My book An Honest Living is now available. It’s about the ostracism and loneliness and alienation (and vitality and joy and regeneration) that comes of being loyal to the oppressed and downtrodden of this world.
Now that (even moderate) pro-Palestine sentiment has been effectively outlawed in both the public and private sectors, I hope we can soon say goodbye to the Western myth of “free speech” from which so many reactionaries built their careers.
I hope Westerners now understand that Palestinians have no choice in how Israel behaves.
It kills when we're calm. It kills when we're upset.
It kills when we're active. It kills when we rest.
Death is Israel's only answer to our presence on this earth.
Never forget: in 1954, the CIA, at the behest of the United Fruit Company, orchestrated a coup against Guatemala's democratically elected president, leading to decades of obscene poverty, ecological devastation, and Indigenous genocide.
Here's why calling the cops on "loiterers" is bad:
--We live in overwhelmingly privatized spaces, ever subject to state violence
--It's usually racist and always classist
--It allows the wealthy to socially engineer access and belonging
--Mind your own damn business
When they say that COVID has killed more people than the Vietnam War, understand that they're only counting Americans. Vietnamese people died by the million, many of them unarmed villagers gunned down, poisoned, and burned alive by US soldiers.
The Palestinian people don't simply deserve aid; they deserve sustenance.
The Palestinian people don't simply deserve rights; they deserve liberation.
The Palestinian people don't simply deserve to live; they deserve life.
Palestinians are experiencing a kind of hell that most people in the West can't even begin to imagine. They don't need moralism or reproof from professional leftists. They need robust defense of their struggle for liberation. Offer that or shut the fuck up altogether.
"I don't know."
"I need to learn more."
"That's best addressed by someone from the community in question."
"I'm not sure yet. What do you think about it?"
Avoid intellectuals who never say any of these things.
If you support (or signed) the Harper's letter, don't invoke me as an example of somebody who was "cancelled." My academic career was systematically destroyed by the same institutional forces the vast majority of signatories uphold (and from which they benefit).
The USA once shot down an Iran Air passenger plane, killing 290 civilians.
The USA also once staged a coup in Iran to replace a popular leader with a monarch who would facilitate Western energy interests.
It is comically inaccurate to call Iran the aggressor.
Blessings to the wonderful people of South Africa for their tremendous solidarity with Palestine throughout the decades. Our nations will always be intertwined.
Burning down a police station scared the ruling class more than any electoral revolution ever has--or ever will. It's no accident that an inspiring, meaningful insurgency is happening in spaces devoid of congressional superstars.
Remember: Israel didn't merely kill Shireen Abu Akleh. Israel also shot at the journalists who came to her aid, assaulted mourners at her funeral, and raided her family's home.
Listen: you gotta stop trying to understand colonization through humanistic logic. The settler doesn't need a "reason" to kill the native. The settler kills because deracinating the native is a precondition of his social identity.
As of now, Biden leads Trump by approximately 3.8 million votes, more than the population of 22 states (and DC). Yet we still await a winner, either of whom will continue plundering the world's poor and vulnerable on behalf of a predatory ruling class.
Hell of a "democracy."
Do not become desensitized to the increasingly brutal images and stories emerging from this Zionist genocide. Let your anger and compassion always outpace the brutality.
White Leftists in North America need to understand that for Natives, Palestinians, Hawaiians, or any other colonized group, national liberation isn't merely a discourse or ideology; it's an essential feature of our existence. Without it, we doom ourselves to genocide.
Nine myths that need to die already:
1. the free market
2. reverse racism
3. patriotic dissent
4. conscientious capitalism
5. cultures of poverty
6. colonial altruism
7. corporate responsibility
8. the resistance
9. Israeli democracy
(Please add your own.)
Roll call of progressive politicians on Israel's massacre in Gaza:
-Cory Booker: silent
-Tulsi Gabbard: silent
-Kirsten Gillibrand: silent
-Kamala Harris: silent
-Bernie Sanders: silent
-Elizabeth Warren: silent
All of them vote to arm Israel, however.
In the past week, Israel has murdered five dozen children, bombed journalists and medical personnel, and left thousands of people homeless. No moral or legal definition of "self-defense" involves this kind of depravity.
Zionists murder our children, steal our land, bulldoze our homes, imprison our loved ones, poison our crops, uproot our olive trees, inhibit our movement, destroy our careers, and then accuse us of racism for not accepting it all with a bow and a smile.
