Time to Bid Adieu to the Big Lie (One of Them, Anyway)?

NOW Magazine scribbler Ellie Kirzner (Muslim chick, no?) says the refusal of Pride parade organizers to allow "my queer brothers and sisters" to march under the "anti-apartheid" banner is the latest loss for the "anti-occupation" crowd. She says it may be time to "lose the "A" word because--go figure--"pro-occupation" blabbermouths won't shut up about it, and because it doesn't seem to be working anymore for those who truly care about poor/starving/oppressed/occupied/victimized Gazans:

...It was scary enough last February when the Ontario Legislature voted to denounce Israeli Apartheid Week (with leftie Cherie DiNovo unfortunately in tow), but now the censorship beast is squatting right in our own grassroots organizations.

To appreciate how badly anti-occupation forces have been outmanoeuvred, consider the trajectory following that February vote. Immediately after, the Toronto District School Board forbade all Israeli Apartheid Week activities. And soon after that, Kyle Rae was writing Pride to review parade entrance requirements, citing the legislative vote and invoking city anti-discrimination policies.

But the snowballing didn’t stop there: next, reps for the city’s diversity unit were expressing their nervousness about whether some Pride participants would feel excluded by the anti-apartheid contingent and raising the issue of city funding for Pride. The implications of this are staggering: pro-occupation ideologues now have their mitts on the city’s fine diversity unit.

All of this makes my skin crawl. The space for allowable discourse shrinks, and now Pride’s great celebration is stumbling into a swamp of bitterness and recrimination.

There’s a lot at stake here. It’s not like there are hordes of groups out there defending the rights of hungry Gaza children, families whose homes have been demolished, Palestinian farmers who’ve had their groves destroyed and civilians strafed by Israeli air power.

Now the orgs that do exist are on the firing line of a relentless and apparently competent campaign to demonize and sideline them.

Things are not going well. In my way of thinking, the weakness of the “Israeli apartheid’’ formulation, quite apart from the interesting debate over whether Israel does or doesn’t practise classic apartheid, is that it allows detractors to claim it stigmatizes the whole of the Israeli people...

Yes, we wouldn't want to "stigmatize" the "good" Israelis, the ones who are just as keen to trash the Jewish State as are their non-Jewish "brothers and sisters."

To my way of thinking, the weakness of the "Israeli apartheid" formulation is that it's not really about Gaza at all. It's part of a plan, orchestrated by the OIC, working through the UN (hello, Durbans I and II), to brand Israel as an apartheid state as a means of justifying its destruction on "moral" grounds. That queers, of all people, would rally to such a cause, one which is Naziesque in intent if not yet in execution (emphasis on "yet"), does more than make my skin crawl. It makes me sick.