The Fall of Pride

Image: Courtesy of Code Pink SELA

“If you find men engaged in a homosexual act – kill the active one as well as the passive one.' Don't start asking: 'Are you active or passive?' Just kill both.” (1) Islamist Hala Samir, 2020 appearing on Watan TV; the Turkey-based Muslim Brotherhood channel.

 “In Islam, homosexuality is one of the most loathsome deeds, and Islamic law instructs that those who carry it out be killed by burning, being thrown from a high place, or stoning...For the Prophet said: 'Whoever is found behaving in the manner of the people of Lot – kill him and the one to whom it was done.'”(6) Muslim Brotherhood member Amer Shamakh wrote for a Brotherhood website.

As Pride celebrations unfold across the globe, we are witnessing with growing concern the proliferation of slogans like “No Pride In Genocide,” "Fags for Hamas," "Queers for Palestine," and "Dyke Intifada" within LGBTQIA+ activist circles. This misguided solidarity with terrorist organizations that systematically persecute and execute LGBTQ+ individuals represents a grotesque contradiction of our foundational values. When so many members of our community champion a movement whose leaders would deny us the very freedoms we have fought generations to secure, it should set off alarm bells that something profoundly dangerous has shifted beneath our feet. It should signal the urgency with which we must ask: how did we reach a point where supporting our would-be oppressors and executioners somehow feels like justice and liberation?

Beware–Every Virtue Can Become A Vice

Many members of the queer community carry deep trauma from isolation and societal dehumanization. From these hardships, we have forged a remarkable capacity for empathy and bridge-building. Yet this superpower for fostering inclusion across diverse communities has also revealed a great vulnerability. In our hyperconnected world, where coalition-building is as simple as adding a "link in bio," our desire for solidarity can be exploited with devastating efficiency.

The same digital networks that enable global advocacy in real-time also create perfect conditions for mass psychological manipulation. The constant stream of misinformation and human suffering flooding our social feeds every second of every day easily outpaces our capacity to apply the necessary frameworks for deep critical thinking while supercharging our tribal instincts. In turn, our trauma-born desire to stand with the marginalized—however noble—can and is cynically being weaponized to further the causes of oppressive regimes that fundamentally oppose our very existence.

The False Binary: Being Pro-Palestine Does Not Require Being Anti-Israel.  Nor Does Being Pro-Israel Require Being Anti-Palestine

Supporting Palestinian dignity, freedom, and safety is non-negotiable. But this moral imperative becomes corrupted when it demands embracing Hamas —a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that Palestinians elected in 2006 and that now governs Gaza through fear, religious extremism, and systematic oppression of the very people it claims to represent.

Hamas is not a liberation movement. Funded by Qatar and The Islamic Republic of Iran, it serves as a military ground force for authoritarian regimes that intentionally create Palestinian suffering to advance their own twisted agendas. Hamas calls for the worldwide annihilation of Jews, brutally executes LGBTQ+ individuals, and deliberately sacrifices Palestinian civilian lives in the name of martyrdom to maximize casualties and international sympathy. Meanwhile, Israel remains the only Middle Eastern country where Arabs enjoy full civil rights, where women serve as Supreme Court justices and prime ministers, and where Pride parades fill the streets every year.

October 7, 2023, wasn't just the single worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust, it was a highly orchestrated attack on pluralistic societies and everything the LGBTQIA+ community holds sacred. Hamas and its radical Islamic terrorists didn't target military installations. They massacred 1,200 innocent civilians and wounded 3,400. They kidnapped 247 hostages and killed babies. They burned alive peace-loving progressives who had spent their lives advocating for Palestinian rights and working with Palestian communities — and committed brutal acts of sexual violence and rape against young people at an electronic music festival. People who embodied the values our movement claims to champion. They attacked tourists and aid workers, activists and Holocaust survivors, and innocent people from over 40 countries. (29)

Yet in the wake of this violence, not a single major PRIDE organization publicly condemned Hamas or the fascists funding them. Instead, many embraced "resistance" slogans crafted in the boardrooms of Doha and Tehran and romanticized a terrorist group that criminalizes the very existence of LGBTQ+ people. By amplifying antisemitic propaganda that echoes the darkest chapters of history while creating hostile environments for Jewish LGBTQIA+ community members, these organizations have abandoned the same people who helped build the movement they now claim to lead. A betrayal that's particularly painful given the fact that Jews have always stood at the forefront of LGBTQ+ liberation. In fact, Magnus Hirschfeld, a German-Jewish physician and outspoken advocate for homosexual and transgender rights co-founded the world's first LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in 1897.

Why are PRIDE organizations calling for the inclusion of radical ideologies that celebrate the murder of civilians? They are creating alliances with groups that target and kill members of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

A great example of this lies in the San Francisco PRIDE parade which announced it would support the inclusion of a Palestinian float, and yet they did not mention…

• Travel to the Palestinian territories is deadly for the LGBTQIA+ community 

• Drag laws in the U.S. that threaten our community 

• Abortion rights threats in the U.S.

• All the places all over the world where homosexuality is criminally dangerous.

