The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York (CUNY) has announced a two-day conference which serves no purpose, except to condemn Israel, reflecting a simple double standard.

In Gaza, Kuwait & Lebanon, homosexuality is illegal and the guilty (if lucky) face 3-10 years in jail. In the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, homosexual acts are punishable by death. After Qatar was awarded the 2022 Football World Cup, the President of the sport’s governing body in the country, said that gays should “refrain from sexual activity”.  The Arab world, to put it mildly doesn’t tolerate homosexuality.

In Israel, gays are treated as equal citizens, and there are laws against discrimination. So, it is only in a world where the Jews are always the bad guys, that a conference could be planned by the gay community to attack Israel. As if that isn’t bad enough, New York City tax-payers, by footing the bill, are being used to further the Anti-Israel political agenda of this despicable conference. Israel has been a champion of gay rights, a place where tens of thousands march in an annual gay pride parade, same sex cohabitation is recognized and gays serve openly in the military and government. The Mayor of Tel Aviv recently said, “We are trying to create a model for openness, pluralism, tolerance – live and let live.” So, do you think it’s fair and decent for New York tax payers to fund this racist conference against Jews?

“Faced with intensifying criticism and the threat of economic boycott,” the conference website states, “the Israeli government expanded their marketing plan by harnessing Homonationalism to reposition its global image.”  No matter what Israel does, to some they are simply evil.  The fact that gays would be put to death in much of the Arab world is simply ignored.

A few months ago, Abdellah Taia wrote an article in The New York Times headlined “A Boy to Be Sacrificed”, where he discussed growing up in the Arab world as an effeminate boy, where “homosexuality did not, of course, exist.”

An excerpt from the article:

I no longer remember the child, the teenager, I was. I know I was effeminate and aware that being so obviously ‘like that’ was wrong. God did not love me. I had strayed from the path. Or so I was made to understand. Not only my family, but also by the entire neighborhood. I learned my lesson perfectly.” “Now, over a year after the Arab Spring began, we must again remember homosexuals. Arabs have finally become aware that they have to invent a new, free Arab individual, without the support of their megalomaniacal leaders. Arab homosexuals are also taking part in this revolution, whether they live in Egypt, Iraq or Morocco. They, too, are part of this desperately needed process of political and individual liberation. And the world must support and protect them.

These issues are ignored – but the Jewish state isn’t. Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky once said: “It is not the anti-Semitism of men, it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer.”

Nobody could have said it any clearer than the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, You are talking anti-Semitism.”  This conference is plainly and clearly Anti-Semitic.

Ronn Torossian is the Founder of 5WPR, a leading NY PR Agency, and author of PR Book “For Immediate Release.”

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