Journalist Chris Hedges disinvited from U. Penn over Israel-ISIS comparison
Journalist and former New York Times Middle East bureau chief Chris Hedges says the University of Pennsylvania disinvited him from a peace conference after he published a column that compared the Islamic State to Israel.
Hedges described the incident in his weekly column for the new website Truthdig, where he writes he had been invited to speak at a conference sponsored by Penn's International Affairs Association scheduled for April 3.
Hedges published the article that got him disinvited on December 15. In it, he wrote, "ISIS, ironically, is perhaps the only example of successful nation-building in the contemporary Middle East, despite the billions of dollars we have squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel."
Following the publication of the column, Hedges writes, Zachary Michael Belnavis, a member of the student group, e-mailed the lecture agency that set up the event, writing, "We’re sorry to inform you that we don’t think that Chris Hedges would be a suitable fit for our upcoming peace conference. We’re saying this in light of a recent article he’s written in which he compares the organization ISIS to Israel.... In light of this comparison we don’t believe he would be suitable to a co-existence speaker based on this stance he’s taken."
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.634168
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