The Year of Genocide
+ a message in support of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah
Without question, this year of genocide has been one of the worst of my life—for all the reasons I’ve written about at length throughout—yet still, also, it was replete with love, and community, and the tortured privilege of living peacefully in the West, which is not unlike living in a murderer’s house while they kill your people with impunity, and justify it ad nauseam, and tell you to stop complaining about all the shredded children because “there’s no such thing as an innocent Arab child” or because you’re desire to save lives is “divisive”, slowly but surely whittling away at your humanity, your equilibrium, your sense of reality.
What did I do this year? I went to protests in Sydney.
I attended the picket in Marrickville when I could.
I wrote a book in response to the genocide, in partnership with my brother Dr Safdar Ahmed, with the $10K advance going to Palestinian relief, as will any subsequent author royalties.
I helped organise and promote actions every week, particularly fundraising efforts.
I’ve been in a public year-long fight with the State Library of Victoria for its discriminatory cancellation of my poetry workshops, alongside other writers, which will continue into the new year in the form of a joint lawsuit.
I joined the Greens, and put my hand up to run in the federal election against this despicable and cowardly Labor government.
I worked my two jobs, and I tried my best to be a good dad to my son and to support my wife, who is currently 38 weeks pregnant with our second child.
It’s not even remotely enough. I feel utterly and entirely miserable with how not enough it is, in response to this year of genocide, in which I have seen the hourly devastation, mutilation, and desecration of Arab people cheered on by the West.
What did you do, reader, in the year of genocide? I ask this not to browbeat, not to condemn, but to encourage you to reflect, and to reaffirm that we have not done enough, that we can and must do more, until the killing stops.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and we are 14 months into the daily massacre, bombardment and starvation of Arab children, women, and men which experts estimate has cumulatively killed at least 335,000 Palestinians, wounded 100,000 more and displaced 1.9 million in forced death marches that amount to the war crime of ethnic cleansing. Israel, the US and its allies, including Australia, have together created the largest group of child amputees in history. The death toll in Lebanon is over 4,000 with more than 15,000 wounded, and over the past week Israel has invaded Syria, stolen more land, and bombed Syrians over 500 times.
You’re not hearing this from our politicians or mainstream media.
You’re not hearing from them about how in July, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel is responsible for the crime of apartheid against the Palestinians. You’re not hearing about the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity, and you’re especially not hearing our government commit to arresting those criminals if they should ever come here. You’re not hearing that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, and hundreds of scholars, including Israeli scholars of the holocaust, have all reported and documented evidence that what we’re seeing is a genocide. Most of all, you are not hearing that Australia still has active weapon export licenses with the genocidal apartheid state, and that crucial weapons parts are manufactured here in Australia, in defiance of international law.
What are we hearing from politicians and media figures instead of this?
We’re hearing about the hurt feelings of privileged Zionists. Endlessly. Over the screams of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims being murdered, we’re hearing about Zionists who are offended by the kheffiyeh or our calls for justice and freedom, from the river to the sea. We’re hearing about watermelon pins and graffiti: the horrors of genocide reduced to “culture war” abstractions. While Australian Zionists go overseas to join the IDF on a murder holiday killing Arabs for sport, we are hearing that we have to stop protesting in the name of social cohesion.
It’s a gross indignity on top of an already unbearable injustice.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve said it all before. I sat down to write in defence of Palestinian academic and author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has been subjected to a relentless smear campaign by our racist media hell-bent on getting her fired, and found that everything I wanted to say, I said last week when Mariam, a Muslim hijabi woman, was attacked by a racist Islamophobe named Kelly Farrugia, who had also tried to ram an Arab public school principal and sheikh with her car, a week prior.
This person has reportedly harassed Granville Boys High for 4-5 years with no repercussions; after Mariam reported the crime to police, they did not bother to show up or respond at all, until social media posts went viral and a rally was called outside Bankstown police station. It’s been over a week, and there has still been no condemnation from our senior politicians, despite the gravity of these extremely racist crimes. Police allege her attempted assault with a vehicle was done with “a disturbing degree of planning” and she has now been charged with threatening violence on the grounds of religion. This is what the normalisation of Islamophobia looks like: serious hate crimes ignored entirely by our federal government. Instead of a sensationalised declaration of terrorism, as with the burning of the Adass Israel synagogue, for which there have still been no arrests and no evidence as to motive, we are met with silence.
This all happened in the Blaxland electorate. What did our federal MP, Labor’s Jason Clare, have to say about this vicious anti-Arab, anti-Muslim violence? Nothing. And yet today he suddenly has something to say— he is quoted in The Australian calling a Palestinian woman hateful and anti-semitic. It cannot be any clearer that this man does not represent us, does not represent fairness, does not stand for justice.
Let me be clear: I have nothing but love and support for Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.
If you don’t already know, Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah is a Future Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University. Her research areas cover Islamophobia, race, Palestine, the war on terror, youth identities and social movement activism. Dr Abdel-Fattah is a former litigation lawyer, and the multi-award-winning author of 12 books published in over 20 countries and translated into over 15 languages. She is a lawyer of the NSW Supreme Court and patron of the Racial Justice Centre, the first Australian Community Legal Service focussed on racial justice.
In short, her consistent advocacy against this utterly racist, utterly illegal genocide is entirely appropriate. She is quite literally an expert in the subject matter, both academically and experientially.
Tell me, what is the appropriate response to your people being slaughtered? What is the appropriate response to apartheid? What is the appropriate response to genocide?
From the standpoint of international law, and the standpoint of decency: the answer is clear: we must do everything in our power to stop apartheid and genocide, to disavow the state of Israel, to sanction it, to stop it from functioning as an apartheid state and as a genocidal regime.
What is an inappropriate response to genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid?
A racist bullying campaign carried out in national papers, in Senate Estimates, and the speeches of politicians blatantly trying to pressure employers to sack Arabs and/or “pro-Palestinian” advocates, while tens of thousands of Arabs are murdered and tortured and starved, and their killers film TikToks laughing about it.
Anyone familiar with Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s work would know she has consistently called for one democratic state in Palestine where everyone can live equally and with the same rights.
In order for this to occur, the racist apartheid State of Israel must cease to exist in its current form: it is explicitly, militantly opposed to Palestinian rights, and to equality. In order for justice to occur, we must also see an end to the catastrophic violence wielded and enabled by the US empire. This is the obvious, moral, and legal case.
But our media is not in the business of providing real information, or genuine context, that might lead to understanding. It is demonstrably biased, and relies entirely on disingenuous, bad-faith engagement to create cycles of foolish hysteria that achieves nothing.
Randa does not need my defence, nor does Mariam: they both can and do speak for themselves with eloquence. I’m just sick and tired of seeing Arab and Muslim women attacked, dismissed, and smeared for the crime of caring about their people being relentlessly murdered.
I’m sick and tired of seeing our so-called representatives consistently favour one community over another.
I’m sick and tired of our media ignoring and suppressing the reality of the genocide, the thousands of dead children, the babies frozen to death, the hospitals bombed and burned, the doctors kidnapped and tortured in concentration camps.
I’m sick and tired of the reality that to be anti-Arab and anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian is the norm, a state of being that goes not just unpunished, but is encouraged and rewarded.
We deserve better than this, both from our politicians and from our media. If you agree, please consider volunteering to support my campaign or donate here—and in the coming federal election, Vote 1 Greens.
Salaam,
Omar