Given the hostility of Hamas to homosexuals, ‘Queers for Palestine’ sounds like ‘turkeys for Christmas.’ In response, the previously prestigious Birkbeck University is attempting to provide some intellectual camouflage for this incoherent project with a public lecture scheduled for Friday, July 4th.
Organised by Palestinian ‘education’ group Makan and the Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality (who else?), speaker Dr. Penn Newell—(they/them) … a queer writer, researcher and Lecturer in Creative & Critical Writing at Birkbeck, University of London—will
contextualise pinkwashing as a conflation of queerness and nationalist ideology, or the “queer branding” of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.
The problem for the organisers is that, unlike all of its Arab neighbours and paramilitary enemies, Israel is liberal in its approach to lesbian and gay rights. This includes:
- Decriminalising same-sex sexual activity (1988), after 35 years of not enforcing laws on sodomy against consenting adults;
- recognising in law unregistered cohabitation between same-sex couples in 1963;
- prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in 1992;
- recognising civil marriages, including same-sex marriages, since 2006;
- Allowing same-sex couples to jointly adopt since a landmark 2008 court decision;
- hosting an internationally recognised gay scene in Tel Aviv.
For pro-Palestine academics, this is mere ‘pinkwashing’ (PR) from Israel, considered a uniquely evil power in the region. Homosexuals are being thrown under the metaphorical bus here—or literally off a rooftop.
After the lecture, gullible postgraduate students are invited to attend a Makan-led “pinkwashing research skills afternoon”
on anti-colonial research skills, collaborating to develop interdisciplinary theoretical knowledge and methods for analysing, evaluating, and resisting pinkwashing … draw[ing] on archival materials and anti-colonial strands of gender theory, attending to topics such as white savourism [sic], colonial masculinities, gay assimilation and queer resistance.
July’s festivities follow on from the “Birkbeck pinkwashing programme of June 2025,” including a “screening of eight short films collectively curated by ‘Queer Cinema for Palestine 2025 – No Pride in Genocide’.”
Its efforts to undermine Israel’s record on gay rights in support of Islamists invert reality—yet more of what this publication has called “the suicidal incoherence of Europe’s progressives.”
