Palestine – Politically Enraged

New Movement Rising

By Daviemoo

The west is trying desperately to crack down on the pro Palestine rebellion, because the movement highlights what our modernity, what our ‘civility’ is built on- the bones of the oppressed.
The pro Palestinian liberation movement must not be hijacked, either by those seeking to expand it into obsolescence or to divert it to irrelevancies- instead, a wider moment must form from this one: a movement which focuses on holistic uplifting, the equity so many are denied and the creation and maintenance of a society that’s built on fair principles, rather than the silent muzzling of other regions and groups to protect the blood covered leaders of this outdated world.

Whenever anyone writes “the West” in anything but neutral or glowing terms there is an immediate mistrust of their words – as though holding criticism of our society is anathema despite the ever growing pool of evidence that the way our world was formed is through the crystallisation of inequity. No society is perfect and immune from scrutiny- yet the arbiters of western democracy will ruthlessly crack down on defenders of it.

Hundreds of years ago, our ancestors set sail to Africa, took innocent people as property and hauled them across the ocean- removing their links, land, family, heritage, freedom, so we could sit in the garden doing experiments and drinking tea as those enslaved folks cleaned our shit out of bedpans, built our government buildings and washed our clothes.
We’re told that the West just magically came to enlightenment, ignoring the protests, the acts of desperate violence and radical calls to action and awareness to instil some rationale in oppressors both silent and loud – and it’s all sanitised, as though this stain on our history was a blip, a mistake, and not a continual campaign of murder, rape and dehumanisation where everyone from housewives to eminent scientists & politicians alike gave reason or theory as to why slavery was fine and should continue.
Even after its abolition, the schools of ignorant thought around racial discrimination remained and remains to this day: it is 2024 and weak minded fools like Nick Fuentes believe black pilots are less qualified than white ones, despite the rigorous testing needed in order to be a pilot.
You even have those like Candace Owens who will state she thinks women are led by emotion & shouldn’t be leaders in a world where powerful men must not be angered lest they punch a hole in a wall, where promotion to the boardroom is given through primal act driven by his hormones over hard headed sense.

Racism, yes, is still alive in the West: in 2020 we had a whole months long set of protests about it- and black women showed up to kick out Trump from his rancid presidency.

But lurking under that, hidden in our own carefully crafted journals of history, lingered an open secret that was engineered to be kept from public discourse: it wasn’t the problem of racism (though it exists and is a problem) but the Colonialism that led to those atrocities, which is not some ghostly thing, long dead and relegated to the past: it’s alive, well, flourishing, and the pro Palestinian marches are the clarion cry of its long needed exposure.

Before Israel was formed, there was discussion of creating a Zionist state in other regions: the Uganda scheme was a potential plan to offer a refuge to Jewish people from persecution, but it was rejected because many in the zionist movement of the early 1900s felt it would make the eventual establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine would be more difficult than we see now, and for non or anti Zionist Jewish people was seen as capitulation to the monstering so many innocents suffered: why flee ignorance and let it win and breed when you can stand against it with allies and defeat it?
If this state had been created, we’d have seen the exact same type of land displacement and violence in Uganda as we see now in Palestine, much as we saw the disgusting dehumanisation of Jewish people expand into a murder machine in Germany- fleeing that type of irrational, evil slaughter is common sense, but engineering more dehumanisation and murder to protect yourselves is transference, not transcendence.

Ultimately, the sad truth is that it was perfect for the west to hand over land that wasn’t ours after the Balfour agreement, and give assent to the creation and maintenance of a state in the Middle East as an ally- because we required a strategic presence in the region.
The Middle East is overflowing with wealth in the form of everything from historical artefacts to goods like oil: having a partner there would make diplomatic discussion easier- to say nothing of the Christian Zionists (because Zionism is not specific to Jewish people- Joseph Biden, a life long devout Catholic said he is a proud Zionist) – who believe fervently that Jewish people need to establish a homeland to bring about religious prophecy.
Ultimately the disgusting idea that Jewish people should be relegated to a patch of land to bring about the end of the world turns my stomach- Christian Zionists believe jewish people and everyone outside their group will burn in hell as they are raptured to heaven and I’d say the mass death of everyone but them is hardly a helpful way to think of others, rife with supremacism as it is.
On a personal level- I don’t want the people I love who are Jewish to go anywhere they don’t want to, or to be forced there by antisemitism stoked up by the actions of the Zionist state erroneously legitimising the lies of the past about Jewish people- but I also don’t want the safety of any peoples to come at the expense of others, because starting with an unbalanced scale never leads to measured safety, progress and civility. The right to safety, life, happiness, protection- this isn’t hierarchy, it’s human.

The history spoken about is complicated: Jewish people have faced persecution for thousands of years because of the embarrassing ignorance of too many – folklore typifying anti Jewish sentiment was replaced by judenhass, supposedly scientific reasons to hate Jewish people coined by the forebears of the Nazi scum who knew they had to bring their argument into a different scope than tattletale to maintain it.
Jewish people, yes, have faced oppression and the debate about rights to homelands are complicated in that respect, but simple in this: if your homeland is established by the violent displacement, dehumanisation, rights removal, bombing, shooting, crushing by tanks, beating and more that Palestinians have faced- one has to question the legacy of that homeland: I was born into a country hundreds of years old, verging on thousands, whose legacy I did not choose and I’d like to hope if I was born in a time my state was committing atrocities to grow I’d work against that as we all are now… because violent expansionism which oppresses is not how states can grow, certainly not without expecting repercussion, and maintaining a state through evil acts means that state delegitimises itself.

Prominent Israeli figures have been heard to say statements that any rational person would call evil at most demure, genocidal in intent if honest: one prominent Israeli politician whose job is to oversee the IDF asked on Israeli TV recently why they aren’t allowed to “kill more Palestinians”. In the West Bank this week, a place with no hamas presence a teenage boy was shot in the heart because he stood too close to a wall- a wall over 15 feet high guarded by snipers. He was chasing a football.

The back and forth of origin is both important and superseded by the latest egregious actions: Yes, the hamas charter did originally refer to mass murder of Israelis which is evil- and Likud’s 1977 charter referred to erasing all Palestinian land. As a devout atheist it is odd to turn to biblical screeds but an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
If “peace” is brought to a region by force it leaves a bloody legacy that doesn’t wash off with the liberal hand waving of some future peaceful time that might just happen if you kill your way there, and it seems that many members of the Israeli state want to finish the job started 75 years ago by wiping out the Palestinian resistance in whole to pretend that peace won by brutal extermination is peace and not the echoing silence following a gunshot, the still calm hanging in the air like the stillness in a room where a murder was committed.

No land settled on the bones of the innocent should exist peacefully because peace is the method to peace- and this is exactly what people all across the west are realising about our own historical and contemporary roles in the world we see around us.

This colonial legacy, we’re reassured, is gone and dead, dust in the wind: it is not legacy: it is alive, well and flourishing through our uncritical support of Israeli military oppression. Before we go further we have to point out that innocent people were murdered on October 7th by hamas and this is terrible- nobody deserves to die in such a manner- nor though, do they deserve the penning in and neck crushing that leads to such extremist retaliation.

Hamas are not the good guys, hand picked by Netanyahu to serve his rationale that you need an enemy to direct at (see the essay “the essential terrorist”, which lays bare Netanyahu’s thinking and justification of his actions).
Hamas’ treatment of women, people in the region in general and minorities is appalling, their collaborative denial of democracy for Palestinians is egregious, and human rights reports will tell you as much. Nevertheless so many wish to pick and choose elements which fit their narrativisation rather than the whole picture: Hamas are bad, but so is the state of Israel’s horrendous crimes against humanity in response to Hamas’ atrocities- I can condemn Hamas and Israel and understand the actions because of the history: Understanding is not acceptance or forgiveness. And yet, we see a rise of people who think it’s as simplistic as picking one side and uncritically pushing for it- more on that and a particular hat clad exponent of this type of reductive thinking further down.

