#imperial asylum

[visionsofour-past]

• The Refectory of the Imperial Asylum at Vincennes.

Artist: Charles Nègre (French, 1820–1880)

Date: 1858–1859

Medium: Salted paper print from glass negative.

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

@ardentpoop god yeah like thinking on the perpetual suspicion/monitoring/surveillance present re: sam over s1-5 (and tbh. never goes away, with each season it just becomes a new issue standing in for what makes him untrustworthy. all different metaphors for the same thing!). sam can never win! you will always be marked as a threat! ('it's not what you're doing/'it's what you are') like, his arc is a tragedy on assimilation!! (it's too real rip)

(^ from 7.03. but then now im also thinking on. how they had a literal suicide bomber metaphor with the angels in s9 lol.)

(^ from 5.02. the way this show also pathologises sam and his anger as something inherently monstrous. the view of the racialised Other as inherently ruthless/backwards/savage in their violence, compared to the righteous violence of state brutality) also the show's nuclear family standing in for an authoritarian state (that justifies its nature by perpetual war -> the dogma at the time: there will always be terrorists, America will forever be at war). sam as the scapegoat, a metaphorical muslim american stand-in, whose freedom gets sacrificed at the altar for the greater good.

the BMOL arc is sooo annoying bc it taps into the show's central hypocrisy! critiquing institutions but refusing to examine hunting as essentially authoritarian. like the classic american vein of fascist justice masked as community mob violence, while deriding government control lol. and the cole arc is also incredibly annoying! but that episode also makes those War on Terror = monstrosity associations explicit!! the layers!! oh no the soldier picked up a monster :( while fighting an imperialist war in an arab nation :( and his PTSD/domestic violence gets sublimated into a literal pathogen (tying in with the show's revised stupid MoC lore being really about military/cop apologia. the just soldier descends into monstrosity, for the sake of protecting a brother from the influence of monstrosity)

[thoughtlessarse]

Last month, the US blocked a British Indian Overseas Territory (BIOT) court from entering the British territory of Diego Garcia—part of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, and prevented a group of Tamil migrants—stranded on the island since 2021, from presenting their case that they were being unlawfully detained. This has left the Tamils living in what amounts to a concentration camp, locked in a legal limbo and held in virtual incommunicado 1,000 miles away from the nearest landmass in India. Tessa Gregory, a lawyer at Leigh Day solicitors representing the asylum seekers, said, “That the British Indian Ocean Territory supreme court has been prevented from sitting in its own territory on Crown land is an extraordinary affront to the rule of law.” She appealed to the incoming Labour government foreign secretary to do everything he could “to ensure that the hearing goes ahead as soon as possible.” In 2021, 89 Tamils, including 16 children, who had fled torture and racist persecution in Sri Lanka, had been trying to reach Canada when their fishing boat ran into trouble. They were rescued by Royal Navy ships and brought to Diego Garcia, part of the British Indian Ocean territories, where they have remained ever since, trying to seek asylum in Britain. In 2022, four more boats carrying asylum seekers reached the island, some of whom were allowed to leave and succeeded in reaching the French territory of Reunion. The conditions in the camp are so dire that a number returned. Others were deported back to Sri Lanka. While some of the migrants were sent to Rwanda for medical treatment, they were later returned to Diego Garcia. It is believed that there are at least 60 asylum seekers still on the island, awaiting decisions on their claims or appeals of earlier rulings that are being processed in the UK. Their plight is compounded by the fact that access to Diego Garcia is restricted to those with connections to the military or BIOT’s administration. There are no commercial flights to the island and access for yachts is only for safe passage through the outer Chagos Islands. They live in rat-infested, communal tents and are confined to a small fenced-in area, no bigger than a football pitch, under the watchful eyes of G4S, a security firm who “are treating us like prisoners,” according to anonymous statements by two of the asylum seekers. The BBC says there have been “multiple suicide attempts” and “reports of sexual harassment and assaults.” Lawyers say that there have been hunger strikes, including by children. In November last year, the UN’s High Commission for Refugees visited the island, and wrote a damning report about the camp. It concluded that “conditions there amounted to arbitrary detention” and called for the Tamils’ “immediate relocation.” Even the British Foreign Office, which administers the BIOT from its office in London, admitted the conditions were not suitable. Britain’s control over the BIOT has been deemed illegal. Britain’s Labour government separated Diego Garcia and the 60-plus Chagos Islands from Mauritius in 1965 before it became independent in 1968 and subsequently incorporated the Islands into the specially created British Indian Ocean Territories. This violated the 1960 United Nations Resolution 1514 banning the breakup of colonies before independence. It forcibly expelled Diego Garcia’s 2,000 indigenous people—the Chagossians—who were exiled to slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean and eventually the UK, where, denied support and compensation and subject to racial discrimination at the hands of officialdom, they have lived in impoverished conditions ever since. The British government has repeatedly rejected their demands to return their homeland.

