Following Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel that caused more than 1,200 fatalities, there was a barrage of injunctions from Western mainstream media, politicians, and pundits insisting that anybody wishing to express an opinion on the events and the ensuing Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza, first denounce Hamas before expressing any other view. The failure to explicitly do so or any attempt to put events in their historical context or emphasise the root causes of the conflict were interpreted as condoning Hamas’s actions (that the speaker was a Hamas sympathiser) and conflated with antisemitism.

By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? — Walter Rodney

Source: The false equivalence of the colonised and coloniser – Pearls and Irritations