During the past year, I’ve faced some mild online harassment over my politics, which led to Beat being removed from lists of screenwriting apps, silly GitHub flame wars and angry, anonymous DMs and e-mails from fresh accounts. This started when I made it public that I had donated all my proceedings from App Store sales in November to NGOs helping victims of the genocide in Gaza.
For me, Beat has been a political project from the very beginning. My background is in DIY, underground and anarchist music and art scene. I wanted to create a software which could lower the barrier of entry to writing cleanly formatted screenplays. Aside from providing a professional tool for writers of all levels, the app has also given me a small but international platform for humanitarian causes near my heart.
So, let’s make it clear: my politics are ANTI-FASCISM, ANTI-RACISM and ANTI-GENOCIDE.
Civilians, including infants, are being ruthlessly murdered in Gaza by the apartheid state of Israel and IDF soldiers. Our colleagues, filmmakers and journalists have been directly targeted, their whole families killed just for speaking out. Children have been sniped in the head, and everyone in Gaza has been subjected to man-made famine. The ethnic cleansing has been going on for decades, and the politicians doing it are calling the victims cockroaches, terrorists and rabid dogs. Don’t believe me? It’s actually worse.
The horrors are beyond imagination, and denying it is just delusion. If you want to silence a fucking screenwriting app or debate the definition of ethnic cleansing, domicide or genocide, maybe direct your complaints to all the international NGOs, International Criminal Court and human rights organizations, who are all calling it a genocide.
Let’s not play pretend: I fucking hate Nazis. Right now, far right is on the rise in Europe, and the world’s richest person is sieg heiling and funding AfD and other racist and fascist parties around the world. While many of those parties are supporting this genocide, they are also associating with real-life, hardcore antisemites and Nazis and spreading antisemitic conspiracies and holocaust denial. Are these really the bunch you want to be in bed with?
If you are still feeling insulted my politics, and would like to argue that technically it’s not a genocide and it’s actually very complicated and not exactly ethnic cleansing, maybe ask yourself this: Do you actually want to live in a world, where ethnic cleansing and genocide can be brushed away? Are you really going to keep on typing your e-mail to try and justify it? That’s not even being a Mitläufer anymore, that’s full complicity later on.
I hope you’ll reconsider your next angry anonymous e-mail, and instead join me in stopping all fascist and Nazis.
And of course, I’m the perfect example of ignoring software vendor’s politics: Apple is involved in quasi-slave labour, genocides, pleasing the Trump administration and constantly disregarding their environmental responsibilities. If even I can ignore all that, you can ignore the politics of this app, and not send threats or start flame wars with me.
Free Palestine. Free Sudan. Free Iran. End slavery in the global south.
No one is free until everyone is free.
(Illustration © Andrea Ebert, Creative Commons license. It depicts photojournalist Fatima Hassona, who was killed alongside her whole family in a targeted IDF airstrike. She appeared in the documentary film Put Your Soul on Your Hand And Walk in 2025, directed by Sepideh Farsi, and was murdered immediately after the film was chosen to Cannes Film Festival, in the same section as my debut feature. She never got to attend. I never got to meet her.)
