Palestinian Resistance is the new Blue Lives Matter
There are extremists on both sides, but it's not who you think
I'm sure I'm not alone in my disgust when, in 2020, Republican reactionaries coined the "Blue Live Matters" slogan. It's both a racist and fascist disputation of Black Lives Matter. Any sane person with any experience of America should be able to say, yes! Black lives matter! Of course!
As a New Yorker, the memory of Eric Garner in Staten Island is so painful it defies description. A man selling cigarettes? Murdered by police -- who then suffer no punishment after years of adjudication? It's horrific. It annihilates all sense of safety, equality or justice.
To me it's a simple moral equation. Black Lives Matter. Don't dilute this with "all lives matter" or the more abhorrent expression, as if a uniform can't be removed, "Blue Lives Matter." Of course all people are valuable. Of course all police should be safe. The point of the Black Lives Matter slogan is to pay righteous attention to the historic and ongoing hatred and targeting of Black people. You can hold both thoughts in your mind: recognizing and protesting the atrocious treatment of a select group of people, while also supporting human dignity writ large.
The Blue Lives crowd clarifies to centrists and leftists what's at stake. Racism. Discrimination. Segregation. The pathology of specifically anti-Black oppression.
To me, the immoral calculus of Blue Lives Matter is happening again, but now on the left, with talks of Palestinian Resistance. Pro Palestine marches fill our cities and campuses with hate speech and violence, there are agonized "what-about isms" in the social media and group texts of the far left. The moral relativists and "de-colonizers" spread disinformation in our mainstream media, there is casual mention of genocide.
Do you believe in the state of France? Are you pro France? Or, if you deplore the way the French government treats some of their citizenry or you don’t like their history, do you advocate the destruction of France?
It seems silly to talk this way. Substitute Israel and you’ll see the violence of the conversation.
To me, these pro Palestine, “from the river to the sea” narratives are just as annihilating and bigoted as racist MAGA activists. Or at least, they occupy a similar mental space and methodology of political oppression. They successfully hijack a fairly universal moral observation: in this case, mass massacre is bad, by injecting a seemingly balanced refutation of “what about the Gaza political status quo.” What’s really at stake is the pernicious negation of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East.
Again, like in the France example, Israel’s existence shouldn’t be up for debate.
The Pro Palestine and Blue Lives Matter meet at the bottom point of the circle of orthodox ideology and groupthink. They live in harmony. Their aim is destruction.
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American politicians, academic professors, journalists and influencers who have never spent meaningful time in the Middle East, who know nothing of the irredentist conflict of pre stae Israel, who couldn't tell you the Peel Commission from an orange, they are now suckers for antisemitism the same way right wing voters are suckers for Donald Trump’s autocracy.
We gird ourselves with slogans which reveal our true colors. Blue Lives Matter don't want a just society with Blacks treated with respect and safety, they want a white supremacist status quo. The Gaza Genocide, Resistance, Anticolonial and Pro Palestine marchers also reveal their true narrative.
They don't want peace, they want war. If you’re a passenger in a car and the driver curses people up ahead, the anger isn’t really directed at the other drivers who can’t hear, it’s directed at you.
We’re the target of the domestic pro resistance rage. Jews and our allies right here in America, we are the audience of their hate.
Just as Blue Lives Matter isn’t about policing, Palestinian Resistance isn’t about the Middle East. It’s about oppression right here at home. Now that’s something to resist.