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Palestinian activists protest for the rights of Palestinians at the Chicago Gay Rights Parade in June 2018

Palestinian activists stand up for LGBTQ Rights

Posted on June 26, 2018 By rayhanania No Comments on Palestinian activists stand up for LGBTQ Rights
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Palestinian activists stand up for LGBTQ Rights

“We Stand With Palestine” Contingent in Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade

Confounding many people’s expectations, our “We Stand With Palestine” contingent in the Chicago Gay Pride Parade yesterday – with its huge 160 sq foot banner, “Israel: STOP killing Palestinians!” – was met with almost universal approval by the approximately 1 million people who lined the four-mile parade route.

With the recent killings of over 100 unarmed protesters by Israeli sharpshooters, including children and clearly identified medics and journalists, and the wounding of over 11,000 others, people in this country are waking up to Israel’s systematic deprivation of Palestinians’ rights.

This list, of course, does not include Democratic Party politicians like Barack Obama or Dick Durbin, who have opportunistically bewailed the Trump administration’s tearing apart migrant families at the US/Mexico border, but who took no notice of the killing of Palestinian children at the border fence of the Gaza open-air prison.

Palestinian activists protest for the rights of Palestinians at the Chicago Gay Rights Parade in June 2018
Palestinian activists protest for the rights of Palestinians at the Chicago Gay Rights Parade in June 2018

LGBT people in the United States have a particular responsibility to respond to these atrocities. Not only is Israel by far the biggest recipient of U.S. arms exports in the world, but it’s a central theme of Israeli propaganda, aimed at diverting attention from its brutality against Palestinians, that Israel is alleged to be a gay paradise.

But it’s no paradise for LGBT Palestinians, who are generally prohibited from going to Tel Aviv (even though some of their families were expelled from there), and the Israeli secret police have a widespread practice of blackmailing gay Palestinians by threatening to out them unless they turn into informers on their own people.

LGBTs in the United States have won many freedoms that LGBTs in other countries don’t enjoy. But that record of progress in no way excuses the vicious racism of police killings of Black people, theft of Native American lands, separating children of immigrants from their parents, and other racist crimes. Likewise, whatever relative freedoms LGBTs have won in Israel does not excuse that country’s continuing brutal treatment of Palestinians.

To privilege one oppressed group’s freedoms over another is playing a divide-and-conquer game that only bigots can win.

We were proud today to march in solidarity with Palestinians.  We helped in a small way to re-water and reaffirm the radical roots of gay liberation in the years following the Stonewall Rebellion, when LGBTs cared not just about their own rights, but opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam and marched in solidarity with women and people of color. We recognized then, as we do now, that the liberation of all oppressed groups is the task of each.

Statement from the Gay Liberation Network,  LGBTliberation@aol.com

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rayhanania
rayhanania
Op-Ed writer, author, radio host, podcaster at The Arab Daily News
Ray Hanania is an award-winning columnist, author & former Chicago City Hall reporter (1977-1992). A veteran who served during the Vietnam War and the recipient of four SPJ Peter Lisagor Awards for column writing, Hanania writes weekly opinion columns on mainstream American & Chicagoland topics for the Southwest News-Herald, Des Plaines Valley News, the Regional News, The Reporter Newspapers, and Suburban Chicagoland.  

His award winning columns can be found at www.HANANIA.COM Subscribe FREE today

Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.

Email Ray Hanania at rghanania@gmail.com.

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  • Israelisnipers shooting and killing hospital workers in Gaza - December 11, 2023
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  • Arab and Muslim American voters face a “simple choice” between Biden’s inhumanity and Trump’s edgy politics - December 9, 2023

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