Stopped!! NYPL's Plan To Turn Over Its 42nd Street Central Reference Library Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom For Event Honoring The Infamous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Good Friend of Stephen Schwarzman?)

If you were following our Twitter or Facebook feeds you already know-

On Wednesday, September 18th, the NYPL trustees had their meeting.  We were there.  Some of us were outside demonstrating with Code Pink.  The NYPL trustees went into executive session.  The NYPL then cancelled the event that it was allowing to be held in its grand Celeste Bartos room at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  The event was to honor the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”).   Crown Prince MBS is the character one running Saudi Arabia now who is responsible for the Yemen War and siege and many attendant war crimes (helped by the U.S. and endorsed by Israel), plus he has been identified as responsible for the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi, lured to his fate into the Saudi embassy in Turkey to get marriage license documents.

See the scathing Guardian op-ed that our library defending team had up at the same time that the NYPL trustees were meeting:

Why is New York's most famous library getting into bed with the Saudi crown prince?– Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is going to be sponsoring an event at the iconic New York Public Library. This reputation-laundering shouldn’t be allowed to happen

In that excellently juicy op-ed, read about Stephen Schwarzman and MBS:

Schwarzman gushed about his relationship with the crown prince in a 2017 interview: “He’s a very smart, very energetic, very visionary person, and being involved with someone like that on a personal basis as well as institutionally is really fascinating.”

Unbelievably, the MBS event was to involve the Crown Prince MBS teaching about “reputation management.”

We have previously put up more about Mr. Schwarzman,* his use of the NYPL for his own personal reputation laundering and his relationship whereby he got $20 billion from the Saudis as seed money for the privatizing of American public assets and public infrastructure. . .   (in other words, when it came to NYC libraries, Mr. Schwarzman was just getting started.)

This gets you to the many pages we have put up at CDL about Mr. SAS.

(* From that link, you can scroll down for older pages for more.)

Here is one recent article we have up about Mr. Schwarzman:

NYPL Trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, With His $1 Billion Salary, Claims Success `NOT Because We’re Smarter’, But Because `We Just See Things Others Can’t See,’ Have Data Others Don’t, And Get Advance Warnings.

Other unsavory people Schwarzman hobnobs with?: We have this tweet up about Schwarzman hangig out with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice in his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail operation- New York Magazine also wrote about their hobnobbing.  

Another recent tweet about Shwarzman we have up is this one linking to an article in the Intercept about how NYPL trustee Schwarzman's Blackstone is involved in the destruction of the Amazon.

Here are tweeted pictures of us with Code Pink outside the Trustees meeting.

After the NYPL trustees meeting when it was announced that the MBS event was cancelled, NYPL COO Iris Weinshall (Sen. Schumer's wife) came out and encountered us, we held up one of our signs and she said, "We did the right thing."  But we think that Ms. Weinshall had to have been involved in making the wrong decision in the first place, and we know that her husband is one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from Mr. Schwarzman.  

Here is a video of Senator Schumer's wife, NYPL Chief Operating Officer Iris Weinshall at another NYPL trustees meeting  patting Blackstone's Schwarzman on back about approval after the public was told about a plan to replace central library space with fancy café.