Bizarre moment Rutgers gender study professor tells seminar that it's 'homophobic and violent' to flag how badly LGBT people are treated in Gaza
- Maya Mikdashi, associate Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, said it was 'homophobic' to raise how LGBT people are treated in Gaza
- The lecture entitled 'Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle', argued that the pro-Palestine movement should 'center queer and trans people'
- 'Queers for Palestine' events and marches have been criticized as a misguided show of support for a regime that does not support gay rights
A Rutgers University professor told a seminar discussing the Israel-Hamas conflict that it is 'violent' and 'homophobic' to raise the issue of how LGBT people are treated in Gaza.
Maya Mikdashi, associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at New Jersey's State University, told students earlier this month that she has been approached by people at pro-Palestine protests who tell her that she would be treated horribly by Hamas.
'So I've been at protests where I'm then told "don't you know what Hamas would do to you, if you were in Palestine",' she said.
'We have to start naming this as homophobic. You cannot rehearse violence to queer people. It's violent.
The event, entitled 'Palestine is a Feminist and Queer Anti-Imperialist Abolition Struggle', took place on March 20 and was co-hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Nadine Naber.
Maya Mikdashi, associate Professor of Women's, Gender , and Sexuality Studies (left) with co-host the University of Illinois at Chicago 's Nadine Naber (right)
'Queers for Palestine' events and marches been criticized as a misguided show of support for a regime that does not support gay rights
'If you were to say you were experiencing sexism in the SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] they would say "there goes those Palestinian's again, silencing women in their communities",' Naber told attendees.
'So no one is going to say it. And if you do say it [others] will say you're a "traitor and collaborating with Zionism".'
Naber also argued that rape had been well-documented in the founding of Israel.
Reading from text she said, 'indeed the practices of rape and sexual assault that have been well-documented during the founding of Israel and continued today are not an exception or a secondary impact of colonial violence.
'[They] are part of the settler, colonial white supremacist logics and practices of Israel that conflate colonized women with the land and nature and assume that therefore to dominate the land necessitates dominating Palestinian women's bodies and their reproductive capacities from 1948 until today,' she explained.
Speaking more on why the event focuses on queer people within the Palestinian movement, Naber said: 'We're going to need our organizing to center queer and trans people not only because they are especially vulnerable to colonial violence and the racism and the doxxing, but they also embody exceptionally nuanced wisdom about Zionism because they are living it in all its complexity.'
Queers for Palestine' events and marches, which have proliferated across the US since the start of the war, have been criticized as a misguided show of support for a regime that does not support gay rights.
The Islamic Middle Eastern state follows sharia law, and as noted by Amnesty International, it is not safe for the queer community.
Hamas 's October 7 terror attack on Israel did involve rape and sexual violence, a new report from the United Nations has concluded. Pictured: An Israeli soldier walks through items left by fleeing festival goers at the site of the Nova music festival, October 12
Based on a range of evidence, the UN said there was clear and convincing' information to show conflict-related sexual violence was committed by members of the Palestinian terror group - including rape and gang rape. Pictured: IDF troops patrol Kibbutz Be'eri on October 11
Pramila Patten, the UN envoy focusing on sexual violence in conflict, detailed witness accounts of two incidents involving the rape of women's corpses
Others see the fight for queer rights and anti-colonialism as intertwined because anti-gay laws were first introduced in Palestine by Britain in 1885 - though former colonial powers have since abolished such legislation in their own countries.
Moreover, Hamas' brutal rapes of Israeli prisoners on and after the terror attacks of October 7 have been widely reported including by the United Nations.
Based on a range of evidence, the international organization said there was 'clear and convincing' information to show conflict-related sexual violence was committed by members of the Palestinian terror group - including rape and gang rape.
It said such attacks were carried out in at least three locations across southern Israel, including the Nova music festival, the site of one of several October 7 massacres.
Pramila Patten, the UN envoy focusing on sexual violence in conflict, also detailed witness accounts of two incidents involving the rape of women's corpses.
In addition to its findings relating to the October 7 attack, Patten also said her team 'found clear and convincing information' that some women and children during their captivity were subjected to the same conflict-related sexual violence.
This included rape and 'sexualized torture' she said.
This evidence was based on first-hand accounts of released hostages, she said, adding there are 'reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing'.
Patten visited Israel and the West Bank from January 29 to February 14 with a nine-member technical team.
The report comes nearly five months after the Oct. 7 attacks, which left about 1,200 people dead and some 250 others taken hostage.
Hamas has rejected allegations that its fighters committed sexual assault.
Maya Mikdashi is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. She received a BA from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
Maya is the author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022). It emerges from archival and ethnographic research in Lebanon.
Maya has been published in several peer reviewed journals, including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. Maya’s scholarship has been translated into Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi.
She is a co-director of the feature-length documentary film About Baghdad (2003), Director of the documentary film Notes on the War (2006), and Assistant Director, Editor, and Cinematographer of the documentary series What is Said About Arabs and Terrorism (2007). Before pursuing graduate school in the United States, Mikdashi worked in the television industry in Lebanon. She published "Queer Theory and Permanent War" in 2016.
According to Canary Mission:
Overview
Mikdashi has published, on both social media and in scholarly articles, accusations that Israel is a colonial state. She has drawn specific parallels between Palestinians and Native Americans, labeling both Israelis and Americans as "Settler Colonialists."
Mikdashi is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.
Demonizing Israel
On July, 23, 2014, Mikdashi published an article in which she stated that "The Israeli war machine, much like the US war machine in Afghanistan or Iraq, does not protect Palestinian queers and women and children. It kills them, maims them, and dispossesses them alongside their loved ones--for the simple reason that they are Palestinian, and thus able to be killed with impunity while the whole world watches."
In a joint interview with Sherene Seikaly that was published on May 16, 2013, Mikdashi stated that "the United States and Israel are at different stages of settlement and genocide."
In another article, published on August 9, 2012, Mikdashi accused Israel of constructing a "regime of legal apartheid."
Depicting Israel as a Colonial State
On February 15, 2017, Mikdashi tweeted: "#trumpbibi press conference is like a crash course in #settlercolonialism settler alliance."
On October 25, 2014, Mikdashi was the featured speaker of an event, hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), entitled: "What is Settler Colonialism?" The event’s purpose was to highlight the ostensible commonalities between the treatment of Palestinians under Israel and the treatment of indigenous peoples in North America.
Mikdashi made the same claim in an article published on July 17, 2012, stating that "It was only after I understood that Israel is a settler colony that I came to see the United States as the same."
In an article published on July 23, 2014, Mikdashi accused Israel of colonizing, quarantining and creating an "open-air prison" in Gaza.
Later in the same article, Mikdashi stated that "Historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, is an Israeli settler colony at varying stages of success."
Again in an article published on August 9, 2012, Mikdashi wrote extensively about Israel’s "ongoing settler colonialism of historic Palestine."
Comparing Palestinians to Holocaust Victims
In an article published on February 16, 2017, Mikdashi compared Palestinians to Holocaust victims. Mikdashi wrote that "when images and articles began emerging evoking the Jewish Holocaust alongside the movement of Syrian refugees in Greece, Hungary, and Germany--I thought about Palestine, about 1948."
In the same article, Mikdashi went on to say that "I thought about how ironic and yet strangely fitting it was that the ghosts of both Palestinian ethnic cleansing and the Jewish Holocaust followed the same national bodies into different but tragically joined historical contexts."
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