Yesterday I went to work, got to the office, sat down, stood up and went straight back home.
I spent the day in a fog; one I have lived within most of my life, and only sometimes escape.
I feel like fire ants are crawling over my veins every minute, like every nerve is screaming.
I cannot pretend that everything is normal.
Here is another dispatch from hell: Well over 8,700 Palestinians have been killed, including 3,600 children. 1,500 are missing under the rubble. More than 20,000 have been severely wounded. Hospitals have been bombed, schools have been bombed, churches and mosques have been bombed, refugee camps have been bombed, journalists and doctors and medics have been bombed, all while Israel systemically starves a trapped population of 2.2 million people, half of whom are kids under the age of 18. They do not have access to water or power and the bombs do not stop.
A month of hell and still, Western leaders do not utter the word “ceasefire”.
There is no explanation for this moral depravity, no excuse for this criminal disregard for human life.
Every decent human observing this nightmare is scrambling to find a sentence, a comparison, an analogy to make measurable the immeasurable atrocity, to pierce the callous scaffold of white imperialism—attempts like, “more children have been killed in Gaza in three weeks than the combined global total of children killed in war since 2019”, or like, “Israel has dropped a tonnage of bombs equivalent to Hiroshima” and what these attempts reveal is nothing more than the entrenched contempt the Anglosphere political and media class has for Arab life. We have established that these other war zones and historical atrocities matter, that they warrant our care and empathy, but there is complete resistance to the idea that Arab lives should receive the same level of regard.
Mainstream media routinely platform Israeli officials, and former officials, that openly say things like “there are no innocents in Gaza” or “yes we bombed a refugee camp” without pushback, and without condemnation.
Here’s another example of the routine justification for genocide being provided:
There have been protests around the world numbering in the millions. There’s been civil disobedience targeting arms manufacturers, sit-ins disrupting traffic as in at Grand Central, and as in the one held at the Australian Defence Minister’s office, and the media of the so-called “free world” has been busy scrambling to provide cover for the illegal, heinous actions of apartheid Israel. Cover that is not just running Israeli talking points as if they’re fact, but extends to deliberately under-reporting the size of protests and smearing the protestors as anti-Semitic if not outright terrorists.
The sit-ins I mentioned above were organised and conducted by anti-Zionist Jewish groups—the Jewish Voice for Peace in the former instance, and the Tzedek Collective in the latter—and this is how it was reported:
There have been so many examples of this it’s worth doing a quick overview of the more egregious examples. Like the Herald Sun running a piece called FREE TO HATE, which cry-wanks to the police about how sad it is that they’re not able to arrest people for the crime of calling Israelis “war criminals” or Nazis. This same racist article incorrectly refers to the Palestinian flag as the “Hamas” flag.
Meanwhile, Whitehouse spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre compared anti-genocide protestors with white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville:
I’m reminded again of this moment recently when noted neo-Nazis were excused in court by a judge in Melbourne who referred to them as “gentlemen” and wished them “good luck”. They were in court for assaulting hikers in Victoria who recorded their Nazi meeting.
I’m thinking of all the neo-Nazi rallies which have been allowed, condoned, and received not so much as a whisper of complaint in comparison to these protests for the freedom and equality of Palestinians. I’m thinking of all the puff pieces and profiles done on the “dashing” alt-right figures, all the attempts to make reasonable the complaints of actual Nazis as “economic anxiety”. The tragic irony is that if Palestinians were Nazis they’d have a better reception in Western media.
A final hysterical example of this coverage:
”A sea of people… many of which are armed with emotively written banners.”
This is unbelievably funny and has to, one hopes, have been written by a subeditor with tongue firmly in cheek. That I can’t say that with surety speaks to the mass derangement we are suffering through. All of these various screeds, joined by a tide of fragile influencers on social media trying to inflame insecurities, would have you believe that masses of Arabs on the march, a tide of unreasonable and ungovernable brutes. They deliberately ignore the proud, loud, loving coalition of Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Africans, Asians and First Nations, across generations. They are doing everything they can to fracture it, and it isn’t working. I promise you this is driving them as crazy as witnessing a genocide and being gaslit about it is psychologically wounding us all.
These protests against the wholesale slaughter and starvation of trapped millions are being demonised. There are active calls to criminalise them, not just in mainstream media but from politicians, too—this is part of the long trend of state crackdowns on protest, rooted in white supremacist suppression of the Black Lives Matter movement and increasingly against climate change activists—and this should terrify us all. We are in an openly fascist moment, and the authoritarian and genocidal actions are being enacted by so-called “left” political parties as well as conservatives. Think about where this is going and how it will end. Think about the ongoing militant refusal of the State to meaningfully address any of the major peaceful protest movements of the past few decades: from anti-war marches against the invasion of Iraq, to Occupy Wall St, from First Nations sovereignty and climate activism to Black Lives Matter to Palestine. Think about the slow worsening of everything we value while the obscenely rich get obscenely richer and the rest of us get poorer. This embrace of Israel’s fascist regime, which has openly slaughtered peaceful protestors and journalists and medics, should terrify us all. And it should also fill us with unshakeable resolve to resist.
Call me whatever
Even as I am heartened by the action of people resisting all around the world, I am also devastated by the scale of political indifference to this effort, devastated by the continued oppression and slaughter, devastated by the full-fledged Orientalist and Islamophobic rhetoric that has once again reared its ugly head. I come again to the fog I mentioned earlier, the despair I lose myself in again and again; this is its name, this is its form, the knowledge that the structures of power are entirely aligned with my death, with total hatred for my faith, my communities, my body. It is the slowest-acting poison in the world, but it has been killing me for a long time.
I know seeing the relentless dishonesty of these anti-Semitic smears is frightening, really, I do. I know you might think it’s best not to speak out, or not to go “too far”, or that maybe your one post was enough to indicate you’re a good person and you can stop now, but it’s not. Not while two million people are being starved to death, not while they have no water, which in addition to dehydration means toilets aren’t flushing and sewerage is flooding the streets filled with the dead, which means disease is spreading; they have no medicine, surgeries are performed without anaesthesia, the list of atrocities goes on and on. You haven’t done enough. I haven’t done enough. This is the simple truth. We must do more.
I don’t care if you call me anti-Semitic, or a Nazi, or whatever the fuck. There is no propaganda and no fear powerful enough to make me approve of or acquiesce to a genocide. Listen. I am a queer Arab Muslim man, I have been called everything under the sun. Guess what? It does not and did not change who I am. I am familiar, too, with the feeling that to criticise my people or even my family for their homophobia, sexism, insert-flaw-here etc., is too dangerous or unfair, given the persecution and prejudice they face in a State hostile to their existence… and it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. Silence is always a false choice; it resigns you either to stasis or death. I refuse to accept being diminished, and likewise I refuse the diminishment of my people—love is an active presence, a willingness to see the totality without passively accepting such, but with an intention and effort to move always toward a better, kinder, more just version of yourself and your community.
I know who I am, I know my values. I stand with my chosen family, my coalition of anti-Zionist Jews, my Arab and Aboriginal my African and Asian beloveds and we are calling for an immediate ceasefire, we are calling for an end to the carnage, we are calling for an end to the apartheid system, we are calling for an end to the blockade, we are calling for land back, we are calling for justice here and there and everywhere. I know who I am, habibis—do you know who you are, and do your choices reflect that? Ask yourself that question, and then speak up.
Louder.
Salaam,
Omar
"I am familiar, too, with the feeling that to criticise my people or even my family for their homophobia, sexism, insert-flaw-here etc., is too dangerous or unfair, given the persecution and prejudice they face in a State hostile to their existence… and it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. Silence is always a false choice; it resigns you either to stasis or death. I refuse to accept being diminished, and likewise I refuse the diminishment of my people—love is an active presence, a willingness to see the totality without passively accepting such, but with an intention and effort to move always toward a better, kinder, more just version of yourself and your community."
i feel like this is the choice every queer muslim/migrant is unfairly asked to make all the time. thank you for articulating it so well, and for continuing to speak truth to fascism and apartheid.