Do I support Hamas? (Are you racist?)

I don’t condemn Hamas. Does that mean I support them?

That’s a pretty loaded question. What do you mean by “support”?

I do support the Palestinian resistance—the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, the acts of resistance, the fight for resistance, the means of resistance. It just so happens that Hamas, qua Al-Qassam Brigades, is the largest and best equipped group providing armed resistance for Palestinians’ liberation from occupation in the Gaza Strip. In that sense, yes, I support Hamas and Al-Qassam, because they happen to be the ones who satisfy the description—and thus are in fact the ones being referred to by the description—“the leading resistance force that is standing up for and fighting for Palestinians’ liberation and freedom from occupation”. In a different possible world, some other political-military group would satisfy that description, and in that possible world I would support that group instead. I don’t support Hamas and Al-Qassam because they are Hamas and Al-Qassam; I support Hamas and Al-Qassam because they are leading the resistance.

Consequently, if you want to support the Palestinians in their resistance and their fight for liberation, freedom, and self determination, and you are not against armed and potentially violent resistance on principle, then you have to support Hamas and Al-Qassam in some sense, because they are leading the resistance right now. (Yes, with help from other groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad; but Hamas outnumbers them all by far.) If you refuse to support them, then your position is self-contradictory and you’re a hypocrite. 

I know you might already be thinking, but what about their beliefs and ideology? I will get to that later, in a future essay. But suffice it to say at the moment that, for the most part, their beliefs and ideology are irrelevant.

[Just an fyi: I am not doing much editing and cleaning up of my writing, here and recently and in the near future, due to time constraints. Because when I do that for my writing, I am obsessive and perfectionist about it and it takes a long time; but these days, I just don’t have the time available for that kind of editing, and I’ve already spent way too many days writing this particular essay. So, yes, my writing is rather messy and rambling and disorganized and has some “stream-of-consciousness” feel to it.]

This needs to STOP.

 This family needs justice. People with disabilities, especially things like autism, suffer enough, they are the most vulnerable, they don’t deserve to be abused. 

Let’s remember who train our cops! The fucking Israel Occupation Forces! 

Puppets for Israel and Zionism… how embarrassing

I’m sorry, but it’s a pathetic sight to see so many famous and public figures tripping over and slobbering over themselves and each other blathering and spitting out hasbara zionist talking points and lies so they don’t upset Israel and hopefully even please Israel. You can tell they’re just repeating what they’ve been instructed to say, or what they’ve heard other Israel apologists say, because they repeat it over and over, one talking point after another, and they don’t go any deeper than the talking points themselves, because they haven’t actually thought about these things, they’re just parroting. So if you start asking questions, they deflect deflect deflect in one way or another. Watching these people do this is pathetic enough; but when they’re actually intelligent people, even if I disagree with them on many other things, it’s kind of embarrassing, because they have to spew these hasbara zionist talking points and lies that tend to be quite obviously abhorrent, whether because they’re just plain hypocritical and contradictory or they make them look puzzlingly foolish because they have to appear to believe ridiculous and implausible things or just plain insanely horrific because they’re trying to justify genocide and/or ethnic cleansing, or at least murdering thousands upon thousands of children. 

(No, I’m not cleaning up my run-on sentences. Sometimes I like them, because they’re a closer representation of my actual thoughts.) 

Watching them I can’t help sometimes thinking, oh you poor puppets… 

But I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them for willingly publicly embarrassing and shaming themselves in front of the entire world, and for putting themselves on the historical record, just for the sake of defending a psychopathic theocratic ethnostate committing genocide against a people they’ve oppressed and imprisoned and dehumanized and brutalized in every way possible.

Do I condemn Hamas?

The question so many are so obsessed with: Do you condemn Hamas?!

I’ll come right out and say it: No, I don’t condemn Hamas!

Why should I? I reject the premise of the question. 

[Sure, go ahead and add me to your “terrorism watchlist” if that makes you feel better. It’s not as if I’m going to give up my right to free speech. I have principles, y’all.]

