Letter to "Pro-Palestine" Friends

A plea from my stupid heart

Dear Friend,

I’ve been thinking of writing to you for a while, but words keep failing me. Zach says there’s no point, you won’t listen, you’re in too deep.

He’s probably right. My previous attempts to talk to other “Pro-Palestine” “friends” and acquaintances have been utter failures.

At a recent plant medicine ceremony, Zach realized that antisemitism often stems from an inability or unwillingness to face one’s own shadow. This shadow is then projected, often onto Jewish people, who, for a variety of reasons, are an easy target. Four years ago, when Zach and I were on our magic mushroom bender, I tried to talk you into trying it, with all my wild and half-manic promises of healing The Great Empty, that darkness that threatens to consume you, if you were just willing to face it, if you were willing to go through the Christmas Carol experience with the Spirits. I could see you were in pain and I wanted you to heal. You prefer to escape into alcohol and stimulants.

I understand the darkness. I’ve also been deep in The Great Empty, that black space between authentic self-expression and the “mask” or “persona” that one feels compelled to put on for acceptance—the character we play in order to feel loved. It’s like being trapped within yourself, looking through the world through a periscope.

When I was deepest in my chronic illness, I became more “woke”, more extreme. My brain was inflamed and so I acted in inflammatory ways. Zach says the same thing about his addiction—the deeper he sunk into it, the more “woke” he became. We both had to heal our brain-guts and our nervous systems in order to clear our heads, to begin to think more critically. To wake up from “woke.”

A few nights ago, Zach and I were talking about our shadow sides. I’m still embarrassed by mine; that monster inside of me that is easily drawn to the darkness in other people, who falls easily into playing the “flying monkey”, who hurts others by playing the apologist, who seeks evidence that I am uniquely loveable by trying to be loved by the misanthrope. That grandiose creature who believes I am somehow so special and sweet that I can grow any Grinch’s heart three sizes by being kind to them. That rabid poetess who thinks I can heal the world and everyone in it by just finding the right words.

As much as I’d like to blame being dropped on my head as a kid for thinking I have the sort of vibes that could tame sociopaths, it’s probably just narcissism and in all likelihood, highly annoying. (Still from the bar scene of Disney’s Tangled, 2010).

I was an idiot and I thought I found “good enough” words and typed out an essay about how I felt. Many people liked what I wrote—Jews, Muslims, white people, people of other races and cultural backgrounds—but not the people I wanted to reach the most. Not the activist crowd you’re so proud to be part of.

I married a Jew — and was completely unprepared for October 7th.

Lately, you look so unwell, so pale. Some people call “wokeness” a mind virus, but I can’t stand what’s it done to your body. You’re aging too quickly. You look like you rarely sleep. You look like you’re being consumed by darkness from inside out.

You’re not the only one. This is what this ideology does to people.

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I have moments of anger, but mostly I’m just sad.

Zach: “They don’t deserve your sadness.”

I had an “angry” moment a few days ago, when I saw one of you share this poster on your Instagram stories.

I looked at the event. It’s a celebration. A goddamn celebration of the hundreds of murders, rapes, and kidnappings of mostly-civilians, including many women, children, and seniors, that happened on October 7th. Organized by a group with “intifada” in its name.

What the hell is wrong with you?

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?

Zach and I asked each other whether this is the too far point, something we won’t be able to forgive.

Zach: “They’ll never apologize or admit they were wrong, so the question is irrelevant.”

Someone I know, who is far older, more experienced, and cynical than me, warned me a few months ago, The are capable of killing you and your family. The ones who aren’t capable of violence are capable of watching and doing nothing. You need to accept this.

I’ve had nightmares about this, I’ll admit. Another Holocaust comes, and people I used to care about are working or cheering for the new Nazis. That what happened in the Iranian Revolution could happen here, in some form. But I am so stupid, my friend, so naive, that even if I can intellectualize it and recognize it as true, my stupid heart can’t accept it.

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Here’s a Substack note I wrote just over a month ago:

“There are many things that disturb me about the “pro-Palestine”/”pro-Hamas” activist crowd.

