Guerrilla History - Palestine and the Media w/ Tara Alami

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

In another crucial episode of Guerrilla History, we continue to examine Palestine and the various components of the conflict in Occupied Palestine.  This time, we bring on Tara Alami to discuss the ongoing bombardment of Gaza and media misrepresentations/propaganda surrounding it.  This is a really critically important conversation, and we hope that you will share it next week when it comes out on our general feed - this is something that we need as many people to hear as possible! Tara Alami is a Palestinian writer from Occupied Jerusalem and Occupied Yafa, currently living in Montreal. You can follow Tara on twitter @taraxrh, and keep up with her work and mutual aid resources here. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

You remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history, podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as

usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Always nice to see you as well. And also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you? I'm doing very well. Excellent. Always happy to see you too, even though you turned off your camera to talk. But that'll be an inside joke for us. Listeners, you'll have no idea what we're talking about. All right. Before I introduce our guests and our topic for today, I just want to remind the listeners

that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like we do by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's gorilla being spelled, G-U-E-R-R-I-I. I-L-L-A history. You can also keep up-to-date with everything that Adnan Brett myself are putting out and as well as the show collectively by going to Twitter at Guerrilla underscore Pod. That's, again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. Today we're going to be talking about Palestine, the conflict that's taking place in Gaza right now, and media representations of this conflict.

and we have an excellent guest with us today, Tara Alami, writer and student from Occupied Jerusalem and Occupied Yaffa, currently living in Montreal. Hello, Tara. It's nice to have you on the show. Hi, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Of course. So, as I mentioned, you're a Palestinian writer. And throughout this ongoing conflict, we have seen just egregious example after egregious example of fabrication, of exaggeration, and of propaganda that's been leveled by the Western media, particularly mainstream media, but it's not only exclusively mainstream media that is perpetuating these misinformation campaigns that always seem to be in favor of the so-called state of Israel.

So this was actually a topic that you proposed to us when I reached out and said, hey, we want to do an episode with you. So I would like to open the conversation by just allowing you to introduce how you got interested in talking about this topic. You know, you are a Palestinian writer. So, of course, there is that connection. But what made you look deeper into this topic of media representation, Palestine, so-called state of Israel and the ongoing conflict in Gaza? Right. I mean, like you mentioned, I'm Palestinian and a Palestinian writer.

And so this, you know, this is something that highly concerns me when I see my people being demonized by mainstream media and not only by mainstream media, like you mentioned, just regular people online, regular people in the streets, regular people in my university. And so the reason that I'm interested in this is because part of our role here in the diaspora and the shattat is to challenge this. This is part of the work that we do in our grassroots organizations. And right now, this hyperfixation on Palestinians, specifically Palestinian men, and then by extension Arab men, by extension Muslim and brown men, as these what Zionist politicians call savage animals or human animals, this hyper-fixation on on Palestinians as these cruel, brutal, violent people who are just being violent for the sake of violence.

This is all part of Zionist propaganda. It's all part of conditioning people to accept that a genocide is being conducted on the people of Ghazir, on Palestinians who live in Ghazir. Palestinians who, it's important to mention 78% of whom are not originally from Ghazi. These are Palestinians who were displaced in 1948 and 1967 into what we call now the Ghaziz strip. And so part of the reason why this has been such an effective propaganda campaign, not so much anymore with the way the Internet is working now for the Zionist state, is because it manufactures consent.

It allows people to enter into this state where they're kind of doing the work of Zionist propagandists themselves. I mean, when you're retweeting an unverified claim about 40 beheaded babies, a claim that was made by a journalist, who, among many, but this journalist specifically, is one of the co-founders of 972 magazine and saying that you have seen these pictures

on the Hamas Telegram channel, a channel that is accessible to literally everyone. I mean, if you have the link, you can just join it, pictures that don't exist, and then you either, you know, pretend that you never did this or you loosely retract your claim after you provide reason for a bloodbath, for massacre after massacre.

It started on October 7th. Today is October 25th. There have been over 6,000 Palestinians killed by Zionist airstrikes, over 40% of whom are children. And so the reason why we focus on this is because it's used as a tool by the Zionist state to justify Zionist settler colonialism and genocide. One quick follow-up.

