This Is What Decolonization Looks Like | The Free Press

On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: What did y all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.  

So far, Sharif s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times by, among others, The Washington Post s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah. 

The point was: Don t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.

If you can t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers. 

All this is a good reminder that when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously. Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds. 

Here is how Quillette editor Claire Lehmann put it on X, formerly Twitter: For the past decade I ve been told that jokes, words & scholarly debates need to be suppressed because they may cause harm to vulnerable minorities. Yet when a global minority is butchered, tortured & maimed, those who suppress words shrug as if war crimes are no big deal.

Real decolonization is a physical process. It is about removing bodies from a place. 

The meaning of Sharif s post a very tidy, very millennial encapsulation of the old Bolshevik spirit is: the ends shall justify the means, and if that bothers you, well, you ve probably been infected by some bourgeois, liberal fungus. 

via www.thefp.com

Above is an important truth.