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QuAIA
I was going to comment on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eumelia's excellent post (which says it all: "LGBT rights are human rights") but what I have to say is probably too long, convoluted, and angry to fit in a single comment. And people—co-workers, even, and I do try to keep politics and my own cultural identity out of the workplace!—have been asking me for my opinion on it, so here goes:
I marched with QuAIA last year. I know most of the people in it; it's a fairly small group. Most of them have been at every Pride March, long before CAIA started affixing -AIA to every Palestinian solidarity group in the city (but that's a different rant). Before there was QuAIA, there were joint contingents between Salaam, the Muslim queer group, and Jewish Women Against the Occupation (now Women in Solidarity With Palestine), a group largely led by and composed of Jewish lesbians. The "No Pride In Occupation" slogan is not a new one. Most of the folks who marched with QuAIA last year have a long history of activism within the queer community.
Most of the people protesting QuAIA's inclusion in the march do not. We met counter-protesters who had been bussed in from the U.S. Most were straight, a few shouted homophobic comments at us. These are not people who would have otherwise attended Pride. I've noticed in some of the less carefully worded complaints by them, there is also the usual rage against the inappropriateness of TNT Men. (Link is NSFW.)
The City of Toronto (and I'm not just talking about the government here) has always had an uncomfortable relationship with Pride. Pride started as a protest, led by the most marginalized members of the queer community, the least co-optable. It's held when it is to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. It's also the largest tourist event in Toronto and it brings in far more money than it costs. In order for it to be the event that almost everyone in the city (and the many people who come in from outside the city to celebrate) enjoys, it has to be a mess of strange bedfellows: corporate sponsors and angry activists, white middle class men in sweater vests and street-involved sex workers, unions and banks and religious groups and community groups and—everyone.
But those primarily interested in money and public image over human rights would prefer to forget the history. We're not Sonoma County, we're not Fulton, Mississippi. We're fine with Kyle fucking Rae making the neighbourhood safe for yuppies. We're fine with the hot TD boys dancing in their skivvies and we're fine with lesbians taking their shirts off and making out in the streets, as long as both are appropriately appealing to the male gaze. We're less fine with elderly wrinkled dudes showing their elderly wrinkled dongs, and we're certainly not cool with any group bringing up politics.
Hence the position in which we find ourselves now. The Pride Committee is in an impossible situation, and I am going to be sympathetic regardless of what they decide. On one hand, they stand to lose their funding if they take a correct stand on freedom of expression, and Pride cannot continue to be what it is without City funding. They never asked to be embroiled in the politics of Palestine and Israel. On the other hand, if they do this little thing now, it's a terrible precedent. It's essentially allowing special interest groups to dictate what is and what is not acceptable speech. Pride will no longer be a community-based event, but one in which free expression must be vetted by outside interests.
I am also utterly disgusted at how the mainstream media is covering this. While I am chuffed that Haaretz covered it (My city! Making world news! And I was there!), the local media is buying lines fed to them by Israel advocacy groups hook, line, and sinker, without doing any sort of research on their own. If a claim is made—for example, that someone in the QuAIA contingent last year was wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it—how hard is it to find a picture? There were lots of pictures of this dude, clearly showing the t-shirt, which had a crossed-out swastika on it. You have to be extremely stupid or extremely disingenuous to claim that this is an anti-Semitic symbol (I mean, it's a swastika in the way that a "no smoking" sign is a picture of a cigarette), but journalists seem to be nodding their heads along to it. Next came the claim that the use of the term "apartheid" is hate speech, which I'm thinking will be news to Desmond Tutu.
This has a lot to do with broader issues—the North American Zionist community is pretty much shitting themselves over the thought that the unfortunately named Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement could actually have an effect, and have turned their efforts almost entirely towards wiping out CAIA. But it also has to do with profit and co-option and making events like Pride palatable and non-controversial, reining in the snowball of progression and tolerance so that there's still someone excluded and marginalized.
It's my sincere hope that the Pride Committee calls the City's bluff on this. I don't think that the City will cancel funding—Pride is just too profitable, and in the end, money will trump ideology every time. Pride is in an apparent no-win situation, and it's going to get worse. If the City thinks that it can dictate political expression in Toronto's queer community now, what's going to happen if Rob "you can't get AIDS unless you're gay" Ford is elected mayor?
eumelia's excellent post (which says it all: "LGBT rights are human rights") but what I have to say is probably too long, convoluted, and angry to fit in a single comment. And people—co-workers, even, and I do try to keep politics and my own cultural identity out of the workplace!—have been asking me for my opinion on it, so here goes:I marched with QuAIA last year. I know most of the people in it; it's a fairly small group. Most of them have been at every Pride March, long before CAIA started affixing -AIA to every Palestinian solidarity group in the city (but that's a different rant). Before there was QuAIA, there were joint contingents between Salaam, the Muslim queer group, and Jewish Women Against the Occupation (now Women in Solidarity With Palestine), a group largely led by and composed of Jewish lesbians. The "No Pride In Occupation" slogan is not a new one. Most of the folks who marched with QuAIA last year have a long history of activism within the queer community.
