Well, you can write off yet another organization dedicated to promoting free expression. First the ACLU went down the tubes, followed by the SPLC, and now PEN America, a group of American writers dedicated to promoting free expression, has canceled a ceremony because the writers want PEN to take a stand on an ideological issue: Israel, say many of its members, is committing genocide, and they are demanding that PEN America take that position. And PEN America crumpled, canceling an upcoming event.
No matter that the issue is debatable, and no matter that the real committers of genocide, those absolutely dedicated to destroying a people, are Hamas, which has sworn to kill all Jews and eliminate Israel. Now that is genocide. But PEN members don’t care what Hamas is doing. The claim of Israeli genocide is not a “truth”, and many of us (including me) disagree, as do many PEN members. But a vocal group of these “free expression” writers insist that their organization call for a cease fire and accuse Israel of genocide. Doesn’t that count as something that chills free expression, and associates an organization for such expression with a specific ideology?
You may recall that a similar dubious position was taken by some PEN members in 2015, when six members refused to attend a banquet—and 145 writers signed a protest letter—all because PEN America was going to give a “freedom of expression award” to Charlie Hebdo after many of the magazine’s writers and artists were killed. That’s even more of a no-brainer, because, yes, Charlie Hebdo, in the face of threats, continued to mock everything, including all religions. But it was their liberal satire of Islam that did them in, with 12 Charlie Hebdo employees shot by Muslim terrorists. Protesting a “courage” award for Charlie Hebdo is ridiculous. But such is PEN America.
Here’s the group’s mission as stated on their “about us” page:
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
Are they protecting free expression by canceling a ceremony because of a misguided assertion about Israel? And what they say is laughable (read below):
Click the headline to read, or find it archived here:
A few excerpts:
The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel and led nearly half of the prize nominees to withdraw.
The event was set to take place on April 29 at Town Hall in Manhattan. But in a news release on Monday, the group announced that although the prizes would still be conferred, the ceremony would not take place.
“We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,” the group’s chief officer for literary programming, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, said in the release.
“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”
In recent months, PEN America has faced intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 people dead, according to health officials there.
In a series of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America support an immediate cease-fire, as its global parent organization, PEN International, and other national chapters have done.
In other words, the writers have demanded (using Hamas statistics, of course) that PEN America take a political position. They are demanding that a group dedicated to free expression take an “official” position that would tend to chill expression and associate PEN with an ideological stand. And if PEN doesn’t, then the writers are going to take their ball and go home. They are demanding, in other words, that the group broach any kind of institutional neutrality that it may have—and it should have some since it’s dedicated to free expression.
More:
In March, a group of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar, announced that they were pulling out of next month’s World Voices Festival, one of PEN America’s signature events. And over the past several weeks, growing numbers of nominees for the literary awards, including Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe and Esther Allen, announced that they were withdrawing their books from consideration.
In a letter that PEN America leadership received last week, 30 of the 87 nominated writers and translators (including nine of the 10 nominees for one prize) criticized the group’s “disgraceful inaction” on the situation in Gaza, accusing it of “clinging to a disingenuous facade of neutrality while parroting” what the letter characterized as Israeli government propaganda. The letter also called for the resignation of the group’s longtime chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, and its president, the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, along with that of the group’s executive committee.
And here’s the dumbest statement of all:
“PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree,’” the nominees stated. “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Well that’s just wrong. I bet I could find many “writers of conscience” who do disagree on the “fact” that “Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people”. If Israel was, all Gazans would have been dead for a long time, but the population of Gaza has grown like gangbusters. And we know that Israel doesn’t just go into Gaza for no reason and kill civilians. It responds only when it’s attacked, and tries to limit damage to Hamas terrorists or their military assets. It’s clear that the IDF wants to eliminate not Palestinians, but members of Hamas. Has any other country sent truckloads of humanitarian assistance, like food and medicine, to an enemy state? Or warned people where and when it was going to attack? Those are real “facts”! But they don’t matter, for these PEN morons claim that they already know the truth.
The reader who sent me this article added the following:
I chortled to myself. It would be funny that fiction writers so self-confidently assert a fiction to be a “fact” if it wasn’t sad that they’re likely driven by anti-Israel animus to do so. Anyway, while PEN tried to push back in its own statement upholding free expression, their awards ceremony has now been derailed by self-righteous nominees who want free expression shut down in service of propagating grotesque lies.
