Omar Sakr and I spoke to Jacobin’s Chris Dite about State Library Victoria, the escalating persecution of pro-Palestine workers in arts and media, and how workers across industries are joining together to fight back.
Genocide is impolite to talk about but not to enact. Safety means Zionists’ feelings and not Palestinians’ lives.
Like many of us, I’ve felt wary of drawing focus from the daily atrocities in Palestine to comparatively petty art world disputes here. I worry the story becomes one of cultural contestation instead of genocide.
But Israel’s genocide relies upon misinformation, censorship & propaganda. Misinformation and media bias have been critical in engineering impunity. I think the Library’s framing of ‘child and cultural safety’ is important, and dangerous, and deliberate.
For six months we have seen Israeli propaganda deny that Palestinian children are children. Think of Deborah Conway on ABC Radio National when asked about all the children killed: ‘Well it depends what you call kids.’ So I think this perversion of ‘child and cultural safety’ needs to be directly challenged.
Jinghua Qian 