Freedom For Palestine, or In Palestine?
Check out the August 19 and 26 issue of The New Republic for a horrifying portrayal of the state of law and liberty in the Palestinian Authority. The politically correct critics of Israel look the other way as thugs and PA police enforce brutal punishments for homosexuality. (I’m not a big fan of Israel, but I’m also not blind to the fact that Israel is a much better place to live than any of its Arab neighbors.) But then, “torturing” homosexuals or flinging them from the tops of buildings may be merely how some groups express their group identity, so who are we to judge them or to impose on them our own cultural identity, which quite contingently happens to emphasize not “torturing” people or “murdering” them. And anyway, homosexuality is just a social construct, isn’t it? So who should really care if this or that “individual” is deconstructed? He or she was just the intersection of the social forces of class, gender, and racial domination, anyway.