To declare up front that you condemn Hamas for the alleged “atrocities” committed on Oct 7 is begging the question—and I mean the true form of begging the question that is a form of fallacious logical reasoning. You cannot begin the discussion by asking me to assume the very conclusion you are intending to argue for. 

Besides, what does it matter whether I condemn Hamas? What is the point of the question? What are you trying to accomplish? It seems the point is purely to begin the conversation from a place of prejudice against the Palestinians. Furthermore, the question, Do you condemn Hamas?, assumes adequate knowledge of the events of Oct 7, something I am unwilling to simply give to you even just for the sake of argument, because it really matters here what actually took place. (I will get into that discussion in another essay.) To grant you that assumption would be to give in to your prejudice against the Palestinians. The problem with that is that the origin of that prejudice is inherently causally related to the very thing for which Hamas is “on trial”, so to speak. For, that prejudice derives from the oppressor and occupier who created the very situation the Palestinians are resisting and fighting against; and that very resistance is what lies at the heart of the issue that Oct 7 brought to the table. Thus, to give in to your prejudice against the Palestinians and against Hamas would bias the conversation in a way that is significantly relevant to the topic of the conversation itself, and is antithetical to the purpose of the conversation. 

And being antithetical to the conversation is precisely the point of biasing the discussion against the Palestinians from the outset; because it is a way of undermining the conversation and ultimately shutting it down.

People say their heart is in Gaza

I started calling it a GENOCIDE on October 12.
And on October 6 I knew almost nothing about the Palestine-Israel issue.
All it took me was five days of obsessively learning as much as I could take in—reading, listening to audio, watching videos, etc.—to see clearly what was beginning to unfold before the world’s eyes. In all honesty, I truly don’t understand why I could figure out in only five days what too many people haven’t yet figured out after years of being aware of far more than I ever was before Oct 6. I’m not being condescending; if anything, besides being confused, I am alarmed. 

I know I should have been writing months ago—or rather, posting my writing that I have actually been doing bit by bit. Aside from personal life and health issues, in all honesty this genocide and ethnic cleansing and all of the media surrounding it have been mentally and emotionally consuming in a way that so often leaves me in a kind of mental paralysis. And it’s been a little traumatizing too. If I do sleep, I wake up tossing and turning and my first awake-aware thoughts are of the Palestinians, of Gaza… I cannot help it, I think about almost nothing else but the Palestinians—yes, the West Bank too, I know. 

I don’t know why I have become consumed by this. There is no rational, logical, historical reason that I care so much. I can rationalize it, of course, that’s easy. The question is, why this issue? Why the Palestinians? Why have I not been this moved and mentally and emotionally consumed by some other atrocious current injustices? I have not a single connection to Palestine or any Palestinians, or to Israel or Israelis; and I am an atheist, though raised in a Roman Catholic family, both immediate and extended on both sides. I knew pretty much nothing about the Palestine-Israel issue my whole life. The only thing I had learned about 15 years ago from a friend who’d been there is that it’s an apartheid state. That struck me and stayed with me. He was trying to explain to me what it was like, and trying to be careful because he knew how delicate the issue is for so many people; but I think he must have seen the genuinely thoroughly puzzled look on my face, and then he used the word apartheid, and that was all I needed to hear, then I understood—shocked, as I wasn’t expecting it, but I understood nonetheless. And so that stuck with me, the word apartheid being attached to Israel.

There is no logical beginning to writing my thoughts on the Palestinians and the current affairs and state of things in Palestine. Anywhere I try to begin, I end up adding prefatory tangents to either contextualize or give background or depth or chronological order or to lay out the perspective from where I am coming. It feels like such a swirling mess inside my head and in my heart. It’s like a whole section in a library has been thrown on the floor: a whole section of stacks of rows of books pulled from the shelves and tossed on the floor: this is what it feels like inside my head, navigating my own mind. 

But my heart? Navigating my own heart feels like…

Perhaps if I come up with a suitable metaphor one day I will add it here.