Palestinian Poem Sets Off Antisemitism Fight at Georgetown
Murtaza Hussain - April 29 2022 - The Intercept
▻https://theintercept.com/2022/04/29/palestine-poem-antisemitism-adl-mohammed-el-kurd
Controversy erupted this week over a young Palestinian activist’s invitation to speak at Georgetown Law School. In advance of the event, the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, accused 23-year-old Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd of being antisemitic — an allegation that was echoed by conservative media outlets. Though the event on Tuesday went ahead as planned, Georgetown has come under pressure in the media, as well as from some students and faculty, to condemn El-Kurd and disavow the event.
The war of words began a few days before the Georgetown event, when Jonathan Greenblatt, the liberal head of the ADL, shared a dossier accusing El-Kurd of antisemitism based on a selection of his tweets and past writing. Most of the accusations were based on social media posts from El-Kurd loudly chastising Israel and Zionism.
One item from the ADL dossier, however, has become the centerpiece of the campaign against the writer: a line from a poem he wrote that is now being alleged to echo a medieval antisemitic trope known as the “blood libel,” an accusation originated in medieval Europe that Jews consumed the blood of non-Jews for ritual purposes.
The passage in question came from El-Kurd’s book of poetry published last year, “Rifqa.” In one of the poems, El-Kurd, who denies the charges of antisemitism, wrote, “They harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.”
The line includes one of the few footnotes in the volume of poetry, directing the reader to a decade-old news story in which the Israeli government admitted to harvesting organs from bodies of Palestinians, as well as some Israelis, without their families’ consent in the 1990s.
El-Kurd denied that the line from the poem had anything to do with the “blood libel” trope, saying in an interview that until very recently he had not been familiar with it. “When I wrote this poem, I was like 14 or 15 years old,” El-Kurd said. “I literally only understood what blood libel was like two months ago. I’d never in my life even heard of this concept.” (...)