Shadee Elmasry – Israeli Apartheid NBF 269
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Smilla Rahmanir Rahim Alhamdulillah wa Salatu was Salam
ala Rasulillah while he was on be here, woman what I welcome
everybody to the Safina society. Nothing but facts live stream. And
again you see we have a panel of this time, political science
students, Media students, and soluble alien simultaneously. So I
have to my right Hamza Reza, a resin former resident of New
Jersey. He's known in many countries. He's lived in a lot of
different places, including South Africa, which leads us to our
topic of apartheid today, Hamza Reza is at Tata bin. He's a
student of knowledge in Egypt right now, but he's also he has an
extensive background and a long CV on matters
related to politics, apartheid, ISRAEL PALESTINE, so he'll be
really Leading today's discussion to my left have beautiful brother
from Virginia who was also a Tod of Edmond mata ki FIP, and a
teacher at ArcView. So he is now teaching medically fit in ArcView
is teaching Zia and we are students are mashallah enjoying
his class and benefiting a lot. He's he's doing a PhD at
Georgetown University, in medical FIP, and also to the federal and
medical FIP. But he also has a background studying media studying
the representation of media and misrepresentation by media so
he'll bring that element to the table. Let's again recap to recap
this whole past two weeks has been, we haven't done our usual
schedule we've been our goal has been to educate the regular person
who was this is their first go around on Palestine, the maybe 20
year old 30 year olds, viewer of the of the Safina side the live
stream, nothing but facts live stream that really doesn't know
much about Israel Palestine. And so we went really back to the
basics. We went to the origins of the State of Israel, we went to
the origins of the conflict with Palestine, how it ended up in the
hands of the British, and how the British basically, I would say,
sort of fumbled it, because they were too busy with World Wars. And
then after fumbling it, they sort of kicked it towards Israel, okay,
towards the Jews. And really a sloppy handoff and how the Zinus
were a competent people, right? They were people with a vision.
They were people who studied how to run a police department, how to
have a military how to run a country. They did all that they
were hungry, they were unified, but they have problem, the concept
of a Jewish state. All right, doesn't really jive with the
modern world that they're living in. And that's what leads us to
apartheid. So Hamza from somebody who doesn't know anything, I in
this episode, I represent the person who doesn't know anything.
So I'm gonna ask to be asking very basic questions. What do you mean,
when you say Israeli apartheid? What does it even mean?
The term I
mean, was not with them. Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa
Ehrlichiosis.
So apartheid is actually a Afrikaans word, Afrikaans was like
a language that the Dutch who colonized South Africa kind of
developed, it's very close to modern Dutch. But apartheid
literally just means apartness. And it was a legal doctrine that
was made in southern Africa, to allow the white minority to kind
of dominate the kind of black majority.
And I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the role of
Muslims in the South Africa, anti apartheid struggle. And the role
of Muslims in the struggle is very interesting, because Muslims made
up 1% of the population. But when democracy happened in South
Africa, in in 1993, the Muslims made up 16% of the first
parliament. So they're 1% of the population, but 16%, the first
parliament, so Muslims were very, very much involved in the
struggle, people like Ibrahim or school, people like the late
Sheikh, Cyril Hendricks, who studied under Mohammed bin Abu al
Maliki
lot of these sorts of people.
So when we say Israel is an apartheid state today, we're
basically saying one of two things. One is we're saying that
Israel is like apartheid South Africa. And the second thing that
we're saying is that Israel fits a legal definition. So after
apartheid ended in South Africa, in 1998, the Rome Statute was kind
of passed was defined apartheid as a crime against humanity. And they
say, and what's interesting about the Rome Statute is it doesn't
include a single reference to South Africa. It has one reference
to Southern Africa, but it says apartheid is a legal definition.
It's not about being like South Africa, but it's about fitting
these kind of guidelines. And Human Rights Watch released a
report called beyond the threshold where they said many years ago
Oh, I think around 2020, that Israel has met this threshold. And
the three kind of main kind of guideline for being an apartheid
state is first that they have intent to maintain racial
* of one racial group over another, which, for even
those who don't know anything about what Israel is doing, they
don't know the specifics or the occupation, all of that. It's not
very complicated to say that Israel intends to have one racial
group dominate and the other racial group not to dominate. If
we look at like the West Bank, Israeli settlers lived there as
full citizens, they are encouraged by the state to live in this
place, which is a violation of international law. Palestinians
live there without statehood. And they are actively kind of they
have every incentive to leave. So there's an incentive for Jews to
live in a specific place, and for indigenous Palestinians to not
live in that place. So that first guideline is kind of very easily
met. The other one is systematic oppression of one racial group
over the other, which is also very clear, if we look at what's
happening in Gaza. Today, we see how even Israelis are treated in
the West Bank and Israel proper, like that's very clear. And then
the third is one or more inhumane acts carried out on a widespread
or like systemic scale. So by a legal definition, Israel fits the
standards of apartheid very easily. And this has been said, by
Human Rights Watch by Amnesty International,
by the Israeli human rights group, but Salem. So that's apartheid is
a legal definition.
Can you tell me I'm curious, any other states fit the bill?
So this is interesting. Yeah. There have been accusations. I
remember one time, Cornel West was asked about this, because they
said, Oh, you know, this Palestinian intellectual, did a
PhD at a Israeli University. So therefore, Israel is not an
apartheid state. And Cornel West said, well, W EB DuBois. He did a
PhD at Harvard in apartheid America. So you can say that their
states had systems of apartheid, a lot of South Africans have also
leveled the accusation against India, because they say because of
the Hindu nationalism, and all this sort of stuff, India also has
a system of apartheid against Muslims. Well,
and I would say that India doesn't have to try to fit the first bill,
of making sure that one
group dominates over the other because their numbers are already
way imbalanced in Hindus, to Muslims already. So but the other
two, I guess you could say is, is there a systematic or systemic
oppression of Muslims? Is it in the law? Or is it some unwritten
rule?
That's where it becomes difficult in terms of like on a kind of NGOs
and legal organizations and stuff, the charge has been leveled
against Israel. But I don't think there's any other state that with
the same firmness has been accused of being an apartheid state. And
even if you look at the way South Africans view Israel, South
Africans have kind of this special kind of solidarity with like to
Palestinians, like Desmond Tutu, went to Israel. He said, I go
there, I see the checkpoints, I see these systems. And it's a
mirror image of what I envisioned under apartheid.
Yeah, and it's actually interesting before the 90s,
apartheid was not a bad word. And the prime minister of South
Africa, in apartheid South Africa, in the 1950s, he wrote actually a
book, there's a book called The secret alliance. And it talks
about the Israeli and kind of South African kind of alliance.
And the prime minister of South Africa actually once said that
Israel, like South Africa is an apartheid state. But he didn't
mean it in the way we meant it today. For them, apartheid was a
thing of pride. Similarly, the way people talk about Zionism today,
right, like Zionism is not, Zionism is kind of becoming a bad
word. But an Israeli will say we're proudly Zionist. So that was
how they use the word apartheid. All right, let's turn to Muhammad.
What do you think? Yeah, I think on that last point, about the, you
know, specifically targeted against Muslims. I think one of
the things, one things that we should keep in mind is sometimes
what,
what oppressors do is that they find another term to refer to a
group of people. And that term encompasses that group of people,
but it's, but allows them basically to,
to speak about it in a way that may be more palatable, palatable
to the rest of us. So instead of referring to a particular
religious group, you refer to them based on their national identity.
instead of referring to a particular ethnic group, you refer
to them based on their national identity. And because we have this
conflation of the nation and the States and especially in the
modern world, we tend to look at that and think of that as being
more fair somehow and perhaps more justified because it's a conflict
between two nations. And we think of that as being a common feature
of our experience in modern period as opposed to being a conflict
between an oppressor and between a particular ethnic group that is
being wiped out or a particular religious group that's been wiped
up
and so on.
I think that's that's one of the things that it's really, really
important for us to kind of keep in the back of our minds. So
sometimes the way that you hear you hear, and this happens in the
media very, very often.
And it's really unfortunate is that the message that you're
getting is a message that's disseminated by those parties that
are interested parties. So in the case of what we're hearing from,
from Palestine right now, you're getting information that's
disseminated by the IDF, you're getting information is
disseminated by specific groups that have an interested stake in
what's happening right now. And so you have to ask the question, are
those interested parties? Are they supporting a more powerful, more
dominance, you know, power, or they supporting those people that
are weaker, and those people who are who are more susceptible to
being taken advantage of, and that's very, very easy to do. So
it's quite easy to look at this conflict. And a lot of people do
look at this conflict is being a religious conflict. But there are
a lot of Palestinian Christians. And in fact, if you look at in
like our recent history, the two most dominant figures, in speaking
out against what happens in, in Palestine, specifically from
academia happens to be a Jew and a Christian. Noam Chomsky was Jewish
and, and Edward sides was Christian. Now, which tells you
that this conflict isn't a religious conflict. It's a
conflict that goes deeper than that. Yeah, if the Palestinians
were whatever ex any non Jewish entity, it would be the same thing
would be happening to them? No, I'm curious about something
historically, has there ever been a country who ran an apartheid
state, they were the minority, ruled over the majority.
