By Tala Alayli – Mar 10, 2024
This article is a historical analysis of liberalism, how it is imperial by nature, with a focal lens on the counterrevolutionary nature of feminist movements that do not show support for Gaza.
In Malcolm X’s analysis of white liberals, he explained that the liberal can only be distinguished from the conservative by his deceit, veiled as support to the oppressed that would later exploit his vulnerability and suffering in the power play of political gain. The liberal’s solidarity, hence, is but a ploy to gain the favor of the oppressed, exploit his struggle, and then throw him back into the ditch he promised to pull him out of.
In this case, liberal feminism can also be considered as a branch of what Malcolm X highlighted, specifically in the case of Gaza and the events that unfolded since October 7, 2023.
Liberal feminism, by definition, focuses on achieving gender equality through political and legal reform within the framework of liberal democracy and is informed by a human rights perspective.
However, the paradigm encompasses two major gaps: The essence of liberal democracy, and the flawed human rights perspective. As both stem from a capitalist, white supremacist, exploitative foundation, they cannot be considered to build equality. This is also because essentially, when we refer to liberalism, we refer to what Malcolm X laid: The flawed, treacherous nature of liberal solidarity that ultimately always goes back to its oppressive roots.
This is what we see when liberal Westerners use the Palestinian flag to show solidarity with Gaza but demonize its Resistance by accusing them of the recurrently refuted accusation of rape in the demonstration of what they consider to be intersectional feminist defense.
Since the New York Times, a pro-“Israel” news outlet, published the narrative that Hamas fighters sexually assaulted female Israeli captives, “pro-Palestinian” Western protesters decided to showcase their activism and solidarity by condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, but by simultaneously, even more vigorously, condemning what they claim Hamas did.
Before we discuss what their activism entails, two matters must be dissected: Why the NYT’s narrative is false, and why the West cannot seem to let it go.
The NYT: Debunked
The NYT has always been biased toward “Israel”, whether by the diluted language it uses when describing the crimes the occupation has committed in Gaza, or its affiliations with pro-Israeli lobbyists, through its connections to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), and its employment of staffers that have direct connections with IOF soldiers.
To clarify, the NYT’s executive editor, Joe Kahn, happens to be the son of a CAMERA board member, a committee that preserves “Israel’s” image in the media. CAMERA has on several occasions forced the NYT, among other media outlets, to change its wording when it appeared to be neutral at most, to the Palestinian cause.
But I am willing to give the NYT the benefit of the doubt and consider that its editorial board does not interfere with running stories written by other authors that happen to be less biased toward “Israel”. This leaves two other major conflicts of interest.
First, a report by the Intercept revealed that a few of the NYT’s editors get their stories from IOF soldiers who had volunteered with the Israeli military. This not only diminishes the integrity of a running story but tells it from an entirely one-sided lens that does not include all the facts, and projects biased Israeli propaganda onto a story that millions could read.
Second, concerning the NYT’s story of Hamas fighters sexually exploiting Israeli captives, the story was not only withdrawn by the news outlet but refuted by internal staff and the families of the captives who had been a part of the story.
When editors in the NYT itself express frustration when a misleading story gets published and their workplace gets disparaged, that becomes a clear indication that said news outlet understood the story needed more research but published it regardless. The reason as to why becomes clear: demonize Hamas in any way possible to justify what “Israel” does next.
Moreover, multiple accounts ascertained that the running story carried several gaps. The Israeli family involved in a key case mentioned in the NYT report has disavowed the published story, asserting that reporters manipulated their statements, Press TV reported, citing Israeli media.
Adam Sella and Anat Schwartz, who co-authored the false article alongside Jeffrey Gettleman, have been called out for their credibility and their attempt to promote a fabricated narrative that the NYT proudly endorsed.
Anat herself cannot be considered a reliable source of information, specifically when running a leading story for one of the biggest news media outlets. However, it does not come as a surprise.
Schwartz formerly served in the Israeli occupation forces and actively worked with Israeli military intelligence. She was also the main focus of several online scandals that exposed her fascist extremism.
Schwartz explicitly liked a post on X that says Zionists actively and deliberately run the narrative equating Hamas to ISIS. It is not a reality, but a charade that Zionist lobbyists have desperately tried to promote to conceal the Israeli occupation’s crimes in Gaza since October 7.
In another incident, she publicly expressed how her fabrications “are important for Hasbara” and the promotion of Israeli and anti-Palestinian propaganda, something the Israeli newspaper Ynet urged the NYT to conceal.
It was also revealed how after the sexual abuse report was vehemently refuted, Adam Sella, who just graduated and garners zero reporting experience, was given another chance to push the narrative, this time using ZAKA.
ZAKA is an Israeli rescue group that submitted a report to the UN regarding the false rape accusations from October 7. It was then revealed that ZAKA’s founder himself, Meshi-Zahav, was convicted of rape and of exploiting his power to sexually assault young girls.
Adam Sella cognitively utilized a renowned rape-infested organization to accuse Hamas of raping Israeli female captives, and tried to hide it by using an alias for ZAKA, the “Rape Crisis Group”.
Israeli media also revealed that police could not find any evidence that proved captives were sexually assaulted, leading readers to an endless sea of possibilities as to why the narrative is still being circulated.
‘The Black Dress’ – Palestinian Documentary Challenges NYT Report on Oct. 7 Mass Rape (Watch)
But the reason why it gained so much momentum is the trend of championing women in sexual assault cases to an extreme that dismisses all other factors, such as its viability.
