Who’s Afraid of Hezbollah/Houthis/ Hamas/Islamic Jihad?

Misrepresenting resistance movements is racist zionist queerphobia…

Apr 23, 2026

The piece below is not satire. It was written by Selene Zhou and published by The University of Sydney’s Honi Soit April 22, 2026.*

Antizionism continues to perform the inversion performed by Nazis. This tactic is today referred to as DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

“International Jewry again and again succeeds in spreading lies about Germany… presenting us as antisemitic barbarians.”
– Hitler, 1939

“The ‘atrocity propaganda’ about Germany’s alleged antisemitism is a lie invented by world Jewry to incite the nations against us”
– Goebbels, 1937

“This is not antisemitism, but a necessary defensive measure.”
– Goering, 1935

“The foreign press speaks of ‘antisemitism.’ This is only a propaganda weapon of the Jews against Germany.”
– Goebbels, 1936

“The term ‘antisemitism’ is exploited by Jewish propaganda to damage the reputation of the Reich abroad.”
– German Foreign Office, 1938

“The so-called ‘antisemitism’ of Germany exists only in the imagination of Jewish agitators.”
– Völkischer Beobachter, 1935

“The Jew cries ‘antisemitism’ whenever someone tries to resist him.”
– Hitler, 1940

“Germany does not persecute Jews out of hatred. The accusation of antisemitism is a political lie.”
– Hans Fritzsche, senior Nazi Propaganda Ministry official, radio address, 1938

*the article has since been removed. The institutions that produced it continue to grow stronger, all the while casting themselves as a ‘resistance’ to evil.

Who’s Afraid of Hezbollah/Houthis/ Hamas/Islamic Jihad?
— Selene Zhou, 22 April 2026. Honi Soit, USYD.

ABC News: “IS[IS]-inspired attacks on LGBTQIA+ men”

Queerphobic, NSW Police bash up trans women. During Mardi Gras 2026, they brutally assaulted the Drag Kings Sydney marchers. In custody and during bail checks, police misgender protesters.

However, this trend of hate violence targeting the queer community does not appear in the press. While NSW Police hunt trans people with OC spray, the news presents some lone wolf actors that ambush queers.

“Islamic school faces de-registration over comments about Zionism.”
“Christian villages in Lebanon with no affiliation to Hezbollah attacked by Israel.”
“Australian memorials for Iran’s leader condemned.”

The news media recycle a script that routinely justifies racism and genocide, framing Arabs as the spectre of a feared enemy: ISIS, al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, or Ansar Allah. Dangerously, they fracture queer alliances with Arabs while the same police brutalise us both.

Racist, bigoted, anti-queer, both Albanese’s Labor Party and the University of Sydney weaponise this surge in anti-Arab racism to justify an oppressive Zionist presence.

‘Orientalism’

Arabs have experienced an escalation in racism based on racist stereotyping of the ‘Orient’ as primitive, irrational, menacing, and prototypical, facilitated by mass media. This February, for instance, The Sydney Morning Herald juxtaposed the “barbaric savagery” of Hamas with “civilised, fair-minded societies.”

Last August, ABC News ascribed how Palestinian boys suffered from sexual torture in ‘Israeli’ custody to ‘traditional,’ ‘reactionary’ values in “conservative Palestinian culture,” and to “the high degree of shame associated with [sexual abuse] in Palestinian society.” This is opposed to the reality that they suffered due to undergoing the most devastating experience a child can be subjected to by the dictatorial Zionist regime.

Especially after the start of Gaza’s Holocaust beginning on October 7, racist assumptions that Arabs are the despotic, fanatic, dirty ‘Other’ have been taken advantage of by politicians. This February, for instance, embattled Labor Premier Chris ‘Mossad’ Minns said the Newcastle Writers Festival was “crazy” to invite Palestinian sociologist Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.

This January, Minns declared a crackdown on prayer halls, depicted as “factories of hate.” In contrast, he protected a warhawk recently returned from ‘Israeli’ slaughter to speak at a Technion – ‘Israel’ Institute of Technology – event held at the Great Synagogue, normalising the university developing Occupation Forces technology on stolen land. Minns had earlier refused to acknowledge the hate speech of a bishop preaching anti-queer views in sermons and describing homosexuality as a “crime in the eyes of God” in a church manufacturing contempt.

Anti-Arab Racism

Widespread and generalised, anti-Arab racism is the motor that drives anti-queer tendencies.

