In the 3rd year of Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Expression and Human Rights presented by Bogazici University History, Sociology and Political Sciences and International Relation departments, Naomi Klein gave a lecture titled 'The Power of Being Consistent: Insisting on Palestinian Humanity in the Western Media.'

The Power of Being Consistent: Insisting on Palestinian Humanity in the Western Media

Recent months have seen a ferocious wave of Israeli attacks targeting Palestinian activists who have chosen to resist occupation through principled, non-violent action. Key leaders are being arrested one by one, particularly those who oppose the construction of the so-called “security barrier,” and those who are calling for Israel to face the kinds of boycotts and sanctions that ultimately ended Apartheid in South Africa. A central tenet of the international campaign has been the decision not to advocate a particular political outcome, but rather to insist that Israel comply with international law. This set of demands is so threatening to Israel’s expansive colonial policies that new words like “lawfare” have recently been invented to slander it. The lecture will examine this latest stage of the struggle for Palestinian rights, interrogating what it tells us about the limits of free expression in the West, as well as the hope it holds to deliver genuine equality between Jews and Palestinians at last.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian award-winning journalist, author of internationally bestselling non-fiction books and political activist. She writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aranson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Her first book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000) was an international bestseller, translated into 28 languages. Her second book, a collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate was published in 2002. Her third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) was also an international bestseller and it was translated into 27 languages. A six minute companion film was created by Alfonso Cuaron and it was downloaded over a million times. Naomi Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, co-produced a feature documentary, The Take, about Argentina’s worker occupied factories in 2004. Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia, Canada.