LONDON: Palestinian American author Susan Abulhawa is suing the Oxford Union in the UK, seeking an apology and compensation for damages after parts of a speech she gave during a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were removed from a video posted by the union on YouTube.<\/p>\n
The Pennsylvania-based author of the best-selling book \u201cMornings in Jenin\u201d was one of eight speakers who took part in the debate in November 2024. The Oxford Union uploaded her speech to YouTube but deleted it from the platform a week after the debate, then replaced it in December with an edited version that omitted remarks she made about Zionism and Israel\u2019s actions in Lebanon.<\/p>\n
The union said that it removed parts of Abulhawa\u2019s speech because of \u201clegal concerns\u201d about certain aspects of it, The Times newspaper reported, including comments about Zionists encouraging \u201cthe most vile of human impulses,\u201d and Israeli booby traps in Lebanon.<\/p>\n
When contacted by Abulhawa\u2019s legal team, the union argued that the cut remarks constituted racial hatred in violation of Section 17 of the UK\u2019s Public Order Act 1986. The author uploaded the full version of her speech to her own YouTube channel in April.<\/p>\n
In one part removed by the union, Abulhawa addresses Zionists directly, saying: \u201cYou don\u2019t know how to live in the world without dominating others. You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also highlighted atrocities carried out by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, including the bombing of hospitals and schools, and the killing of women and children, which a number of UN and Western officials have described as amounting to genocide.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s military campaign in Gaza has resulted in the killing of more than 65,000 Palestinians since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and the displacement of the entire 2 million-strong population of the territory.<\/p>\n
Abulhawa, whose family hails from the Mount of Olives, a Palestinian neighborhood overlooking the walled city of occupied East Jerusalem, described the edited version of her speech as \u201cpolitically motivated censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cThey talk about freedom of expression, free discourse and free debate, exchange of thoughts, exchange of ideas, however uncomfortable, but when it comes to this one issue \u2026 there\u2019s a different set of rules.\u201d<\/p>\n
Abulhawa said the actions of the Oxford Union, one of Britain\u2019s oldest university unions, had damaged her reputation by implying her remarks were criminal, The Times reported. She wants an apology, damages, and for the union to restore the full version of her speech. She is suing the union on various legal grounds, including copyright infringement, discrimination and breach of contract.<\/p>\n
\u201cI prepared a speech that I labored over for quite a while and I chose my words carefully for content,\u201d she said. \u201cThe suggestion was I said things that were unlawful, that were malicious or substandard. It was definitely disparaging to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The debate resulted in approval of a motion that proposed \u201cIsrael is an apartheid state responsible for genocide.\u201d The union did not comment on Abulhawa\u2019s legal challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON: Palestinian American author Susan Abulhawa is suing the Oxford Union in the UK, seeking an apology and compensation for damages after parts of a speech she gave during a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were removed from a video posted by the union on YouTube. The Pennsylvania-based author of the best-selling book \u201cMornings in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89223,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89206\/revisions\/89223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}