• Afghanistan

• Antigua

• Barbuda

• Brunei

• Egypt

• Islamic Republic of Iran

• Jordan

• Nigeria

• Pakistan

• Palestine — Gaza and West Bank 

• Qatar

• Saudi Arabia

• Uganda

• United Arab Emirates

• Yemen

LGBTQ+ Life in the Middle East

The rush for LGBTQIA+ members to support full-throttled "inclusion" without understanding what they're including is dangerous to our communities and allies. Across the Middle East and North Africa, arrests, torture, imprisonment, and murder for homosexuality are common practice—everywhere except Israel.

How did we reach a point where members of the LGBTQIA+ community actively protest in support of regimes that loudly and proudly kill us within their borders while advocating against Israel—the only country in the region that leads the world toward full inclusion and celebration of LGBTQIA+ freedom?

The Reality of LGBTQIA+ Life Under These Regimes

In the fundamentalist Islamic regimes many LGBTQIA+ activists champion today, queer life is not simply marginalized—it is criminalized, persecuted, and often punishable by death:

• LGBTQ+ individuals are tortured, murdered, and arrested for merely the intent to "commit" homosexual behavior, often discovered through government surveillance and privacy breaches

• Female rape victims are murdered by their own families in "honor killings" for the crime of being raped

• In the Islamic Republic of Iran—Hamas' top financial and ideological backer—public executions of gay men are carried out by hanging, often from cranes. 

• In Gaza, LGBTQ+ individuals live in constant fear of arrest, torture, or execution. 

• LGBTQ+ Palestinians seek asylum in Israel to escape abuse and murder in Palestinian society

By The Numbers

According to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA):

• Homosexuality is criminalized in 67 countries

• 11 countries impose the death penalty

• Gaza and the West Bank are among those territories

The Broader Pattern of Oppression

This persecution extends far beyond LGBTQ+ rights into systematic gender-based oppression:

• Not one female serves as chief justice in any Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) country

• Every MENA economy restricts the types of work women can perform

• MENA has the fewest laws protecting women from domestic violence of any region globally, including physical, sexual, and economic abuse

• Only Morocco prohibits discrimination against women when providing access to credit

While Western democracies certainly have anti-homosexual sentiment, the widespread cultural norms across Middle Eastern countries are aggressively anti-homosexual, backed by public policies that legalize capital punishment, torture, and imprisonment for being queer.

Israel: The Exception That Proves the Rule

By contrast, Israel stands out as a rare beacon of safety and rights for LGBTQIA+ people in the region:

• Same-sex unions recognized since 1988—a full 27 years before the United States

• Open military service for LGBTQ+ individuals since 1993

• Adoption, inheritance, and partner immigration rights for same-sex couples

• Tel Aviv is widely considered the LGBTQ+ capital of the Middle East

• LGBTQ+ Palestinians can seek and receive humanitarian protection in Israel

The Tragic Irony

The most damning evidence of this moral confusion? LGBTQ+ Palestinians themselves vote with their feet, seeking refuge in the very country our activist community demonizes. They flee to Israel despite the rhetoric many LGBTQ+ activists have been mindlessly repeating, because they understand what many Western protestors refuse to acknowledge: that in the Middle East, only one nation offers Queer people the possibility of living openly, safely, and with dignity.

This is not a partisan talking point—it is a humanitarian issue.

We Are Responsible for the Ideologies We Set Free

Every movement faces a defining choice: the means we embrace to achieve our ends. Each of us is responsible for the people we choose to hold hands with, the words we amplify, the protests we join, and the silence we maintain. When misguided leaders within the LGBTQIA+ community lend their voices and platforms to terrorist ideologies while others remain silent, they all become complicit in violence that predictably follows. And that violence has measurable, devastating consequences not just for the people directly impacted, but for the societies in which we live.

The Escalating Cost of Complicity

Violence targeting Jewish people and the West has reached shocking levels this year. On New Year's Day 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a pickup truck flying an ISIS flag into crowds on New Orleans' Bourbon Street, killing 15 people and injuring dozens more while shouting about Palestine.

Just weeks ago on May 21, 2025, two Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were executed at close range outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., by a domestic terrorist shouting "Free Palestine" as he opened fire.

In Paris on May 31, 2025, coordinated attacks defaced the Holocaust Memorial and three synagogues with green paint, targeting the Wall of the Righteous that honors 3,900 individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Days later on June 1, 2025 in Boulder, Colorado, a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood yelling "Free Palestine" used incendiary devices and a makeshift flamethrower to attack civilians at a peaceful demonstration supporting Israeli hostages, injuring 15 people ranging in age from 25 to 88, and a dog. Mohamed Soliman had hoped to kill all of the roughly 20 participants in Sunday's demonstration at the popular Pearl Street pedestrian mall, but was only able to throw two of his eighteen Molotov cocktails, police said. According to an FBI affidavit, Soliman told police he planned his attack for a year and was driven by a desire "to kill all Zionist people"—a reference to the liberal movement to establish and protect a Jewish state in Israel. Authorities said he expressed no remorse about the attack.

And just a few months ago on the first night of Passover April 13, 2025, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's residence was firebombed by 38-year-old Cody Balmer, who specifically targeted the Jewish governor because of "what he wants to do to the Palestinian people." Balmer scaled security fences with homemade Molotov cocktails, torched the exact dining room where Shapiro had hosted an 80-person Passover Seder just hours earlier, and told police he intended to beat the governor with a sledgehammer.