0
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The following is a conversation with Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman, his second time on the podcast.
0
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He is a Palestinian American, a Muslim scholar, a civil rights leader, president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and is one of the most influential Muslims in the world.
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Our previous conversation was focused on Islam.
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This time, the focus was on Gaza and Palestine.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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We got Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management software, BetterHelp for mental health, Aidsleep for naps, and AG1 for delicious health.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
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And now, on to the full ad reads.
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As always, no ads in the middle.
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I try to make these interesting, but, friends, if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will too.
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This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
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I use it to sell merch shirts.
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I use it to also go to other people s merch stores and buy it.
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Shopify enables me to wear a bunch of stuff that I m a fan of.
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Also, if we re talking about t-shirts, they do,
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a lot, thousands of integrations and third-party apps, including on-demand printing for T-shirts.
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So you sell on Shopify, and then another company does the printing.
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I ve had a few incredible artists contact me about sharing their art.
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First of all, I m just grateful that artists exist in the world, that artists create.
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It s not the easiest way to make money.
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In fact, it s nearly impossible to make money with art.
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And still they do.
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And still they persevere.
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And still they fight the odds.
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And still they long to create.
0
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And oftentimes, for no reason besides the act of creation itself, the beauty laden in the act of creation, the money doesn t matter, the fame doesn t matter, none of it matters.
0
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Just loving the process of going from the idea to the final thing.
0
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Now I ve just seen some incredible works of art.
0
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And a couple of artists have reached out, wanting to create some art.
0
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I m always deeply, deeply honored by that.
0
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Anyway, I bring that up because maybe some of those arts will end up on a T-shirt.
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And that T-shirt will be sold on Shopify.
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You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex.
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That s all lowercase.
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Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.
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This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
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as the kids in the biz call it, ERP system.
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Takes care of all the messy stuff.
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Everything from the financials to the HR to the inventory and supply to the e-commerce and much, much more, you can check out Reddit.
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Reuse on Reddit.
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And those people can sometimes be a little bit cranky.
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And when it comes to NetSuite, they re not cranky, they re positive.
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That s how you know Netsuite is legit.
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There s a lot of ways to know Netsuite is legit.
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That s kind of like one of the perspectives.
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I often think about the stress, the drama, the complexities, the anxiety, the fears involved in running a company.
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You know, doing research at a university and then hosting a podcast.
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such a beautifully simple existence especially in a close-knit team where everybody likes each other we re all inspired by each other and I don t know
0
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To take a leap into the unknown of a startup is exciting and terrifying.
0
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And I think the terrifying part is not just the sort of sexy things like product design and innovation and the actual sort of engineering, but all the stuff that makes the company work.
0
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It feels like the little things, the details, can matter a lot in defining the culture, how efficient the thing works, the machine of a company works, especially when it has to scale quickly.
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They asked me very nicely to mention that 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, and they asked me to say that NetSuite turned 25 this year.
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Download NetSuite s popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com slash lex.
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That s netsuite.com slash lex for your own KPI checklist.
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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
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They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
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They got therapy for individuals.
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They got therapy for couples.
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The couples thing I recently found out, that s pretty cool.
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That s really cool.
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Anyway, the thing is easy, discreet, affordable, available worldwide.
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On their website, they have a counter of various kinds.
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I like numbers, especially when number go up.
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Number go up is a really exciting thing, I have to be honest.
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And the number I want to mention is 350 million, over 350 million messages, chat, phone, and video sessions.
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Over 34,000 licensed therapists.
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Over 4.4 million people got help.
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Man, talk therapy can be an important part.
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of getting your mind right.
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So, BetterHelp is easy and accessible, so you should try it.
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That s betterhelp.com slash Lex.
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This episode is brought to you by Asleep and its Pod3 cover.
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You can control temperature with an app.
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It is such a fundamental part
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of a joyful existence at home for me.
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That s the thing I look forward to when I m traveling.
0
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That s the thing that makes me feel like I m at home.
0
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I think more than probably anything else.
0
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It s just that process of either going to take a nap or going to sleep for the night.
0
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It s the cold bed.
0
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The ritual of it, the experience of it, the sensation of it, cold bed with a warm blanket.
0
SPEAKER_02
The sleep world period is just a fascinating place.
0
SPEAKER_02
It really is a journey to another place.
0
SPEAKER_02
I do feel like I travel.
0
SPEAKER_02
I travel when I lay down and I m reading a book and then I slowly get tired and then just fade away.
0
SPEAKER_02
But I m not fading.
0
SPEAKER_02
I m being teleported to another place.
0
SPEAKER_02
Sometimes with a dream, sometimes with a calm nothingness.
0
SPEAKER_02
The book I was currently just yesterday reading, it s not something you can read for very long, it s tiny, is The Little Prince.
0
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And it just always makes you smile.
0
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I recommend it highly if you haven t.
0
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It s a kind of children s book, but deeper in meaning.
0
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It really reverberates through the years.
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in its simplicity, in its profundity of its simple message.
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Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to asleep.com slash lux.
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This episode is also brought to you by AG1, the thing I m going to have in about 10 minutes.
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It s an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
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I ve been getting back on the road.
0
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When I m in Austin, Texas, you know, all through the winter,
0
SPEAKER_02
The temperature does dip sometimes but really it can comfortably be at like 50 or 60 where you can just throw on a sweatshirt and still in shorts and just do a good 10, 8, 10, 12 miles, sometimes 5 miles depending on what I m feeling like.
0
SPEAKER_02
Fast 5, slow 5, slow 12, slow 15.
0
SPEAKER_02
One of these days I should do like a double loop and do a marathon.
0
SPEAKER_02
Just on a random Tuesday.
0
SPEAKER_02
Screw it.
0
SPEAKER_02
I m just gonna step outside at some 1.30 p.m.
0
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on a Tuesday and just go like Forrest Gump.
0
SPEAKER_02
And then when I do a full loop, it s gonna be about 12 miles.
0
SPEAKER_02
I ll do it again.
0
SPEAKER_02
Just say, you know what, you re supposed to be done with the run, and you say, you know what, I can keep going.
0
SPEAKER_02
I can do this again.
0
SPEAKER_02
Still to this day, I ve not run a marathon.
0
SPEAKER_02
I ve run 48 miles as part of a David Goggins challenge, but that wasn t continuous miles.
0
SPEAKER_02
There was a lot of rest in between.
0
SPEAKER_02
but continuous 26 miles, I don t know, even 48 miles continuously, I don t know.
0
SPEAKER_02
Of course, your body is capable of much more than you realize and I m sure that is true for my body as well.
0
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Anyway, at the end of the run, I almost always include a nice AG1 drink.
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They ll give you one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com.
0
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
0
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
0
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And now, dear friends, here s Omar Suleiman.
0
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What did you think, feel, and pray for in the days that followed October 7th?
0
SPEAKER_00
I think the first feeling was that there s going to be a lot of death and destruction in Gaza as a result, right?
0
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We always kind of see this where one Israeli casualty leads to hundreds of Palestinian casualties, right?
0
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It s a pretty familiar cycle in some ways, where there are daily transgressions against Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, the checkpoints, the aggression on Masjid al-Aqsa, the settlements expanding, the stories of Palestinian death.
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And then you have rockets fired from Gaza, and that s when the Western press catches up and starts to cover it.
0
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Israel responds with Hellfire missiles, white phosphorus bombs, and the casualties are wildly disproportionate.
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And so I think that, you know, I wasn t surprised.
0
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I prayed for the people that I knew were going to bear the brunt of this outbreak, but the outbreak was predictable.
0
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You wrote a statement on October 9th.
0
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I was hoping to read it, if it s okay.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, go ahead.
0
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Our Palestinian casualties are always your footnotes.
0
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The daily humiliation of occupation ignored.
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The aggression by settlers and soldiers alike on holy sites and souls.
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The annihilation of entire families that follows.
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The devastation of whatever scraps remain in the open air prison of Gaza.
0
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Unsustainable and inhumane.
0
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So if you re waking up to a sudden interest in the region and want to know what s been happening, dig a bit deeper than two weeks and try to read beyond the headlines of a media that has been dehumanizing us for decades.
0
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Again, this was not surprising.
0
SPEAKER_00
This was very predictable.
0
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If you ve been watching what s been unfolding,
0
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before October 7th, 2021.
0
SPEAKER_00
Human Rights Watch puts out the report, Threshold Reached, Israel is an Apartheid State.
0
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Amnesty International 2022, The Crime of Apartheid, showing how all of the legal determinations of apartheid have been reached.
0
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the occupation is only getting more aggressive.
0
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Sharina Baraka, a Palestinian-American journalist, is shot dead in 2022 in front of the world.
0
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The United States says initially that if it is shown that Israel was complicit or that Israel carried out the execution, then there will be consequences.
0
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Of course, once it was shown that Israel was indeed responsible for the bullet that killed Sharina Baraka, the United States did absolutely nothing.
0
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Shireen s funeral was attacked.
0
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The Palbers were beaten.
0
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Her casket almost fell.
0
SPEAKER_00
And again, the world is watching.
0
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The aggression against
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Worshippers in Al-Aqsa is getting worse.
0
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You have the flag march, the Jerusalem flag march, where extremist settlers are let loose and wild on Palestinians by the thousands, chanting things like, Muhammad is dead.
0
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We re going to murder you Arabs, all with the protection of the state, with Israeli soldiers.
0
SPEAKER_00
And throughout this time, it s like something bad is going to happen.
0
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And then 2023 comes along.
0
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You had 13,000 settler units in 2023, a plan of 13,000 settler units, the most in the history of the occupation, the most racist and extremist government, Israeli government, that you have ever had.
0
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And people don t realize that in 2023 alone, over 600 Palestinians had already been killed.
0
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It just doesn t make Western headlines.
0
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And so if you wonder why the American public sees this so much differently than the rest of the world, it s because
0
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American media shows the American public something so much different than what the rest of the world has shown.
0
SPEAKER_00
And so this was a pressure cooker.
0
SPEAKER_00
This was going to explode.
0
SPEAKER_00
It is extremely predictable.
0
SPEAKER_00
You ve given people absolutely no hope.
0
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And so I think that as we re watching that, you know, it s important for us to actually interrogate the ignorance that people have.
0
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of the Palestinian plight, the ignorance of the root causes of this violence, the ignorance of the occupation.
0
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And also ask yourselves, you know, why is it that Israel can violate every single international law on the books?
0
SPEAKER_00
have all these determinations, and the United States keeps on issuing these inconsequential statements, while also at the same time funding these aggressions.
0
SPEAKER_00
So it s like, stop the settler violence.
0
SPEAKER_00
The United States will issue statement after statement, stop the settler violence.
0
SPEAKER_00
Stop the incursions on Masjid al-Aqsa.
0
SPEAKER_00
Stop violating the people in Jerusalem.
0
SPEAKER_00
Stop trying to wipe out the Palestinian people.
0
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Stop openly saying that there is no two-state solution, that we will never allow a Palestinian state to be established.
0
SPEAKER_00
But at the same time, here s your $3 billion check.
0
SPEAKER_00
And if the United Nations issues any sort of resolution against Israel, or if any international body tries to hold Israel accountable,
0
SPEAKER_00
The United States stands in the way of any accountability.
0
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It s important for us to ask why, and so I always tell people, read beyond the headlines.
0
SPEAKER_00
Even now, with the backdrop of a genocide, over 30,000 people have been killed.
0
SPEAKER_00
If you open the front page of most American mainstream sites,
0
SPEAKER_00
You will see stories about the hostages, the Israeli hostages.
0
SPEAKER_00
You will see stories about October 7th, but October 8th is missing, October 9th is missing, October 10th is missing.
0
SPEAKER_00
100 days of genocide are missing, and you ll barely have a story that shows up every once in a while that is still very much so controlled by the Israeli propaganda machine, because while Israel kills Palestinian journalists,
0
SPEAKER_00
It also makes sure that American journalists are only able to tell a certain story.
0
SPEAKER_00
They re only able to see Gaza from a certain perspective.
0
SPEAKER_00
They re only able to speak about Gaza from a certain perspective.
0
SPEAKER_00
And this is well-documented that they have to review their media tapes with Israel before they can publicize them.
0
SPEAKER_00
And so this is state propaganda.
1
SPEAKER_01
at this point.
1
SPEAKER_01
The mainstream media and the United States government are in lockstep telling a very skewed story.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that is leading to a greater sense of frustration.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think the American public has been wronged as well by not knowing what s happening.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you mentioned settlements.
1
SPEAKER_00
So to you, this is bigger than Gaza.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is the West Bank.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is the Palestinian people broadly.
1
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
1
SPEAKER_01
You can t disconnect Gaza from Palestine.
1
SPEAKER_01
You can t disconnect the West Bank from Palestine.
1
SPEAKER_01
You can t disconnect Jerusalem from Palestine, and you can t disconnect the very human story from the political plight.
1
SPEAKER_01
You interviewed Mohammed al-Kurd.
1
SPEAKER_01
You met him.
1
SPEAKER_01
What did the world do when it saw the images of the coded household being taken over by a guy from Brooklyn or Long Island who just shows up and lays claim to their home?
1
SPEAKER_01
What did the world do when American settlers
1
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suddenly decided they could walk into historic Palestinian homes and throw people out of their homes.
1
SPEAKER_01
What did the world do?
1
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And so, yes, this is very much so connected to the broader issue of Palestinian existence.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you realize here, we are erased in peace and we are erased in war.
1
SPEAKER_01
In peace, it s the Abraham Accords.
1
SPEAKER_01
agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which is supposedly to solve the Palestinian problem.
1
SPEAKER_01
The Palestinians are absent from their own fate, from discussions about their own fate.
