Israel and freedom

I posted the other day about an identity politics problem in Israel: an American Palestinian showed up in Israel for the gay pride parade, only to find himself and his friends on the receiving end of a violent beating from Muslim religious authorities. Surprisingly, the gay American Palestinian was surprised. I was not surprised. If the focus is on your place in the hierarchy of oppression at any given time, rather than on underlying conduct, you’re going to have clashes. In other words, we’ve long stopped being surprised that NOW assiduously ignores Islamic misogyny, and we’re going to get to sit and watch and see how the gay community deals with increasingly virulent Islamic homophobia.

I was pleased, though, to learn that the newspaper story that told of the gay American Palestinian’s plight got it wrong when it said that Israel caved to fundamentalist forces and cancelled the gay pride parade. It didn’t, and you can read all about it here, at Mere Rhetoric (which looks like a very good site). Briefly, according to Mere Rhetoric:

Unfortunately for them, this isn’t that example. Let’s be very precise about this: fundamentalist pressure did not cause the parade to get canceled. It was neither sufficient nor necessary for the cancelation. The parade was originally going to go on despite it, and police had made plans to bring out over 10,000 officers to make sure that it went on. And the parade would have been called off because of the security alert without it. Implying that Israeli leaders caved to fundamentalist religious pressure is very nice for people whose ideology tells them that “the problem is not Islam, it’s religious fundamentalism in general”. But it’s false.

This is a useful reminder that, when it comes to gay identity politics, the current threat isn’t from the Judeo-Christian religion, notwithstanding the fact that those religions do not approve of active homosexual conduct.