And then eventually tipped over and became the majority and
basically went on to become a normal country, or quote, unquote,
normal country. Has that ever happened in history? Can we think
of?
Yes. So that's basically what settler kind of colonization is
where it's like a foreign group comes, they kind of oppressed the
kind of indigenous population. And the goal is eventually to get rid
of the which is what Israel is trying to do in Gaza. Right now,
we have Israeli officials who have said that we want another Nakba.
We want to kill their children. We want to kill their women, we want
to kill their citizens. We want them in the Sinai, all this sort
of stuff. So I mean, we're living in a country that did that. Or how
about how about Australia? Yeah, the United States, Australia,
parts of South America, there are countries in South America where
like, I think, like Costa Rica, where it's like, the majority of
the population is kind of just white people.
So yeah, there have been many examples of the problem. Probably
we could point to Argentina.
Argentina. Yep. So so this has happened quite a number of times
before. Right. But, but one was the latest that it hasn't ever
happened in, you know, the past 150 years or so 100 years, we
could say.
In the world of documentation in the world of, you know, media and
faster transmission of knowledge. Is this happened? And is there any
precedent because Israel will be going up against something
that is going to be watched? No. Whereas the aboriginals in
Australia, they were getting away with stuff. Nobody knows the news
in Australia 200 300 years ago, right? Same in America.
1700s 1800s. Right. Nobody knows the News, the news, and it's
spread fast enough.
So that's the that's what's unprecedented where
you're watching it live in real time. Yeah. I think the large part
of a large part of the reason why both, I think Hamza and I or are
thinking through like modern, modern examples, is primarily
because the Europeans had a head start on everybody. So the fact
that they're able to get in, in the 18th century, in the 19th
century, and then be able to tip the scales in their favor in the
United States, in, in,
in Australia, in Argentina, and, you know, large parts of Latin
America.
Even in Mexico, if I'm not mistaken, too, I think there's
been a history of that in Mexico. The, the fact that they were able
to do that and kind of sanitized that history speaks a lot to the
dangers of the current, you know, attempts by design as powerful
design is kind of power based in Israel, because one of the main
things that you want to do is that you want to rewrite this something
that you love puppet talks about in his book on, on, on Palestine,
modern Palestine, he mentioned that one of the things that
one of the attempts in this modernization process is basically
to rewrite the history to refashion that history. And if you
look I mean, somebody can take a look at American history as we get
it in the general textbooks that you get in middle school and in
high school and your US history classes.
Is the AP US History, whatever it may be IB, whatever. And you can
compare that with the with these revisionist people's history books
such as Howard Zinn's book, and you can see whether it's facts,
it's they're both facts, but the way that you paint a particular
history and national identity has a has a lot to say about how you
perceive yourself, and how you perceive the other. And how you
kind of indigenized yourself is one of the terms that the T's is
used. And I believe maybe it's been automated, maybe it's the
same thing as what it's indigenized, the settler.
And so, you know, we're experiencing that right now. So
even if we, even if, you know, it's, it may be difficult to point
to, you know, this example here, that example there. It's primarily
because we have several examples in the modern period that
stretches from the post Enlightenment period of Age of
Discovery. Based on that, you know, we're experiencing right now
it's good to kind of look at what we're seeing right now. You talked
about painting a new picture, one of these pictures in the defenses
of Israel's apartheid in Palestine, or the idea that
they're not settler or colonialist is that the land was empty. And
this is one of the hilarious lies. And even yesterday on yesterday's
stream, there was a comment put someone put over night that I saw,
he went through a long lists of what was happening in Palestine,
from way back time of Moses all the way down. But funny thing is
like, he had to stop at about 70 ad. I'm like, Hey, you're missing
about, you know, 1900 years, there's a gap there of 1900 years,
right? Because obviously, they're gonna have to put Muslims in
there. Right. So your use, you talked about how part of your
study is media, misrepresentations, apartheid
states have to they must constantly repeat
their the this this misrepresentation or this new
vision in the Americas, in the Americas, they had to repeat the
what was it?
provenant what was it? What was the American slogan that justified
them taking the land from the from
manifest destiny? Manifest Destiny, right? Yeah, these people
had themes, they had narratives, right? Like, if you're in a normal
situation, you don't have a narrative, right? You need you
need to come up with a narrative usually, to pull the wool over
someone's head over someone's eyes. Right? So what are some of
the, the these false narratives or, you know, media
misrepresentations stories spun? That you want people to be aware
of? No.
So here's the deal. I'm gonna go first. So we want to go. Yeah. So
we have to look at, we look at media representation in two ways.
One of them, we have to look at the target audience of the of the
media, right? So you either have the target audience be the
population, internal population of the state, we have to be external,
external parties, right. And so we have in the United States, for
example, a specific type of propaganda, this disseminated
amongst the population through the educational system, the way that
the history books are written the types of material that makes its
way into the history books, that types of discussions that can be
had at a public level, the fact that we've had McCarthyism in this
country, and, you know, the discourse on on anti semitism is
very much like McCarthyism, you know, policing, the fact that you
had the canary mission and these kinds of Institute, you know, you
could find Muslim students or students that are supporting
Palestine, on websites out there is very much like, anti communist
witch hunt. Right. So there's kind of internal internal propaganda
that that goes on in those external propaganda, the attempt
to sway public opinion in other parts of the world to support your
cause. And, unfortunately, I turned to a friend of mine, very
good friend of mine the other day, and I told him, I said, you know,
I feel bad for a lot of Israelis, right, there's a, there's just a
lot of young people in Israel grow up. And they have a particular
view of their history, you know, pumped into their minds or
brainwashed into thinking basically, that this was,
you know, to
a land without people, right for people without a land, right? That
that kind of messages can consistently being imposed upon
you to the point where, right you have to start to believe it and
you don't question and that's why some of these, like I mentioned
Elon pop it earlier little puppet talks about this season, Israeli
academic who was teaching it I don't know if he's still keeping a
Haifa University. But he frequently does an experiment with
students where you ask them to describe, you know, what they see
outside of the university. Outside of university, they look outside
they see the slopes and they try and describe what they're seeing
and the way that they
Describe this land various differently between students that
are Israeli students and students that would consider themselves to
be more Palestinian as opposed Palestinian Arab students. And so
that just really goes to show that ideology is disseminated through
through education, but it's also disseminated through the media
apparatus and the media apparatus is not doesn't serve the benefits,
it doesn't serve the interests of the common person doesn't serve
the interests of like the average citizen, it serves the interests
of those people who are able to fund the media. If you think
about, like our news programs today, how often do they cut to,
to commercials, it's they need that commercial money, they need
the advertising money. And on top of that, the there's like five,
six, a handful of corporations that own majority of the media
distributed around the world. I mean, this just goes to show you
why is it that it's concentrated in the hands of just a small few?
Why is it that when there's there's some news that may be
damaging to the reputation of the United States government, or
damaging to the reputation of other climate states such as
Israel, right? When it's damaging to them, it doesn't make it into
the headlines, or it makes it into the headlines, you mix it into one
of the later pages or down below the fold. On a day that nobody
really reads the newspaper, right? It doesn't show up on a day when
people reading, it doesn't show up at a time when people are reading
it. All of that is part of the propaganda machine. And so we're
constantly receiving us as Americans. And the fact that we
have social media is a two pronged, we need to look at it
from two, two perspectives. There's the benefit of it, which
is that a lot of this can't be silenced anymore. It's difficult
to silence it, because there's a democratization of the news. But
on the flip side, also with artificial intelligence, and in
this, there's also possibility not just of artificial intelligence,
but the possibility of manipulation in us as well through
bots. And so the interests are always going to be there, you just
have to do your digging. Yeah. And it's funny that you talk about how
people on the inside of a country that's that's pumping this stuff
out, they can get brainwashed. And in this day and age that we're in,
it's, it's really easy to come out of that. brainwashing. Right, with
the world of technology that we have. And I was thinking the funny
thing the other day, I was driving in here today.
All the talk about normalization.
I thought to myself, You know what, this is actually really
good. Because what's the monthly if you just take like a monthly
approach? What is What are the lessem of normalization?
abnormality, right? You would not have to normalize if you already
normal, right?
You are literally implying that
you that this this nation, something is not right. Right.
It's just It's funny that Israel has sort of not come up with its
its own framing for it. Right? This is actually a frame that
Arabs own for once, because this is not a good term for them.
Normalization itself to be me or any Toby something that's normal.
Whoever came up with it has really sort of done a disservice to the,
to the Zionist cause. Right? They also think about the work that the
BI itself from an Arab from Arabic, right, they make something
natural. Yeah, you know, so it's yeah, the premise like that. This
is where a month benefits, like the study of logic benefits,
because every word has to have a definition. It also many words
have premises, right. Right to to round something out. If I tell you
here, take a piece of dough and round it out, like make it a ball.
Well, what's the premise? It's not round? Right? Yeah. So
normalization is something that I don't think any Israeli non
Israeli can get away from. It's
it's in the news. It's everyone's talking about it. And it's again,
pointing to the fact that this is part of the fabric of the story,
that you're not normal. Right. And most people this is one of the
things that I brought up is that so many people imagine that Israel
is no different than like Ecuador, Greece, like a regular country.