When it comes to western people all over, we’re suddenly keenly aware that the resources we consume, the comforts we enjoy- all come at the cost of the maintenance of a totalitarian regime we’re the unwitting beneficiaries of. Remember how those who benefit from oppression often don’t see it? Many of us are starting to, in spite of the best effort of state to prevent that by cracking down on discourse around it.

Suddenly we know the iPhones we enjoy videos of critical analysis on this very topic may well have parts made by starving children forced into labour inside them- we know the apps that are letting us talk about this are a threat to the status quo as politicians frame us as talking from ignorance and endangering society when what we learn isn’t ignorant dogma: we learn that the food we eat is grown in fields thick with dried innocents’ blood, or extracted from countries whose citizens are in famine as we gorge on their proceeds: their government ministers feed on our dollars and pounds, assuring their countryfolk that their shrinking waists can be survived.

We know our lights are kept on by oil we buy from despots like Putin or extract under duress with the threat of retaliation, oppression or intervention, or we take easily from theocratic regimes we install after we encourage assassinations of the socialist leaders of those Middle Eastern countries or countries in Africa- the women, the minorities who suffer there, sometimes suffer because our governments chose to arm extremists who swore to do our bidding over leaders who wanted better for their countries- because sometimes better meant not dealing with us, or actually making us pay fair trade for their resources.
Capitalism writ large is installing a dictator who accepts pittance for resource as the price of power, instead of working with a government who wants fair price so they can sink that into betterment of state for their citizenry.

The West’s dark history is still being written in blood, and this must stop- but the enemies within are also rallying.
People like George Galloway gain political influence for the righteous cause of standing against the oppression of Palestine, yet recycles the same dull hard right rhetoric of “anti wokeness” and his followers will recite the same as if it’s common sense to expect those of us whose identities mark us as woke whether we believe it of not to accept this meekly.
Recently he said he thinks people like myself are not “normal”: what is the definition of normal, because if it’s creating a loving relationship and contributing to society, we do not differ. Biological arguments against trans and gay/bi people don’t work- we can’t help our biology nor does it harm anyone. Biological arguments about child rearing are pointless- I have the same capacity as a heterosexual man, I just don’t weaponise it as some type of supremacy because it’s ludicrous to think that the genital collusion of two people makes them innately better, when they might ham fistedly raise a child who is miserable.
Galloway’s argument is that normal is a man, a woman and children: to say nothing of the heterosexual people who do not want or or cannot have children, those who lose children and so on- our worth is innate as human beings and not predicated on whether we follow a socially prescribed model of human behaviours or progress, especially in a world where so many do that it is an irrelevance: if our greatest artists, our most strident writers and our most open hearted fellows were child free does it devalue their works? Does it mean they lived empty lives because they didn’t follow the steps of billions of others? Or do they matter because they were here and because of what they left behind beyond more people?
He says we’re worthy of respect – but that telling children about us is “sexualising”. Is saying “that married couple” sexualisation, if you’re referring to two men instead of a man and a woman? Is referring to “Aunt Penny” who began transition 13 years ago sexual? It is gross to feel sexualised simply because my existence is acknowledged, and it is weaponised incompetence to pretend you cannot tell people about our existence without sinking into the seedy. If you cannot speak to children about other humans without sinking into the crass, rethink having children until you learn.

It is the pushers of this dull “anti woke” ideology who sexualise us unwillingly, it is a rape of our existence, and my existence is no more or less sexual than Galloway, than Sunak, than Starmer, than anyone.
Galloway fronts a cause to help some and hurt others, using his megaphone shouting for justice in one area to divert criticism of his poor ideas in others.

Ultimately his cause should be something decent: we do need a world where identity politics takes a back seat: but not because it makes cis-het people uncomfortable: because it should only be relevant when it is relevant: the very distaste Galloway and his followers feel for us is exactly why that relevance in wider political discourse remains- if you didn’t bring us up, if you didn’t speak so dispassionately about us, if you weren’t threatening to hide us like a dirty secret- if you didn’t have such twisted views about us, we wouldn’t need to be on the defensive and have to force progressive legislation through that drags equity out of your hands when you should offer it freely.

These views will always infiltrate movements: in the BLM uprisings, much discourse was had on holistic inclusion of black and brown people with further marginalisation.
I choose the words of a black commentator I’ve admired for many years, TheConsciousLee who says “if your activism isn’t intersectional it’s not useful” because uplifting some and not others is not uplift: it’s a framework for a new supremacist order.

The anti trans movement, too, typifies this: there is objective truth in womens’ continued suffrage in society. To deny that is to be obtuse: but to pretend that movement is about liberating women when it’s so clearly about removing trans rights, and jest that those topics are a monolith is fallacy- see the proof in the states where trans healthcare is banned alongside womens’ reproductive choices, where anti trans women hospitalise each other for each thinking the other is trans, where existing access to spaces is banned, where trans people can be legally punished for seeking healthcare… and now in the UK where trans people are singled out to be offered third spaces in hospitals so overburdened you sometimes cannot even be admitted when you need to be- if your care is delayed because a trans person is being ostracised that’s the fault of knee jerk fear metastasising into politics, not the sick trans person. This erosion of human parity based on arbitrary characteristics and labelling of “woke” is to say there is a hierarchy you want, just not the one that prevails when so many of us are fighting to abolish a hierarchy at all.

People like Galloway claim they want socialism- but if socialism is a social system designed to empower the proletariat and give us executive control over the production of goods, meaning we’re as liable for the rewards as the company owners who currently offer us paltry salary for the money we make them, how can we seek equity if people don’t even get the chance to be workers?
The Equality Act doesn’t endow people with more rights: it prevents the violation of their existing ones: If a gay man isn’t offered a job because an anti wokeness afficionado runs the company, he cannot access the fruits of a labour he is denied.
A new system built on a lack of equity is another not fit for purpose: and all it takes is for something else to be declared “woke” for its exclusion: many think the pro Palestine movement is “woke”. Here we feed back to the fact that Galloway is eager for Donald Trump- who also reviles wokeness- to win the US presidency because he will pull out of NATO: conveniently ignoring Trump’s Muslim ban, his bigotry spilling into policy which erodes peoples’ ability to enjoy the proceeds they would otherwise reap as humans outside of their marginal identities- to say nothing of his multitude of schemes which have decimated the rights of workers in his empire, to say nothing of his status as a supposed billionaire violence agitator (though he whittles at this himself with his own egregious behaviours).
I myself have spoken about being sick of identity politics, not because it’s not important: because of its weaponisation by people just like Galloway, Trump, Starmer, Tice, Sunak. The constant consolidation into a shibboleth like “wokeness” and it’s invocation as the enemy diverts focus to our human existence- and means it’s diverting from real issues we should be facing and breaking down. Centralising an issue that shouldn’t exist in the first place is a waste of everyones’ time, not to mention half the equalities bunting you see is simply liberal chest beating about how accepting they are, and how quickly the worm turns if you question them elsewhere- liberals will swear they’re allies and yet how quickly that latent hate bursts to the surface if you come at opposition on their stances on workers rights, Palestine, world affairs, anything… liberals see their acceptance as a reward for being their good little pet, not an innate right.

Galloway is not the leader of a better politics; he’s a voice for a free Palestine, and vital to that cause and little more because his politics is crafted from a different type of hierarchy.

Better politics by its own nature must account for inequality in society: if people are treated unequally from the knee because of skin colour, because of their sexual characteristics, their gender, sexuality, their dialect, their ability, that society grows out of the muck of inequality and cannot shake off those constraints and affects that person’s path, chaining them to fewer and fewer directions.
Equitable politics is not some overbearing political correctness: it’s the fertile seedbed for a world to develop that admits, and ceases, its colonial actions: It’s a world that offers everyone the opportunities they’re due, accounting for who they are and giving them uplifting in line with their own needs, rather than demanding people behave in line with a framework developed by others who proscribe their experiences to everyone.
It’s a time where your identifying characteristics don’t matter because people rationally see that their own small minded biases don’t stop you being a good worker, a decent person. And it’s a society which focuses, not just on uplifting one group, or a few groups who are palatable- but overthrowing a system built from floor to highest ceiling on the oppression of many for the benefit of the few- the central socialist ideal.

