First some important guardrails to this position piece:
a. Criticism of Israel and solidarity with Palestinian liberation is not anti-Semitic.
b. Criticism of Palestinian movements and the larger Muslim world that tend to be very sympathetic to them is not Islamophobic.
(1) I write this as someone deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and firmly in solidarity with their struggle for freedom. I have written in a past article how I believe Islamic radicalism has destroyed any hopes of the same and I continue to maintain that position.
(2) I also maintain the position that Zionism and the state of Israel are fast destroying any sympathies for the Jewish community and any anti-Semitism they might face. Religious radicals tend to erode at humanitarian sympathies others might have for the people who identify with that religion.
(3) It’s my honest opinion that the only way out of this horrendous atrocity that is the Zionist state and its primarily Islamic enemies is a single, secular, democratic state over all of Israel-Palestine with 1948 borders (naive and utopian as it may sound).
(4) The real enemy is and always has been religious radicalism. There can simply be no way forward to ending the suffering and endless cycles of hatred unless the very religious radicals that cause them in the first place are rendered powerless.
(5) This is the time for moderates to rise. I don’t know if it’ll happen any time soon. Passions are inflamed, with an unequal conflict between a brutal, ethno-fascist first world military power and a loose coalition of well-armed militant groups backed by less militarily advanced, equally brutal, theocracies. It’s easy to see how this could rage into a much bigger regional war.
(6) But as I’ve said before, one can always hope. It’s the only thing one can do really – apart from feeling completely useless.
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Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 31 2023
love liberation struggle 