continue reading

Brexiteers on EU: Sovereignty blah blah blah control our borders blah blah blah our rules blah blah blah

Brexiteers on US presence in what they see as British territory: *crickets*

[runalongprincevaliant]

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A post shared by Che Guerrero (@myundocumentedass)

TW: drowning woman and her child

They make it out ok, but it’s distressing to hear and watch

[probablyasocialecologist]

Last week, Senate Democrats strongly indicated that the liberal wing of the American political establishment is woefully unprepared to face the future that the US—as both the world’s biggest imperial power and a leading architect of the climate crisis—has helped create. In an attempt to score a win ahead of this year’s federal election, Democrats proposed a piece of legislation that is, in effect, a laundry list of hard-line anti-immigrant policies demanded by Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress. In so doing, they conceded the right-wing framing that an increase in immigrants and asylum seekers at the southern border—already a real phenomenon—represents a “crisis” that requires a series of punitive solutions. This marks a shift in tone and policy from the Trump years, when Democrats rhetorically placed themselves in opposition to the xenophobia of the White House and tended to downplay the idea of rising immigration pressures. It also reflects an even deeper conception of the border as a bulwark against the savage hordes that would destroy life as we know it if we let our guard down. As it happens, that is exactly how the Israeli government talks about Gaza (and like Gaza is how the American right is beginning to talk about the border). Even in the short term, the Democrats’ turn is a huge mistake; as Adam Johnson and Kate Aronoff argued forcefully in separate pieces last week, going head-to-head with the right over border toughness is a losing battle, since Democrats will have a hard time beating the Republicans at their own game (racism). But more importantly, there is no indication that deterrence can counteract the long-term economic, political, and ecological forces animating population flows. Even if it were sensible policy, there is no way to shut down the border that is not itself a time bomb for political violence. Thus, by taking the hard-line approach—or, to put it another way, by embracing the Gaza model—Democrats risk losing elections, while harming national well-being where and when they do take power.

[puttingherinhistory]

A lot of white people from smaller European countries that never directly owned colonies will try to play innocent and assert that:

a) there are absolutely no people of color whatsoever in their countries, their countries are utopic safe havens of whiteness simply just 100% white, and

b) because they never directly owned colonies (or at least colonies outside of europe) and that their countries are (allegedly) 100% white with never a PoC in sight that it's impossible for them to be racist, in fact if you try to call them out for racism that's violent American / western European imperialism and you should be ashamed of yourself you stupid yankee and realize not everywhere is the U.S

I'm telling you now not to fall for it. With a quick google search on their country it's almost a guarantee that you'll find that both a) there are indeed people of color living in their country, even *gasp* born in their country and b) there are likely going to be active and dangerous white supremacist groups in their country or at the very least news stories of racist violence against people of color in their country

Particularly violence against Romani people and asylum seekers from Africa and the middle east is really bad in these smaller European countries that like to play innocent.