You mentioned the Hamas Telegram channel. I just saw some news today. And again, we're recording on the 25th of October. I just saw some news today that that channel was being blocked. And now, you know, Telegram is supposed to be like this very open, very accessible way of aggregating news on various channels. I'm just explaining for listeners who don't use Telegram. It's really great, to be honest with you. But the page or the channel for Hamas is being blocked in various languages and in various countries that was just coming out today,

which is only going to make it more difficult for people to verify or, you know, verifiably disprove these claims that Hamas was bragging about, you know, whatever on their telegram channel because now that telegram channel is not going to be accessible to large swaths of the people who would be able to go there. otherwise and just openly look for themselves and see that that was a blatant falsehood because it is not there. Anyway, Brett, go ahead. Sure, yeah. So one of the things that obviously sticks out with regards to the Zionists' ability to control the information flow, especially in the age of the internet, is this recent move by them to cut all electricity and fuel for generators such that a lot of regular Palestinians in

Gaza can no longer, you know, share their videos, share. on the ground perspectives of what's happening, allowing Israel to make a little bit more of a full spectrum approach to the information war and to crowd out or to just shut down those voices. And we've seen that starkly in the past couple of days. I also have been struck by the fact that Western media seems even worse in so many ways than like, you know, papers in the area, even Israeli herets. I mean, these are not perfect papers by any means, Al Jazeera, English. These are not perfect outlets, but they seem much more willing to wrestle with nuance and complexity than anything I can see here in the West. And so my question to you is just sort of a broad question

as to what you see as some of the main differences between Western media outlets and other media outlets around the world. Why Western media is uniquely bad? And then maybe you could also say something if you have time about the role that the Internet plays in this this new information more. Yeah. Well, one of the main differences is literally just asking Palestinians to come on TV and talk about what's happening versus getting like, I don't know, the chief of the Israeli military to describe what's going on, getting the ex-Zionist prime minister to talk about

what's going on, and not even allowing journalists from Ghazeh, who are literally right now in Ghazir to come on TV and talk about. the genocide that's going on we saw like outlets for example like electronic intifada did a live stream with someone in ghzda and you could hear the bombs in the background i mean this is something that they are trying really really really hard to avoid and they're going to avoid it at all cost because it does not fit their editorial line if we're talking about bbc if we're talking about sky news if we're talking about cnn and all of those means i mean and also foxes news, obviously, and all of those mainstream media companies, corporations that have class

interests and have interests in suppressing Palestinian voices. They have material interest in only showing the Zionist perspective of what's going on, which it's just going to be a regurgitation of, you know, Palestinians are quote-unquote terrorists. Palestinians are violent. Palestinians are lying about the death count. Palestinians are lying about how many people they found under the rubble. Palestinians are lying about no electricity, about Gaza not having access to electricity, which is not even the first time the electricity is cut from Gaza. This is a tactic that the Zionist state has used repeatedly

in almost every single war on Gaza since the siege started. in 2007, cutting electricity, bombing media towers, bombing internet towers. These are all ways in which the Zionist state can secure, basically, can conduct a massacre in a blackout, in a media blackout. And that's where the role of the internet comes in. people in Ghazia have been sporadically they've been able to sporadically get access to internet

and they've been sharing what's going on and these on platforms like Instagram Facebook, Twitter, of course telegram platforms you know like meta that work extra hard to censor Palestinian voices I mean we're seeing

not just Palestinians but any account getting suspended just every day these huge accounts are getting suspended. Journalists have been getting journalists from Gaza have been getting suspended. And this is just when we're talking about social media, literally an hour and a half before we started recording this,

a journalist in Gaza called Wael Dahoodoo. He's the chief journalist of Al Jazeera in Gaza found out that his family, his entire family was massacred on air after they received a warning call to their home. And so this silencing of Palestinian voices, of course, happens on social media, of Palestinian journalists on social media, but also literally happens on the ground. They are literally being targeted by Zionist airstrikes. They are literally being targeted to be killed because they don't serve the narrative that's being spread by the empire. And, of course, we're talking here about imperialist media, imperialist media that, of course, at the end of the day, is going to align with the interests of the imperialist state that they serve, like the U.S. or Britain or Canada or other states in the EU.

