{"id":286,"date":"2026-07-15T11:37:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=286"},"modified":"2026-07-15T11:37:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:37:30","slug":"when-anti-zionists-become-censors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=286","title":{"rendered":"When Anti-Zionists Become Censors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This column is not about anything in the news from the Middle East. My current views are well-represented by\u00a0Rahm Emanuel\u2019s blistering critique\u00a0of the Israeli government.<\/p>\n

Read more Brief Encounter: A Letter from a 19th Century Physician to Donald Trump<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m concerned with something simple: whether writers should be free to write, whatever their nationality or the conduct of the governments they live under.<\/p>\n

Last week, the Ethiopian-American novelist\u00a0Dinaw Mengestu\u00a0resigned as president of\u00a0PEN America, the prestigious writers\u2019 group that helps imprisoned authors abroad and fights book bans and other threats to free expression in the United States.<\/p>\n

Mengestu, a MacArthur Fellow recipient and professor at Bard College, is said to be a good novelist and journalist. Before I tell you why I think he represents the moral confusion, hypocrisy, ahistorical thinking, and, yes, anti-Semitism of so many of today\u2019s anti-Zionist intellectuals, let\u2019s quote what\u00a0Mengestu said in an interview with The New York Times\u00a0<\/em>after he assumed the position late last year:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIf we lose awareness of how important our culture of literary and artistic production is, our understanding of free expression goes with it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mengestu thinks \u201cliterary and artistic production\u201d is important. So far, so good. And even though I disagreed with\u00a0the boycott\u00a0that shut down the 2024 PEN literary festival (a boycott that George Packer rightly called authoritarian in spirit), let\u2019s stipulate Mengestu\u2019s argument that it was \u201cvery fair for writers to ask us [PEN] to do more\u201d to speak out on behalf of Palestinian writers.<\/p>\n

And his next point always bears repeating:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWriters are the ones who hold us accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So let\u2019s hold Mengestu accountable for his \u201cunderstanding of free expression,\u201d as he put it. Sad to say, he doesn\u2019t understand it at all.<\/p>\n

Mengestu resigned because he objected to an article on the PEN website entitled \u201cA Silent Moratorium\u201d\u00a0that detailed how hard it is nowadays for all Israeli writers and many Jewish writers to get published. Thanks to a boycott, the article said, \u201cthe mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article shows how ever since October 7, Israeli and Jewish writers have been disinvited from conferences, harassed on social media, review-bombed on Goodreads, and \u201csubjected to online calls not to be read, platformed, or engaged with if they had ever shown support for Israel or Zionism. Some writers described being ignored by agents, publishers, literary journals, and magazines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mengestu considered the article \u201cunethical\u201d because it discriminated against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Here\u2019s how he explained his reasoning that it\u2019s BDS\u2014not Jewish writers\u2014now facing \u201cdiscrimination\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

We have the responsibility to be conscious and aware of how our work can impact and influence those debates, and especially if that means producing work that might actually restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Say, what? Mengestu\u2019s point is incomprehensible and poorly argued because it\u2019s lame. So let me translate: Boycotts are a form of free speech, and opposing them is a form of censorship.<\/p>\n

So if an organization dedicated to fighting boycotts of writers decides to, uh, chronicle boycotts of writers, we\u2019re supposed to believe that constitutes \u201csuppressing speech\u201d?<\/p>\n

Somewhere, George Orwell is gagging. If you want to know why, read his essential essay,\u00a0Politics and the English Language.<\/p>\n

Read more A Marine, Two Murders, and a War on Women<\/a><\/p>\n

Speaking of Orwell: He was British at a time when Great Britain wrote the book on what is now called settler colonialism. So by Mengestu\u2019s logic, if anti-imperialists had announced a boycott of British writers, it would be \u201cunethical\u201d to suggest that Orwell should be published in the United States or allowed to attend a conference here.<\/p>\n

Would it be \u201csuppressing free speech\u201d to explain why American authors of the 1960s should not be blackballed even though the U.S. government was then killing nearly two million civilians in Southeast Asia?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s bring it into the present and closer to home. As an American novelist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, Mengestu would have good reason to feel aggrieved if foreign publishers suddenly said that, because Donald Trump is a menace, we won\u2019t be publishing any books by you or other American authors.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, Columbia professor\u00a0Mahmood Mamdani, father of the mayor of New York City, claims he draws a distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel, but he has called for boycotting academic conferences with Israeli attendees. How would he feel if he were disinvited to a conference abroad because he came from the country run by Trump?<\/p>\n

Mengestu arrived in the U.S. in 1980 as a two-year-old when his family fled the\u00a0Ethiopian Red Terror<\/strong>, a period of Marxist-Leninist political repression that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Let\u2019s say he had stayed in Ethiopia. How would he feel if his books were boycotted and he was harassed for being Ethiopian? Would that be anti-Ethiopian racism? Seems so.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still trying to get my head around the idea that the president of PEN can\u2019t tell the difference between boycotting products and boycotting speech. Economic boycotts have a long tradition, even if BDS won\u2019t admit that its own leaders break the boycott by using iPhones that contain Israeli parts. By contrast, boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning speech is just censorship with a trendy name.<\/p>\n

It boils down to this: Mengestu is against book bans in red-state schools and for them in blue-state publishing houses.<\/p>\n

I get the sense that Mengestu loves and respects writers as long as they aren\u2019t Israeli. It doesn\u2019t matter if they\u2019re highly critical of their government. The fact that they are Israeli (and thus by definition \u201cZionist\u201d) means that they and anyone else with a Z connection have relinquished their right to be protected by PEN.<\/p>\n

Actually, it\u2019s worse than that. Mengestu\u2019s theatrical resignation is a way of saying not only that Israeli and Jewish writers don\u2019t deserve attention, but that they\u00a0must not\u00a0<\/em>be heard, and that this a matter of high constitutional principle.<\/p>\n

In the end, Mengestu\u2019s tortured logic grows out of the same exasperation that anti-Zionists feel any time someone brings up October 7 or the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

They think that writing about Jewish suffering detracts from outrage over Palestinian suffering and thus must be silenced. And of course they\u2019re certain that even poor Israeli writers scribbling in an attic somewhere are too rich and privileged to be \u201cmarginalized.\u201d I guess being shunned everywhere in the world just because you\u2019re born in a pariah state doesn\u2019t rise to the level of marginalization.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a long history of telling Jews to shut up about their misfortune and stop calling out discrimination against them. It\u2019s a familiar feature of anti-Semitism. Dinaw Mengestu might not know that, but he should.<\/p>\n

Read more How to Save the IRS<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president of PEN America quit for reasons that are morally confused, hypocritical and, yes, casually anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,19,2],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-newsletter","category-politics","tag-tagged-bds-boycott-dinaw-mengestu-free-speech-pen-pen-america-zionism"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Anti-Zionists Become Censors - USA Business Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/usabusinesschronicle.com\/?p=286\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When Anti-Zionists Become Censors - 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