Our hearts and minds for nearly three weeks now have been heavy. I never thought I would live through a literal genocide unfolding in Palestine at this very moment.
Yes, I am calling it a genocide. Unfortunately, it has been described as everything but what it is: the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine.
The use of words to describe the current horror ranges from "Israel-Palestine conflict” or, more ironically, "Palestinian conflict”.
The fight between two unequal enemies cannot be described as a "conflict”.
The only word that can adequately describe the agony Gaza is experiencing—and has been experiencing for several days—at the hands of Israel's vicious killing machine is genocide.
Israel is executing civilians, demolishing entire districts, and crushing residential structures while the occupants remain inside.
How people can still describe the situation as conflict is beyond me, as Israel mercilessly continues targeting hospitals, places of worship, and civilian homes, cutting off fuel, water, electricity and medication.
The Rafah crossing - the only viable means of survival for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip - was bombed to ensure it stays closed.
Palestinians are mourning entire families; mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and children all wiped out in a heartbeat.
On social media, they are witnessing scenes of horrific massacres in which no one can retrieve the dead bodies or retrieve only scattered body parts.
A core part, and which has been the subject of discourse for many, is how this colonisation is depicted.
The Western media are more often than not dominated by Pro-Israeli voices, promoting its victim narrative on screens, in newspapers and news channels. Hours of airtime are dedicated to present fallacies and lies, using "self-defense” as an excuse to justify their actions.
A friend recently asked me about the matter and how she felt that you are able to be pro-Palestine but not pro-Hamas, and in what category does that put her in? And that she felt there was not a safe place to have these conversations as you had to be one or another, there was no room for middle-ground neutrality.
She asked why words matter - and frankly I guess this opinion piece is written as a very long answer.
Being silent, sitting on the fence or waiting for an issue to be ‘over’ simply serves the narrative of the occupier. It feeds into one side of the genocide and that is the side of those perpetrating it. After all, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr; "silence is complicity”.
Palestine matters because you have a moral obligation to acknowledge it as a human being. There is no way that you can be "politically correct”.
In some cases, apolitical is not apolitical at all. It is deeply political. It is political by design.
Complicity means you are siding with genocide.
It can be difficult for non-Muslims to comprehend the scale to which the Palestinian cause sits at the heart of Muslimness itself.
So if you don’t know, if you have the luxury to look away, if your circle isn't talking about it, then I’ll tell you.
Like most Muslims over the past week or so, the social media feeds of Muslims have been dominated with images and videos of the most unthinkable atrocities.
Most of us are up all night scrolling through pictures of the crushed bodies of infants, babies convulsing with the sheer shock of hearing a missile up close, and children writing their names on their arms so they can be identified if they are killed.
Children whose entire bloodline has just been wiped out before their very eyes screaming for their mothers. White body bag after white body bag, some with blood splattered across it.
This is what they are sharing and being sent. And with the same questions running through our brains: Why is this happening? How is this allowed to happen? Why are certain governments standing unequivocally with the perpetrators of this genocide? How is this self-defence?
Some have argued it is beyond religion, but perhaps you will be familiar with the hadith where the entire Ummah feels the pain of our Muslim brother and sisters.
On the rare occasion that the media does cover what is happening in Palestine, Palestinians are either painted as violent terrorists or as helpless victims of settler colonial violence. In truth, Palestinians are freedom fighters and agents of resistance with a right to defend themselves against the brutal occupation and settler colonial violence of a nuclear superpower.
So, in the era of social media, the responsibility lies on us to uncover the truth - unfiltered and uncensored.