And yes, PEN America did push back, but it still truckled to the ideologues. From the NYT:
That letter [from the 30 nominees] drew a brief but forceful response last week in which the organization described the war in Gaza as “horrific” but challenged what it said was the letter’s “alarming language and characterizations.”
“The perspective that ‘there is no disagreement’ and that there are among us final arbiters of ‘fact and fiction’ reads to us as a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Charter and what we stand for as an organization,” the organization said in a statement.
The second paragraph is spot on, and admirable. So why did PEN cancel the ceremony? Maybe some of the nominees won’t show up, but either they can get their award in absentia or they can be dropped because they don’t favor free expression. I really don’t care. What I do care about is that yet another one of America’s bastions of free expression has turned cowardly, violating its own charter in the face of loud and misguided ideological demands from writers.
If the PEN Charter really does stand for institutional neutrality, then the organization should conform to it. Writers are of course welcome to express their own views, but the organization itself should not be the arbiter or promoter of those views.
There is an excellent letter from nine past presidents of PEN America, supporting its commitment to free speech and continuing dialogue. This is posted on the PEN America website.
PEN : “… recognizing the power of the word to transform the world.”
Nearly exact sentiment to Paulo Freire – not a mistake, either.
Free expression with the technologies in written language is not a tool of Hermetic alchemy nor a target for critical subversion to reclaim the “power” from.
I found a quote :
“There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.”
-Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Tempting, yes – gnostic temptation.
post-deadline edit:
Language might or might not be Hermetic alchemy, but to PEN it is. That is what they mean. The meaning is found by a critical reading, i.e. recognizing the esoteric meaning of the exoteric words.
So, not any other meaning of “critical” that is not empowered by critical consciousness. I’m not making that up, it’s all throughout that strain of literature.
I recently came across what could be called “Hermetic Alchemy for Dummies” 🙂, “https://mitch-horowitz-nyc.medium.com/the-age-of-hermes-f815b977b591”. I now understand a lot more about what you’ve been banging on about 🙂🙂.
Edit: How does one properly put a link into a post?
I’ll have to find it.
I offer in return, a fun book :
The occult, witchcraft & magic : an illustrated history
Dell, Christopher
2016
.. though I have a lot more!
I flirted briefly with the occult in my youth (even participated in an exorcism!), but now it holds zero personal interest. My take on “This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius”:
Follow up: I found a cache of Horowitz’ output, including a video on The Kybalion – this is gonna be great!
Thanks!
Such hypocrites.
This is so sad that Free Speech is under attack by organizations that profess to support it. They probably compartmentalize good free speech from bad free speech. That distinction is the only way PEN (and others) can escape a legitimate claim they are hypocrites. Once they make that distinction, however, they void the purpose and meaning of the phrase “free speech.”
One can criticize Israel’s military strategy without playing into the hands of antisemitism. That seems to be a point PEN and others are missing. I think PEN should amend their press release by pointing out “Some of our best friends are Jews,” for those of us that are too dense to see what they are doing.
I hope I’m not excessively parsing what might have been a throwaway line about PEN, Michael, but I think it’s important. In any existential war, I’m not sure that it is possible to criticize the military strategy without undermining the right of the state to prevail and thereby exist. In reference to Israel, it is hard to see how criticism does not play into the hands of murderous antisemites, especially if you want your country’s policy toward Israel to transmit that criticism, as ours has.
One could criticize the design and execution of the strategy on technical grounds but that would require as much military situational knowledge, including secret intelligence, as the High Command has, so that can’t be what you mean. You could claim that fewer civilians would die if the IDF did this instead of that and Israel would still defeat Hamas but you can’t know. If you criticize, you’re really just saying, as President Biden does, that you don’t like what the IDF is doing and wish they would do something different, without having to own the consequences yourself (or himself) to the people of Israel. This is the kind of criticism that Israel must simply ignore, just as it ignores calls for a unilateral ceasefire, but foreign countries have the luxury of acting on it, and do.
North American countries have been engaged only in optional “expeditionary” wars during their entire history since they reduced the Indian tribes to where they could no longer push the colonizers back into the sea. In an optional war you can say, “Let’s bomb at 500 feet and only in daylight instead of 19,000 to increase accuracy and avoid any misidentification of civilians. Or not bomb at all. Infantry only. This will increase our losses but it’s a line we won’t cross. If we can’t win the war with those rules, we’ll say the war isn’t worth the moral injury. We’ll pull out and go home, leaving our ally to his fate.” In an existential war you have to do whatever it takes to win, defined as achieving the military goals set out by the civilian leadership.