It's not a regular country, right, regular country. He found it on
the map. And of 200 years ago, 300 years ago, and there's never a
concern that they won't be on the map 100 years from now, 200 years
from now, right? Whereas that's not the case either way for
Israel. On one hand, you're not on the map. You didn't exist. You
have a founding story from that started I couldn't believe this
when I started this when I was young. Like one dude, theater
Hertzel
was not one but he was the main guy. Like
like one guy spun up a country, like how is this a normal way of
being? And then secondly, there's still constantly a worry and a
concern, will that exist in 100? years? Right? Will it be removed
from from from the map and 100 years, 200 years or whatever?
Right. And if you if you look into certain spheres, there are Jews
making contingency plans already. Right for China was was one funny
thing that I heard, we're all going to go to China next. So
turning this now to Hamza,
the framing of the apartheid state, they need a lot of
propaganda, they need a lot of narrative, they need a lot of
story, to cover up this imbalance with some kind of acceptable sauce
expand for us.
And kind of the two elements of that fell off or from like a media
perspective is kind of silencing dissenting voices. So we've seen
this in people, people, if you speak out on Palestine, you might
get fired, you might get doxxed, you I get put on Canary mission.
You've seen journalists like Mark Lamont hill a few years back, he
was just actually Nelson Mandela himself, when they were in the
midst of negotiations between 1990 and 1994. Nelson Mandela was in
the United States. And he was on Ted Koppel, who's, you know, a
famous journalist, and had cobble basically said to him, he said,
you know, we know you guys stand with Palestinians. But there are a
lot of people in prominent positions in the United States who
say that, you know, apartheid is bad, the South African struggle is
bad. But if you guys are gonna stick with the Palestinians, why
don't we just keep the same? Why don't we like not sanction South
Africa? Why don't we kind of not do all this sort of stuff. And
Nelson Mandela said that no, he said, This is something that we as
the African National Congress are uncompromising on Yasser Arafat as
a comrade in arms, our struggle in the struggle to Palestinians is
the same struggle. And he later on said that, you know, our struggle,
our freedom is incomplete, without that at the Palestinians. But this
is the greatest issue of our times. So one thing, this idea of
crushing dissent, and they've been trying to do this for decades, and
then the other thing is, is this idea of kind of dehumanizing
Palestinians. And we've seen this in very explicit ways over the
past few weeks, where, you know, they've literally called
Palestinians, animals, all this sort of stuff. Because if you
don't have that sort of framework, then it becomes this idea where if
you have to treat Palestinians as kind of rational human beings as
rational actors, then it's like, okay, why did this all this stuff
go on on October 7? Why did these kidnappings occur? Why did all
this happen? If history starts on that day, and you can start from
the premise that Palestinians are just these people who you know,
are just, you know, foaming at the mouth, they just hate Israelis for
no reason, and all this sort of stuff, then the kind of narrative
works. But if you go back a few weeks, if you want to talk about
the siege on Gaza, that's been around since 2006. If you want to
talk about the Nakba, 1948, all this sort of stuff, then the
narrative kind of falls apart. And the reality is, is this narrative
can only be kept apart for so long with the way that media is. And
with the fact that as you mentioned, the premise is always
Israel is abnormal. A European settler colony in the middle of
the Levant is by definition abnormal. Yeah, the State of
Israel is different from Egypt, it's different from Lebanon is
different from Jordan is different from all the states around him in
the sense that it's a kind of European transplant. And even kind
of like with liberal human rights discourse.
The State of Israel does not abide by this liberal human rights
discourse that its kind of allies in the United States in Western
Europe claim to kind of stand so schizophrenic.
Yeah, yeah. So it's like, if a country like Pakistan, were doing
stuff like this, or if a country in Africa, we're doing stuff like
this, like it would be kind of crazy. But it's ironic that the
allies of Israel are the people who are kind of the people who
want to push this kind of liberal human rights discourse, like on
the rest of the world. Yeah.
I mean,
their, their view, their view of things of where things are going
is, I believe the hope that they could continue to mow the lawn in
the Gaza enough to reduce the population of Arabs to below 50%.
Right 40 45%, then eventually 4035, etc. And then they don't
have to worry about that one factor of one ethnicity trying to
dominate over the other. All right. We saw in history this
happened in the past the Latin Kingdom during the time of the
Crusades. The first Crusade was won by the Europeans, which were
mainly French people. And they opened up four cities Jerusalem.
Ashkelon, I think was one of them. Who you guys remember the four
states? Oh, the Jerusalem
Ashkelon, four city states basically, that formed the Latin
kingdom. I can't remember what the fourth or the four are. But you
remember, yeah. So they're forced suit. But these are purely French,
like French cities right in the middle of the Arab, the Levant.
And sometimes, you know, when you when you're young, and you learn
about something for the first time, you're fit that actually
gives you an answer that
has a lot of truth to it. and
whatnot for when I was young learning about Israel, and
realizing they put themselves right smack in the middle of a 300
million Muslims, right.
Just the patterns of success and failure. From watching sports. You
see the best teams that like the Jordan bulls, they're untouchable?
Well, three, one season after retirement, they don't make the
playoffs, right? What does that tell, like generations come and
go. You open the history books, the Greeks are untouchable? Well,
two chapters later, they're in the garbage, right? They can't do
anything for themselves. The Romans are untouchable through
chapters laid here. You know, Louis, Jesus was flipping pizzas.
Okay?
What what's going to happen when this when that pendulum swings
from the competent ben-gurion generation, right. And that
pendulum has to swing to sometimes they hear hear they call it the
Long Island juice syndrome. So pampered so rich, doesn't know an
ounce of hardship, and doesn't really have the will to fight and
doesn't care about Israel anymore. Well, what happens when that
actually occurs? Okay. In the State of Israel that has you're
talking five, 6 million people surround by 300 million? Do they
imagine that Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Syria, all these
countries are going to remain incompetent forever. Right? That
they're going to remain as a bumbling Arabs that don't know how
to do anything, and are slaves to the west forever, it's not gonna
last, like, literally, it's just a matter of time, you're gonna go
through the normal stages of history. Okay.
And the competency is going to change. And then you're really how
are you going to survive that?
You know, so that's why this dehumanization, and depopulation
is going to be so important. But it still doesn't make a
difference. Because you're surrounded, right? By countries
whose numbers are growing. And eventually, I have a clock that
doesn't work is right two times a day, right? Eventually, they must
produce a competent generation with a crisp vision, and a will to
exert you know, their destiny on the world rather than receive it
become the subject of history rather than the objects of
history. It's a matter of time, what are they going to do in that
case? Technology can only take you so far. Right. So what do you guys
thoughts about that?
I think the other factor is, is the United States basically, is
kind of like a necessity for kind of Israel to like survive. And
even within states, we're seeing public opinion shift so rapidly, I
think they did a poll that said 80% of Democrats support a
ceasefire. And I think like 70, something percent of independence,
and like 60 something percent of Republicans, two thirds of
Americans, as a whole, two thirds of Americans support a ceasefire,
but only 13 Members of Congress out of 435 I called for a
ceasefire. So once we see kind of things catch up with in terms of
public opinion, and the United States kind of support for Israel
ends, they're not going to really have much to stand on. And even
now, if you look at like the statements of these guys, when I
read these statements, I'm like, Oh, wow, when these guys, you
know, are at The Hague, like statements like this are really
going to look very bad.
So I think we should be very optimistic. Well, one of my
teachers were selling Buhari a couple of days ago. And he said,
I've never seen popular support in the Muslim world, like what I've
seen today in the entirety of my life. So we should be very kind of
hopeful in that regard. And I think another thing is, is even in
terms of apartheid South Africa, if you told someone in the 80s,
that apartheid would be gone in the 90s. They wouldn't believe
you.
Things shift a lot more rapidly than we think. There have been
reports of a lack of morale at the State Department, because of the
kind of internal politics of the State Department. Is it clear that
this is wrong? I've heard that. Yep. Yeah. So we're, we're seeing
a lot of kinds of changes happening.
Those changes are gonna manifest sooner than later. Yep. Well,
also, eventually, the United States influence as we saw,
the British Empire's influence. It's eventually going to go down.
It's not gonna last forever.
Ever, right? It's eventually going to go down. And let me turn
something tear
in terms of media and representation.
How do you see the Israeli academic scene? Responding to
this? How are they fitting into the rest of the
academic world? Who is clearly in tune with more Ilan puppies?
Perspective inside of Israel? Is that perspective still shut down?
Or is it something that is growing?
That critical perspective? Yeah. So,
you know, I think
the easy answer is I don't know. But if I can maybe take a guess
based off of individuals who are kind of, perhaps more popularly
known in the West, such as Elon Pompeii, or Yuval, Noah Harare,
read Sapiens, right. And these individuals, a lot of them
represent, I think, the liberal wing in Israeli politics, and
they're worried about the kind of the rise of the far right in the
same way that the liberal wing of the United States is also
concerned about the rise of the far right. And so in generally
speaking, has bought into the notion of there being certain
human rights, universal human rights. And, and these are
obviously human rights violations, according to, to these
conventions, right, international conventions are the Declaration of
Human Rights.
But I will say that historically, one of the things that
kind of goes under the radar is how the intellectual echelon of
society has been co opted, by those corporate interests, right.
