The racist cloak of invisibility
Supporting Israel's war crimes has given Canadian commentators and politicians the licence to go full bore racist
Not many people like being called racist. Call someone a racist and they usually first and foremost, act offended. This is a basic fact. Try it if you’re curious.
Being a racist, though, is something different. It’s very easy to do racist things without even feeling bad about it. Racism in a society built on white supremacy is everywhere. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere — literally everywhere you might look, you will see racism. And to get any level of power in Canada is very hard for white people if they aren’t, at some level, racist.
When someone is called a racist, they will either be proud of their racism (a minority) or pretend to be offended (a majority). The majority might be actually offended, perhaps even cry that you’ve called them out. So to do racism more comfortably, they need a cover.
And right now, Israel has given a perfect cover to So. Many. Racists.
To be So. Incredibly. Racist.
While it’s been clear from the start of Israel’s aggression that Israel’s leadership believes that Palestinians are inferior and subhuman, the general consensus among western media and politicians that Israel can do no wrong sometimes hides this very important starting point. Indeed, no country hurls itself towards doing genocide without a pre-campaign of mass dehumanization. Otherwise, average people wouldn’t stand to see such violence meted out against fellow humans.
There are million different ways that Israel has dehumanized Palestinians and I won’t get into that here. But since October 7, 2023, this dehumanization has been used as accelerant to convince people that what Israel is doing in Gaza is necessary, even good.
For the racists who are desperate to do racism but not be offended when called racist, for the racists who cry, Israel has given them a cloak of invisibility. Finally, the genocide in Gaza allows them to express their racist thoughts without risk of someone calling them racist.
This past week, there have been many examples of this. The most egregious perhaps is the brou-ha-ha surrounding a Remembrance Day ceremony at an Ottawa high school. Students there sang a song about peace. This triggered politicians and commentators to lose their shit. High profile racists spoke out, bullied the principal into apologizing and now the school board is investigating.
Yes, a song about peace was this week’s cover to be full-bore, ragingly racist. The song was sung in Arabic, officially the language of our enemies, I guess. Not the language spoken by many Western allies during the world wars. Not the language spoken by many students or staff at the school. Not the language spoken by nearly 300 million people worldwide. Arabic is the language of Palestinians and to sing in their language on Remembrance Day made Jewish students unsafe, the racists said.
There’s no other reasonable way to read this. Someone hearing a language and claiming that the public expression of that language is an affront to them, in a context of rising Islamophobia (whicht has killed more people in Canada than any other religious-based hatred), is racist to its core. And as Israel annihilates what they haven’t yet annihilated of Gaza, its supporters in Canada claim that to hear the victims’ language, calling out for peace in song, is offensive to them. Remember that the largest cohort of Gazans killed by Israel are children who all spoke Arabic.
Similarly, when the soccer hooligans supporting Maccabi Tel Aviv had their asses handed to them for being generally shitty, Western media turned the story into one where savage Arabs hunted down Jews in the streets of Amsterdam. The New York Times removed a video that they said showed Israeli fans being attacked after it was demonstrated that actually, it was vice-versa. The story didn’t switch to the Israelis being the aggressors, it was simply dropped. Forgotten.
It takes racism to look at a situation like this one and conclude that of course, Arabs were the aggressors, the violent ones, and Israelis were the victims. It takes racism to be so bold in these assertions that even video evidence doesn’t shake the consensus among Western leaders. It takes racism to even believe a narrative that Arabs in Amsterdam are so violent, so undisciplined and so hateful towards Jews that, of course, they would be the aggressors and that no other possibilities are valid.
Similarly, the Israelies who tore down Palestinian flags or chanted racist chants aren’t undisciplined savages either. They are the product of a society that has been primed to support a genocide.
The genocide in Gaza has allowed racists — from soft racists to raging racists — to express their racism loudly, in both simple and complex forms. Their racism can be academic. If can be sophomoric. It can be subtle or not. It’s shouted by political leaders on social media platforms and woven throughout political decisions (like Alberta considering putting citizenship status on driver’s licenses).
Israel’s war on Gaza is important to the global order for many reasons. While the most important reason is that it signals the tenuous and fleeting grasp of American hegemony, this minor benefit of allowing people to go full bore with their racism is a nice little bonus for them. Israel’s genocide has allowed opinion makers to manufacture permission to be racist and no can make them cry by calling them a racist any longer.
They aren’t racist. They’re just defending Israel.
I went to Sir Robert Borden high school and let my tell you, this is the first time I have been proud to say it.
Playing a song of peace on Remembrance Day is what every single person and organization should be doing. And if songs of peace make people uncomfortable, maybe they can take a minute of silence to think about why that is.
It's pretty ugly all right....and let's not forget the role that Mammon Worship plays in the west's venal dedication to ethnic cleansing, here there and everywhere. Nor should we let off the Christian churches...for too long the spiritual arm of imperial colonialism around the world.
As the Hawaiians said after conversion: "We bowed our heads to pray and when we looked up, all that we had was gone."
Rapists and pillagers have led the charge.......Christian racists come after and convert the heathens into accepting God's plan for them. In spite of it all......we continue in our little bubbles of prosperity to believe.....but in what, I swear I have no idea.