I’m pleased to share this LinkedIn post by Miral Askar, whose tagline is Building Products by Day, Advocating for Justice by Passion.

Imagine strangers flooding in — not to share, not to live alongside you — but to claim your land as their own future. Not to integrate, but to replace you. Imagine they say, without shame, that they will build their own state on the land you’ve lived on for generations — your home, your heritage, your identity.

Why go far? Imagine if the Cherokee, the Lakota, the Navajo — the Indigenous nations of North America — stood up today and declared, this was our land before you colonized it, and now we are taking it back. Imagine watching the people you’ve always known as neighbors suddenly branded as refugees, while those who have just arrived are crowned as rightful owners.

And here’s the hypocrisy: You are already furious about immigration, terrified of people fleeing wars and poverty — wars you waged, poverty you engineered through sanctions, coups, invasions, bombs. People run because your governments made their countries unlivable. We are not even free to elect our own leaders. That is the kind of control you enforce. You destroy, and when the displaced arrive at your doorstep, you call them a threat.

Imagine the UN and the world’s great powers nodding along. Signing a partition plan. Giving international recognition. Applauding this “new state” being created on your homeland. Imagine watching global powers give your home, your country, your entire history, to someone else.

Would you accept it? Would you stand by? Or would you resist?

And then — imagine the world calling YOU a terrorist for doing so.

Now take it further. Imagine waking up each day to news that someone you know has been killed or imprisoned. Your father, a cousin, a neighbor, a childhood friend. Imagine your house raided in the middle of the night, children dragged from their beds. Imagine prisons where tens of thousands are held, not for crimes, but for existing under occupation.

Imagine your city cut into zones: one for them, another for you. Imagine you can’t even reach your farmland, without a permit — and the land that fed your grandparents is now called “a military zone” or “state land” and handed to immigrants. Imagine counting your dead not in dozens, but in hundreds. In thousands. Imagine a life where even breathing feels like resistance.

And then imagine turning on the news and hearing that YOU are the threat. That YOU are to blame. That your grief, your dead children, your hunger, your destroyed home — are nothing but “collateral damage” because you are the terrorist.

And then look at Palestine. Stop imagining — this is their reality. A reality your governments finance, arm, and defend at every international stage.

The only difference is that when it happens to them, the world calls it “security.” When they resist, the world calls it “terrorism.” And when they are killed, the world calls it “complicated.”

Now tell me: if this were happening to you, what would you call it?