Gee… who represents the Israelis in that movie, who represents the Palestinians, and who represents Hamas?
Liberation is a just cause.
Just because Western media is confused doesn’t mean you have to be.
Al Jazeera: I encourage you to tune in a few times a day to the live stream on their homepage.
Nothing has surpassed Al Jazeera’s coverage. They’re platforming Palestinians themselves to report what they are living, press and civilians alike. And there’s usually a live feed of the Gaza skyline. And there’s Marwan Bishara, my new favorite political analyst, who caused the host to have to apologize ‘for an offensive word just now’ when Bishara called Western positions on a ‘humanitarian’ ceasefire and this horror in general “bullshit,” because really it is nothing but bullshit.
For an incredible resource that cuts through all the propaganda, check out Decolonize Palestine: for example, “Rainbow Washing,” where they break down all the different kinds of [color]-washing Israeli and Western governments promote, like pink-washing, the double narrative that all Palestinians are murderously anti-LGBTQIA+ while all of Palestine occupied by the Israelis is 100% inclusive of the LGBTQIA+ community. As Decolonize Palestine explains in full, this narrative is a double failure: (1) not all Israelis are so inclusive; (2) Palestinian Palestine is not worse than the community I grew up in, nor worse than any community I’ve lived in since: some people think they have reasons to be bigoted, so they’re bigoted and they’re loud about it; but not everyone is, and actually most people are indifferent. (3) I could spend entire days nonstop talking about the acts of violence that have been committed against my community in the United States and Europe, starting with the Holocaust itself. So this genocide of the Palestinians that has been continuously ongoing since well before 1948 is personal to me, and ought to be equally personal to any of my LGBTQIA+ comrades as well.
Why am I watching this unfold? Why should you be subjecting yourself to these horrors?
Because if you and I keep looking away, neither you nor I will ever know the unspeakable horrors being committed with our dollars, and with bombs and planes we’ve made, and it will be hundreds of thousands more human lives lost the longer we look away. It will be over two million new refugees who have to go . . . somewhere, and European countries are already turning as fascistic as the US on immigration. You and I would be complicit in genocide and not even know it if we kept looking away. But that guilt does not pass you by just because you don’t acknowledge it: we will be held accountable for this crime by the rest of the world. You and I must witness what is happening and rely on our grief to propel us to demand action to end this violence, accountability for any and all warcrimes committed by anyone, and a permanent political solution uniting the people of the Levant into a single democratic entity as it always ought to have been.
Both you and I have learned about the Holocaust—part of it, anyway—and we’ve wondered why people would let something so awful happen. Ignorance mixed with political falsehoods that play on ignorance. And there is only one antidote to misinformation: you must know the truth of what is happening, and then you must get out and join in the massive protests that are only growing all over the world. But in the US we are financially liable for these crimes, so we have a special obligation to make it stop. At least 300,000 people marched in London on Saturday, November 11th; many times that number of us have marched somewhere in the last month.
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