Toronto based BDSHole group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (who you may remember from here) are no more (hat tip: Marvin).
Palestinian rights group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is shutting itself down after seven years of activism and controversy.
Tim McCaskell, one of the group’s organizers, announced in a news release Thursday that QuAIA will “officially retire” at the end of this month.
The group educated Canadians about the Israeli “occupation”, popularized the terms “Israeli apartheid” and “pinkwashing” and inspired QuAIA groups in queer communities around the world,” he said.
But deteriorating Middle East conditions and Canada’s attempts to “suppress” boycott, divestment and sanction efforts “pulled activist energies in many directions,” and QuAIA members to other groups and cities.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” McCaskell said. “But we decided that retiring QuAIA allows us all to develop new strategies for supporting the Palestine solidarity movement and to make new links across oppressions in our communities.”
Avi Benlolo, chief executive of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies, and a past critic of what he called a “fringe group”, welcomed QuAIA’s decision but doubted the stated reason.
“It’s quite obvious that they would lose momentum,” Benlolo said.” With extremist massacres in Syria, ISIS going around cutting people’s heads off, Iran executing gays … why would anybody be going after Israel with its pride parades in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?”
Good point.
I suggest the group comes back but with a new name. Perhaps Activist Socialist Society of Homosexuals Against the Terror State. Or A S S H A T S.
Meanwhile, just to show you the idiocy of this now defunct group, the aforementioned Tim McCaskell is pictured here with this T-shirt.
Given Israel is engaged in AIDS research and has already made good progress, would he boycott such treatments?