You can look at this time and understand that, whilst we were all sanguine in our ignorance and compliant with the whims of state, it seemed like freedom: but now people are being kicked from campus, stabbed, shot, imprisoned and worse asides for the crime of genuinely being disgusted by the mechanisms of state and asking for change, for a society that is not built from the ashes of those we trampled during its creation: Biden says peaceful protest is a right sacrosanct as he watches agitators on his side instigate violence and as the press try desperately to tell us it’s the ones screaming for peace who did the violence: and that is because he is the violence. His office is the violence: It led to one Trump presidency and is leading to another.
America must reconcile with the truth of its creation and the cost of its maintenance in this form, or it will veer from extremist president to extremist president who will throw human rights, citizenry and liberty itself into the jaws of state maintenance.
The further maintenance of the Israeli state is a facet- though a very relevant- facet of that larger idea. The foolish sleight of hand that anti Zionism is anti semitisim doesn’t work when Biden, who is a catholic, says he is a Zionist- and when his uncritical diffidence to Zionism means he’s letting Americans die and be injured over standing up to a foreign entity, it means he chooses state over liberty. Blue or red, the chains still fit the same.

State is now entering delusion to maintain itself- America is gearing up to pass a bill claiming antisemitism is speaking out against Zionism even as a catholic Zionist is president, and as jewish people who are at the white hot forefront of the movement to liberate Palestine are beaten, arrested and mistreated- in Germany, anti zionist jewish organisations are having their assets frozen: we see the same thing in the UK where Rishi Sunak pushes forward the unreality of new legislation to declare an unsafe country – Rwanda- safe in his bid to maintain state as it stands: in shambles.
Rwanda is verging on open war with Congo. Rwanda has sold of 70% of housing stock for migrants. Migrants have died in Rwanda previously because of the negligence of state. It is not a safe country, but our government who talks often of common sense and reality, is legislating against reality itself to declare ignorance to enact a scheme that will not help the problem. Every single migrant to our shores could be sent away and we would still have hospitals bereft of staff, schools crumbling into dust, parochial workers rights and corruption bleeding from the heart of our government. But state must lie to maintain itself: and that means state itself is a lie.

It’s bigger than all of us

At this moment in time, our states are more interested in protecting the colonial regime they collectively embody than our liberty. Biden ignores the death of innocents in Palestine both born there and innocents there to pass out aid- innocents from his own country, because to stand up to Israel is to imperil the rank behaviours of all states held together through colonial action. We can literally die because of Zionist extremism and Biden will overlook it, because dismantling that cultivated system threatens the world he grappled with long ago and accepted the cost of: the blood of dissenters.

This all fits into the wider skein of my own political awakening. In the UK, the battle isn’t so trite as to just “remove the tories”- it’s to utterly break apart the system that empowers them, a system that allows the opposition to offer the barest stirrings of change to be seen as electable- a system where minoritised people are expected to live “less than” lives so people around them can enjoy the simple life as their noise cancelling headphones tune out the screams of the bombed whose corpses grow the plants they eat in coffee shops, whose laptop screens block the vision of a fellow citizen having their right to use facilities removed to accommodate small minded bigots- a life where the student loans we pay go to universities knee deep in the arms trade or funding countries who mistreat their citizens: a world where the dint of your birth sets your choices in stone before your character begins to develop and other avenues are cut off by the bigotry of your familial wealth, diction, skin colour, region, gender, sexuality and you’re cajoled, pushed and pressed into being another body in the ceaseless machine of capitalism, your blood oiling the cogs as they turn to produce more people to keep powering this shuddering project forward.

We can do better- we should do better. The pro Palestine movement is the tip of an iceberg big enough to sink the titanic states we’ve existed in for a millennia. We surely do not want to live lives where merely existing under our states causes pain elsewhere for others: where our resource guarding means others suffer, where we force people into militant labour to produce clothes we discard after months, and where the proceeds go to the rich who scorn our request for equity.
This is not the human condition: capitalism is not the human condition, bailed out by socialist theory every decade since I was born or collapsing into ruin and taking everyone with it as we defend regimes accused of genocide over our own citizens.
Racism, bigotry and more are not the human condition- humans intellectualise reasons to hate rather than accepting the reality that we are all the same until our heads are packed with the empty vessels of hatred, and we’re pushed into a tiny space where only the proscribed, narrow thoughts we’re told are vital to consider, paralyse us.

We’re a species with so much potential to coexist with each other and with our world itself, and the movement to call for that and work to it would be an earth shaking change.
People would need to compromise, to adjust, and to work within the bounds of a new way to live which guarantees coexistence in peace.
But better that than to keep careening towards the fulfilment of the colonial project where everyone who is in our way becomes a bloody smear under our boot, and our history is that we slaughtered our way to a manufactured peace filled with the shouts of those we brutalised to get there: isn’t it?

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation is a dark mirror America needs to peer into

By Daviemoo

The immediacy of watching a US service member douse himself in gasoline & lighting himself on fire over aiding genocide is a stark reminder that some would sooner die than be part of the horrors our nations inflict on other civilians the world over, and it should make us ask questions about how invested in continuing our imperial legacy we truly are. The flames are a light which allows us to scrutinise our tangential roles in the actions of our nation and to allow us to introspect one vital question: is this us?

It takes a lot to bother me. I grew up in the days where people would send you a link claiming it was YouTube when it was actually a gore video. I used to want to be a pathologist, so dead bodies and gore just don’t impact on me that much and most of all, once you’ve sat in a room and watched your loved one slowly die in front of you, racked with pain you cannot prevent and losing all dignity, you are touched by a horror nothing else can really exceed. So the fact that I can still hear Aaron Bushnell screaming “Free Palestine” as fire engulfs his body should let you know how harrowing it was to see. Nor did I see it purposefully: I didn’t know what I was watching until a few seconds into the video.
My concern is that the message is being lost amid peoples’ predictable reactions to the idiotic policemen who pointed their guns at a man who was already dead.

Bushnell sacrificed his life because he’d rather have lit himself on fire than help his nation flatten Palestinian homes, starve more Palestinian babies, shoot more unarmed Palestinian civilians as they walk up the street waving white flags. Many across the internet are stating that nobody of sound mind would self immolate, ignoring the disturbingly rich history of self immolation as an extreme form of protest. One of the most important images in all of human history is of a monk self immolating to protest the mistreatment of Buddhists under Catholicism and its control of their state. Perhaps it does take insanity to do so- one would then argue that whatever drives you to that point may be the true issue and it is this which needs to be dealt with- but as always, people trained to ignorance will stare at the effect before the cause.
But Bushnell was clear in his preamble that he wanted to make this point; that whatever he did to himself, Palestinians are suffering more.

Of course many across the internet have had a visceral reaction to this, declaring that now it’s gone too far. Now a US service member has died burning in front of a foreign embassy suddenly some distant line we didn’t know existed has been crossed.
I wonder if they’ve somehow been insulated from the images coming from Gaza every day.
Particular images that have stuck with me: a father carrying his very small child’s body down a road thronged by exhausted people forced to flee their homes. He begs the camera to explain how his tiny three year old child was hamas, why he deserved to die this way.
Rows of feet stuck out from under a collapsed building, the bodies flattened by falling rubble. One set of toes is painted a light red colour. The rest are small- children’s feet.
Body parts in the street being gathered up in plastic bags so people have something to bury, whole roads painted red with blood, a small, legless body hanging from a wall.
These are images that long preceded Bushnell’s act, and they should not be less horrifying. But for some reason, the image of a white man in military regalia burning is more horrifying than the bodies of brown children. People have had access to all of the atrocities being perpetrated and yet they ignore, they rationalise, they dehumanise.

