Letter to the State Library of Victoria Staff

And all arts workers

Dear Librarians:

I understand there is a staff union meeting this week, and that you might need encouragement to stand against the Board and CEO who have lied so maliciously and cravenly to us, to the public, and caused reputational damage—both to us and to you—in the process of terminating our contracted work on the basis of “child and cultural safety”. We have been put in an ugly position and we need your help.

Recently, in The Age newspaper, Kerrie O’Brien revealed that multiple staff members confirmed that SLV CEO Paul Duldig cited my social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as the reason for terminating this program.

Like me, the other writers protesting this damaging premise for our termination—Jinghua Qian, Alison Evans, and Ariel Slamet Ries—are queer, and so we’re also deeply concerned about the way this reasoning falls into a long-standing conservative smear campaign that posits us as inherently predatory. It’s especially sick that a framework meant for the protection of Indigenous people and marginalised communities disadvantaged by a racist system is being used by a state government institution against us, allegedly in order to suppress our political opinions.

We know that the CEO has lied about the premise for this cancellation, and the Library continues to mislead the public by saying that the program will continue without clarifying that it will be without us, which confirms that it considers us the “problem” even as it tries to weasel around directly saying so. Even the claim that this is a “program-wide” review is untrue: SLV continues to offer other workshops and programs for kids. This is targeted, it’s malicious, and it does us all a disservice in an increasingly hostile, fascistic atmosphere of violent censorship and suppression.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say anymore. I’m running out of words. Every day for six months I have watched Arab men, women, and kids be starved and bombed and shot to death, ripped to pieces, run over by tanks, crushed by rubble, murdered in hospital beds, bundled into mass graves. More than 40,000 killed. 100,000 wounded. I have watched my people scream for help for six months and not only be denied, but for aid to be given to their murderers instead, and for human rights organisations and advocates to be openly attacked and punished in a frightening campaign to silence dissent. I have seen the bodies of children who were forcibly starved to death, a slow agonising murder, a burning from within, and I will never be the same.

Now I know and you know that my position against this genocide has led to this state-sanctioned discrimination, this callous cancellation that not only deprived me of my contracted work but also managed to malign me and my peers in the process. Why? Because I/we stand opposed to the slaughter of 14,000 children? Their murder is acceptable to the State because they are Arab, but it is not and will never be acceptable to me. How much starker does the situation need to be? Some of you can speak directly to this discrimination, some of you saw and heard it in person. What’s at stake is so much larger than our reputations but goes to the heart of our human rights and our duty of care to one another. Please do something. Please stand with us.

I understand it’s scary. Most of us need to work to pay the bills. That, too, is part of the reason we can’t walk away: to accept the implication here is to accept our removal from classrooms, to be subject to this kind of treatment again, and by other government institutions. Even if there wasn’t a single dollar on the line, I would still oppose this ugliness. The people of Palestine are trapped in an extermination camp where they are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands; war crimes are being committed daily, proudly, and our government openly supports this genocide. I will never be quiet about this horror, I will always stand against it. The injustices we allow for others will inevitably be injustices wielded against us here at home. Linger here— this last sentence should haunt you: what we have allowed will be used against us.

Salaam,
Omar