Former 'Comment is Free' contributor Mya Guarnieri's new radical gig.

It’s been quite a while since we heard from Mya Guarnieri on the pages of CiF.

Not that I’ve been losing any sleep over that, but the other day I unintentionally stumbled across the apparent reason.

As she stated on her 972 Magazine platform in October Mya has “got a new gig in Jerusalem” and that gig seems to be with the Alternative Information Centre.

The AIC is an Israeli-Palestinian NGO established in 1984. Its Israeli founders were members of the Revolutionary Communist League – previously Matzpen. Its Director, Michael Warschawski, was tried and imprisoned in 1987 due to links with George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

tumblr_lw669yWD3d1qap9gno1_500 — PFLP poster celebrating the group's 44th anniversary

Warschawski accuses Israel of being a ‘colonial settler state’, of practicing ‘ethnic cleansing’ and of inventing and manipulating ‘neo-antisemitism’. Predictably, he supports BDS. At the Haifa Conference for the Right of Return in 2008, Warschawski stated that:

“..one has to unequivocally reject the very idea (and existence) of a Jewish state, whatever will be its borders.”

The AIC Director has also collaborated extensively with the UK-based Khomenist Islamic Human Rights Commission, appearing at their conferences and taking part in their delegation to the 2009 ‘Durban II’ conference. His conclusions regarding that conference can be read here and include the following.

“The UN Durban I Conference, held in South Africa in 2001, was a powerful statement by almost all the nations of the world against racism, and in spite of some marginal anti-Semitic incidents, an extraordinary outcry of international civil society. In fact, Durban was the last international demonstration of the decolonization era that started with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the awakening of the colonized nations.“

To those familiar with her work it is perhaps not very surprising that Mya Guarnieri seems to have gravitated towards the more extreme end of the anti-Zionist scale, but the Guardian’s editors should probably be asking themselves how she ever came to be considered an appropriate columnist for ‘the world’s leading liberal voice’.