Transcript
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Omar elad's new book one day everyone will have always been against this is a
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powerful and penetrating examination of the bankrupt morality of industrialized
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nations especially the United States which have sustained the genocide
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against Palestinians and Justified it with racist tropes and lies he exposes
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in his book our innate barbarity our Clin hypocrisy our latent racism our
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narcissistic self-adulation our demented belief embraced by liberals and
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conservatives that we have the right to impose our supposed virtues on the quote unquote lesser breeds of the earth we
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subjugate and exploit with campaigns of industrial violence whether in Afghanistan Iraq Libya or Palestine Omar
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who was born born in Egypt grew up in Qatar he moved to Canada as a teenager and currently lives in the United States
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he is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest book sellers award and
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the Oregon book award his books have been translated into 13 languages his
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debut novel American war was named by the BBC as one of the 100 novels that
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shaped our world joining me to discuss one day everyone will have been against this is Omar l Cod uh I loved your book
Language
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I read it all in one sitting I'm going to begin right at the beginning um and
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uh you talk about language uh you do that a lot about your book I'm just going to read this passage and then have
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you comment on it language too forces the air from the lungs beyond the high
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walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place there is the Empire and the Empire as well is cocooned
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inside its own Fortress of language a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather
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spontaneously combust in which blasts come and go like Shooks over the
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mountain and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their
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existence as though living was an aberration and this language might
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protect the Empire's most bloodthirsty Fringe but The Fringe has no use for
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linguistic malpractice it is instead the middle the liberal well-meaning easily upset middle that desperately needs the
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protection this kind of language provides because it is the middle of the Empire that must look upon this and say
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yes this is tragic but necessary because the alternative is barbarism the
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alternative of the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and
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the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and
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dogs and and days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism and I
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just as a caveat you and I ran straight into this buzs saw when we were supposed to do an event together and the
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organizers refused uh to allow us to use the word genocide in the description of
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the talk but L you make this point I think very preent about language uh and
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the way it serves as a kind of buffer or a mask from reality especially Visa but
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not explicitly not only but Visa this genocide can you talk about that um yeah
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thank you very much for having me first of all I really really appreciate it I've been a longtime reader of your work
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um a very long time ago I was um I was reporting in Guantanamo Bay um in the
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prison camps there and um they were giving us a tour of the place and I
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asked a question I asked something like you know so when do the prisoners when I got to
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that word one of the soldiers stopped me and said we don't have prisoners here sir we have detainees and it was very very important
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to to that person's worldview that there be no prisoners here because a prisoner
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implies a prison sentence which somebody has to Define at some point uh a detainee you can hold
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forever um there were no there were no interrogations at Guantanamo Bay of
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course people were interrogated left right and Center they just didn't call it that they called them reservations as
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in D 8692 has an 8:30 p.m. reservation it means they were going to be taken
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into the interrogation Shacks I did far far less war reporting
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than you did I did very very brief stints but one of the things they sort
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of informed in terms of my worldview is that the physical layer of violence in
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Wartime or in might what might be described as peace time even though it isn't can't stand in a vacuum it can't
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stand on its own it needs other layers holding it up and one of those layers is linguistic violence euphemistic violence
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the violence of calling a thing something other than what it is collateral damage instead of oops we
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bombed a wedding party um and that you see I mean in
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varying degrees of intensity particularly over the last 25 years or so but in the last year and change it's
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it's had almost numbing quality to it where it's
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not just the general from the invading Army telling you this it's the anchor on
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the Nightly News describing a little girl as a young lady uh who who collided
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with a bullet what the hell does any of that mean right but it's necessary because fundamentally what you're trying
