This article was originally published by the Nonsense Newsletter team. You can find the original article here.
On Fridays, from my unit, I hear the call to prayer sing out of Auburn’s Gallipoli mosque, and I remember my father’s funeral service there, the metal casket, the green cloth laid over it, the blazing white courtyard. Sometimes I join my brothers there, and sometimes I don’t. I have yet to take my son, who is almost two, to the masjid so near to our home and which is tied indelibly to my heart, but that day is nearing.
I have, however, taken him to the local library. I’m sitting here now thinking about how somewhere on the shelves in this library are my own books, or anthologies containing my work, like Kindred: 12 LoveOzYA Stories, in which I explore a young queer Arab Muslim teenager’s awakening, and all around me, in this suburb I call home, where I live and pray and parent my child, there are people who despise me for the desires and loves I acknowledge in myself, or for my heritage or faith, and who will do everything they can to ensure I have a less equal life while invoking words like “community” and “safety” to do so.
People like Councillor Steve Christou, who in the absence of intelligence and integrity and love, seem to be animated only by the vague sense of importance gained from mobilising a mob to better hide their own inadequacies. His passions to date include banning Drag Storytime, vowing to ban Welcome to Country ceremonies, and most recently banning a book on same-sex parenting from the local library.
None of this is new. It is as old as edged weapons, and has as bloody a history. The library as a target for reactionary, backward politics; the fear of free knowledge and services, which facilitates maturity and independence from predatory men and exploitative structures; the disingenuous moral panic of children’s safety utilised principally by Christian evangelicals who routinely protect paedophile priests and the Church itself, the only global institution we know of which housed the rape and molestation of hundreds of thousands of kids for decades, and systematically covered it up.
Safety versus control
For conservatives of every denomination, it has always been the case that the “safety” and quality of life for a child is determined very much by whether the child belongs to them by blood or association: this is clearer than ever, in the wake of 15,000 murdered Palestinian children, and a million kids deliberately starved, some even to death, with the continued support of bigots everywhere. I would tell you that some of those children (this means anybody under the age of 18) were queer, or felt same sex attraction in some way, but I know that would only make some of you cheer harder for their murderers.
I put safety in quotation marks because too many people use it when what they mean is control. This became clear as day to me when the State Library of Victoria cancelled my online poetry workshops on the grounds of “child and cultural safety” (control), which staff reported was due to my advocacy for Palestinian human rights and the cessation of a genocide which is killing one kid every ten minutes, on average. In what way was I a threat or danger to any student in an online Zoom class? The contest here again lies in what information you imagine might be imparted in an educational setting. What is threatened by knowledge is not safety, but a parent’s feeling of control over their children, which is manifesting in increasingly fascistic ways. There’s a reason why conservatives’ favourite bashing grounds for years have been libraries and universities, well before the Drag Storytime hysteria in the former, and student encampments in the latter, and that is because the one thing they correctly identify is the liberatory, transformational capacity education can have on an individual.
It is only ever a capacity, of course: you need only look at the tertiary-graduate war criminals in governments and military and intelligence services to understand it is just one of the many levers of power in society. Consider how those same tertiary-graduates happily bombed every university in Gaza, a wilful destruction not just of the present and the past but the future too, the very ability to gather and teach, to disseminate the knowledge and skills necessary to survive in an apartheid system maintained by AI-driven weapons and systems of murder. Consider the ubiquity of the phrase bomb you back into the Stone Age, and the image of the Palestinian child with a stone in hand, or Edward Said with a stone in his hand, arm cocked back, how it was already true, how invariably, words can only do so much. This is to say that for all the supposed disdain of education by elites, the constant rhetorical and fiscal assaults on the arts and on progressive “snowflakes” who care too much about words, power’s first imperative has always been policing language and determining meaning so as to ensure its own continuation.
At this point, those without wit typically say something along the lines of, “the Left and the Right are just the same!” pointing to censorship as the common ground, which is kind of like saying a man who stabbed another is exactly the same as his victim because they’re both connected to a knife, in that it obscures entirely the relationship each has to the other, it makes abstract the harm done. Put another way, trying to remove the knife from the equation is not the same as trying to stab you with it. Describing racism is not as harmful as racism itself, and likewise, disallowing discrimination that perpetuates violent inequities is not the same as discrimination, which by itself means being able to differentiate between two things.
The point is not who determines the practice, the point is always who is using their power for harm and how can we reduce that harm?
An extraordinary act of censorship
Now the likes of bigoted politicians will point to a book like Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig and say that it constitutes harm. Christou, for example, tells a story of the book being brought to him by anonymous “distraught parents”, and without any evidence whatsoever falsely claims that it “sexualised” children. It does no such thing, and even if it had, he wouldn’t know because he didn’t read it, and the alleged distress he cites is meaningless for a volunteer recreational activity; what’s more, the motion he brought to council was not aimed at the book he so blithely insisted was dangerous (I hope the author sues him to the last miserable dollar he owns) but rather all books about queer parents as if he believes that if we are not read about, we will cease to exist.
The motion states that “Council take immediate action to rid same sex parents books/materials in Council’s library service.” It is an extraordinary act of censorship, completely out of scope of any council’s remit, and obviously violates anti-discrimination laws as well as the NSW Libraries Act. Given that—which ambitiously assumes the councillors who voted for it are aware of the relevant laws—and the commentary surrounding it about “family values” and “religious families”, what can we surmise was the purpose of this sad stunt? Aside from the kind of odious publicity sought by mediocre non-entities like this, anyway, there’s only one purpose: to assert a definition of family, of religious, of community that explicitly excludes queer parents like me, and in so doing shame us and our children.
It’s a deliberate act of hostility that Others, that fosters ignorance, division, and disenfranchisement. Christou doesn’t want there to be any “confusion” among kids, particularly kids with queer parents, he wants them to understand they are not welcome, not normal, not part of the public. It’s no wonder he’s also set against “Welcome to Country” ceremonies; like every white supremacist, he wants to determine who gets to feel welcome, and who doesn’t.
This is not just a local issue, but an example of a larger trend of policing not the present but the future, what we could feasibly become. Consider the widely mocked moment NYPD Deputy Commissioner Draughty held up an academic textbook titled “On Terrorism”, retrieved from the assault on Hind’s Hall at Columbia University, as nefarious evidence that these students were secret Hamas agents or could have been on the road to becoming such. Likewise, early in Israel’s current genocidal rampage, Israeli politicians and spokespeople were seemingly unable to stop finding pristine copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf book in the exploded remnants of children’s bedrooms, with the explicit case being made that these were not “normal” children, that they were terrorists or would be soon enough.
In all of these cases, the safety of children, of young people, is not considered. What is considered is how best to control them, and the measures at hand range from banning books, suppressing search terms in algorithms, banning social media entirely, expulsion from universities, unemployment, the brutal tactics of militarised police—batons to bullets to tear gas—to arrest, and murder. Underpinning all of this is the conservative logic that information is contagion, and without it, we would return to the “natural” state of things: obedience to heteropatriarchal white supremacy.
We are in the middle of a worldwide fascistic crackdown on marginalised people, and the ongoing support of the Zionist entity from Western governments is shining a harsh light on irreconcilable contradictions. State and Federal ministers were quick to condemn Cumberland Council’s clumsy act of bigoted censorship, but those same ministers have been quiet about the State Library of Victoria’s cancellation of five queer and trans authors on the back of our “pro-Palestinian” opinions; they have been quiet about the sacking of Arab journalist Antoinette Lattouf from the ABC because she dared to share credible reports of war Israeli crimes; politicians and mainstream media alike have openly pursued a clear pro-Israeli agenda, refusing to use the word genocide—no matter how many experts in the subject prove its accuracy for this moment—which has resulted in hideously skewed coverage across the Anglosphere.
To say I’m disgusted by the actions of my local council would be an understatement, but I’m far and away more disgusted by the extreme inhumanity that has been shown by our government and many others since October last year, the willingness to stand by as children are starved to death and bombed and maimed and killed in every horrific way imaginable, with graphic footage of their murders now part of our daily timelines. We have been protesting for seven months to no avail and every step of the way, there has been a hyper-fixation on the feelings of a privileged few—Zionist theatregoers clutching their pearls over actors wearing a keffiyeh, the demand for a complete absence, the erasure of all things Palestinian from the public sphere, the implanting of protest slogans with the subjective meaning of those being protested against—over the material harms being done, from the genocide in Palestine to the brutalisation of protestors and acts of extreme Zionist violence in the West.
In that context, why shouldn’t a few “distraught parents” get to dictate what books the rest of are allowed to borrow from a library, and more broadly, what books are allowed to be published, what kind of people allowed to exist? If you remove the language of social justice from the context of material reality, from structural inequities and the real harm being committed by the powerful against the marginalised, it becomes just another tool a cop can use to disappear you with the full permission of the State.
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Omar Sakr does not have a bio in the genocide. Redirect your attention to liberation for the oppressed.
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