Shame for Fame: by Nahida Exiled Palestinian

I avoided writing about this topic, trying to give Palestine Chronicle and its chief editor Ramzy Baroud the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t think keeping silent is an option any more

In March 2011 I met Ramzy Baroud during his UK tour, I invited him to stay with us in my family home, where he was warmly welcomed. As we both were devoted to working for liberation of our homeland and advocating for justice for our people, I thought we had forged a mutually respectful friendship.

I continued to communicate with Baroud via email and Facebook, sharing my poems, thoughts, comments and articles with him, with hardly any response, if ever. The communication was a one way street, but I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt and finding excuses, for he is such a busy journalist.

In December 2013, I posted a series of comments on Palestine Chronicle of which PC editor published only three while censoring the most crucial.

Being one of my Facebook friends, I wrote to Mr Baroud privately inquiring about the reason of censoring my comments, I never received a reply.

Today, April 12, 2016, I notice that he had deleted me from his list of friends (not sure when), I contacted him again asking for an explanation, again no reply.

Also today, I noticed that the Palestine Chronicle team, which consists of “professional journalists and respected writers and authors“, has published one of my photoswhich I took during my visit to Palestine in 2012, without asking permission or giving credit.

Furthermore, in the same edition of Palestine Chronicle two poems are published: One is eerily the same topic and same title as a poem I published three years ago and had sent to Mr Baroud.

The second poem also bears almost the same title and has the same topic as one of my prose/poems, written in 2012, and is illustrated by my photograph that I used for the same publication, a photo that is significant because it depicts the garden that triggered me to write the prose/poem in the first place. Mr Baroud also received it via email at the time.

This is irrefutably not a coincidence, and is irrefutably an act of unwarranted hostility, an attempt by a fellow Palestinian to dispossess the intellectual rights of a fellow Palestinian author.

Ramzy Baroud, I am asking you for an explanation. What is going on? What has gone so wrong with you that you engage in such unfathomable act?

Why does Palestine Chronicle participate in censoring Palestinian voices and obfuscating their work, bordering on plagiarism?

Do we really need thought commissars in our movement of liberation?

Is it excommunication against untamed Palestinian voices whose narrative is not approved by anti-Zionist rabbis and lacking the kosher stamp?

This kind of subliminal attacks coming from a Palestinian, who brags of his father being a “freedom fighter” and who engages into yet another dispossession and attempted demoralization of a fellow Palestinian freedom fighter is beyond shameful

Is that the price of fame? Does Mr Baroud really think that it will not cost him discredit and shame?

Palestine Chronicle, Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Poetry for Palestine, July 8, 2011

Palestine Chronicle, Saturday, April 9, 2016

As well as publishing one of Nahida’s photos without authorisation

Poetry for Palestine, April 28, 2012