Pœpcorn

I very briefly watched an interview that Mehdi Hasan had, where he presented two types of people: PoPs and PePs. The PoPs are people who are Progressive only on Palestine. On the other hand, you have the PePs, people who are Progressive except on Palestine. Of the two, Mehdi mentions that the PoPs are the more dangerous ones out of the 2. I have some thoughts on this.

1. why is Palestine/Gaza such a divisive topic?

You may skip this section if you already understand why, but I’d highly recommend just reading it anyway so we’re on the same page.

I kind of hate that I have to describe to people sometimes why I feel so strongly about Gaza. Sometimes I imagine the rationale behind such a question is genuine curiousity, but I have seen the usual follow up to be something like: you only care because you’re Muslim or why you only care about Gaza then? I mean fair points to be very honest, as I feel like both speak to the aforementioned PoP mentality - which I’ll get into more later.

For now, I think the gore recorded from both the Gazan’s and the Israeli’s genocidal perspective has truly shocked me to the core. The fact that I can open an app and stumble upon a video of a blurred-but-still-recognisable silhouette of a boy’s motionless body with his jaw blown off, is simply going to fuck you up on the inside if you have even a shred of human empathy. Note the use of the word human there, as I feel like this concept of selective empathy is a recurring theme here in this thought piece.

I have been to Palestine, during more peaceful times. It was one of the most memorable trips of my life. I remember very clearly the Palestinians I met being very hospitable and welcoming, quite a contrast to the IDF soldiers that stood among the crowds and the gated checkpoints boasting mounted remote machine guns. I spoke to a pair of Palestinian and Israeli shopkeepers, both working together at a single confectionary shop. I remember a Jewish person spitting in front of me as I walked out of the Al-Aqsa mosque. I also remember a European lady arguing with an IDF soldier outside a cafe, while a little orange cat licked itself clean.

I genuinely had no idea at the time why Palestine was such a big deal for international politics and the Abrahamic faiths as I was 14/15 at the time and one of my biggest priorities was figuring out how to pirate the latest Call of Duty. My parents told me that we were very lucky to get a chance to visit. The history of the place was maddeningly deep, stretching back hundreds of years. It was really fascinating to see various places of worship being shared homes of spiritual rekindling for Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.

Yet, I do not really attribute my deep concern for this issue to the fact that I’ve been there, or my faith or for any reason other than the sheer injustice at play here. I won the geographical lottery because somewhere in Gaza, there is a 23 year old, interested in writing, in programming, in architecture, in 3D art, in making videos, that is buried deep dead under rubble. The world is worse off as a whole, because we never gave him a chance to showcase his talents, all because a couple of fucking rich, old men decided to drop bunker buster bombs over his homeland. I will never forgive the imperialists for what they did, not just here in Gaza, but for every innocent light they have taken from our world. They have taken and perverted our shared human sense of justice, and they want us to be okay with it.

Gaza should be a warning sign for you. As geopolitics gets increasingly unstable as days pass, it should come as no surprise that no country is safe from The War Machine and its allies, enablers and funders. They blockade aid, energy and water to masses of innocents, they invade foreign lands under the guise of “the war on X” (drugs, terror, “authoritarians”), they fund endless budgets into the “defence” sector while their homeless starve and die on the streets. Their greed and brutality is boundless, and they want us to be okay with it. They want us to feel helpless, that we should tow the line or we’re next. Singapore is the perfect example of that. The state-sponsored narrative that we are helpless and small plays perfectly into silently enabling our bigger allies’ war machines. We send a couple thousand dollars to victims of their oppression, so our leaders can look like they’re “deeply concerned” about the situation in [blank] while we quietly watch their state-sponsored terror organisations. All this, with our tax dollars, and they want us to be okay with it.

Our ministers express “deep concern” about what the US and Israel is doing all over the world but try their hardest to crack down on dissenting voices that condemn this endless cycle of violence perpetrated for years by them. It’s all just performance, one that keeps the peace, so Singaporeans don’t wake up and grow a spine for what our country enables directly or indirectly. It’s all just performance, to keep one of the most documented genocides a “Malay/Muslim” issue, disgustingly segregating human rights into a race and faith-based issue and many people buy wholesale into it. It’s all just performance so me and you don’t wake up and see that this violence is not something that only “woke, rainbow-haired liberals” should care about.