Most of the people protesting QuAIA's inclusion in the march do not. We met counter-protesters who had been bussed in from the U.S. Most were straight, a few shouted homophobic comments at us. These are not people who would have otherwise attended Pride. I've noticed in some of the less carefully worded complaints by them, there is also the usual rage against the inappropriateness of TNT Men. (Link is NSFW.)
The City of Toronto (and I'm not just talking about the government here) has always had an uncomfortable relationship with Pride. Pride started as a protest, led by the most marginalized members of the queer community, the least co-optable. It's held when it is to commemorate the Stonewall Riots. It's also the largest tourist event in Toronto and it brings in far more money than it costs. In order for it to be the event that almost everyone in the city (and the many people who come in from outside the city to celebrate) enjoys, it has to be a mess of strange bedfellows: corporate sponsors and angry activists, white middle class men in sweater vests and street-involved sex workers, unions and banks and religious groups and community groups and—everyone.
But those primarily interested in money and public image over human rights would prefer to forget the history. We're not Sonoma County, we're not Fulton, Mississippi. We're fine with Kyle fucking Rae making the neighbourhood safe for yuppies. We're fine with the hot TD boys dancing in their skivvies and we're fine with lesbians taking their shirts off and making out in the streets, as long as both are appropriately appealing to the male gaze. We're less fine with elderly wrinkled dudes showing their elderly wrinkled dongs, and we're certainly not cool with any group bringing up politics.
Hence the position in which we find ourselves now. The Pride Committee is in an impossible situation, and I am going to be sympathetic regardless of what they decide. On one hand, they stand to lose their funding if they take a correct stand on freedom of expression, and Pride cannot continue to be what it is without City funding. They never asked to be embroiled in the politics of Palestine and Israel. On the other hand, if they do this little thing now, it's a terrible precedent. It's essentially allowing special interest groups to dictate what is and what is not acceptable speech. Pride will no longer be a community-based event, but one in which free expression must be vetted by outside interests.
I am also utterly disgusted at how the mainstream media is covering this. While I am chuffed that Haaretz covered it (My city! Making world news! And I was there!), the local media is buying lines fed to them by Israel advocacy groups hook, line, and sinker, without doing any sort of research on their own. If a claim is made—for example, that someone in the QuAIA contingent last year was wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it—how hard is it to find a picture? There were lots of pictures of this dude, clearly showing the t-shirt, which had a crossed-out swastika on it. You have to be extremely stupid or extremely disingenuous to claim that this is an anti-Semitic symbol (I mean, it's a swastika in the way that a "no smoking" sign is a picture of a cigarette), but journalists seem to be nodding their heads along to it. Next came the claim that the use of the term "apartheid" is hate speech, which I'm thinking will be news to Desmond Tutu.
This has a lot to do with broader issues—the North American Zionist community is pretty much shitting themselves over the thought that the unfortunately named Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement could actually have an effect, and have turned their efforts almost entirely towards wiping out CAIA. But it also has to do with profit and co-option and making events like Pride palatable and non-controversial, reining in the snowball of progression and tolerance so that there's still someone excluded and marginalized.
It's my sincere hope that the Pride Committee calls the City's bluff on this. I don't think that the City will cancel funding—Pride is just too profitable, and in the end, money will trump ideology every time. Pride is in an apparent no-win situation, and it's going to get worse. If the City thinks that it can dictate political expression in Toronto's queer community now, what's going to happen if Rob "you can't get AIDS unless you're gay" Ford is elected mayor?
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On the one hand, I don't think there's any basis for saying that criticizing the actions of a particular country's government is somehow hate speech - making that equation actually sets a really dangerous precedent, because if criticizing the Israeli government's actions can be equated to hate speech, couldn't the same be said for criticizing any government? Is criticizing US foreign policy hate speech against Americans? Ultimately that logic seems to be pointing in the direction of criminalizing almost any form of dissent, and that's kind of scary.
