The Postcolonial Left's Blindness to Islamic Homophobia
For Western LGBT rights activists to support Hamas's continued rule over Gaza is hypocritical in the extreme.
A version of this piece first appeared in Queer Majority here.
When left-wing pro-Palestine protestors recently went viral with signs reading “Queers for Palestine”, their attempt at creating an “intersectional” political coalition was broadly mocked for ignoring (or demonstrating a lack of awareness of) how dismal it is to be LGBT in Palestine. In an effort to downplay the virulent and legally institutionalized homophobia in Gaza, British leftist Owen Jones tweeted the following:
Echoing talking points from academics like Sa’ed Atshan, pro-Hamas organizations such as the Institute for Palestinian Studies, and publications like the British outlet Gay Times, Jones’s tweets attempt to shift the moral responsibility for systemic homophobia in Gaza. Correcting the record on the death penalty in the interests of accuracy is fair enough. But to downplay such a retrograde system in defense of Hamas reveals the game many self-described “anti-imperialist” leftists are playing. As you can see above, the tweet was quickly annotated by Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, “Community Notes”:
While it is true that the British Empire introduced anti-LGBT laws in its colonies, those laws are not valid anymore as the Mandate ended in 1948. Israel was also part of it, and no such laws exist [there] anymore. Today, most countries with those laws are under Sharia, like Gaza.
Indeed, Palestine’s rankings on LGBT acceptance from institutions like UCLA and Georgetown are dismal, and Hamas’s Islamic fundamentalist ideology predates the British Empire’s 40-year presence in the region by over 1,000 years. As Armin Navabi recently wrote, this ideology “harbors a brutal dogma that is antithetical to the liberties and rights championed by LGBT activists.” Hamas’s attitude toward homosexuality comes not from the British, but from their fundamentalist Islamism (just as Britain’s formerly homophobic laws were inspired by conservative Christianity). As Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar told Reuters in 2010, “You [in the West] do not live like human beings. You do not even live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?”
Armin Navabi
The eruption of war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, following the most deadly attack on Jews in generations, has ravaged the lives of millions. The war has also upended several of our assumptions about just how much brutality and bigotry the Western Left is willing to excuse in the service of Critical Social Justice and “decolonization.” The massive suffering caused by imperialism is beyond dispute; however, we should not overstate its role in shaping the social attitudes of people who were once the subjects of imperial whim. It is true that the effects of colonialism can long outlive any empire, but there comes a point at which invoking the legacy of past imperialism to excuse modern problems denies the agency of colonized people.
Islamic homophobia is an issue that goes beyond terrorist groups like Hamas. While the Quran’s language regarding homosexual and bisexual behavior is somewhat ambiguous, the hadiths, the canonical sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, contain many straightforward prohibitions. In practice, this results in both official and extrajudicial persecution of LGBT people throughout the Muslim world. LGBT Palestinians face extreme ostracism, are sometimes forced to flee as refugees, and even risk being kidnapped and beheaded. The authorities also ban the activities of LGBT rights groups. And it isn’t just LGBT Palestinians who are oppressed by Hamas in Gaza. The oppression of women is an intrinsic feature of Sharia law. Human rights researchers rank the Palestinian territories among the worst places in the world to be a woman. For Western activists ostensibly concerned about marginalized groups to effectively support Hamas's continued rule over Gaza and to deny Israel the right to self-defense against the terrorist organization is hypocritical in the extreme.