That's wonderful. Thank you. I just wanted to continue and follow up. And firstly, of course, Tara, thank you so much for coming on to the show. It's really valuable to have perspectives like yours, precisely. because, as you say, there's so much censorship and limitation on the mainstream media. But first, just to follow up on the social media dimension, I know you're pretty active, you know, on Twitter, for example. And one example that came up recently is that there's been accounts, pro-Palestine accounts that are being suppressed. It's not possible to follow them.

one, for example, the new Palestine Action USA branch that started, had a Twitter account a few days ago. There were only 600 people or something like that following it. I posted about it. Others did to try and promote the account so that people could get involved in an exciting new direct action, you know, possibilities for resisting here in the Imperial Corps doing what we can. to support and show solidarity. And for days, nobody could follow this account. However, I just looked on it and I think after persistent raising of the contradictions and hypocrisy of Twitter under Elon Musk, you know, for being a supposed free speech

advocate, but limiting this account, it seems that that. that is lifted, and within a day or two, it's now at 206,000, which suggests, or even more, perhaps than that, which suggests, of course, that popular pressure can make some small changes in this venue, but above all, that, in fact, there's actually a lot of pro-Palestine sentiment out there, and I wonder what you think, like over the last week, finally, both on social media, these sort of restrictions seem to be pushed back successfully against, and also even mainstream media is now at least covering some components in limited fashion

of the casualties in Gaza, for example. And it just suggests to me that people, even though there's been this media propaganda, you know, Hasbara gone wild in the first week, 10 days, that when people have even a small inkling of the actual character of the violence taking place as a result of Israel's military assault on Gaza, they actually are not that, you know, in favor of it. So I'm wondering for you as somebody assessing this, you know, what's your sense of this, of social media and of the broader climate of Palestine solidarity that's appearing

online and in and whether this is having some consequential effect on media coverage. I mean, for sure, social media plays a role, but I want to stress that the real work is happening on the ground. There are several grassroots organizations that have been, I mean, that have been present on Turtle Island in North America for decades, but also in the past few years since in the past couple of years since the Unity and the Fado of 2021 have really gained popular support from youth across campuses, youth after graduating from university. And so we're seeing, I think we're seeing social media reflect that change

that's happening on the ground. Like today, for example, there was a transnational walkout in the US and Canada. Hundreds of students recorded themselves walking out. out in Montreal and Concordia students are doing a sit-in on campus. They're occupying the campus. And so I think that what we're seeing on social media is just a reflection of that. And of course, these mainstream media companies like BBC, like CNN and et cetera, they're going to feel that pushback when every tweet they make is getting called out by hundreds or thousands of people online because that's embarrassing.

It's not a good look. And of course, they want their viewers, or sometimes their clients, to believe them so that they can continue to support them. And so it's really not a good look. It's not a good look when a Palestinian, like Hissam Zumloth, was being interviewed on air and says that six of his family members were martyred. And the first thing that the interviewer says is, well, I'm really sorry about that. but do you condemn Hamas?

Like, you know, just on any level, that is not a good look. And so, yes, we're seeing PR damage control from these mainstream media corporations, but we're also seeing an increase in popular support. And that's why thousands and thousands of people are coming out every single week in support of Palestinian liberation. That's why the movement for Palestinian liberation is multiracial, it's multi-ethnic, it's multi-religious and the movement for whatever Zionist settler colonialism isn't. It's a white supremacist, ethno-nationalist movement.

It does not and will never, it will never get the popular support that the Palestinian struggle does because Palestine is a central issue, Palestine can be connected to basically every other third world struggle for liberation from colonialism and imperialism, because it is connected. to it because we know that the U.S. empire supports the bankrolls the Zionist army and bankrolls Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. We know that the U.S. Empire bankrupts colonialism and imperialism everywhere else. We know that the Israeli army is involved in weapons trading with the Indian state, for example. And so all of these issues are connected. And I think people have been increasingly understanding that since the Unity Intifado of 2021, which was led by youth.