Unfortunately for even-handedness, criticizing Israeli military strategy even without antisemitic intent now inevitably plays into the hands of the antisemites. “What do you want us to do?”, asks Israel. “Lose to make you feel better?” I think I know what you mean, generously, in theory. But in practice it doesn’t work that way.
Thank you for your extensive comments. It made me think, always a good thing.
I will admit I have no knowledge about how to fight a conventional, non-nuclear, war. I will also agree that the United State’s history is terrible when it comes to making war on the indigenous people of the Americas, the people we forcibly transported here as slaves, and the proxy wars we fought for no good reason in Vietnam and other Asian countries. There are countless other examples.
But, and of course there is a ‘but” because that is why I am writing this, I believe in a distinction between the people of a country and the government of a county. I think you can criticize Israel, as a government, and not be antisemitic. I certainly criticized the United States during Vietnam. The majority of Americans did not support the war. That did not make me anti-American.
I am aware that there is a strong existential component to the war in Gaza that we did not have in Vietnam. “No s**t, Sherlock!” you may exclaim. But that does not mean that any criticism of military action – including simple judgements that too many children are being killed – means the person making the criticism is an antisemite. You may think that is naïve thinking, but I obviously do not.
I think we can agree, as long as you can acknowledge that criticism of Israel’s military strategy is to make you feel better and is not meant to have any impact on what Israel actually does. Because it won’t. It mustn’t.
It might be worth adding that the Letter from the long-listed writers withdrawing from consideration for the PEN award included an objection to PEN having forcibly removed Randa Jarrar from a recent PEN event. She had been forcibly removed by security so the event could proceed. She had a speaker so that the event involving Moshe Kasher and Mayim Bialik could not proceed. Here PEN proceeded with an event that Jarrar and a group of other protesters had attempted to derail.
It is hard to imagine how infected with ideology a mind must be to generate what you listed as the dumbest statement of all “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.” LOL. So nice to now know that whenever I have any questions about fact vs fiction, I know who the final arbiter of truth is.
That statement reminded me of Gary Trudeau’s years ago mind-numbingly stupid comment about the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who were murdered:
“By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world.”
So, by Trudeau’s “logic”, drawing the cartoons was punching down, but killing the cartoonists was more excusable because it was punching up? But equally ridiculous is his comment about a statement or drawing being classified as hate speech if it triggers violence — even if the violence is being committed by those who object to what you have written or drawn! He was saying — actually saying — that speech becomes hate speech not only if it incites violence against the target of your speech, but also if it incites violence BY the target of your speech. OMG — that doesn’t even rise to the level of tortured logic! Reading that was the last time I had any respect for Trudeau at all.
That punching up & down business never made sense to me. I do recall that about the Charlie Hebdo case.
Pen America didn’t cancel their ceremony in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time.
They also didn’t cancel their ceremony anytime from 2012 onwards, after Putin and Assad levelled Syria and killed 500,000 people.
They also didn’t cancel their ceremony over China’s treatment of the Uyghur and other minorities…and so forth.
Also oppression and mass murder of Muslims in Yemen, Sudan, Sri Lanka; open return of slavery in Yemen; systematic oppression of women in ~all countries with Muslim majorities; one could go on and on. The cherry-picking of Israel and Gaza is so tiresome, even setting aside the existential nature of the war against Hamas, its use of human shields, and the rejection of Gaza refugees by Egypt and other nearby countries.
Not only is no one protesting Putin, he has a sizeable group of fans here in North America. Don’t ask me why.
Since they are still doing the awards, Maybe the canceling of the ceremony is a simple dollars and cents issue: not enough paid attendees guaranteed to cover the cost of the hall and event. In any case I find what is passing for reasoning by the protesters to be abhorrent. But I defend their right to express that position and would support a structured debate in which they can make their points and answer mine. PEN has no particular expertise as an organization to take a position on the war, but they can be a neutral host or platform of differing opinions.
I have a more positive reading of this decision. PEN are refusing to concede to the demands of the Hamas lovers, and they’re also refusing to provide a platform those people would no doubt use to grandstand on the issue. Good for them.
This is my opinion as well.
Has anybody heard of any of the authors named?
I’ve heard of Naomi Klein and Jennifer Boylan. Klein’s most famous book was probably The Shock Doctrine.
I know of Boylan only because I’m gender critical and Boylan’s a trans activist. I’ve seen some of his tweets.