PEN America Sells out. Again.

PEN America, once a fearless advocate on behalf of persecuted writers around the globe, has become a shill for Zionism and American imperialism.

Poison Pen - by Mr. Fish

PEN America, an organization founded to defend persecuted and censored writers, has once again made a mockery of itself with its call to protect Israeli writers from discrimination.

Yes. Israeli writers.

Its most recent screed, “A Silent Moratorium,” is so tone deaf and embarrassing that it triggered a widespread backlash. PEN America’s president, Dinaw Mengestu, resigned in protest.

Mengestu told The New York Times the post is the most recent in a series of moves he felt are counter to the organization’s values and could harm efforts to preserve freedom of expression.

“This report is not an isolated incident,” Mengestu said. He added, it “continues this approach toward defending some rights while not defending others.”

I doubt Mengestu’s resignation will change much. At best, it will make PEN America more circumspect about exposing its moral bankruptcy.

“A Silent Moratorium,” is authored by Editorial Director Lisa Tolin, Chief Communications Officer Geraldine Baum and consultant Malka Margolies. It criticizes what it calls “a widening cultural isolation” of Israel. It decries “the blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate that some Jewish and Israeli authors” face. It calls the loss of opportunities for Jewish writers “devastating” and complains that Israelis who write for U.S. magazines “are put through a series of ideological checks, such as whether they use the word genocide.” It condemns the call by more than 7,000 writers and literary professionals, who in the fall of 2024 signed a pledge not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies, and publications which “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” And it defends Zionists, stating:

In interviews with PEN America, Israeli and Jewish writers described a climate where Zionism is treated as a slur. While there remains no popular agreement on what it means to be a Zionist, recent survey data suggests that one-third of American Jews self-identify as Zionist and nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Calls to exclude Zionists from publishing could therefore mean excluding people with a wide range of voices and views.

For the record, Zionism is explicitly racist. It is an ideology used to justify the occupation and colonization of historic Palestine and the ethnic cleansing and annihilation of its native inhabitants. Hateful ideologies cannot be normalized because a third of American Jews identify as Zionists. The Nazis, after all, had about the same level of support among German voters — 37.3 percent — in the 1932 election.

This latest defense of Israel comes from an organization that has spent the last decade shredding its credibility. It studiously ignored the genocide in Gaza and the murder and maiming of Palestinian journalists, academics, writers, poets and their family members.

PEN America accepted money from the Israeli government to fund its literary festival for five years and only stopped in 2017, following heavy criticism. It failed to defend the few courageous voices inside Israel who denounce Israeli apartheid and genocide, or did so only belatedly. It remained silent as Palestinian writers were deplatformed or blocked from publishing. It regularly promoted Zionist authors such as A. B. Yehoshua, who has long dismissed the reality of settler-colonialism in Palestine. It co-sponsored a book event with Zionist actor Mayim Bialik, who has donated to the Israel Defense Forces, is an outspoken ceasefire opponent, regularly circulates anti-Palestinian and Israeli military propaganda and frames pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic.”

PEN America placed an employee under investigation for sharing an article critical of Zionism and later fired him after he wrote an article explaining why he was placed under investigation. It functioned as a propaganda arm for the Biden administration and Ukrainian government, including cancelling a panel that included Russian writers — under pressure from PEN Ukraine — despite the fact that they were critics of the Russian government. It amplified lies about Julian Assange and refused to classify him as a journalist.

PEN America’s board includes writers such as George Packer, labeled one of “Bush’s useful idiots” by Tony Judt for cheerleading the invasion and occupation of Iraq, along with real estate and investment firm CEOs. It has been hijacked by wealthy backers, corporate donors and apologists for imperialism and genocide.

“PEN America peddles agitprop,” I wrote in 2024. “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.”

PEN America lost its way over a decade ago, when in 2013 it appointed a former Clinton State Department official, Suzanne Nossel, as its Executive Director. That year, I won the PEN Center USA First Amendment Award. I was scheduled to participate as a speaker at the PEN World Voices Festival when Nossel’s appointment was announced. I refused to take part in the festival and resigned from PEN America in protest.

“This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend,” I wrote in my resignation letter:

I spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. 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, especially one that has global concerns. PEN American Center, by appointing Nossel, has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for our dissidents, especially Bradley Manning. I hereby resign from PEN. I will wait until the organization returns to its original mandate to defend those who are persecuted, including those within the United States, before returning to the organization.

PEN Canada responded to my resignation by offering me membership, which I accepted.

PEN America’s latest post, which refers to the genocide in Gaza as a “war,” is in the spirit of Nossel. Nossel participated in the State Department’s efforts to discredit Assange and the WikiLeaks disclosures. In May 2012, when NATO held a “Summit Meeting” in Chicago, Amnesty International USA — with Nossel as the executive director — sponsored a “Shadow Summit.” She dotted the city with billboards reading: “NATO, Keep the Progress Going. Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan.” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once said 500,000 dead Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions was “worth it,” was invited to speak at Nossel’s event. Nossel left Amnesty International USA within a year, before ending up at PEN America. She resigned in 2024 after numerous writers — angered at the organization’s failure to defend Palestinian writers — withdrew from the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York and Los Angeles, resulting in the cancellation of the event and its annual Literary Awards.

PEN America was once run by writers who fought on behalf of writers persecuted across the globe. I knew some of them, including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Robert Jay Lifton, Joan Didion and Russell Banks. They were fierce critics of U.S. militarism, capitalism and imperialism. They were steadfast champions of freedom of expression. They would be sickened by what PEN America has become.

“This failure is particularly striking in light of the extraordinary toll this catastrophe has taken in the cultural sphere,” the letter sent to PEN America in March 2024 — signed by writers including Naomi Klein, Ruha Benjamin, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar — reads. It goes on:

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.

A scathing open letter sent to PEN America one month earlier, criticising its double standards when dealing with Palestinians and Israel’s genocide, garnared over 1,300 signatories.

Fascism looms. Those who write and speak in opposition to the genocide are silenced and criminalized. Our universities have banned free speech and purged students and faculty who dare to denounce the crime of all crimes. Corporate media, including CBS and CNN — bought by the arch-Zionist Larry Ellison — have been cowed into silence. The Democratic Party, captured by the Israel lobby, ignores the call by 75 percent of registered Democrats to end arms shipments to Israel.

Free expression is withering away. Liberties are being abolished. Those who resist are branded enemies of the state.

It will only get worse.

PEN America has been hollowed out. Its moral core is gone. It abandoned its mission to “defend writers, artists, and journalists and protect free expression.” It transformed itself into a propaganda machine for the oppressors, not the oppressed. It should be purged and returned to its former self or shut down.