Transgender Activist Janet Mock Cancels Talk at Brown U. Hillel After 'Pinkwashing' Campaign

http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/336426/transgender-activist-janet-mock-cancels-talk-at-brown-u-hillel-after-pinkwa/

Forward/By JTAMarch 19, 2016

"A prominent African-American transgender activist canceled her scheduled appearance at the Brown University Hillel after facing criticism for allegedly supporting the Jewish group's "pinkwashing" of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

Janet Mock announced Wednesday that she had cancelled her talk scheduled for March 21 at the Providence, Rhode Island Ivy League school, The Brown Daily Herald reported.

Moral Voices, a Jewish student group, had invited her in partnership with the Brown Center for Students of Color, Sarah Doyle Women's Center, LGBTQ Center, Sexual Assault Peer Educators and other campus groups, along with the Brown/RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Hillel."

Wow, "pinkwashing"... the internet teaches me yet another silly made-up word.

QuotePinkwashing is a portmanteau compound word of the words pink and whitewashing. In the context of LGBT rights, it is used to describe a variety of marketing and political strategies aimed at promoting a product or an entity through an appeal to queer-friendliness, primarily by political or social activists.

Not sure how you could make anything about the treatment of Palestine "queer-friendly" but there you go!

My opinion of Ms. Mock has just dropped a few notches.

In my understanding, Hillel is a religious and social organization. The change.org petition provides no evidence that Hillel does what they accuse it of, so it's impossible for me to evaluate it. The petition does contain some very dubious claims about Brown as a university, also unsubstantiated, so if that is the level of discourse I have strong doubts.

In my opinion, a flimsy justification for supporting this attack on Hillel.

Regardless of who sponsors a talk by one of ours, especially by one as respected as Janet Mock, if the offer is sincere and not an attempt to ambush her, then the talk should happen. This sounds too much like someone objected to the talk and grabbed an opportunity to squash it. That or someone grabbed something unrelated to publicize their own issue. Is no Jew allowed to do anything positive because one group thinks some Jews have done something negative? Isn't this just what Muslims complain about when people tar them with the same brush over things fanatics have done?