Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
In May 2013 I resigned from PEN America over the appointment of former State Department official Suzanne Nossel. A decade later, PEN America has become a propaganda arm of the state.
Chris Hedges
Mar 23
PEN America, once an important defender of rights for writers, editors and artists, has, under the direction of former State Department official Suzanne Nossel, abandoned its mission, destroyed its credibility and provoked a revolt among its members.
Its refusal to condemn the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s targeted killings of writers, academics and journalists, has seen numerous writers withdraw from the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York and Los Angeles, scheduled for April and May. PEN America has not only failed to denouce the genocide but provides platforms to Israelis who use racist and dehumanizing language to describe Palestinians. It blacklists those who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. PEN America functions as a propaganda arm for the Biden administration and Ukrainian government — including the banning of Russian writers from a PEN event last May. It has repeated false accusations against Julian Assange and refused to classify him as a journalist.
PEN America peddles agitprop. It is our version of the Union of Soviet Writers. The human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our own, and those of our allies, are ignored or whitewashed. Writers and editors, such as Assange, who expose the lies and crimes of the state, are discredited, while propagandists for U.S. imperialism and the apartheid state Israel – even as it carries out genocide – are fêted.
Angela Flournoy and Kathleen Alcott canceled their participation in PEN’s “New Year, New Books” event in January because of PEN’s invitation to Mayim Bialik who Flournoy explained engages in “dehumanizing anti-Palestinian propaganda and rallying her five million followers to the cause of the Israeli military.” At the Bialik event in Los Angeles in February, Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar was forcibly removed from the room for protesting.
Alcott wrote in an email to PEN America “..if I squint I can find perhaps two mentions [on PEN America’s twitter feed] of the word Palestine, one in reference to an op-ed in Newsweek which encourages a truly impotent and ahistorical neutrality (as well as, arguably, some internalized Islamophobia).”
Over 600 writers, including Roxane Gay and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, signed an open letter last month, demanding that “PEN … take an actual stand against an actual genocide.”
PEN America is a sock puppet of the U.S. and Israel. Nossel accepted funding from the Israeli government — which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank and assassinates them and their families in Gaza — for the literary group’s annual World Voices festival in New York. This funding only stopped in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers demanded an end to the organization's partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
PEN America, like other human rights organizations, has been hijacked by apparatchiks like Nossel and their corporate backers, surrendering its independence and integrity.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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