Of My Little Khaykology II: Who Are "Queers For Palestine"?

Hint: It's NOT the blue-haired, LGBTQ+ college kids.

Queers for Palestine. Blue haired college kids who think they’re so progressive and anti-establishment but they don’t know or care that they’ll get thrown off a rooftop in Gaza for being gay. By now we all got a good laugh at their expense - they’re like chickens for KFC, blacks for KKK, smurfs for Gargamel… Ain’t it so?

No. That is, yes - those blue haired college kids really think they’re so anti-establishment and don’t know or care that they’ll get thrown off a rooftop in Gaza for being gay. But they are just useful idiots, a front for what is hiding behind the curtains.

To have a better understanding of what “Queers for Palestine” really means, we revisited our favorite Hamas cheerleader, Prof. Khayke Scottish. After all, she wrote a book about it - “Queer terror”, which we covered before. We, or rather our dear friend Madame DeFarge, read it so you won’t have to. This is a reminder for us to visit the Madame at the mental institution where she is still recovering from the ordeal.

Take a deep breath. Here we go (emphasis ours).

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Tl;dr - it’s not about gay people, but about Western civilization.

First, it needs to be clear that “queer” doesn’t necessarily mean gay.

[Q]ueer necropolitics thinkers use radical and liberatory critical theory to analyze the ways that queerness functions as a lever of classed, racialized, and nationalized exclusion, with the result that some populations, whether “queer” or “queered,” become either dead or disposable, either killable or eligible for targeted killing (Intro, xvi)

Necropolitics sounds a bit… deadly. And oh boy is it even deadlier than we think. Our queer theorist friend really loves death. What she doesn’t like is moralism, civilizationalism, repronormativity and other words that trigger our auto-correct and kill our brain cells.

If “life,” in the settler sovereign scheme, is moralized as proper desire, and that propriety is what must be cherished and preserved and defended against “death” at all costs, then queer theory, or queerness is simultaneously a principled position of antimoralism and an unapologetic advocacy of “death”. Its contribution to a broader theory of liberation is its proposal of a world without morality, revelry in impropriety, and, indeed, a veritable celebration of “death.” (Intro, xvii)

I suggest that queer theory’s specific contribution to radical/left politics is its antimoralism, whether that moralism takes the form of bourgeois repronormativity… or modernity’s biopolitical civilizationalism. In short… queer theory is fundamentally antimoral, anti-“life,” and, indeed, a representative and champion of “death.” (Intro, xxi)

If the definition of “queer” is not clear by now, let Prof. Scottish crystallize it for you:

[F]uturism provides a useful map of the determination of all “enemies” of the social order, whether those enemies be sinthomosexuals¹, indigenous peoples, people of color, or the disabled — “queer” is merely their structural, catchall designation. (p.114)

Finally, we are ready to define terror as “queer resistance to colonization”.

If… the War on Terror is a continuation of the settler conquest that established the United States, then “terrorism” becomes legible not as an ostensibly objective classification of a specific type of political violence, but rather as the ideological name for any resistance to colonization or refusal to acknowledge its goodness, rightness, morality, or legitimacy… From the point of view of an antimoral, liberatory queer theory, however, the “terrorist” as emissary of “death” is a figure of radical resistance whose commitment to decolonization - not implication in any sort of violence, however real or imagined - renders them a mortal threat to the settler social order. (Intro, xxi)

The closing paragraph seals the deal. Queer terror is all about the annihilation of the evil West:

Today, these queers are Muslims and Arabs; tomorrow it may be somebody else. But it will inevitably be someone, because futurism is a definitive logic of modern sovereignty; the War on Terror is merely the latest of its episodes… let’s declare that we, too, are queers, bent on the annihilation of the social order and its ceaseless reproduction of specters of nihilism and death. (p.168)

With all of the above, and with chapters and sections aptly named “Society must be destroyed”, “Terrorism and/as Queerness” and “Terrorism and/as Queer Resistance”, suddenly “Queers for Palestine” makes perfect and terrifying sense.

Farewell, dear friends. We are now joining Madame DeFarge in the asylum.

1. Having no personal interest in the future of humanity because of one's (non-heterosexual, therefore non-reproductive) sexual orientation.