Apr 24, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than your feelings. Your feelings don’t matter.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than playing along with the persecution-LARPing of Zionist university students.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than some privileged Ivy Leaguers pretending to feel “unsafe” or “unwelcome” on campus.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than whatever you’re pretending to believe “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than making sure everyone says all the right words and condemns Hamas with sufficient fervor.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than making sure Joe Biden maintains enough support to win re-election.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than performing all kinds of mental contortions and prostrations while talking about Israel’s criminality to avoid offending people who make everything about themselves.

Stopping the slaughter in Gaza is more important than helping you avoid the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance incurred by the contradictions between your stated value system and the genocidal murderousness and cruelty of apartheid Israel.

Your feelings are not more important than Palestinian lives.

Your feelings are not more important than Palestinian displacement.

Your feelings are not even more important than Palestinian feelings.

Your feelings are not important. Stopping the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the people of Gaza is important.

It is a symptom of the cancerousness of western civilization that there are people living their whole lives under the entirely unquestioned assumption that their feelings are so important that it is fine and normal to expect that a limitless number of impoverished foreigners may be killed without any opposition whatsoever in order to promote the interests of their favorite ethnostate, and that anyone who does oppose it is persecuting them.

It is a symptom of how diseased our entire society has become that people are so narcissistic that they now perceive anti-genocide demonstrations on university campuses as a direct attack against them and their identity, and will use any amount of spin and mental contortion to make this seem true.

It is a symptom of the dire need to dismantle the entire western empire that a mainstream narrative structure exists in our society which says opposing a genocide is a far more egregious offense than committing one.

It is a symptom of the dire need for radical revolutionary changes in this civilization that western political systems are urgently discussing the need to stomp out protests against a genocide at university campuses under the pretense of protecting people’s feelings.

Don’t protect people’s feelings. Stop the genocide in Gaza.

People’s feelings should be uncomfortable when a genocide is happening.

People should be experiencing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance and shame when their innately unjust worldview is being completely discredited in front of everyone.

None of us should be feeling comfortable with any of this. We should be feeling very, very uncomfortable, and letting that discomfort drive us to end this nightmare forever.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Ted Eytan (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)