1
SPEAKER_01
In war, it s the Israel-Hamas war.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s Israel and Gaza.
1
SPEAKER_01
Where are the Palestinian people, the millions of Palestinian people that have either been removed from their land or are being tormented on their land?
1
SPEAKER_01
Where are they in this discussion?
1
SPEAKER_00
What are the Palestinians in the Diaspora feeling?
1
SPEAKER_01
I think deeply frustrated.
1
SPEAKER_01
a great sense of anger, sadness.
1
SPEAKER_01
Every single Palestinian right now knows someone that s been killed.
1
SPEAKER_01
Every single Palestinian is a part of a story of displacement or destruction.
1
SPEAKER_01
Every single Palestinian has a relative that s either missing a limb or a loved one.
1
SPEAKER_01
Every single Palestinian in the world is traumatized by this.
1
SPEAKER_01
And in some ways, being outside of Palestine, being away from it all, hurts even more.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because you see your people being killed and starved and brutalized and slaughtered, and you can t do anything about it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the people around you are justifying that slaughter.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you turn on a TV or if you open a mainstream news site, these sites are justifying your slaughter and people are being killed over there because they look like me, because they re Palestinian like I m Palestinian.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so we re watching this in diaspora with agony.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can t go, we can t.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can t heal our loved ones, we can t comfort the people that are there.
1
SPEAKER_01
I recently spoke to a doctor who s lost 75 relatives, 75 relatives in Gaza, and he s a medical doctor.
1
SPEAKER_01
And all he wants to do is get in there and just use his medical expertise to help his people and he can t.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so we re watching it from afar, but our hearts are there.
1
SPEAKER_01
They are in the buildings that are being destroyed.
1
SPEAKER_01
They re in the hospitals that are being bombed.
1
SPEAKER_01
They are there and they are with the people.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re somebody who s always rushed into the midst of a crisis.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what does it feel like on a personal level to not be able to do that here, to go to Gaza to help?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s really hard.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, when any group of people are killed,
1
SPEAKER_01
my instinct and I think a lot of people is to go there to help, whether it s a natural disaster or especially after an incident of terror, wherever it is, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s rush there and do the best that you can to help people get through it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it s been
1
SPEAKER_01
extremely hard to watch this from afar and feel like I can t do anything about it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so that s why, instead, I think that most of us are driven to continue to be the voice of the voiceless.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, I always say that if they ve made them faceless, they can t make us voiceless.
1
SPEAKER_01
They have reduced our casualties in Palestine to a number.
1
SPEAKER_01
The number is hundreds a day, over 30,000 people.
1
SPEAKER_01
We re averaging 10,000 people a month.
1
SPEAKER_01
The fact that they ve been turned into faceless numbers with no stories, with no humanity, makes it that much more important for us to tell their stories here.
1
SPEAKER_01
and to remind the world that you ve lost your humanity if you can watch this unfold and not even have the decency to call for a ceasefire.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s where we ve reached.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s how low it is right now.
1
SPEAKER_01
Calling for a ceasefire has now become radical.
1
SPEAKER_01
So we have to remind the world that if you re okay with the demolition of
1
SPEAKER_01
an entire town or a city or whatever it is that you want to call Gaza, because it wasn t always the Gaza Strip.
1
SPEAKER_01
But if you re okay with this and you re okay with this casualty count every single day,
1
SPEAKER_01
It s not just them who are being killed, it s your hearts that are dying.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think that when I look back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
1
SPEAKER_01
and I mentioned this, he wrote about Vietnam.
1
SPEAKER_01
He said that if America was to succumb to its spiritual death, the autopsy would read Vietnam.
1
SPEAKER_01
I would say that it would read Gaza now.
1
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of the people, the faces, the voices, one of the people you ve talked about, you ve posted about, you ve written about is Wael al-Khattab and being hospitalized.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s a Palestinian journalist and Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera in Gaza City.
1
SPEAKER_00
What can you tell me about this man?
1
SPEAKER_01
If Wael al-Dahdouh wasn t Palestinian, he d be on the cover of Time Magazine right now.
1
SPEAKER_01
He would be the most celebrated journalist in the world.
1
SPEAKER_01
Wael al-Dahdouh is from Gaza.
1
SPEAKER_01
He has been in Israeli prisons.
1
SPEAKER_01
He has been under Israeli airstrikes.
1
SPEAKER_01
He has seen the worst of the occupation before he s seen the worst of the genocide.
1
SPEAKER_01
while on TV, I mean, and this is insane when you think about it.
1
SPEAKER_01
We have over 100 journalists now, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That s more than any conflict in history that have been killed.
1
SPEAKER_01
And there is sufficient evidence by international watchdogs that this is intentional, that journalists have been killed intentionally.
1
SPEAKER_01
But then their families, while it was reporting on TV, when an airstrike hits his wife, two kids, and a grandchild.
1
SPEAKER_01
He goes to the scene and he said this, you know, you never expect as a journalist to be the subject of the story.
1
SPEAKER_01
Suddenly the camera s on him, mourning over his dead wife and kids and grandkid.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he s saying, he even says in Arabic, he says, they re taking it out on our children.
1
SPEAKER_01
They re taking it out on our children.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, I ve heard this from multiple people that have had relatives targeted that I wish it was me instead.
1
SPEAKER_01
He gets back on camera the same day because he feels a responsibility to continue to cover the lives of the people of Gaza.
1
SPEAKER_01
He understands that his story, as devastating as it is, is not unique in regards to the people of Gaza, that there are many people whose families have been killed in airstrikes.
1
SPEAKER_01
All 2 million people have been traumatized in some way.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so he gets back on camera, tells the story again.
1
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And then he is targeted himself.
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His arm struck, his cameraman, Samer Abu Dhaqqa, dies in front of him.
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He bleeds out.
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Wa el watches him bleed out for hours.
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And while any aid workers try to reach them,
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in the building that they were in, snipers would shoot all of those that were rushing to Samar.
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So he watches his cameraman and one of his best friends bleed out to death.
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Wael goes to the hospital, his arm is wrapped up, gets treatment.
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He s back on camera the next day.
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A few weeks later.
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Another child is killed again with his friend in a car.
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So this was a targeted airstrike.
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His son is driving and his son and his best friend are hitting an airstrike.
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What leads the funeral prayer is back on camera again and speaks with such dignity, with such compassion.
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You know, one of the things that
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always gets to me as a Palestinian, right, and as a Muslim too, is that we are portrayed to be these beasts and savages.
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Tell me a man that would be put through what was put through and still stand on that pulpit and in front of the world with such dignity, with such grace, continues to tell the story.
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Wa el has become a hero to many of us, and he would be a hero in a world that wasn t anti-Palestinian.
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And unfortunately, Wa el has not only lost his family, he s not only lost much of his own existence, but Wa el is part of the greater story of Erasure.
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So even though he s telling the story of the people of Gaza, and he is the story of the people of Gaza,
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Most people will never learn about Walid Dahdouh.
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You have posted videos and written about what is happening in Gaza since October 7th.
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What has been happening there, the individual stories and the broader impact on the two million people there?
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Gaza has been described as the world s largest open-air prison.
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Unemployment, blockaded from all directions, no airport.
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regular added restrictions placed even on their ability to fish.
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So every aspect of Ghazdan life has been under occupation.
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I would argue that it s an injustice to even call it an open-air prison, because
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Inmates are not bombed in prisons routinely by the most sophisticated weapons in the world.
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Regular bombardment of Gaza, every single person in Gaza has lived through multiple rounds of bombardment.
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It is deeply distressing.
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I remember in 2021, there was an image that I will never forget of children having to go back to school
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after the bombardment of 2021.
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And next to them, they would have the empty chairs and the posters of the child that used to sit in that chair.
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I think what encapsulates it most for me.
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An image that I grew up with was the image of Mohammed Durra, who was in his father s lap over 20 years ago.
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And his father was begging for Israel to spare his child.
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And Mohammed was murdered in his lap.
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And you know what happened this last round?
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His other kids were murdered.
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So Muhammad s brothers were murdered and his father s been on the run.
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Every single person in Gaza has witnessed multiple wars, has witnessed the greatest suffocation of occupation.
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has even had their diets restricted, and has suffered under Israel state policy, which is called mowing the lawn.
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And everyone should look this up.
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This is what Israeli ministers refer to as routine bombardment of Gaza, mowing the lawn, which shows you that before they called us animals, they considered us insects.
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And unfortunately, the casualty counts get higher and higher every time.
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and people become more and more desperate, more and more helpless.
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Gaza has been, unfortunately, the worst manifestation of anti-Palestinian bigotry.
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It s already, I mean, 60% of the population is a refugee population.
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What that means, and people do need to understand this, is that people move to Gaza from other parts of occupied territory to find refuge.
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And we re practically living on top of each other.
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There are people that are in the Gaza Strip that know that they had homes right beyond that apartheid wall, and those homes were stolen from them, and they can t even enter that territory anymore.
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And they know that on the other side of that wall, there s life.
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On the other side of that wall, there s opportunity.
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On the other side of that wall, you have a passport, you have an airport, you have the ability to travel, you have the ability to export and import.
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You can dream.
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But behind that wall,
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You are to live until the next airstrike.
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You are to live until Israel mows the lawn again and hope that you re not part of the grass.
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That s what Gaza has been all of these years.
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So pragmatically and psychologically, it is very difficult to flourish when you re just waiting for more bombardment.
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Because you know that it s around the corner.
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You always know when you live in Gaza that it s only a matter of time before the next bombs drop.
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You know if you re in Gaza that
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you are waiting for your death.
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People dream about going out in the world and pursuing education.
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People dream about going out in the world and pursuing economic opportunity.
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In Gaza, your idea of opportunity is an opportunity to see the next year.
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That has been the case.
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And so when we talk about this not existing in a vacuum, if people only hear about Gaza
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on October 7th, that is a major part of the problem.
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And that is, again, part of the problem of our ignorance and our apathy, right?
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Why is it that the plight of the people of Gaza is not brought up until an attack happens on Israel?
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I ve gotten a chance to witness a destroyed school in Ukraine.
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It s something that
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is really difficult to see.
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You have over a hundred destroyed mosques.
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Every university in Gaza has been demolished.
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We re seeing TikTok videos
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of Israeli soldiers laughing and singing as they press a button and we see the demolition of every single university in Gaza.
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Schools have been reduced to rubble.
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There s a cultural genocide as well.
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I want you to think about what you saw in Ukraine.
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Look, imagine coming back to school in Gaza.
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and some destroyed building.
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You re missing legs.
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You re missing arms.
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You have white phosphorus burns.
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Have you ever seen what white phosphorus does to a person?
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There s a reason why it s a war crime.
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You have white phosphorus burns.
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Your mom s dead.
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Your dad s dead.
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All of your uncles and aunts are dead.
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All of your siblings are dead.
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Somehow you got pulled out of the rubble.
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You know, in my own family, my father s in-laws, my father remarried after my mother passed away, and they re in Gaza.
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All of them were killed in an airstrike except for an elderly aunt who somehow made it out of the rubble a day later.
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If you re a child that s been pulled out of the rubble, what are you going to grow up with?
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I mean, what are you supposed to feel?
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What are you supposed to think?
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And then you have, you know, racist commentators that say,
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They could have turned that into a Singapore.
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You know, the Palestinians are the authors of their own destruction, because if they wanted to, they could have turned this into a place of prosperity.
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But they keep on bringing destruction upon themselves.
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So at the root of this is a bigotry.
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And again, this idea that Palestinians are savages, they re animals, and the only way to deal with them is to continuously mow the lawn while simultaneously expanding the occupation and erasing anything that was ever called Palestine and any human being that was ever called a Palestinian.
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So those kids growing up in Gaza
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now, to you, they have almost no choice but to have hatred for Israel?
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It s human.
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I mean, look, any child that is under that type of oppression is going to hate their oppressor.
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I don t care who you are.
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I don t care what you are.
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But here s my problem with how that gets brought up.
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You re talking about the future of the security of Israel.
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Even some people that speak about it seemingly from a place of being well-meaning that say the only way that Israel can have its security is to stop killing Palestinians.
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And so the future of Israel depends upon Palestinians not hating Israel so much.
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And so we ve got to stop tormenting these people so that they don t grow up to want to torment us.
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You ve already decided then whose life is worth more than the other.
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And so instead of talking about the future of Israeli lives, why don t you talk about the present of Palestinian lives?
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Instead of talking about whether or not your state will be secure in the future, talk to me about why you re killing children now.
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Two thirds of the 30,000 civilians are women and children.
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And so we can t talk about what these children are going to grow up with
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we should talk about whether or not these children are going to grow up in the first place.
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And that should be what dominates our conscience right now and what drives our policies and what drives our emotions right now.
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So when I had a conversation with Elon Musk, he suggested that what Israel should do is conspicuous acts of kindness.
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So do as much positive
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things in Gaza as possible on a basic individual human level and at a policy level, at every level.
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What do you think about that?
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I mean, you don t pass out candy in a concentration camp.
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You end the occupation.
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And so there has to be a solution that is beyond merely acts of kindness.
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At the end of the day, if you re occupying a people,
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you have to remove that occupation.
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Apartheid is not dealt with by acts of kindness on the part of the occupying power.
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Apartheid is dealt with by ending apartheid.
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And so, there has to be a level of accountability.
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It s not just acts of kindness.
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It s not just
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treating the people with more dignity.
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It s giving them the ability to pursue their own dignity.
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There s a reason why it s called Palestinian self-determination.
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The United States likes to use it in all of its inconsequential statements that we need Palestinian self-determination too.