And that's because a) often because they're smaller and not as powerful and wealthy as the big colonial powers they cling to the sentiment of "well at least I'm white" and b) they are not immune to cultural and ideological influence from their colonial neighbors

[fatehbaz]

[The British imperial imaginary conceives] of Bermuda as a tiny paradise in the North Atlantic. But long before cruise ships moored up, prison ships carried hundreds of convicts to the island, first docking in 1824 and remaining there for decades. [...] [T]he use of Bermuda as a prison destination is less well known. For 40 years, British prisoners worked backbreaking days labouring in Bermuda’s dockyards and died in their thousands. [...]

[T]he notorious floating prisons known as hulks. [...] [I]n addition to locations across the Thames Estuary, Portsmouth and Plymouth, the British government used these ships as emergency detention centres in colonial outposts across the 19th century, detaining convicts in Bermuda between 1824 and 1863 and Gibraltar between 1842 and 1875. England has a long history of banishing its criminal population. In the 18th century, criminals were typically sentenced to seven years overseas in America. Many worked as plantation labourers in Maryland and Virginia [...]. Britain [...] turned to hulks to cope with rising [prison housing] numbers. Each could hold between 300 and 500 men, and they were nicknamed “floating hells” for their unsanitary and dangerous conditions.

---

[T]he government felt that convict labour could be put to use in other colonies [in addition to Australia], and so began an experiment in 1824 to send men to Bermuda. [...] Though only 20 miles long, the island was already extremely important to naval strategy. It was used as a refuelling station for British ships travelling to colonial outposts such as Halifax, Nova Scotia and the Caribbean. But the naval dockyard needed modernisation, and rather than employ local workers, convicts - a cheap and easily mobilised workforce - filled the labour gap. [...]

[M]en lived on board the ships they had sailed on (seven in total). [...] Many were injured in the dockyards, others went blind from the reflected glare of the sun as they quarried white limestone. [...] They were burnt by scorching temperatures and suffered sunstroke [...]. Bermuda also received people convicted in other British colonies, including Canada and the Caribbean. During the years of the great famine in Ireland (1845 to 1852), thousands of Irish convicts arrived on the island, many suffering from malnourishment. [...] The experiment ended after 40 years, in 1863, when dockyard repairs were completed. The remaining hulks were scuttled or broken up for scrap, and convicts were transported to Australia and Tasmania, or home to England [...].

---

Bermuda’s history as a prison island has been largely forgotten, but this story shares parallels with today. Prisons are suffering from overcrowding, and governments still detain prisoners and others on islands and modified ships. In Dorset, the Bibby Stockholm ship is housing asylum seekers [...].

The convicts who lived, worked and died in Bermuda are part of a larger global story of coercion and empire.

The product of their labour was imperial strength, but for those sent thousands of miles from home and buried in unmarked graves, the brutalities of their experience should also be remembered.

---

All text above by: Anna McKay. "Britain's forgotten prison island: remembering the thousands of convicts who died working in Bermuda's dockyards". The Conversation. 27 March 2024. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[the-lornacorn]

So, living in the UK is a bit scary at the second.

My boss just had a phone call with me saying I should work from home unless I absolutely have to come to work because I'm pretty obviously queer and disabled and currently my motorcycle is being repaired. In effect my boss has said "I don't want you to be on a bus right now".

Our service had to close early because of concerns around the current far-right (Nazi) riots in the UK. A thing I am noticing very, very intensely is the way the UK government is responding to the situation.

"Mindless Thuggery" - This is an organized, racist, far-right extremist terror campaign for one, it's not mindless. But also, couldn't you find a different word than "Thuggery" considering the history of the word? Like damn guys. You can invoke imperial racism but you can't call the rioters "Racist", "Islamaphobic" or "Bigoted"? Like Jesus.

I'll be honest, I am scared. An asylum seeker refuge hotel in Tamworth was set on fire and that's not very far from my home. I'm scared, I don't want to live in a country like this.

[a-roguish-gambit]

Hello, in your turn of the century AU, were Pietro and Wanda raised by Magneto their father? In X-Men Evolution, Mags sent Wanda to an asylum because she couldn't control her powers, something out of character for him. In the comics when Wanda causes an accident with her powers in a small town, her response to the angry mob was to kill them all. Does something similar happen in this au?Since the twins are well dressed unlike the other children it makes me think that Magneto at least covers his basic needs. But why did he leave them with Mystique and Destiny?