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to do is not represent the situation as it is what you're trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet
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who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pay in their
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conscience all of this essentially works the moment somebody in the privileged
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side of the world is able to say yeah that's all so complicated and turn away from it that's all they're being asked
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to do and this is the language that facilitates that well it
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also even though the images are there when you adopt this uh kind of fault
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metaphor to describe it it uh it drains it of its atrocity in in some sense
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doesn't it oh absolutely and I mean that's otherwise it wouldn't have its
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power um I mean the the distance that you can impose with this kind of
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language is so modular um you end up in a situation where you can apply this
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language to anybody whose presence whose existence is inconvenient to the project
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um and I mean we're going to see this right we're going to see this with um the language being used by
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the government of the United States uh with regards to migrants over the next four years is going to use the same kind
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of anesthetic language um and it's it's almost the employment of language for
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the exact opposite of what language is supposed to do there's supposed to be some concern with Precision here
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with using the word that most closely describes the thing and this is the exact opposite of that and it cannot be
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said to be done accidentally this is an incredibly deliberate kind of linguistic
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malpractice and overwhelmingly it works overwhelmingly um you call someone an
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enemy combatant and who the hell wants to stand up for an enemy combatant who
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who wants to be that person you call someone a terrorist after the fact they're dead they can't defend
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themselves maybe they were a terrorist maybe they were this incredibly evil person I don't want to my reputation to
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be destroyed standing up for a kind of person like that so overwhelmingly all evidence is that this kind of things
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thing works and so I I can fully understand why institutions of all kinds
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not just the military not just the government would rely on this um it's the fastest way to avoid dealing with
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something that would otherwise make very privileged people very
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uncomfortable well it shuts shuts down any ability to give any situation any
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context so I debated Christopher Hitchens on his ridiculous book God Is
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Not Great at Berkeley and in the middle of it he starts shouting at me shame on
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you for defending suicide bombers which of course I've never done and didn't even do in the debate but it becomes if
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if there is no context then whatever happens like on October 7th becomes not
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only incomprehensible but the people who carry out something like that after 16
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years of being locked in a concentration camp they become incomprehensible I mean I I think a big
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part of this a necessary component of the world as it exists today that would allow something like this to happen by
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which I mean not only the genocide of the last year and change but 3/4 of a
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century of occupation at the very least um is a kind of imaginative poverty
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which is to say that kind of accusation and accusations like it um you want to
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kill all Israelis you are a terrorism supporter you all of this sort of stuff I think makes perfect sense if you
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believe in a world where there are only two options you are either wearing the boot or you're having your neck stepped
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on and so to speak up on behalf of anybody who's having their neck stepped on is immediately assumed to mean oh you want
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to step on my neck those are the only sort of World Views that are acceptable
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under that ordering of the world and it's it's disastrous if you know because
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the obligations put on somebody who's trying to imagine a better world are unlimited if you and I both want
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something better than this I guarantee you within 5 minutes of talking about it we will have some kind of disagreement
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as to what better looks like because the imaginative obligations placed on us are infinite somebody who is served by the
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system doesn't have to imagine anything else and so can safely live within the
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confines of this fantasy where yes either these people be killed or those
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people will be killed either this genocide happens this way or an even worse genocide is going to happen and it
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is such imaginative poverty um and it's
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it's applicable to virtually every facet of Life under an Empire it has to be this way because somebody has to do the
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killing and may as well be us I think one of the things that gives your book such You Beautiful writer
Cultural survival kit
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first of all but one of the things that gives your book poers that uh even though of course your English is uh you
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know not only fluent but highly literate you nevertheless are seen by The Wider
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society as an outsider uh and and you talk early on in the book about an experience of with
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your father he gets I think he's working in Cairo and he gets stopped by the police and uh you know but for the
