Pride began 2 days ago. Jonathan Joss was murdered. His husband, who was there, says it was an act of homophobic violence. The police deny this. Maybe the police are lying. That seems likely to me. But I will concede that it is possible that the police are incapable of seeing homophobic violence for what it is because they are trained and conditioned not to connect those dots unless the evidence is overwhelming obvious. I believe they are still going to look like idiots either way as more comes out about this case.
In Gaza, Palestinian people are still starving and Israel military forces are making it as difficult as possible for food and medical aid, including firing upon people approaching aid distribution sites almost every day. Israeli media claims all of this is lies and that it is Hamas that is manipulating world media agencies into propagating lies. According to the Israeli government, it is Hamas who is preventing aid from getting to people in Gaza. This is the same Israeli government, run by Netanyahu, that helped fund Hamas in the first place to prevent a unified Palestinian people. A fact that Netanyahu continues to deny, even though many people in his government and his cabinet do not. Netanyahu expects the world to believe him even though he is still on trail in Israel for fraud, because he has weaponized the word “Anti-semitism” to be a bludgeon he can use against anyone that opposes him or the extreme violence his administration has employed against the people of Gaza.
In Boulder Colorado a man carried out an attack against a group of mostly Jewish people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Thankfully, no one died in this attack. The man is being charged with an antisemitic hate crime. The man had planned (apparently for over a year) on throwing 18 Molotov cocktails but didn’t cary out his full plan because he got scared and he had never hurt anyone before. Perhaps surprisingly to some, I personally do think this act of violence qualifies as antisemitism, even though Mohamed Soliman has been pretty specific in talking about Zionism and not the Jewish people as a whole, because the attack happened at the start of a Jewish holiday and is having the very real effect of making Jewish people feel like we are under attack anywhere we go. I don’t think intentions necessarily matter when determining whether acts of violence feel targeted to a group of people when it is clear that there are only specific groups of people who are going to be targeted by that violence. Soliman’s target was a “Run For Their Lives” group that claims to be apolitical, but is clearly pro-Israel, with participants carrying Israeli flags, so I understand why some people might disagree with me and argue that Soliman’s attack was anti-Israel or maybe anti-zionist, and not antisemitic, but, for me, the people he attacked are not in any functional way actually connected to the State of Israel’s war machine. I believe unscrupulous actors, like Benjamin Netanyahu, are absolutely overusing anti-semitism in their rhetoric to dismiss anger at the violent acts of an authoritarian, war-frenzied nation, but I also think it places a pretty intense burden of alienation from Jewish communities for any Jew to be expected to deny that this act of violence feels like it is directed at Jews and not the State of Israel. There are real currents of antisemitism that are running along side Israeli State propaganda and if that cannot be acknowledged, it makes it very difficult for avowedly anti-zionist Jews like me to call out how harmful Netanyahu and his like’s propagandistic use of anti-semitism is actively responsible for hurting Jewish people. It is possible to say that what happened in Boulder was antisemitic violence that makes me sad, but also that people like Netanyahu claiming events like this for political posturing to try to silence dissent against Israeli State violence against the people of Gaza is sickening and disgusting. It is also possible to feel empathy and sadness for the family of Mohamed Soliman, that have been taken into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and threatened with swift deportation (like maybe tomorrow), and almost certainly without any further due process , despite his claim and theirs that no one other than Soliman knew anything about the attack. This is a situation I will be keeping an eye on, because deporting people for the crimes of their families feels very much fascist state violence to me.
And lastly, speaking of the violence of the state against migrant people, families and communities, here in Seattle, a supposedly sanctuary city, people who are trying to follow the legal paper work process of asylum seeking and obtaining work permit through immigration court are having their cases routinely dismissed, and then being immediately detained by DHS to as of yet unknown ends. I have been a part of a Spanish language learning group for the last couple of months that meets specifically to enable communication and support for the folks being targeted by ICE and DHS harassment and disappearance, and have heard directly from observers in the immigration courts and from people who have had family members taken that these things are going on and no one is sure yet whether city officials are complicit in allowing this to happen, or if it is happening behind local government’s back. Either way, it is happening in my city. Children are being separated from their families, families who just a week or two ago felt safe in their immigration status/process are now terrified to show up to the necessary appointments and meetings to continue those processes and this is not yet being reported as news anywhere.
It is pride month. A time to remember that people and not governments or churches or schools or any authoritarian institutions get to tell any of us who or how we can love, or who or how we get to exist within our own bodies. Maybe it seems weird or disrupting to be thinking so heavily about the relationship between citizenship, sexuality and gender identity during pride, but I cannot help but see the connected violences being perpetrated by people who feel like it is necessary to label the very existence of others different from them as “illegal.” This month I want to fight not just for myself, my family, my friends and my communities and my neighbors’ right to exist as we all are, but to exist as we all are, right here, right now, together, even if the face of so much hate and violence.