On the other - I've encountered a fair number of leftist/pro-Palestinian activists who are of the opinion that Israel shouldn't exist, period - that the whole area currently called Israel should be given back to the Palestinians. Some of them are very up front with that view, some of them tend to dance around it in the interests of not alienating people, but will admit that's what they think if pressed, and some of them won't exactly say it, but will support organizations that do. And I do think that there's a big difference between saying "$country should stop doing $thing", and saying "$country should not be allowed to exist". The latter statement leans perilously close to saying "$people should not be allowed to exist", even though a lot of the people taking that stand will argue that it's not quite the same. But it seems to me like a bit of a slippery slope - and something that perhaps is skating perilously close to hate speech.
Now, that said, I am not all that familiar with QuAIA. I don't remember seeing them at past Prides, and so I really don't know if they keep their statements solidly on the "Israel should stop doing bad things" side or occasionally veer toward the "Israel shouldn't exist" side. If it's the former, I'm far more inclined to be supportive, though it may be that part of the reason for many people's negative reaction to them is too many encounters with pro-Palestinians of the latter sort. If they do edge toward the latter, then I'm afraid they've lost my sympathy. I've walked out of demos where the rhetoric took a turn in that direction, because it wasn't something I wanted to be part of.
I've heard people earnestly argue that really, saying that Israel shouldn't exist technically isn't anti-Semitism, that it doesn't mean you want everyone that currently lives there killed or anything like that, but it still feels chillingly close to the kind of thing a lot of white supremacists say about immigrants. It really does feel hateful to me - and I'm not even Jewish. So on a certain level I can sympathize with some of the Jews who've said that having groups like QuAIA at Pride makes them feel unsafe - I mean, they've got a certain history of being told they shouldn't exist, you know? Now, it may be that QuAIA are taking a more moderate stand and it's just guilt by association, I don't know - I guess I'm just saying that I can see why this is an awkward and difficult issue for a lot of people.
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In regards to the issue of whether Israel has the right to exist, I believe it's tangential to both Pride and the activities of Palestinians and Palestinian solidarity groups. Do I think that the Zionist project was a good idea? No, I do not; I think it's a terrible idea that has had damaging consequences for Jews and Palestinians alike. Do I think that Europe had the right to atone for its sins against its Jewish population by transplanting them to an Arab region and displacing the local populace? That was a shitty thing to do, though typical of Europeans. Probably in this respect, I don't hold moderate views, especially for a Jew. But given that this happened, and that Israel is now a nuclear power financially and militarily backed by superpowers—and on an ethical level, now has a Jewish population of around five million—it isn't going to cease existing regardless of whether or not it was a good idea in the first place. It is not threatened by Palestinian suicide bombers or homemade rockets that miss all the time, or by Iran's bluster, and it is especially not threatened by the rhetoric of North American activists. When the issue of Israel's right to exist is brought up by either side, I squint suspiciously and back away, because the question is typically not argued in good faith.
Which is one of the reasons why the apartheid model is a useful framework (if flawed). White South Africa was never going to go away, and hasn't. The goal of the anti-apartheid movement was never to kill or displace all the white settlers, regardless of how much many of them had it coming. It was to remove the apartheid structure and transform South Africa into a state for all of its citizens. By drawing the comparison, QuAIA/CAIA essentially says, "look, we are not trying to threaten the lives or homes of anyone; we want human rights for Palestinians just like Israelis currently have." This is a good thing for all concerned unless one is specifically invested in Jewish supremacy in Israel.
In terms of creating a safe space—while safe spaces are important, at something the size of Pride, it's impossible to have a safe space where no one is uncomfortable or feels unsafe. I mean, the police are allowed to march in Pride. And many people in the march, particularly sex workers and First Nations people, have faced actual brutal violence at the hands of the police, with batons and pepper spray and tasers, which is far worse than being made to feel uncomfortable because of a political slogan. Queer Palestinians no doubt feel threatened by having groups like StandWithUs there, given that they support violence against Palestinians. Or countless other groups who might find that their shared sexual identity is not enough to bridge the gaps with people of different cultural, national, or ideological identities. One does have to draw a line, and that line should be drawn only at hate speech, because if the line is drawn at "hurts my feelings" or "makes me feel uncomfortable," Pride will fail to achieve the very diversity it sets out to celebrate.
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Not convoluted in any way, manner or form.
It really irks me when the whole "right to exist" thing comes up, because as you say it isn't ever brought up in good faith and is quite often empty rhetoric and it usually hateful - especially when it'd hurled at me and I'm kind of invested in Israel continuing to exist... I'd like it to exist differently!
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