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intervention of somebody uh who knows him he could have been haul off uh to an
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Egyptian prison this was in Egypt uh and and uh and you write about that uh that
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memory you said you know which you come back you said you come back to it often um and then you write rules conventions
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morals reality exist all exists so long as their existence is convenient to the
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preservation of power otherwise they like all else are expendable and that
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that small incident with your father and that observation is just of course rid large with the breakdown of any kind of
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even pretense about a rules based order and the genocide in Gaza yeah I mean that moment I think was
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was one of those that that you know long before I showed up or or had any kind of
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agency um altered the trajectory of my life because my father loved Egypt I mean he he grew up there he I don't
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think ever imagined leaving that country it was home for him and still he had to get the hell out and
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so the the sort of defining way in which that has altered my life is that I'm
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relatively unrooted um there is no geography certainly no nation state that
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can point to and say this is mine uh and that'll never be the case for me for the rest of my life one of the things I find
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really interesting in people's sort of perception of me is that it varies wildly depending on which facet of my my
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identity they decide to latch onto first um so if it's my name or My Religion
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that's a very different person they believe they're talking to whereas if it's this accent where I could call you
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up and tell you my name was John Smith and you'd probably believe me that's an entirely different person they
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believe they're talking to or if it's the books and so on and so forth um and so it's not so
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much existence as something lesser which which appears in sort of brief moments a
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lot of go back where you came from or you know that sort of thing and I had my fair share of that I mean I was a journalist I was a full-time journalist
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in the peak of the internet comments era when when newspaper websites used to leave those comments on so I've
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certainly seen my fair share of that kind of thing and it doesn't trouble me at all it is relatively meaningless um
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the more sort of pervasive mode of existing in this part of the world is preempt preemptively
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preparing for which version of my Phantom self this person is going to latch on to um and trying to put them at
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ease so this is a very silly example but you go through security at an airport
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for example and for the longest time because I'm perpetually terrified of that interaction even though it's never
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gone wrong for me um I would walk in and it would be yes sir no sir and very sort
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of polite and then I realized over time empirically that I was having an easier time if I was much more casual because
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that's what the people who are from here are that's the way they're behaving and so you sort of build up this kind
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of cultural survival kit that you keep in your back pocket and most of the time
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it's not a huge deal at all it's just how you get through the day but the cumulative effect of it is such that you
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are made cognizant of of an entire spectrum of dealing with institutions of
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power and with the loadbearing beams of a society that folks who do feel rooted to that society never really think about
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it's a kind of Shadow world that some of us inhabit and some of us don't know exists um I've come to terms with that
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but all of that traces back to that one day when a soldier working for the Egyptian regime decided to give my dad a
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hard time and my dad realized that there was no rationality you could be in the right
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you could have done nothing wrong and it wouldn't matter in the slightest because somebody with some modicum of power has
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decided that today's your day well it it may not have happened to you but it happened to your father he was denied
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entry to the United States uh he was uh because of a similar kind of name he was
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even profiled so as a child you did watch this happen yeah and I mean I I've
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seen I've seen relatives of mine who have similar names who look the same but who don't
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have this accent um get treated entirely different um you know for a very long
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time I think I thought of this in in I was very proud of myself that I had
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become this person that I had become fluent in this language in this culture
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that I could maintain a conversation with somebody and they wouldn't even know that I wasn't from here you know
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that that sort of thing precisely because I'd seen what happened to people who didn't have that um who are much
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better human beings than me but who are regularly dragged into secondary because
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there's this distance there's this implied otherness and a lot of my life I'm not particularly proud to say this
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but a lot of my life has been about causing myself as few headaches as possible
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by adopting whatever it takes to close that distance to say to somebody hey
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don't be scared I'm like you I get this I'm not far away um and the worst part