People across the spectrum of western media and politics have equivocated loudly that the horrors being foisted upon those in Palestine are deserved because of October 7th- a horrendous act that should not have happened. But the constancy of the false equation behind “I understand why this happened” and “I condone it” prevents any actual helpful discussion from coming about.
I think October 7th was horrendous. I think the article I read about Palestinians dying in the West Bank on October 6th was horrendous. I think the siege of Gaza was and is horrendous. I think what Nazis did- and do- to jewish people is evil, and I think what Israel is doing to Palestinians is evil too.

It’s confusing to watch people feign an inability to juggle these ideas as though they contradict. It’s also confusing to watch these western media personalities give monstrous talks on television that in my view legitimise the acts “the other side” commits.
Watching Julia Hartley-Brewer say she doesn’t like the sound of ethnic cleansing but perhaps Palestinians should be encouraged to go elsewhere… Imagine being so debased as to make that statement and believe that you are a decent human, and to be confused as to why the people you’re talking about might viscerally hate you. No doubt if 1.1 million Palestinians were resettled to Julia’s hometown she’d be furious.

Watching western leaders mumble and stumble and equivocate on violence is unreal. These are the people I’m meant to put my safety and my life into the hands of? The people who seem to believe the easiest solution is to explode people? People who are seemingly incapable of understanding that if you mercilessly oppress people they might just attack back, people who pretend the response is the crime and not the preceding oppression? If I wanted stupid people as leaders I’d… well, have voted for them.
As a queer person, watching our bodies be elevated as human shields against criticism against decimation of the region… You think it’s a binary choice of us as rainbow people or them? Especially in the face of the anti queer uprisings across the west: the lesson at present seems to be, be glad you’re not a faggot in Palestine because they’d kill you, we just want to make sure you can’t marry who you want, adopt children, be open publicly about your life, be safe at home… Apparently there’s an acceptable, nice, sanitised level of Western homophobia we should wear like a blanket because in other regions people have it worse.
If we went to Palestine right now we wouldn’t die because we’re queer- we’d die because the entire region is being destroyed with bombs provided by our leaders.
Does it mean I’m ok with the mistreatment of queer people? No. Does it mean I think everyone deserves death indiscriminate? Also no. Queer bodies die just the same, and that’s what we’re condoning right now. I also don’t think queer life has a premium over non-queer life. We’re all alive, we all deserve to live and if we transgress with violence against others because of their ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion- then we deserve punishment. But bombing and bullets are not punishment. They are execution, and it’s okay for people not to want to take part in that.

I don’t understand how people can make statements like the ones we’ve seen: “they’re all rats, inhuman, evil, they’re all terrorists, all involved, nobody is innocent”- and be surprised when we’re met with violence, in the same way that when civil rights movements have gotten violent people have been shocked, as though it’s all safe chats about who can do what where based on some imagined human contract that leans the way of a few humans and away from many others and not the dispassionate discussion about which humans have supremacy over others.
The idea that hamas are good is ridiculous- I’ve read about human rights abuses under hamas. But this isn’t about placating them, it’s about destroying the reason behind their necessitation- and that’s not in the cards for Palestinians. They can’t self liberate when you’re shelling them every day. It’s up to them to decide who runs their state and if they don’t need to be overlooked by people pushing for a radical agenda because the agenda doesn’t make sense because equality is theirs to have, why would they vote for it?
Denying that is the reason for this violence, whether you want to accept that or not. And again we have to state: understanding, accepting the rationale is not condoning. There is nuance here people constantly shirk in order to offer offence instead of answers.

Of course people will disingenuously read this as “capitulate to terrorism” because simplistics is the defence of the purposely ignorant. This isn’t about capitulation to extremism, it is about an honest assessment of the situation. The Israeli state does not have the right to obliterate civilians to make themselves feel safe. If the price of civilian safety on one side is civilian slaughter on the other, is it not natural to understand that that situation is not sustainable or ethical?
Capitulation is not what’s on the cards- a human assessment of basic ethics, unburdened by religion or skin hue bias, points that violence will be reciprocated always and that intervention is required by those not under the heady influence of ideology- religious or secular. This isn’t about who supports gay people or where genealogy originates, it’s about human life and it’s innate value, a value that should not be denoted by where you were born, your skin, the language you learn- and right now, it is.

Bushnell’s sacrifice is meant to elevate the plight of Palestinian people who are starving, dying of wounds and sickness, or of being obliterated by weapons our taxes are paying for. It’s meant to show you the visceral horror of what is being perpetrated in our names, with our silent assent. In the UK people beadily eye the gauzy distance, knowing that somewhere within a general election looms, and whilst we wait for that election, Palestinians die.
In the US, democrats condemn in the strongest terms and do nothing as president Biden gears up to send more weapons and money to the region, hailing Israel as a true democracy in the Middle East when Israel defies democracy not only by having a vastly unpopular prime minister and a hard right cabinet who was implemented because of successive failed elections and deals cut to form government, but simply by being a theocracy- you cannot have democracy under a religious framework because already there are terms to access the society- following the state’s religion. Of course, secular jewish people who simply relate to their ethnicity exist in the region and yet still must observe practice; it’s hard to have democracy in a secular nation, never mind one that compels religion as the price for equity.

Most of all though, the violence that’s been done to the region is legitimising, whether we like it or not, recompense down the line.
If you think the west has seen terror before, imagine what happens when people whose entire lives, generations, families, businesses, homes, loved ones are evaporated before their eyes as overly painted glass eyed TV presenters wax lyrical on where they should be caged or if it’s ok to have wiped their families out are roaming the world. Cause, again, will go ignored because the effect will be civilian casualties as the Sunaks, the Starmers, the Bidens, the Trumps, the politicians, the political chat show hosts put their hands on their chests and condemn violence in the strongest terms, safe from the violence they condone and even stir- but those terms neatly cutting out their role in its creation, skirting around the acknowledgement: when you teach a man to fish, he feeds himself. When you teach your country that a man is evil because he was born an Arab in an Arab nation, how can you be surprised when the horrors your speech normalises against his people come back to you in the form of violence?

Aaron Bushnell would rather have set himself on fire and died, screaming for the freedom of a people being mercilessly slaughtered because of state sponsored oppression than continue to be complicit. It is truly terrible that he felt this was an option, and worse still that people are sanitising it, ignoring it and finding ways to dodge acknowledgement. And whilst I hope more people don’t come to the dark conclusion that this is the only way to be heard and to remove ourselves from complicity, I fear we’re merely at the threshold of what these atrocities will prompt in people.

Remember Aaron Bushnell as a man who died for his convictions, remember what that sacrifice was about- a reluctance to bloody his hands- and remember that this is what people are being driven to to escape complicity in this violence. Whilst it’s a useful symbol to look at the police officers pointing guns at the burnt corpse of a decent man and understand that it typifies our western body politic all too well, do not forget the message he was writing with his own lifeblood: that innocent people are suffering all day every day because of a tangled web of events that precede most of us, but which can only be brought to a halt by our visceral, unending cries for an end to it.

My letter to my labour MP, begging him to call for a ceasefire- take 2

Dear *my local MP*

I hope all is well.
I write because I’ve been made aware there is another call for a ceasefire to be made in parliament and I am curious as to your intent, and that of the party, in this matter.
I’ve read your previous email over again before writing this and I’m curious as to whether you maintain your positions. I’ve seen much from Labour about the horrors we’ve all been witnessing, much of it disturbing. For example, I recently saw an interview with Ms Rayner who stated she would, and I quote, “do anything she can” to bring about an end to hostilities. My concern is that this was being said in response to asking why she didn’t call for a ceasefire previously. Ms. Rayner explained that she was more invested in “doing things on the ground to bring about the conditions” for a ceasefire than “just” voting for one, and my grievance is: this is a false binary.You can both use the seat of our democracy, where we often make votes to solemnise intent and action, to call for an end to hostilities and be on the ground bringing those conditions about. One could argue that it is in fact essential to make clear your motivations by voting for a ceasefire if that truly is your intent. If you pass up an opportunity to vote in favour of something or even vote against it, then push for it through direct action, I’d say that sends a murky message.I found it odd that a politician of the stature of the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who are poised to take governance in 2024, would essentially dismiss voting in parliament as ineffectual or gesture politics (my own words, not Ms. Rayners)- when it is arguably the rationale of the existence of parliament to debate on issues, and make clear your intent by voting on them. Am I incorrect in believing this?
Additionally your previous email gave me much detail on the history of the conflict, data I’m still reading up on daily as the history of the region is enormous and naturally varies by the biases of the authors.I want to make something very clear: I am aware, Mr Benn, that hamas are not the good guys here. I’ve read about their historic abuses of power, of women, of queer people, disabled people… people foolish enough to think hamas are bravely fighting for Palestinian liberation and not for more violent expansionism in the region are naive. In my eyes the good guys are brave Israelis who fight against the actions of their state and those of Palestinians who simply want to live in peace, unmolested.
You mentioned that Palestinian officials need to take the helm and engage in dialogue with Israeli state officials… I have seen endless rafts of evidence which mean I don’t believe either party is acting in good faith- hamas changing their charter to remove reference to the murder of Jewish people doesn’t convince me of anything, nor does Elon Levy shouting about tunnels under camps when asked about evidence of the involvement of 13 UNWRA personnel on October 7ths horrors. I assume you’ve seen the same images as I: scores of dead children, Israeli officials saying that everyone in Palestine deserves death, Palestinian men being shot in the chest whilst waving white flags, Israeli newscasters saying everyone over the age of four is involved with hamas and deserves what’s being done. You will also be aware that Israel rejected another ceasefire, I believe this very weekend, which offered a return of all hostages- I’m sure there’s a sensible rationale behind this rejection I haven’t found yet but surely you can see why I can’t help but be concerned by how those peace talks we’re so eager for would play out without rational intervention from supposedly influential world leaders. We can hardly call the US sensible on the issue- Mr Biden called himself a proud Zionist and has ignored congress I believe twice to send aid to Israel when at last count 71% of his own party want him to call for a ceasefire and his actions in this conflict appear to have pushed him into such unpopularity that seditionist and blustering fool Donald Trump, who I consider a genuine threat to worldwide safety, may well walk back into power this year.
The question that arises for me is as simple as this: we can, and should, call for a ceasefire. But if the conditions that create hamas- the blockade Israeli state officials say don’t exist since they “pulled out” of the strip in 2005 though they were able to cut off food, electricity, water, aid to the strip immediately post October 7th- the imposition of Hamas (I assume you will have read “the essential terrorist”, the scholarly response to Netanyahu’s own anti terror writings) through denial of democracy with the assent of Mr Netanyahu- if the conditions of absolute horror that those in the Gaza Strip are subjected to are not also changed, post ceasefire, surely as you mentioned in your own response, the cycle of violence will continue anew- so if Labour are not to call for a ceasefire, exactly what is the plan to bring about peace in the region? On other related worries, I’m concerned that our perceived allies can commit blatant atrocities with our uncritical backing. You talked of Israel’s right to self defence and I wonder whether, this far into the actions we’ve seen, you believe Israel is still acting within that right. There’s much talk of the limits of self defence and in particular, self defence for an occupying power and whether that is indeed what Israel is.I have my own conclusions there which may or may not mirror yours. Yes, I believe a government can and should act to protect its people in terms of defence- but the specificities are vague enough to seemingly include scores of innocents being wiped out and that, perhaps, is something we’ll need to discuss as a collective in coming years as this conflict changes our understanding of the implication of international law. For example, as Israel has nuclear weaponry but is not a signatory to some of the treaties drafted historically about nuclear non proliferation, it’s currently in contention as to whether the US is breaking international law by arming Israel before they have signed these treaties. We have had clarification from international courts that some of Israel’s actions could be genocidal in nature and human rights orgs stating that what is happening in the region to innocents is of deep concern- if we condone this because it is our allies who are bringing the conditions about, what message am I, are we, to take from that?
You mentioned a two state solution and your commitment to it. I admire that you’ve come to a solid decision in this turmoil- I cannot, because I don’t think it’s right for me to decide the autonomy of a peoples halfway around the world and I think it fits within the remit of further western imperialism to think our solutions and answers for all peoples of the region are the solutions and answers.I don’t know what the solution is beyond demanding both sides lay down arms and begin to understand that concessions will have to be made so that scores of innocents on either side don’t suffer unnecessarily.What I do know is, part of ending the hostilities in the region is not just to call for a ceasefire but to understand why one is needed, again- and that is because of the history of the region, a history that doesn’t have to decide it’s future as a bleak land where people must be treated as inferior, blockaded, detained unfairly or even ethnically cleansed.

Today I saw footage of Julia Hartley-Brewer (who let me be clear I respect about as much as typhoid) state that “ethnic cleansing is an ugly term- but” perhaps Palestinians should be “displaced elsewhere”. This, from another stop the boats screaming right wing reactionary: I wonder where she’d like them to be displaced to. Not here, I’m sure. This is the type of person who thinks calling for an end to hostilities is “woke” or pointless.
I feel like cool heads do not prevail here and I am very worried about Labour, as an impending government, and their intent to tackle the issue & what that means for us as citizens. If we can watch allies ignore, break, bend, international law and do nothing- what does that mean for our own safety domestically?
I don’t want anyone innocent on either side to suffer but having seen some absolutely repulsive videos from the IDF who are constantly called a “moral army” I feel the adage of ACAB applies- if five men joined to ensure their country was safe and one man joined to snipe people going for water, and the five do not call to account the one then there are six immoral people. I saw Sir Keir state that he “hadn’t had time” to watch the footage a fellow human rights lawyer on the news called “compelling footage of a war crime”. Surely as an ex human rights lawyer this is where he should be able to give the most illuminating answers?
Ultimately, if we can’t call to account the actions of our allies, how can we call ourselves moral? Sometimes the most difficult thing we can do is to tell those we’re in alignment with that they are in the wrong.Israel has arguably been overstepping international law for months in the public eye- you too will have seen the provisional ICJ ruling. Let me ask you- as a former labour member who left due to the increasing transphobic rhetoric I couldn’t brook because I could see the pain it was causing my loved ones- if Labour won’t stand against wrongdoing from those we’re allied with because of – what, fear of criticism, fear of losing polling support- what does that mean for those in the sights of the malign in this country? I fear for what Labour may allow or even condone in order to secure and retain power, and nothing I’ve seen from this situation or frankly any of you in the party has even begun to assuage that. I watch as sensible Macron in France signs into law immigration policy that Marine Le Pen – whose father was a holocaust denying horror- an “ideological victory”- as Biden passes new Immigration law to appease Republicans. This seems to be the nature of the “sensible option” we’re presented with- appeasing the increasingly debased. I hope Labour will steer from this- I fear you will not. Am I wrong to feel this way? And will you tell me I just have to wait and see what Labour do as though it’s not a huge ask to just hope Labour will stand on the right side of issues, once the threat of election losses is temporarily at bay?
Before I reached the end of my limit, I said that criticising labour wasn’t something I enjoyed, and it still isn’t. I am imploring Labour to be better, as I know you can be. My fear that Labour are too concerned about the insidious press in the UK who have a two tiered reporting system based on who says what in which party, is eclipsing the morally right thing to do in far too many situations.I want the conservatives gone from power so badly. But I worry every day that a Labour Party who seems unwilling to stand back to back with those who built it and who run the labour movement for fear of negative coverage in the daily mail isn’t the vehicle to fight for the liberation of anyone- not queer people, not the working class, not the increasing number of disabled people in this country who fear Reeves’ budget- and not Palestinian innocents: so I suppose my ultimate question in this email is as simple as this: can I count on Labour to do the right thing now and in future, or not?
Yours, David

STOP INVOKING QUEER BODIES AS A DEFENCE OF GENOCIDE!

