Oppression & Resistance in West Asia/Middle East

Oppression and resistance in West Asia/Middle East is often likely to be framed into the category of “terrorism”, an area I am interest to focus on. The way Western media portrays oppression and resistance in the Middle East is eerily similar to how it portrays Black Lives Matter protests—with a largely racist lens. I’ve heard it mentioned that resistance to oppression has to constantly be made palatable for the west in order to be “legitimate”, which we have seen with most domestic resistance movements even.

Take for example the recent media coverage of the “Israel-Palestine conflict” in the West; because of the close relationship the state of Israel has with the United States, it has resulted in countless years of zionist propaganda infiltrating our everyday media. I have noticed a few patterns in the news cycle regarding Israel/Palestine, most notably: pink-washing and imperialism.

First off I have seen an uncomfortable amount of Western LGBTQ+ members call to support Israel because of its “LGBT friendly” status. However, if they were to do a little more critical research, they would find that Israeli government does not support gay marriage, and regularly blackmails and kills queer Palestinians. This is a phenomenon called “pink-washing” similar to “green-washing”, which refers to corporations seemingly pushing for environmental policies when they themselves are serious offenders. Pink-washing is a devastating strategy because it uses the dominating groups of the western queer community (cissexual, white, etc) to effectively push anti-Palestinian propaganda. This effectively divides the narrative in the west and pushes forth a very regressive, dehumanized version of Palestine so as to undermine support. Supporters are then more likely to view Palestinian resistance as a form of terrorism, unknowingly perpetuating the cycle of terror.

I see a great deal of imperialist propaganda when looking at when news media coverage of Palestinian oppression and resistance. Why didn’t western news media cover the Israeli attack on Sheikh Jarrah and at Al-Aqsa mosque on Eid? Why does the media continuously only report when “Hamas attacks Israel”? To push the defensive narrative in favor of Israel? Or could it be because the United States government has a vested interest, literally, in siding with the Israeli government because of powerful lobbyists and the military-industrial complex? It’s mostly the latter and that the United States has largely supported the Israeli government first and foremost, because they are both settler states, and because of western imperialism. The US now has an ally in the Middle East that allows it to perpetuate very profitable conflicts—a clear indicator of neo-imperialism. In order to keep public support of such a massive imperial campaign, it is imperative for the media coverage to push a narrative that makes Palestinian solidarity harder for western audiences. Therefore a majority of news outlets have a very skewed perspective of this conflict, a lot of which uses the language of the oppressor when addressing acts of resistance to ethnic cleansing (oppression). Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is misleading because Hamas only retaliated to recent attacks by the Israeli government on civilians. It is also imperative to mention that the current ruling party of the Israeli government is losing public support following elections, and it cancelled the Palestinian elections that were supposed to take place, which all could explain the recent inflammatory behavior from Israel that started the cycle of terror again. What a better way to garner public support than state racketeering—which it can then paint as an act of horrific terrorism committed by the oppressed group?

Again and again, we see these colonial and imperialist perspectives of oppression and resistance in the Middle East. We are faster to condemn terrorism than we are to even define it—to know if what we understand as terrorism is even the correct label. It is a real shame because not all forms of Middle Eastern resistance is terrorism, of course there absolutely are very clear cases of true terrorism but even in these cases Western audiences don’t want to ask questions surrounding the why of such extremist groups. Why is Hamas the designated terrorist group whereas the Israeli government “has the right to defend itself” when Israel literally brought Hamas into power in the 80’s to replace the secular Palestinian liberation movement? Hamas maybe is a terrorist organization, but Zionists in the Israeli government that put their own citizens at constant risk and indoctrinate them with extremist propaganda—all for political power—is not defined as a terrorist organization. You can see that the resistance of one is seen as more credible rather than the clear colonial power dynamic the two. Similarly with Iran, it is said to be a terrorist state with “terrorist sympathies” when it remains one of the few countries untouched by US invasion—and because we have short term memory loss in the states—we often forget about the role US imperialism had in installing the current Iranian regime. These examples don’t stop at just the US either, decades and decades of western imperialism and colonialism in the Middle East is what has brought us here; if you were to look into the histories of most known terrorist groups, you will see a consistent pattern of western imperial intervention throughout.

Between media propaganda and biased academia, we have to practice consuming information very critically if we wish to advocate for human rights. The term “terrorism” has come to mean almost nothing amidst all of the propaganda. It’s has become a tool for western propaganda at this point, which is truly unfortunate for those facing oppressive realities, attempting to practice resistance how they can, and all while escaping violence from true terror, state-sponsored or otherwise.




 * 1) Lobbying for the Faithful. Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project. (2020, May 30). https://www.pewforum.org/2011/11/21/lobbying-for-the-faithful-exec/#expenditures.