So yes and no on the asylum. When she had a breakdown from her powers he sent her to one initially for a week, because at the time thats what you were told to do then when your loved ones needed psychiatric help particularly women, unfortunately, thinking it would be safe. it was a private asylum not a public one and the brochure said that there would be like lots of greenery, musical enrichment, healing springs, trained staff, etc. A lot of asylums at the time up sold themselves as these verdant pastoral estates and never expecting the families to visit. But magneto did, cause he wanted to make sure they could handle her. When he saw that they had essentially chained her up out of fear of her powers.... Well let's just say that asylum is no longer in commission.

He...honestly felt like he couldn't face her after that and she honestly didn't want to talk to him either, so he set her up in a small estate with some mutant staff to look after her. It's a lovely place with all the actual amenities the asylum was supposed to have, but she took this as him being ashamed of her and not him being ashamed of himself, and trying to pretend she doesn't exist.

He continues to raise Pietro tho is pretty absentee cause he's getting into this new fangled utopian socialism that's all the rage in the turn of the century, and has set up this mutant organization founded on the idea that humans can't run society fairly even for themselves with their desire for capital and imperialism, and rampant discrimination and classism and if they were the rulers of society they could create a truly fair world. It's kinda gone off the initial path tho and veered into establishing an independent mutant state at this point. Anyways eventually he has Pietro sent to live with mystique and the brotherhood as his focus on his plotting grows.

Wanda eventually gets fed up with this isolation and goes looking for her father and brother and ends up finding the brotherhood of mutants.

Sorry that was a rant. Hope you liked it!

[bioethicists]

(physical, brick + mortar) institutions are institutions. they have underlying logics, methods, and violences. i was first introduced to this concept when i read "asylums" and, having previously been exposed to (limited) prison abolition work, was shocked to see my experiences as a psych patient being compared to prisoners. surely those were completely different experiences, right??? except goffman does an excellent job of ripping away a shiny skin to reveal the identical bones beneath- prisons, army barracks, boarding schools, hospitals, etc.

as activists + scholars of any form of institutional abuse, we have to break from sectarian politics which acknowledge the violences of one institution (commonly prisons) but fail to see the bones beneath, the systemic logics which created those conditions in the first place. prison abolition + psychiatric liberation + anti imperialism + disability justice are all facets of one structure. they must work in tandem and learn from one another, because they are targeting the same skeleton wearing different skins.

[septembriseur]

This obituary for the forger and photographer Adolfo Kaminsky has been making the rounds on Tumblr, and I want to add to it a piece of longform journalism about him that predates his death: “License to Live: The Career of Adolfo Kaminsky.”

What is perhaps most remarkable about Kaminsky is not (only) his work during the Second World War, which reportedly saved the lives of about 14,000 Jews, but his continuation of that work after the war: forging papers for Jewish refugees so they could enter British Palestine (but later rejecting the State of Israel when he saw what it had become), working for Algerian freedom fighters, Vietnam War draft dodgers, African and Latin American liberation movements. He told a French reporter: “Il n'y a rien de plus poreux qu'une frontière et que les idées, elles, n'en ont pas” (There is nothing more porous than a border, and ideas have no such thing), which to me makes clear the fundamental continuity of his work with a larger struggle against border imperialism today. 

I may be kind of working on a nonfiction piece that talks about this a bit. But it was really striking to see people share his obituary while I was also seeing, on the other hand, an outpouring of racism regarding Denmark’s announcement that it would grant asylum to Afghan women and girls on the basis of gender. This is, by the way, a completely meaningless announcement, basically— as this article points out, it affects all of five active active cases and ten cases that will be reopened, because Afghan women and girls can’t get to Denmark to claim asylum. But nevertheless the European racists were out, crying about how the brown people were now going to come turn their countries into brown countries. And it’s just truly incredible to me the vast disconnect that allows a widespread veneration of Kaminsky at the same time as a fundamental rejection of the principles he embodied. You can’t say “Oh, I would have done that if I lived back then” when the same demand is around us all the time now, always. 