And this happens very frequently. If you think about the United
States, we think about the tobacco industry, what was the tobacco
industry able to do was able to co opt a certain segment of the of
the scientific community, specifically those that were
pretty prominent following the Manhattan Project physicists, for
example, to get them to, to partake in their efforts to shift
public opinion away from a lot of the studies that were produced in
the 1950s and 1960s, that showed that smoking was harmful, and was
one of the was occurs, you know, contain carcinogens and lead to
lung cancer, right. And so, you know, there's numbers of
scientific community that we're against that there's members of
scientific community who've, we've spoken out against the, you know,
climate change, or other kinds of like issues. And so you really
have to ask, you know, what, what are the factors that are
influencing a particular into a member of intelligentsia is a
support or lack of support of, of, of this cause. And sometimes
you'll find that there are people who are, who are principled, who
have a particular, you know, ideology they believe in, and they
manifest the ideology, regardless of what's happening, they just
believe that there's certain things that are wrong. Ilana pop
in Noam Chomsky being examples of that. And then you have other
individuals who are perhaps a bit more opportunistic, or who are
able to convince themselves that there are national security
concerns that we really need to think about, or who bought into
the narrative that if you don't support Israel, that you are anti
semitic, or that you you know, what's going to happen is these
Arabs are foaming at the mouth. You know, funnel talks about the
fact that like, the natives are oftentimes spoken about in
zoological terms, that they're like rats, and that they live in
what you know, sewage is in like, and so they're constantly
irrational beings. And if you think about the way that the media
is representing the Palestinians, and specifically their political
organizations, even democratically elected political organizations,
they, they represent them as being irrational agents, and generally
speaking, autocratic regimes that are in the in the Arab world are
represented as being basically bulwarks against an irrational
Native population that will just sweep over the entire land like a
Jewish man who's gone God kind of situation. And so I think that, I
think what you what you see is generally speaking in in the,
you have a segment of the population, especially amongst the
intellectual class that has shifted to the left historically.
And that's why, you know, those of you that are going through college
or whatever, you start realizing that a lot of your professors are
very, very kind of closer to like left leaning liberals, maybe not
progressives, but the left leaning liberals. And you do have like a
kind of rise also of certain far right conservatives that are that
are coming up in Europe and in the United States, and also, you know,
most likely in Israel. So I think we should, you know, we should be
conscious of the fact that this intellectual class is not, you
know, like a monolith. And those of them that do go against those
interests are oftentimes subject to certain purchase like in Russia
or in other places, right in Germany, the same
I think as well, here in the United States, a certain type of
purge was McCarthyism, right. That's a type of purge. And so
they're also worried about their careers. They're worried about
their, their futures, etc. So,
you know, I'm glad, I'm glad that there are professors that are
speaking out and PhD students are speaking up. But I can tell you
for a fact that just just as there are Muslims who are in PhD
programs, who are studying Arabic and Islamic Studies, for example,
who were, who are secretly Muslim, or who downplayed their Islamic
identity, because they are conscious of the fact that they
will be perceived as people who have biases when they apply for
jobs.
The same thing also goes for people who are probably supportive
for the Palestinian cause, but are worried about how their reputation
what that will do for the reputation. And there are calls
for certain professors to be fired from their jobs just because they
say something like, you know, Israel is an apartheid state and
automatically like your, you know, you're faced with that backlash.
And there is this, since Trump came around, he popularized this
concept of just believing something because you want to,
irrespective of all the facts,
and this go rounds has sort of it's highlighted people who still
want that. Good. And it's also but it's also been balanced out
because it's a war. In a war, you have pictures. If you're telling
me someone got killed, show us the picture, right? In this day and
age, we got evidence for the skin just make up lies. As in the past
that perhaps then you could just believe those lies if you want to.
The Western media has been so egregious, The Guardian has been
much better. I'm looking here at an article that said 85 year old
hostage,
okay, and because it says she went through *, that's actually not
what she said.
It's actually not what she said. She said that she, she was in a
great amount of fear. Let me actually read to you what she
said. And then you see that the Guardian gives you a polar
opposite image. It's almost like they're making just making up
stuff. So
yo, yo Javad Lavich, she says, has described her ordeal of being
captured by Hamas at a press conference in Tel Aviv hospital.
Okay. She was one of the two women returned by Hamas yesterday and
third and fourth of hostages to be freed. Israel said on Monday
morning that Hamas was holding 222 People goes Lifshitz spoken Hebrew
with her daughter translating in English. Okay. She said that she
had been through * after being captured by Hamas fighters on
motorbikes. Okay, so that is the one part that she said. And then
she says, And at one point, she was forced to walk. However, she
was forced when she arrived at the, at the tunnels, she was
taken, treated very differently. She said, people treated her
gently. They looked after our needs, the captives were fed, we
got mattresses to sleep on. And she said there were doctors and
paramedics paramedics ready there in the tunnels in Gaza, to tend to
the wounded. She was critical of Israel's military for not taking
the threat of Hamas seriously before that. Good. So let's take
out a look at the New York Times says quotes that picture Well,
lion went through *. That's not all she said. Right? But that's
what they're gonna highlight. Now. What is the guardian highlight the
Guardian highlights? The same woman got 85 shown shaking hands
with Hamas captcha, basically saying goodbye to the CAPTCHA upon
leaving, good. Alright, Lifshitz said that after the initial
violence in her cameras capture had shown her this is her in her
words, care and gentleness, a rare description of humanity and a
savage conflicts. Okay, these are her words.
Guards fed the prisoners the same type of food they ate. This is my
reading here, the guardian of which one is this is the garden.
They gave the same type of food that
the guards ate. A doctor visited every single day. medication and
treatment was provided every single day.
In one case, a hostage was injured, not because they were
beaten but because the motorbike that took them crashed the
motorbikes I probably chased by the IDF. So we crashed.
She said they were very concerned with our hygiene. And we're
worried about an outbreak of something. We had toilets, and
they clean them every day. All right. She's saying this. She said
that Hamas there that bathrooms and they cleaned the bathrooms
every day to make sure no one got infection. Lifshitz accused Israel
security forces of ignoring evidence that Hamas was praying
attack
Three weeks ago masses arrived at the fence. The IDF didn't take it
seriously, we were left to fend for ourselves. Several Israeli
media commentators said Lifshitz comments were a PR disaster.
And accused Israeli authorities of clumsy ly clumsy handling of the
press conference, namely, that they didn't sit down there and
prep her
beforehand and make her say things beforehand, which the US has done
many, many times. So this goes into what?
Excuse me What Muhammad was talking about, that
apartheid states have to prop up a narrative, because and what Hamza
said earlier humanization
is a problem. If you humanize people, this is a big problem for
the apartheid, you have to consistently repeat a message over
and over that dehumanizes them. And that
justifies people sort of eradicating them off the face of
the earth like rats, and, and vermin.
I'm going to open it up to questions from the audience right
now. Let's open it up here. And then
what the point I wanted to make was that when you have a war, when
you have a physical situation, you can't just believe what you want,
right? Because evidence is required. And you can't deny the
evidence, you can't deny some of these pictures. And one of the
things we said earlier, is that a couple episodes ago is that in
today's world, you have to look for context.
In the image, and a picture, epistemologically, we have to
downgrade it No, like big time, the photograph has to be severely
downgraded. Whereas in the past, during Vietnam times, there was no
manipulation of photographs in the way it is today. Right. So the
video is far more important. Until now, there, there probably will
come a time where you can AI and
manipulate a video to make it look just like, you know, the same way
that we manipulate photos. But for now, the context of these videos
is the video offers context. And one of the most powerful videos
was the Palestinian men
who had about six, seven babies in front of him. And he had four or
five people, dead babies. And he's talking, right. Like, the when
babies were killed, the Palestinians were able to give a
video that had context, right. And Western media made sure never, not
once to come close, right to releasing that kind of video and
that kind of footage. And the only place that we have it is in
you know, into individual based social media, and mainly Twitter,
not even that. So as far as saying videos can be manipulated. Yeah,
they can. They they can be they will be better in the future. But
up at this moment in time, you could still tell the regular
viewer can still tell the difference between
you know, manipulated one, Muhammad? Yeah, awesome. Yeah,
sorry, I have to say I wanted to just say that on that point of the
manipulation of the video, let's just say, for example, that we
happen to know that governments is specifically like the Israeli
governments because Israel, Israel has some of the most advanced
technology in the world. Right. And actually, Israel produces a
lot of kinds of technology that's used by security and industry and
intelligence industry. And so they're really advanced in this on
this front. So let's say for example, that Israel actually has
this technology in the same way that doctoring images is something
that even Stalin was able to deal with, right? Before it became a
kind of common thing that we can do through Photoshop, etc, decades
later. Even if that's the case, the people who can't doctor the
images, or the or the Israeli, it's Israeli government that
conducted it's not the average Palestinian who's taking videos on
their phones and recording that. And so even if you were to stay,
the videos can be doctored. The average Palestinian on the street
does not have in Azusa or, you know, the West Bank or any of the
occupied occupied Palestinian territories does not have the
capacity does because they're they are severely limited in terms of
their resources, they don't have the capacity to be able to produce
that type of technology. The fact that you just don't have water and
food means that you don't have electricity and don't have the
energy that you need to be able to produce that let alone the
technology that's advanced enough to do that. So even if you even if
you have to accept that it's just Palestinians aren't doing it. So
the material just released by the Palestinians is more real than the
material that's produced by by the Israeli sources. Yeah, that's a
good point. Hamza.