Consider for a second, how sure are we that they won’t come for us one day? Consider the mad men in their politics and our proximity to one of the world’s busiest trade routes. Will people cry, protest and march for us then or will they share our collective silence and inaction now?

Gaza should be a warning sign for you. A world ruled by fear, technocrats, anti-intellectualism and male oligarchs is a soulless world on the brink of extinction. Capitalism and colonialism violently takes, takes and takes from everything - its populations, its environments, its societies - and gives them nothing back in return except slop or a new trend to buy into every few weeks and endless wars. Gaza isn’t the only example we have. Congo, Sudan, Myanmar, Vietnam, so many countries in Central America and a laundry list of other countries globally have experienced the wrath of the decades old imperialist war machine, created by capitalists.

Gaza is just one of the biggest, most documented genocides of our modern day. As Susan Abuhalwa, a Palestinian writer and activist, said:

“We are the only people in history who are expected to witness our own genocide, and then watch what we say so we don’t hurt the feelings of the people who did this.” (Susan Abuhalwa, shoutout to her recent appearance on the Bad Hasbara podcast)

I refuse to let the man in the 3 piece suit tell us that those are not our brothers and sisters getting killed by his hand. I refuse to let him alienate and “other” us, scaring us into silence about his crusade against our brothers and sisters from the faraway land. I refuse to believe that to have human empathy, is to be weak. I want to love our brothers and sisters from all across this globe, who have dreams and aspirations they want to chase. I want to resist the brutal oppression of the systems that the capitalists have locked us into. I want to resist their ideas that borders and tongues divide who we are as humans.

After all,

الجنة بدون ناس ما تنداس

(a paradise without people is not worth stepping foot in.)

2. PePtides

I suppose the amount of input I can and should add here is pretty limited. I would really ask people who identify as PePs, why? What is so different about the struggle for Palestinian freedom and statehood recognition as that of any other? What is the roadblock in recognising the struggle of the marginalised in this, one particular geographic area, as equal to that of another in Laos, Venezuela, Cuba etc.? What makes this fight for justice and equality any different from that of our LGBTQ+ folks? (see the video below if you’re somehow offended by that because kHaMas kILLs da GayS)

y’all should sub to this guy, we need more socialist content creators like him

Commonly cited reasons for PePs are (in my head, at least) islamophobia or the fear of association/endorsement of an Islamist terrorist group, Hamas, and in turn the “antisemitic” narrative that Western propaganda loves to push. I would recommend actually reading the 2017 Hamas charter here. This is the lesser referred to document that clearly outlines that:

“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

We see this conflation of Judaism and this Israeli version of the Zionist project (which to be clear is the project of colonialism and oppression that is being carried out by the Israeli government, majority of Israeli society and settlers) time and time again. I’m in no clear room to comment as someone who’s not Jewish, but I fear this conflation is akin to saying the Islam of ISIS and the Taliban is that of what I and most other Muslims practice in Singapore. It’s simply just not true. Extreme ideologies and extremists exist in every faith, and even among the faithless. To conflate and label the resistance to a settler project carried out violently and in defiance of international law by Israel, with an attack on the Jewish faith, is very damaging to not just the Jewish faith but all faiths in general. In a similar line of thought, a Taliban member can claim that their brutal project of oppression of women and children is in line with the goals of the entire Islamic faith. This is nothing more than a sick perversion of it, created by men who claim to be Muslims but want nothing more than an abhorrent fantasy of violent domination and subjugation of the marginalised.

The conflation of Judaism with the Israeli’s government and settlers’ actions should really be addressed more. It harms Jews first, in my opinion, because it tells them that their ancient, diverse, diasporic faith and civilization is so easily reducible to a single modern colonial project. It says that: your prayers, your ethics, your synagogues, your Shabbos table, your family’s Ladino or Yiddish or Arabic heritage - all of that is not important. What actually matters and defines your Jewish identity is this very specific far-right government’s evil, violent deeds in the West Bank and Gaza. I really fail to see how that is some sense of solidarity with Jews. This to me is a depressing form of self-inflicted antisemitism dressed as anti-Zionism, because it denies Jewish people the right to define themselves beyond one state’s politics and policies. If it was me, I would genuinely be scared shitless if ISIS killed thousands and said that this was done as jihad for every Muslim on planet Earth.