And that's why it's being reflected on social media. Yeah, just two quick follow-up comments here. One is about Palestine Action U.S. So I'm friends with a few of the founders of Palestine Action U.S., and we will be bringing them on the show soon to talk about the foundation of the branch here. I say here. I'm not there. but in the United States, as well as their opening actions against Elbit Systems, as well as the repression on social media and Twitter specifically making it impossible for folks to follow them for several days until there was such backlash because all of the big name even remotely left people on social media.

All of them were calling out Twitter or X for not a lot. allowing people to follow until eventually they relented. And as you mentioned, Adnan, within a day of them, allowing people to follow it, went to over 200,000 followers. What I actually want to follow up, though, on, and let Tara have her thoughts on it is another thing that Adnan said about

casualty numbers. So we've been seeing these horrific numbers of casualties coming out from Gaza. And if you look at the pictures coming out from Gaza, they are entirely believable yeah like if you look at any pictures to say oh i think that they're lying that there's civilians that are dying you would be absolutely out of your freaking mind to intimate that they're lying that civilians are dying in large numbers especially when we have direct accounts of names and ages of family members of people who are dying verifiable accounts operating in Gaza that have never been found to have fabricated data on these sorts of

things. And I'll get to that in just a second. That being said, though, we are starting to see a new narrative come out. And I know that this episode may come out a little bit after we record it. So again, we're recording on October 25th. One of the latest things that has been coming out is, well, you can't really trust the casualty numbers because Hamas is the one who is releasing the casualty numbers, and just today, again, October 25th, Biden himself, and I'm quoting here, said, I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth. I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it is the price of waging war. Israel should be incredibly careful to ensure they're going after the folks propagating this war. We're seeing this kind of rhetoric come out,

as we see images and video of Gaza being flattened by an absolute genocidal bombardment by settler colonial Israel. So the reason that I'm bringing this up, like I said again, is that it drives me crazy that we see this narrative forming in real time. Well, these numbers that we're seeing of casualties, they can't be real because Hamas is the one who's governing Gaza, therefore any number that they put out is going to be inflated. Again, this is coming out from Gaza's health ministry, a source that, and I'm just citing here, a report that came out from Human Rights Watch, said that they had never seen any discrepancies in assessments of death tolls from Gaza Health Ministry in any of their assessments, independent assessments that had ever gone on. And so we see now this narrative coming out that you can't trust the numbers because there's no independent verification that's coming out. That's because Israel's preventing the people from going in to independently verify. They've blocked access to these independent verifiers like human rights watch or Amnesty International or any of these organizations, which, you know, they do some good, they do some not so good. But at least you would have this narrative of there being not any independent.

verification of these numbers, you would be able to dispel it. And so this is the narrative that's kind of forming in real time as of this moment is that, well, you know, I'm sure that there's some people that are dying, but they're probably lying about the numbers. And I find this absolutely insulting. And I'm going to try to calm down, Henry. Okay, Tara, I'm just going to turn it over to you. This narrative that's forming it in real time that we can't believe anything that's coming out

from Gasa is very pervasive right now and very frustrating. Can I have your thoughts on it? Yes, you can't have my thoughts on it. It is insulting and it's racist. It's extremely racist to, first of all, I mean, propagate the idea that Palestinians can't even count their own martyrs. Like, that's just an insane, I mean, it's an insane thing, but the only people who can say something like that and be believed are Zionist propagandists, because they've been saying insane stuff like this for years and years and years. When this first started two weeks ago, almost three weeks ago, there was a story that was even tweeted by one of the official state-affiliated accounts about a pregnant woman having

her baby taken out from her stomach and then being assaulted. This is literally a story from the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. This is a verified account. from the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which took place in 1982 that was conducted by philandrous forces, supported by Zionists and U.S. forces in Lebanon. And so what we're seeing is, first of all, trying to co-op the narrative by basically saying that atrocities that I've committed have been done to me. And so, you know, you should support me because this is what's going on. But then when you do just a little bit of research, you realize that, no, this is actually what the Zionist state has been doing, but is doing right now to the people of Gaza. The idea that we need even more evidence, more pictures, I mean, there was this tweet just a couple of days ago, again, from one of the state affiliated accounts being like, you know, we would show you this horrific picture.

