Yesterday at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, a Chicago suburb, we laid a child to rest. The Muslim community came together in the thousands and held a funeral prayer for 6-year-old Wadea, whose body was present in a disturbingly small white casket, draped with a Palestinian flag. This week the besieged people of Gaza buried over a thousand of their own children. Each child was first dehumanized and then killed by the Israeli military for the crime of simply being Palestinian.
My heart broke for Wadea’s parents, for the innocence robbed of the little boy and for the life he’ll never get to experience. My heart breaks for the entire Muslim community, who have been reminded yet again that there’s no shortage of zealots and bigots in our neighborhoods who would senselessly extinguish our lives given the opportunity, just for being Muslim. The same news outlets that spread unfounded rumors of a “day of Jihad” just last week were the ones crowding the entrance to the mosque yesterday, witnessing the fallout of their biased and uninformed coverage. It remains enraging to witness the journalistic malpractice consistently on display, as news outlets amplify baseless rumors of brutal war crimes committed by Palestinians while completely overlooking well-documented violations against defenseless populations by the sadistic Israeli military.
The BBC issued a rare on-air apology yesterday for summarizing this weekend’s Palestinian solidarity marches across England as, “people voiced their backing for Hamas”. BBC and endless other outlets have peddled in dehumanizing, purposely anti-Palestinian and unsubstantiated information that’s having a direct and fatal impact specifically on Gazans, whose slaughter is being broadly justified. These statements are never accidents or errors. The decision to report lies or elevate one narrative over another, allowing the apartheid state of Israel to take hold in the public consciousness, but overlooking Palestine altogether and only later offering a quiet, useless retraction is typical imperial messaging strategy.
Last night, before going to bed, I noticed a giant image projected onto a building near my apartment. It was a picture of a child, with the words “bring them home” emblazoned along the bottom of the image. At first I thought it was a local missing persons case, until I noticed the word “hostage” written across the top of the projection. I quickly realized that this projection was actually cycling through the names and images of several (I counted four) Israeli children taken hostage last week.
I absolutely empathize with the sentiment, there’s no doubt these children deserve to be safe at home with their families. Unsurprisingly, the projection failed to make mention of the hundreds of Palestinian children killed in the past 10 days, or the fact that, had these children miraculously survived Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza, they’d have no home to be brought back to… y’know, on account of the endless carpet bombing. The choice to project the images of these four vulnerable Israeli children taken hostage is evidence of a choice to prioritize their lives over the lives of the hundreds of defenseless Palestinians being genocided (horrifying new verb alert!) on a daily basis.
For anyone still confused, saying “Free Palestine” doesn’t mean that you’re anti-Semitic or that you don’t feel sympathy for the hostage children of an apartheid state. “Free Palestine” means freeing Palestinians from the Israeli occupation that has deprived them of their basic human rights for the past 75 years. “Free Palestine” means ending the imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians in the world’s largest open-air prison. “Free Palestine” means ending apartheid imposed by the Israeli government. If these are things you stand for, then saying “Free Palestine” should come naturally.
But the war machine churns on. This first-hand account of what life is currently like in Gaza illustrates just how hopeless the situation is and the lack of any safe haven for residents. The footage out of Gaza puts into perspective just how efficiently destructive the military branch of an apartheid regime can be, endlessly and indiscriminately laying waste to what were once bustling neighborhoods and communities. Reports out of Gaza indicate that Palestinian hospitals have now run out of body bags for the dead, that people have resorted to drinking sea water due to their water supply being cut off by the Israeli regime.
Yesterday, Spain’s Minister of Social Rights, Ione Belarra, called for Benny Netanyahu to be brought before the International Criminal Court for war crimes. But Ol Joey Biden was quick to maintain that America is happy to assist in the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. America’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen insisted that the US can “absolutely” afford to financially support both Israel and Ukraine in their ongoing war efforts. Somehow the American government wants its taxpayers to fund a war and a genocide but doesn’t want to cancel their student debt. There’s plenty of money to massacre Palestinians, but not enough to provide adequate healthcare or affordable housing. It’s never been a question of whether or not America can afford these things, they’ve just never registered as much of a priority to the people in power.