There are Zionist traditions rooted in genuinely productive labour rights, in refugees’ need for safety, in cultural revival, in secular socialism and even in anti-colonial thought. True safety for Jews, or any group for that matter, cannot be built on another people’s systematic dispossession. This just leads to the birth of an endless cycle of violence, as history has come to teach us. (I feel like I don’t have to tell anyone this but somehow it seems this point is often lost on some people.)

There is also sometimes this understanding that this is a “complicated political issue”, with “bad people on both sides”. I often see this being deployed not as a thoughtful observation, but as a fullstop to rhetoric. It collapses asymmetrical power into some kind of moral equivalence. One side has a modern military occupying territory illegally under international law, controlling borders, food (yes, they poisoned goats), water (yes, they destroyed pipes), electricity and movement. Their settlements have been declared illegal by the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and successive international consensus. The other side lives under that brutal grip of occupation, with but a fraction of the military capacity, no air force, no navy, no Iron Dome and no ability to shut down their neighbour’s water, electricity or food supply.

When the children saw the destruction, they burst into tears. I saw them pale and sad, and my heart ached. They don’t understand why the settlers are bothered by them enjoying the outdoors. I know these criminals just want to drive us off the land in order to take it over and build another settlement on it. But we won’t give up, and we won’t let it happen. We were born here in Silwad, and this is our place and our country, and we have no other place.

• Fathallah Hammad, 44, a father of four (as reported by Iyad Hadad of B’Tselem)

The implication that Palestinian armed resistance (including its worst illegal acts, such as using the cover of war to extrajudicially execute internal political dissent and their killings of Israeli civilians) is morally equivalent to a state-sponsored settler colonial project backed by the world’s most powerful military and diplomatic support is not nuance. I implore “both sides” people to consider which side has an internationally recognised right to self-determination under multiple UN resolutions? Which side has been waiting 75 years for that right to be realised? Which side’s children are shot dead for throwing stones at their oppressors, and which side’s soldiers are lauded for their rapes and sexual abuses? The structural asymmetry here is genuinely not an opinion you can throw around, it is a lived legal and material reality by many Palestinians. Such things simply can’t be reduced to some intellectual debate on if these Israelis have the ordained right to slaughter as many people as possible and exert conquest on land that was promised to them 7.2 billion millennia ago.

Besides just that, I would also seek to challenge the standard government assigned label of “terrorists” to Hamas. Most Hamas activities have geographically and ideologically confined to the freedom of Palestinians. Take this in comparison to the IDF, the self-appointed most moral army in the world, that has viciously claimed infinitely more innocent blood than Hamas on multiple geographical warfronts. Are these not terrorists who shoot children in the head for sport? Are these not terrorists who kill innocent, starving masses queuing for aid? Are these not terrorists committing violent, state-endorsed attacks in blatant defiance of international law? If you think Hamas are terrorists, it doesn’t take a single degree of mental gymnastics to draw a similar conclusion about the Israeli “Defence” Forces and the settlers it enables. They are undoubtfully, terrorists too. No amount of pinkwashing can remove that label that they have drawn for themselves in blood.

After all, Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel, has been quoted as saying:

“Truth be told, if I was born Palestinian, I would join one of the terror organisations.”

3. PoPpin bees

PoPs, I seriously don’t know why y’all are like that. If you are a PoP, just know that you are why people who are unsympathetic to the Palestinian struggle will never change their minds. I mean this genuinely in an effort to better align the outcomes we should seek. Palestine is just one node in a gigantic graph of violence. Solving Palestine, however, will not cause the entire network to crumble. Our struggle is so much more important and interconnected to other flashpoints of violence and oppression.

