Mothin Ali just became the Green Party’s co-deputy leader. And the establishment media is already trying to smear him. But its attack is just desperate propaganda.
Ali has long been a firm opponent of Israel’s settler-colonial crimes against Palestinians, most recently its genocide in Gaza. And the media is now going after him for his immediate contextual response to the events of 7 October 2023. But while the bile is strong, the argument is weak.
Where’s the lie?
History didn’t start with the Hamas-led breakout on 7 October from what human-rights experts had long called an ‘open-air prison‘. Israel had for many years sought to isolate Gaza’s highly concentrated population of refugees with a brutal blockade. And in the context of Israel’s illegal occupation, as experts have pointed out, Palestinian people have the right to resist occupation, but Israel does not have the right to decimate the territory it occupies.
On 8 October 2023, Ali basically stated these facts on Facebook, saying:
This didn’t start yesterday, it started nearly 80 years ago by European settler colonialists.
Never forget that the Western media will always portray indigenous people defending themselves as barbarians, however they dress it up it’s just another manifestation of white supremacy.
The West’s response to brown Palestinians fighting back does indeed seem very much like white-supremacist thinking, especially when we compare it to the praise that white Ukrainians have received for their resistance to Russian occupation. Any honest commentator would at the very least have to accept the logic of Ali’s argument.
This is not to say Hamas is a progressive champion, because it’s not. But nor has it committed even a fraction of the crimes that Israeli occupation forces have committed. As UNICEF recently wrote, “In Gaza, a classroom of children have been killed every day for 22 months“. To clarify, that’s at least one Palestinian child every hour, reaching a total so far of 18,430 children (including about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-10-year-olds).
Break the Islamophobic propaganda machine against Mothin Ali
The Telegraph is very fond of trying to smear people it disagrees with. But its headline – New Green Party leader under pressure to sack deputy for defending Oct 7 terrorists – seemed to have come straight from Israeli propagandists.
Firstly, there’s a difference between explaining why an attack has happened and “defending” the attackers. Because Ali didn’t praise them – he simply explained why they’d attacked and emphasised their right to resist occupation. The ‘terrorist’ designation, of course, is Britain’s official position. But when the British state protects and supports a genocidal colonial power that has (on average) been killing a classroom worth of kids on a daily basis for almost two years, its fair to question the state’s judgement.
The Telegraph‘s sub-heading was Mothin Ali suggested condemnation of Hamas attack on Israel was ‘white supremacy’. Again, that’s some real backbending to make an argument. But what Ali actually suggested, of course, was that the media would be hypocritical and ignore context because Palestinians are brown… which is what happened.
Islamophobia is already at record levels in Britain. And Ali himself has already faced significant racist abuse both online and offline. The Telegraph is only likely to stoke even more hatred from white supremacists by dogwhistling about ‘terrorists’ and Hamas in a piece about a high-profile Muslim man with a beard.
It’s dangerous. It’s wrong. And we’ve got to call it out.