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But the United States also voted against 138 states in the United Nations to allow for Palestinian self-determination.
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Self-determination means I get to pursue my own course of worth.
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I get to pursue my own happiness.
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I don t have to depend on the benevolence of my occupier, and when my occupier feels like throwing me a few more crumbs, it has to end.
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There has to be a point now where the world says, this is not sustainable.
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It s not just about ending the present genocide.
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A ceasefire is the bare minimum.
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I think any decent human being would be calling for a ceasefire right now, but at some point you cease occupation, you cease apartheid, because what led to the ability
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of Israel to carry out a genocide without any accountability was that the global arena has permitted it to do so, largely due to American obstruction of justice.
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Is violence an effective method of resistance?
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So the framework that I would propose is that
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Dr. King mentioned that peace is not the absence of violence, it s the presence of justice.
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And so occupation and apartheid are violent even in their most benevolent manifestations.
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The default of occupation is that it is unjustified.
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The default of apartheid is that it is unjustified and it must be dealt with.
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The default of resistance to occupation and apartheid is that it is justified, but there can be transgressions even in resisting occupation and apartheid, right?
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And I come to this from an Islamic perspective.
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My moral framework is Islam.
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The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was outraged when he saw a woman or a child that was dead from the other side, the side of his persecutors.
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And so, yes, we have a saying as Muslims that they are not our teachers.
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Our oppressors are not our teachers.
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But the concept of resistance to occupation,
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It is morally justified.
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It is justified by international law.
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Any occupied people have the right to defend themselves.
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We talk about Israel s right to defend itself.
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Israel is the occupier.
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Any occupied people, by international law, have the right to defend themselves.
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And any occupation is unjustified and illegal.
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And so that s where I start from.
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That s the point that I come to this with.
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I think that the problem is, is that the Palestinians are told, find better ways to resist, and then they are demonized when they try to find any other way to resist.
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You know, if you go back a few years ago, you had the Great Return March.
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People in Gaza marched to the wall in what was one of the most inspiring protests or demonstrations that I had ever seen.
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March to the wall.
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Nonviolent protest.
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And snipers took out their legs.
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AP actually documented.
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that Israeli snipers had knee counts, where you had an Israeli soldier that would say, I took out 45 knees.
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They actually had to register a scroll of knee counts.
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And so you have all these kids in Gaza walking around without legs now, because they were targeted by snipers when they marched to the wall.
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We re told to find methods of nonviolent resistance, but when we boycott, when we launch, you know, boycotts around the world,
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in response to this transgression, in response to this ongoing oppression that the world powers have shown either the inability or the unwillingness to rein in, we re told that that s anti-Semitic, even though it is based on the South African method of bringing an end to the apartheid regime there.
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So don t respond with violence.
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Don t respond non-violently.
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Don t protest.
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Don t try to use people power in the face of global impotence at the political level.
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Instead, let s just keep talking about the two-state solution.
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And while talking about the two-state solution, if you were to look at a map, under every single Israeli regime,
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conservative or liberal, whatever it is, the settlements have expanded.
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More Palestinian land has disappeared.
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More Palestinians have been dispossessed.
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More Palestinians have been killed.
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And so we have these little pieces of land that keep on shrinking.
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And Jerusalem keeps disappearing.
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And there s aggression, whether Palestinians are resisting or not.
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But then we re told, why can t you people just pursue peace?
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Why can t you just believe in a better way?
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All along, we re hearing Israeli ministers become far more radical and open about their intentions to wipe us off the face of the earth.
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And that is actually their policy.
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It s not just slogans.
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It s not fringe elements.
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Actual Israeli ministers, starting from the prime minister himself, who has executed a policy of the removal of all Palestinian lands and Palestinian lives.
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And then we re told, peace, peace, peace, peace.
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And it is awfully ugly when you use the language of peace to suffocate the work of justice.
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You know, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of his early sermons was something along the lines of when peace is obnoxious.
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when peace is obnoxious.
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It was in the 1950s around the Montgomery bus boycott, and he talked about how this obsession with the language of peace is usually used to try to keep people
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in status quo and make them complacent with their miserable situation.
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That has been the story of the Palestinian people, that they ve been told that if you do things differently, then you will find peace.
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But everything the Palestinians have tried, inside and outside, has been met with repression.
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The most violent forms of it, they re in Gaza and beyond.
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And so, look, I start from the place of wanting to see peace.
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I want to see a situation in which no innocent people lose their lives.
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But we have to analyze the situation with some justice, with some fairness.
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What would any group of people do in this situation?
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That doesn t mean that you hope for hell.
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That means that you analyze the existing circumstances of hell, which was life in Gaza even before October 7th.
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That said, you did talk about wahelak taktu and dignity, and you mentioned transgressions.
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So there is places where violence can go too far.
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Absolutely.
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So violence, again, the point is, is that you ask yourself why we ve been silent about the violence all of this time.
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And you know what?
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When people say, well, what about this?
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Well, what about that?
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My response is this.
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What I would love to see
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is effective international bodies of justice being able to rein in any party that has committed an act of aggression or committed an act of injustice and hold them accountable.
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Any reasonable human being would say, yeah, you know what?
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There should be effective international bodies that can rein in parties that can t be reined in domestically, that could stop the violence, that could assign blame properly,
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and then have methods of accountability.
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The problem is, is that Israel has been made invincible in the international arena because of the United States.
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And then we wonder why there s such a rise in global anti-American sentiment.
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It s not because of American freedom.
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It s because America is directly participating, the United States government is directly participating in the worst genocide that we have ever seen in our lives, right?
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Playing out on screen.
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you know, on social media, and we can t do anything about it.
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So I think that the point is, is that we need those international bodies.
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We need methods of effective accountability.
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And I would love to see blame properly assigned, and anyone that kills any innocent human being
2
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take into account, anyone that is guilty of a war crime, take into account, we have to ask ourselves, why is it that Israel has violated over 63 United Nations resolutions, has expanded its occupation, has killed over 600 Palestinians before October 7th?
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Why is it that Israel cannot be held accountable?
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And so when you talk about, you know, words that get thrown around, you know, that are used to justify violence against more innocent people,
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You know, when I m asked about terrorism, is it only terrorism if it s a non-state actor?
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If someone s sitting inside a room, you know, of suits and can press a button and terrorize thousands of people and murder innocent people with no consequences,
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How is that not terrorism?
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So if terrorism is only to be assigned to non-state actors, then it s a word without function.
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In fact, it s a word that justifies more terror that is then rained upon innocent populations.
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We have to have moral consistency.
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Children should not be killed.
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Non-combatants should not be targeted.
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We can all agree upon that.
2
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Why aren t there proper investigative bodies and then proper international bodies of accountability then?
2
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that can execute their findings in a way that makes the world a better place, in a way that actually brings about more peace.
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And so, you know, I think this is where we re at right now, and this is the frustration, and this is the place that the Palestinians have been left.
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So to you, violence becomes terrorism.
2
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when women and children, non-combatants are killed no matter who is doing the killing.
2
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Absolutely, absolutely.
2
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In America, for you, for other Palestinians, other Muslims in your community, what has all of this been like?
2
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It feels like there s a return to some of the days after 9-11, the dehumanization, the feeling of complete disregard for our humanity at the level of government, at the level of media.
2
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The feeling of an increase in surveillance, the feeling of an increase in bigotry, people are losing their jobs, and people are being berated on campuses, in grocery stores, and people are being killed.
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I went to the funeral of a six-year-old boy.
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who was killed directly due to anti-Palestinian propaganda.
2
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And so I think that a lot of us are feeling a return to that, but we also refuse to be cornered into a position where we are told to perpetually condemn acts of violence and not speak about the violence that s committed against us here or abroad.
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Can you tell the story of this boy, Wadi Al-Fayyum?
2
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He s a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed 26 times in his home in Plainfield Township, Illinois.
2
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It was found to be a hate crime motivated by Islamophobia.
2
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And the attacker said, you Muslims must die.
2
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So before Wadeer was killed, Wadeer was killed on a Saturday.
2
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It was the immediate Saturday after October 7th.
2
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I remember on Friday.
2
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Media starts to reach out to every imam in the country, every Muslim leader in the country, and say, what are you going to do about this global day of jihad?
2
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What are you going to do about the global day of jihad?
2
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It s like, what are you talking about?
2
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It s like, well, Hamas has called for a global day of jihad, so how are you going to stop Muslims from attacking people?
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So it s Friday, and I m like, well, this is the first I m hearing from you.
2
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And I remember responding to a local reporter.
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Most people I just ignored.
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I responded to a local reporter.
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I said, I ve got people in my community that have already lost 10, 15 relatives at that point.
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Now it s 20, 30.
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And you haven t said a word.
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And now you re reaching out to me about the potential violence of Muslims in America.
2
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This is great.
2
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This is just like 9-11, right?
2
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What are you going to do to restrain you angry Muslims?
2
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from responding to what s happening overseas and responding to the call of a global day of jihad.
2
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Guess what, that night?
2
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This man takes out a military knife and attacks a six-year-old boy, a six-year-old Palestinian boy.
2
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By the way, it gets worse the more details that you know.
2
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And I recently had a chance to go and speak to his mom because she was in the hospital when I was there for the funeral.
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So I had a chance to visit her not too long ago.
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And she was attacked also.
2
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She was attacked first.
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It was actually their landlord.
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So Hanan, the mother, was at home with Wadir, six-year-old boy.
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Landlord comes in and with absolutely no emotion, just charges at her.
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Starts with her.
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She was able to fight him off.
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Stabbed her initially seven or eight times with a military grade knife.
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She fought him off, escaped to call 911.
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And while she s calling 911, she hears Wadir.
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Wadir ran up to the man, calling him Uncle Joe.
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because the landlord prior to that had been kind to them.
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Used to give Wadir toys.
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Wadir had an infectious, beautiful smile.
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Every picture you see of that kid, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful smile.
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And so Wadir runs up to him, says, Uncle Joe, he runs up to him to give him a hug, even though he s carrying a military grade knife with blood on it.
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it, because Wadiyar doesn t believe that harm can come to him from that man.
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And Hanan didn t think that he would do anything to her kid, even in that fit of rage.
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The last thing that she says she heard was, oh no.
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You know, Wadiyar says, oh no, and then he starts to stab him 26 times, says, you Muslims must die.
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SPEAKER_01
Usually in a scene like that, police are hesitant to classify something as a hate crime.
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It was classified as a hate crime the very same day.
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The thing is, is that who s complicit in that hate crime?
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What filled that man s head for him to believe that he was doing an act of good by murdering a six-year-old Palestinian boy?
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And in reality,
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Uncle Joe was motivated by President Joe Biden, who repeated a debunked report that there were 40 beheaded Israeli babies.
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And he said, I saw 40 beheaded Israeli babies.
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The White House walked it back afterwards in a statement that no one reads because it was factually false.
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But Uncle Joe heard it.
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and had been binge-watching media about these violent Palestinians, and suddenly the propaganda overcame his own humanity and what he knew of that family.
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And he went in and ruined their lives.
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And, you know, now, you know, just like any mom, you know, she hasn t moved a thing.
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His bike is still in the same place it was.
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His toys are still in the same place.
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She s left with this great void, this great emptiness.
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If that was the only crime, it would be enough.
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to wake this country up and say, oh no, this is not where we need to go.
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Oh no, right?
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The last thing she heard him say was, oh no.
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SPEAKER_01
If that was it, and I got the news, by the way, when I was ironically at a protest.
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SPEAKER_01
We were protesting on Saturday, downtown Dallas, and I started getting all these texts about what happened in Chicago.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh no, right?
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Like, no Muslims attacked anyone.
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The media was in a frenzy over the global day of jihad.
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SPEAKER_01
I got called by national news outlets and local news outlets.
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What are you going to do about Muslims that are going to turn into monsters and start killing people in the streets?
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Next thing we know, we have a dead six-year-old Palestinian boy.
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Went to his funeral, and that kind of speaks to the proximity part of things.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it felt like stepping into Gaza, right, for a moment.
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It didn t feel like America.
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Didn t feel like America.
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Felt like stepping into Gaza.
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His casket was wrapped in a Palestinian flag.
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There was not just sadness at his funeral, but a deep sense of anger.
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At the funeral, some of his family members shouted out, Joe Biden, you did this.
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Joe Biden, you did this.
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And, you know, I remember,
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The next day, it was right after the funeral, looking at the front page of CNN, and the story of Wadir was buried in the last section.
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SPEAKER_01
And it was right over all these meaningless ads.
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And I thought to myself, that s it.
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Like, if this was an Arab man—let s be real.
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SPEAKER_01
Let s be honest here.
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SPEAKER_01
If this was a Palestinian landlord that stabbed a six-year-old Jewish boy to death, this would have gotten more attention.
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SPEAKER_01
It would have been the front page of the news, and rightfully so, people would have grieved
3
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over the insanity of stabbing a six-year-old boy 26 times.
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SPEAKER_01
Wadir became an afterthought the very next day.
3
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And so it s an extension of the bigotry, an extension of the racism, and there s so much that happens after that.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s the terrible stabbing of Detroit synagogue president Samantha Wall.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s horrible, she was stabbed in her driveway.
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SPEAKER_01
Immediately, front page of all the news outlets, immediately, it s the main news story, and immediately the implications are, there go the Muslims, the Palestinians have lost their minds.
3
SPEAKER_01
The Muslims have, they are who we thought they were, right?
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SPEAKER_01
That s what it is, they are who we thought they were.
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They went and they stabbed a synagogue president.
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It turned out it wasn t a hate crime, although it s an awful crime.
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It turned out it wasn t a hate crime.
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Wadir is an afterthought.
