For ‘love’: charity-washing colonialism, fascism and genocide

From India and the US to Israel and Myanmar, the ‘non-profit industrial complex’ is serving to enforce deeply-rooted structures of domination.

In the name of “charity”, the Jewish National Fund of Israel is buying up Palestinian land in the West Bank for colonial settlements and calling it “environmentalism”; far-right Hindutva nationalist organisations are propagating their fascist-inspired ideology across the world and calling it “decolonisation” and “anti-racism”; and monks who justify genocide in Myanmar are running tax-exempt centres across the United States for the practice of “religion for peace” Buddhism. While Muslim and Palestinian charities in the US have been listed and prosecuted as “terrorists”, even for donations to hospitals and other entirely non-violent initiatives, those promoting violence against Muslims and Palestinians continue to be subsidised by tax exemptions from the state. Such absurdities expose the contradictions of the “non-profit industrial complex”: which, like the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, serves to enforce deeply-rooted structures of domination. The difference is that the non-profit version operates under the mantle of benevolence and love – “love” being the literal translation of the Latin term caritas, from which the word “charity” is derived.