We Have To Co-Opt The Orlando Shooting For Palestine Without Supporting Gays

By Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian President

As with every other major tragedy, our task as Palestinian leaders and advocates is to tie our struggle in with the victims of the Orlando night club massacre, but in this case we have to make sure to do so in a way that does not invite the accusation that we in any way care about homosexuals.

Ostensibly, the shooter’s affiliation with the Islamic State should make it easy to shoehorn Palestinian concerns into the discourse. We simply have to hammer home the argument that Israel benefits from the Arab instability that ISIS foments, and must therefore be suspected of supporting, even creating, Daesh, which obviously means people must oppose Israel by supporting the Palestinian cause. But the Orlando shooter’s choice of target complicates things, in that his victims were the patrons and staff of a gay bar, which puts him on the same side as Palestinian society. To make matters worse, Israel makes life pretty easy for non-heterosexuals, to the extent that LGBT Palestinians end up fleeing to Tel Aviv. So we have to tread carefully on this one.

The irony is that we have no problem with gays being targeted for mass murder, but from a PR standpoint, we find ourselves wishing the victims were some other, less-despised group. It would be so much smoother for us to be able to join in solidarity with the community of the victims and say that we Palestinians know what facing terrorism is like, because Israel does it to us all the time. People eat it up. Ferguson and Baltimore were great that way. But we can’t do that the same way with the Pulse shootings, because expressing direct solidarity in this case means we care when gays are targeted for violence.

It’s not just that our neighbors in the region would balk at such a stance; it’s that we, as a society, remain deeply uncomfortable with homosexuality, and we hate anyone who reminds us in public that it exists. It might not be enough to simply ignore the sexual orientation of the Orlando victims; we might have to give up on using the massacre as a political tool. Some Gulf States haven’t even seen fit to make an official pronouncement of condolences for the US, and those who have done so have pointedly elided the identities of the victims. It pains me to think we might have to avoid exploiting this powerful event to advance our agenda.

It might be appropriate here to say something about missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity…