Netanyahu Is So wrong About Orlando, Here's Why

Netanyahu Is So wrong About Orlando, Here's Why
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Three days after the shooting of 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a speech on YouTube, which received over 22 million views on Facebook alone. Whilst the motivations of the shooter remain unknown, Netanyahu's celebrated speech presents them as explicitly terrorist in nature. What we see is a classic case of pinkwashing, a tactic that hijacks LGBTQ struggles for other agendas, while distracting from other injustices and violence. For Netanyahu, this means using pro-gay rhetoric to strengthen the Israeli apartheid, dependent as it is on fear and hatred toward "radical Islamist terror." A tactic that further erases the visibility of Palestinian and Muslim queers.

If his speech were not pinkwashing, if it were actually pro-gay, the footage would look something more like this.

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