By Daviemoo

The queer community is invoked constantly by liberals and even by right wing populist fools who ply their trade on social media as “counter culture”, as proof that we live in tolerant nations. But their arguments are castles built on sand: if you want to dictate to queer people who we should lend solidarity to, you’d best monitor your own behaviour first– and if genocide is condoned against anti queer people, what safety does that afford the robust anti queer movements in our own countries?

“Do you know what they’d do to you in Palestine” is a comment I get, I will say, roughly 20 times a week on social media at the moment. I get it almost constantly, a low hum in the background of everything I’m doing. This refrain is tedious at best, not the least because it implies that I’m supporting people who hate me because it’s a trend and not because I’m horrified by daily images of limp corpses and blood spatters, but because it’s often said in a gloating way- not a warning or a concerned entreaty to consider my allegiances, but a gleeful recounting of the imagined violence they expect me to endure. It’s the same to me as “if you don’t vote for the less bad guy, then the really bad guy will fuck you up”. A bad guy is a bad guy and if it’s a choice between a broken thumb or a broken ankle why wouldn’t I choose to burn their houses down?

I will never go to Palestine- not because I know I’m not welcome there on account of my wicked, homosexual ways, but because it’s being actively bombarded with missiles, bombs, an extensive ground offensive. What would Palestinians do to me if I was there?
Run past me as they flee from explosions that are wiping whole bloodlines from the face of the planet.
Would I get killed if I was in Palestine? Absolutely. Probably not by the people fleeing from refugee camp to refugee camp as they get bombed- probably by the bombs unless of course Netanyahu has at last patented technology that lets white phosphorous dance around queer bodies and only injure the cisgender, heterosexual ones?

Some of the people saying these things are wholly ironic. Ah yes, the barbaric Arab homophobia, disgusting and evil! Much worse than the orderly, conveyor belt homophobia of American states or of a UK government utterly feckless and impotent against the actual problems we’re up against.
How dare they mistreat queer people in the Arab nations- often said by people who are enthusiastically banning books that mention people just like me, people who castigate people like us on podcasts, news or in senate meetings as a “paedophile groomer cult”, people working to actively restrict trans healthcare, ban gay people from teaching jobs, people who spend hours- hours– writing about how pronouns are akin to rape- no doubt the assault on gay marriage will come in America and perhaps even to my own shores. But at least it’s western homophobia, right?

I was at a counter protest for known transphobic shill Posey Parker at the weekend. A hundred people crammed into the corner of a park talking about the dangers of ‘gender ideology’ in a country where four million, two hundred thousand children are growing up in poverty. Your gender disappears into the background fuzz of malnutrition and disease that speakers could be railing against. A starving child who identifies as trans is a starving child first and foremost but all of that disappears to these middle class fair-weather feminists who want to police how people look and deny them their rights if they aren’t up to snuff. Parker thinks there’s a very narrow ledge women should perch on due to the virtue of their DNA lest she cast them over the side.
Parker sells t shirts, pyjamas etc, making money off the backs of the people she claims to loathe- I wonder how much of that money goes to charities to help people suffering from period poverty, assist people waiting months for PCOS treatments on the NHS to go private, whether it goes to shelters for abuse victims- or does it just fund her ironic campaign.
If trans people disappeared, Parker would actually have to contribute meaningfully and as an avowed “not feminist” one has to wonder what she’d do? On her tax returns its rumoured she lists her career as “housewife”- probably because “international hate stoker who occasionally has far right violent mobs attend her vigils” is too word intensive for the forms. What has she done to help uplift the women she feels are oppressed by queer people, besides gather them in parks to shout angrily? Has this transphobic campaign improved the life of one single woman or is it just a stratified temper tantrum about other people’s rights. If anyone is appropriating womanhood it’s the sad, empty people who gather in droves to insert themselves into someone else’s gender identity and say “this isn’t about me enough”.

And it’s people like this, or people who support this wave of unhinged self centring, who continually appeal to me, to us, to drop support for Palestine because of what they’d do to us there.
It was Daesh who slaughtered gay people by throwing them from towers- Hamas is anti LGBT+ and yes, in fact, much of the populace of Palestine is noted as anti queer. Nevertheless there was a queer scene there which is easy to read about in books like “This Arab is Queer” or any of the other works about queer Arabic life. That scene s no doubt gone now considering much of occupied Palestine is rubble- the last blocks of buildings can stand as a graveyard to any pro queer outreach programmes.

It’s almost comical to me that we’re told by homophobes to ignore, condone, actively support the indiscriminate slaughter of a population of people who are apparently of the same ilk, but who choose legislative violence over physical- usually.
If we as queer people are to support the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the flattening of Gaza, what is it that we’re allowed to condone here? Because you see, at the counter protest this weekend we were penned in, forced to remain in place by the police, compelled by a watery, illogical dissemination of the new anti protest laws and utterly surrounded by at one point by 33 police people- they were dismissive, sarcastic, outright disrespectful. No doubt that can be rationalised considering there was a lot of anti cop cheers on our side- but they proved our point eminently. There were less than five police ensuring the side who usually attracts the far right were kept in order, but they were more than happy to attempt to menace a small coterie of LGBT+ people gathered to drown out cries from a woman who wants to strip trans people of established rights.
I’d guess the answer is, they knew they could outfight us but probably not a bunch of far right hooligans so I suppose the police are fine to police people they can win against- but not the actual wrongdoers.
But if we’re to ignore at best or condone at worst, any and all retribution against people we’re told are homophobes- why? If anti LGBT+ sentiment is punishable by violence, displacement, even an indiscriminate death- what is it we’re to do with our own country as it passes acts that strip trans peoples’ access to spaces they have been in for longer than I have been alive (I turn 36 shortly)? Or a country where prominent MPs speak out about our community?
Is it that the largely orderly, state sponsored violence against queer bodies in our own countries is absolutely acceptable? Is it that because it’s the government making these amendments we’re to accept this type of violence as though it is not of the same origin as more physical violence and is, in many notable historical instances, a prelude to that very violence?
I’m confused. Are we to accept western homophobia because it’s rooted in paperwork and suited men and women talking patiently into microphones, as though the outcomes are somehow less disturbing when the axe does finally fall?

I’m afraid that even this excuse doesn’t work. Figures show that anti queer hate crimes are up precipitously in the UK- we are a less safe country than we’ve been for many years for queer people with anti gay and bi hate crimes up 112% in 5 years: anti trans violence is up a dizzying 186%. So if it’s the threat of physical violence which is where queer people should condone violence in reciprocation- well UK, I’ve got bad news.

The hilarity is that this writing will no doubt be misconstrued as a threat. I can see now snippets being shared on mumsnet or on social media in the circles that run counter to us, all attached to the idea that I- that we- are trying to stir up violence instead of doing all we can to avoid it.
It will honestly make me laugh- it’s almost like you people do understand the concept of speech being a precursor to violence when it’s directed against you and not by you, isn’t it?
Incidentally, it is not a threat- I do not intend to do anything to imperil the state, nor homophobic people currently. It is a simple observation that queer people will be pushed but so far before we either react naturally or are provoked to. Where the line is, I and no doubt we will decide- but I assure you the line is to be drawn by us, not by people aligned against us.
Perceivably there will be a reckoning where the more militant tactics LGBT+ people eschewed when we had more mainstream acceptance will be dusted off and we will have to return to the acts which instilled fear in the hearts of anti queer speakers and politicians alike in the past. And who would they be to speak out against this recidivism when it is their actions we’ll count as the first stone? And even if we don’t- we’re told it’s fine to abuse, assault, injure queerphobic people- aren’t we?
Or is it just because they are brown, or because they live far away, their homophobia is over a line YOU drew, not us?

