(article written August 2025)
Today I saw a video of a baby in Gaza with a slashed stomach, intestines hanging out. And the post wasn’t even about the murdered child. It was about another injured little girl reaching for the doctor as if he was her dad, the dead baby lying in the background.
For those of us that have been following the harrowing news out of Palestine, out of Sudan, Congo, Yemen…(the list is terrifyingly long) seeing brutal image after brutal image – it’s easy to feel numb at worst and helpless at best. Spending every day feeling like you’re living in a different planet to everyone else – going through the motions in your still very normal life with its very normal concerns (alhamdulilah) that pale in comparison to what our brothers and sisters are being subjected to all around the world.
Of course, as Muslims in the west, we’ve always been aware of current events internationally – what our white friends blissfully see as ‘politics’ – distant, irrelevant and occasionally controversial, for many of us is very real, constant and impacts our daily life – I remember even as a child being aware of the genocide in Bosnia. But since October 2023, with the Zionist regime ramping up its well-documented ethnic cleansing of Palestine – it feels like living with a constant scream in your head;
‘How can we allow this to happen? Why is no one doing anything?’
For almost two years, we’ve watched as Israel and its allies found uniquely new ways to torture and kill innocent civilians every day. Frozen and helpless.
We have the luxury of closing our eyes, of turning away but we MUST hold tight to our humanity. Even if it feels like there is nothing we can do with the forced starvation and closed borders, we still have to bear witness. You and I, who saw that baby murdered, that father carrying the remains of his children in a plastic bag, we are their record keepers. Lest the fickle world forgets – who was harmed and who denied it.
Because the tide will turn, as it has started to now and suddenly supporters of Israel, celebrities that we saw were comfortable in their deafening silence, will slither over and quietly find their place amongst us, with empty, meaningless platitudes.
And most of all, we cannot accept this as the new normal. We cannot let the helplessness and and sorrow consume us, we simply cannot look away. Turning away means normalising murdered children and people, killed for simply existing – nameless and just seen as another victim of the genocide.
Remember, each precious life snuffed out so violently was beloved and cherished, someone’s reason to smile every day. And if nothing else, know that what happens in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, what we’ve taken as ‘the way things are’ means that we accept that people in power can decide who gets to live and who is oppressed based on a label that they can change on a whim.
Today it’s Palestine, tomorrow it could be you.
