Pinkwashing at the Soura Film Festival

Soura Film Festival, the so-called “First Queer Middle East & North African Film Festival” completely excludes Palestinian filmmakers and has chosen to highlight Israeli films. Soft or strong, normalization is normalization!

This is not a theoretical debate, but a concrete demand to not exclude Palestine and the Palestinians from the discussion. The very fact that we need to write to SOURA about their exclusion of Palestine is absurd in this situation. But our moral responsibility demands us to expose such complicity wherever it appears.

Last year at the Radical Queer March, PoC, Black and Arab queers have made a loud and clear statement about the need of solidarity to exist between Black, PoC, queers, and other marginalized communities in the left, and the Palestinian struggle. We are not willing to compromise this victory in exchange for some movies being shown in a shallow context without including any Palestinian films or participants.

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Organisers fail to silence BIPoC voices at Berlin “anarchist” pride

Official statement from Berlin Against Pinkwashing and QUARC about the 2020 Berlin Anarchist CSD:

Despite the promises of the Berlin Anarchist Christopher Street Day march (ACSD) to hold an event “where all people feel comfortable”, it ended up being more of the same: the organisers subjected BIPoC marchers to racism and silencing. In the face of this, we, a group of marchers from BaP (Berlin against Pinkwashing) and QuARC (Queers Against Racism And Colonialism) made our voices heard — to applause from our fellow marchers and local bystanders.

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The “march for queer visibility in Neukölln”

We distributed flyers at a “march for queer visibility in Neukölln” yesterday. The attending crowd was (unsurprisingly) overwhelmingly white and sprinkled with a bunch of rainbow-colored european union flags. Fun fact: people with EU-gear were especially unwilling to read our flyers and engage with our criticism, immediately throwing them away or demanding that absent BPoC queers explain to them personally why they chose not to attend in an act of unpaid emotional labor.

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Our Lives, Our Streets! Palestine Solidarity in the Radical Queer March Berlin 2019

Official statement from the organisers of the ‘Queers for Palestine’ block
More than 500 people showed up for the Queers for Palestine block in the Berlin Radical Queer March on Saturday, July 27, 2019. From the anti-deutsche “radical queers” who evidently called the police to block us, to the cancelation of the queer after-party at Liebig34 in protest of the queer march organizers calling in cops in riot gear – it’s been a critical day for Berlin. The time of silence on Palestine is over! The time of the White left dictating people with lived experiences of racism and colonial oppression how to be free is over!
No Pride in Apartheid!
Queer Liberation – Stop the Occupation!
No Justice, No Peace! No Racist Police!
We’re Here! We’re Queer! Palestine is in Berlin!
Like other radical queer and trans folks, feminists, anarchists and revolutionaries of all sorts, we were excited about the Radical Queer March in Berlin. We were taken aback by the level of aggression and outright physical violence we were to experience from fellow queer organizers and demonstrators in an attempt to silence and exclude us. Unfathomable that “radical queers” would call the cops on queers of colour, migrants and refugees. But we did it. We marched together, felt our collective power and are thrilled, energized and hopeful for the future.

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