Yeah, I mean, one thing that's interesting here is Palestinians
in a sense, are relying on a lot more kind of low tech stuff.
This is a little bit unrelated, but I'm like, kind of drawing the
comparison between like Palestinian resistance groups, not
just Hamas, but also like Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the PFLP other
groups that are also fighting in Gaza right now. If you compare
them to the African National Congress, I spent a lot of time
interviewing South Africans who were involved in the anti
apartheid struggle, were members of the ANC and kind of other
groups. And one thing one of them said to me, that was really
interesting, is he said, I hope Palestinians don't resist
apartheid, like we did. And I said to him, I said, What do you mean
by that? And he said, a lot of the stuff that we did, because of just
the heat of being occupied and stuff we shouldn't have done. And
he said, one thing that we did is we would do necklace things. And
we're necklace is, is someone is a, if someone is suspected of
spying or like spying on behalf of the regime, you put a tire around
them, you tie the tie around them, and you light it on fire. This is
something that the African National Congress did, they bombed
train stations, they bombed coffee shops, they engage in kidnappings,
they engaged in murders, all of this sort of stuff, all the stuff
that we find atrocious, even if we say that their you know, their
right to resist apartheid was legitimate.
And in South Africa, there was a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, where they basically kind of took two people to task
for their crimes, both like of the apartheid regime, but also members
of liberation groups that did these things. And Desmond Tutu was
head of the of the TRC. And he said something really profound. He
said that we're taking both groups to task, he said, but don't think
that there's an equivalence here know that Apartheid was the
primary infection. And the primary aim as a result were secondary
infections. And this is one issue with media manipulation. They're
always talking about the secondary infections, but they never want to
talk about the primary issue. They never want to talk about the
occupation, the siege on Gaza, the system of apartheid, the Nakba,
all of this sort of stuff, they always want to talk about these
secondary infections. And then even pro Palestinian people, when
they get on, they're not there to be interviewed, they're there to
be interrogated, you know, condemn this kidnapping, condemned this
murder, all this sort of stuff. And then when it comes to the
Israeli government, you know, murdering civilians and all this
sort of stuff, that kind of is like, you know, under the rug.
Yeah, it's
there is a messiness. When it comes to Well, first two things
out two points I want to make the first point is that
a few weeks before October 7, a couple friends of mine were
talking, I was like, you know, what, the Palestinians don't have
to do anything anymore. Because Israel is combusting from within.
There, we're on the verge of their own, you know, civil strife. I
don't can't say it was gonna go to, you know, picking up arms, but
you had the military on one side, the courts on the other side, and
Netanyahu on the, with the courts. And we were just watching sit back
and watch as you'll go at it with each other, right? And then this
suddenly happens. So on one hand, that's sort of makes sense, what
you're saying what the eight what the ANC said, you know, don't do
what we did, right? Because that secondary infection is can be used
against you. Right, that you're the terrorists here. But the
second
second point that I wanted to make
Subhanallah
Yeah, go ahead. If on that first point, if you don't mind.
You know,
when you have when you have an internal conflict in your country,
one of the easiest ways to distract from that conflict is to
start some kind of external conflict, right? So you don't want
to deal with your internal problems. And you are realizing
that there's a kind of stratification society along
different lines, ideological lines, or whatever being to unify
the country. Yeah. And one of the one of the easiest ways to do that
is to identify an external enemy, or other internal enemy that's
like a minority or something like that, where it's an external
enemy. And it just happens to be really, really fascinating that
that, you know, you bring this point up, but it's brought up also
in on the opposite side by by Tom Friedman. Right. Thomas Friedman
is a New York Times columnist, who Noam Chomsky actually said about
him that anytime that the United States wants to wants to have it's
kind of like interesting in a particular conflict, reported the
New York Times sent over to Tom Friedman to that area and so
people that are from the Middle East and from like Lebanon and
Palestine and just kind of heard his reporting and read his
reporting over the decades, know exactly, you know, what I'm
talking about here, but Thomas Friedman, in in podcasts recently
for the New York Times, basically said, and I want to get his words
here, I thought it was really, really fascinating. He, he says he
advances the claim that they talk by headmaster on October 7
is a calculated effort to stem the tide of normalization. Look, he
says this was a strategic threat, they had to do something that
would trigger as violence and as crazy response as they could from
Israel that would create as many Palestinian casualties as they
could, that would then freeze the Saudis and all the Arab countries,
those who have already normalized and those who might be considering
it from going ahead. And I think that to the best, we can figure
out the timing. That was it. And it's working pretty much for Hamas
in Iran. Right. So instead of like, instead of thinking of it
is, you know, the Israel is having internal conflict in Netanyahu,
you know, like, for all intensive purposes, there's an intelligence
failure, even like American intelligence.
Experts are saying this is an intelligence failure that happened
in Israel. They could have prevented this if they wanted to,
right. But they just didn't they overlooked this. Why is that?
Netanyahu is on the on the out. He's, you know, there's, there's
rise of kind of a faction in the government that doesn't want
Netanyahu there. And so it's just very easy to start a conflict and
say, you know, what, I need to, on top of that, what do you do you
amass more power as an executive in the same way that, you know,
George Bush did during the Iraq War and infanticide, also the war
in Afghanistan. So it's, it's fascinating that you can look at
it from either perspective, but it's really key to think about why
is it that Thomas Friedman is looking at it from this particular
perspective? Whereas it would make more sense to look at it from the
other perspective, you're looking at kind of what's happening
externally in Israel? Yeah. He can't help his. He's a hometown.
Right. Yeah. And can you do the end of his? Sorry, go ahead. God,
good. Yeah. He can't help himself. But except view in that from that
light? Yeah, even like he says, A flat out. He says, he's asked
basically to, to, you know, to consider what he would do if he
was in Israel's Israel, you know, position. And he says, I'm
reluctant to talk about how I would fight. This is a quote, I'm
reluctant to talk about how I would fight this war, because it's
Israel's war. And I look at it from America's interests. right
handers already heard this, as we talked about it the other day. But
it's fascinating to think about it, you're a journalist, like why
should you be looking at it from America's interest, you should be
looking at from the interest of like, the truth, factual
reporting.
And even like in our media, forgive me for for just kind of
adding this and going on a tangent, but from from the
perspective of the media. There, there was a there was kind of like
the fairness and Reporting Act, I believe, it's called, like the
fair Fairness Act, or something to that effect, which basically
balanced reporting act, right. Which basically stated that, that,
you know, public broadcasting, you know, broadcasting stations that
would receive funding from the federal government is, you know,
collected from taxes, that they would be required to, to highlight
different perspectives on an issue and to give equal weight to
different perspectives on an issue. The thing is, that was
severe, like that was manipulated. Initially, it was manipulated by
the tobacco industry that has been manipulated by various other
industries. But generally speaking, it's been manipulated by
both corporations and by government interests to make sure
that to muddy the waters, so sometimes the issue is very, very
clear, very, very clear, you don't have two sides on an issue. It's
just there's only one side, but how often do you see that like,
that they bring on some kind of random experts to kind of, you
know, muddy the waters, you know, this person doesn't really know
what they're talking about. And oftentimes, in the case of those
issues that are of concern to us, as Muslims, for example, what
they'll do is they'll bring on oftentimes, they'll bring on the
most the most, you know, well speaking, you know,
puppet for a particular cause, you know, while speaking knows all the
rhetoric rhetorical tools and devices has been on multiple,
like, you know, interviews, they'll bring that person ought to
get to debate with Muslim activists, number two are Muslim
activist, activist number three, who's somebody who's passionate
about the issue, but doesn't have immediate training. And then you
just look at that and you think this person is destroyed by media
training. The truth is with a person who is obviously with this
person who's speaking, you know, speaking truth to power, but on
the other side, what people read, and it's just like, wow, this
person just basically destroy that. And we see that also as
Muslims, like, you know, what's happening with Piers Morgan and
the various people that he's bringing on kudos and to bring out
like, a lot of people that are speaking on behalf of Palestine.
Yeah, but at the same time, also, the talking points are just
hilarious. You know, think about it.
Yeah, the contrast is what they go for. Right? They go for a
contrast, and they try to, and the questions they ask, so yeah, it's
one thing you brought both sides, but you just gave a nice fastball
down the middle, for one side, right. And for the other side, you
you're asking like almost attacking them with a question.
And putting,
condemning,
putting them on the defensive right away. These are all games
they're playing. And I want to actually turn you guys to fit for
a second. And we have to say that you there is an element of
sloppiness when it comes to some moral to some injustices. In other
words, in the macro sphere,
There's a clear injustice, right? Let's say in South Africa, you're
colonizing right. You're just stealing. In Israel. We just say
it's the same. Same thing, the Nakba and all that you guys did.
Right? All that they did there. It's theft, and murder and all
these things. Now, in sec, and you're both students of medically
fit, right? How are you studying Medical Ficker? 100?
I've done a little bit of medical, but mostly how do people think
you're Hanafy? Yeah. Okay. So, well, this goes to your point
then, because nobody's doing it.
And nobody knows.
