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.
I get where you’re coming from, but I have a special dislike for people who are obviously intelligent enough to understand what I’m painstakingly accurately explaining but equally obviously, to me at least, too stubborn to even try.
It’s one thing to disagree or misunderstand, but to just automatically reject carefully expressed points as nonsense pissed me off more than almost anything else tbh. It’s the ultimate lack of respect for me, my time and the effort and care I put into making everything absolutely obviously clear.
“painstakingly accurately explaining”
You do know that an accurate explanation has to be correct, right?
And painstakingly? Of your three comments, only one even attempts to make an actual explanation, which is two-and-a-half lines of being incorrect about the definition of a logical fallacy you’re accusing me of.
Where’s the painstaking here? Where’s the effort? I put more effort into each of my replies than you did in the entire chain.
See, bullshit like this is why I originally tried to disengage and did so in a slightly discourteous way.
Let me be clear: you’re wrong, you’re being wilfully obtuse in a very disrespectful manner and I don’t want to keep arguing with you. Leave me alone.
Because you were wrong and would rather throw a hissy fit than admit that you misused a term and that your accusation was baseless?
For the third time: you’re wrong and your repetition is doing nothing but underlining your own stubbornness and annoying me. Now leave me the fuck alone.