[doomed-prophetess]

Your post about Derrick and the possible fiance he had in OG timeline...really made me think ...Frollo vibes.

In an au where OG Penelope fake her death and run away with Eckles.

Would Derrick "know" peace? Bc I see him going mad. There is no Penny but in his mind, she lives rent free...and well, hard being a good husband if you are losing your mind thanks to unrequited lust.

The noble lady is losing the a "dead" woman with low birth as background.

I do think he would snap...either end his life to follow Penny or use some dark magic to bring her back.

Either way, Derrick cuases his own downfall as well for the family.

The version of Derrick that's in my head is basically if you put Frollo and Humbert Humbert into a blender, reduced the creepy age gap and replaced it with incest guilt and increased his yandereness by 120 %. Were noble children allowed to sing in a Boys Choir? Well, my new headcanon is now that Derrick had a gread singing voice and received vocal lessons. He'd slay it in a priest robe as Claude Frollo in Hellfire.

Suicide? I have a different perspective. Derrick is not the type of person who would end his life after losing the one he loves. That sounds more like Iklies or Callisto. Derrick would find suicide emasculating. It might sound strange, because Derrick's character is so strongly defined by his guilt from the loss of Ivonne but I cannot imagine him feeling genuinely guilty about the pain he inflicted onto Penelope. He would regret it that his actions had caused her so much distress that she would have chosen death over him but I feel like if given the choice to go back to the start he would do it again just slightly differently. It would take him countless failed attempts to fix the timeline until he realizes that he is the problem.

I'm unsure about Derrick using magic to bring her back. For once he's not the wizard kind of person, second he doesn't have the connections (yeah Vinter is friends with his dad but Vinter is super secretive about his wizard guild and Derrick acts quite frankly like a cop who would rat him out to the authorities), third he looks like he has been swallowing imperial propaganda (including anti wizard media) for two decades and is perfectly happy to keep doing it for another. Maybe Derrick would lose his mind little by litte until one of his knights gave him the coup de grace to release their master from his suffering. Or his lady wife finally tires of hiding her husband's condition and loosens his saddle before he goes on a hunting trip, hoping he might fall from his horse and break his neck before he could drag her family down with him. Perhaps he'd be declared insane and anonymously committed to a lunatic asylum or sent to the countryside to recover (under surveillance, of course). Everything he accused Penelope of being and everything he planned to do to her happens to him.

In a just world Derrick loses everything he valued. His razor-sharp mind, the spotless reputation of an aristocrat that he had spent years building up, the loyalty of his wife and Penelope (although he had never really possessed the latter in the first place).

[hummussexual]

Excerpt:

Pinkwashing’s relationship with homonationalism and Orientalism

The pinkwashing carried out by Israeli authorities is based on an Orientalist view that Palestinians remain “backwards” in their stance on homosexuality because apparently, we refuse to emulate the progressiveness of the west. 

To be “gay friendly,” as gender studies academic Jasbir Puar explains, is to be modern, cosmopolitan, developed, first-world, Global North, and, most significantly, democratic – something that Palestinians supposedly do not have the capability of ever achieving.

This erases the agency of Palestinians, especially the progressive forces inside Palestine – including the achievements of queer Palestinian movements. The Orientalist tropes found in pinkwashing also completely disregards the history and legacies of colonialism and modern-day imperialism in the region. It is an example of euro-centric, western exceptionalism – and a pillar of anti-Arab racism.

Pinkwashing and homonationalism also go hand in hand. First coined by Puar in 2007, the concept of homonationalism argues that western LGBTQI+ movements are often bound up with upholding the racist sovereignty of the nation state. Puar argued that neoliberal and capitalist power structures line up with the queer liberation movement by using sexual diversity and LGBTQI+ rights to peddle or maintain nationalist stances – such as anti-immigration policies which are based on prejudices that the “other” are homophobic and that western society is egalitarian.

For Israel, homonationalism is deployed to justify its own exceptionalism and violent oppression of the “other” – in this case, Palestinians. 

Israel flaunts its liberal openness to homosexuality while contrasting it to the sexual oppression among Palestinian society and neighbouring Arab countries. It therefore serves as an excuse for Israel to rationalise its occupation of Palestinians, and to “liberate” oppressed Palestinian queers. The latter is seen through Israel’s myths about “saving” Palestinian queers by “regularly” approving their asylum seeker applications to escape their homophobic and oppressive families or communities in the West Bank or Gaza.

While it’s hard to verify how often these asylum seeker approvals occur, waxing lyrical about their supposed humanitarian work plays into the homonationalist narrative. Since when are immigration authorities – not just in Israel, but any immigration (or border) authority globally – benevolent, progressive entities full of empathy and care? Let alone towards Arabs?

As Queers Against Israeli Apartheid once pointed out, “there is no pink door in the apartheid wall.” This means that like every other Palestinian, LGBTQI+ Palestinians are also at the mercy of Israel’s violent, racist settler-colonial project. This is because queer Palestinians simply do not fit into Israel’s homonationalist quest to uphold the racist sovereignty of its nation state – one where a legally-enforced apartheid system puts only Jewish people at the top of the pyramid.

[roga-el-rojo]

Assata: An Autobiograhy - Assata Shakur

Hello friends!

I’m incredibly excited for this week’s recommendation as we start Black August, a month dedicated to highlighting the history of revolutionary Black political prisoners and their comrades in and outside the US. I’ll be highlighting a crucial radical Black woman’s experience today: “Assata: An Autobiography” by Assata Olugbala Shakur.

While Assata needs no introduction, here’s a quick biography before delving into the text. Assata Shakur, born JoAnne Deborah Byron on July 16, 1947, is a New Afrikan revolutionary and former member of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party. She grew up between New York and North Carolina, experiencing the worst of Jim Crow, and was radicalized by the Vietnam War in college. After joining the BLA for a while, she was present in a shootout on a New Jersey Turnpike that left a state trooper dead in 1973. She was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but she escaped in 1979 and fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum and lives in to this day.

There are too many aspects of Assata's storied history to highlight here, all of which deserve serious reflection. I'll start by noting her incredible bravery and fortitude throughout her harrowing encounters with white supremacy, patriarchal violence, and settler capitalism in and out of prison. As her name shows, she is one who thankfully struggles for the people.

Her position as a socialist revolutionary is important to highlight. She was a part of a militant black freedom struggle rooted in communist thought which sought to upend global imperialism and colonialism to free all peoples, especially black women as some of the most exploited Third World Women (seeing New Afrika as a colony). She also criticized white chauvinist elements of the Left which sadly still exist.

I also want to mention her solidarity with Lolita Lebrón, an incredibly important Puerto Rican nationalist, in prison when no one else would. She knew that decolonization for Puerto Rico was a part of a global struggle for liberation.

I highly recommend everyone read this book to gain first-hand insight into a Black revolutionary's struggle for freedom!

[vintagetvstars]

Anna May Wong Vs. Peggy Ashcroft

Propaganda

Anna May Wong - (The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong) - The groundbreaking Chinese-American star became the first Asian-American to star in a TV show with this series on the DuMont Network. Like most DuMont shows, no episodes survive, but we know from her other roles that Anna May Wong was indeed very hot!