of this woman who was murdered by Hamas terrorists, but we can't because of the guidelines in terms of service. Every single day, I am seeing hundreds of photos and videos coming out of Ghazé of Palestinians who've been maimed, who've been dismembered, who've been burned by the bombs, including white phosphorus, which white phosphorus does incredible damage, not just for Palestinians who are being impacted firsthand physically by it,

but also it's going to do just. generational damage, which is now what we're seeing in Iraq after it was, after white phosphorus was used in Iraq by U.S. forces, children to this day, 20 years after the bombs were used, are being born with fatal congenital, with fatal congenital abnormalities. And so we are seeing this, this effort to try to reclaim all the atrocities that they've committed onto others, not just from now, but also stories from 1982 that have been confirmed, again, by, like, institutions that don't always do great work, but sometimes do great work, like Amnesty International, the UN, and etc. And then we have, you know,

institutions like Reuters, when one of their journalists was killed, being like, oh, there was this rocket that came from the direction of Israel that mysteriously hit one of our journalists and then he died. No, your journalist was killed by an Israeli airstrike. That's literally what happened. When the hospital in Gaza was flattened in one air strike, 500 people dead, doctors did the press conference surrounded by corpses, surrounded by corpses. I mean, this is a magnitude of devastation that's like inconceivable even.

And then you have people, propagandists who are state-affiliated, but also regular people, like I mentioned, online being like, well, I don't know. The evidence doesn't seem reliable. Or the corpses that were surrounding these doctors who were doing the press conference, that's not 500 bodies. So I can't believe that 500 bodies, 500 people were killed by this airstrike. Or this air strike came from within, from Palestine, from Palestinian. resistance, because actually Palestinians are victims of their own resistance.

This is another narrative that they're trying to spin now, but we know, first of all, that Hamas was democratically elected after the PA was forced to do an election in 2005, Hamas was democratically elected, and then they were

booted out of the West Bank and into Ghazi, and the people of Ghazze continue en masse, of course not, Palestinian are not a monolith, but the majority of people in Ghazda support the resistance, support resistance efforts, including armed resistance against the Zionist entity. But they also support Hamas as a political structure. Like when we're talking about Hamas, we're not talking about only the armed wing. We're talking about governmental services. We're talking about hospitals.

We're talking about social workers. We're talking about doctors, teachers, you know, just regular people. And so when they're saying, you know, we're striking Hamas militants or what, what Biden said about, you know, you might get a few innocents here and there when you're trying to target what they call terrorists. This is a war that's being launched on the people of Husday. It does not matter if you're affiliated with Hamas, if you condemn Hamas, if you condone Hamas, if you even know what Hamas is. I mean, there are children, babies that are being killed. Babies who are, babies who are, who haven't even had a chance at life, you know, to be able to decide whether or not they condemn Hamas. And so what we need to understand is that this is a war that's being carried out against the people of Gaza, against Palestinians living in Gaza, who are now being subjected to collective punishment for having the audacity to resist against their colonizer, using armed struggle, which they have the right to use armed struggle as a form of resistance, as an occupied people, not only legally, but also morally.

A couple of things I wanted to comment on some of the stuff that you said, Tara, which is, one, you know, even liberals across the political spectrum, they want to dehumanize Hamas, right? Of course they want to dehumanize the Palestinians, but they also want to dehumanize Hamas and most people, even liberals and progressives and even some socialists will go along with it, right? The whole idea of condemning Hamas is to subordinate you ideologically to their premises and assumptions before the conversation can even start, before you can even grant Palestinians in general humanity. But when you ask yourself, who are Hamas, they're just Palestinians who pick up the gun. Regardless of what you think about any given individual's ideology and, you know, Hamas is the organization that is like

the main fighting force, among many organizations, of course. But I guarantee if you sat down with every single member of Hamas and asked them their opinions, they would have individual views, individual reasons for why they get involved, etc. But most of these people are, you know, young men who grew up, like the fighters in Hamas, young men who grew up in these horrific conditions, who have no life opportunities, who are strangled at every turn, who have watched their friends and their family members and their comrades be slaughtered with the full backing of the so-called Democratic and Free West for their entire lives. and then they pick up the gun to fight for their land for their people, and they are dehumanized. And then half of the left, three quarters of the left, also goes along with that dehumanization. You know, I just saw somebody like, you know, just to pick one name out of a hat, a crystal ball on breaking points. Crystal ball is this, you know, democratic socialist, progressive social democrat type. And the first thing she says is, okay, yeah, Hamas is disgusting.