That is the most tiring part of all of this song and dance. We’re constantly told what is and is not queerphobic by people who are being just that. I’ve had people say things to me like “It’s not homophobic for me to think gayness is unnatural”. Unnatural implies something doesn’t happen in nature and animals besides humans engage in homosexual acts. What doesn’t happen in nature is hospitals, aeroplanes, rent, religion, capitalism. What doesn’t happen in nature is relentless artillery shelling of birds seeking to displace other birds from their nest areas. What doesn’t happen in nature is homophobia.
We can’t even appeal to common sense and argue a for instance that cuts the other way- because societal oppression of straight people based on their heterosexuality is literally unimaginable for some people- they find the idea comical, and I know: I’ve tried to argue these things with straight people. “Where can’t you hold hands with your partner” is met with airy assertions of oppression- Oh this Orthodox Church I went to in Corfu… I’m going to now ask you who decided those rules? Was it heterosexual people deciding the limits of what heterosexuality was ok, or was it militant gay people forcing you not to under penalty of punishment. Were you being told not to or asked not to? Imagine if that church was the entire fucking globe and then start to conceive of the restrictions queer people live patiently under, usually instilled upon ourselves out of fear of you.

But most of all the relentless invocation of queer people as some sort of shibboleth for the denial of western homophobia because it’s worse elsewhere is the exhausting sanitisation of countries where we strived for acceptance, got to the threshold of it and were then cast bodily back out under a new anti queer panic designed to exhaust us under an eternal struggle- a struggle that makes no sense and a struggle that has shown many of us that striving for acceptance has been a decades long pointless flailing at institutions who begrudge us even the crumbs we’re cast- I don’t want to be accepted by a society that will cast us back out suddenly because of a new imagined “what if” about us- I have no choice but to be accepted, so I can pay the bills I need to, the rent I need to, the tax I need to- all to watch that tax money be spent on more relentless sloganeering by governments and opposition parties who couldn’t give a fuck about the escalating violence against us, both legislatively and physically.

To think you can fill your dirty mouths with protestations of queer suffering when it’s the same mouth that calls us faggots and paedos and groomers in the back of smoky local pubs or from podiums or pulpits, as though we have any interest in your children beyond making sure you don’t immiserate the latest queer ones the same way you did us.

I in particular am constantly told there are no queer children. I feel like I live in the twilight zone under this argument. I was a queer child. I always knew I liked other boys, from the earliest days of primary school. I had a crush on my neighbour, then my friend Kevin. In high school I wanted to be boyfriends with someone in my class. Your denial of the existence of queer children falls flat when you’re talking to a former queer child. And isn’t it funny how there’s no queer children, but whenever a child acts in a way not expected these grown adults are happy to label them as such? I’ve seen it. Four years ago a little boy walking down the street in a pink t shirt, holding his mum’s hand and a flower in the other. A straight man in front of me turned to his friend and muttered “that one’s going to grow up to be a queer eh” and laughed. No doubt he’d be the type to tell me he has no problem with it, he just wishes we wouldn’t force it on him- the way he forced homosexuality on a happy child.

Is there a date in our minds you picture that sets our sexuality in stone? Or have you just never thought about it because you’re indoctrinated by a world that tells you we’re a diversion instead of just another facet of nature?
This relentless appeal to the west’s treatment of LGBT+ people would be merely frustrating if it wasn’t also a lie. LGBT+ people face difficulty finding and keeping work, difficulty with harassment in the workplace, at the doctors, difficulty in public life- I have myself had issues with all of these things. A doctor insinuated the reason I was suicidally depressed in 2016 was that I hadn’t accepted my sexuality- and not that I was with an abusive man, that my boss and her bosses were bullies, that I’d watched my grandfather waste away in a bed in a nursing home. A manager at my old job called me a faggot in front of half the office and my boss refused to do anything even when I demanded the complaint was brought to HR. I’ve been called names, threatened with violence- had violence meted upon me- in public for nothing more than being an effeminate man. And yet my society wants me to ignore all these things, disregard my reality, to condone other people- some of whom absolutely were queer before they were killed- being slaughtered.

I don’t care who is spouting homophobic garbage- I still don’t think they deserve to lose life, home, limb, because of it. But if the west truly wants us to condone the acts carried out in our names, invoking our community even as they work against it, then I hope those calling for our support are very understanding when the tide turns against them.
Queer bodies- bodies that you violate- are not sandbags you can use as insulation in your complicity in indiscriminate slaughter and if this violence is meted out by the “civilised, progressive” side then perhaps it’s antithetical. LGBT+ people have been oppressed for hundreds of years by societies who demand that we clip our wings to conform to your standards of behaviour, morality, to religions which dictate slaughter of the other, which condone slavery, rape, domestic violence- all the while calling us repulsive, but stopping just short of actually snuffing out our lives with your own hands so you can pat yourselves on the back about how progressive you are because you graciously allow us to live in a world you think is yours to own and ours to rent.

If we’re to be asked to ignore the violence done in our supposed name, may the violence we mete out to our own, home grown oppressors, be similarly forgiven when that inevitable time comes.

Heavy are the scales

By Daviemoo

I hereby display the letter I have just written to my MP today, following yesterday’s vote for a ceasefire:

Thanks for your response.

As the government seems to be calling neither for a ceasefire nor a pause I can only conclude that Gazan lives have a lower premium than other lives.

Daily we’re viewing images of utter carnage in Palestine: the other day in particular I saw the image of a father, walking to south Gaza with what remained of his family, holding his recently dead child in his arms, begging the camera to explain what his infant had done- was his infant Hamas? Would he have grown up to be Hamas? Is that why he deserved the indignity of death on a march to find scant safety in a land wrecked by bombs our taxes paid for? One must wonder.

That child’s vacant eyes will haunt me for the rest of my life- In fact, I couldn’t sleep the other night because I saw that child in my mind and I hoped our politicians would consider that perhaps this modus operandi won’t serve anyone well in the long run.

In my view, this campaign will create two types of person- people utterly pulverised by what we’re seeing who will have lives utterly shadowed by these events, people who will no doubt try to flee and end up in small boats at our shores and being sent to Rwanda, and of course, another generation of utterly bereft extremists who will continue violence we had the chance to stand against. Perhaps the UK government – whichever side, as broadly you all seem to be of one glut now- believe that child’s eyes are better vacant than growing up absorbing the horrors of the flattening of Gaza which would no doubt have hardened him against the countries like ours, who stood impotent, rather than call to stop the violence which took his life.

Truly I feel like the Labour Party has abandoned the core of its reasoned stances in order to secure power at the next election. Watching the party make talk of making brexit a success, of stating “if these policies sound conservative then so be it”, to watch prominent members at conference declare that “labour is the true home of conservative voters”, listening to Sir Keir appealing to the utterly hateful gender critical movement using dog whistles and refusing to progress the GRA reforms that even Teresa May in her sensible conservatism endorsed – has been harrowing.

It is not that I have moved from the party, it is that the party has bodily shoved me away for having the temerity to cling to the values of the labour movement rather than shedding them to appeal to the worst amongst us.

I’ve no doubt you’ll win, but I have to wonder what you’ve sacrificed in order to attain power and subsequently whether labour taking over will actually deal with the problems of conservatism or will simply continue them in a more orderly fashion.

Please don’t feel pressured to respond- my hopes for a reasoned discussion about the benefit of a call to end the violence are truly gone, and the last thing I need is a pasted email of blithe reassurances that the war crimes we’re witnessing will stop eventually, when other politicians hopefully develop the moral fortitude to point out the difference between the right to self defence and indiscriminately murdering civilians.

No votes for people who cant condone war crimes.

We are not our states.

By Daviemoo

This world is a mess. Human beings, human actions have led us inevitably to another crux, a point where the world is split in another way, tearing humans apart. But is it truly fair to state that these actions are performed by humans when the truth of it is that states act this way, states who wreak harm upon their own and others and states who use human life as collateral for violence? And are we truly our states? I don’t believe so, nor will I ever- for conflating states and humanity will break my core belief that humans are fundamentally decent.

