From my Ottawa Citizen column today:
. . . If you can resist the hegemonist and patriarchal urges of homonationalism, you will correctly avoid taking any pride to notice that Israeli Apartheid Week is a distinctly Canadian contribution to these giddy eruptions of the global avant-garde. It all began in Toronto in 2005. It continues to spread its toxic mumbo jumbo, every year sucking greater volumes of oxygen out of all the spaces where a robust Israeli-Palestinian solidarity movement might otherwise be.
. . . If you can resist the hegemonist and patriarchal urges of homonationalism, you will correctly avoid taking any pride to notice that Israeli Apartheid Week is a distinctly Canadian contribution to these giddy eruptions of the global avant-garde. It all began in Toronto in 2005. It continues to spread its toxic mumbo jumbo, every year sucking greater volumes of oxygen out of all the spaces where a robust Israeli-Palestinian solidarity movement might otherwise be.
You’d think the Arab Spring never happened. You’d think the Khomeinists in Tehran were not still jailing and torturing and disappearing Iranian democracy activists and feminists and journalists, and that Bashar al Assad’s Baathists were not continuing their slaughter of thousands of Syrians even as I write this. It is as though the very rights and liberties that millions of young Arabs have been fighting and dying for from Algeria to Amman were not already guaranteed, uniquely in the Middle East, by Israel. . .
To my missus, my ma, and my daughter: Always. To my sisters and aunties everywhere, especially in Afghanistan and Iran: Hambestagi. You will win.