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about it is that empirically it has worked it has proven wildly successful for me um and the proof is you know
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among many other examples my relatives who don't have this um and I've seen a much darker side of daily interactions
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than I regularly do I want to talk about this uh the
‘Now that it’s over’
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Hallmarks of Western liberalism uh you writ it is an assumption and hindsight of virtuous resistance is the only
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polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism while the terrible thing is happening while the
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land is being stolen and the natives still being killed any form of opposition is terroristic and must be
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crushed for the sake of civilization but decades centuries later when enough of
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the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed it is safe enough to
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venerate resistance in hindsight and of course which you're you you are talking
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about uh you know now that it's over we can uh you know talk about seated land
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and which we have no intention of giving back or uh the ethic of indigenous
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peoples Etc now that they've been exterminated but of course this uh is
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applies directly to what's happening to the Palestinians at this
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moment yeah I mean I I a long time ago I was at a a literary Festival up in
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Canada and um literary festivals in Canada started with land
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acknowledgements well before us um festivals started doing the same and um we were sitting there we
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were about to start our event and one of the organizers gets up and says um just
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before we begin you know I just want to you know take take this time to acknowledge um the the really important
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um uh acknowledgement that we are on unseated indigenous territory and to also thank the hedge fund that is
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sponsoring this event that was like this is the most honest land acknowledgement I've ever heard you know um I I think I
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think of it particularly this idea of of after
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Thea acknowledgement as and maybe this is particularly cynical of me but I
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think of it as a continuation of theft um you steal land you steal lives and
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what's left to steal at the end but a narrative The Narrative that that
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absolves all that came before um you know when I wrote the the title of this
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book when I was first thinking about it I wasn't thinking in terms of weeks or even years uh I was thinking if I'm
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fortunate enough to live the average lifespan in this part of the world maybe by the end of my life um I'll be
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watching a a poetry reading in Tel Aviv that begins with a land acknowledgement um I think it's a
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fundamental part of of any system of endless taking um which you know colonialism and
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whatever stage of capitalism we're in are fundamentally part of
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um it's there are very few systems as
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well-versed in after Thea um shame and after the fact
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guilt as the ones that are predicated on endless taking and and you see it all over the
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place I mean there's an incredible poetry collection by L long soldier called whereas which is all about sort of
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repurposing and undermining a US Government declaration that basically said sorry about all that genocide
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indigenous people sorry about the theft and it was it was passed in the most sort of bland
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manner hundreds of years after the fact and that
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is such an important part of the entire project we can all be sorry afterwards
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um the taking happens now and the apology comes later it's it's a Hallmark
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of every colonial society the thing that makes it so Danger to acknowledge right
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now is that we're not after the fact we're in the middle of the fact and so
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the people who disagree with the content of this book or with with the with the um assertion of that title are going to
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disagree vehemently until one day they don't have to um and then they're going to
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acknowledge it and there will be no repercussions and we can sit around and listen to a very flowery land
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acknowledgement uh when it's too late to do anything about it right at Jared kushner's Resort in uh
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Northern Gaza um I want to talk about this point you make you you talk about
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this moment in Qatar where you lived as a boy and of course I've been in Qatar
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twice in the last few months and uh much of the labor is performed by South
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Asians Southeast Asian uh who uh witnessed a small traffic accident and
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and um the uh Southeast Asian man is uh
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i' beaten with a sandal or something but anyway you you said you talk about non-existence non-existence is necessary
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to the self-conception of this place not Qatar is hardly exclusive to this think
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of undocumented workers here and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever the non-existence is
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violated uh talk about that how we live in the midst of it undocumented workers
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all around us essentially occupy that position yeah and I should say here that
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um a lot of this book I mean I think it it comes out comes in through the door
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swinging like it's a series of arguments like I'm trying to pick a fight with somebody and I I don't think I am and I
