حرية لفلسطين

Smearing protestors and inciting violence:

The reprehensible act of smearing and inciting violence against pro-Palestinian protesters – even indirectly – represents dangerous attempts to silence advocacy for human rights and suppress criticism of the oppressive policies enacted against the Palestinian people. These unconscionable tactics seek to delegitimize and demonize those standing in solidarity with the struggles against occupation, apartheid, and the denial of self-determination.

By characterizing these demonstrations as violent hate-marches not only serves as an attempt to smear demonstrators in the eyes of the general public but also gaslight them into questioning their own actions. When combined with the false narrative around how these spaces are “unsafe” for Jewish individuals, played up only by inflammatory and incendiary terms like “no go zones” to further divide the movement and block meaningful mass organising between the different pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide and anti-Zionist movements.

This provides a smokescreen to justify forcibly disrupting and violating the fundamental civil liberties of peaceful protestors and conflates lawful expressions of dissent with threats to public order, falsely portraying those decrying injustice as provocateurs and aggressors in need of subjugation by state forces.

This defamatory rhetoric has routinely been deployed by authoritarian regimes throughout history to discredit challengers to their unjust systems of domination and marginalization. By cynically equating criticism of state misconduct with impending chaos, the powerful can recast efforts to hold them accountable as threats to societal stability requiring violent suppression. These divisive strategies are no different to the age-old tactics employed by colonial regimes who label the colonized as terrorists for taking up arms in their quest for liberation.

Those who peddle such dangerous rhetoric against Palestinian activists engage in an obstruction of truth and an assault on the sacrosanct rights of free speech, free assembly and freedom of conscience. They provide ethical and rhetorical cover for the repression of noble grassroots movements born of moral outrage in the face of subjugation and apartheid policies.

This results in the violent suppression of voices by police regimes, a reality we’re already seeing unfold before our very eyes across the global north. While it’s predominantly only extremist individuals committing acts of violence against their peers who are choosing to protest against the active genocide, it’s a worrying trend that should be

Any claims of such demonstrations being “inconvenient” or “not winning any hearts” only demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the core tenets of protests, civil disobedience and the philosophy behind demonstrations. Protests, in their very nature, are intended to disrupt and cause inconvenience, because at the end of the day, they’re a community’s desperate efforts to get their peers to listen, pay attention and take direct action.

By instead ignoring these calls to action and discussing how the protests affect you personally, you not only undermine the wider collective’s efforts but shift focus away from the core goal of saving lives and ensuring equality for all.Defenders of the indefensible find themselves resorting to such duplicitous vilification because they cannot counteract substantive criticism of the injustices and human rights violations they enable through truthful argument and moral reasoning. Smears and incitements become their only available tactics to obfuscate and deflect righteous condemnation.

Those genuinely committed to democratic values and universal human rights must firmly resist such ignoble efforts to denigrate and endanger pro-Palestinian demonstrators. In reality, portraying pro-Palestinian solidarity as an incitement of violence is, in itself, an incitement against the nonviolent civil resistors who represent the continued march toward universal freedom, dignity, and adherence to international law. This vilification of protestors is merely a desperate attempt to preserve an outmoded ethnonationalist order through the weaponization of misinformation and undemocratic physical force.