Peggy Ashcroft - (The Jewel in the Crown, She's Been Away, The Wars of the Roses) - Peggy Ashcroft's brilliance needs no introduction. One the finest stage actresses to ever grace the British stage, Dame Peggy Ashcroft made several notable TV appearances, particularly in the mid and later eras of her career. In the TV adaptation of The Cherry Orchard (1962) she played Madame Ranevskaya, and while her performance was brilliant she cut an elegant, tragic, beautiful and somewhat foolishly carefree figure who instantly caught your eye. In the TV series adaptation of The Wars of the Roses (1965), she played Margaret of Anjou, going from naive youth to fierce warrior queen and bitter old age in a matter of episodes. It was a masterclass in Shakespeare on TV by one of the best Shakespearean actresses ever, a magnetic performance and she herself looked absolutely stunning. In the TV film "Caught on a Train" she played an elderly Austrian aristocrat, self centered, kind-in-a-weird-way, imperious and elegant. In the TV film "Cream in My Coffee" she was a sad married woman hoping that a holiday would build bridges in her marriage that broke down before it even began. The TV series The Jewel in the Crown was one of her best TV appearances ever where she played a slightly dotty retired missionary and her ultimate tragic end. Her swan song on TV was her final TV appearance in the the TV film She's Been Away where she played an old woman released from a mental asylum where she was locked in since her youth. Peggy Ashcroft looked stunning on TV and translated her wealth of stage experience into her television performances, winning several BAFTA awards for Best Actress, being nominated for several more BAFTA's for Best Actress and was nominated for two Emmy's (one outstanding lead actress and another outstanding supporting actress) and a Golden Globe (also for outstanding lead actress) as well.

Master Poll List of the Hot Vintage TV Ladies Bracket

Additional propaganda below the cut

Anna May Wong:

Peggy Ashcroft:

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Adam Zivo

Published: Nov 30, 2023

Given the chance, Hamas would murder every LGBTQ person in the world

Amid renewed conflict in Gaza, a startling number of queer progressives are romanticizing Palestinians and playing down their hatred towards LGBTQ people. This whitewashing is wrong, no matter how legitimate Palestinian calls for self-determination may be.

Since the early 2000s, radical queer activists have fervently advocated for Palestinian rights under the assumption that, as both communities oppose the capitalist West, “queer liberation” cannot be disentangled from “anti-imperialism.”

This has never made much sense. Strategically aligning against a shared enemy does not necessarily make two groups friends. There are obvious tensions between Palestinians and the LGBTQ community that cannot be ignored — mainly the fact that most Palestinians, along with their political leaders, hate gay and trans people and many want them dead.

In a 2019 poll conducted by the BBC, only five per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank approved of homosexuality — which was the lowest rate within the Middle East and North Africa. Gazans are generally excluded from this research, but local Islamic law mandates death or 10 years of imprisonment for homosexuality.

LGBTQ people face such dire threats to their safety in Gaza and the West Bank that hundreds have fled to Israel as refugees. When interviewed by the United Nations, escapees have recounted harrowing torture and death threats from both family members and Palestinian security forces. Yet even abroad, these people are not safe. Last year, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay man living under asylum in Israel, was kidnapped and then beheaded in the West Bank just two months before he was scheduled to immigrate to Canada.

Despite this, activists throughout the West have paraded signs bearing the message “Queers for Palestine” — a slogan that some have ridiculed as the equivalent of “Chickens for KFC.” Earlier this month a banner was hung in the University of British Columbia reading: “Trans liberation can’t happen without Palestinian liberation.”

It’s unclear why LGBTQ rights are in any way dependent on Palestinian self-determination — activist explanations here tend to be vague and muddled at best.

Is the argument that no disadvantaged social group can be free until all are? If that’s the case, then why is this logic rarely, if ever, applied to antisemitism? And if all disadvantaged groups need support, then why should any LGBTQ person, who has limited resources and time, prioritize the Palestinians over the many other communities fighting for rights and attention in the world today?

While LGBTQ people have no special obligation to support Palestinians, there is nothing wrong with defending Palestinians’ fundamental rights despite their rampant homophobia — the validity of these rights is not conditional on moral perfection, after all. If a gay man can support Afghan and Iranian women, or Uyghur Muslims, all of whom have their own prejudices, then Palestinians can be reasonably supported as well.

Deciding what social causes to support is a deeply personal choice for anyone — some LGBTQ people prioritize Palestinians, and others don’t. Each option is understandable, but which path one chooses to take should, ideally, be based on accurate information.