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think a lot of this book is a self-interrogation because particularly that moment that you mention where it's
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me and my buddy were teenagers he's just gotten his driver's license we're driving around and we see this like very
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slight fender bender where this man who was probably Pakistani or Indian comes
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out and the man who I I strongly suspect was a local was a country man comes out
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and starts beating him like starts physically assaulting this man over a minor fender
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bender I was on board with that right when I when I was talk about you you were laughing you and your friend were
Whose existence is denied?
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laughing I mean the people driving past were lowering their windows and honking their horns and smiling and hooting and
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we were fully on board with this idea that yes we live in a society where there's an underclass and that is
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perfectly fine and I don't have to think about it and I come to this part of the world and I'm effectively asked to
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partake in a similar deal um where the hell are these fruits and vegetables in my grocery store coming from and whose
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life is being made miserable to provide this well just don't think about it the
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there is people whose non-existence is Central to your
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privilege of of daily existence um all you have to do is not think about them
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all you have to do is look away and when I was living in Qatar I mean granted I was a teenager um
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but I fully bought in yeah that's just the way these things work um and I think
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think about that now because it shaped me to a large extent I work that muscle
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to the point that it was very powerful that I could look away from almost anything um that I could normalize
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almost anything and in trying to correct that and to be honest mostly failing because
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it was so ingrained for so long that has come to be how I think about any society
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now um I don't care about your GDP I don't care about the standard markers of
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quality of Life those are all fantastic more power to you whose non-existence is Central to
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this project and I've asked that about every society I've been a part of every
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society I've ever looked at since that point because not only does it happen
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everywhere to certain degrees it is so easy to normalize I mean you know this
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you've been there life in a place like Qatar if you sign that deal to look away
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is one of the easiest lives you will ever have um incredible Comfort
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incredible wealth all the rest of it and I don't know that that's super far removed from the deal I sign over here
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where my grocery stores uh shelves are fully stocked and there's a certain ease of life that is part and parcel of me
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not thinking about the people who make this happen um that's just come it's a very minor incident in the grand scheme
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of things this minor fender bender in the streets of Doha one day um but it has heavily influenced how we think
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about the world ever since well it's of course how the Israelis looked at the Palestinian day workers when they were
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allowed to go into Israel and build their houses and do other menial work um
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I don't you write about the press and you write quite pressingly about the Press uh there's one little passage I
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want to read and then have you comment on uh and we of course we were both journalists uh more than a few of my
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former colleagues in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas tax on Israel proudly boasted of
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their support for both Ukraine and Israel when Russian authorities detained an eventually convicted Wall Street
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Journal reporter Evan gerscovich who has since been released in an obvious sham of a judicial process almost every
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Western media Outlet called it what it was but as the Israeli military wiped out both Palestinian journalists and
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their entire families in a deliberate campaign to silence the flow of information out of Gaza virtually all
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the same colleagues all the same Outlets took a very different approach the profession of Journalism necessitates a
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capacity to understand things and all who watched the killings understood what
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was happening the Press has played such a shameful role in all of this um but
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and just comment a little bit on that incredible
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duplicity yeah I um so I was a journalist for 10 years um I covered all kinds of different
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beats and I was all over the place and I think one of the facets of
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Journalism that um is is somewhat difficult to get
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across is is that journalism
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demands or at least journalism in the sort of corporate environment or an Institutional environment demands two
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almost directly contr contradictory things I mean I was a journalist in Canada where we have something called
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the miter award and the miter award is widely regarded as sort of the highest award for journalism in the country and
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it's very much predicated on the idea of Public Service which is to say um journalism that causes institutional
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change you know um there was some amazing pieces of Journalism that um
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caused for example um a lot of our police forces to completely reexamine
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how they deal with sexual assault cases and that was the result of work done by a reporter named Robin dittle it was an
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incredible piece of Journalism but I don't know how somebody looks at that and doesn't see a measure
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of activism you have to believe in something you have to believe that you
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are in this to cause positive change and yet there is a part of the
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spectrum where the switch can be flipped and suddenly you have to be sort of
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capital o objective and neutral whatever those terms mean and you have to shut
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off the part of you that would result in the best most important kind of Journalism and I think one of the things
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about the situation in in Gazza where you're watching this ongoing genocide is
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that rarely in my life have I seen the switch flipped so quickly and so
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flagrantly um you had the immediate juxtaposition of what journalists are
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allowed to say about Ukraine you had the immediate the immediacy of these being
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journalists that are being killed right these aren't these aren't members of another profession even these are your
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colleagues and suddenly you see the switch flipped and I mean the result is is not
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only sort of detrimental to The Souls of the people who are involved in this or I guess
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non-involved it also creates some real garbage journalism I mean you can see
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the tortured constructions in some of these headlines you know bullet collides
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with uh lives lost um the the the the flower Massacre headlines as though the
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bags of flower had committed the massacre I mean it the whole thing just results in almost cartoonishly bad
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journalism and people are okay with it because the alternative is is personal consequences
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the alternative is is in tional consequences somebody might pull an ad somebody might pull access um
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whereas if you if you do subscribe to this and you do use this tortured passive construction yeah maybe somebody
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will yell at you on Twitter um you know journalists are very well-versed I think
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in in weighing consequences we sort of have to be uh and in this case the
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relative consequences are clear um you could lose your job you could lose your livelihood
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on one hand on the other hand uh you could get yelled at by somebody on on a social media platform or something like
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that it's not I can see how the case is made internally but that doesn't mean I have to agree with
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it you talk a about the uh that's what by the way Chomsky used to call worthy
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and unworthy victims I used to see that overseas all the time uh so when church
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people are murdered and raped in El Salvador where I was uh they uh you know
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working with the terrorist Rebels or they aren't really church people or they're whatever and then when a Polish
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priest is murdered under the Communist Regime in Poland he becomes a saint at the same time at exactly the same moment
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you're that's what you're describing just talk as you do in the book about this you know least worst kind of
The lesser of two evils
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scenario in the midst of a genocide um which you kind of eviscerate uh talk about that that
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argument that oh we can't of course it's too late now but we can't uh uh not vote
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for Harris because we'll get Trump yeah I mean this I think for me
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dates back to my earliest memories of growing up in the Arab world um I almost
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universally am not a huge fan of any of the governments of the Arab world or any of the governing organizations in the
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Arab world and a big part of from a young age looking towards the West for
32:54
something that something was was almost always a negative space um it wasn't what it offered it was what
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I didn't have to deal with and so you know you could talk about politics without worrying about the secret police
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coming to get you or that there were underlying principles of free speech and equal justice and so on and so forth but
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they were all relative to the place I grew up in and so you come to this part of the
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world and I think that there's a kind of stickiness to that initial
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impulse that causes you to to constantly think of things in terms of what is the
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least worst option here which to be perfectly honest with with you this is
33:37
how I behave for most of my life you know there have been several elections where I looked at the at the ballot and
33:44
saw an R next to somebody's name and voted for whoever the hell had the best chance against that
33:49
R I think one of the things that has become that became really clear over the
33:55
last year and change is that for some people there is a hard line after which
34:00
I can no longer do that after which this idea of relative evil is consumed by
34:07
absolute evil and for me and for I think a lot of people a genocide is that point
34:14
you know over the last year I have become conditioned that whenever I see a
34:19
picture of a smiling child on my social media feed that is probably there because that child has just been
34:25
murdered dismembered or starving to death I cannot go from that mode just as
34:33
a human being just as somebody with a soul and I'm sure your listeners will disagree with me on a million political points but setting all of that aside
34:40
just as a human being I cannot go from that to voting for an Administration
34:47
that would allow or bankroll or cheerlead for this and say to myself that well at least I'm voting for the
34:54
lesser of two evils I know the Trump Administration is evil I know Republican
34:59
politics has become a kind of deranged F fascist cult I get all of
35:05
this but at some point you have to decide what the hell it means to you to be
35:11
human and for me I I cannot continue to think of myself as human and then
35:18
casually vote for somebody who would allow something like this to happen and I've I mean I've lost friends over this
35:24
and I can see where they're coming from right I had a friend who who talked about this idea of you know we need to
35:30
vote for Harris and then push her on Gaza and then push her on climate change and then do all of this stuff and I
35:37
thought you know if that works for you fantastic do your thing I guess but also I'm not 100% sure that
35:45
you're going to be pushing for any of this stuff I I think that you you're either horrified by what
35:53
was happen what has happened or you're not and if you're not that's okay that's that's your life but we are on opposite
35:59
ends of a Chasm and it precludes me from voting for this person you describe it I
36:05
think the words you use are theft of your soul that's right that's how I see
36:11
it yeah I I mean it's the theft of your soul we we can we can have a political
36:16
argument about almost anything and I and I will compromise and I will find common ground and all the rest of it but
36:21
there's certain points where no I'm not going to do that I I I I understand that
36:27
Trump might be a million times worse on every facet of of foreign and domestic
36:33
governance I'm not going to put my name in alignment with somebody who allowed
36:39
the last year to happen I'm just not I I just have to read this even though it doesn't because I thought it was great
36:45
uh you're quoting the uh Palestinian America poet nor Hindi she says I want
36:51
to be like those poets who care about the moon moon and the name of the poem
36:56
is titled F your lecture on Craft my people are
37:02
dying um yep it's become one of my go-to poems over the years isn't that
37:08
great you write uh the problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's
37:16
opponent is descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that eventually it gets too dark to tell the
37:24
difference explain what you mean by that I think one of the the sort of Hallmarks
37:32
of of Republican politics over the last 20 years is that you could safely go
37:37
back a decade or so and take any piece of ideology or policy proposal that was
37:44
previously on The Fringe and now it will be in the center now it will be in the
37:49
mainstream um and that kind of derangement has been ongoing for a very long time um
37:58
and I think instead of sort of standing in opposition to that there has been a
38:05
an Impulse within mainstream Progressive liberal Democratic circles to sort of present ones as as a
38:14
kind of endless Centrist um I'm high-minded I'm above it all I find the center position and
38:21
that's that's the correct one to take and I think at some point everybody in the right wing realized that you could
38:26
take advantage of this and just push things further to the right further towards Fascism and these
38:33
very same people will gladly move further to the right alongside you because they want to remain in the
38:40
center it's just that the center keeps changing um I've I've heard variations of this
38:48
argument in every part of the world you know we need to keep this autocracy or
38:55
this dictator in place because the the alternative is Islamic fundamentalists
39:00
and and this sure okay I don't want that fine but at some point if you're
39:06
constantly tethering yourself to this idea of being slightly better than what's assumed to be the
39:13
worst thing you must be cognizant of what direction you're headed um which is
39:19
I mean I think something that the Democratic party despite their their every effort is going to have to contend
39:26
with at some point I I don't need you to be half as tough
39:31
on migrants as the Republicans are because the Republicans are just going to get tougher on migrants and you will
39:37
have to move your position and it is indistinguishable from having no position at all I don't need you to be
39:43
that I need you to stand for something uh and I think this idea of tethering yourself to being slightly less evil uh
39:50
than than the most evil thing essentially becomes indistinguishable from that over time yeah that's
39:57
precisely what happened the Democratic party transformed itself into the Republican Party certainly begun by
40:04
Clinton and the Republican party uh became uh a a
40:10
cultish uh you know insane uh movement to embracing magical thinking but you're
40:17
exactly right it also happened in Israel by the way where I was lived in Israel when they outlawed the [ __ ] party in
40:24
Marana and now people running Israel all the Heirs of Kahana this is this radical
40:30
racist Rabbi I want to talk about non-violence um one of the most damaging
Non-violence
40:36
longest lasting consequences of the war on terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for
40:43
non-violence talk about that yeah I think one of one of the more difficult parts of this book and I I
40:49
talked about a little bit as a sort of self-interrogation I don't think you can write this kind of book and not contend
40:55
with the many things you are uh including some things that I'm not particularly proud of and one of those
41:01
interrogations has to do with this notion of how I describe myself I mean I describe myself as a pacifist as a
41:08
fairly committed um proponent of nonviolence but I have the privilege of
41:14
saying those words in a relative vacuum a vacuum created by the fact that I live
41:20
on the launching end of the bombs yeah um I live within the heart of the Empire
41:26
and so two things come into come into Clarity that I wish hadn't um but being
41:32
as though they have I need to address them the first is my right to tell anybody under a state of occupation how
41:38
to resist that occupation which is no right at all I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under
41:46
occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that Injustice um particularly when there is
41:54
no acceptable form of resistance in in the view of the institutions doing the
42:01
oppressing uh you engage in boycotts that's economic terrorism uh you try to
42:06
March peacefully you are shot with the intent to kill and or MIM um you boycott
42:13
cultural institutions you are being illiberal you take up arms you are a terrorist and you will be wiped out the
42:18
all you can do is die that is your only acceptable form of resistance so first of all I have absolutely no right to
42:25
tell anybody how to resist their occupation or or a state of Injustice but second I can sit here and I can tell you
42:32
how committed I am to nonviolence and I can believe that fully but by virtue of
42:37
the society I live in and by virtue of what my tax dollars are being used to do
42:43
I am one of the most violent human beings on Earth and I can't simply brush that away and say hey I I haven't thrown
42:49
a punch since I was 15 years old I fully committed to nonviolence I am part of a society that
42:56
exercises great industrial violence and at the very least I should acknowledge
43:01
that and that makes it much much more difficult to then go around parading My
43:06
Views about how violence debates this us all um sure it does but I am actively
43:14
engaged in it right now um that has been a very difficult thing to contend with
43:19
and I wish I I wish I had a sort of easy wraparound answer for it but I don't well this is you know first of all
43:26
it's always the oppressor uh who determined the configuration of resistance and the Zionist oppressor has
43:33
