#we organize along antizionist jews

[thelonelyjew]

Pride banned Jews?!?

So it's that time of year again that I see people circulating stuff that is completely fabricated about what they imagine happened at Chicago Dyke March in 2017.

First, Dyke March is not Pride. It is not meant to be apolitical or single-issue. It is explicitly anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and, yes, antizionist. It's not the big mainstream pride Parade that has corporate sponsors (and ads for gay tourism in Israel), it's a small radical grassroots demonstration.

Ok now that that's out of the way, they did not "ban Jews". I was there. They did not "ban Jewish symbols". They did not ask anyone to leave because of their Jewish pride flag.

What actually happened was three women who turned out to be employed by Israeli pinkwashing operation A Wider Bridge participated in the march with a rainbow flag that featured a blue star of david in the center. I remember seeing it and disliking it bc it gave me Zionist vibes but neither I nor anyone else bothered them about it.

After the march there was a cookout in the park. The women were asked to leave by a Jewish member of the Dyke March Collective after several hours of hanging out at the cookout because they were harassing other marchgoers.

Immediately publications like Forward, Tablet, JTA, as well as more mainstream publications started running stories making wild untrue claims which you can still read if you Google it because none of these were ever corrected or retracted. It's clear that these AWB agents had press releases pre-written and ready to fire as soon as they managed to provoke any reaction that they could spin into a controversy.

The photos that ran along with these headlines were also misleading. One of them showed a photo of a rainbow flag with a white star in the center. The star on the flag I saw was blue, and the shade of the star has specific political connotations. Showing a different flag with the politically significant color removed is extremely misleading. The one that was carried in the march (and which, again, wasn't banned!) looked like this:

Another banner image, this one in a New York Times article, showed a young woman with dark curly hair holding a sign that says "this is who we are". She was clearly chosen to feature because of her stereotypically Jewish features. The article implies that she is one of the supposedly banned Jews. This is false. You know how I know? Bc that was the friend I was there with that day! She does not identify as Jewish, she looks like that bc she is Italian, and she had no idea she was being photographed!

I had a hat decorated with red and black stars of David, and the following year a bunch of us wore Workers Circle sashes with Yiddish text (which uses the Hebrew alphabet) as well. No one who wasn't employed by a Zionist organization was asked to leave or even questioned about anything related to Zionism or Jewish identity.

I'm resigning myself to the fact that this is going to get dug up and passed around every year and people will believe what they want to believe, but if you hear claims that some queer group "banned Jews" or something similar, please look at the source for the information and if possible try to talk to actual Jewish people who participate in the community events being discussed. And if you hear this about Chicago Dyke March in specific, please correct people. I feel like I'm going insane when this many people are insisting that what I saw and experienced wasn't real and pointing to the barrage of misleading articles as what I should believe over my own experiences.

[germiyahu]

I think we shouldn't talk about Aaron Bushnell from here on out. I know everyone has their own hot takes about it, and there are plenty of posts that entice one to debate, many such cases of bait...

But don't give him what he wants. Let his name fade into obscurity.

Already the antizionist "activists" are hailing him as a martyr and a prominent leader of the "movement." People are going to remember his name over any individual Palestinian names. The Palestinians who've died will just be a lump sum, whereas Aaron Bushnell will always have a face and a name and a story. They're going to have him represent the ~victims of Zionist fascist genocidal Apartheid terror~ equally if not more so than Palestinians, who will be a nameless statistic beyond a few exceptions. The hashtag "restinpower" was trending when he was confirmed dead.

Do you know how disrespectful and disgusting that is? A white American man who worked for the United States military, an organization that has killed orders of magnitude more civilians in the Middle East, made himself the star of Palestinian Liberation. And he probably was aware that this could happen. But he wanted to be seen as a martyr, he wanted to be absolved of his sins. Nobody will ever dare criticize his career in the military now. No one will mention his hypocrisy as a settler on stolen native land who actively helped propagate the imperial hegemony of the United States.

He gets to be a "hero" to the Palestinians even though he's helped zero of them. What allyship had he worked toward in his life? He gets to be placed along side them as a fellow victim of the Jews Zionists. And they will use his face, name, and memory as a rallying cry.

Maybe someone on their side will make a similar point, not to get too carried away making a white man the face of "resistance" against the West and Israel and capitalism and all that. But I doubt it'll gain traction.