For a gay high schooler living in the U.S., it is with extreme difficulty that I watch the American and Israeli governments exploit my sexual identity to excuse ongoing ethnic cleansing.
The Progress Pride Flag was never intended to fly over the corpses of dead Palestinians. Like many queer young people today, I have watched with paralyzing anger as the symbol of our liberation waves atop armed Israeli killing machines and our existence is commodified as justification for Israel’s imperial violence. Israel has no right to wave any flag over the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Yet, for that flag to be colored with a rainbow is illustrative of the settler state’s incorrect, dangerous rationale for carrying out its ongoing genocide.
As Israel and its associated settler colonies market themselves as “gay havens,” they perpetuate the flip side narrative as well—that Palestinians are a barbaric and homophobic population of uncivilized heathens. The narrative itself is anerasure of Palestinian queer life and Israel’s oppression of LGBTQ residents. It ignores that Western colonialism has historically led to worse treatment of LGBTQ minorities in colonized regions. When the British claimed “Mandate Palestine” in 1920, they passed sweeping anti-gay legislation that still governs homosexual relationships in Gaza today. Throughout history, in the name of bringing civilization to Middle Eastern communities, colonialists have criminalized queerness and facilitated queer oppression.
Moreover, Israel itself has punished LGBTQ identities since the state’s birth. The current Netanyahu administration has positionedhomophobicleaders at the peaks of the Israeli government, refuses to legalize gay marriage, and faces rampant rates ofanti-LGBTQ sentiment in the country. Israel cannot be considered a pro-gay force for freedom as it continues the erasure of Palestinian queer life, facilitates an ongoing genocide, and furthers anti-queer lawmaking.
Fucking what? How is that a whataboutism at all?
Article: colonialism historically criminalizes queerness
You: oh yeah? What about the people who were there BEFORE the colonialism criminalizing queerness? Your argument is invalid!
It really doesn’t get much more textbook whataboutism than that.
But this is kind of a criticism of responding to what aboutism with what aboutism. Both sides were historically anti queer in both similar and different ways.
Not really, no. It’s not whataboutism to point out that a whataboutism argument is illogical and that said illogical argument is being used to excuse atrocities.
People are being killed at a large scale, the aggressor is pink washing using a what aboutism about those people’s track record on gay rights, and this article doing a what aboutism about israel and the west’s gay rights track record. The headline is about genocide. But the content of the article is just trying to make an argument about which side has the better gay rights track record. I don’t think any body is actually arguing, or believing an israel argument, that this war is justified because israel is supposedly kinder to gay people than palestine.
Yeah they are. I’ve been in arguments with Israel apologists using that exact argument to say that the genocide is ok because Hamas bad literally dozens of times.
Article: [Accuses colonialism of bringing the criminalization of queerness to the Middle East]
Me: “That’s literally not true”
That’s not a whataboutism. That’s disputing a fact. A whataboutism would be “Oh yeah? Well the Middle East was doing it too, therefore Europe’s colonial homophobia was okay!” or, if you prefer, “Oh yeah? Europe was homophobic? Well, what about the Middle East’s homophobia?”
I’m not saying Europe was okay. I’m not saying the Middle East was exceptionally awful. I’m not trying to justify Europe’s colonial homophobia. I’m saying blame for homophobia being laid at the feet of colonizers in the Middle East is absurd. They have enough crimes to answer for without making more up.
And I’m not even addressing the main thrust of the article, which I agree with.
Which is exactly the problem and exactly what makes it a whataboutism: rather than engage with the actual pertinent points of the article, you choose to nitpick a largely irrelevant detail in such a manner as to distract in exactly the same manner as someone trying to dismiss the whole thing based on that detail.
You have an awfully odd way showing it, then…
… that’s not what a whataboutism is. A whataboutism isn’t when someone gets caught up on a detail. JFC.
If someone, in the middle of an article I otherwise found anodyne and agreeable, said “Just like the British brought prosperity to Africa by building roads and hospitals”, I would find myself in the comments section to dispute that shit as well. I’m not here in the comments section because the article bothered or pleased me; I agree with it, but have no urge to make a comment on the article itself. I’m here because a detail which pushes a very inaccurate and eurocentric narrative is being spread, and I would rather like it if it wasn’t.
I give up. You clearly are incapable of understanding what I’m explaining to you.
Have the day you deserve.
I don’t think that was called for.
You think they deserve a day that bad, huh? 😉
I get the joke, but you’re both regulars and this isn’t Reddit and courtesy goes a long way. I’m not trying to be all ‘hug it out, guys’ here, I’m just saying you both contribute a lot to this community and even if you aren’t seeing eye-to-eye right now, you don’t have to resort to incivility.
I have been guilty of this myself, so I’m not trying to be a hypocrite. I think we all have to try to do better, especially when we’re talking to someone else who makes good contributions to the discussion overall.
It might help if the core of your argument, an accusation of whataboutism, was actually at all related to the concept of a whataboutism.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but if queerness was criminalized before colonialism and queerness was criminalized after, that would seem to invalidate the idea that colonialism was responsible.
I’m just reading what you are saying and interpreting it through my own ignorance of queer history save for the last 50 years or so I’ve seen with my own eyes.
It’s also really hard to follow what people are actually saying vs. the words being assigned to them for rhetorical purposes to manufacture the argument another person wants to have. Social media really is the worst form of communication.
That’s only half of the picture, though. The point that the article is making isn’t that colonialism brought anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment to the middle east. It’s that colonialism is generally anti-LGBTQ+ whether or not the area was already and as such, the argument that the colonialists are better because they’re not anti-LGBTQ+ is empty propaganda.
Or put in words already in the very headline of the article: pinkwashing genocide.