made it clear that whether it's nonviolent resistance or it doesn't make any difference you'll still be
43:38
obliterated but it's also as the Theologian James con writing about the difference between Martin Luther King
43:45
and Malcolm X he said Malcolm X grew up in an environment where he didn't have the luxury to be non-violent um and uh I want to talk
Love vs. Empire
43:53
about love at the end here I this was really important it's something I certainly saw
43:59
in places like Gaza but it's a love that you say cannot be acknowledged by Empire
44:05
because it is a people's love for one another anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of
44:10
a bomb building who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks
44:16
on who has watched their water poisoned their land burned their Community start
44:22
is intimately well-versed in love but in the eyes of the Empire such a thing can
44:28
never be called love because the directive was never in the first place
44:34
love but rather Love Me In Spite of it all love
44:40
me yeah I think I think this has to do with with the idea of nonviolence as
44:46
well which is not only a matter of of strategy or or conscience but also uh of
44:53
narrative um I think this is part of The Narrative of Empire um you know I I I
44:59
don't know how many how many books I've read at this point from former US
45:04
soldiers who came back from Iraq and then wrote about how sad it made them to have to kill all those brown people
45:10
there's narrative exercises are sort of fundamental to all of this but I
45:16
think as as dejected and as cynical as the last year has made me especially with regards to
45:24
our institutions obviously our political institutions but also our academic and cultural
45:30
institutions it has it has caused the exact opposite
45:35
impulse with respect to individuals I mean yes I've lost friends and yes there's people that I now realize I
45:42
served only as the token Brown friend friend too and and I get all of that but I'm watching daily incredible
45:50
acts of solidarity um I'm I'm watching Jewish folks shut down one of the biggest
45:57
stations in the world calling for solidarity in in in opposition to the
46:03
oppression of people of another religion on the other side of the planet I'm watching people
46:09
exercise acts of Love at Great personal risk you don't you don't chain yourself
46:14
to to the gate of a weapons manufacturer and expect to get away scot-free
46:22
um I've watched people go into a killing field and and practice
46:29
surgery to to ease the suffering of children I mean there are immense acts
46:34
of Love happening right now I wish that they weren't necessitated um I wish that they weren't
46:41
necessary um but what I am no longer interested in is is love as a form of institutional
46:50
camouflage I'm no longer interested in that I'm no longer interested in stories that talk about
46:57
um how everything was was great at the end after all the bad stuff happened I
47:02
am interested in that active form of love that is trying to stop the bad thing from happening right now um and
47:09
I'm seeing so many examples of it and it is the one thing keeping me going I a deeply um I'm not a particularly strong
47:17
person I'm a deeply weak person and I need that kind of inspiration and I am getting it daily
47:23
from people who are much stronger than me and who are engaged in the kind of love that matters more than
47:29
any other I think well you point out you quote the Palestinian poet
ALways resist
47:34
Rashia uh Abdul Hadi
47:40
uh wherever you are whatever sand you can throw in the gears of
47:47
genocide do it now if it's a handful throw it if it's a fingernail full
47:54
scrape it out and throw it get in the way however you
48:00
can uh and I think that you know that speaks to an issue you rais in the book
48:06
that sense of frustration we all feel that no matter what we do it will go on
48:12
I don't expect the ceasefire to last I think the Netanyahu government is quite clear that it won't they're hardly done
48:19
with their killing project uh and they've accelerated their uh Killing
48:24
Spree in the in the West Bank um but it is absolutely imperative and I think it
48:31
gets back to that point of on the theft of the Soul um that uh we can't
48:39
measure uh what we do empirically um but it keeps us whole
48:45
that resistance and and I think that's a point you make and you also at the end of the book tie it into the breakdown in
48:52
the climate crisis and everything else this is what we're watching in Gaza a harbinger of what's coming as the world
48:59
breaks down and it's an imperative that those of us who have some kind of a conscience however feudal it may seem
49:06
must uh as uh as Russia writes get in the way
49:14
however we can yeah I often go back to um I was on
49:19
this panel once it was for a climate uh essay Anthology and the final question
49:24
of the panel was something like you know where do you derive hope where do you get your Hope from and that sort of
49:29
thing and and people gave the sort of answers you'd expect except the last guy the last guy his house had just burned
49:35
down in the California wildfires and he said something like there is no hope
49:41
we've gone too far we've done too much damage but we must act as though there
49:46
is and I think about that a lot I mean you know I come from a long line of malfunctioning Hearts the men in my
49:52
family don't don't live very long I I have young children who will have to deal with whatever this world is that
49:59
we've created much much longer than I and this of course ties into the idea of
50:05
climate breakdown of of this um overarching existential mess that we
50:13
have made that of course is going to uh impact the most vulnerable first but will impact everybody
50:20
eventually and I think that even on my worst days and look I haven't done anything I've written a book who cares
50:26
there are people who are every day doing acts of resistance and acts of standing
50:32
up to this machine that are far more courageous than anything I've ever been able to
50:37
muster but whatever the hell it is that I'm going to do on any given
50:43
day it means something because I remember being that kid in the
50:51
school when the speaker came in and said sorry we've screwed everything up but your generation is going to be the one
50:56
to fix it and now I'm that idiot going into high schools and saying I'm so sorry we've screwed this up but your
51:03
generation is going to be the one to fix so that that's not enough we are
51:10
obligated to give a damn about one another we are obligated to want
51:16
something better than this I think we're obligated to love one another even in this incredibly cruel moment and this
51:23
culmination of so many cruel moments that keeps me going every day even when
51:30
I do the bare minimum or do nothing at all and I truly believe that right now
51:37
there is a huge huge Chasm between what people want and what our institutions of
51:42
governance are doing but we have one another and that I think is is a form of
51:49
strength that no institution can ever mimic um there are days I wake up and
51:55
realize that I don't have an ounce of the resources of the Machinery aligned
52:00
against me but we have one another and I hold on to that and if that's my only
52:05
source of Hope then so be it that's enough well get enough of us we can
Outro
52:12
bring it down um uh we're talking with Omar El aad on his book one day
52:20
everyone will have always been against this I want to thank uh Diego Sophia Max
52:28
and Thomas who produced the show you can find me at Chris edges. substack
52:35
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What Strange Paradise