On social media, I see people sharing memes with blood libels against Israelis that are easily proven to be untrue, distorted, or removed from important context. Making claims that are just mind-boggling stupid (one woman wrote to my husband that what was happening in Palestine was “the biggest atrocity that has happened to land and children in the history of the world”). Others have shared “facts” with links to sources that, when checked, very clearly did not say what they claimed they said. I don’t know if this is dishonesty and manipulation, or, as Jordan Peterson has suggested, a result of poor reading comprehension and low verbal intelligence.

One man on my Facebook feed has posted several times bragging about tearing down posters of kidnapped children and signs that say “There’s Nothing Peaceful About Dehumanizing Israel”.

One man, in response to my article at

Future of Jewish

, left about 200 increasing insane and angry comments on my Facebook, including multiple reference to “cleansing” me.

But what I can’t wrap my head around is the callous way they disregard and ignore the voices of Palestinians and other people from Muslim backgrounds who speak out against Hamas and Islamic extremism and/or in support of Israel.

I quoted several Palestinians in my FoJ article. When I pointed that out to the activists freaking out at me — and pointed out that several Muslims we knew had told me or my husband that they liked my essay — they ignored this. Every single one refused to read any of the articles I linked to. When I sent videos of podcasts and Instagram podcasts to several of these people, most did not respond at all. A couple responded with laugh emojis on a podcast by Yasmine Mohammed (a Palestinian-Egyptian woman) interviewing Elica Le Bon, an Iranian activist. Laughing at two women who have suffered became of Islamic extremism, and are bravely speaking out and sharing their stories.

The man who sent the 200 harassing messages at one point wrote that he “didn’t care” (his actual words) about the stories of Palestinians who criticized Hamas or the Western “pro-Palestinian” activists.

I get that these people are antisemitic. It’s hard for me to accept, but I get it. But they claim to care about Palestinians and Muslims, and yet ignore the insanely brave people who are risking their lives, risking rape, risking imprisonment, being forced to flee their homes and their countries for their safety (etc) to write or speak what they believe is the truth and is right, to stand up to the extremists running/ruining their countries and oppressing their people. Not only ignore, but actively dismiss, disregard, disrespect. Even insult. My article was framed around a conversation with a Lebanese Muslim friend of mine, and an unhinged white woman “activist” actually launched into insults against her on my Facebook page too.

It’s unbelievably evil. Unbelievably narcissistic.

They really don’t care about anyone other than themselves and their own deluded narratives.

This clip by

Maral Salmassi

about “moral narcissism” and the activists is incredibly on-point.

There’s no convincing them. They’re so far gone. It’s heartbreaking. In many cases, these are people I believed were “good” people, or at least people I saw some “good” in.

I’m struggling to see any “good” in the “pro-Palestine” “woke” “activist” crowd anymore.”

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Fine, maybe you hate the Jews. You might not realize that you do, but if you shout From the River to the Sea! and Globalize the Intifada! and condemn all “Zionists”, you effectively hate the Jewish people, and hate that they have an incredibly small democratic, independent state in their ancestral homeland (where Muslims, Christians, Druze, Jews and other faiths live in peace and enjoy equal rights—did you know Israeli Arabs serve in parliament there? Did you know an Arab judge once sent a former (Jewish) Israeli prime minister to jail? He later served on the Supreme Court. Did you know that even though they have no obligation to join the IDF, many Arabs choose to do so anyway? Did you know that while he was in prison in Israel, doctors operated on Yahya Sinwar to save his life from a brain tumour? Did you know that many Jewish Israelis used to volunteer to drive into Gaza to bring people into Israel for medical treatment? Did you know thousands of Palestinians were permitted to travel across the border daily to work in Israel for significantly higher wages than they could have earned in Palestine? Did you know that some of these people used this opportunity to collect information, that some Palestinians pretended to befriend Israelis to help plan the October 7 attacks? Did you know that Palestinians who escape to Israel from Gaza are allowed to convert to Judaism if they wish? Wow. So evil. So apartheid. So genocidal.)

