Chris Hedges: PEN America Self-Destructs

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

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 organization’s tepid attempts to address the revolt — it issued a response filled with banalities such as expressing “our sorrow and anguish at the suffering endured by so many Palestinian civilians in Gaza” — is further evidence of its moral vacuity.

Nossel repeats slanderous tropes used to discredit Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher who faces extradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. 

“Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here,” Nossel has said.

Nossel, an attorney, served as a member of the State Department task force formed to deal with the WikiLeaks publications. She is well aware that the issue of whether Assange is a journalist is not immaterial. It is crucial. The U.S. effort to extradite Assange is built around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. If he is extradited and found guilty, the precedent will criminalize any journalist that possesses or publishes classified material.  

Nossel parrots the U.S. government’s charges against Assange, including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections — charges that are false. PEN America, under her direction, sent out news briefs with headlines such as: “Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling.” 

PEN America, after heavy pressure, eventually said Assange should not be extradited. Advocating for his extradition was difficult after The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País published a joint statement demanding charges against Assange be dropped. PEN centers around the world have also denounced the extradition proceedings. Nossel, however, was long part of Assange’s lynch mob. 

Nossel said on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC in May 2019 that Assange went “beyond what a mainstream news outlet would do.” She blasted WikiLeaks’ publications as “massive and indiscriminate” and blamed Assange for not redacting names.

Assange, in fact, contacted the State Department to warn them that the complete unredacted cables were on the verge of being published by a third party, urged the State Department to take action and offered to assist them in doing so. It was the U.S. government which ultimately decided to do nothing.

PEN America was once run by writers dedicated to defending those persecuted around the globe — regardless of which government carried out the persecuting. I knew some of these writers, including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Russell Banks. They were fierce critics of U.S. militarism, champions of freedom of expression and fiery advocates for the persecuted and the oppressed.

Nossel stands for none of these ideals. She is a former corporate lawyer, listed as a “contributor” to the Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as vice president of U.S. business development for Bertelsmann. Her disastrous one year tenure as the Executive Director of Amnesty International saw her turn the human rights organization into a cheerleader for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In May 2012, when NATO held its “Summit Meeting” in Chicago, she sponsored a “Shadow Summit” and dotted the city with bus stop billboards reading “NATO, Keep the Progress Going. Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan.” That was apparently too much, even for Amnesty International, and she was reportedly pushed out. 

Nossel at PEN America, however, has successfully hollowed out the organization and crowned herself with the ludicrous title of CEO of PEN America, emblematic of the soulless corporatism she embodies. 

A 2004 Foreign Affairs article by Nossel titled “Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism” calls for “liberal internationalism” and an “assertive leadership” by the U.S. that is “diplomatic, economic, and not least, military [my italics] — to advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction.”

I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York and resigned from PEN America – which that same year had given me its First Amendment Award – to protest Nossel’s appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership, which I accepted. I wrote in my resignation letter:

The suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the plight of those caught up in our imperial wars in countries such as Iraq are not abstractions to me. Nossel’s relentless championing of preemptive war — which under international law is illegal — as a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization.

The current letter, now signed by more than 1,300 writers, notes that “Palestine’s poets, scholars, novelists and journalists and essayists have risked everything, including their lives and the lives of their families, to share their words with the world. Yet PEN America appears unwilling to stand with them firmly against the powers that have oppressed and dispossessed them for the last 75 years.”

The writers charge that “PEN America has betrayed the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere.” 

PEN America refuses to call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. 

“This failure is particularly striking in light of the extraordinary toll this catastrophe has taken in the cultural sphere,” the writers say. “Israel has killed, and at times deliberately targeted and assassinated journalists, poets, novelists, and writers of all kinds. It has destroyed almost all forms of cultural infrastructure that support the practice of literature, art, intellectual exchange, and free speech through the bombing and demolition of universities, cultural centers, museums, libraries, and printing presses. By disrupting access to digital communication, Israel has also been blocking Palestinians from sharing what they have witnessed and experienced and telling the truth of what is happening to them. Everyone who uses the power of the pen and free speech to appeal to the conscience of the world is at risk.”

Israel, the letter notes, “has killed nearly one hundred journalists and media workers, more than in the two-decade war in Afghanistan, and more than in the deadliest year of the Iraq War. Israel has also killed nearly one hundred academics and writers.”

PEN America “took four and half months to utter the word ‘ceasefire,’ then only with a vague ‘hope’ for one that is ‘mutually agreed,’ rather than a clear call.” 

“Equally concerning is PEN America’s history of condemning authors who choose to honor the Palestinian call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in their oppression, accusing them of impeding ‘the free flow of ideas,’” the letter continues. “It seems to us that this violates several principles at the heart of PEN’s mission. To begin with, the idea that BDS, which does not boycott individual writers or scholars, can impede the ‘free flow of ideas’ in Israel-Palestine assumes that such a thing exists there. In fact, it is a cruel fantasy so long as Palestinians live under a rule reliant on racial segregation and the implementation of ethnic hierarchies, siege and collective punishment, the very conditions BDS seeks to end.”

The banning of writers who support BDS “contributes to a neo-McCarthyite environment in North America and Europe, in which the growing support for BDS is increasingly criminalized.” Opposition to BDS , the letter points out, “overlooks the long and proud history of the boycott as an effective, nonviolent tool of collective liberation. Just as boycott was a principal tool used to successfully end political apartheid in South Africa, so it should be accepted that some are free to adopt it as a vital tool in the nonviolent resistance movement against Israeli impunity today.”

The writers responded to PEN America’s recently posted statements expressing concern about various incidents in Gaza by asking “Where are the actions that flow from these stated concerns?” 

They note that “PEN America has not launched any substantial coordinated support or issued any reports highlighting the scale and scope of the attacks on writers in Gaza, or on Palestinian speech and culture more broadly. PEN America has done very little to mobilize or inspire its many members — quite unlike recent PEN America campaigns opposing the war in Ukraine and its impact on culture, or PEN International’s ‘Day of the Dead’ honoring journalists killed in Latin America.”

The writers also say they are “dismayed that there has been no apology to the Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar for the shocking act of dragging her out of an event featuring an anti-Palestinian and pro-war Hollywood actor as Jarrar read out the names of murdered Palestinian writers.”

Palestinian writers, the letter reads, “have found themselves in the insulting position of having to fight PEN America to loudly call for the U.S.-funded bombs to stop falling. They have been forced to point out, over and over again, that if the current onslaught was directed against any other people, there would have been clear condemnations of the crimes, as well as support for all forms of nonviolent resistance against oppression, alongside events focused on the artists who are the most vulnerable in the world.”

PEN America may continue to exist, indeed its obsequiousness to governmental and corporate power will probably assure its funding, but it is a hollow brand used to justify the crimes and lies of the U.S. government and Israel. 

The best writers in the Soviet Union refused to join the Union of Soviet Writers or were expelled. Those left were propagandists, third rate writers and careerists. PEN America is fast becoming its doppelgänger.  

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By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

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Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

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