Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was banned from a Penn conference about the possibility of peace in the Middle East after he compared Israel to ISIS.
Hedges had been invited to speak at the conference sponsored by Penn's International Affairs Association (IAA) that will take place on April 3. However, the former Middle East bureau chief had his invitation revoked after his controversial comments about Israel that appeared in his column for Truthdig.com.
His column was entitled "ISIS – the new Israel" and included the following excerpt.
"[ISIS'] quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel."
After the column was written, Zachary Michael Belnavis, a member of the IAA, wrote to those organizing the conference about Hedges' inclusion in it.
“In light of this comparison, we don’t believe he would be suitable to a co-existence speaker based on this stance he’s taken," Belnavis wrote in an email.
Hedges wrote another column about being banned that said he was unsurprised that his comments led to his ban.
Read more from The Jerusalem Post or The Jewish Daily Forward. You can also read the controversial column here.
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