The Founders of Fetrah Revealed Its Achievements Against the Global LGBTQ Campaigns

A fierce virtual battle experienced by Arab social networking sites was sparked by intense and escalating Western calls for tolerance of homosexuality in the public space.

The campaign had a counterproductive result, represented in another campaign called Fetrah to counter the first campaign claims highlighting the sexual differences between males and females and confronting the wave of LGBTQ propaganda.

On July 12, 2022, Fetrah announced the closure of all its Facebook and Instagram accounts, while the TikTok application began restricting the initiative's publications, which prompted Al-Estiklal to communicate with those responsible for it.

 

LGBTQ Propaganda

On June 29, 2022, the US Embassy in Rabat published a picture of the embassy with the colors of the so-called LGBT community reflected on it, with the phrase "Whatever you are, be proud of yourself."

Morocco was not alone in this targeting, but the US embassy in Kuwait had previously published a similar tweet on the social networking site Facebook at the beginning of June.

The embassy announced its involvement in the "Pride Month" activities, which are celebrated by the United States and most of the Western world.

The tweet, published on June 2, was accompanied by a message from US President Joe Biden "in defense of the human rights of LGBT people," saying that all people deserve respect, dignity, and the ability to live without fear, regardless of who they are or who they love.

The tweet sparked public and official anger in Kuwait, to the extent that the Kuwaiti Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Acting Chargé d'Affaires of the United States Embassy, followed by the issuance of a statement.

 

What is Fetrah?

On June 24, a page appeared on social media, calling itself Fetrah, identifying itself as a non-governmental and non-profit organization.

In a series of tweets on Twitter, Fetrah posted an introduction about its aims. Addressing its audience, it said, "First: We would like to thank everyone who supported the initiative, and of course, thanks go to all the loved ones who will contribute with us in spreading the initiative."

Second: There are specific points that we will try to convey everything we know about the initiative, which was the result of more than a year of work and thought.

It continued, "The initiative does not aim to make people interact with it only for a day or two. The goal that we hope to reach is to be a banner for everyone who declares their rejection of homosexuality, whose number is very large, but there is no unified banner through which we announce our position."

About "the initiative's flag took a very long time and thought, as we tried to appear with many symbols and names, but they did not have the same degree of influence (rainbow flag/anomaly)."

It continued, “for this reason, we decided to completely stay away from a logo that is a symbol of ‘icon,’ and we thought of colors similar to the way they were spread, only explicit colors, but after the opinions of many distinguished people. We decided that the flag should be only two colors, a color representing the male and a color representing the female. These are the universally recognized colors.”

Regarding the mechanism of work, Fetrah added, "The flag aims to be free of any symbols, and based only on colors, so that it can be easily spread among individuals and institutions, by adding a logo or a person's image on a background in the colors of the initiative."

In its definition, Fetrah stated what they call for as follows: First, "People know that the two colors are for anyone who wants to declare their rejection of homosexuality."

Second, "interact with the initiative by changing the profile picture or the account of their organization." And third, "Any anti-homosexuality video, conference, or even blog is to be posted using these colors."

About the "name of the initiative," it said, "the aim from the beginning is to make things simple and clear to everyone, so we found that the name # Fetrah is the most appropriate name for it because it is the instinct of God that created us on it, and this is the marking that we will adopt."

It concluded that "the issue may seem difficult and almost impossible, but perhaps it will be an argument for us before God that we tried."

To find out more details about the initiative, Al-Estiklal contacted the official pages on the social networking sites of the Fetrah initiative.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said, "Thank you for your support. We are honored to communicate with you. Our main goal is for it to be an instinct for all people and all sects."

He added: "Instinct is an idea through which anyone can express their rejection of all campaigns and malicious ideas directed against everything that is against human instinct with courage and without fear of deliberate smear campaigns."

He emphasized, "That is why we would like to thank all journalists and media professionals for publishing Fetrah, but we confirm that anyone who speaks on our behalf officially in the media and the press represents only themselves and does not represent the idea itself, so it is necessary to note it." He stressed that "Fetrah does not belong to any particular individual, institution, entity, current or faction."

 

Electronic Battle

He said: "Fetrah initiative succeeded in creating great popular support for it from the ocean to the Gulf. In less than two weeks, it was able to gather more than two million followers on its documented page on Facebook, while the number of its Twitter subscribers reached more than 70,000."

This rapid expansion prompted the Arab press to stop at the initiative, as the number of titles published in Google instinctively amounted to more than 68 thousand titles.

The great detour around the Fetrah initiative was a blessing as well as a curse, as it opened a new battle this time with Facebook, which decided to close the documented page twice in a row after it was exposed to a campaign of notifications.

On July 8, 2022, Fetrah said on its Twitter account: "We are currently subjected to the largest campaign of attack and systematic distortion! This was expected, and we were sure that this would happen."

Hours later, the Fetrah initiative announced the closure of its page by Facebook after reaching more than two million people worldwide.

The page added: "As the West's habit of restricting freedoms if the opinion is contrary to their whims, they close the page, but they will not be able to stop the idea…because it is in their minds now. The power of the idea terrifies them."

Minutes later, it published an update in which it announced: "All the alternative pages on Facebook have been closed. We will not be able to do any alternative pages there now. Spread the hashtag #Fetrah."

Supporters of Fetrah responded, for their part, to reduce the rating of Facebook on the App Store on mobile phones.

An expert in institutional communication, Nizar Khairoun, confirmed that the Fetrah initiative was widely spread, as everyone felt that the LGBT campaigns directly affected them and that it poses a real danger to the future of entire generations.

Nizar Khairoun said in a statement to Al-Estiklal that despite the spread of the spontaneous digital campaign Fetrah it remains very limited in terms of the possibilities harnessed to it compared to the LGBT campaign organized and heavily supported by international companies.

He stressed that "the algorithms of the Facebook and Instagram platforms hinder many digital publications and campaigns and impose penalties on users who engage in them, such as those related to the Palestinian cause, for example, or related to the Fetrah campaign."