Freedom Code: On worldwide genocide and forced displacement
Yesterday, I was on the phone with a friend who is Muslim and another friend, and we were talking about Palestine. My Muslim friend was exacerbated in his frustration, and he said something along the lines of—“my entire life, I’ve watched people who look like me and you, Fati, die and be bombed and be villainized at horrific rates.”
My friend went on to talk about the way that Halal butchers kill cows—they bring a cow away from all of the other cows, because they don’t want the other cows to see what is happening. When a cow sees another cow die, it feels fear, and it lets off a chemical reaction of fear throughout its body that poisons the meat.
We’re watching images of a genocide being broadcast to our phones, watching images of people who look like us, people who share the same faith, people who are being slaughtered in mass for what they believe, and seeing the international community do absolutely nothing but continue to justify the genocide. We’re hearing dangerous rhetoric every day that calls for this slaughter. We’re seeing humanity collapse in real time, while the international community does nothing.
This could be prevented. This could all be prevented.
My entire life I’ve watched depictions of Muslim people be seen as savage terrorists in western media and told that’s who my people are. I’ve seen and heard people apply simple words, with racist contexts being applied to them that take them away from their original meanings. Example—Intifada, meaning, to shake off. Nakba, meaning, catastrophe. Jihad, meaning struggle against the shadow self. All of these words, these specific concepts, this poetry, reduced to being considered ‘terrorism; because the machines of western propaganda have been intent on making Muslim people into savages, to justify the way that they bomb us, undercut our governments, pit us against each other, and deplete our lands.
I am so angry. I can’t contain how angry I am. My body cannot handle it. I am overflowing with anger. I feel it every day. I cannot—and don’t want—to get rid of it. There are genocides happening. Genocides in Palestine, in Sudan, in the Congo. There is an apartheid state in Palestine. Pakistan is forcing out Afghan refugees in less than a month, creating forced displacement and a refugee crisis that is disastrous. The world is on fire. And motherfuckers want to sit online and debate about semantics, about philosophy, about how all of this is justified.
To which I will say, with my full chest—fuck that shit.
I don’t know how anyone can sit here and watch scores and scores of Palestinian children be murdered. I don’t know how anyone can watch Palestinian fathers dig their families out of rubble and call that terrorism. I don’t know how anyone can watch an entire people be starved out, cut off from electricity, internet, food, water and fuel. I don’t know how we can hear stories a Palestinian mom, three weeks into a relentless siege, scrambled to make a cupcake for her five-year-old daughter’s birthday, only to be murdered in an airstrike a few hours later. I don’t know how we can see that Israel has bombed ambulances, hospitals, schools, churches and mosques and still see western media saying that this ‘war’ is justified.
I am sick. I feel so sick.
Years from now, the world will ask—where were you? where were you when this happened? What did you do? I am haunted by how many people who are sitting back now, not doing anything, will lie when that time comes.
But isn’t that history? Isn’t that the way folks’ delusions cause suffering and breeds more shame for their offspring to hold?
A few weeks ago, a friend and editor asked me to write an article for a magazine that they work for. I wrote it, it was a call to action, a heart-centered piece that was urgent and reached into liberation theory and queer imagining to help ground. Last week my editor called me to say that the piece had been delayed because the magazine was currently undergoing a lot of negative pushback for its pro-Palestinian coverage as being labeled ‘one-sided’. We don’t know if, or when, the piece will be able to be published.
The amount of censorship we are facing is beyond belief. It’s staggering.
I’ve been listening to this song called Freedom Code by Rotana on repeat. I heard her describe it as a Palestinian Freedom song/ lullaby, and then recently read that it’s part of a genre called Al-Malula or Tarweda, a type of folkloric resistance song that sounds like an incomprehensible code, but is actually sung in a language that was invented to resist British and Israeli colonizers, that women would sing to men passing by to pass on news of the resistance, and passing messages between the detainees and their families. The language was based on reversing the letters of the sentence or inverting the last letter of each word.
I’m so amazed by the ways that people, throughout generations, encode resistance in their day to day movements, how they literally create new languages against the state. I also saw this Twitter thread that made me emotional, thinking about the poetry of resistance. And thinking about Bisan, who is one of the young people on the ground in Gaza who has been so courageous in keeping us all informed, in keeping the calendar.
I can’t come to you heart-centered today. All I can do is come with my anger, my rightful rage and my demand for change. I know so many of you feel the way I do. For those of you, my kin, know I am with you.
This is what you can do:
For Palestine:
1. Call every day for a ceasefire, an end to the genocide, and an end to the occupation of Palestine by Israel. It’s important to note that THIS IS A FIRST STEP. ceasefires can be broken. But this is the most pressing need. And then we have to continue to hold pressure on our government officials to put pressure on Israel to end the occupation.
Here is an updated script:
2. Donate to Palestinian Children’s Fund
3. Amplify all you can and correct propaganda narratives. We are needed.
4. Protest
5. Boycott Starbucks, McDonalds and Disney and anything else that supports Israel.
For Sudan:
1. Amplify all you can and raise awareness. Here are resources to more info: Here is a good briefer on instagram, follow Sara Elhassan on insta, this is a good one minute run-down.
2. Donate to Sudan Relief and Here.
For the Congo:
1. Amplify all you can and raise awareness. Also read Neema talking about Palestine, Sudan and the Congo.
For Pakistan trying to force out Afghan Refugees:
1. Amplify all you can and raise awareness. Check out Aurat March, who have been raising awareness and organizing protests in Pakistan, and Amnesty International.
2. Donate.