I do not believe that humans are their states. I am not represented by Britain’s disgusting colonial past, forcing ourselves into other countries, raiding their supplies, slaughtering their people and bringing them back to our shores in iron, dehumanising them and forcing them to build our infrastructure as we lazed. And yet those things happened, something we must own- our ancestors did those things and we cannot deny it- the least we can do is acknowledge, apologise and try to make reparation.
Yet I also believe that this current state does not represent me. For years I have railed against the conservatives, calling out their lies, their indecency, the evil things they do in our name.
And yet they dare to claim they represent me. “WE believe in, We think that, WE stand with“:
No, Mr Sunak, YOU do. I did not elect you, I never would, your decisions are taken in spite of me, not for.

Innocent people are always, always the collateral that pays for state violence. Human body counts litter the news like DOW jones reports. The government will claim to do everything it does for you- for us- for the people. Yet we are always the ones to pay the price for governmental evils.
When our government invaded other countries, oppressed its people, committed horrendous crimes, tortured innocents and sexually assaulted prisoners, those actions led to the formation of terror cells, cells who came to our shores and wrought harm upon us as individuals. Did the government suffer these atrocities, or did ordinary people, many of whom no doubt were either purposely kept ignorant of or decried our government’s actions?

Innocent people are the collateral, the currency for state level violence

Political violence rarely springs from nowhere. Often, state action causes a domino effect of violence that does not circle back to the initiator, nor stops with those who are victims within the state that began the cascade.

Armies invade countries based on thinly held suspicion of weapons. The people there are oppressed and mistreated. From that violence, dissidence forms, from that dissidence forms radical groups whose mission is as short as, repay the harm to their own. Those dissidents infiltrate, harm innocents on the invaders’ own lands and in response, further violence in their own state is supposedly legitimised. Blood spills like coin- and who picks up that money, but corporations who profit from violence, states who gain international aid for the violence done to them because of their own violence.
It has not always been this way, nor should it ever have been. Humanity has committed so many wrongs sometimes it feels like we cannot correct course. But there it is, isn’t it: is it humans who did this, or state, and are we intertwined inextricably into state or do we exist either independently or, worse, under that concept?

We must sink our hands deep into the flesh of state and take our part of it- we are, in a way, our states- but is state, us?

The tories do not represent me. They sicken me. Everything they’ve done, killing hundreds of thousands under austerity, eroding quality of life, making it impossible for the young to live fairly, condoning atrocities the world over, rolling back our rights. Even those who did vote for them are not, cannot be wholly represented by them- surely?
It is the same elsewhere- are we to believe that everyone in a foreign land is represented by governments installed through trickery, broken voting systems, demonising of the other? Or are we all existing under the collective illusion of state as representation when in fact states, no matter how benign, still carry authoritarianism in their DNA?
Additionally, you would expect that if I do not feel represented by one side then I would feel so by the opposition: but Labour has queued up to take lines from the government too, uncritically backing colonial operations a world away, blithely stating uncritical support even when asked about blatant war crimes – and all the while neither tories nor labour taking ownership as always for the aged British imperial fingerprints on the lands half a world away that caused this chaos.

Whether they would suffer loss in polls or difficult questions from journalists is immaterial- if politicians cannot stand for right then they do not represent me nor will I ignore their transgressions for the sake of some not-too-distant electoral win tainted with the lifeblood of innocents. This is about base level decency and contributes to a wider gulf between state and individual- because the state makes no effort to represent us, they are merely a machine for other states’ propagandism and therefore useless to me. Many will play apologist, appealing to ideas of strategy- and many should respond with calls to decency, to morality. We expect the conservative government who has eroded our own quality of life to pigheadedly back the wrong choice- but are we fated to be denied any dissenting political voice for fear of misrepresentation? What truly brave and useful politicians we have, who are tied to falsehood for fear of bad press.

The grand point though, is that we are not our states. Whilst we are, to a greater or lesser degree, part of our state through election and action, increasingly we see a huge valley between state action and human acceptance of those actions. We do not feel represented by the tories here, and last night in Poland the far right government was defeated because attitudes and times change. America rejected Donald Trump (technically both times but specifically in 2020) because they saw the damage that a state which is not in alignment with people can – and will– do.
It is right to always call out actions of state for what they are, to stand against your state when they commit atrocities, when they do evil in your supposed name. Is that not the very essence of voting? It puts a tiny mark of assent from you on the government as they stand- and whilst it does not encompass the holistic actions of a government, it is tacit agreement with their ethos and for us to decide whether we will continually stand with a political party or turn away when they fail to represent us.
It is of vital import to let yourself, let the world, let everybody know that the things they do, aim to do, want to do is not of your choosing if they act out of accordance with you.

Blair ignored a million people who marched in London against the invasion of Iraq, calling it “fatuous”. A million people crowded the streets against the war machine of the US and the UK and our representative, a man elected to be the voice of the people wrapped hands around the throat of the public and crowed denial over our cries of dissent. Now again, state representatives distort fact, ask unbalanced question, ignore decades of violence in order to narrativise atrocities and fit them into the neat box of “acceptable because we condone it”.
When asked if it was right to collectively punish innocent people, almost every tory said yes- as did many members of labour. It is widely believed that labour leadership has put a moratorium on speaking on the killing of Palestinians. Many will state that this is because we’re so close to an election, so close to being rid of the ghastly tories at last.
Begs again the question, what are we replacing them with if we can’t state that no innocent Israeli people should have been murdered and nor should any innocent Palestinians, that terrorism committed by anyone is wrong, that the preservation of life and liberty is what is key and that this is not what is happening.
Two groups of people, loaded into chambers and fired like bullets at one another while state on one side and state representatives on another escape unscathed, shoved deeper into their belief that anyone on the other side must be wiped out. But there is no other side to innocent people. There are humans, trying to live, to cultivate land, to love and marry and be.

You can trace many conflicts back to initiating incidents, and beyond those initiations you can trace streams of history, further back all the time. Historical injustices do not lose their sting for those who suffered them and asking people to contextualise the horrors they saw, their family saw, their loved ones suffered is gauche. Lost in the morass of war and terror are always the voices of those who just existed in the wrong place at the wrong time. We are seeing voices cut from the air and hidden beneath rubble, watching faces blurred from our screens as they try desperately to shout truths- and who obscures but the state, always.

Make no mistake that the British empire caused the root of this conflict and the British state intends to condone any and all atrocities as long as these acts are within the law. That, dear reader, is precisely why the law is not just. Because the deaths of the innocent cannot ever be within the law and should not be condoned by state, nor it’s seeming assent by state be accepted by you, by us.

Our politicians are the only ones who could call for actions to change- you or I cannot, and we clearly cannot ask, beg, shout for it as once again our leaders of state will tighten their fingers around our collective voicebox and shout our acceptance over our guttural cries. And believe me, it will be us- it will be innocent Israelis, and jewish people, it will be Palestinian refugees and muslim people, it will be we, the people lost in the tides below our lofty states, hopelessly tiny in the shadow of our hierarchies, who will suffer because of this conflict- and our states will continue the broken narrative that any of us want this.

The actions of state is, as we speak, forming new radical dissidents, dissidents who will wreak more state violence against us all in the name of injustices against themselves and the cycle will continue again, state violence creating more state violence and all the while the state escapes unscathed, borne aloft on the corpses of those who suffered under them.

I urge you to stand up for what you believe in the face of injustice. Stand for innocents lost in bloodshed past, present and no doubt future. Whether the state chooses to listen or not, other people can know our position, other people can see us support them in their strife, can watch us beg for better for ourselves and each other.
Even if we lose, even if the engine of state drives over us and pushes us to the mud- I would rather have stood against imperialist dogma and have lost than meekly allowed the worlds’ governments to use us as live rounds to puncture holes in our peace, and never have tried speaking truth to power.

It’s bigger than all of us

Share the rage!

Share the rage!

Share the rage!

Share the rage!

Share the rage!

Share the rage!