I also have “concerns”… about your article on the library’s May 9 reception for the Nakba photo exhibit – starting with the title: the EXHIBIT “sparks concerns”? The suppression of a planned, public event by a loud, angry, verbally abusive mob, while the City’s police stood by and did nothing, does NOT raise “concerns”?
The second paragraph alludes to “concerns” which not well addressed in the article:
- Free speech: Suppressing someone else’s speech is not “free speech”.
- Timing: Israel’s seizure of independence is contemporaneous with the Nakba; it is the Nakba through another lens. Concerns about the timing privilege the feelings of one group of people over those of another.
- Differing representations of facts should be addressed by a second event. Shutting down this event should be characterized as an attempt to PREVENT alternatives to a particular narrative.
Then there are the “substantive” quotes. You quoted only one person who supported the event, and then only about technical matters-of-fact. All the interpretations were from one side.
The protestors outside may have been mostly silent, at first. Those inside were loud and abusive. Later, when the frustrated presenters staged a counter-rally at City Hall, the protesters were hardly “silent”. (Your article mentions the bullhorn; a funny thing at a “silent protest”,) I listened to a Palestinian-American speaker say “we want peace and equality for ALL who live in that land” while the surrounding protestors screamed that she was a “terrorist.”
Overall, your coverage gives an extremely biased view of a deeply disturbing event; disturbing both on a direct, emotional level, and for what it says about the erosion of the USA as a liberal democracy (with Newton apparently leading the charge).
David Oscar Knuttunen
Nonantum
Ed. Note: This letter was submitted before we updated the article it references.
