Opening up the Lannan Foundation
The Lannan Foundation will offer 12 programs in its 2018-19 season. Seven will feature novelists or poets, one author focusing on prisons, one focusing on climate and four programs apparently involving politics overseas. Of these four, three will feature speakers with rabid anti-Israel views and a history of fake factual representations.
First off was the now-postponed presentation from Khury Petersen-Smith and the Rev. William Barber II, which had been set for Sept. 12. Petersen-Smith is a vocal opponent of Israel. He was the co-author of a piece printed in Ebony magazine on Aug. 18, 2015, which I believe is loaded with fake “facts.”
One outrageous example is the assertion that Israel is “sterilizing Ethiopian Israelis without their knowledge or consent.” This is false and any Google search would have shown it to be so. While Ethiopian women immigrants to Israel received an injectable form of birth control that lasts for three months, it was not forced on them nor was it administered without their consent or knowledge.
Equally false is the old canard that Israel engages in “ethnic cleansing.” The increase in the Arab population of both Israel and the West Bank is almost twice as high as the increase in Egypt and equals that in Saudi Arabia. Israel’s Arab population increased 15 percent in the seven years between 1997 and 2004. When a former Israeli foreign minister suggested moving the border between Israel and the Palestinian Authority so that an Arab village would shift from Israel to the Palestinian Authority, the villagers refused, citing better economic prospects, less corruption and greater political freedom in Israel.
Then, on Wednesday, Lannan will feature Nikhil Pal Singh. He has denied Jews’ historic ties to Israel and repeats the “ethnic cleansing” libel as well as the “apartheid” accusations of Petersen-Smith. Even ancient Roman triumphal arches testify to the Jews’ millennia-long roots in Israel — long before there were any Muslims anywhere in the world. The triumphal arch of Emperor Titus shows his soldiers carrying the menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, 501 years before the birth of Mohammed. While the Romans expelled Jews from Jerusalem in the next century, Jews returned to the land during the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire and have lived there without interruption to the present.
On Jan. 23, 2019, the featured speaker will be Ilan Pappé, aided and abetted by Dima Khalidi. Pappé is a notorious poster boy for opinion presented as history. By his own confession, his “history” is his own “narration” of “facts” as he sees them. If Lannan is absolutely determined to give him a podium, he should be classified with the novelists, not the historians.
Pappé will be introduced by Dima Khalidi. She is a fullthroated supporter of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement, and compares its activities to the anti-apartheid movement. No less an authority than Richard J. Goldstone, who was so instrumental in ending South African apartheid, rejects any such comparison.
In November 2015, The New Mexican printed a story in which Patrick Lannan (“Falk’s war: Lannan Foundation lecture,” Pasatiempo, Nov. 27, 2015) stated that the foundation chooses “to air perspectives that go underrepresented in the U.S. media climate.”
Would it be so difficult for Lannan to imitate Al Jazeera, no friend to Israel, which broadcast a discussion among two pro-Israel and two pro-Palestinian speakers in November 2017?