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LOCAL News :: Civil & Human Rights

AFSC Promotes Event Featuring Israeli Apartheid Apologist Ellen Cannon

Chicago’s chapter of the American Friends Service Committee is currently promoting a local appearance of Israeli apologist Ellen Cannon. AFSC’s promotion of a stage for Cannon’s ideas may at first seem contradictory, given the group’s historic assertion of support for Palestinian human rights and its avowed commitment to peace with justice. But AFSC has also promoted the notion of ‘moral equivalency’ in its analysis of the Palestinian/Zionist conflict, decrying violence on both sides while carefully sidestepping the roots of the conflict in Israeli apartheid and the Israeli state's increasingly genocidal policy toward the indigenous Palestinian people.
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Chicago’s chapter of the American Friends Service Committee is currently promoting a local appearance on August 27 of policy analyst and Israeli apologist Ellen Cannon. AFSC is billing the event on their Chicago Peace Calendar, which is cross-posted to this website.

Cannon has criticized the American Jewish community for establishing academic chairs in subjects like Holocaust studies instead of Israeli studies during the period of the Oslo accords, at the same time that academic programs in Middle East studies have been willing to view Israeli policy with a critical eye.

Cannon has aggressively promoted the analysis that criticism of the state of Israel can be equated with anti-Semitism, a central tenet in the propaganda war against Palestinian self-determination and a line that has been heavily promoted by the right-wing Zionist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as well as the Sharon government in Israel and reactionary policy projects like CAMERA.

She has spoken favorably of the Bush administration’s aggressive support of Israeli policy in the region, particularly as crafted by top Bush advisors Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, two of the administration’s most notorious hawks. Wolfowitz has been one of the administration’s most aggressive promoters of war on Iraq and a hardline supporter of the Sharon government’s continuing occupation of Palestine, which has been widely condemned for sweeping human rights violations of Palestinian civilians.

She also argued before the invasion of Iraq that the country was armed with missiles possessing chemical and biological payloads, and that at least 70 of these missiles could reach Israel within five and a half minutes of launch. To date, weapons inspectors have been unable to locate weapons of mass destruction – including chemical and biological weapons – in Iraq, an embarrassment to the Bush administration, which grounded its strategy of ‘preemptive’ war in the region on Iraq’s alleged possession of these weapons. In addition, before the war Dr. Cannon predicted that “members of terrorist cells, with no regard for their own lives, like suicide bombers, will become infected with disease and deliberately enter Israel to spread it to others,” according to a speech she delivered to Louisville’s Lions of Judah.

Dr. Cannon has also promoted concerns that Americans must also expect chemical and biological weapons attacks in major cities in the U.S., at the same time that she has supported Bush foreign policy positions that increasing numbers of people believe has undercut the safety of U.S. civilians.

Dr. Cannon has asserted that only when Israel is "secure" can the Jewish people return to a policy of beneficence and tikkun olam -- words interpreted by hard-line Zionists to mean that Israel's violent suppression of Palestinians may proceed unchecked, since there can be no 'security' for Israel as long as Palestinians live in their midst. Cannon has also touted the assertion that without the Zionist state, there will be no Jewish world, an argument sceptics say is deeply flawed, given the hundreds of generations that vibrant Jewish culture and community thrived prior to the establishment of the Zionist entity.

AFSC’s promotion of a stage for Cannon’s ideas may at first seem contradictory, given the group’s historic assertion of support for Palestinian human rights and its avowed commitment to peace with justice. But AFSC has also promoted the notion of ‘moral equivalency’ in its analysis of the Palestinian/Zionist conflict, decrying violence on both sides while carefully sidestepping the roots of the conflict in Israeli apartheid and Zionism’s increasingly genocidal policy toward the indigenous Palestinian people.
 
 

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