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I had people reach out to me afterwards expressing condolences, and I responded to them, those who have justified the genocide in Gaza, but that we re somehow offering condolences for Wadir, privately, of course.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, by the way, if a Muslim would have committed that crime, every single Muslim leader would have had press in front of their door to condemn that crime.
3
SPEAKER_01
We would have all been made complicit.
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I had people reach out to me, say, I m sorry about what happened with Wadir.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s terrible.
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You know, I saw you at the funeral praying for you.
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SPEAKER_01
My response was, what s the difference between Wadir and a boy in Gaza?
3
SPEAKER_01
What s the difference between me and Wadir?
3
SPEAKER_01
I m a Palestinian child.
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SPEAKER_01
My parents made it out of Palestine.
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SPEAKER_01
I was born in this country.
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SPEAKER_01
If I didn t have the opportunity to grow up here and to become the person that I became, you would have been justifying my murder right now.
3
SPEAKER_01
You would have been okay with my genocide.
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SPEAKER_01
You would have been giving the talking points to the press to erase me.
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SPEAKER_01
But you feel sorry because Wadir was killed.
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SPEAKER_01
And I think this is when we say that anti-Palestinian bigotry is an extension of Islamophobia.
3
SPEAKER_01
If a mosque gets targeted here, people rightfully rush to protect that mosque and say, this is horrible and it shouldn t happen.
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SPEAKER_01
But when you have an Israeli soldier bombing a mosque and laughing like a maniac on video, and it s going viral on TikTok, and there is no way to rein that in, and you don t have a word of condemnation about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, you are standing in the way of a ceasefire.
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SPEAKER_01
then you re a hypocrite.
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SPEAKER_01
There s no way around it.
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SPEAKER_01
You are a hypocrite.
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SPEAKER_01
What s the difference between a mosque here and a mosque there?
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SPEAKER_01
What s the difference between a Palestinian life here and a Palestinian life there?
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SPEAKER_01
If you re okay with me being murdered there, don t say that you care about my life here.
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SPEAKER_01
And so that hypocrisy has been laid bare.
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SPEAKER_01
We have said multiple times, masks are falling.
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SPEAKER_01
Masks are falling.
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People that we thought were decent people somehow have found it in themselves to justify a genocide
3
SPEAKER_01
There is no shortage at this point of videos.
3
SPEAKER_01
And again, when you, you know, I could have made the excuse for you maybe in the first few weeks, you know, that you hadn t seen enough.
3
SPEAKER_01
But with all social media suppression across all platforms, there isn t a single platform that hasn t suppressed Palestinian voices.
3
SPEAKER_01
With all that suppression, there are enough videos at this point.
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SPEAKER_01
of children whose heads have been blown off, of children walking around without limbs, of parents carrying their kids in bags—not body bags, I mean grocery bags, because they don t even have body bags—and screaming out and saying, why are you doing this to me?
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SPEAKER_01
Make it stop.
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And you come back and you tell that person, it s Hamas s fault.
3
SPEAKER_01
Where is your humanity?
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SPEAKER_01
Where is your sense of decency?
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SPEAKER_01
Isn t that the logic of the so-called terrorism that you condemn?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, you can wipe out entire populations.
3
SPEAKER_01
You should have talked to Hamas.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s Hamas s fault.
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SPEAKER_01
All the kids in the West Bank, like, where does this end?
3
SPEAKER_01
So what are your moral boundaries here, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So if that s the logic that you re okay with,
3
SPEAKER_01
Then in that case, when there s a mass shooter in a school in the United States, just bomb the whole school.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, bomb the whole town if you can t find the mass shooter.
3
SPEAKER_01
Where does this end for you?
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SPEAKER_01
And so when I say people have lost their humanity, they re killing us overseas, but their hearts are dying.
3
SPEAKER_01
People have lost their humanity.
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SPEAKER_01
They ve lost any sense.
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SPEAKER_01
of morality and their moral boundaries.
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SPEAKER_01
And being there and, I mean, participating in his funeral, it was anger.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not used to that.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not used to that.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, I m an imam, I pastor to people.
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SPEAKER_01
I went to Christ Church.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that was the worst I d ever seen before, where 50 Muslims were killed by a white supremacist.
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SPEAKER_01
And he murdered them with such callousness.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I remember being at those funerals.
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SPEAKER_01
And yeah, I mean, there was anger, but it was just profound sadness, because at least the rest of the world could all come out in one voice and say, that s wrong.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, most of the world sees what s happening in Gaza and says, this is disgusting.
3
SPEAKER_01
Most of the world sees this and says, this is a genocide.
3
SPEAKER_01
But we happen to live in this bubble here where we re constantly being told, we did this to ourselves.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s the same logic that led to our initial expulsion, 1948.
3
SPEAKER_01
What was the crime of those 700,000 Palestinians that were driven out of their home in 1948?
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SPEAKER_01
What did they do?
3
SPEAKER_01
They did not commit the Holocaust.
3
SPEAKER_01
They didn t have a mass murder of Jews at their hands.
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SPEAKER_01
What did they do?
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SPEAKER_01
What crime were they paying for?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it s been the consistent theme.
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SPEAKER_01
This is the story of our people, not since October 7th.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is the story of our people for the last 75 years.
3
SPEAKER_00
There is a deep geopolitical connection between the United States and that part of the world.
3
SPEAKER_00
What is the role of US politicians in all of this?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, James Baldwin wrote about how Israel was created as an extension of United States policy to be a colonial entity at the gates of the Middle East, and to function essentially as a military base out there, and as a means of extending its policy throughout the Middle East.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it has functioned as such.
3
SPEAKER_01
The United States is not an honest peace broker.
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SPEAKER_01
It never has been an honest peace broker.
3
SPEAKER_01
The United States has never shown any meaningful inclination towards peace, has guarded and protected Israel from international accountability, has made Israel invincible.
3
SPEAKER_01
The United States is not just responsible at the governmental level for
3
SPEAKER_01
the genocide.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s responsible for letting it get to this point in the first place.
3
SPEAKER_01
We have funded that arsenal.
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SPEAKER_01
We ve given them the most sophisticated weapons in the world to test on the most desperate population in the world.
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SPEAKER_01
We ve given them the weapons
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It s been bipartisan.
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SPEAKER_01
We have issued at most inconsequential statements of condemnation, but at the same time stopped any international body of law from actually holding it accountable.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the United States at this point, unfortunately has rightfully lost all credibility.
3
SPEAKER_01
It should remove itself.
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SPEAKER_01
from this because it is not an honest peace broker.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think Americans are probably sick of us paying for wars in general.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think Americans are probably sick of our tax dollars going to funding a genocide while we have a rise of homelessness and income disparity here in the United States.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that Americans probably don t like that we re making ourselves so deeply unpopular
3
SPEAKER_01
in the world because of Israel s actions.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, in the immediate moment, make this stop.
3
SPEAKER_01
The United States could have had a ceasefire a long time ago.
3
SPEAKER_01
The United States could have ended this genocide right away.
3
SPEAKER_01
The reason why this is continuing
3
SPEAKER_01
is because of U.S.
3
SPEAKER_01
foreign policy.
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SPEAKER_01
And in the process of Joe Biden talking about managing this crisis and talking about making things better, there have only been more bills that have come out of Congress.
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SPEAKER_01
In fact, he s bypassed Congress to fund the arsenal, to keep replenishing the arsenal.
3
SPEAKER_01
Stop paying for weapons.
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SPEAKER_01
Stop paying for someone else s war crimes.
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SPEAKER_01
Stop protecting another country as it commits these war crimes.
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SPEAKER_01
And if you can t be an honest peace broker, get out of the process.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s money that you just mentioned and bills, and then there s rhetoric, which you also criticized, that he spoke about the beheaded babies and things of that nature.
3
SPEAKER_00
So where has Joe Biden fallen short?
3
SPEAKER_01
We need another podcast.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s going to take a few hours to talk about where Joe Biden has failed.
3
SPEAKER_01
For one, the first time he seemed to find the word Palestinian in his vocabulary was when he accused the Palestinians of lying about
3
SPEAKER_01
the death toll in Gaza.
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SPEAKER_01
And then that turned out to also be false.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, the numbers that were coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry, according to multiple international bodies, have been underreporting Palestinian casualty counts.
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SPEAKER_01
Israeli intelligence has said that the civilian count or the death toll is actually higher than what s been coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry.
3
SPEAKER_01
So he s failed on that front.
3
SPEAKER_01
He has failed to speak to Palestinian humanity.
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SPEAKER_01
He has spoken with deep passion and concern, as has Anthony Blinken, about the devastation in Israel and the way that people are feeling in Israel, and has shown nothing of that sort towards Palestinians.
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SPEAKER_01
We don t want the rhetoric.
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SPEAKER_01
We really don t want the rhetoric.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, when people say, call for a ceasefire,
3
SPEAKER_01
The United States has had an opportunity and has an opportunity to really walk back and reflect on its entire policy towards Israel-Palestine.
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SPEAKER_01
This is a moment of reflection.
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SPEAKER_01
This is a moment of restoration, if you want it to be, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And to think about what we ve enabled in the first place.
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SPEAKER_01
He s shown absolutely no real empathy.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that he is under great delusion in thinking that the Muslim community or people of conscience are gonna forgive this, are gonna forget this come November.
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SPEAKER_01
You can t tell us that, well, at least I don t have the Trump Muslim ban while also carrying out a genocide primarily against Muslims and think that the Muslims are still gonna vote for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so we will make him hear us at the polls and any politician
3
SPEAKER_01
for Congress or otherwise that has not called for a ceasefire that has been a part of this dehumanization, we will make sure that we see support for them in any way as a community.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s only right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So Biden has lost or is losing the hearts and the support of the Muslim
3
SPEAKER_00
Palestinian people and Muslim people in America.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if you ever had the hearts of the Muslim community, to be honest with you.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I personally was never a Joe Biden fan.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of people felt the same.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, this country, unfortunately, leads to the way that our political system is built is that you re always voting for the lesser of the two evils.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s always the way that it is.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s analyzing which evil is lesser, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And when people say,
3
SPEAKER_01
If you vote for Donald Trump, and I m not planning to vote for Donald Trump either, but if you don t vote for Joe Biden, right, if you don t vote for Joe Biden, right, then you are destroying democracy.
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SPEAKER_01
I m like a democracy that s given us a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is already a failed democracy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so he never had the hearts and minds of the Muslim community.
3
SPEAKER_01
People always saw past his rhetoric.
3
SPEAKER_01
He always has had a terrible disposition towards Palestine.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s always had a terrible disposition towards the Muslim world.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, his segregationist past comes out sometimes when he starts talking about the Muslim world, and you can hear the racism in his voice, and you can hear the way that he talks about Palestinian life in such devalued fashion.
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SPEAKER_01
So he lost us a long time ago, but he s definitely not getting us back after this in any way.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I can t speak for all Muslims, but I think that come November, he and all of those politicians, especially in swing states that have turned their backs on the Muslim community, and not just the Muslim community, by the way, 67% of this country wants a ceasefire.
3
SPEAKER_01
Three-fourths of Democratic voters want a ceasefire.
3
SPEAKER_01
Half of Republican voters want a ceasefire.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not just the Muslim community.
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SPEAKER_00
This is not some radical opinion to call for a ceasefire.
4
SPEAKER_00
And every single politician that has refused to hear us is going to pay a price at the polls, as they should.
4
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t mean that we re under any illusion that the other side promises us anything better.
4
SPEAKER_00
In fact, it feels like Republicans have simply rushed to out-racist the Democrats, to outpace them.
4
SPEAKER_00
in terms of talking about how they re going to be more unapologetic in supporting Israel unconditionally, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, it s been pathetic, but something has to change.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that Americans of conscience have to look at how this failed political system has hurt people here and abroad.
4
SPEAKER_00
And talk about how to transcend that with just more humanity.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, when you have 67% of the American public that wants a ceasefire, but only a handful of congressmen.
4
SPEAKER_00
out of over 500 can muster up the courage in the face of these super PACs to say that, you know, we should stop the genocide, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, what are you asking for here?
4
SPEAKER_00
You re asking for the genocide to stop.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re asking for Israeli hostages to be brought home.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re asking for Palestinian prisoners to be released.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re asking for peace and to start carving the path out.
4
SPEAKER_00
to end this once and for all, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
In the most ambiguous way possible, by the way, because there aren t many radical American politicians, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the way that the system is.
4
SPEAKER_00
In the most ambiguous, bare way possible.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you can t even bring yourself to do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is already a failed democracy then.
4
SPEAKER_00
All the while, again,
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, it always boggles my mind, if you re from the America First crew, what s America First about?
4
SPEAKER_00
Funding billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel while it carries out this genocide, while people are starving here.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you re part of the human rights crew and, you know, progressive crew, it s, you know, they have a term called progressive except Palestine, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
P-E-P, progressive except Palestine.
4
SPEAKER_00
Where are all your notions of social justice?
4
SPEAKER_00
You talk about policing here, but you don t talk about who trains our police departments in many major cities and the type of brutality that s being carried out there.
4
SPEAKER_00
You talk about human rights at the border here, but you don t talk about the assault on people at the border there.
4
SPEAKER_00
You talk about all of these things here, but you somehow use the exact same framings against the people there.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s exposed.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think the moral bankruptcy
4
SPEAKER_00
of both political polar opposites that exist in this country right now, and hopefully evoked a greater societal sentiment to say, this is ridiculous.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, one of the things that is happening is that more people are getting their news outside of legacy media outlets.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can t hide that many dead babies anymore.
4
SPEAKER_00
You just can t.
