in my resignation letter:
The struggling of the Palestinians below Israeli occupation and the plight of these caught up in our imperial wars in nations reminiscent of Iraq will not be abstractions to me. Nossel’s relentless championing of preemptive battle — which below worldwide regulation is illegitimate — as a State Division official alongside together with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a authorities official to denounce the usage of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her completely unfit to steer any human rights group.
The present letter, now signed by greater than 1,300 writers, notes that “Palestine’s poets, students, novelists and journalists and essayists have risked the whole lot, together with their lives and the lives of their households, to share their phrases with the world. But PEN America seems unwilling to face with them firmly in opposition to the powers which have oppressed and dispossessed them for the final 75 years.”
The writers cost that “PEN America has betrayed the group’s professed dedication to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and safety for writers all over the place.”
PEN America refuses to name for an instantaneous and unconditional ceasefire.
“This failure is especially putting in gentle of the extraordinary toll this disaster has taken within the cultural sphere,” the writers say. “Israel has killed, and at occasions intentionally focused and assassinated journalists, poets, novelists, and writers of all types. It has destroyed nearly all types of cultural infrastructure that assist the apply of literature, artwork, mental trade, and free speech via the bombing and demolition of universities, cultural facilities, museums, libraries, and printing presses. By disrupting entry to digital communication, Israel has additionally been blocking Palestinians from sharing what they’ve witnessed and skilled and telling the reality of what’s taking place to them. Everybody who makes use of the ability of the pen and free speech to enchantment to the conscience of the world is in danger.”
Israel, the letter notes, “has killed practically 100 journalists and media staff, greater than within the two-decade battle in Afghanistan, and greater than within the deadliest 12 months of the Iraq Battle. Israel has additionally killed practically 100 teachers and writers.”
PEN America “took 4 and half months to utter the phrase ‘ceasefire,’ then solely with a obscure ‘hope’ for one that’s ‘mutually agreed,’ reasonably than a transparent name.”
“Equally regarding is PEN America’s historical past of condemning authors who select to honor the Palestinian name for a cultural and tutorial boycott of Israeli establishments complicit of their oppression, accusing them of impeding ‘the free circulation of concepts,’” the letter continues. “It appears to us that this violates a number of rules on the coronary heart of PEN’s mission. To start with, the concept that BDS, which doesn’t boycott particular person writers or students, can impede the ‘free circulation of concepts’ in Israel-Palestine assumes that such a factor exists there. The truth is, it’s a merciless fantasy as long as Palestinians dwell below a rule reliant on racial segregation and the implementation of ethnic hierarchies, siege and collective punishment, the very situations BDS seeks to finish.”
The banning of writers who assist BDS “contributes to a neo-McCarthyite setting in North America and Europe, by which the rising assist for BDS is more and more criminalized.” Opposition to BDS , the letter factors out, “overlooks the lengthy and proud historical past of the boycott as an efficient, nonviolent device of collective liberation. Simply as boycott was a principal device used to efficiently finish political apartheid in South Africa, so it needs to be accepted that some are free to undertake it as a significant device within the nonviolent resistance motion in opposition to Israeli impunity immediately.”
The writers responded to PEN America’s not too long ago posted statements expressing concern about varied incidents in Gaza by asking “The place are the actions that circulation from these said considerations?”
They notice that “PEN America has not launched any substantial coordinated assist or issued any reviews highlighting the size and scope of the assaults on writers in Gaza, or on Palestinian speech and tradition extra broadly. PEN America has finished little or no to mobilize or encourage its many members — fairly not like current PEN America campaigns opposing the battle in Ukraine and its influence on tradition, or PEN Worldwide’s ‘Day of the Lifeless’ honoring journalists killed in Latin America.”
The writers additionally say they’re “dismayed that there was no apology to the Palestinian author Randa Jarrar for the stunning act of dragging her out of an occasion that includes an anti-Palestinian and pro-war Hollywood actor as Jarrar learn out the names of murdered Palestinian writers.”
Palestinian writers, the letter reads, “have discovered themselves within the insulting place of getting to battle PEN America to loudly name for the U.S.-funded bombs to cease falling. They’ve been compelled to level out, over and over, that if the present onslaught was directed in opposition to every other folks, there would have been clear condemnations of the crimes, in addition to assist for all types of nonviolent resistance in opposition to oppression, alongside occasions centered on the artists who’re probably the most weak on this planet.”
PEN America could live on, certainly its obsequiousness to governmental and company energy will in all probability guarantee its funding, however it’s a hole model used to justify the crimes and lies of the U.S. authorities and Israel.
The very best writers within the Soviet Union refused to hitch the Union of Soviet Writers or had been expelled. These left had been propagandists, third charge writers and careerists. PEN America is quick changing into its doppelgänger.
