Critical discourse analysis teaches us that what is said (or written), and how, is just as important as what is left out. This is the idea behind one or another group “owning” the narrative.
Here’s why “Do you condemn Hamas?” is not only a lazy but also more importantly an Islamophobic question.
The question, “Do you condemn all violence against civilians?” focuses on killing and brutality, addressing the actual crime.
But “Do you condemn Hamas?” links that brutality to a Muslim group alone. In so doing, it reinforces the trope of the terrorist Palestinian. Does anyone ever ask, “Do you condemn the century of slaughter of Palestinians?” They don’t, because the other thing the Hamas question does is “decontextualises” October 7th. It separates it from the larger landscape of a century of the brutal oppression of an indigenous people — the inhabitants of Palestine.
I’ll get back to the Hamas question, but there’s another question that also demonstrates how what is left out is just as important as what is included and helps to fortify the one-sided ownership of narrative.
“Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” is what I call the “ask” for a performatively recited loyalty oath to a nation-state that kills, steals, and commits atrocities under the guise of self-protection, an obvious lie. It would like asking, “Do you support South Africa’s right to exist?” before Nelson Mandela, beloved the world over and once branded a terrorist, ascended to its presidency.
The point: A better question, “Do you support the human right to self-determination for all people, and the right to live in dignity and safety?” centers humanity over nationhood.
Why is this not the question — the one that centers humanity? Or why isn’t the question “Do you support the right of Palestinians to their homeland?”
Sometimes the asker of the question about “right to exist” does the bait-and-switch maneuver, something like this:
“If you want to give the Palestinians their land, then I guess we have to give the Native Americans their land, too.”
(A “gotcha” shake of head as if to say, “You are nuts.”)
The real answer is that these two issues are not separate but entwined. If we kept the resources that we ship to Israel, if we used them to focus on our own problems, we could fund health care, education opportunities, jobs corps, a living wage, environmental protections, housing, etc., including those necessities for Native people — indeed, all people. But the dispossession of indigenous people is a money-maker. The $$ sent to Israel is used to buy American munitions (this is a condition of the aid), and that fattens everyone’s stock portfolio. Everyone except our poor, working poor, and the dispossessed.
The answer to the bait-and-switch is, “Yes, I do want to do that because the two issues are actually one issue” for the reasons stated.
Finally, to circle back to “Do you condemn Hamas?”
Another piece of “owning the narrative” is defining what deserves our moral outrage and what doesn’t. Zooming in on the October 7th attack (and here, like a recorder on rewind, I’m supposed to say, “and I’m not in any way condoning what Hamas did”) privileges the bloodshed of Israeli civilians over that of Palestinians.
I won’t do that…because it becomes a justification for war. It’s a lesson in whom to hate or not hate. More laziness.
Until the person pointing that question at you has condemned all forms of Israeli violence over more than a century (because it pre-dates the “birth” of Israel) including kidnapping children, stealing land, murdering journalists, ethnic cleansing, torture, bombing Lebanon, bombing Syria, blockading Gazans, killing residents of the West Bank, destroying homes, mosques, and schools, and on and on and ON…
That person does not have the moral authority to ask you to condemn Hamas. That person does not have the right to ask you to play their lazy word game. That person does not have the right to demand that you perpetuate Islamophobia or puppet what they want you to say because they haven’t educated themselves, asked important questions, or even — ever — spoken to a Palestinian person.
Moral courage is not the same as fake moral outrage. Courage demands truth-telling, and truth-telling is never lazy.
#Palestine #Gaza #CondemnHamas #Genocide #DiscourseAnalysis