4
SPEAKER_00
More people have woken up to the Palestinian plight now than ever before.
4
SPEAKER_00
More people are outraged that this has been our American foreign policy all throughout Democratic and Republican administrations.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is what we ve been paying for?
4
SPEAKER_00
This is what we ve been excusing?
4
SPEAKER_00
And Israeli leaders literally spit in the faces of whoever the American president is,
4
SPEAKER_00
and says, yeah, we don t care what they tell us to do.
4
SPEAKER_00
American leadership says we re pushing Israel to minimize the casualties, to get less indiscriminate with its bombing, to manage the crisis, get a few more humanitarian corridors in, to make sure that Gaza is not evacuated and not ethnically cleansed, to make sure Palestinians can come back.
4
SPEAKER_00
And Netanyahu comes on TV and says, from the river to the sea.
4
SPEAKER_00
How ironic is that?
4
SPEAKER_00
From the river to the sea, and that is his policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
We re going to make sure that Israel controls from the river to the sea, and we re going to push Palestinians into Sinai, and Muslim countries need to take them in.
4
SPEAKER_00
You have Israeli ministers, national defense ministers, saying, you know, things openly, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
We want to thin out the population, i.e.
4
SPEAKER_00
ethnic cleansing.
4
SPEAKER_00
We want to remove people.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the Muslim world needs to step up and take in these refugees, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And the American administration, you know, or the American president says, and the American Secretary of State says, you know, we re talking to them and we re making sure that that s not going to happen.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if one of their ministers says something,
4
SPEAKER_00
Blinken maybe tweets out something about how that s not going to happen, but then it happens anyway.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then we still write them the checks.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I think most of the American public is probably going to get sick of this at some point.
4
SPEAKER_00
And just people of decency and people of conscience are going to say, yeah, this is not something we want to be a part of anymore.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think there s something that Donald Trump can do to help move this in the right direction?
4
SPEAKER_00
Trump s first words were about how he s going to be worse on this, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So he talked about how he s going to deport people, revoke visas of, you know, students that are part of these pro-Palestinian rallies.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the focus was on the rallies versus what s going on abroad.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but look, we had a Donald Trump presidency.
4
SPEAKER_00
He moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
4
SPEAKER_00
He was not better on this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately, this is a bipartisan problem.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so again, we re under no illusion here.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like we re not looking to Donald Trump as a savior here, but we are going to penalize Joe Biden.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s, you know, I can t speak for everybody, but I think that that s where a lot of our minds are at right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
You spoke at the November 4th demonstration in Washington called the Free Palestine March.
4
SPEAKER_01
It had a lot of people, several hundred thousand people there.
4
SPEAKER_01
What do you remember from that experience?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, the first thing I remember is that there was no news coverage of it.
4
SPEAKER_00
So 400,000 people march on DC, one of the largest marches in history.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was nowhere to be found in mainstream media coverage.
4
SPEAKER_00
Whereas when the Stand with Israel rally happened, between the 300,000 strong Palestine rally and the 400,000 strong Palestine rally, there was a Stand with Israel rally where congressmen were bused from Congress to speak at that rally.
4
SPEAKER_00
Democrats and Republicans and high-profile celebrities, and it was, you know, live-streamed across multiple places.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I have to say this, the ICJ, if that wasn t the greatest display of media bias
4
SPEAKER_00
in the domain of United States mainstream media, then I don t know what is.
4
SPEAKER_00
They live-streamed the Israeli defense on multiple Amooz outlets, defending itself against the case for genocide, and completely omitted the South African presentation of the crimes of Israel the day before.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what I remember first and foremost about the protests is that they were nowhere to be found on mainstream media, which was expected.
4
SPEAKER_00
But what I also remember from the actual day of, and from all of the pro-Palestine rallies, is that I have never seen a more multi-faith, more diverse group of people consistently coming out for Palestine against the genocide in Gaza that I have this time around.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that has been the experience all around.
4
SPEAKER_00
There has been a pronounced Jewish presence.
4
SPEAKER_00
Jewish Voice for Peace, if not now, other anti-Zionist Jewish groups, groups that are against the genocide, against the occupation, former Israeli soldiers even, you know, that have been showing up at these protests.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s been a pronounced presence from Native American groups, indigenous groups, all across the board, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Christians, Jews, Muslims,
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve never seen more diversity at these rallies than I ve seen this time around, which I think is a sign of where things are going.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you look at the under 35 opinion polls, it s very clear that there s a generational gap here, that the country is moving into a more coherent direction and understanding what has been happening over there.
4
SPEAKER_00
And people from all backgrounds are standing up to it now.
4
SPEAKER_01
What do you think about the protests on campus against Israel?
4
SPEAKER_00
Every protest I ve been to has had the exact same tenor, has had the exact same messaging, but you always have that idiot or two that shows up with a sign.
4
SPEAKER_00
And no one knows who that idiot is, ironically.
4
SPEAKER_00
Never comes with anybody else.
4
SPEAKER_00
Always shows up somehow in the middle of the protest and puts up a sign that says something completely contrary to the messaging of the protest.
4
SPEAKER_00
And all the cameras shift towards that guy.
4
SPEAKER_00
I see it every single time, but the overwhelming
4
SPEAKER_00
tenor of all of these protests has been consistent.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s been calling for freedom, it s been calling for liberation, it s been calling for an end to the genocide, a ceasefire, an end to the occupation, an end to the apartheid.
4
SPEAKER_00
I will tell you what many people are not seeing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Columbia University, two IDF soldiers, former IDF soldiers, spraying Palestinian protesters with skunk water.
4
SPEAKER_00
which is what the IDF uses on Palestinian protesters and sometimes on worshipers on their way to Masjid al-Aqsa, which has multiple health repercussions.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I was reading about how one of the students that was sprayed on campus at Columbia, Palestinian student,
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, has showered at this point of us doing this podcast 11 times, cannot get the smell out of her, has suffered all sorts of health issues as a result of being sprayed.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, people are not seeing the other side here.
4
SPEAKER_00
People are not seeing what we ve had to deal with at these protests, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
The open bigotry.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I want you to think about this, by the way.
4
SPEAKER_00
People go and serve in the IDF and then come back to the United States or the United Kingdom and they re not stigmatized for participating in apartheid policies or participating in a genocide.
4
SPEAKER_00
How am I supposed to feel as a Palestinian knowing that this guy right next to me participated in murdering my relatives in Gaza, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And has open reign to say what he wants to say or do what he wants to do.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so we haven t seen the other side of that as well, but I d recommend to anyone that s talking about pro-Palestine protests to actually go see one.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you go to the protests, you listen to what s being said, and you don t just capture them, and you got 400,000 people, don t just go try to find, you re gonna find four stupid people at a protest of 400,000 people, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because the protest scene is always messy.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I think that this is a sign of the outrage.
4
SPEAKER_00
and the anger and the frustration that many students have about being silenced, again, in the media, in academic settings.
4
SPEAKER_00
Professors are losing their jobs.
4
SPEAKER_00
Students are having their faces put on trucks, being doxed.
4
SPEAKER_00
These shady watch lists that get put out.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m on a few of them as well, and I just don t care anymore, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
But you got these shady watch lists.
4
SPEAKER_00
People are losing their jobs at law firms.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re losing all of their future opportunities, young Palestinian students, because of something that they tweeted that s being taken out of context 10 years ago, right, when they were 17 years old.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s ridiculous.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so I think that, you know, we have to listen to the overwhelming majority of voices of people that are demonstrating for justice.
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SPEAKER_00
not demonstrating against anyone, but demonstrating for people.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, there s a large, pronounced Jewish presence at every single pro-Palestine march.
4
SPEAKER_00
In fact, if you look at the organizations, the groups that have taken over Capitol Hill and train stations, it s been, if not now, not in our name, never again means for anyone, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s been Jewish groups.
4
SPEAKER_00
many Jewish anti-occupation groups that have been at the forefront.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that that s where we have to pay attention to the beauty of how diverse this movement for a free Palestine has actually been.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the average sentiment is anti-occupation, not anti-Semitic?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s incredibly lazy, incredibly lazy to say that anti-Zionism or that anti-occupation is anti-Semitic.
4
SPEAKER_00
First and foremost, the Palestinians are a Semitic people.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s number one.
4
SPEAKER_00
Number two, look, I m proud of my community.
4
SPEAKER_00
My community has stood against anti-Semitism in this country.
4
SPEAKER_00
The Muslim community has been at the forefront of condemning anti-Semitism.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have stood in front of synagogues.
4
SPEAKER_00
We have stood with the Jewish community when the Jewish community is attacked.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is about occupation.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is a story of a colonial entity that has driven us out of our homes and has done so in such a way that has forced us to try to be the voice of a people that are being exterminated overseas right now.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is not an anti-Semitic movement.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is a pro-freedom movement.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you think the protests ever go too far?
4
SPEAKER_00
The protest scene is a messy scene.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so again, you re going to have sometimes that odd speaker or people get carried away in their emotions.
4
SPEAKER_00
And yes, sometimes people chant things or do things that are contrary to the protests.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty unfair when you judge the entire protest movement by some of these incidents that have happened at protests.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you don t pay attention to what they re protesting about in the first place, which is a genocide.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right now, everything is secondary to ending a genocide that is ongoing.
4
SPEAKER_00
In the course of this discussion, it s not an exaggeration to say that at least 30, 40 people would have been killed just over the last few hours, because we re averaging 135 to 150 a day.
4
SPEAKER_00
Everything else is secondary to that.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is where we all need to be right now as people of conscience.
4
SPEAKER_00
How do we stop this?
4
SPEAKER_00
Because every single day is deeply costly.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think there has been a rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate in the U.S. ?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think that s factual.
4
SPEAKER_00
Look, anti-Semitism is always to be condemned.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s wrong.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s something that as a Muslim community and as people of conscience, we have always taken a stand against.
4
SPEAKER_00
Jewish people should not be attacked for being Jewish people here or anywhere else.
4
SPEAKER_00
Synagogues should be protected.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if a person is attacked for being Jewish, we will be the first to go and to stand with them and to reject that attack on them.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there has been, as I said, an inspiring, pronounced Jewish presence in the movement to end the occupation.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so we re being morally consistent here.
4
SPEAKER_00
As far as the rise in Islamophobia, it is felt, it s underreported, and it is part of the same framing that has led to the devastation of our people overseas.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s a rise in Islamophobia, there s a rise in anti-Semitism, there s a rise in hatred.
4
SPEAKER_00
All of that is true, but there s also an ongoing genocide, and that should be our priority right now to end.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think we spoke last time about a year ago.
4
SPEAKER_01
How has your view on Benjamin Netanyahu evolved over time?
4
SPEAKER_00
Benjamin Netanyahu has committed himself to the erasure of Palestinian people and Palestinian symbols and Palestinian land from the very beginning of his political career.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is who he has been.
4
SPEAKER_00
We just haven t been listening to him.
4
SPEAKER_00
He campaigned on bigotry and racism and on the promise that there would never be a Palestinian state.
4
SPEAKER_00
He campaigned on the promise that Gaza would be wiped out.
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SPEAKER_00
He campaigned by saying the Arabs are rushing to the polls.
4
SPEAKER_00
We need to make sure that they don t infect our policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
He has always been this person.
4
SPEAKER_00
This has always been his policy.
4
SPEAKER_00
He has always indicated that genocide and ethnic cleansing is where he wants to go.
4
SPEAKER_00
So he s simply manifesting what his message has always been.
4
SPEAKER_00
And anyone that ignores that is being disingenuous.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can find statements from Benjamin Netanyahu in the 80s, 90s, 2000s.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can find him talking about this prior to October 7th and after October 7th.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s definitely doing this now to save his political career.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think he wants to drive this as long as he possibly can, because he knows that his days in office are numbered.
5
SPEAKER_01
But let s also ask ourselves, why is it that Benjamin Netanyahu was able to rise to power in the first place?
5
SPEAKER_01
There s something deeply troubling about the fact that his messaging ever resonated and what the prospects are for peace if Benjamin Netanyahu is able to rise with such pronounced hateful messaging.
5
SPEAKER_00
So the claim that security of Israel is the primary concern is you re saying a dishonest claim.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think he s trying to secure his seat in office.
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SPEAKER_01
He knows his days are numbered.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is not about Israel.
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SPEAKER_01
This isn t about the hostages for him.
5
SPEAKER_01
This isn t about anything but Benjamin Netanyahu.
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SPEAKER_01
He is a narcissist.
5
SPEAKER_01
He s a tyrant.
5
SPEAKER_01
He is despised around the world, and I think even amongst Israelis.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a deep hatred for him.
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SPEAKER_01
I think the hostages  families know that he doesn t care about the families or about the hostages, but he s driving a political agenda that doesn t care about people.
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SPEAKER_01
not Palestinian people or otherwise.
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SPEAKER_01
However, the problem of the occupation is not Benjamin Netanyahu.
5
SPEAKER_01
The problem of the occupation is the occupation.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yair Lapid was the progressive moderate alternative and he drove just as bigoted of an agenda against the Palestinian people as possible.
5
SPEAKER_01
So to the Palestinian that s living in Gaza or the Palestinian in the West Bank,
5
SPEAKER_01
whoever s sitting in that seat has meant the exact same thing to them.
5
SPEAKER_01
But Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly, I think, the loudest bigot that we have seen in that seat.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you think Israel has the right to defend its borders?
5
SPEAKER_01
I think Israel has a responsibility to protect those that it occupies.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think you have to ask that question differently.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, Noura Arakat wrote a tremendous article on this from a legal perspective.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, when you talk about Israel defending itself.
5
SPEAKER_01
Israel is bound to occupation law.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is the problem all along.
