Whilst perusing the interwebs today I ran across a story about ‘Queers for Palestine’ that frankly irritated me. Not the article, that was well written and thoroughly researched, but a single tweet used as the MacGuffin of the article.
Every word in that post is wrong. Even community notes got in on the act:
There was no Palestinian state until 1988. From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was controlled by Jordan. Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip.Jordan decriminalised same-sex relations in 1951. They did not legalise gay marriage.
Let’s take a step back and look at the history of that region for a minute. The first evidence of a Jewish presence in the Levant starts showing up in the late Bronze age, 1550-1150 BCE. By the early Iron Age, there was ample evidence of two major Jewish/Israeli kingdoms, Israel and Judea.
The boundaries changed fairly frequently over the next thousand years due to external wars and successional ones. What didn’t change was the fact that there were Jews living there the entire time. During the reign of Herod the Great, 72-4BCE, the Jewish kingdom was a client state of the Roman Empire. the boundaries of Israel, or more properly Judea and Samaria, looked pretty similar to what they do today.
I should note here that during the Roman occupation the areas to the south of Judea were called Philistine, after the tribes that lived there. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the entire region was renamed Palaestina – which was intended as an insult to the Jews, the Philistines were notoriously uncultured – and became a Roman province. This becomes important later.
The Islamic conquest of the Levant started in 634, more than 2000 years after the first Jews appeared there. The conquest was swift and Sharia, or at least the version of Sharia that was practiced then, was imposed. From that point up until the end of WWI, the lands of Israel were controlled by the various Muslim caliphates.
Fast forward a thousand or so years to the Ottoman Empire period. The Turks controlled the Levant and thus the lands that would become modern Israel. During the time the Ottomans controlled the lands, they were known as the Mustaffarate of Jerusalem. I probably should let you know that during the entire Muslim period, Jews were treated as Dwimmi and paid Jizaya, that is the tax on non-muslims and were subject to periodic pogroms. Yet they were still there.
At the end of WWI, the Ottoman lands outside of Turkey proper were divided between the French and British.
It was at this point that Palestine came into common use with British Mandatory Palestine. Prior to 1922 and the establishment of the Mandate, you could not find the word Palestine used on any map or in any textbook. The Brits, being the insufferable toerags they were back then, insisted on a call-back to the Roman era insult, and chose a ‘modernized’ version of Palaestina. Regardless, the Brits had promised a Jewish homeland in the Mandate, and many European Jews emigrated at this time.
I’m sure most of you have at least passing knowledge of the history of the founding of Israel in 1947 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars so I won’t get into it, this article is getting too long already. I don’t think I realized where this was going when I started.
Now on to the things that irritated me about that post above. We see a few common themes with all the queers for Palestine and Social Justice crowds when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war, and they’re all stupid.
First up is a complete lack of knowledge about the history of the Levant and the Jewish presence there. Hence the longish – but still incomplete – history lesson above. I keep hearing the Israelis being called ‘colonizers’ yet their presence in the region predates almost every ethnic group or religion. If anyone could be accused of being colonizers it’s the Muslims. They took over the land with fire and sword more than a thousand years after the Jews had settled there.
Next up is the aversion to the true teachings* of Islam. There are dozens of examples of fairly prominent Imams and Islamic scholars saying that the reason Hamas is losing is because there are too many homosexuals at the rallies and protests. I’m a firm believer in the adage when they tell you who they are, believe them. And the Islamists are telling any-and-every one who will listen that being gay goes against the teachings of Allah and deserves the death penalty. I could provide you with the Suras, but frankly I’m too lazy to google them.
It was only a year or so ago that Hamas beheaded a prominent Gazan LGBT activist. It was a public execution if I’m remembering correctly. The Iranians chuck homos off roofs fairly regularly. Being gay in Saudi Arabia will get you flogged. I don’t even want to know what the Taliban would do to homosexuals. Rape you to death probably.
The last thing that irritates me is when they get called out on their nonsense they run away. It’s uncomfortable for them to have their world view challenged and they do everything they can to avoid it. The particular poster here locked down replies as soon as they realized they were gonna get demolished in the replies. There have been more than 15 thousand retweets of that post and I wouldn’t be surprised if the account locks down in the near future.
* Don’t get me wrong here, I am not endorsing Islam in any way here. I’m using true in the this is what islam really says way.