Rather than allow this, though, the queer left uses misleading arguments to inflate support for the Palestinian cause — firstly, by fabricating an artificial obligation to Palestinian liberation, and, secondly, by playing down the severity of Palestinian homophobia (and, by extension, Islamic homophobia).

Queer leftists are quick to argue that the Qur’an’s language on homosexuality is ambiguous, while ignoring the fact that the hadiths, which are the canonical teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, explicitly prohibit homosexuality. Muslim-majority countries do not pass discriminatory legislation arbitrarily — they work off mainstream interpretations of Shariah law.

Some queer leftists try to exonerate Palestinians of any moral responsibility for their homophobia by blaming western colonialism. To make this argument, they typically fixate on the fact that legal prohibitions on homosexuality were first introduced into the region by the British in 1936.

But the British ruled this part of the Middle East for only 30 years (from 1918 to 1948) and implemented sodomy laws for barely more than a decade. Palestinians have had 75 years to improve their attitudes and laws, but haven’t done so and show no desire for change — even though the Israelis, who also inherited these laws, were able to shed this baggage decades ago.

To blame contemporary Palestinian homophobia on a relatively brief, long-dead period of colonial rule is inane and patronizing. It implies that the Palestinians have no moral agency; that their beliefs and institutions are simply dictated by western policy choices; and that they are incapable of being held to the same ethical standards as Europeans.

Another minimization strategy is to argue that Islamic homophobia is not much worse than what is experienced in the West. For example, world-famous drag queen Katya Zamolodchikova (an Irish-American who cosplays as a Soviet citizen) recently claimed on X that anti-LGBTQ violence in Gaza is comparable to that in Scotland or Massachusetts. The post went viral and was liked over 140,000 times.

The last time I checked, gay people are not beheaded or routinely tortured in the West. While some anti-LGTBQ violence exists, only very coddled westerners can delude themselves into believing that this is similar to what occurs in Gaza, the West Bank or the rest of the Islamic world.

Some queer leftists also nonsensically claim that criticizing Palestinian homophobia “erases the existence of queer Palestinians” — but absolutely no one, except maybe Hamas, is saying that LGBTQ Palestinians don’t exist. Calling attention to social prejudice actually spotlights victims who would otherwise be forgotten. This should be glaringly obvious.

The queer left’s tendency to romanticize Palestinians and ignore their homophobia may seem strange at first, but it becomes intelligible when one remembers that this crowd often subscribes to a strain of “anti-imperialism” that interprets the world through a simplistic and reflexively anti-western framework.

This framework divides the world into a simple binary: oppressors (who are unambiguously evil) and the oppressed (who are morally pure). “Anti-imperialists” assume that: i) communities that oppose the West overwhelmingly fall into the “oppressed” class; ii) members of this class tend to have similar political and social priorities; and iii) political violence committed by the oppressed automatically counts as morally justified “resistance.”

Of course, the world does not actually conform to this framework, because global conflicts are far more nuanced than anti-imperialists are willing to admit. There is no black-and-white divide between good and evil, and no grand coalition of victims — real life is too diverse and fractured for such a simplistic narrative.

Yet false simplicity provides comfort to many queer activists, because it conceals the uncomfortable compromises that come with political life. Many progressives feel anxious about their own privileged positions in the world, and, as a result, often resort to performative righteousness to assuage these insecurities. The dynamics here are not much different from what is sometimes seen among the devoutly religious — the presence of doubt, compromise and moral greyness is psychologically unacceptable.

In the context of the Palestinians, this fundamentally selfish need for black-and-white thinking leads the queer left to minimize homophobia that, in any other context, would be unacceptable. It encourages the romanticization of Hamas, a terrorist organization that would, if given the chance, murder every LGBTQ person in the world.

If queer leftists wish to ensconce themselves in fairytales, then that’s their prerogative — but other LGBTQ people are justified in taking a skeptical approach, which, yes, can include support for Palestinians’ self-determination that uncomfortably co-exists with clear-eyed recognition of the very ugly parts of Palestinian culture.