They can absolutely be annihilated, do anything you want to them. But the Palestinians are people and, you know, the civilians. should be cared for. I find that disgusting and I personally refuse. I don't speak for anybody else, but I personally refuse to dehumanize even the Hamas fighters. They're human beings. They deserve dignity and anything else that anybody else does. And when you can reduce them to something worth less than an animal, you not only justify their slaughter, but you justify the slaughter of civilians in pursuit of them. And that's exactly what we are seeing. Another great point, Tara, you can talk on any of these points that I'm throwing out there, but something you said is about

the projection, basically, how Israel projects its own crimes onto the Palestinians and onto Hamas. They'll say, you know, Palestinians, Hamas, they want to genocide us as they're doing genocide. You know, they'll say, Hamas uses human shields. They don't care about civilian deaths as they bomb entire apartment blocks and hospitals and schools and slaughter civilians in front of the entire world. You know, they'll say, the river to the sea is genocidal as they actively enhanced settlements in the West Bank to take over land more for Israel, you know, literally purging, you know, Palestinians from their homeland, etc. So every accusation, you know, launched by a Zionist is really an admission. And when you have that framework in your mind, a lot of what

they say makes a lot more sense. And it's, it's despicable, but it's very there. My question to you, and you could again touch on anything I just laid on the table, but I'm just interested in more of the common framings, you know, that the media in particular spokesmen's and Zionists in general prop up, you know, certain framings like Israel has a right to exist, Israel has a right to defend itself, you know, Hamas uses human shields, etc. There's so many of them. Can you talk about some of these common framings that Zionist propagandist will use and maybe some ways that we can push back on that or, you know, see through those lies? Yeah, absolutely. But before I do, you mentioned something extremely important, which is that the conditions of armed struggle, the reason that armed struggle

is born is because conditions force people to pick up arms. We are talking, and not just about Gaza, but specifically right now in Gaza, we are talking about a people, over two million people living in the largest open-air prison in the world. It's the second most densely populated place in the world. People who have been deliberately placed under an air, land, and sea blockade, deliberately, economically subjugated to the occupying force, which is the Zionist state. And so they depend on the Zionist state for trade. They depend on the Zionist state for everything that's going in and out. They depend on the Zionist state for are people who want permits to work somewhere else in their own homeland.

So either in the West Bank or in the lands occupied in 1948, they depend on the site on the Zionist state for access to water, for access to sea water, which is on the coast of Hazzar. And let me just remind everyone of when humanitarian aid was once sent in a flotilla in 2014 and those, the workers on that flotilla were, were airstriked and killed because the Zionist state did not want any aid to reach Ghazze through the water, through the Mediterranean Sea. And so we're talking about a population that has been living in these conditions for 17 years.

Over 50% of this population are youth under 18 that have lived through over six wars and then in between those wars, sporadic airstrikes. And so these are the conditions that we need to understand when we're trying to comprehend why someone would pick up arms and someone would decide to go to choose the route of armed resistance. And I want to also remind everyone of 2014 the Great March of Return when people in Ghazze were approaching borders and thousands were killed at close range by Isra. 80 forces. These were peaceful protests. And so all of these, all of, all of this, uh, these narratives, these narratives that are being, um, that are being, uh, regurgitated about Palestinians as violent. Palestinians are just, you know, they're barbaric. They're just being violent for the sake of, of being violent. Uh, because, because this is the only way that they know. I mean,

first of all, this is not true. No one on earth, uh, no one, you know, just decides to pick up a gun for no reason. There are conditions that lead you through several ways of resistance, several ways of trying to resist the colonial entity, and eventually lead you to armed struggle, which again is a moral and legal right of occupied people. And so the way that we can, just to go back to your question about how we can combat these narratives on the media about Palestinians and all of, you know, all of the lies that we're seeing. Like, for example, the hospital in Gaza was bombed by Palestinians themselves. You know, the only way to do this is by just stating facts.

