SilverBack

I have a question for Hollywood. You wore the keffiyeh on the red carpet, signed boycott pledges, gave speeches at award shows and used your platforms to tell the rest of us what justice looks like. Macklemore. Susan Sarandon. Mark Ruffalo. Javier Bardem. Emma Stone. Joaquin Phoenix. Olivia Colman. Tilda Swinton. Riz Ahmed. Andrew Garfield. Ayo Edebiri. Bella Hadid. Hannah Einbinder. Melissa Barrera. Cynthia Nixon. Now the UN itself has documented what is happening in the camps in Gaza. Girls handed over for food. Rape victims pushed into marrying the man who attacked them. A father gave away his 14-year-old daughter for two bags of flour. Forced marriages more than doubled in a single quarter. No Israeli soldier arranged those weddings. Fathers did. Uncles, brothers-in-law, clan elders and camp leaders did. And a Hamas regime lets it happen. The same regime shot one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, after holding him for a year. Hamas announced he had been executed for "moral turpitude," its term for homosexuality. Hamas documents later found in a tunnel in Gaza describe what happened and show that Hamas kept torturing members it believed were gay. Every summer the same regime gathers tens of thousands of children and teenagers in camps. There they learn to take weapons apart and put them back together, and they practice kidnapping Israeli soldiers. In earlier years they were trained to stab and stone police officers, while instructors celebrated the dead as martyrs. Much of the training takes place in schoolyards and classrooms, where children should be learning to read. On Hamas's own TV channel, little kids in military uniforms are interviewed about the fight. A child in Gaza learns early that the greatest thing it can achieve is to die. You march for women's rights and for gay people's right to live freely. You talk about every child's right to a childhood. In Gaza you stand shoulder to shoulder with the people crushing all of it. As long as they fight Israel, you look the other way. Can you really not see the double standard? Or are you just playing dumb to get attention at any cost? You call Israel genocidal. No court has ruled that it is, and the death tolls behind the accusation come from Hamas's own health ministry. You cheer for "the resistance." But in Gaza the resistance has a name, and the name is Hamas. You just won't say it out loud. Look at the leaders the Palestinians have been given. The Grand Mufti who sat down with Hitler. Arafat, who hijacked planes and funneled hundreds of millions into accounts he controlled. Abbas, elected for four years and still in power more than twenty years later. And then Hamas, whose leaders lived in luxury in Qatar while sending their own people to die. You defend a people and close your eyes to the tyrants who have kept it down for a hundred years. Where are your posts now? Where is the speech from the stage? Macklemore, you wrote an entire song for Gaza. Where is the verse about a 14-year-old girl sold for flour? The girls of Gaza only mattered as long as they fit your story. The moment reality stopped fitting, you went quiet. You were never fighting for them, only for yourselves and your own reputation. A reputation that will soon be put to shame. Because the truth always wins, and it takes down those who stayed silent when it mattered. Now sit down and shut up.