This February, Labor Zionist Prime Minister Anthony Albanese derived malicious claims about Arabs from One Nation. Albanese asserted that women who had visited their families in Syria, misrepresented as the so-called ‘ISIS brides’, had “made their bed” together with their children and must now “lie in it” in a forced detention camp.

Like other Australians using their time off for travel to Western Europe or Japan, these ‘difficult women’ had travelled to see their families overseas, take a holiday, avoid burnout, and/or other motivations of travel. Unlike everyone else, they were then accused by their government of running off to join ISIS. This groundless accusation is a real-life experience of many Arabs and Muslims since September 11, when North America, Australia, and other belligerents of the so-called ‘democratic’ West waged the ‘war on terror’ crusade with mass surveillance and extrajudicial detention to attack the scary, terrifying ‘Oriental’ despots: the Afghan Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Ba’athist insurgents, or a queer Arab racially profiled and stopped at Sydney Airport.

This serious contempt was fuelled by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s own ignorance that perpetuates deep-seated racism in bad laws and worse media, contributing to how Arabs are discriminated against in day-to-day interactions with employment, services, police, immigration, and the people around them. On Albanese’s watch, Hanson shifted politics to the right, and activated the Liberal–National Coalition, giving rise to transphobic attacks emboldened by One Nation and other far-right movements. In Queensland and the Northern Territory, the Liberals’ bans on puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for youth were direct results of such attitudes, and Hanson has since called for trans healthcare restrictions nationally.

Queerphobia

Rising racism manifests in a wide range of inaccurate representations reducing Arabs to fictional, distorted images of Al-Qassam Brigades, the Shahada, Hassan Nasrallah, Ayatollah Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a Caliphate, sharia, hijab, the takbir, Intifada.

In November 2024, the University of Sydney regurgitated an exploitative allegation by ‘investigative journalist’ Nick McKenzie regarding Arabs. After inviting discredited business executive Jillian Segal to meetings, the University commissioned the Hodgkinson Report, which falsely accused the Gaza Solidarity Encampment of providing an opportunity for ‘Islamist’ spectre Hizb ut-Tahrir to influence left-wing activists.

This bigoted fabrication was formed by a poorly researched, ill-informed piece in which Nick McKenzie ‘revealed’ his racist stereotypes about Arabs, telling us he had unmasked Hizb ut-Tahrir subversives amongst us infiltrating the student intifada. As a direct result, the University hardened their line, framed by the political discourse on student mobilisations, to bring about their threats to deport trans refugee student Luna Choo over pro-Palestine messages during Mardi Gras season. To shut down criticism of their racism and investments in weapons companies, they repeatedly refused Luna’s requests for more time to respond to the bogus disciplinary action, which amounted to threats of forced medical detransition and conversion therapy.

Zionist lobbying group 5A made submissions and held meetings with the Hodgkinson Report review, which brought into being the University’s transphobic, anti-refugee, anti-protest Campus Access Policy (CAP) and Luna’s pro-Palestinian deportation scare. The Hodgkinson Report also resulted in another trans student receiving a misconduct notice and being disciplined according to the repressive CAP for speaking at the Trans Day of Visibility protest last year.

The University has also platformed right-wing propaganda campaign StandWithUs (SWU), who stand with U.S. and ‘Israeli’ atrocities. SWU is pro-Occupation and leverages LGBTQIA+ issues to generate support for Zionism in booklets, workshops, speaking tours. This is part of a propaganda (hasbara) machine called Brand ‘Israel’ legitimising the Zionist usurper as an enlightened, contemporary Western-style liberal democracy among static, undeveloped, essentially inferior ‘Asiatic’ autocracies.

Contrary to their exploitation of LGBTQIA+ rights, known as ‘pinkwashing’, the Occupation Forces proudly blew up a civilian building in the ongoing Nakba and laughed “it is a boy,” while filming and celebrating their ‘gender reveal’ bombing. During Pride Month 2025, apartheid ‘Israel’ disappeared over 100 trans inmates after their airstrikes targeted an Iranian prison in the deadliest terrorist incident in transgender history.

Last April, SWU promoted a provocative event inviting war criminals returned from ‘Israeli’ aggression, hosted in the University of Sydney management building. In reaction to an open letter signed by staff and students standing for Palestine, disgraced Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott replied that his University recognises “a broad range of activities that reflect different perspectives,” including pro-genocide racism and anti-queer intolerance. Along with graduating genocide bootlicker extraordinaire Anthony Albanese in 1984, is this the leadership for good the University claims to be producing?

