TRAITORS!

TO THE SELLOUTS IN THE QUEER RIGHTS MOVEMENT: HAPPY PRIDE DAY. NOW SASHAY AWAY.

Time for another uprising.

On this 56th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, it’s time for another riot — an uprising that will purge from the ranks of the LGBTQ+ movement those traitors who have sold out our cause, betrayed our people and defiled everything our movement has struggled for.

A small group of queer quislings are infecting the gay rights movement with an ideology that harms LGBTQ+ people everywhere.

They are “pro-Palestinian” activists who, as I’ve written, do nothing to advance freedom or life for Palestinians — but they also actively harm the cause of equality for LGBTQ+ people everywhere.

What are they doing in our movement?

There is an idea that, in order to support one cause, you need to support a whole panoply of causes. This sort of solidarity and coalition-building is absolutely correct — in theory.

But to make ideological sense, the causes must be complementary. They should all fall under a rubric of broad core values, like human freedom and equality. That’s why this form of solidarity makes sense when feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, protections for migrants and refugees, racial equality and the like are under the umbrella.

The problem is that Palestinianism does not fit under the umbrella of these core values. One of these things is not like the others.

Until all of us are free, goes the slogan, none of us are free. That’s a fine sentiment. But Palestinianism is not about freedom. It is not about freedom for Palestinians and it sure as hell is not about freedom for queer people or women or minorities of any description. There is simply no evidence to suggest that the Palestinian movement carries in its DNA the slightest commitment to any of the priorities of the global progressive movement.

In defense, these activists allege that they are not allied with the oppressors who make up the governments in Gaza and the West Bank, but are supporting ordinary Palestinians. Except they’re not. Nothing they do challenges the oppression Palestinians suffer under their homegrown tyrants. All they do is attack Israel. And that does precisely nothing to actually Free Palestine!

For one thing, Palestinian self-determination will come only through a negotiated settlement when Palestinians demonstrate they are willing to live in peace next to Israelis (ie., not in our lifetimes). And so every screaming mob of stooges chanting “From the river to the sea” and other intolerant, divisive, binary positions actually impedes Palestinian self-determination.

The holier-than-thou activists who march down North American streets and hold Pride Parades hostage are not freeing Palestine. As I have written, they are a major reason Palestinians are dying.

Even if it could legitimately be said that these activists — many of whom openly celebrate the rapes, beheadings, immolations, kidnapping and mass murders of October 7 — were genuine progressive gay-rights activists, this still wouldn’t justify their allegiance with “ordinary” Palestinians.

Have they ever met an “ordinary” Palestinian?

According to a significant opinion survey of attitudes in the Arab world, Palestinians are among the most homophobic people on the planet.

According to this survey, more Palestinians believe it is morally acceptable to kill a homosexual (8%) than to be a homosexual (5%).

That’s some coalition for human rights you’re building there.

If Queers for Palestine tried to inculcate tolerance among Palestinians, that might justify their existence. But they overlook Palestinian gay-hatred so they can advance their own Jew-hatred. It’s a nasty, self-destructive ideology of hate.

A “free Palestine,” which almost certainly would not be free in any sense of the term Western activists understand it, would be a hellscape for queer Palestinians. It already is — even under the moderating influence of Israeli occupation. And overseas activists have done, as far as I can see, precisely dick all to change this fundamental truth.

If queers are going to have a foreign policy, there is no end of causes that should top our agenda.

In countries like Iran and Afghanistan, queer people are treated the same as murderers under the law. And yet many of the same activists who make common cause with Palestinianism advocated for the Western pullout from Afghanistan, which threw Afghan women, queers and everyone else to the savagery of the Taliban. Gobsmackingly, a ton of them — including Canada’s largest trade union — were enthusiastically siding with Iran in the recent war with Israel.

These are the people we are welcoming into our Pride Parades?!

If queers want to engage in foreign affairs — if we want to actualize the idea that “until all of us are free, none of us are free,” why aren’t we blocking parade routes and violently chanting against Saudi floggings of gays? Why aren’t we screaming blue murder about Nigeria’s Sharia law that imprisons gays for 14 years (if they are the lucky ones who aren’t summarily executed)? Why do we hear bugger all about Uganda’s medieval antigay laws? What about Russia’s “gay propaganda” laws that make Ron DeSantis look like Lil Nas X? About gays being stoned to death in Brunei?

All of these horrors have effectively no currency in the global queer rights movement. It’s all Palestine! Palestine! Palestine!

Why? (Short answer: Because Jews. But anyways.)

