If you plan a seminar featuring a banished anti-Israeli speaker and it gets cancelled, you apparently then need to come up with a quick new excuse for hating Jews.
Enter the anemic Portland Press Herald, which is now quoting an organizer for the doomed pro-Palestinian confab as complaining that “conservatives” are at fault for being the skunk at the garden party.
“Organizers said in a statement Tuesday the cancellation was the product of an ‘outside pressure campaign’ after the conference was written about in several Jewish and Israeli news outlets, and the right-wing publication The Maine Wire,” according to Maine’s newspaper of questionable record.
The February 28 event in Portland was to be co-hosted by the Maine Coalition for Palestine, Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights and the University of Southern Maine.
But the problem for the organizers is not The Maine Wire – contrary to the Portland Press Herald report – but featured speaker Francesca Albanese, who is on the U.S. Department of Treasury’s sanction list.
Once school officials learned Albanese was on the roster of invitees, they told the pro-Palestinian crowd they were no longer welcome.
“To have this individual speak virtually would have required conference organizers to obtain permission from the Treasury Department, which they did not,” a school spokeswoman was quoted in the Portland Press Herald. “Hosting a conference that is being actively promoted as including a speaker sanctioned by the U.S. government would put our public university in violation of federal law.”
Republicans in the Maine Senate, meanwhile, are demanding answers from the publicly-funded university as to how they decided to allow the conference to go forward in the first place.
Now organizers – with the Press Herald’s help – are defending inviting Albanese, using as a disclaimer that they were not paying for her appearance.
They also claimed they had permission from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency that enforces that sanctions list.
The Maine Wire last week broke the story about Albanese being invited to the conference and within days of that report university officials decided to pull the plug on the project.
Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, called Israel the “common enemy of humanity” at a recent Qatar forum featuring Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.
After the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, she called for an immediate ceasefire and warned that Palestinians in Gaza were at risk of ethnic cleansing.
Two years ago Albanese reported to the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide.
If Albanese weren’t enough of a headache for what the Portland Press Herald comedically called an “academic conference,” the coverage by The Maine Wire included the irony that the anti-Jewish meeting was to be held in an auditorium named for Linda Abromson, who was Portland’s first female Jewish mayor.
Oops.
Oh what a tangled web they weave…with help of the Portland Press Herald which never asked, “How again in this The Maine Wire’s fault? Asking for a friend.”
