Video: Queers For Palestine Attend Pro-Hamas Protest But Receive a Harsh Reminder of Who They Support
The political discourse surrounding the brutal events and the war that has come in its wake, especially in the West, has been tinged with a misguided transposition of Western identity politics onto the Middle East that collapses all nuance and reduces a complex situation into a simple binary of “oppressor versus oppressed.” As such, leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestine (including Hamas) as an oppressed, brown victim class whose freedom-fighting “resistance” against their oppressive, white, US-backed colonizers in Israel is a righteous cause with which to stand in solidarity. This simplistic view of the long-standing conflict in the Middle East leads to confused and contradictory thinking, as seen in the slogan (and now meme) “Queers for Palestine” brandished at anti-Israel rallies. It’s worth exploring just how incoherent this concept is.
On the surface, “Queers for Palestine” attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlpool of ridicule and criticism due to the fact that LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world, and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized with variations like “Chickens for KFC” or “Blacks for the KKK”, which highlight the basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with the Islamic right they so readily champion.
And what started as meme is now coming true again!
Video surfaced where a group baring the Palestine flag tackle down an LGBT+ progress flag and trample it on the ground, sparking conflict.
Video below:
While Pew Research shows that attitudes towards LGBTQ+ have evolved to be more tolerant in much of the world over the last decade, in the Palestinian territories there has been no progress.
Despite the dark reality for gay Palestinians, some left wing and LGBTQ+ groups in the West still insist on supporting the Free Palestine camp. Yet, while they call for Israel’s destruction, Palestinians legally and socially persecute their own LGBTQ+ community.
Not only are there atrocious laws against LGBTQ+ in the West Bank and Gaza, the social attitudes are an even larger problem, with deeply embedded homophobia rampant in the culture that endangers the local community.
Bruce Hoenshell is a military historian, he is one of the most prolific conservative writers today, often churning out multiple columns per week. His writings tend to focus on international themes, modern warfare. Style Sampling: “ It is not that we need social networking and Internet searches more than food and fuel, but rather that we have the impression that cool zillionaires in flip-flops are good while uncool ones in wingtips are quite bad.”
