It’s been a big week.
Yesterday, I announced my preselection as the Greens candidate for Blaxland, alongside Mehreen Faruqi and the candidate for Parramatta, Liz Tilly. My reasons for running are much the same as for joining the Greens, after many years of voting for them, which I wrote about here.
I’m thrilled, as well, to share the cover of my new book, The Nightmare Sequence, a collection of my poems and of Safdar Ahmed’s art jointly responding to the genocide in Gaza and the compromised function of “witness” within empire. Our royalties are being donated to Palestinian charities.
Yesterday, it was announced in Books+Publishing that The Nightmare Sequence has been sold to the US and UK markets, where it will be released by Nightboat Books and the87press respectively.
Naturally, since announcing my run for office, I’ve fielded lots of different reactions, positive and negative and in between. Now as I’m not interested in what the racist supporters of genocide deem “offensive” about me, and I don’t have anything but gratitude for the excitement and encouragement given by good people, I wanted to address some of the in-between questioning. The simplest and most-heard question, Why?, which usually comes with the implicit or explicit addition, “Why, when you’re not going to win?” Then there’s the variant, Why, when there’s going to be so much extra distorting attention on your social media?
My electorate, Blaxland, is considered a “safe” Labor seat, won with a margin of about 15% in the last election. Things are very different now, particularly with my Muslim community, who comprise 30% of this seat, but I’m not here to argue about why I will, could or should win. I think there’s something really illustrative about these questions with respect to Australian culture, and perhaps culture more broadly, which finds trying—that is, being seen to try, to work, to labour—as inherently negative, even gauche. What a waste of effort if there isn’t success on the other end, which has the miraculous quality of retroactively making the endeavour effortless or noble. I’m a poet, a working class artist, and failure is baked into what I do. I live with it daily; it is absolutely necessary. From my failures, I learn, I grow, I find new ways to think and act and be.
What’s far more important to me than succeeding, is actually trying to achieve something, and even more than that, for the achievement itself to be good or worthwhile, to have a value outside of myself; being of benefit to others, whether that is immediately perceivable or not. I want to articulate this because increasingly I see the poison of cynicism and self-defeating futility as a rot hobbling us from enacting our collective power. You do not need a material or tangible reward in order to act or to understand your actions as being necessary, nor should you be oriented toward that only. What is indisputably and irrevocably true is that if we do nothing different, things will get worse. The only chance we have of things improving is if we make changes. Stasis is impossible. What’s left to us then, except trying something else?
With that said, why try this—running for office—now, with its attending risks of Zionist hostility, racist attacks, the general social stigma associated with losing? Because for the past 14 months we have witnessed a genocide unfolding in Palestine in which our nation is complicit, through continued arms exports to the apartheid state of Israel; because I have tried protesting and picketing and boycotting and writing articles and poems and signing petitions and I want to be able to say to my children one day that I tried everything in my power to act against the horrors of this rising fascism. There are other reasons, of course, chief among them the failure to act to mitigate fossil-fuel led climate change, but I have to be honest that the true catalyst for this move is having had to watch, daily, as Arabs are systematically mass murdered while those in our media and political classes protect the murderers and demand those of us with relatives in Lebanon and Palestine and Syria just shut up and let them be killed with impunity.
This became especially clear to me when my poetry workshops at the State Library of Victoria were cancelled due to Zionist complaints about my “pro Palestine” anti-genocide commentary online. This is just one example of many in a long list of artists and journalists being punished for their “political” stand to support human rights, which in the context of Israeli supremacy, is evidently taboo in the West. I thought, If I’m too political to be hired, then surely politics is the only course left available to me or soon will be? Happily, I work four days a week as a cultural worker managing literary programs for an independent arts charity in Western Sydney, and I’m still fighting the SLV to ensure this brazen censorship does not become the norm, so that’s not the basis of this run for office, it’s just an additional indication that not only are we expected to be silent about these extreme crimes against humanity, but that speaking up will be met with punishment, and this punishment is not limited to Arabs or Muslims either, as the other authors impacted by the Library’s cancellation can attest.
I’ve also had occasions where I’ve been interviewed by journalists only to hear back later that they couldn’t run what I said. I have numerous contacts who work in journalism and in the media, and I hear from them weekly about their stories being suppressed or put on hold or even being denied the ability to write on this subject. So in addition to punitive measures, there is this ongoing and intense silencing in the media: Israel is in the news every other day here but the substance of that coverage is largely reduced to “cultural wars”, to hysteria over kheffiyehs, or slogans, or graffiti. Every single day I see the ripped-apart bodies of Arab children, women, and men. I see the intestines of babies. I see their cold, shrivelled corpses. I see them reduced to skin and bones. I see their brains exploded around them. Or, at least, I used to see them every day. For a year I saw uncountable visceral horrors. I saw Israeli soldiers performing atrocities with glee. And then, gradually, I saw less horrors—because the journalists and photographers had been systematically murdered, because anyone with a camera has become a target, and because many Palestinians in particular feel there’s no point in keeping a record anymore. They recorded everything for a year, and the governments of the world stood by as Israel continued starving them to death and destroying everything in sight.
This is the crux of it for me. I want you to see what my community has seen every single day, and this is why I don’t care if I “fail” to win the seat of Blaxland, this is why I welcome the scrutiny of hack journalists and Zionists who will try to trick people, racists and ignorant alike, into piling onto my social media: welcome, habibi, I want you to see this. I want you to have a chance to see and hear what my community has seen and heard every day for 14 months, I want you to have a chance to read the methodical evidence documented by humans rights organisations, scholars, and international courts, which our media is so determinedly avoiding covering with the rigour it deserves. I want you to have a chance to make an informed decision at the election, so you truly understand what it means to vote for Labor or for the Liberals.
Simply put, I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. And if I do win, then we all win through having a representative in Parliament who actually has the integrity to stand against injustice, who represents the public and not the powerful.
For those who have come searching for me on the basis of hack journalists selectively and deceptively misquoting my tweets, I offer the following:
In July, the International Court of Justice found Israel responsible for apartheid against the Palestinians—as most major human rights organisations have long since done so, including Israeli orgs—and laid out a long list of abuses and violations of international law by Israeli authorities. Recently the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli ministers for the war crime of deliberate starvation of civilians and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”. Emphasis mine. It’s worth noting as well the 300-page Amnesty International report that recently declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, as well as Israeli historian Lee Mordechai’s 124-page report “Bearing Witness” which does the same, and the 827-page “A Cartography of Genocide” report by Forensic Architecture.
You are welcome not to find the actions of Zionists in their apartheid state inhumane—despite having starved kids to death; killed an estimated 335,000 Palestinians including tens of thousands of children; gang-raped Palestinians in prison; and created the largest cohort of child amputees in history—but I’m in good company with those who do. If you are still centring the feelings of Zionists in the West determined to shut down anti-genocide protests, then I repeat that you are indulging a hysterical privilege with the most damning racist consequences.
I’ll end on this note: Zionists and their allies in conservative media rely on trying to frame this as “Arabs and/or Muslims vs Jews” and they are woefully wrong about that. Every week for 14 months an enormous coalition of Arabs, anti-Zionist Jews, and Australians of all stripes and faiths, across age groups, all over this country, have marched in their tens of thousands to protest this genocide. The same is true all over the world. The central issues of justice and equality, freedom of speech and freedom of protest affect all of us, as do the ruinous impact of America’s forever wars, which Australia needs to step away from, once and for all.
People are fed up and it’s time we let those elected to office know all about it.
You can volunteer to support my campaign or donate here.
Salaam,
Omar