We Are Not Weapons, We Are Instruments of Justice
It is happening now, as it always happens when a queer person stands in solidarity with anyone: the weaponization of our identity and the vulnerabilities inherit within. How can you support those people? Don’t you know what it’s like for people like you in those countries? Do you know what happens to your people in countries run by those people?
Right there, without them realising it, they are referring to both myself and entire groups of people as those people. You people. Your or their people. Other people. The LGBT people, the Arab and Muslim people. It has happened when voicing opposition to the illegal War on Terror, and in opposition to the bombing and siege of Yemen, and the destruction of Libya; it has happened when voicing support for Black Lives Matter or Indigenous Water Protectors or immigrants fleeing US sponsored carnage in Central America.
Homophobia exists everywhere. I face it everywhere. There are no days off, not in any society, and for any straight, white person to tell me that my support of a people who have faced ethnic cleansing and apartheid since 1948, and are now living through genocide and filming and sharing it IN REAL TIME IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE WORLD that it’s worse for my people in those societies is appealing to my ethics by way of bigotry. Bigotry. You are asking me to see over a billion people on the planet through the narrow lens of racism and Islamophobia. The victims in Palestine film their martyrdom while the IDF film the looting and torture they commit; they film the destruction of universities, mosques, residential blocks and water works. They have social media channels run by the state celebrating every atrocity it is possible to commit. They take pictures of the genocide they inflict, and then share it on dating profiles, or X or Facebook, proud of their bigotry. Proud of erasing a people from the map. Literally, erasing them from the map and they celebrate and call for more death. For all of their deaths.
How dare you ask me to sympathize with that. How dare you ask me or cajole me or shame me as a queer person into supporting that. Muslims are no more homophobic than Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hidus, or any other faith. It exists among the faithless. Among liberal and conservative. It exists culturally and institutionally. It is everywhere, and moments like these not only share the racist and Islamophobic underpinnings of some people’s dubious moral authority, it exposes their own unease with the issue of my people as well.
You cannot weaponize my vulnerable place in this world against anyone. You cannot turn me as a part of the LGBT community into a weapon to be wielded in defense of racism, illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide or injustice or any sort. Not ever. Solidarity is not predicated on the perfection of either party or parties, it is predicated on a fundamental and unalienable set of Human Rights, and absolute faith in the dignity of all people. It is a shared moral contract. It is founded in shared beliefs not in any way evident in the “only democracy” in the region, not in any apparent in the “world’s most moral army”.
I am not new to the game. My courage does not waiver. To try and turn my heart against the Palestinian souls suffering in fields of death, literal killing fields, and you only expose yourself as the absolute worst sort of bigot, possessed of an atrophic soul. A ghoul of the Nancy Pelosi variety. Of the Chuck Schumer ilk. Base. Remorseless. Actively discouraging empathy while the greatest crime we have ever witnessed is happening, 143 days and counting right in front of us. In a word, you announce your complicity and it will never, ever be forgotten.
