P is for Palestine: Fear and loathing at the children’s library
P is for Palestine illustration
Nada Elia reports in Middle East Eye:
As security surrounded the building in New Jersey’s Highland Park, the author – who needed an armed police escort – had to be snuck in through the back door. One of her friends, a member of Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, was by her side throughout the event.
Outside, police were ready for action. The fear was that members of the Jewish Defense League, classified by the FBI as a right-wing terrorist group, would be there to harass library patrons, as they had done two years earlier for another reading of the same book.
Indeed, positioned on either side of the entrance to the library, in the pouring rain, were two camps. Fans stood to one side, carrying a colourful banner reading: “We support our libraries, free speech, and Palestinian rights.” On the other side, mirroring the white nationalist rallies that are now a sadly familiar sight in parts of the US, foes chanted pro-Trump slogans and hurled insults at the author.
“I felt like an African American child being escorted into an unwelcoming white school in the 1960s,” author Golbarg Bashi told MEE. “The community, the library patrons, did not want me, considered me a threat. During desegregation, whites claimed that blacks were dangerous, that black boys would rape white girls. Today, the fear is of Palestinians – no one should even know of their existence, and my tiny little crowd-fundraised book is viewed as a threat.”
Indeed, since the publication of her children’s book in 2017, Bashi has been smeared as a terrorist and an antisemite, and has received death threats. Zionists also forced an independent bookstore in New York to stop carrying the book, and to issue an apology for having stocked it.