In defense of violence
We are terrorists when we are silent, we are terrorists when we speak; do not ask us to die quietly.

A new language must be born to materialise the horrors of Israel and the West and their accomplices—a brutality so relentless and dark and senseless.

The reported number of murdered Palestinians in Gaza by Israel are debated—some say 66,005 Palestinians, others say 66,200. In Sudan, the number of murdered people by the RSF have been reported to be 61,000 people, and others claim 150,000. 

In the Global South, lives continue to be estimated by collapsed healthcare systems, in an effort to dignify their people.  You see numbers that you do not grasp, except they are too inordinate. Figures we clutch onto, fearing that their reality is far more grotesque. 

We have become numb, and our eyes gloss over the figures, but you might come across something that quantifies the chaos and feel the weight of it all. A daughter wailing over her mother’s body. A boy screaming for his brother to wake up. A grandfather’s worn body thrown over his grandchildren, grieving over small bodies wrapped in cloth. A testimony of a girl recalling the details of the sexual violence she has endured.

It guilts me that my writing on the Global South remains a target to a vernacular of devastation. So, note that the livelihood of Black and brown people does not exist within the borders of tragedy—our existence is more than pain and pity.

But, as the second-year mark of the deliberate genocidal attack on Gaza by the apartheid state of Israel approaches, the world’s humanity has become pliable. 

Throughout the two years, journalists in the US, Canada, and UK alike continue to target Hamas as the perpetuator of this “war,” interrogating and demanding Palestinians and activists to condemn October 7th. This is always presumed with a complete disregard of the violence of the Zionist project that has existed since the nineteenth-century. 

To that, the West has conjured a few fantasies: that white skin is infantalized and victimised; Black and brown skin is inherently violent; every and any resistance is unjustifiable; and colonialism requires “international law” to be legitimised. It’s a historical narrative that has been used to satisfy the bloodthirst of the West. 

Since the fifteenth-century, colonisers have tried to convince us that resistance is synonymous to terrorism. For terror and fear can only be truly experienced by the European. 

So, to them, when a 10-year old Palestinian boy—orphaned, starved, and dismembered—chooses to defend his land, he is an instigator and his identity is established as inherently violent. They will taint and reduce his existence, and have him beg: “I am not a terrorist, I am a Palestinian… I want to take revenge for what they have done to our land.”

In 1956, Zohra Drif walked into an ice cream parlor, tucked a woven basket beneath a chair, and left. Shortly after, the basket exploded, killing at least three French men. To the French, it terrorised their peace; to the Algerian, it ignited a hope for their liberation. The French media went on to interrogate Larbi Ben M’Hidi, as reenacted in the Battle of Algiers (1966), claiming it was “cowardly… to carry bombs [in baskets] which have killed many innocent lives.” To that, Ben M’Hidi responded:

Isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages, with napalm bombs that kill many thousands times more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombs, sir, and you can have our baskets.

Truthfully, you cannot taunt me with the narrative of empathy when it has never been a card dealt for my people. You cannot ask me to be the “bigger” person, to stand on a moral pedestal for the sake of humanity, when I had been stripped of humanisation in the first place. 

And truthfully, the West fetishises peaceful protests. They romanticise the concept of civil treaties and productive conversations. Yet, what they don’t realise is that in order for a peaceful approach to be achieved, the coloniser must dignify the colonised. But, colonialism is a violent and brutal process—and so decolonialism must mirror precisely that. 

Malcolm X assumed such, too, claiming that “anyone who is depriving you of your freedom isn’t deserving of a peaceful approach.” Why must we audition for your empathy and perform for your compassion, knowing it will never be spared by the West?

Least of all, the West places quotas on who can be a victim of violence: Charlie Kirk—a podcaster that thrived through the spread of bigotry online and the resurgence of conservatism among the youth—was “a father and husband,” whilst thousands of Black and brown men are ridiculed by racialised indignity. 

They define who can be violent: the US, whose every president, since 1980, has invaded a country in the Global South, each are regarded as “protectors of peace,” whilst thousands of Black and brown children are regarded as “terrorists” for seeking revenge. 

It has become the case that terrorism lies within the language boundaries of colonialism. It is a word thrown against every freedom fighter, to delegitimize their movement. It is a term void of context and reason. 

Because, “when the victim stands on his feet and fights back, he is not a victim anymore,” but a ploy in the “uncivilised” narrative that has been enforced on them. 

I cannot condemn violence in the name of liberation. We are terrorists when we are silent, we are terrorists when we speak. Do not ask us to die quietly.