WE HAVE FAILED TO STOP A GENOCIDE - Comfort Zone Activism

Our inability and reluctance to leave the comfort of the constraints we are in, knowing full well that they are totally corrupt and do not work.

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash

When are we going to admit that though we may have had some small successes - we have failed in preventing genocide?

And that those small successes, within the neoliberal global rules-based order, will be short-lived as the status quo balances out once again once memories are wiped and time passes after this genocide. Just like no-one cares anymore, nor do they boycott the likes of BASF and Mercedes and Porsche and Hugo boss - all complicit in the Nazi regime. They cared so little, they let it happen again with no diminution in overall profits in the objective scheme of things. The same will happen again. History repeats itself and the goldfish-esque memories of humans has been further and totally decimated by the tech companies who rule over us.

There are millions and millions of us and yet they still continued with their ethnic cleansing, caged them all in and will kill them all.

Our protests did nothing to stop them.

When are we going to get our heads together, rip ourselves from our comfort zones and admit we need another plan and another action? And admit that we - none of us - can go on living like this?

We all must be brave enough to sacrifice the comfort of our fake lives to end this because otherwise it will never end.

Palestine isn't the only genocide. It's not the first. It won't be the last. There are several raging as we speak.

People are so scared of leaving their faux comfort that in a Britain, the High Court recently ruled that in a school where 50% of the student population are Muslim, the Muslim students cannot pray. Of course, it is their human right, enshrined in the Human Rights Act 1998. But we know the notion of human rights is bullsh*t and the judge ignored it because endowed with that wig, he can be as fascist as he wants. Human rights for British brown people? NO!

Famous human rights lawyers in the UK include Sir Keir Starmer KC, who believes starving children - as long as they are brown - is absolutely fine and Israel has the right to do that. And that is the state of ‘Human Rights law’ in the UK.

The Muslim community around me got panicked. They started writing petitions to parliament, asking them to protect the right to pray. I could not help but let my frustration rip.

“If you want to pray, just pray! It takes two minutes! No one even needs to know. Sit in your chair, pray quickly, done!”

“But the school said they weren’t allowed!”

“So?!!? What are they going to do??”

“Expel them!”

“So??? They do not need to attend THAT school to get a GOOD EDUCATION! They can go ANYWHERE! They can even TEACH THEMSELVES!! Why are you putting yourself in these mind prisons; if you want to pray, pray! And if they have a problem, then LEAVE! Why are you even trusting these Islamophobes with your children’s education? It makes NO SENSE!”

These people who think that prayer is so important - a facet of their actual religious life and devotion - will not leave the comfort zone of a pompous, intolerant school; they will not put themselves through finding a better one for their kids.

These fake prisons we put ourselves in, they are killing us. They render us helpless. We can do so much more but we don’t because of ‘comfort’.

The apex of human progress is ‘comfort’. The ability to sit in one place and from that one place work, be entertained, call for food deliveries, be satiated, be full. We call it comfort, though we over-consume everything, our bodies overweight and underworked, our brains overstimulated with propaganda, our mental health in shreds, the natural world around us untouched by our feet, there only to serve us via the proxy corporations who control us. We are in a desperate prison and we refuse to leave it, even though we know that within it we can never, never, never stop genocide.

I don’t need to convince you. You can see it yourself. NOTHING WORKED.

I saw a doctor in Gaza today. He was crying into his hands. A little girl lay in a bed next to him, confused. She had walked to him, holding her severed arm in her hand, asking him to sew it back onto her body. He cried in response. She remained confused at his cries; her request was reasonable in her innocent eyes.

We must sacrifice our ‘comfort’. We must sacrifice it. There is no other way to liberation, there is no other way to freedom, there is no other way to a just world.

How much do we sacrifice? I do not know. I do not know what to do. I do not know how to save Rafah. I, like you, will watch it on Instagram. I, like you, will never wash the blood from my hands - my ‘comfort’ and those around me - the cause of genocide; every.single.time. I, like you, will live forever with the weight of guilt around my neck for the rest of my pointless, worthless days. I do not know how to save Rafah.

But I know one thing. I cannot keep living in a world where children carry their limbs in their hands, asking for doctors to sew them back on. I cannot live in a world where, despite police mowing down students protesting, despite the violence we have faced in our peaceful calls for the end of genocide, our ‘democratically elected’ rulers still pushed them into Gaza, closed the only escape route, and announced to the whole world they are going to kill every single human in Rafah; where we sit in our comfortable chairs, in our comfortable homes, watching from the comfort of our screens.