Closer to home, the infiltration of Palestinianism into the gay rights movement undermines our legitimacy. Why in hell would anyone take our cause seriously when we are marching with the supporters of Hamas and Iran, and remaining completely silent about the worst abuses of gay rights in the world? What in the name of RuPaul is going on here?

I’ve stopped going to Pride Parades because of the likelihood that anti-Israel, “pro-Palestinian” extremists will ruin my day (and our movement) by subverting the celebration for freedom and equality into a venue for hatred, homophobia, antisemitism and terror.

I would feel no more comfortable at a Pride Parade that welcomes groups like Queers for Palestine or “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” (as my local parade did) than I would be comfortable at a parade that welcomed neo-Nazis or hooded Klansmen.

And just as no Pride Parade should welcome Nazis or Klansmen, neither should they welcome activists who wear a sheet of progressivism over their white saviorism, selective outrage, antisemitism and substantive homophobia.

As an aside, I would even like some proof that the people who call themselves “Queers for Palestine” are actually “queer” by any conventional understanding of the term. There is a phenomenon in which people with precisely no connection to Jewishness declare themselves “Jews” in order to gain legitimacy in attacking Israel. Is the same thing happening here?

Everyone is “queer” these days, it seems, but if someone is going to arrogate my identity for some political cause, especially one that advances a worldview that would see me thrown from a roof, I’d actually like to know if they are who they say they are. (Aside: When a friend told me her tween niece announced, “I’m a lesbian, y’know,” I blurted out, “Yeah. Talk to me when you’ve _____’d your first _____.”)

I would like to know whether these Queers for Palestine actually have some skin in the game. But anyways.

Since we’re talking about the broader concept of global solidarity, though, consider what else the Palestinian movement has done to despoil the cause of equality worldwide.

Palestinianism it is a violent, homophobic, misogynistic, hateful movement that has co-opted the left and somehow blinded erstwhile progressive people to piss on everything they claim to believe.

Feminists complain about the patriarchy and then make common cause with jihadists, female “circumcisers,” femiciders and rapists.

Atheists rail against the intrusion of religion on state (including in Israel) and then march with Islamists while staying mum about actual Sharia law in Yemen, Malaysia, Indonesia and a dozen other places.

Activists who claim to defend democracy wail about Donald Trump’s affronts and then actively defend the autocrats of Palestine while remaining deathly silent on the tyranny in scores of other places.

Pacifists decry every effort by Israel to defend its civilians but then literally chant celebration of Houthis targeting civilian ships, defend Iran’s “right” to nuclear weapons and, of course, justify rape, infanticide and burning people alive as “resistance” that will “free Palestine” “by any means necessary.”

The list goes on and on.

Trade unionists side with a movement that has demonstrated no commitment to the rights of Palestinian workers, free collective bargaining or union organizing.

Immigrant and refugee rights campaigners reward the caging of four generations of Palestinians, and their ghettoization from the larger populations in Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere. In every other instance, progressives would insist the countries of domicile integrate and welcome them, but in this case, with this one people, they reward imposed statelessness because it serves their anti-Israel ends. Progressives encourage Palestinians to waste more generations pining for a “right of return” that is neither a right nor ever going to happen.

Indigenous rights advocates side with the people who came later and accuse the people who were there first of being imperialist, colonial usurpers.

Activists who, when it comes to any suggestion of antisemitism in their domestic movements become free speech absolutists, have no qualms about siding with the most tyrannical repressors of free expression in Palestine.

Tenured Western academics, who enjoy and defend their own unbridled rights to babble however senselessly, attempt to silence, boycott and cancel Israeli academics while adopting pet Palestinian professors who chafe under authoritarian conditions.

And, when people like me say, Ummm, seems like you might have a problem with Jews since you treat the Jewish state and Jewish people differently than you treat every other country and every other people, we are met with outrage. In any parallel situation, genuinely progressive people would take a moment for a tiny bit of introspection — this is literally the progressive dogma when confronted with any hint of prejudice, except when it come to Jews.

In this case, a wall of incandescent fury rains down upon us: Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!

OK, Felicia.

Have I made my point?

These people are not our friends.

They have no right to be in our parades.

Palestinianism has no place in the queer rights movement or the broader progressive left.

For the queer rights movement to maintain any realness it must either (1) purge the supporters of misogynistic, homophobic, hateful Palestinianism from our ranks, or (2) make actual equality for queer Palestinians — and queer people everywhere — the focus of our foreign policy.

Happy Pride Day, traitors.

Now vanish like your legitimacy. You’re not worth our glitter.

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