Hassam Munir, Sports and Health Editor
Featured image courtesy of RT
Calls for a boycott rang out during Israeli Apartheid Week as a group representing black graduate students made allegations against Students Against Israeli Apartheid’s guest speaker Rania Khalek, an independent journalist and activist whom they accused of being “notoriously anti-black.”
York University Black Graduate Student’s Collective posted an anti-black racism bulletin on March 23, the same day that Khalek was to deliver a lecture called The Weapon’s Lab: Israeli Apartheid and the Arms Trade. According to SAIA, Khalek was invited to give a lecture on how Israel uses Palestine as a laboratory for weapons and methods of domination and control, which are then exported to other parts of the world.
BGSC’s bulletin calls for a boycott of Khalek’s lecture, stating it is their policy whenever a speaker with a history of committing emotional, social, and or physical violence against groups of black people. However, the event proceeded as scheduled.
The BGSC was not available for further comment.
“Rania Khalek is a well-known supporter of Black Lives Matter and the call for reparations for past and present injustices inflicted on black people in the United States,” says Merate Atare, member of SAIA. “Those who levelled the allegation that Khalek is anti-black, with no evidence, lack a progressive worldview based on mutual solidarity.”
Atare explains SAIA reached out to the individual, but couldn’t come to an agreement.
“We in the Palestine solidarity movement at York will not throw our friends and supporters under the bus, and we stand firmly behind them.”
Khalek has come under fire in the past for allegedly overstating the similarity between the movements for Palestinian and black rights, particular on social media.
In the aftermath of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in late 2014, for example, Khalek made a connection between the repression of Palestinian protests in Israel and of black protests in the United States.
She faced backlash on Twitter, where she was referred to as “an anti-black, ahistoric troll” and was threatened with violent retaliation.