Antisemitism and falling for blood libels is ancient. Fine. But what confuses me, is that you proclaim to care about “brown lives” (not all Arabs, Palestinians, or Muslims have brown skin; many Jews do, anyone with eyeballs should be able to realize this, but “woke” glasses seem to blind people to many obvious truths), you proclaim to care about Palestinians, to care about Muslims, about indigenous peoples in the Middle East, and yet you ignore so many voices of people from that region.

Why do you ignore all the Palestinian voices who speak out against Hamas (and against the activist protests you love to attend?). Why do you ignore people like Yasmine Mohammed, Hamza Howidy, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, Ala Mohammed Mushtaha, Mosab Hassan Yousef, or this anonymous man?

The Palestinian ‘Traitor’ Risking Everything to Speak Out

They risk their lives, while you and your “activist” friends hide your faces behind keffiyehs bought from China and blot out your identities with cute watermelon emojis.

So brave!

A Gazan man after being tortured for a Facebook post criticizing Hamas. Meanwhile, in Israel, people could write “F-ck Bibi” on Facebook all day and not get beat up by the IDF.

A Gazan woman murdered by Hamas after standing up to them.

A couple of days ago, a Muslim woman I know lowered her voice to tell me that she’s glad the IDF is wiping out Hezbollah—and so are her family members back home, but she’s scared that they keep saying so on the phone, because they could get killed for saying such things if they are caught.

Here’s a Twitter (X, whatever) post from a Lebanese-American man that describes the situation in Lebanon well. Did you know Lebanon used to be Christian country?

Meanwhile, in Syria:

Now why would Syrians feel this way? Why would they take to the streets to celebrate Nasrallah’s death? Let’s go to the next couple of slides:

The people are celebrating!

Here’s a video of Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to the Iranian people.

And here are some of the comments on the YouTube video:

Remarkable is putting it mildly.

The harshest criticisms I’ve heard of the “pro-Palestine” activists have come out of the mouths of Iranians. Good god, they think your “movement” is, well, shit.

Here’s an interview with Iranian-British activist and lawyer Elica Le Bon. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, you can skip ahead to the “Useless Idiots” segment.

Here’s

Amir Pars

with an epic takedown of the college campus activists:

A letter to the protesters

Here’s the top comment on his post, a painful dose of reality from

Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek

(silly me wants to believe she’s wrong, of course, me and my stupid, hopeful heart—narcissistic me, thinking somehow my words will break through when so many people who are smarter, more informed, and more poetic than I have failed).

And, finally, here’s a powerful video of Iranians trying to warn the West about Islamic extremism. You’ll have to click through to watch it directly on YouTube because it’s rated 18A for some reason (censorship?).

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While you were weeping for Hezbollah members getting their dicks blown off in an incredible, targeted attack, deliberately designed to minimize civilian casualties (like any sane person with a heart, I do not want civilians in any country to suffer or die, Palestinian, Lebanese, or anyone else),

The Free Press

released a video of a former Hezbollah sex slave telling her story.

Does her story matter to you?

What about this Yazidi woman, who was recently rescued by the IDF after spending a decade as a sex slave in Gaza?

This is also important—

You’re an anti-violence activist, you claim to care about violence against women and children.

“The Internet is full of YouTube videos of children being viciously attacked in madrasas. Girls getting grabbed by the hair and being pulled to the ground for not wearing hijab, boys being whipped and kicked as they fall to the ground. The abuse I endured, as barbaric as it was, is light in comparison to stories I’ve heard. A girl in Somalia told me of how her mother poured hot oil down her brother’s throat (as he was tied to a bed), a siblings were forced to watch,

According to recent report, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 70 percent of children aged two to fourteen years are disciplined in a violent manner. In some countries—like Yemen, Tunisia, Palestine, Egypt—over 90 percent of children report being violently abused. What is the reason for this? Why do those countries have such incidences of violence against children? The common thread is that they all follow the same religion.”

— Yasmine Mohammed, Unveiled (2019), pages 9-10.