The West has adopted sexual harassment issues as a personal burden they have suffered from, but also wish to rid women internationally of, whether the case is credible or not. In this case, we see white women calling for the protection of other white women, when Palestinians are being quite literally shredded into clumps.
But they cannot seem to detach themselves from the fact that Hamas never sexually exploited Israeli captives, and that is because the magnitude of Israeli brutality must be justified by the occupation’s benefactors. So, when all else fails, they go back to the one flawed argument that guarantees mass condemnation of Hamas, and mass support for “Israel’s” warmongering.
This brings me to my second headline, the examination of the phenomenon of neglecting literary fallacies and facts despite knowledge of them.
Lessons in Civilization
The main thing to examine is the racial prejudice the West has against Palestinians and how it affects their understanding of the Resistance’s conduct.
The West is still engulfed in ideological white supremacy, and thereby looks at the third world with an inferior eye and a patronizing attitude, solely because their societies cannot understand the struggle we have seen since the colonial and post-colonial ages.
Over the past 20 years alone, Gaza has been a victim of war seven times. The West, however, saw zero wars on their lands. So, a discrepancy is born when Western societies fail to understand what drives the Palestinians so passionately into resisting occupation perpetrated by a racial supremacist entity, and its white supremacist benefactors. This is because there is no tangible experience that the West has collectively touched that drives them into taking back what is theirs.
Some argue that the West itself is also built on theft from indigenous communities, so even if the basis of the struggle is a concept it is familiar with, it has been the aggressor for the last two centuries, which is why it sees so much of their reflection in “Israel”.
The extent of fraternization with the Zionist entity is also another facet of Western-Israeli solidarity. When “Israel” was created as a vassal entity, it was made for the West; this includes systems of cooperation between the Israeli settler society and the Western one.
“Israel” depends on the US and the West for survival, reproduction, and rebranding. Incorporating Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory, they are classified as the core, while “Israel” is a periphery state. This means that a relation of dependency has been birthed. “Israel” provides resources it has usurped to the core, while the core ensures its survival. The development of “Israel” however, very clearly, established it as a settler colonial entity. “Israel” turned into a core in its region and treated its surroundings as its peripheries and semi-peripheries. Its settler colonial influence itself is derived from its relative core, and just as its predecessors’ philosophies and racial classifications transcended into material genocides, it attempts to erase indegenous societies to host settler societies from around the world. This is further proven by Joe Biden’s infamous “If Israel did not exist, we would have to create an Israel”.
In this sphere, we could also examine Antonio Gramsci’s relation of dependency and the neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony.
“Israel” has consented to be dependent on the US and American hegemony because this necessitates its survival, which allowed the US to extend its capitalistic notions onto this settler society. And since the US controls and influences all notions that reproduce capitalism, such as international law, “Israel” has been evidently exempt from prosecution. In this case, we regard the dependent relationship between “Israel” and the US as consensual, but the one between them and Palestine as coercive. Military force now transpires to force Palestine into submitting to this hegemony, which in turn creates a stereotypical consensus that Palestinian society, much like other societies that have rejected US hegemony, is painted as violent and terroristic, which reinforces the systematic racism the West builds its ideology on.
The Western feminist has also ridden the bandwagon and forgone its intersectional component that would regard all societies as equal instead of recognizing violence when it is allegedly committed against the same society that has consented to be dependent on the core.
When the Resistance defends its lands and people against the West’s colonial baby, it is regarded as violent. When Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it was regarded as violent because the West saw it as a phenomenon that was born from a vacuum.
However, today, on the 155th day of the genocide in Gaza, the entire world recognizes “Israel’s” viciousness and disproportionate response to Al-Aqsa Flood. Over 30,000 martyrs later, the West can no longer ignore the mass crimes its closest ally has committed in a small enclave. But they defend these crimes either way.
The reason, I found to be in Rudyard Kipling’s pro-imperialism poem titled “The White Man’s Burden”.
Take up the White Man’s Burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought
Kipling paints a dichotomy in the above stanza, one that shows the paradox of how a destructive, murderous war is meant to bring peace, but ultimately fails because those who are being fought are lazy and foolish, which fails the Empire’s imperial plan.
This is how the West perceives the Middle East. Since October 7, what the West has said about Arab people and governments is that they are indolent and have let Palestine down. This holds a certain truth, but it also shows how the West thinks it is entitled to step up and “bring peace” to a country it has no ties to but the resources it would later steal.
So, when we compare this analysis to liberal feminist movements that criminalize Hamas, movements that give the Resistance the green light to resist, but in mechanisms that the West could approve of, we can recognize the entitlement and superiority that these societies think they possess over the brave and highly moral Resistance. We see notions that are so offensively and inherently racist, the notion that says Middle Eastern societies, and the Resistance in this case, need to take lessons in civilization from a highly self-regarded Western ethical institution, that authorizes the ethnic cleansing of people around the world, but draws the line at a fully acknowledged fake story used to further their perspective of third world people.
In this case [and all cases], liberalism equals imperialism, strongly and transparently, and it uses feminism to achieve its goal: Always regard the liberal West as a high standard of ethics and mold nations, societies, and even Resistance movements, into what it essentially wants: A conditioned force that only acts by the rules of the major aggressor. But it fails every time.
So, when feminists take to the streets and tell the Resistance it should do its job in a way that is considered acceptable to the West, what it is doing in fact, is neglecting the anti-colonial essence of feminism, embracing imperial liberalism, and imposing it on the same movement that fights it, ideologically and militarily, thereby rendering all their attempts of extending support counterrevolutionary.
