Email parliamentarians now | Don't cancel Palestinian voices

Email parliamentarians now

Your email will be sent to your local federal representative and Senators (and for South Australians your State ones), calling on them to let Palestinians speak. Your email will also be copied in to the Federal Minister for the Arts, the SA Premier as well as Adelaide Writers' Week.

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When Mohammed El-Kurd was 11 years old, he came home from school to find his family's belongings thrown onto the street, his family kicked out of their home and half his house taken over by Israeli settlers. Mohammed lives in East Jerusalem, which has been under an illegal Israeli military occupation since 1967. In May 2021 Israeli settlers were threatening to displace entire neighbourhoods of Palestinians, and Israeli forces injured over 1,000 Palestinians protesters in Jerusalem. Mohammed El-Kurd emerged as a powerful voice, reaching a global audience with his moral clarity and first hand accounts of the violence of soldiers and settlers in East Jerusalem. In those weeks, Israeli bombs rained down on Gaza, killing 253 people including 66 children, and destroyed media infrastructure trying to report on the horrors.  It was in this context - seeing worshipers at Al Aqsa Mosque tear-gassed, beaten and shot at; Palestinian property looted, destroyed and stolen - that Mohammed posted tweets of justified anger.

These cries of protest and anguish were the ones grossly taken out of context by the Murdoch press last week, amplifying campaigns to have him cancelled from the Adelaide Writers' Week.  Last year Mohammed El Kurd spoke before the United Nations General Assembly and he has been published widely, his appearance in Adelaide must not be cancelled.

Susan Abulhawa's book "Mornings in Jenin" has exposed to millions of people the reality of life in a refugee camp in the West Bank. Already this year 11 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces. In the last 20 years, 12,000 Palestinian children have been detained by Israel, many of them taken from their beds in the middle of the night and held in Israeli jails for months without charge. UNICEF has documented how Israel systematically mistreats Palestinian children.  It is in this context Susan talks about children being kidnapped and tortured, again comments twisted in a campaign for her too to be cancelled.

Every time a Palestinian is given a platform to speak of their oppression and Israel's gross human rights violations, the pro-Israel lobby seeks to discredit and silence them, smearing them with accusations of antisemitism. Mohammed and Susan are writers who have shared their pain with the world, and we commend the Adelaide Writers' Week for giving them a place their voice can be heard.

I ask you to please stand by the Adelaide Writers' Week to support the freedom of speech for Palestinians, and speak out against these attempts to have Palestinian writers cancelled.

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