The school, the Hanafi school that we have to admit is closest to the
sun. Yes. Medicare, of course, being the son. Right? Yeah.
All right. So now listen to this.
If a mob leader a mafia don commits a crime, okay, then raises
his family upon that crime. In other words, upon that wealth, or
upon the property,
then dies, you know, a lot of people are gonna get upset about
this. But we got to say the truth, then he dies.
And the inheritance goes to his little kid, his little kit, this
is all he knows, this is his world. Right? That's my house.
The guy he stole the house from is still alive and fuming and trying
to get his house back. Now, what is the MACOM? Now? What is the
position now between the son of the mafia don, who has all he did
was claiming inheritance to the home in which he was raised right.
In himself, he did no wrong. Yet, the victim
whose house was stolen, is still alive. Okay. What is the fix of
this conflict between the two of them?
That's the question. Yes, but I don't know if that analogy is
perfect. Because it just leave it forget it as an analogy, but as it
just as that
just the kid would not have the school the kid would not be
responsible for what was stolen, because he has received it
lawfully right. Now, mind you, this is where I had said earlier,
because I always you have to be consistent with things I said
earlier, the grievance with Philistine and as
an Israel is not the concept of conquering the land. You lost it.
Right? Ottomans lost it. They lost the war. They lost their country.
Okay. It fell into the hands of the British now the British do
what they want with it. They gave it to Israel. Okay. And they gave
parts of it to Palestine, the grievance begins with the then
unlawful usurping of land in 1948.
And number two, with the treatment of the
of the Palestinian people in West Bank in Gaza being suspended?
Neither are they Palestinians with their state, nor are they citizens
of, of Israel. Would you agree that that is actually the
grievance, because in the example that I gave, it's just a matter of
conquest once the Conqueror and he is an oppressor, transit mid sit
down one generation, okay, at that point, according to Hanafi law,
you can't make a claim anymore. Right. And that's where I think
the analogy is a little bit imperfect, because it's not like
that happened in 48, then Israelis kind of stopped stealing land, the
Nakba has been ongoing for seven. That's what I'm saying. That's
where the grievous because they keep stealing land, and they're
not giving the citizens a position, either your take a state
B, be your own country, nor are you citizens, which leads me to
ask, in these other situations in South Africa, what was the
citizenship of the actual South African people? What was your
citizenship status? So this is interesting. And this is similar
to like Israel does South Africa, they kind of create what you would
call like a racial ladder. So there were the there were the
whites who had the most amount of rights. Then there were Indians
who were kind of below the whites. And then there were colors. And
the this is what like they were this was they are classified as,
and these will be people who are mixed between races, or
Malaysians, who were brought over to South Africa, like the kind of
Cape Malays, and then below that was the indigenous Africans. But
when the South African government spoke of black and white,
everyone who wasn't white was included as black so Indians,
colored and indigenous Africans.
But they would kind of play this game where they would give one
like the Indians were still discriminated against but they
would have more rights in the colors. The colors would have less
rights.
Indians have more rights than the kind of indigenous Africans. And
we see this in Israel today. It's not just Israelis and
Palestinians. There's a whole ladder amongst kind of like Jews,
Ashkenazi Jews are at the top Sephardic Jews below them, Mizrahi
Jews below them, African Jews below them.
Below that, or you could say, Palestinian citizens of Israel,
who still face immense discrimination and expulsions and
all that. After that West Bank, Palestinians in the West Bank,
there's area A, B, C, they're ruled by different groups, then
there are Palestinians in Gaza. But if you look at like the whole
system, Israel is the ruling power in this entire system,
Palestinians in the West Bank, they pay taxes to the Israeli
government, which the Israeli government then gives to the PA.
So Palestinians in the West Bank are not voting for the government
that controls them. They have no state controls. And so this is a
parallel between like apartheid, South Africa and Israel, where
it's not just like one group and the other group, but they create
kind of like this ladder, and it kind of helps to kind of create
like, kind of like this kind of, what would you call it creates
this kind of cloudiness, they kind of blurred the lines a little bit.
And there's something me and Sheikh Mohammed are talking about
a couple of days ago, that Sheikh Hassan Edo he said in this time,
he said, you know, we should donate, we should protest, we
should pray, we should fast, we pray the 100 We should make
liquor. But one thing that he recommended was reading Surah
Imran and you know, I thought to myself, like you know, what is it
in Surah Imran that will kind of benefit us for like this
situation. And I read I think verse number seven were talks
about like Iran has more Hakima in the Quran has Mata shall be heard,
and the people of fitna, they love to concentrate on the watershed we
had. And if you look at kind of where the Israeli kind of
government kind of
kind of thrives is in these multi Shabbiha, even if you look at like
the propaganda that spread, it's on these kind of like blurry
lines, where you can kind of just make up stuff.
So yes, it's something that's very important that these lines are
blurred on purpose. And there's kind of
a method and like, kind of mind behind it. Yeah, the peace talks
was all to blur everything and delay everything. Muhammad, what
do you think of that? That mess out of there, that
So
to the best of my knowledge, and I need to do a bit more review on my
mind than that, but to the best of my knowledge, make a distinction
amongst the mannequin that whether the person who's inheriting knows
or they don't know. Right, so if they if they do know that it's
really important that, yeah, they do know that that item was stolen,
or that property was stolen, whether it be land or be something
else movable property or property, then they are basically in the
same position as the person who stole it. They're like their
parents that they end up taking it in. And so the problem that we
have today is that a lot of the people that weren't born in during
the Nakba, and they were born after that period, and live in
those are even after 1967 are born after, you know, the expansion of
the of Israel's borders after that.
These people know what happened. It's not like they don't know. And
the whole,
the whole world knows. I mean, it's just the it's just the fact.
And even what's happening right now with the settlers in the West
Bank, which is interesting, think about the tactic that's happening
there. They're employing two different tactics, one tactic for
the President, which is kind of like, you know, separate them off,
don't intermix just kind of like in the West Bank, almost, like,
settle them out, you know, like, just create so many settlements
that it becomes, you take it over. And that's just kind of my like,
you know, ignorance kind of take on that position. But I think
making that distinction is very important. There's a paper that I
wrote for a class, which actually was for Professor Brown. And I'm
hoping nobody who's listening to the sense of taking up this before
I publishes an article.
But we do have, we do have precedents and our tradition, and
it's something that's overlooked, you'd have to like look at old,
dark, old kind of texts, taxation documents, such as those written
by Yusuf and others, tax on the history of Bella booties, for
example, put the hat to the couture, as began by a better
theory, which is a textbook talks about the kinds of
the conquest of the Muslims in the early period and the relationships
that they had with the people that they were conquering. And one of
the things that's really fascinating is that, you know, if
you look at our fifth manuals, and you look at the history, there's
two ways of conquering according to most things, what's known as
which, while Hala says so beautifully in in a podcast that
he did on Fifth Gen, where he says there's a difference between that
and conquering, right, but as offering is opening, right, it's
an opening, whereas conquering in terms of the way that we conceive
of conquering conquest is that you're completely subduing the
other
And and Muslims weren't trying to subdue the others in this Congress
was opening them up to the message of Islam so that they had less
than less reasons, material reasons to stick to their
religions. And if they wanted to stick to the religion, they're
sticking to the religion for ideological purposes, not for
material purposes. Which can you say again, before you continue?
Yeah, it's a pinch on podcast for our podcasts in Arabic podcasts
you can listen to with, with Walhalla. The person who sent it
to me with Shakespeare presents or
sent it to her room, set it to myself sent it to a couple other
people. So it's a beautiful podcast for hours necessary
listening for anybody who can understand Arabic, it's a
beautiful, beautiful podcast. But But notice we have two ways we
have the compass by force, and we have accomplished by by treaty.
Now a lot of places decided that they're going to enter into
treaties. Now there's this region in adalah, that's called select.
So out of Iraq, it's called the Black region of Iraq. And the
reason why they call it is because it's fertile land, fertile land is
called the sweat of the soul gap, for example, right. So it's called
its fertile land. Now, a portion of this land actually entered into
a so the people that own that land, into NATO, so agreements,
but it just so happened, that's when the best it's where, if I
remember correctly, when our baskets were creating their
states, they built Baghdad and Medina to set up they built it on
a portion of that land. Right, that they didn't actually they
didn't, it was supposed to mean, it was supposed to be maintained
in the hands of those tribes that may have been Jewish Christians,
but I don't know some other like religion. But it was supposed to
be maintained in their hands. It wasn't the property of the Muslims
to do with as Muslims wanted to do. Was it the property was a part
of the beta man, right? Yeah. Which is what almost it almost
distributed the slander for it for the Muslims. He didn't Yeah,
because he didn't want it to concentrate in the hands of a
select group of people. Right capital accumulation, you know,
almost thinking ahead of his time, right. So this land was built to
back down on its now fast forward to, you know, a little while later
still amongst the seller, and you have somebody like,
I think it's in that Teddy fan that you mentioned this, right,
the author mentions this, you have somebody like
and ignore Mubarak, who would say that they would not ramble along
and like Ilhan Omar, they would say that they wouldn't they
wouldn't pray on that land, not only that, from the Ludlow that
they produce of that land, right? Because they recognize that it's
stolen, and it was stolen from Muslims or stolen from other
people. Right? So it's just amazing to think about how like
that we have precedents in our history, that can we read enough,
right, and that's part of like, the project of art, you know,
maybe our generation, the earlier generation was spending time, you
know, kind of building up institutions in our communities.
