This is a special mini episode, driven by the immediacy of the horrors happening right now in the Gaza Strip.
Mia Khalifa, controversial public figure and Lebanese ex-porn star, was publicly reprimanded and fired last week by Playboy for her "disgusting actions"—a.k.a. voicing solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation against settler colonial apartheid and genocide. Obvious contradictions arise here that can be extrapolated to better understand the entire structure of how easily signs are twisted and power is inverted to justify the horrors of imperialist and colonial power, as well as how our marginalized identities are used against us in an attempt to turn us against the most marginalized for the lie of our own meager benefit.
It’s no mistake that “terrorism” is only used to describe violence committed by politically disenfranchised actors in the absence of state sanctioned power. State power commits much more violence, but naturalizes and invisibilizes it as necessary and normal. Only resistance to the state is terrorism, which is why terrorism is such a powerful idea in order to confound where power actually lies—it seems as if it is suddenly the disenfranchised who inflict the greatest horrors, the oppressed made oppressor and the oppressor made oppressed. If you don’t believe in violence, instead of condemning the disenfranchised you should be steadfastly in solidarity with oppressed peoples in their struggle for liberation from the tyranny of state power, which constructs, commits, and excuses the vast majority of violence. If saying you don’t believe in violence leads you to be on the side of colonial and imperialist power, all you really believe in is the comfort, stability, and privilege of the status quo.
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