5
SPEAKER_01
When John Kerry said, of course, the US is great sometimes at issuing inconsequential statements that Israel has to choose whether or not it wants to be a Jewish or a democratic state, be a Jewish or a democratic state, but it can t be both.
5
SPEAKER_01
Israel wants to occupy and deny, and at the same time not be held to the standards of being an occupier, but be treated as if it s some normal state.
5
SPEAKER_01
Those borders were drawn across occupied land and have been expanding into Palestinian territory and people have been thrown out of their homes systematically and transgressed upon even in the places that they fled to, which is Gaza, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So when you talk about Israel having a right to defend itself, you should be talking about Israel s duty to protect everyone under its occupation.
5
SPEAKER_01
Either lift the occupation or protect everyone under your occupation.
5
SPEAKER_01
Where are your borders, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
What is your responsibility?
5
SPEAKER_01
Who are you protecting?
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think that it speaks to the fact that Israeli policy considers Palestinians to be animals.
5
SPEAKER_01
They say as much and they do as much.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve spoken about James Baldwin, and James Baldwin talked about this pious silence surrounding Israel that we re supposed to pretend like it s just another state, you know, and ignore how it came into being and what it functions as.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think that pious silence has to be broken.
5
SPEAKER_01
I remember Jon Stewart, when he had The Daily Show several years ago, and he talked about this policy of, we have to defend ourselves.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if someone was attacking your home, what would you do?
5
SPEAKER_01
And the response was, well, why are you forcing people into a closet?
5
SPEAKER_01
So you force people into this desperate situation.
5
SPEAKER_01
You drive them out of their homes, claim their homes.
5
SPEAKER_01
and then say that you re defending yourself against them.
5
SPEAKER_01
The default is that an occupied people have a right to defend themselves.
5
SPEAKER_01
The occupier is obligated to those that they occupy.
5
SPEAKER_00
Can you speak to this term occupation in Gaza?
5
SPEAKER_00
because the people that say it is not an occupation say that Israeli troops have been pulled out from there before October 7th for many years.
5
SPEAKER_00
And to you, it still is a de facto occupation.
5
SPEAKER_01
Israel doesn t get to set the terms.
5
SPEAKER_01
and then define them.
5
SPEAKER_01
It is an occupation according to any legal standard, international legal standard.
5
SPEAKER_01
Israel controls the movement of everyone in Gaza.
5
SPEAKER_01
It controls the air and the seas.
5
SPEAKER_01
It controls the ability to import or export
5
SPEAKER_01
The people that live in Gaza and the people that live in the West Bank, the Palestinians have had their identity stolen from them.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there s the freedom of movement, there is the freedom of thriving, there is self-determination.
5
SPEAKER_01
All of that has been stolen from the people of Gaza.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s no airport in Gaza that was destroyed by Israel as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
It is an occupation at every level and by any meaningful legal determination.
5
SPEAKER_00
What do you think about Yemen s Houthi rebels attacking Israel in response to October 7th?
5
SPEAKER_00
And then the United States and the UK initiating bombing of multiple targets in Yemen in response to that?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that it s clear that the United States cares more about its shipping lanes than it does about Palestinian lives, and that actually has proved it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Look, I do not support the Houthis as Houthis or their policies in general.
5
SPEAKER_01
But if you look at what has transpired and what they have said, they re attacking these ships in response to the occupation, or in response to the genocide, and saying that they will continue to do so, to stop business as usual, until a ceasefire is reached.
5
SPEAKER_01
They have not killed anyone, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
They have seized ships, they have blocked the lanes, but they have said that if a ceasefire happens,
5
SPEAKER_01
they will cease their activity.
5
SPEAKER_01
So instead of the United States trying to get a ceasefire through, the United States decided, let s go bomb Yemen too.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s spend more money on weapons and killing innocent people, which shows you exactly where our policy always leads itself to, unfortunately.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I think that most reasonable people
5
SPEAKER_01
would say that the problem is not with Yemeni rebels attacking ships.
5
SPEAKER_01
The problem is with Israel attacking innocent Palestinian lives.
5
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned paying respects to the legacy of EBJ, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and remembering Palestinian child prisoners.
5
SPEAKER_00
Can you explain?
5
SPEAKER_01
So Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was one of the few co-sponsors of a bill that has been on the floor of Congress for years, initially sponsored by Congresswoman Betty McCollum.
5
SPEAKER_01
to penalize Israel for its detention of child prisoners.
5
SPEAKER_01
Thousands of children arbitrarily detained, put in military courts, solitary confinement, and yes, sexual violence that s been documented by human rights organizations against them, and there have been no repercussions.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I want you to think about this, you know.
5
SPEAKER_01
Just the thought of conditioning aid to Israel, you know, so that it doesn t indiscriminately bomb entire populations has not been able to find any home in mainstream American politics.
5
SPEAKER_01
For years, just trying to stop Israel from picking up children and throwing them into military prisons where they disappear for decades at times has not found any thrust in mainstream American politics.
5
SPEAKER_01
Whereas any resolution that is pro-Israel will make it past both chambers relatively quickly.
5
SPEAKER_01
When people talk about Israeli hostages and then talk about Palestinian prisoners, there s already a problem with that framing.
5
SPEAKER_01
First of all, all 2.2 million people in Gaza are hostages.
5
SPEAKER_01
Every Palestinian that lives under occupation is a hostage.
5
SPEAKER_01
But all of those prisoners that have been picked up, women, children,
5
SPEAKER_01
Innocent people with absolutely no process of making sure that they re treated right or given fair trials or even given a communication line with their families or with any government to help them is absolutely criminal.
5
SPEAKER_01
All of those prisoners are also hostages.
5
SPEAKER_01
And when you already propose this idea that there are Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, you re already implying that one group is complicit in their own devastation, whereas another group has had devastation visited upon them entirely out of their own doing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so it s important for people to learn about children prisoners who are indeed hostages to an apartheid system.
5
SPEAKER_01
And even what happened during that four-day truce, which all of us hoped would be extended and become permanent, where 150 Palestinian prisoners were released, Israel just went and picked up another 135 in the West Bank and threw them in prisons.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s what I mean when I say you re not addressing the root of the problem.
5
SPEAKER_01
The root of the problem is the occupation.
5
SPEAKER_01
The root of the problem is the apartheid.
5
SPEAKER_01
The root of the problem is the desperation that then drives the creation of all sorts of circumstances that will only further lead to the devastation of everyone, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
If you don t solve that problem,
5
SPEAKER_01
And at the root of that problem is the dehumanization of the Palestinian, because no one is raising alarms for those Palestinian hostages in Israeli military prisons.
5
SPEAKER_01
No one s putting up their pictures and no one s talking about who they are and their human stories and the violence that s been wreaked against them.
5
SPEAKER_01
at every level.
5
SPEAKER_01
So if you don t solve not just the root of occupation, but also the dehumanization that drives the occupation, which is unfortunately so pervasive right now in the discourse, then you re going to continue to have this gap in how the world sees the plight of the Palestinians and how, unfortunately, the American public sees the problem of the Palestinians.
5
SPEAKER_00
And to you, big peace agreements like
5
SPEAKER_00
of the like of Abraham Accords should include Palestine.
5
SPEAKER_01
Abraham Accords is nothing but an agreement in which you slap the name of Abraham on arms deals in exchange for countries being able to undertake their own unholy pursuits.
5
SPEAKER_01
They use one of the holiest names in history and continue to erase the main victims of this atrocity.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so the Abraham Accords are an insult to humanity, an insult to the Palestinians.
5
SPEAKER_01
and an insult to the name of Abraham.
5
SPEAKER_00
But do you think something like that, agreements of that nature, of that scale could be made that include the Palestinian people, and that would actually make progress?
5
SPEAKER_01
If they re honest to the plight of the Palestinians, if they are honest to the roots of the problem, absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_01
Look, again, peace is sought, but peace cannot be used to silence.
5
SPEAKER_01
The entire peace process has been hung over the Palestinians all these years, while settlements continue to expand and their situation only continues to get worse.
5
SPEAKER_01
Is Israel really going to remove the 700,000, 800,000 settlers, right, and suddenly change its tune on a two-state solution?
5
SPEAKER_01
Benjamin Netanyahu is saying right now, and he s speaking to, unfortunately, what is clearly a majority of the Israeli public, that there will never be a Palestinian state.
5
SPEAKER_01
So these peace talks cannot be used to suffocate all of the work of justice and bringing Israel to accountability.
5
SPEAKER_01
The world has to act when they see apartheid.
5
SPEAKER_01
The world has to act when they see occupation.
5
SPEAKER_01
If the world fails to bring Israel to a place of accountability, then a few countries that have their own agendas
5
SPEAKER_01
cannot put forth anything meaningful for the victims of Israel being the Palestinian people.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of questions I want to ask you about.
5
SPEAKER_00
the nature of resistance and what is the proper way to resist?
5
SPEAKER_00
What is the practical, pragmatic, effective ways of resisting?
5
SPEAKER_00
So one example that is often brought up is the difference between MLK and Malcolm X. One emphasized nonviolent resistance, the other emphasized any means necessary resistance.
5
SPEAKER_00
Which do you side with?
5
SPEAKER_00
in general and in this particular case of what has happened over the past 100 plus days?
5
SPEAKER_01
So in general, that framing relies on a sanitization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
5
SPEAKER_01
and a vilification of Malcolm X that a lot of people do put forth and present as two polar opposites in how they approach
5
SPEAKER_01
the plight of black people in America and resisting racism here in America.
5
SPEAKER_01
When I taught a course at Southern Methodist University on MLK and Malcolm X and Islam and the civil rights movement, what I d often do is I d give my students
5
SPEAKER_01
a set of quotes, and I would say, assign this to Malcolm or Martin, and they d always get it wrong.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you can find quotes from MLK in Breaking the Silence, and especially when he took a stand against the Vietnam War, that sounds so radical when you compare them to the image of MLK.
5
SPEAKER_01
And Malcolm is, of course, turned into this militant, angry Muslim who just wanted violence and was seeking chaos here in the United States.
5
SPEAKER_01
So let s be clear about something here, that Malcolm never himself was part of any violence.
5
SPEAKER_01
Malcolm never did anything violent.
5
SPEAKER_01
Malcolm found it hypocritical to commit the oppressed people to nonviolence while not restraining the oppressor from its violence.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I agree with Malcolm.
5
SPEAKER_01
It is absolutely hypocritical to focus your attention and your energy on the oppressed people and committing them to nonviolence while not directing your attention to the oppressor.
5
SPEAKER_01
When you have such asymmetry, when you have a clear aggressor and aggressed upon, you have a clear colonial entity and a clear colonized people,
5
SPEAKER_01
You focus your energy on restraining the colonial power.
5
SPEAKER_01
You focus your energy on restraining the oppressor, not the oppressed.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so that was Malcolm s point, and it s clear in his messaging throughout his religious growth, because of course Malcolm did evolve as a person.
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But Malcolm found it deeply hypocritical to commit the oppressed to nonviolence.
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Malcolm also had a deep understanding of the way that brutality here, state violence in the United States was connected to its state violence abroad, and American imperialism as a whole.
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Malcolm was the first to speak on Vietnam, the first major African American leader to speak on Vietnam.
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Martin followed.
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Malcolm also went to Gaza in 1964.
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1964, when Tehan Yunus, which is now under heavy bombardment, and Malcolm penned an essay on Zionism and connected Zionism to American imperialism and the broader implications of America s foreign policy.
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So Martin and Malcolm, if you look at them in the capacity of what s happening right now,
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where I would say you can find something that is deeply profound.
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James Cone wrote a book called Malcolm and Martin, Dreams and Nightmares, and he wrote something profound to the effect that Martin
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tried to liberate white people from their own racism, whereas Malcolm tried to liberate black people from the effects of that racism on them.
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And so they both played a deeply important role.
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Self-determination is crucial to maintain the fuel of a movement.
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And I think one of the things that probably deeply frustrates those that have sought the erasure of Palestine is that Palestinian consciousness has only continued to grow after 75 years.
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Palestinians in diaspora and Palestinians within occupied territory
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all are deeply rooted in their Palestinian identity and existence, and they re not going away.
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So I think that that s where the function is important of this, whereas those that are complicit in the oppression need to be liberated from their own oppression, you know, and liberated from what they re participating in.
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Most Americans that I talk to that have absolutely no idea about what s going on
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When they come to hear just a few stories of the plight of the Palestinian people and the types of brutality that we have encountered, wake up to this and say, oh my God, this is what my tax dollars go to.
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This is what I m a part of, right?
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So we have to liberate people across the board from being oppressors or from being oppressed.
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What do you think about the seeming fact the majority of Palestinians support the October 7th attacks?
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You have to see the world, their world, through their eyes.
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You can t try to see their world through your eyes.
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If you live under occupation, you re routinely harassed,
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at Israeli checkpoints.
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The occupation is expanding into your territory.
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You re meeting families, you know, regularly that have been thrown out of their homes and that are looking for a new place in the shrinking territory.
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You deal with routine airstrikes.
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You have no way to get out.
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You have no way to grow.
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You don t even have a passport.
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Your education is subpar.
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Your standards of living are lower than the rest of the world.
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and all you hear from the other side, which dominates the discourse and dominates every element of your existence, are promises of erasure, of complete erasure.
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13,000 people, I mentioned, 2023, 13,000 new settlement units being advanced.
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If that happened anywhere, right, just think about what that means, right?
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When you clear out a village or two,
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And it s not that big of a territory, right?
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When you know that that s happening and when you have been subjected to that, anyone that claims to be supporting you or uplifting you from that state of misery is going to have sympathy.