If Palestine is now legible to more people in North America, then it's only because untold individuals forgotten to social media stood tall amid decades of ostracism, defamation, and punishment.
Things that Israel's bombardment of Gaza is not:
--a situation
--an overreaction
--a conflict
--self-defense
--anti-terrorism
--a cycle of violence
What it actually is:
--mass murder as calculated strategy in a broader effort at genocide
Appropriate ways to describe Israel killing 8 civilians in Gaza:
--"colonial violence"
--"massacre"
--"state-sanctioned murder"
--"brutal repression"
--"ongoing genocide"
The depraved, malevolent way to describe it:
--"clashes"
It should take hardly any time to get from Haifa to Beirut, from Damascus to Nazareth, from Gaza to Jerusalem. That so many journeys once common across the centuries are now convoluted or impossible is one of the great tragedies of European colonization.
I see people giving (wonderful) advice to incoming grad students. Here's mine:
With every particle of your mind, with every atom of your soul, resist the idea (into which you'll be insidiously socialized) that compassion for the persecuted and dispossessed is unprofessional.
The fact that "from the river to the sea" unsettles Zionists is all the more reason to keep saying it. Our language shouldn't be designed to appease the oppressor.
This is not a moment to dazzle with nuance.
This is not a moment to complexify.
This is not a moment to appease the professional classes.
This is not a moment for good manners.
It is a moment to decisively condemn Zionist genocide.
Forget cancel culture. Can we instead discuss how vapid provocation dressed up as contrarianism seems to always earn nitwits and bozos a devoted social media following that translates into professional opportunities unavailable to people still naively devoted to ideas?
Palestinians constantly face preconditions for support: Are you antisemitic? Are you assadist? Are you pro-Hamas? Are you gay friendly?
Support us as we are, not as you want us to be.
Either way, save your interrogations for the oppressor.
An antisemite has died today. Tutu is gone but Israel is still here.
Years ago, I had the merit to protest his appearance at Cardozo Law School along with
@MalkahFleisher
Israelis had to invent a language, a cuisine, a paleo-history, a nationality, and a folk culture from a set of mythologies about the ancient past and then have the goddamn nerve to declare that Palestinians are a fiction.
I've started a site to host some writing, mainly longform pieces with the occasional polemic. The first entry details my transition from professor to school bus driver. I'd be most honored if you give it a look:
Lots of people celebrating Seth Rogan on my feed. I'm happy that his politics seem to be getting less horrible, but my humble advice is to keep wary of anyone who suddenly discovers that Zionism isn't so great after all but studiously avoids the word "Palestinian."
Over the past three months, Zionists of all stripes--liberals, conservatives, secularists, theocrats, politicians, journalists, academics, soldiers, entertainers--have displayed a collective racism that is truly breathtaking in its candor and animosity.
The USA has inflicted untold aggression on Cuba since the 19th century, with a particular tenacity over the past six decades. Observe the news with this history in mind.
I was once deeply invested in the term "decolonization"--still am in many ways--but it's at the point of being watered down into a liberal platitude, a great shame given its revolutionary origins. For Fanon, Rodney, et al, decolonization necessarily meant anti-capitalism.
Please stop this shit about the presidential election being a battle for the "soul of America." Settler colonies have no souls, only ruling classes that want us to feel pious about their depravity.
Dear College Students:
A lot of well-known professors are toxic and/or exploitative. A lot. Being educated, influential, or accomplished doesn't necessarily make anyone a good person (the opposite is often true). Don't override your instinct when it tells you to be wary.
A guide to speech on campus:
--Nazism: free
--Settler colonization: free
--White supremacy: free
--Xenophobia: free
--Militarism: free
--Palestine: [insert official statement expressing zero tolerance for incivility]
Two million people. Half children. Starved. Bombed. Cut from communication.
Have those facilitating this thought much about the future this leaves us? No.
Some may dismiss a ceasefire as naïve or worse. Yet who has a plan for what follows this destruction? What do we call that?
The fact that Canada keeps unearthing mass child graves--with many more still to discover--should forever quash the stupid and offensive belief among elements of the left that colonization somehow ended in North America. It is an ongoing evil that demands our full attention.
The love and kinship coming from Hawaii, from Kashmir, from Native America, from the Arab World, from Ireland, from Iran, from the Caribbean, from across the African continent, bring to life Cesaire's unforgettable line, "there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory."