What's actually going on, which is Palestinians have been living through enduring, enduring and surviving Zionist settler colonialism for over 75 years. British colonialism before that. Palestinians have been enduring and surviving U.S. imperialism, also for 75 years, more so after the 60s and the 70s. Palestinians in the West Bank are living under military occupation. There are military checkpoints everywhere. There are settlers everywhere.

They are living under the control of a Palestinian, quote-unquote, Palestinian puppet regime. which is the Palestinian authority that was installed after the Oslo Accords were signed against the will of the Palestinian masses. Palestinians are living in the 1948 territories that are called Israel. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are sequestered into what they call Arab neighborhoods. There is a very clear, very clear separation between Zionist settlers, Jewish, settlers in 1948 territories versus Palestinians who are living on their own land. And so these are the conditions that lead someone to take up arms. These are the conditions that lead someone to deciding that they want to put their life

on the line to protect, to fight for their livelihood, for their land and for their people. And so that's how we should contextualize our response. to these narratives about Palestinians as violent. And, you know, there are other ways that there are other times sometimes when I see things that are just so outrageous. Things like I saw this morning, today someone was saying that, you know, they don't believe the photos of the mass graves. I don't care.

I don't care that you don't believe them. I know. I know from my friends back in Ghazze. I know that they are living through this. I know that my friend's whole entire building was flattened by an airstrike. I know that I have a friend who lost 18 family members, 18 relatives, just in the past two weeks. And so I don't need you to believe this. And I don't need the approval of me.

I mean, I don't need it. And also Palestinians back home don't need the approval of some random guy in like Oklahoma for him to be like, okay, well, now I understand why Palestinians have the right to resist. Now I understand why Palestinians have the right to violence when violence has been inflicted upon them for years and years and years, but also increasingly, since the 2021 unity intifada, increasingly when we're seeing, I mean, when we're seeing an arise in organized, youth-led, revolutionary armed struggle in the West Bank. We're also seeing increased colonial

violence against the youth. When we're seeing organized strikes in the West Bank, labor, teachers, lawyers, nurses were all going on strikes against the PA for better working conditions, for the right to have their own democratically elected unions. We're seeing more colonial violence when it comes to labor. We're seeing more colonial violence when it comes to labor. We're seeing more colonial violence when it comes to Palestinians not being able to get permits to work outside the West Bank or to work outside Gaza. And speaking of workers who get permits to be able to work outside Gaza, there are at least 500 recorded workers from Gaza who are now stranded in the West Bank,

who are arrested by Israeli forces during this ongoing onslaught on Gaza. And so in response to organized revolutionary violence, we are going to. to see, we are going to see increasing colonial violence. And then there will always be resistance to that. You can't, like, you know, they're trying to say, we want to destroy Hamas. We want to destroy P.I.J, the Palestinian Islamic jihad. You can't. You can't. Because when, when there's colonial violence, there will always be resistance. When there's colonial imperialist violence, the people, people in Palestine love their life. People in Palestine love their land. They will always continue to fight by any means necessary for liberation.

We've been seeing this for 75 years. We saw it in Algeria for 132 years. People will continue to fight for their livelihood. They will continue to fight for liberation. And they will never surrender. And this is what we're seeing in Ghazda. This is literally what we're saying when we see people in Ghazir, refusing to leave. Refusing to leave places that have received calls from Israeli forces saying we're going to bomb this building.

We're going to bomb this hospital. Doctors are refusing to leave their patients. People are refusing to leave their land. And so this is what we're always going to see in response to colonial violence. There will always be resistance, especially in the case of Palestine. And it will always be justified, always. Yeah, very, very well said, and I could not agree more. You know, and you mentioned Algeria.

It's a great case study. The Haitian revolution, I think of slave revolts. I think about American settlers during the dispossession and genocide of the indigenous people of North America, the same exact verbiage, the same logic, the same fantastical stories about the savagery and the brutality of the natives comes into play over and over and over again. So when you study colonial history, you can see incredibly clearly how not only the actions and the behavior, but the rhetoric and the propaganda coming out of Israel and from Zionism is just. just part and parcel of this colonialist, hubristic, white supremacist, euro supremacist history. You know, it plugs right into that. And it's very clarifying, at least, to have that sort of knowledge. But my question to you before I leave, and I'll have to tap out a little early on this conversation,

I just want to get a chance to thank you so much for coming on and sharing your voice with us before I leave. But the question I'll leave you with, and then the other guys can take the interview further. is I'm just interested in how you're viewing some of the tactics by Zionists when it comes to shutting down speech in the West, whether that's targeting, doxing, harassing individuals, students, whether that's police forces coming out and brutalizing protesters who dare fly, something like a Palestinian flag, etc. Can you kind of talk about the tactics that the Zionists have been using as of late to squash, to silence speech, and maybe some ideas on how. we can more effectively combat this? Yeah, well, I mean, first, thank you so much for having me, and I really appreciate these questions.