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Whether you agree with their mission or their methods or not, it s human.
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It is human.
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That if anyone says that they are going to get you out of this misery,
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and inflict pain on those who have given you a life of pain and promised you a future of pain, you re going to have sympathy to that group, whether you agree with them or not.
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I think that the question also has to be asked.
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What about the Israeli public?
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Israel holds all of the power in that region, holds all of the power over that territory, is able to dominate the expansion of its own territory and diminish any Palestinian territory, is able to place restrictions whenever it wants on Palestinian movement, trying to get to their holy sites or otherwise, whether it s Mezal Aqsa or the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of Nativity, right?
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The majority of the Israeli public
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Before October 7th, unfortunately, according to all polls, favors a non-democratic regime, the end of a two-state solution, does not care about the plight of Palestinian people, the majority of the Israeli public.
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Why is that?
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And what does that mean for Palestinians, right?
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Especially now, after this genocide, the vast majority of the Israeli public does not favor a ceasefire, right?
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What are we supposed to do when we see mainstream media coming out of Israel, pop culture, TikTok videos that only speak to a greater desire to eliminate the Palestinian people, right?
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So anyone that says that they are going to support your plight
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Whether you agree with their mission or their methods is going to resonate with that child that has grown up in those desperate circumstances.
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You know, Bassem Youssef had an interview with Piers Morgan and he was talking about this.
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I mean, he literally gave it a human story.
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If you re a child that s grown up, you ve lost limbs, your parents are dead, your friends are dead.
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You have been made a refugee two or three times already.
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You have no future in sight.
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And then someone comes to you and says, I m going to help you and I m gonna fight back on your behalf.
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Of course it s gonna resonate, it s human, right?
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And so I think that it s important for us to see the world through their eyes rather than try to see the world through our eyes.
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So as Malcolm X did, you re calling for highlighting the asymmetry in violence and asymmetry in moral reasoning.
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Absolutely.
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It s important.
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You re not going to be able to solve this problem unless you re able to do that.
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And so when Malcolm said that if you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out six inches, that s not progress.
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Progress is healing the wounds, and you re not even willing to acknowledge that the knife is there yet.
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those that don t acknowledge what is determined now by any international human rights organization, even Israeli human rights organization, Bet Islam and others, to be apartheid, a state of apartheid and a state of occupation, and now an unfolding genocide, are not partners for peace.
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It just hurts me to think
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how long it takes to heal.
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Even if the healing begins now with a knife metaphor, it s just going to be generations because people don t forget when your father and mother were murdered or somebody that you know in your family was killed, they don t forget.
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Look,
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I think the point is that we have to come to terms with the fact that the trauma of the past does not justify the murder of the present, and the fear of the future does not justify the murder of the present.
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The urgency of the world right now should be entirely focused on ending this atrocity that unfortunately the world has become so complacent with.
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Again, prior to October 7th, this status quo was not acceptable, and there was no means in sight in the global arena to rein this in, to make Israel more accountable, to stop this.
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I do believe in the power of healing.
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I do believe in the power of growth.
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I do believe that we have seen ugly episodes of history before.
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that have been rectified.
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I also believe in the heart of my people.
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I believe that the Palestinian people are people of resistance, they re people of resilience, they re people of courage, and they re people of benevolence and magnanimity, and they re people who have been made to grow under the worst of circumstances.
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I don t see in the hearts of young Palestinians that have been tormented.
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I don t see darkness.
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I see light.
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I see the ability to still laugh and find joy despite everything that s happened.
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And so I think that the urgency right now just has to be towards ensuring that they have a life, that they re not being killed anymore.
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I was wondering if you can comment on
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idea and a notion that comes up often in conversations about this, of why can t other nations in the region take in Palestinian refugees?
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So I think that we have to tackle what s implied by that.
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at multiple levels.
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And I actually want to walk back, you know, I was listening to Nikki Haley when she said in one of her interviews, you know, and why is it that you think no one wants to take the Palestinians in?
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And she had like this deeply disturbing laugh to it.
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Or Ben Shapiro, when he said, Israelis like to build and Arabs like to bomb crap and live in their sewage.
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Or, you know, why is it that no one wants to govern the Palestinians?
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Suggesting that Palestinians are ungovernable and not fit to bring into your countries.
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And that s why they re being turned away.
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You know who else faced that bigotry?
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Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
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1939, 300,000 Germans applied for refuge here in the United States.
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I think only about 10,000 were allowed in.
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And we also turned away ships of Jews that were seeking refuge here in the United States on what basis that they were a national security threat and could not be trusted.
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They could not be taken in.
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That s the same bigotry that s driving this.
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And I want you to think about it, you know, from that perspective, how deeply offensive that is.
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When you have millions of Palestinians in diaspora, where have Palestinians caused trouble where they ve gone?
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Everywhere Palestinians are, they have overcome significant hurdles to become scientists and doctors.
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and to grow themselves and to grow the places that they re in.
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We have Palestinians that have been displaced all over the world, caused issues for people, right?
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So it s both racist and factually incorrect.
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That s not the right question that should be asked.
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The question that should be asked are why are these people driven from their homes?
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Not why won t other people around them open their homes to them?
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And so I ll just share with you that even on a personal level, you know, it s really interesting because sometimes on Twitter or wherever it is, it ll be like, go back home, right?
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Why don t you go back home?
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And I m sitting there thinking to myself like, sure.
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You know, my parents were driven from their homes.
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Yeah, sure.
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I was born in this country as a consequence of bad policy.
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Now,
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I embrace my complicated identity in that regard, and I hope to be productive as an American, but I am a Palestinian, and Palestinians in diaspora that have been fortunate enough
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to have the ability to build and to overcome circumstances should not be an excuse for eliminating the Palestinians that remain in their homes under that torment.
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So this bigotry is not new.
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Unfortunately, its manifestation is ugly.
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And we have to push back on it whenever it shows itself, no matter who it s being spoken about.
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How difficult has it been for people in Gaza to flee?
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I mean, they re blockaded from all directions.
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There is nowhere for people in Gaza to go.
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They cannot get out.
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And the reality is is that they don t want to leave.
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They do not want to leave.
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The Palestinian people want to live in their land, in their homes, and to continue to produce an extension of the beautiful culture
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and legacy that was handed to them.
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They don t want to leave.
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In fact, those that have fled for whatever reason, or have been able to get out for medical treatment, or because they have some sort of citizenship in other countries, all they re talking about is going back and rebuilding.
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You can t bomb Palestine out of our hearts.
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You cannot starve Palestine out of our hearts.
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I think that s a critical mistake that Israel is making.
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And it thinks that if it destroys Gaza enough, if it wipes out all the buildings, that people will never want to come back.
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We don t want to go anywhere as a Palestinian people.
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you know, in a way that would remove us from our homes.
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The Palestinian people are proud people.
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Yeah, you ve met a lot of them, right?
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When you sat with Mohamed al-Qaradawi people in East Jerusalem, what those people have been subjected to, you know, the harassment.
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Like, think about the tenacity and the character that it takes to still
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try to walk back into your home after an intruder has been brought in by the state that s sitting in your living room that is pushing you around, and you re saying, I m not leaving my home.
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This is literally what s been happening in East Jerusalem, and we re not going anywhere.
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I think those of us that are in diaspora, Palestine is not leaving our hearts.
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And those of us that are still there are not leaving their land.
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And the world has to make the occupier more accountable, not tell the occupied how to cope.
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Do you ever imagine that if your family did not flee and you are now living in
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in, say, in Gaza, what you would be doing?
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I think about what could have been all the time.
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You know, I actually mentioned this in the first DC protest.
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that I remember getting a notification, a news notification just prior to October with my name in it, you know.
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So I always get these notifications, right, if my name s mentioned in an article.
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And so, oh, your name s mentioned in an article.
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And it was a 16-year-old Omer Suleiman who was murdered in the West Bank.
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He literally had my name, held up His picture, and I realized that could have been me.
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So, I think of why God chose me to not be there.
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and hopefully Him choosing all of us that are not there to be for those that are still there, to be their voices.
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I m grateful, and I m also in pain.
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I m grateful for the opportunity to be able to speak on their behalf, but I m also guilty that they have to bear the brunt of this evil hatred that unfortunately displaced our parents in the first place.
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You mentioned that Palestinians invoke the plight of indigenous people, like Native Americans.
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What works and doesn t work about this analogy?
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So I think that there s a powerful connection between the Palestinian people and the indigenous in this land and in other places.
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that have been wronged.
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We are living here in the United States on stolen lands that is drenched in the blood of the natives, and that was built upon with the blood, sweat, and labor of enslaved Africans that were brought from overseas.
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It s a great evil that we have to reckon with constantly.
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And so I think that s the power of solidarity.
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And, you know, if you look in Canada and you look in places like Australia, there has been a refocus on the crimes against the indigenous of those places.
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I think that what makes the Palestinian plight deeply painful and maybe where the analogy even doesn t do justice is
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that from the river to the sea is less than 500 times what the United States is in terms of land.
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It s not that big of a piece of land.
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And so the original lie was
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a land without a people for a people without a land.
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And the problem was that there were people on that land that were forcibly removed.
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So I think that the sheer size, right, we re talking about a tiny piece of land and a lot of people that were removed forcibly from their land and that continue to be brutalized under those miserable conditions.
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Why is Palestine a special place, a holy land?
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It s the land of prophets.
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It is a land that holds deep significance, obviously, to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
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It s the land of Abraham, peace be upon him.
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It is the land that has such a rich history to it that connects multiple peoples in multiple ways.
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It s precious.
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I think that history, while it tells the story of tragedy and struggle over that piece of land, also tells a beautiful story of sanctity.
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So you mentioned Abraham, prophets, Prophet Muhammad is deeply venerated in Islam, obviously, but other prophets are as well, Jesus being one of them.
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What are the similarities and differences in the teachings from these two prophets?
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Well, Islam refers to this idea of submission to one God and attaining peace in the process, and refers to the way of life that prophets have all come with, which is this idea of
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monotheism and serving that one God in the way that he commands you to serve him.
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So to us, as it says in the Quran that we do not distinguish between the prophets, all the prophets came with one message, one mission.
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There s a coherence in the creed.
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There s a beauty in the foundation of what would become the legislation of each of those prophets.
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And we see them all as siblings in prophethood.
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And so we say Abraham, peace be upon him.
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We say Jesus, peace be upon him.
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We say Moses, peace be upon him.
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We say Muhammad, peace be upon him.
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We believe that.
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Moses came to confirm what came from Abraham, Jesus came to confirm what came from Moses, Muhammad came to confirm what came from Jesus.
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They upheld the same message.
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God did not change over time, nor did the centrality of his message of monotheism change over time.
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And so, to us, it s one beautiful house.
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There s a saying from the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, where he describes the house of prophethood, each prophet being a brick, and him simply being the last brick of a beautiful house.
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And so, we love the prophets of God, and we believe that they each came with the legislation that was necessary for the time, but with the same message.
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So the message is fundamentally the same.
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Is there a difference in emphasis?
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For example, the emphasis on love for Jesus.
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Yeah, you know, this is, it s like when you talk about MLK and Malcolm to an extent.
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Except there was actually some difference, right, between MLK and Malcolm.
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You know, I just think that the difference is exaggerated between them.
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I don t think that Moses didn t emphasize love, but Jesus emphasized love, and then Muhammad didn t emphasize love, peace be upon them all.
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I think that they each emphasized the same attributes and names of God and ways of knowing God.
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But there were, of course, changes within legislation, changes within the divine law.
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But the Divine Spirit remained the same, and so I don t see them as being counter to each other, nor do I see that any prophet betrayed the message that came before them.
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I think they re all part of the same beautiful message.
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that we have to be at harmony with our Creator, and that we turn towards Him for our guidance, and that when we do so, we establish a greater existence here on Earth.
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And so I think that that s something that s consistent throughout the message of all the prophets.
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You have been longtime friends with and had amazing conversations with people of other faiths.
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Christian, Jewish, how has the events of October 7th and the days after affected this in the United States, your ability to have interfaith conversations?
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connections, relationships, friendships?
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Complicated, very complicated.
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And it s not just Muslims and Jews, it s also Christian Zionists.
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Christian Zionism is at the root of the problem, in my opinion, especially when we talk about what drives America s unshakable, unconditional commitment to Israel.
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It s devastating, I think, to Palestinian Christians in particular, when Israel can bomb some of the oldest churches of Christianity in Gaza and kill Palestinian Christians, and Palestinian Christians are barred from going to the Holy Sepulcher or to their places of worship in Bethlehem or Jerusalem, and Christians here in the United States turn their back on them.
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I think that it is particularly outrageous.
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So it s complicated.
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Look, I expect more from people in the face of a genocide.
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We don t have to agree on all the particulars, but we can agree that what is happening is morally outrageous.
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And so I think that
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I ve had a few people that have reached out and said, I wanna say something, but I can t.
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And I ve had to respond with, that s not good enough.
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So I think that we have a problem.
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And instead of focusing on that problem, I d like to focus on the more morally consistent voices across faiths that have risen to the moment, rather than those that have failed.
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So you wish more rabbis would be able to have a conversation like we re having today,
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and also not allow it to be seen as them turning their back on their religion?
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Rabbis, pastors, again, it s not just Jewish leadership, it s also Christian leadership.
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I think that it s important for those that have claimed to be allies in the fight against Islamophobia to see that you cannot be opposed to Islamophobia while also extending anti-Palestinian bigotry.
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Yeah, one of the things, since we last spoke, I ve gotten to meet a lot of Palestinian Christians, including in West Bank, and that was fascinating, and those are beautiful people.
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I think people should watch Reverend Munderish Haq s sermon on Christmas, Jesus and the Rebel.
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It was deeply profound.
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I had a chance to speak to Mitri Rahab from the Lutheran Church there as well.
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No, they re devastated.
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You know, it was eye-opening to many people here when Justin Amish, who was a Republican congressman, right, a Palestinian Christian Republican congressman, posted about his own family dying in one of the church bombings.
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So it s strange, strange times.
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And I think that it shows that the philosophy of hate that drives this terrible policy is secular at its root and not religious.
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One of the criticisms of Islam points to specific verses of the Quran
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and the criticism being that it is not a religion of peace.
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Can you speak to that?
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So, objectively speaking, if you were to take the verses of the Quran about violence and compare them, just from a purely percentage-based comparison to the New Testament and the Old Testament, you would find less verses about war in the Quran than the Old Testament or the New Testament.
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And there are plenty of studies to speak to that.
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Deeper than that, contextualizing the birth of Islam, the revelation of the Qur an, which was over 23 years, in response to deep persecution of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, makes it very clear that none of those verses are what they ve been made out to be.
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If Muslims believed that they had to kill people wherever they are, mankind would not exist.
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There are 2 billion of us, right?
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If we believe that we were called by the Qur an to hurt people,
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and to kill people simply for being non-believers, right?
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It would not make for a sustainable world.
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So Islam is not violent.
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And I think that the history of Muslims also bears witness to that.
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The history of Islam is a history of contribution, is a history of building, is a history of medicine and science and math.
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And of course, Muslims have sometimes fallen short of Islamic standards in the past and in the present.
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But if you look at the overall history of Islam and the history of the Muslim community, that s not the case.
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And when you look at the present,
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you know, Muslim community around the world, Muslims do not account for a greater proportion of violence than other faith communities.
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And again, the word terrorist is a functionless and meaningless word, because to me it s no less violent if it s commanded by a head of state or by a government.
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than by a non-state actor.
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So Muslims do not account for a greater portion of violence now, nor have they accounted for a greater portion of violence in the past.
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What do you think these narratives have taken hold in present discourse, at least in the United States?
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Because they allow for greater violence against the Muslim community domestically and abroad.
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The United States has launched wars against primarily Muslim countries, right?
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And has a particularly violent foreign policy towards the Muslim world.
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And the Muslim community here in the United States has dealt with, unfortunately, multiple aggressive iterations of programs of suppression and surveillance under Republican and Democratic administrations.
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And so there s a convenience to that Islamophobia.
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There s a convenience to that framing of the Muslim community that also distracts from other forms of violence that are deeply pervasive and present, including the ones that are committed by the government itself.
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If it s okay, you ve mentioned Al-Aqsa Mosque a couple of times.
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I would love it if you can describe why it is such an important place, a holy place for Muslims in general, but also for this particular crisis that we have been speaking about today.
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So, Muslims honor the history of all of the prophets, right?
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So, all of the prophets that have walked in that place, all of the prophets that have worshipped in that place, all of that makes it sacred, right?
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So, it s not separated for Muslims from, you know, post-Muhammad, peace be upon him.
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versus prior to Muhammad, peace be upon him, in terms of the sanctity of that place.
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So we honor it.
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And Masjid al-Aqsa, in particular, is the place where the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, leads the other prophets in prayer in the night of what s known as al-Isra, al-Mi raj, the night journey of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
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And then he ascends to the heavens and back.
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And it s also the first Qibla, which is the first place of direction of prayer for us.
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So before Muslims,
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faced Mecca in prayer for the first half of Islam, they actually faced towards Jerusalem in their prayer.
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It was our direction of prayer, and it remained a fundamental part of our faith.
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a fundamental holy sanctuary.
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There are three sanctuaries in Islam, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and Mezz al-Aqsa is precious to us.
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And so you can imagine then the pain of watching innocent Palestinian worshipers being stomped on by Israeli soldiers, or skunk water being sprayed on people as they re trying to walk in, or tear gassing taking place in the nights of Ramadan.
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in that place, the restrictions on people that live right next to it and that cannot pray in it due to the certain classification of Palestinian that they ve been given, or the age, right?
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Because generally speaking, if you re younger, you re not allowed to go to Masjid al-Aqsa, even if you live within the occupied territories.
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So it s tough to watch such a sacred place with such an ugly occupation.
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But I ll also say this, that the sanctity of a human being, the sanctity of just one person is greater than the sanctity of any place of worship to us.
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So the sanctity of one individual in Gaza or one individual in Jerusalem is greater to us than the sanctity of a place of worship.
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But it is all certainly interconnected.
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That s a really powerful idea.
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The value of a human being is greater than even the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
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So that s a foundational idea for Islam.
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The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, says to the Kaaba itself that the value of a believer s dignity and honor is greater than the value of the structure itself.
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And so when I see a person in Gaza aggressed upon, when I see one, when I see one child,
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that s greater to me than even Al-Aqsa, but Al-Aqsa is at the heart of who we are as well.
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And it s certainly at the heart of the Palestinian cause.
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It s a place of prophets and it s a place that should be treated prophetically.
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You mentioned to me that since October 7th, a lot of young people in the United States and in general have been showing interest in Islam.
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First of all, can you explain what you ve been seeing and experiencing in terms of that trend?
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Yeah, we have Quran TikTok trends, where you had a few people that went on camera and said, you know, I m reading the Quran for the first time.
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And I think that that s the beauty of the faith of the people of Gaza, the beauty of their resilience.
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You know, when you re looking at these people,
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living what s hell on earth, but they re seeking paradise outside and they re able to still be inspired towards words of faith and determination and certainty.
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You re like, what is their secret, right?
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What are they reading?
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What are they on that allows them to still face this brutality with such grace, right?
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I mean, they re not shouting profanities, they re not shouting, you know, words of emptiness or despair.
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but rather they are pouring out their hearts that are full of faith for the world to see.
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And I think that a lot of people have seen that and said, what is that?
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And so, you know, we ve had multiple people come to the mosque.
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I ve never seen more people become Muslim in my life, but not just that, but gain an appreciation for Islam.
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Like what type of,
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and engineering is there that allows for people to have that type of faith.
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So people are opening the Quran for the first time.
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People are asking questions about Islam in a way that shows that they re inspired, even though they re heartbroken by what they re seeing.
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What s a good way to get introduced to Islam, the faith, the spiritual experience of it?
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Well, I think, look, you go to our websites, you go to whyislam.org, you come to Yaqeen s website, yaqeenastud.org, you go to multiple Islamic websites to get those questions answered, but there s nothing like going to a mosque.
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There s nothing like actually going to a mosque and meeting Muslims and asking questions.
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And I tell people, like, you have to step out of your comfort zone and go there and let your world be complicated a bit.
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Experience it, listen to the sermon, meet people from different backgrounds, and ask questions.
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Muslims love to be asked, by the way, about their faith, because they re so sick of hearing other people talk about it.
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So, Muslims love to be asked about their faith.
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Palestinians love to be asked about Palestine, because they re so sick of other people talking about it.
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So, ask questions, and you will have them answered.
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But there s nothing like a physical connection.
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There s nothing like a human connection.
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So, definitely try to reach out to your local Islamic organizations and meet people.
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How difficult is it to convert to Islam?
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It takes 20 seconds, man.
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What s involved?
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Simple enough.
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You testify to the one, there s no pool, there s no baptism.
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I often joke with people, I m like, all right, we got the pool in the back, we re gonna do the baptism now.
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It s literally testifying to the oneness of God and testifying that Muhammad is his final messenger.
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And so, that s called the shahadah, and when you testify to the oneness of God and to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, being his final prophet, you are accepting what s known as the six articles of faith.
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Six articles of faith are belief in one God,
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belief in the angels, belief in the messengers.
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So you can t be a Muslim without believing in Jesus or Moses or Abraham or Muhammad, to believe in the messages that God has spoken to humanity through divine revelation, the Quran being the last revelation, to believe in the day of judgment, and to believe in divine decree and predestination.
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So those are six articles of faith.
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So when you testify to the oneness of God and to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, being the final messenger, that s called the Shahada, you embrace the package of those articles of faith, that s the implication.
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Then you learn the prayers, learn to fast in Ramadan, you give what s known as Zakah, the mandatory charity, 2.5% of your retained earnings, and Hajj, which is the pilgrimage to Mecca, if you can.
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So that s the growth part, the journey.
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Once a person takes the testimony, they then grow.
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It s really interesting because we always have those people that convert to Islam like a week before Ramadan or even a day before Ramadan.
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So you re Muslim and you gotta fast the next day.
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And that s always a challenging experience for people, but a fulfilling experience for many people when they embrace Islam at that point.
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And again, I mean, it s simple, and I think that the beauty of Islam to many people is in its simplicity.
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One God, one humanity, one body of prophets, and one community.
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Because for you, as a Palestinian American, this year, the Ramadan, perhaps will be especially difficult.
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Spiritually, what are you anticipating?
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What do you think is the difference this year?
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I hope, I hope and pray that we have a ceasefire before Ramadan.
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I hope that at that point we re rebuilding Gaza, talking about rebuilding Gaza and helping people that have been damaged in so many different ways.
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I hope that Ramadan is turning a corner.
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Every Ramadan, the aggression against the Palestinian people seems to grow.
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So we re usually dealing with, you know, last 10 nights of Ramadan, and then the incursions on Mazar al-Aqsa really sour it for the entire Muslim world, right?
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Because you re watching worshippers being assaulted in one of the holiest places in the world, and at the same time, you re trying to find your deep connection, your own deep, holy connection, right?
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in Ramadan.
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This time we re going in, and if this is still ongoing, we re dealing with a continued genocide.
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So I think that the mood has been somber in the community.
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The mood has been different from anything I ve ever seen before.
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So I anticipate this Ramadan would be different from anything we ve ever seen before.
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I think the focus will continue to be on Gaza.
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and on either stopping the aggression on Gaza or beginning the rebuilding of Gaza.
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So general heaviness permeates.
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just your prayers and your thoughts throughout this.
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Yeah, I mean, look, every sermon I ve given since October 7th has had to have some inclusion of this, because it s what s on everyone s hearts and minds.
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We also have people in our communities that have lost 20, 30, 40 people, right, in our midst.
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It s not the same if we start to have refugees or people that escape for medical treatment or that are able to get out through Egypt and join their families.
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it s becoming more real, right?
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It s becoming more personal for people.
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So I think that Ramadan will surround, both in terms of messaging as well as community, the pain of the moment with a prayer for hope and healing.
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Not to put you on the spot, but in your sermons, in your private life, what is the passage in the Quran that is one you find yourself returning to often?
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You know, the part of the Quran, I get asked this question that resonates with me most, usually has to do with what is heaviest for me at the moment.
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There s a verse in the chapter of Mary, a part of the verse, Your Lord does not forget.
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Your Lord does not forget.
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And so, you know, as you see,
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what s transpiring right now, our hope is not in creation, our hope is in our Creator.
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And our hope is not in this life, our hope is in the afterlife.
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And so that verse deeply resonates, because I think that, you know, many of us often wonder, how are they going to rebuild?
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How are they going to get past this?
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And we know that God has a way of restoring everything.
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God will restore everything, if not in this life, then in the next.
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flame of hope that burns there.
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Yeah, and the people of Gaza have it.
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The people of Gaza have it.
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You know, you can be more easily deluded by this material world if you re hostage to it.
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But the people of Gaza have never been deluded by the material world because they never really had it.
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They ve always been attached to a greater idea, to a greater place.
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And so it is part of the secret ingredient that they have, right?
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That they believe in something greater than this.
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And so you can t survive hell on earth unless you believe in paradise outside of it.
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When you look far into the future, 20, 30, 40 years from now, we re doing another podcast in 80s and 90 years old, what do you hope to see in the Middle East?
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What do you hope to see change in the Middle East and the United States as a people, as a set of policies, cultures, nations?
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I think that the nation state
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model and nationalism are becoming so unsustainable just with the growth of refugee populations, desperate refugee populations, the rise of, unfortunately, fanaticism and fascism in different parts of the world, climate, and all that that presents to us in terms of displacement.
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We re going to have to figure out how to function as a world rather than as nations and states.
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We re going to have to figure out how to not see everyone outside of our borders as threats and people that are different from us within our borders as threats.
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We re gonna have to start seeing people as people.
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And so my hope would be that
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we would have made people uncomfortable enough to transcend some of the barriers in their hearts and some of the barriers that we have in the world that don t allow us to see other people as people.
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And then that drives horrific policies towards people that are so distant from us.
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You have been fearless in walking through the fire.
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What gives you strength psychologically to keep going, to speak out, but just also maintain an optimism and a hope for the future?
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I don t believe that anyone gives me success or causes me failure without the permission of God.
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I don t seek fuel from anyone else.
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I don t seek hope from anyone else.
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I believe in a creator.
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that has a greater plan, and I want to be a greater part of that plan.
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And I m inspired by the resilience of the people of Gaza.
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I m inspired by the resilience of my parents and our grandparents and Palestinians.
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around the world that have refused to succumb to their erasure, that have refused to give up.
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And so we have both the energy that we need and we have the examples that we need.
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The energy is from above.
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The examples are all around us.
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Well, Omar, Imam, this is a huge honor to once again speak.
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with you and I just wanna say thank you not just for this but for many private notes you have sent me of kindness and support and love through some of the low points for as silly as they are for me personally.
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So it s just great to be able to call you a friend and to be able to have you in my corner.
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I m forever grateful to you for that.
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I appreciate it, thank you so much.
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And thank you for talking today.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Omar Suleiman.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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We shall overcome, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
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