Over the last decade, Pride has been professionalized and depoliticized: paid staff, marketing partnerships, VIP tickets, security trainings with the FBI. Pride is no longer a grassroots expression of queer struggle. It has become a PR-friendly festival designed to keep us passive and "proud," but only so long as we make no demands.

Every month, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza reaches new levels of devastation. The so-called "aid corridor" at the Rafah border remains a PR stunt. Despite international promises, aid is not reaching the people who need it. Those who make their way to humanitarian aid sites are shot and killed in cold blood by the Israeli military.

History has shown that acts of individual terror are an ineffective—and, indeed, counterproductive—means of achieving revolutionary ends. Only organized political action by the broad masses can remove the yolk of capitalism and the bourgeois state from our necks. We insist that only a people united against exploitation can never be defeated. However, we also say that the full moral and political culpability for such individual actions falls on the shoulders of the oppressor, whether that oppressor is a capitalist firm, a police department, or an imperialist nation.

Solidarity with the Palestinian resistance must be uncompromising. There is no middle ground between imperialism and liberation. The Palestinian cause demands internationalist, anti-imperialist, and socialist solidarity, not performative slogans and conditional support. 

Around the US, pro-Palestine students, organizers, and protesters are being arrested on trumped up immigration charges and other related offenses. From Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University in New York to Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts University in Massachusetts, student after student, teacher after teacher continues to stand up for the people of Palestine in the face of repression by the bourgeois police state. These arrests are being carried out in broad daylight by non uniformed officers.

Cincinnati Socialists demands the release of Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil.

Our organization has come under fire recently from Rabbi Ari Jun, the Director of Cincinnati’s Jewish Community Relations Council and an outspoken Cincinnati Zionist.