‘Israel’

On September 23, 2025, a smear campaign was launched by The Jerusalem Post, Murdoch outlets, and other pro-Zionist media known for supporting Palestinian genocide. They falsely accused the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla of homophobia after flotilla participants allegedly rejected Saif Ayadi, a ‘Communist queer militant based in Tunisia’ and the only Queer activist from the Global South on board.

Ayadi rejected all these unsubstantiated claims and, contrary to Zionist lies led by media platforms and online newspapers, took part in the flotilla to break Gaza’s siege. Pro-genocide, public figures exploited Ayadi’s presence as a queer political organiser and used propaganda around queer Arab identities to delegitimise the flotilla.

This anti-Arab trope of queerphobia was created by the Zionist lobby in 2011. After the Occupation Navy sabotaged and raided the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the ‘Israeli’ Prime Minister’s Office and hasbara machine promoted another smear tactic to discredit the Freedom Flotilla II. Omer Gershon, an ‘Israeli’ actor, falsely accused the flotilla of homophobia after staging scenes of a media hoax in which he pretended to face rejection from the flotilla because of his LGBTQIA+ identity. Ziowood – a portmanteau of ‘Zionist’ and ‘Hollywood’.

On March 1, 2024, the Occupation Forces kidnapped queer Palestinian activist Omar al-Khatib from the airport and tortured them. Transferred to four different prisons in the 15 months since their arrest, Al-Khatib was repeatedly beaten and held hostage in so-called ‘administrative detention’ – punitive incarceration without charge or trial.

Every accusation of queerphobia is a confession by Zionism. After the Occupation Navy intercepted and boarded the ship Handala in July 2025, queer Arab journalist Tan Safi was abducted and brutalised physically and psychologically. Occupying soldiers assaulted, strip searched, and sexually humiliated Safi along with other activists aboard the humanitarian mission.

Right now, queer Wiradjuri, Ngiyampaa, and Wailwan activist Ethan Floyd is on their way to break Gaza’s siege on the 2026 Global Sumud Flotilla. Despite the Students’ Representative Council supporting the flotilla in which Floyd is participating, students did not see their ‘SSAF fees at work’ in the form of global solidarity. Anti-Indigenous, anti-Arab, and queerphobic, the University’s racist and bigoted management quarantined SRC funding meant for the flotilla fundraiser.

Solidarity

The effect of this exploitation of anti-Arab racism is an observed uptick in queerphobia.

On campus, the Queer Action Collective (QuAC) were excessively surveilled at Welcome Week 2025 while displaying a “Queers for Palestine” banner and harassed at Welcome Week 2026 for hanging a Palestine flag on their stall. Off campus, gay couple Jesse Baird and Luke Davies were murdered in 2024 with a police-issued handgun that was signed out for work policing a Palestine Action Group protest.

ABC News: “NSW premier flags new laws after IS[IS]-inspired attacks”

NSW Premier: “I want to make sure we’re in a situation where police have got the resources”

Antisemitic, NSW Police authorised a neo-Nazi rally at the state parliament. After the racist and hateful rally, police found the neo-Nazi protesters did not incite racial hatred. At a Palestine action at Port Botany, they wore ‘thin blue line’ badges to assault protesters.

Nevertheless, the press makes a feature of those cops working to continue the over-policing of Mardi Gras. News stars an offensive NSW Premier that defends the same bastards while they attack queers, Arabs, women, and Blak people.

In response, queers and allies must dismantle talking points that cast Arabs or the ‘Orient’ as the fuzzy concept of an imagined threat: terrorism, pan-Islamism, fundamentalism, or Jihad. We must progress queer and Arab solidarity strategically.

The peril is not potential or exaggerated; it is real. Because the enemy is a common foe, and it is the police, Labor, Zionism, and ‘Israel.’

So call us ‘pro-Hamas college students’ or ‘Islamo-Marxists.’ The Nazis called us ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks.’ But we are Progressive Including Palestine (PIP), we are queers for Arabs, Muslims, migrants, refugees. We are a branch of the Revolutionary Front and the Resistance deserves our unconditional support until victory.

Justice for Dr. Rose Nakad. Justice for Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. Glory to all our martyrs. From Gadigal to Gaza, we’ll have an Intifada!

For more information on Rose Nakad: