Greenwich Library Faces Mideast Lecture Controversy
Greenwich (Conn.) Library officials decided February 14 to allow a speaker to proceed with two scheduled lectures on Israeli-Palestinian relations at the library’s Cole Auditorium. The permission was a reversal of a previous action to cancel the lectures after the library received a number of complaints from community members.
The speaker, Alison Weir, is the founder of If Americans Knew, a watchdog organization critical of US news coverage of the Middle East. After privately placed advertisements for Weir’s speech “Israel-Palestine: Beyond the Headlines” ran in local papers February 8, the library began receiving negative feedback. One of the issues, Executive Director Mario González said in the February 13 Greenwich Time, was that some community members believed that the library itself booked the program. Library officials then opted to cancel the talks because they were “offensive to public sensitivity,” as outlined in the library’s meeting-room policy.
“The library does not normally receive complaints on programs that have been held on its grounds, so when numerous complaints came in on this particular program, the library needed to do due diligence and determine what was in the best interest of the public,” González said in a February 13 press release. The library typically holds around 1,100 programs every year and none have ever before been challenged, González told American Libraries.
However, following the initial cancellation, Weir insisted that it was her constitutional right to deliver her program. After fielding complaints from supporters of Weir’s assertion, most of them from out-of-state, library trustees sought legal counsel and affirmed that, although the library is a private nonprofit organization, because the town of Greenwich supplies some of the operating budget, the facility is technically a public institution that cannot discriminate over which groups can hold events there.
“We hope that the community understands that this was a legal decision based on advice from legal counsel,” González told AL. “The community overall has been very supportive of our decision and understands the legality of the issue.”
“The only thing that concerns me now is that the library management basically already said that my program violated public sensitivities,” Weir told the Associated Press February 14.
Weir’s first program, held the evening of February 14 and attended by people on both sides of the issue, went off without incident, though the library did bolster the amount of security guards and added a police presence, González told AL. The second talk was scheduled to occur on February 16.
A similar controversy is brewing at the Vancouver (B.C.) Public Library, where Greg Felton, author of The Host and the Parasite: How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America, is scheduled to present a book discussion February 25 during Canada’s Freedom to Read Week. After an opinion piece by Terry Glavin ran in the February 12 Vancouver Sun criticizing the library for giving a platform to an accused anti-Semite, City Librarian Paul Whitney wrote a February 13 rebuttal, stating that the public library’s role “is to provide a forum for an open and public exchange of contradictory views and to make materials available that represent a wide range of views, including those that may be considered unconventional, unpopular, or unacceptable.”
Posted on February 15, 2008. Discuss.