In the wake of the Islamic terrorist attack on a Pride gathering in Berlin, perpetrated by a 21-year-old Lebanese man named Abdul Ballout, subsequently shot dead by the SEK, I posted commentary from a German queer who said: “If I go to Palestine, I’m not afraid of Hamas. I’m afraid of Israel.” A friend commented, “I do not understand the LGBTQ point on Palestine. It makes zero fucking sense.” No and yes. In this essay, I explain why “Queers for Palestine” does and doesn’t make sense.
“Queers for Palestine” makes sense from a particular worldview. The logic follows from the “oppressor-oppressed” or “perpetrator-victim” framework. Queer politics portrays the West as oppressive. Those outside the West—and obviously marginalized groups within the West—are its victims. Islam is outside the West. Therefore, Muslims are victims of Western oppression. Their victim status makes them natural allies with other groups victimized by and in the West. Warped by the postmodernist gaze, the queer sees himself in the Muslim.
The oppressor-oppressed framework has been in operation for a long time. This frame explains why the left allied with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s. The Iranian left believed that both itself and Islam were fighting Western imperialism, which it took to be all bad. Leftists outside Iran also adopted this view. This was most famously articulated by the West’s most cited philosopher, the postmodernist Michel Foucault. Widely regarded as the “godfather of queer theory,” Foucault is a central figure in the perversion of critical theory.
Foucault traveled to Iran twice in 1978 as a journalist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and wrote a series of essays expressing fascination with the revolutionary movement. He did not simply praise Ayatollah Khomeini personally; rather, he believed he was witnessing a new form of political resistance that challenged Western liberalism. He admired what he conceptualized as “political spirituality,” a fusion of religion and political action.
Today’s red-green alliance is moved by the same spirit as the alliance between leftists and Islamists in Iran in the 1970s. These are examples of common cause convergence (which leads to more dark places—see The Left-Far Right Convergence and Notes on the Fourth Political Theory). The historical case provides a valuable lesson about the peril of such a convergence; to wit, when the Muslims took command of Iran, leftists found themselves dwelling on a hellish landscape. The Islamic Republic forces women under the veil and hangs homosexuals from cranes. Yet, the inevitable consequence of establishing an Islamic state is lost on the contemporary left. The oppressor-oppressed frame has made them stupid and self-destructive, turning them against the very liberal values that liberated women and homosexuals.
A similar thing occurred in Germany with the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s. The aspirations of the Nazi Party were bolstered by a vigorous socialist wing. The socialist wing drew disaffected workers into the party, marshaling popular support for fascism and undercutting the left. It advocated policies such as nationalizing industries, breaking up large department stores, curbing the power of finance capital, and presenting the party as a revolutionary movement for workers as well as the middle class.
I trust that the reader hears the echoes of the Nazi platform in the declared positions of today’s democratic socialists, who are increasingly commanding the Democratic Party. It might be one thing if the democratic socialists stood in opposition to the Democratic Party (albeit that would raise a different problem). But they are allied with it. Like the socialists in the Nazi Party, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party ultimately serves the purposes of the corporatocracy. The Democratic Party tolerates socialism because it undercuts the working class. Today’s socialists are not the socialists of yesteryear; they have jettisoned organized class politics in favor of the nihilism of political spirituality.
Hitler tolerated the socialists because they broadened the party’s appeal. But his priorities were always racial and corporatist rather than class-based. As soon as he had secured power, the socialists were eliminated. Horrifically, during the Night of the Long Knives (June–July 1934), leaders of the socialist wing and the SA—dominant paramilitary force within the Nazi Party—were murdered, and left-wing parties outlawed. This is not a closed chapter in the book of possibility. Khomeini’s rise paralleled Hitler’s rise to and subsequent consolidation of power. We find ourselves once more in this terrible situation.
This is why the queer stance on Islam is lunacy. Queer activists, and today’s left more broadly, do not grasp the reality that, if Islam were to prevail, homosexuality would be severely suppressed by the regime. So, yes, in that sense, my Facebook friend is right: it makes zero fucking sense. But to a mind corrupted by the oppressor-oppressed frame, it does make sense. The oppressor-oppressed frame represents a set of tragic failures in reasoning, historical knowledge, and basic grasp of ideology. Yet the left today believes irrationalism and ignorance are sources of truth. They are true because reason and knowledge are false. Reason and knowledge are false because they are Western social constructions.
“Queers for Palestine” is a species of slogan George Orwell identified in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Ignorance is Strength,” “Freedom is Slavery”—these are the slogans of a totalitarian socialist state.
The left no longer operates in the real world. Once it abandoned historical and scientific materialism for political spirituality, substituting perversion for moral truth, it switched from mobilizing for a more just world (however that works out in the end) to a praxis intent on transgressing Western norms. Islam transgresses Western norms, too, and that makes Muslims natural allies to a lunatic mind.
Both the left today and Islam eternally are illiberal. Both deny the truth of the world. The left today believes the most ridiculous things. We see this most obviously in the denial of the gender binary and its immutability. But we also see this in the adoption of a worldview in which Jews are suspected of having engineered the world queers find so objectionable. Antisemitism reinforces the queer alliance with Islam. The paradox that queers are tolerated in Israel and murdered in Iran escapes the left. Islam has the left right where it wants it. And the left is incapable of embarassment.
So, I agree, “Queers for Palestine” is lunacy. But this is because I live in the real world, know history, and understand the ideology at work. Unfortunately, not everybody lives in the real world but rather in a world that lives in their heads—and the madness compels us to fight its externalization.
It is also unfortunate that reasoning with people becomes impossible when they check out of reality. Those pulled into a mass psychogenic illness become immune to facts and logic. And they become unreasonable and violent as a result. The only strategies left to those who remain grounded in reality are to ridicule and marginalize the lunatic and ensure he never obtains power.
The problem with queer politics is not just what it does to confused youth (that’s bad enough), but what it will do to all of us if it gets its paws on the levers of the state.
freedom and reason 