Look, we don’t have to speak out about everything. We would drive ourselves mad if we tried to. But the Palestinian struggle for statehood and peace is not the only one that exists on the planet. I find that some people show up for just this one issue however, and are suspiciously silent on others that maybe don’t offer the same aesthetic payoff or virtue signalling potential. You can wear the keffiyeh, you can learn all the chants in the world and put the Palestine flag and the red triangle in your bio and feel like maybe you have done something. I would truly love to see some effort however, in learning and talking about the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Kurds in Afrin, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, the Balochs in Pakistan or even Black Palestinians facing “double racism” in Palestine itself or the discrimination of the Bajau Laut people in Malaysia. If these struggles don’t interest you, then I fear you may be looking for a cause to wear as a costume more than one to struggle and to fight for. Perhaps you may be looking for a costume that fits because the victims look like you or pray like you. I’m not arguing that proximity is invalid as it’s natural to feel drawn to suffering that mirrors your own. However, if solidarity depends on that mirror, then you’ve stopped being an internationalist and started being an identity capitalist. I really hope this doesn’t come off as whataboutism. It’s more so about being equally outraged about this system of violence instituted in multiple geographies, and in multiple shapes and forms. This awareness helps us, and does not hurt our cause.

Sometimes selective outrage may not even just be about identity affinity, in the worst case, it curdles into genuine antisemitism. Saying that Hitler had a point is quite possibly one of the most fucking repugnant things anyone could say, knowing full well the extent of violence and trauma he ordered to be dispensed on a single people. You can’t be out here condemning the mass violence perpetrated by Israel and the US, while turning around and recycling the exact same tropes that have been used to murder, exile and terrorise Jewish people en masse in the past. Yet I’ve seen these comments floating around in progressive spaces online, much to my absolute dismay. Having a Palestinian flag in your profile picture does not somehow make you immune to bigotry. I urge progressives to call out such behaviour because it has absolutely no place in a movement that demands understanding, and not shared mindsets with the Ku Klux fucking Klan. We need solidarity and unity across multiple faiths and backgrounds. We do not need a cult.

> hey this reminds me, if there are any American progressives reading this by some weird chance: please don’t “Vote Blue No Matter Who”. as is you guys can’t even do that properly. i mean seriously y’all had Katz Abughazaleh and your party still decided to brainlessly split votes.

Let me be clear: opposing the Israeli government’s actions is not antisemitic. Calling settlements illegal, demanding equal rights, supporting BDS, marching for Gaza, none of that is antisemitic. I support all of it. But when you start to make jokes about gas chambers, when you say Hitler was right about anything, when you harass Jewish students on campus for being Jewish rather than for any political position they hold, when you burn a synagogue in Berlin and call it resistance, that is not anti-Zionism. That is antisemitism and pretending otherwise is not just dishonest; it’s fuckin dangerous. Every time a PoP does this, and every time we excuse or ignore it, you hand Benjamin Netanyahu the only rhetorical weapon he needs. “See? They just hate Jews. We are their target, not our policies.” You are effectively undermining the Palestinian liberation movement even better than any Likud politician ever could. I believe you are giving the occupation and the occupier cover and ammo. That is something Tel-Aviv would genuinely be impressed of.

Palestinian freedom depends on a genuinely multi-ethnic, multi-faith and internationalist movement. The core of the movement depends on Jews, Muslims and Christians and secular people standing together against a settler colonial project that ultimately harms all of them. That coalition cannot include antisemites. The moment it does, we fracture Jewish solidarity with Palestine. Thousands of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, in and out of Israel, have dedicated their lives to ending the occupation.

Also, where are PoPs on matters outside of geopolitics? I ask this not to shame anyone for having a primary focus. We all have limited time, limited emotional bandwidth, limited capacity to care. I’m not saying everyone needs to be an expert on everything. I do think however, think it’s worth asking: if your political identity is built around justice, equality, and the liberation of oppressed peoples, why does that identity seem to switch off the moment the conversation moves away from geopolitical struggles?

Take LGBTQ+ rights, for example. Queer Palestinians face unique, inhuman discrimination from both the occupation and from within their own communities. I know that any genuine liberation movement has to include them, it has to fight for their right to exist openly and safely. I rarely see PoPs talking about that. I’m gonna be critical of some Muslims for a minute, but I hope you understand that this is all in good faith (if you are offended by this).

A lot of the loudest pro-Palestine voices hailing from religiously conservative spaces, including here in Singapore, are the same people who would never speak up for LGBTQ+ rights, who would never defend a queer person in their own community, who would say “it’s against Islam” and leave it at that. They want freedom for Palestinians, but only the straight ones. Well, shocker, gay Palestinians exist! The conservative uncles and aunties, who you meet during Hari Raya, who bash Israel like there’s no tomorrow, often would not give a flying fuck, if you told them about the violence and oppression that trans people face. This is not to pinkwash this genocide and somehow shift the reason of liberation towards the rights of the LGBTQ+ Palestinians, but is instead to highlight the hypocrisy of PoPs. Every struggle against oppression, is a shared, interconnected struggle (just as what most communist beliefs share).

