Everybody’s being told to hate Hamas because you can’t just openly say ‘hate Palestinians’. I mean, the Israelis do, they’re openly saying “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly” (War Minister) and “they are savages” (Prime Minister). Meanwhile successful genocide colonies (Europe, US, Canada, Australia) are saying, “for sure young blood, whatever you need, whatever you want.” And I’m supposed to hate Hamas why? Because they broke out of the ghetto that Israel is now liquidating?

As Malcolm X said,“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Gaza is a concentration camp for 2 million people, half of them children. Israel is an apartheid state, a rogue nuclear power, a place literally built on ongoing murder and theft. There aren’t ‘two sides’ here, unless you mean two sides of a concentration camp wall. Now Israel has cut off food and water to the concentration camp and are bombing it from above. The US has surrounded Gaza with aircraft carriers. Who’s the oppressed and who’s doing the oppressing here? They’ve got you all fucked up.

The liberal line is to first condemn Hamas and then condemn Israel, thus condemning yourself in a corner. Why play this game at all? Palestinians have voted for Hamas and Hamas has the balls and the organization to fight back against an oppressor. How are they different from any other organization that uses violence, AKA any political organization? Hamas primarily hit military bases that were killing their people. They took hostages to get their hostages released. Proportionality is the one dim suggestion of war, and what they did was (hideously) more than proportional. Israel does worse, as their response has shown.

Israel’s response has been to cut off food, water, and electricity to entire civilian population, while dropping phosphorus bombs on them from fighter jets. They’re not hitting military targets, they’re hitting UN shelters, homes, journalists homes, hospitals, mosques, whatever. They’re kidnapping and torturing even more than usual and, in their indiscriminate bombing, likely killing their own people held hostage. As an Israeli army spokesman said, “our focus is on (creating) damage, not on precision.” Is this proportional and, even more importantly, what is Israel fighting for? They’re fighting to shove the people back into the concentration camp. How are there two sides to this? Pro concentration camp and con?

You might say I wouldn’t want to live under Hamas, but that’s irrelevant, isn’t it? The point is that the Palestinian people don’t want to live under Israel and they have a right to resistance and self-determination. All the hand-wringing about peaceful protest just led to hundreds of people getting killed and thousands having their legs blown apart. Israel just opened fire on them. If Palestine was represented by the most peaceful, non-violent leadership they would be killed by the violent people next door. If Hamas didn’t exist the Israelis would still be genociding Palestine while America genuflects with one hand while supplying arms with the other. Waiting for the worst people on the Earth to be happy with your government is like waiting for Godot.

At some point people are going to take up arms, which Hamas has done. Is this self-defeating? Does this bring destruction upon their own people? I don’t know, but Palestinians have been getting killed for decades now. Hamas has taken a strategic decision with an outcome we don’t know yet. I know how quickly empire can turn moments of hope into bitterest gall, but Hamas broke out of the concentration camp! That was something. I have to admire them for sticking it to the most militarized, brutal country on Earth, backed by the worst warmonger, and catching them with their pants down. The people telling me to hate them are far more hateable, so I’ll give Hamas the benefit of the doubt.

The fact is that there’s nothing uniquely evil about Hamas, and indeed they’re far more gentle than the Americans or the Israelis, who kill not in bursts but for decades, as a matter of ongoing policy, as the fiber of their existence. Hamas is fighting back against the most evil empire on Earth, in its most colonial heart. What’s to hate about that?

The word Hamas is actually a meaningless stand in for the media audience at home. It just means ‘swarthy, scary Muslims’ without saying that. Just the latest villain trotted out into the Cable TV Colosseum, to justify all the killing the Empire does all around. It was the USSR, it was Al Qaeda, it was ISIS, it’s always somebody, while the empire continues killing throughout it all.

The word Hamas is just the latest shibboleth, a password that lets people say at best disengaged and at worst genocidal things about Palestinians. So western media and politicians use the world ‘Hamas’ as a stand in for Palestinians, because you can’t say ‘we’re going to eliminate Palestinians,’ which is precisely what they’re doing. As always with westerners, you have to look at their actions and look at the words. And their actions are genocide, using the same words they always used for colonized people—savages, animals. After 400 years, are we still falling for this? I won’t. I won’t hate on Hamas. I’ll direct that hate where it’s deserved. The evil Empire occupying Palestine, not the people fighting them.