Tonight I mourn a dear friend and brilliant writer, Refaat Alareer, killed in cold blood by the Zionist genocidaires. We will keep your honorable memory in our hearts and on our tongues, always. And we will never cede a solitary inch to your murderers.
If your aim is to murder civilians, torment children with disabilities, or whine about the psychic trauma of committing war crimes, there's nobody better.
What they said: if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, we're burning it all down.
What they meant: nagging everyone to vote is the highest stage of rebellion.
The phrase "from the river to the sea" doesn't connote a hypothetical genocide of Israelis. It describes the area in which Israel performed an actual (and ongoing) genocide of Palestinians.
Zionists are always dropping what they think is a clever rhetorical device: "But what about US and Canadian colonization? Hmmm?"
Yeah we deplore it too and fully support the liberation of North America's Indigenous peoples.
Next question.
Fatally shot ***BY THE IDF***
They always leave that part out--the most crucial fact--as if magical bullets appear from the ether (or from Palestinians) and there is no Israeli military occupation, no tradition of war crimes, no gruesome history of targeting journalists.
In discussions about reopening schools, please don't forget custodial staff and bus drivers. I don't know what it looks like elsewhere, but where I work the majority of custodians and drivers are over the age of 50 and often in contact with body fluids.
After being persecuted and suspended by the Hebrew University for her opposition to the annihilation of her people in Gaza, Palestinian Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian now arrested. Israeli unis and settler state are part of the same complex of elimination, silencing, repression
Hawaii: occupied territory
Standing Rock: occupied territory
Wet’suwet’en: occupied territory
White Earth: occupied territory
Puerto Rico: occupied territory
Settler colonization isn't the past; it is the portent of a catastrophic future.
This pandemic has made clear (not for the first time) that the USA, despite its loud professions of moral superiority, is more adept at exploiting than healing the afflicted.
Dismissing movements for justice as impossible (abolishing police, decolonizing North America, liberating Palestine) isn't a concession to pragmatism; it's a failure of imagination. Anything is possible unless you kill the idea.
They told me I'd become more conservative once I had kids. I had a kid. I became more radical.
I changed in one important way, though: I'm even more disdainful of people who use children as an excuse for being reactionary servants of the ruling class.
Whatever you think of her being cast as Cleopatra, never forget that Gal Gadot proudly served (and continues to support) a colonial army notorious for maiming and murdering civilians.
For a full six decades, professors who affirm Palestinian life have been harassed, maligned, fired, and imprisoned and at no point during this period has the mainstream pundit class treated it as a moral crisis.
"Israel is a nation for all Jews" is one of Zionism's biggest lies.
It's not for Black Jews.
It's not for Jews who support BDS.
And it's not a nation; it's a settler colonial state.
The people of Haiti violently abolished chattel slavery. They expelled a colonial power. They defy US imperialism. They disrupt foreign extraction.
In case you're wondering why their resistance never achieves the status of "pro-democracy movement" in the Global North.
Getting tired of people holding up Tucker Carlson as a paragon of free speech when his website (at the time), The Daily Caller, helped set in motion my termination from the University of Illinois and then spent months justifying that brazen violation of academic freedom.
In 2017, Israel...
...arrested 483 children
...approved 3736 new settlement units
...razed an entire village
...demolished 351 homes
...enacted 7 new discriminatory laws
Consider making "abolish Zionism" your New Year's resolution.
Common phrases: "black crime"; "victims of communism"; "Islamic terrorism"; "Russian meddling."
Unusual phrases: "white crime"; "victims of capitalism"; "Christian terrorism"; "American meddling."
And thus corporate media pretend to be neutral while cosseting the ruling class.
In 2018, Israel...
...murdered 295 Palestinians (57 children)
...injured 19,000 others (7,000 children)
...razed 7,900 olive trees
...seized or demolished 459 West Bank structures
Consider making "abolish Zionism" your New Year's resolution.
Fuck Israel. Fuck Israel's US sponsor. Fuck every media luminary who whitewashes Palestine. Fuck every politician who ever voted to fund the Zionist entity. And fuck every leftist who ever insisted we have to vote for a Zionist.
The recent experiences of Angela Davis and Marc Lamont Hill illustrate that Zionism isn't merely an affront to Palestinians; it is an impediment to Black liberation, to Native decolonization, and to justice for all oppressed peoples around the world.
Violence didn't "flare up" in Gaza. Fire wasn't "exchanged" between two feuding parties.
A colonial power murdered two teenagers entrapped in a concentration camp because they belong to the wrong religion.