Like I said, identity politics and a cult stemming from them has no place in a genuine progressive movement. If you feel offended by what I said, you need to admit that your solidarity has terms and conditions. You need to explain why a queer person’s right to love and literally just exist openly matters less to you than a straight Palestinian’s right to land. They should be equal struggles. Right now, it looks an awful lot like you’ve picked and chosen which oppressions to care about based on who you personally find respectable. That is not true liberation.

> i’ve always found it extremely weird how, despite Iran being a majority Muslim country, i don’t hear imams in the mosques mention it as a struggle worth supporting or even praying for during Friday prayer sermons. or Congo or Sudan either. like damn y’all can’t even focus on the “Muslim” struggles properly.

There’s also a point to be made on the neurodivergent community. To put it simply, there are people in the pro-Palestine space that just casually drop the r-word or make terrible and offensive jokes about neurodivergent folks. Let’s be clear here, an intellectual disability shouldn’t be an insult. If you can’t see why using disabled people as a punchline is exactly the kind of dehumanization we should all be fighting against, then I implore you to consider if your activism is performative and selective. Disabled Palestinians exist. Disabled children in Gaza exist. Children with Down syndrome, with cerebral palsy, with intellectual disabilities, all of whom are living through a genocide right now. You are using the same slurs that have been used to dismiss, mock, and exclude people like them for generations. You want to talk about occupation? About dehumanization? About the way power structures decide who counts as fully human? Take a look at your own vocabulary first you buffoon. There’s sincerely no way, in the big ‘26, you can’t source for ethical alternatives to the fucking r-word of all things.

And now, I’m gonna talk about Sneako.

For those who don’t know, Sneako is a streamer who converted to Islam a couple of years ago and has since become one of the loudest “Muslim” voices online for young men. He’s also a blatant misogynist. Openly, proudly, unapologetically. He’s pals with Andrew Tate. Yeah, that self-described misogynist currently facing trafficking charges. He’s said that feminism is responsible for young men’s sexual frustration and loneliness, which is prime rhetoric for young incels/mincels. He’s been banned from Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok for hateful conduct.

> I’ve seen so many of these misogynists convert to Islam as some kind of moral mouthwash when they suddenly decide to be spiritual. they genuinely give Islam such a bad rep. absolutely no sane Muslim should glorify the fact that Andrew Tate converted to Islam and there’s nothing i hate more than seeing Islamic brainrot platforming these degenerates.

Let’s be real, you cannot be “anti-oppression” and a Sneako fan. You cannot. Sneako is not a complicated figure with some good takes and some bad ones. He is a misogynist. That is his brand. That is his content. That is what he sells to young men. If you defend him and other misogynists, if you jump through mental hoops for them, if you look the other way because they say “Free Palestine” then you are telling me something very clear about whose oppression you actually care about. You care about Palestinians when the oppressor is Israeli. You simply don’t care about women when the oppressor is a Muslim man with an online platform. Palestinian women exist. They are watching you defend the same kind of men who want to control their lives, restrict their societal progression and silence their voices.

It’s almost like when a woman starts talking about the patriarchy and saying “all men ain’t shit”, some male PoPs shift uncomfortably in their seats for some reason. What is it about feminism that makes these otherwise loud, opinionated, politically engaged men shut down completely? I think part of it is fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of saying something that gets them called out. Hence, instead of engaging, listening, learning and sitting with the discomfort, they just tap out. They tell themselves that feminism isn’t their fight. They rally for one flag only, and that is for Palestine.

To wrap it all up, I really think being a human and seeing others as humans, first and foremost, could really be the cure to these issues. As cliché as it sounds, I truly firmly believe that. This struggle for a people’s statehood is not just isolated to a singular class, race or faith of people but is shared across us all. We see the story of Palestine across so many borders, just in different shapes and forms.

Love y’all, stay safe and have a good one.

> oh btw I’m more of a mixed, sweet and salty, guy myself.