A young women who spoke beside him at the University of Uppsala in Sweden is Christy Anastas. She is a Palestinian Christian whose family lives in Bethlehem. In fact, her family's home was featured in the 60 Minutes television show about the Arab Christians. It is the home surrounded on three sides by the Israel security wall. I tried to find a video of just the university speech but events have moved on and the video now contains three videos.
The first two are short. One is Anastas speaking from the United Kingdom, pleading with Dr. Saeb Erekat to protect her family in Palestine because she believes that they are under pressure. The next short video is one of Anastas asking Erekat a question about his attempts at negotiations. But the larger part is her speech at the university.
What I hope you will see by watching this video, is that Christy does not justify everything that the Israelis do, but she understands that there are serious abuses of human rights in the Palestinian territories. Her thoughts on women's rights is important.
Her life is still in danger.
I want to add more to this information. One of the Palestinian newspapers that the Israel/Palestine Mission Network use on their twitter links recently featured the same video with the family insisting that Christy is being pressured and used in the United Kingdom. The paper, Ma'an New Agency reports:
The Anastas family also denied claims that their daughter had been forced to flee, saying that they feared she had been the victim of "entrapment" and was under "pressure" from sponsors who had promised to pay her enrollment fees and housing costs for university in the United Kingdom.I point this out because the stories featured in Ma'an and other papers like it are not complete, which means they cannot always be trusted.
This news item from Haaretz fits in with the points both Meyers and Anastas are making, "Union 'expels' Palestinian professor who took students to Auschwitz."
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