But it's really on us in our generation to make sure that
reading reading modern texts reading, you know, classical
texts, reading pre, you know, the texts of the seller, but we're
really, really looking to see how is it that like that Muslims
engaged with their particular time period, and the exigencies of that
time period, it's not the case that you can just respond to our
particular moment today, in the way that somebody responded in the
medieval period, or the classical period. If you look at pictures,
even Shakespeare tells us that if you look at fifth text, and you
try and apply what you find in fifth texts, or even in the
federal manuals, or federal compilations, so our moment,
you're failing, right? You have to be able to understand the
arrangements of political, social, social, economic arrangements of
your time to be able to deal with them, and you can draw inspiration
from our history. And that really requires digging into that
material and not being shy of it. You know, that's a beautiful
comment what you just said, the difference between a conquest and
a FET. And the Conqueror is trying to benefit from the land and the
resources of those people. The fat is simply trying to bring the
truth to those people we don't, is not trying to take your money, not
trying to control your bodies not trying to steal your land. And
just this idea that most of them recognize that part of their
Baghdad itself was unlawfully built up by Muslims,
right from the previous non Muslim owners, and they refuse to eat
from it, pray upon it, et cetera.
That needs to be highlighted more. Yeah, that really needs that, that
that whole section really needs to be highlighted more just to show
the precedent of justice and it's massive. It's a massive
psychological
boost to a person who has I come from a trough I come from a
history of adjust law. My people had adjust law. Right. And they
have moral progressives now they're just trying to figure out
what what is right. Like you're just trying to figure it out. We
have a history. Our our forefathers were not banging on
caves. They weren't just oppressive, as strong eats the
weak. They weren't a people whose morals we can't look up to. As is
happening now in America, people sort of disobey vowing Thomas
Jefferson and things like
like that, okay? That these are our four. That's why a dean is a
far more important identity than anything else. Because that's
it's, it's moral choice that you're aligning yourself with.
It's a morality that you're aligning yourself with. Right?
Whereas if it's a lineage, I watched an interview one time with
a woman, celebrity, and she said,
she didn't know who her dad was, right? And she said, Well, you're
now like, big and famous, the interviewer. If you put a
request out there, you'll find your dad and you just take DNA
tests from everyone claiming to be your dad. Right? And she said,
Actually, I don't want that, because he's most likely some kind
of a douchebag. Right? Ya know, the way my mom was living, I don't
want to know my dad, she say, right, he's, it's going to bring
me down, it's going to bring my self esteem doubt, right, or my
self worth down. So she, it's so important to highlight these
cases. And it's not just oh, they were nice hearted people know,
they had a law from Allah subhanaw taala. Adjust law. Now we know
what's right, and what's wrong. And they acted upon it as as much
as they can. So that's, that's really important. And
that, that this segment of knowing that aspect of knowing is really
important to differentiate between the the what did they call it in,
in,
in law today, the the time lapse between when you can call back a
crime? And when you can't? What does that call it, again? Limits a
statute of limitations, right? So I read in one of your law books is
like 40 years in terms of like property or something like that.
But it's really you can't put a number on it, right? It's the
state of being, do we all know that this was stolen? Or has it
like faded away, and nobody really knows, and, you know, time passed.
So whether it's 40 years or whether it's transmitted, sold
lawfully, or inherited lawfully,
the factor of knowledge of knowing, right is makes more sense
to me than anything else. Right. Yeah. You know, and that's where
as Hamza rightfully said, The analogy that I just gave, you
know, doesn't fit because it's knowledge that matters, right?
It's knowledge, there can be a lot of family feuds, where the dad
steals something, but there's not a lot of knowledge that he's
stolen, then it's Trent it's inherited lawfully by the son. He
doesn't know nobody knows. And he goes on living then someone knocks
on the door years later with a claim a your dad robbed me? I
don't know if that's true or not. Do you have evidence? No, but I
know we all know he robbed No, we don't know. Right? So in that
case, it's very different than when the world knows that's why
education on the history of Israel Palestine almost becomes a type of
flooded Cafe upon the OMA because that which cannot be attained
without it fought it is needed, right. And if if something if a
Fudd cannot be executed without something, that thing becomes a
fault. Right? And if we allow this issue to just disappear in
history,
in the same way that you know, we other crisis and oppressions have
disappeared in history. And no one knows exactly who oppressed who,
whose home was stolen etcetera, then we have allowed an obligation
to slip from our hands
so becomes like a fuck you failure for us to do a weird every year we
should do a teaching and education teach I don't like you're teaching
us like a socialist.
Term resident, only people to teach ins are like commies and
socialist and Marxist, right. But we should we should do a regular
education
on the history of this, these people
so that it never disappears from consciousness that this entire
operation is built upon. baltit Okay. Mabuni out about it for her
about it.
And one thing I would kind of add on to that is, this past World Cup
was a prime example of that, where up until even a couple of the kind
of foreign policy establishment was kind of this idea that the
Middle East is boring, you know, people are interested in the
Palestinian issue, all of that, but the World Cup in Qatar, we saw
fans, we saw teams putting up like, you know, raising the
Palestinian flag, even the rockin team that I think what the semi
finals, they will have the Moroccan flag flag, but they will
also have the Palestinian flag after their country had kind of
normalized relations with Israel. So there is kind of this message
that these governments might be doing more
memorization, all this sort of stuff, but the hearts of the
general populations are, are with the Palestinian people. And I
don't know if you know how Imam Shafi has the as the kind of line
where he says, hope and faith for the internal love of the faith is
obligatory amongst us or apart. It's the same thing for policy.
It's very hard to find a Muslim except that they have love for
Palestine in their hearts. Yeah, and it's pretty pitiful for anyone
who fumbles the Palestinian issue, as you know, some people you've
seen them sort of they fumble issue and you're wondering, how
are you screwing up this issue? The whole Oma? In fact, I would
say the entire global south sucks, quote unquote, and increasing
numbers within England and America.
Their hearts are with the Palestinian people. Right? And,
like you said, it's like afforded upon us because it's the only way
that it's an obligation to keep it on our consciousness so that it
doesn't fade away into one of the oppressions that happened in the
past, right? Like, what's an example? Andalus Okay, you got
kicked out of endos and then call us like a generation past a new
generation is raised in Spain. That's a no that's a new country
now, right? Yeah. But had the Muslims kept the issue alive,
right. Maybe they had to come back but endless is not like Philistine
out of the land of Andalus. Spain was not recited in the Quran that
is MOBA con. Mahalo Right?
Or Baraka, Hola. Hola. says, all right.
This land all around it from Master Luxa. All around Mr. Luxor
from 2d Cena all around it is sacred land to us. Right. And
that's why it inflames the heart of of a believer more than any
other issue. Right without decreasing from the sanctity of
other peoples and their lands.
closing words, Muhammad? Yeah, if you don't mind, I can chime in
just I like what Srikanta just said, you know about the fact that
it's Palestinian people, right? I think one of the things that we
should be wary of doing is to nationalize these kinds of issues.
Nationalism is a failed ideology, just it's something that as
Muslims we shouldn't really participate in, we shouldn't
promote it. It's something that it's kind of a modern ideology
that goes hand in hand with the stuff that you're seeing in terms
of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, it's goes hand in hand with that
kind of ideology, right. And so one of the one of the key things
is to look at the way in which pre modern peoples associated
themselves and organize themselves. And to think of those
things, those kinds of units as being more fundamental than the
idea of like a nation state, as Benedict Anderson says about the
nation state that is an imagined community, right. And so you have
to in order for you to create the nation state, something that's
created, you had to create a history, that history is
fabricated, it's a mythological history. And so there's, there's
the fear, people should have a fear of creating a mythological
history for a group of people, in order to justify the same justify
the same kind of nationalistic behavior that you see in other
parts of the world. And I think you'll see this I don't, you know,
Egypt, for example, just recently, the whole thing of like, going
back to this, you know, we're not, it's not a Muslim country, it's
like, we're thinking of it as like a Quranic country. So going back
to this, it's because it's part of the national identities, the
National like,
it's kind of like nationalist vision. So I think it's important
for us not, not to kind of get caught up in into that it's kind
of like rhetoric or just think of it in those terms. And think of it
primarily as there's a group of people, these people have had,
like, you know, they've lived on that land for historically,
they've lived on it for a long period of time. In fact, we were
saying this the other day, a number of times, and
then with Chef Harun that
some of the people that are in Palestine today that are Muslims
are actually people that converted from from Judaism, right. So
they're actually people that have, like, you know, ancestor shared
ancestry with the Israelis that maybe could trace their lineage
back to Benny slight yield, for example. So I think that's just
something that I really want to just caution is that we don't need
to necessarily take upon ourselves, the ideologies of the
present, these ideologies are helpful in terms of analyzing
what's going on, but you don't necessarily need to take on those
ideological commitments. And if you see what Europe has done,
historically, Europe gave the world the idea of the nation
state, handed it out, carved up Africa carved up the Middle East
carved up Asia and Latin America carved up all these places said
we're going to put you into these little, you know, nations or
whatever the Balinese aren't natural borders, their borders
that we just made up. And then after that, you know, like Europe
realizes at some points in the in the late 19th century, so late
20th century, you know, what we want to actually be part of like a
larger units and economic zone, you know, and so we want to get
rid of these national boundaries in
nationalism is a bad thing. And there's like far right nationalism
that's taking over Europe. And so we're constantly playing their
game. And so we want to maintain this idea that we're somehow in
the past, like Edward site says, like, we're, we're living in the
European past, if you want to play that game to take on the same
ideologies become nationalistic. And eventually, 100 years from
now, you'll do the same thing that European Zone is doing or the EU
is doing. But instead, it just makes more sense for us to go back
to our own kind of indigenous forms of governance that were
there, and they're not, they're not like a nation, nation system,
next nationalist system. And when we talk about a Muslim political
consciousness, then the deconstruction of nationalism has
to be part of it. Because in any Aqeedah, you must deconstruct the
fitna of your time. You don't deconstruct the fitna of a past
time. That doesn't make any sense, right? You deconstruct the fitna
that is that is corrupting hearts today, and we have to have a
political consciousness, Muslims, you have to have a political
consciousness. Part of that is the deconstruction of nationalism and
realizing that nationalism is incoherent within itself, the
Egyptian himself can is too cosmopolitan to ever have a
national story. Because you're all just waves of migrants from
Cleopatra is Greek. Yeah, right. Alex, Caesar comes in and what is
he?
Italian Roman. They come in, they marry each other. Right? Not
Julius Caesar, but who?
It was Mark Anthony. And Mark Anthony, comes in. A Roman Man
Marries a Greek woman in Egypt. Right? What are you celebrating?
None of you are Egyptian, right? Native Egyptian is a little more
farmer miskeen in the south, right? Who has never taken part in
any of this. He's farming the land. And he's watching Oh, the
Greeks or the Romans. And no one bothers him because they need him
for food. Yeah, even the Pharaoh was not Egyptian. They came from
other places. They came from Libya, it said, right? They were
redheads. The pharaohs were not native to Egypt, they came. Who
wouldn't want to go to a place like Egypt that has a Nile that
has water at the North water at the east, right water down the
middle. And then you have desert below you to protect you desert on
your left, who can penetrate such a land, right? So national, the
more cosmopolitan you are, the more on the edge of the continents
that you are
access to water and transport and all the and goods and all these
things, the more impossible it is to you actually forge a national
history for yourself, you're gonna eventually trace yourself out of
it. Most Egyptians I would say can probably within two three
generations trace themselves out. In other words, if they knew their
lineage at all, they'd either be from from from the West, there was
a massive Moroccan migration. There was a massive caucuses from
the caucuses, migration of rulers, there was always been Hijazi is
coming to earn a living in Egypt. All right. And the only true
Egyptian is going to be probably some of the deep, deep, deep
countryside farmers. Right? Same Same with many other countries
like this. Right? So like trying to forge a history of New York,
when in Harlem history of Harlem, but ways your half half of you are
Dominican, have no basis here like like not knowing you have no roots
here. Your personal history is back to the Dominican Republic.
Yeah. So the national it's to a perchance, a national history is
up for chance. The true history and identity of that person should
go for is the history of the beliefs that you hold.
which frees you because that's your choice, you choose those
beliefs. Nationalism is it's this luck of the draw. Right? You know,
oh, and when my kids tell us, Oh, but we're from Egypt. I said,
You're not from Egypt. Your roots are in Egypt, right? But you have
never set foot in Cairo. Your dad hardly has set foot in Cairo,
right? Like I personally went a couple times. That's it. I
couldn't know my way around. Right. And if I go there, no one
is going to consider thinking image Gyptian. They're gonna say,
Oh, your Arabic has a little accent to it. You're not from
here. This is the first thing to say, you know, you're not from
here. Right? Yeah. I said, Well, I didn't want to thank you. I don't
want to be you don't know how to clean your streets, right? I want
to be from here, right? You will be insulting me. And I don't take
my kids there because I don't want them to see these dirty streets.
Until that's your origin. Right? So transit, transit, where people
go is all up for chance. And it's a stupid way to establish an
identity. Right? Your actual identity has got to be what you
choose to believe about life. about right and wrong about the
origin of life of the day, the destiny of man, that type of stuff
is far more worth it.
That's why we're, you know, we're grateful that prophets came down
to show us this without this. We'd be blind banging around just like
all these other people trying to find roots trying to find
stability trying to find meaning. And so, you know, the negation of
nationalism, the deconstruction national and maybe that's the next
episode we do together. Yeah, that'd be nice. Yeah.
I was all says a lot to say about that. I know he has a lot of stuff
to say about it. All right. So let's do take two on Wrap It Up
final statement on deconstruction of nationalism and then we'll take
it home.
What I would also say is, it's very important to kind of teach
our, like our young people, like we're good teaching our kids, the
stories of the prophets, the Sahaba, all of this sort of stuff.
I think one way we fall short is in teaching the stories of like
the Odeon. And if you look at someone like Salahuddin, like
everyone knows of Koosman, Dino UBA is all of this. he conquers
policy and all this sort of stuff. What people don't know is that his
direct Shake, shake up the call their journey, so he has direct or
via coming from Sedona Odeon. And it's mentioned that SWAT have been
not only teaches him like the solos, but he also taught him how
to play polo, where you know, you're on horses, like playing
polo, all this sort of stuff. So they have a personal relationship
also. And slow Dean, it's mentioned about him that when he
was recruiting someone for his army, the first question he would
ask before he asked them about their military intelligence or
their strength or any of that, he would say, do you pray 200. So if
they say, I don't want someone my army who doesn't pray 200,
SubhanAllah. And
even even in the South African anti apartheid struggle, one of
the early Muslims killed in the anti apartheid struggle was a man
by the name of Imam Abdullah Hassan. And he had studied in
Makkah for many years under the father of Mohammed, Bin Ali and
Mandy, who we all somehow he was someone who is killed by the
apartheid regime in the 60s. And he's captured as a result of kind
of supporting kind of the struggle, and he's captured the
night of the moment, and the moment to happen that evening in
his machine. And he says to his wife, he says, Don't worry, I'll
be back.
He's in detention for 120 days, he's killed and the apartheid
regime says the way that he died is he fell down the stairs, the
night of or that day, Imam Abdullah Harun, they have this
janazah 10,000 People 10,000 Muslims in Cape Town come for his
Janessa No one says a word about how he was killed. Because they
say if we talk about how the apartheid regime killed him, we're
going to you know, face consequences, we're gonna go to
jail, we might die, all this sort of stuff. There's an earthquake in
Cape Town, the day of his janazah. And it's mentioned that this is
the biggest earthquake in like modern history in Cape Town. He
Brahim talks about this. He says I was seven years old at the time,
he says, I don't remember anything about what was said at that
janazah I just remember, we were eating food in our house that
evening. And my father talked about how this the earthquake
during when people were speaking and all of that was part of the
other bubbeleh that of what the apartheid regime did, but also
because we said nothing about it. Subhan Allah. So it's very, very
important that we teach our kids these stories, and one of the
things that's mentioned is the only still exists today. Just
because Imam Lula Harun died in the 1960s. Does that mean that he
was nobody, there are the US that are out there today.
And they're here and there are people who we should teach our
kids about and all these sorts of things, their greatest of ODR
still to come. Because by this year, your will is by your your
father, your father, your virtue is by your Samba. So if you are
going to be the site Sahabi of Prophet ASA Medea, who in our idea
is to return to this earth, then you are going to be from the
highest level of Alia, right beneath the sahaba. Because the
Sahaba have the soft love of the prophets of Allah when he was
salam, they will have the Sahaba of the of so I always think about
it that we may be raising a generation, you may be raising a
son, that son will have a son, who will call you grandpa, and will be
a Sahabi a prophet a sipping muddy, like you may be that close,
right? If not, you live in long enough to meet him yourself. Maybe
your kid lives long enough. Maybe you have a grandkid, who's an
amazing Sahaba Prophet, Isa Medina, and can remember you in
His presence in Doha, and that'll be your sofa. Just that one time
that he remembers, you mentioned your name in the presence of the
great messenger of Allah. He said, Madame Exelis, all that any pain
in your grave is gone. So
that was a great story to end with. And can you quickly write it
down so we could publish it as a blog post? That story? All right.
Thank you both so much.
Come on. Well, Karen, there's a lot of you guys have spawned a lot
of talk in the comment section of today's stream. Thank you again
for all those who are listening or watching. I had Hamza Reza on my
right, Muhammad Ali on my left Hamza as a former Jersey guy then
went to many countries states, Maryland, Tennessee, Egypt, South
Africa, now he's in Egypt, Mohammed it is to my right he is
an ArcView teacher teaches medically fit go to ArcView dot O
R G to study with him to study with him medically. FIP and he's
Georgetown PhD, so we're inshallah this won't be the last time we
have both Youjizz Akumal al Qaeda Subhanak Allah humo Byham Deke
shadow Illa illa Anta stockfetcher quintuple La Crosse in Santa Fe Of
course. Ill Alladhina amanu homicide hot water well, so but
Huck, what's also a suburb was salam aleikum wa rahmatullah?
US
boom