Of course, I didn’t see a word from you when this happened in Afghanistan:

Or the increasing violence and repression of women in Iran, which even the United Nations admits to.

The women of Iran are a million times braver than you and your activist friends. They are a million times braver than me, than most of us.

Where is your support for them?

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You claim to care about Black people. Did you know that a common word for Black people in Arabic means “slave”? Did you know that there’s a Black neighbourhood in Palestine that’s colloquially known as “the Slave Area”.

I recommend watching the whole thing, but at the very least, jump ahead to the one hour 27 minute mark.

I recommend you Google “Arab slave trade”. The Arabs, under Islam, were a colonial power in North Africa and the Middle East, just as the Aryans were a colonial power, under Christianity, in Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world (that’s why there are so many Muslim and Arab-majority countries now!).

Holy crap, learn some history from more than 100 years ago!

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Will you follow any of these links? Will you listen to any of these voices?

I’ve tried sharing some of this stuff with other “pro-Palestine” activists. Exactly zero responded to me (I have no idea whether they bothered to watch the videos or not).

Will you read these articles, check out these social media accounts, watch these videos? Read the comments from the thousands of people grateful for them? Or will you shut them out too?

Or will you dismiss all these voices, and so many more, and accuse me, as one man did, of falling for “Zionist propaganda”? (I guess my sources didn’t seem as credible as that antisemitic cartoon squirrel he and other activists are so fond of citing, or the Qatari-funded “news” site Al Jazeera).

I’m not asking you to become pro-Israel or pro-Zionist, to like Bibi, or to pretend that there is no extremism among the Jewish people (there is). I think it’s fine to criticize Israel, the Jewish people, and individual Jews—although, radically, I think these criticisms should be accurate, a standard that it seems the vast majority of “pro-Palestine” activists fail to achieve. However, if you’re going to spout off about how much you care about Muslims, Middle Easterners, “brown” people, Arabs etc I strongly suggest you listen to more of them when they are trying to tell you that your “movement” isn’t helping anyone, and is probably prolonging the war by empowering Hamas and the Iranian regime, thus resulting in more death and destruction.

Obviously, there are many innocent Palestinians, many good people among the Palestinian people, among the Arab people, many wonderful Muslims out there. And there are many god-awful Jewish people. There are heroes and villains, sinners and saints, murderers and peaceniks, rapists and women’s rights activists, good parents and abusive ones, among every people in the world, of every skin colour, of every race and religion.

I’m asking you to please exit your echo chamber and listen to stories that challenge your narrative, to stop thinking about this in such black and white terms, to ask yourself whether you are really, as you so clearly believe, standing on the right side of history.

I’ve become obsessed with this quote recently:

“The louder the abuse, the bigger the lie.”

— Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (1976), pages 51-52

I’ve started to note how people respond to criticism, how they treat their ideological opponents. If truth and justice are on your side, then why do so many of you jump to insults, unfounded allegations, smear campaigns, exaggerations, blacklisting, silencing, or condemnations when challenged? In my experience, very few of the “pro-Palestine” activists can write more than three sentences to someone who disagrees with them without including a lie, insult, or unfounded accusation (You support genocide!!).

Why is that?

Do you have any idea how many people are afraid to stand up to “pro-Palestine” or “woke” activists because of their intolerance for any opinion or fact that violates their rigid worldview, of the loudness of their abuse?

Unfortunately, the more evidence presented, the greater the narcissistic injury, the more fragile the activists’ egos become. The louder their abuse.

Is your moral narcissism so rigid, your need to see yourself as Good Person so intense, the darkness inside you so unfaceable?

Is your need for community among your fellow activists so desperate that you cannot face any criticism of the cult? (After all, once belief falls, the other dogmas of the “woke” cult may tumble like dominos).

Can you still see the humanity in people who disagree with, challenge, or contradict one or more of your beliefs?

Are you capable of admitting that you might have misunderstood, been fooled by propaganda, gotten some things wrong?

Can you hear our prayers?

With sadness, anger, and love,

Meghan