TERROR FROM—

Third blog in a week, so you know I’m all kinds of fucked up.

I know it’s pointless. I know it will not stop any of the horrors. This is what I turn to when I have nothing else: little words, each one digging the smallest scratch into the unbearable weight on my heart. I imagine the weight will eventually get lighter. I pray.

Israel’s death toll is around 1,300. It is their highest death toll since the Holocaust, a fact which is being trumpeted by every Zionist and conservative.

The Palestinian death toll is now over 1,500. This includes 500 children. I have wept so often this week. I’ve been unable to focus. I am fixed on this horror, and it seeps over my life. The only thing keeping me going are my love and my guttering rage.

Earlier this week, Jamie Lee Curtis posted an image of terrified brown children in panic, looking up: TERROR FROM THE SKIES she wrote. With a little Israeli flag.

She was unaware that the image was actually of Palestinian children in a panic from Israeli terror—the usual bombardment, I mean, what the West accepts as the norm. When this fact went viral, the image was deleted.

Not long after, Justin Bieber posted a picture of a devastated city with the caption PRAYING FOR ISRAEL. The city in ruins is Gaza. When this fact went viral, he deleted the image.

There is so much disinformation and propaganda flooding social media it is dizzying. It’s hard to know what to believe, and this is the point, ultimately, the reason Elon Musk bought the damn thing and began to make it unrecognisable, an ugliness in form and content and aesthetic, its usefulness blunted. I keep thinking about the particular nature of this disinformation, though, and the malignant ignorance of the Jamie Lees and Justin Bieber’s boosting them, how their understanding of what horror and terror look like instinctively aligned with images of devastated Gaza and panicked Arab children, and how when they knew it was Palestine, knew those were Arab children, they did not apologise, did not alter their words, simply deleted it.

Have you ever seen a retracted prayer before? I struggle to comprehend it.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t give a shit about these celebrities. They are simply useful examples of the astonishing indifference, the complete disregard for Arab humanity that I’ve seen—again, because this is far from new—coming from every corner, out of politicians and news anchors and journalists as well as the regular racists with no real platform but plenty of nastiness to drive them regardless.

1,300 Israeli dead and the Holocaust is invoked, and most sickeningly of all, not as a reason for dismantling oppression and prejudice but as justification for another genocide. In a very literal sense: Israel has ordered the expulsion of 1.1 million Palestinians out of southern Gaza. They have 24 hours to move. Even were Gaza not being bombarded—Israel has dropped over 6000 bombs in 6 days—it would be impossible to do. There is no water, no food, and little electricity, and no room for them. The UN has said if Israel carries through with this it would be “calamitous”.

You know, the thing is, this fury and grief for the 1,300 Israeli dead? I get it. In fact, I appreciate it. In these pandemic years, one of the many horrors has been the way people have shrugged off the colossal tide of death, the staggering weekly and monthly and years tolls. There should be this much grief, and this much anger. Speaking strictly of the emotion, and not what’s being done in the name of it, this level of feeling is appropriate.

Earlier, I mentioned my guttering rage. This is why: Israel has murdered more than 1,300 innocent Palestinians twice in the past two decades, and has done so for a third time now. The Holocaust being invoked, this genocidal rage, this reducing-the-city-to-rubble-again fury, this exterminate them, flatten them, finish them moral outcry has been done to Palestinians three times in 20 years, and the Western world’s response? Not so much as a whisper of this anger, this judgment, this grief. In fact, their response was to arm Israel more, to give them more money.

I,300 is the number that justifies genocide apparently, 1,300 is the number that invokes the Holocaust.

In the 2008-2009 Gaza War, also known as the Gaza Massacre, Israel killed 1,417 innocent Palestinians, including 313 children. In the 2014 assault on Gaza, Israel killed innocent 1,462 Palestinians, including 551 children. Currently, in the span of six days, they have killed over 1500, including 500 children. I am 33 years old, turning 34; I was eleven in 2001. I have known since then that Western society hates Arabs, I have seen police brutalise my family and been subject to their harassment, I have been the subject of hostility and suspicion most of my life, and I also have learned that this hatred predates 2001 by some centuries, though we don’t need to go all the way back to the Crusades. There is the infamous Madeleine Albright quote, then the US secretary of state, who when asked in 1996 if 500,000 Iraqi children dying from starvation was an acceptable price of US economic sanctions, replied “…the price, we think the price was worth it.”

And still, I confess, seeing the Western political elite this week respond with support and encouragement to the openly declared war crimes of the Israeli state—from collective punishment to the use of white phosphorous gas, and now to the attempted genocide of Palestinians—has been shocking. It’s not that I didn’t know, I guess the mind has its way of swallowing trauma, of conditioning itself to survive. Or perhaps this is the fault of that soft deceptive veil we call hope making me forget how sharp the edge of the blade is at our necks.

Western media have also called the Hamas attack, “Israel’s 9/11”, which I think is instructive in two ways. The first being the Western insistence on overshadowing any disaster with their own, to recenter the US, but also to invoke the war on terror and its limitless reprisal which has already been swallowed by the public as uncomfortable but acceptable. They might grumble about it from time to time, you know, the lies. The extraordinary expense, in human life, human rights, and of course financially. But that’s all. Nobody is threatened by grumbles. War crimes are almost routinely exposed as having been committed by the US, by Australia, and the UK, and there are grumbles about that too, but not much else.

After all, it’s happening to Arabs. To Afghans. To Africans. Muslims, mostly.

The second way that calling it “Israel’s 9/11” is instructive is in the parallel attempt to claim the site of an attack as “ground zero”, the starting point of horror, and in so doing create a narrative of righteous response, of good triumphing against evil. It is a lie in both instances, for numerous reasons, not least of which is that both events took place in the context of decades-long resistance to US imperialism and both events, in terms of their human cost, are utterly dwarfed by the devastation caused by America and its proxies. In the same way that the CIA trained and armed Al-Qaeda, so too has Israel nurtured Hamas as a useful tool to justify their continued oppression of Palestinians and continued theft of Palestinian lands.

I could point to other hypocrisies - the oft-cited example of Ukraine, the rush to arm resistance, to support them, to condemn Russia’s collective punishment tactics etc. - but hypocrisies only matter if the powerful care about truth, about consistency, and the reality is they don’t. Hypocrisy only serves to highlight the power disparity. It’s a dead end. Today any hope I had of fairness in this society, even the future possibility of it, died. It’s a sham. It always has been. The brutal heel of Western imperialism is exposed for all to see. It is on our heads, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

I return now to the retracted prayer, the retreating grace.

How many mistaken angels are there, do you think?

I return now to the deleted image, the unseen children.

I love you, habibtis.

I return to all the massacres the West refuses to see, to mourn, or regret.

I see you, the scorned dead, I carry you in my heart.

I return to the Nakba, which I never left.

I return to TERROR FROM—

To all my Arab and Muslim kin, to all who see us and stand with us, to our anti-Zionist Jewish allies—I pray for a better day for all of us.

Salaam,
Omar

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