I am, so I'm a student here in Montreal, and I've been doxed, like many, many other students, like many other organizers who are living on Turtle Island. These smear campaigns have been a thing for about a decade now, but, you know, we're seeing them ramp up the allegations, ramp up the smearing of Palestinian students, Arab students, anyone really who vaguely supports Palestine online with very clear purpose. One of them is to get them, you know, expelled and removed from academic institutions that are that are systemically involved in Zionist settler colonialism, that are materially invested. And that are materially invested in Zionist settler colonialism. Like, for example, I'll just list my own university, McGill,

literally invests in real estate companies that build settlements in the occupied West Bank. And so Zionist donors are not happy when Miguel students vote, for example, by 71% majority to pass a Palestine solidarity policy. And so Zionist donors lobby the university to threaten the student union to cut funding until they repeal the policy that democratically passed, which is the real thing that happened at McGill. We're seeing York University, the graduate student union is being threatened also by the university with legal action for putting out a statement in support of Palestine. And so when we see popular support in these institutions, like academic institutions. And I mean, it's a little bit different in the work. And it's a little bit

different in the workforce because unless you're in a union, people aren't like as organized as students. But, you know, even when it comes to the workforce, like there was this letter that was leaked from Starbucks that they were trying to crack down on a unionized Starbucks that have released statements in support of Palestine and Palestinians. And so when we see this organized, popular support for Palestine in institutions that are materially invested in Zionist settler colonialism that have material class interest in the genocide of Palestinians. We're going to see backlash. And this backlash has been, I mean, just ramped up to insane levels in the past two weeks.

Like you mentioned, police are being called on... Police are being called on Palestinians just in general, but also cops are assaulting people who are protesting. University administrators have been sending emails that are hysterical fearmongering emails with mentioning the word terrorism without knowing how much weight that word has, how much danger they're putting Arab, visibly Arab and Muslim students on their campuses. how much danger they're subjecting them to, how much they're enabling Zionist organizations on campus

to continue these smear campaigns, to continue to docks and harass Palestinian students, Arab students, academics, and, you know, staff. And so, you know, aside from these organized campaigns, we're also seeing cops being heavily involved in all of this. For example, I don't know. know why, but two weeks ago before the protests started or before the first protest, major protest, there were police chiefs in Toronto and from the RCMP tweeting about quote-unquote

violence in the Middle East, tweeting about keeping an eye on quote-unquote relevant areas or relevant locations, by which they mean mosques, by which they mean we're going to continue surveilling Palestinians, we're going to continue surveilling Arabs and Muslims. because we're going into a set, you know, for the second time, 9-11 levels of mass hysteria around Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians being organized in any way or fashion, even when we're talking about people being organized to pray, even when we're talking about people being organized to attend university together, to form a Muslim Students Association, to form an association for Palestinian human rights.

and so yes the cops are heavily involved in this and the cops are heavily involved in this because the police as a state apparatus as a repressive state apparatus is heavily involved in Zionist settler colonialism and we see this very clearly in what's called the deadly exchange I mean they exchange literal training

with Israeli occupation forces they exchange weapons they exchange trade sorry, they exchange arms. And so naturally, when you have this material investment in Zionist settler colonialism, you're going to project all the forms of colonial violence on anyone who opposes or resists or even, you know, vaguely goes against the status quo here on Turtle Island. And this is why it's really important to understand that Zionism doesn't just exist in Palestine. Zionism, you know, like what Gassan Kenafani said about imperialism, will extend its tentacles as far as it can reach.

It will extend its tentacles to universities like McGill, like York University. It will extend its tentacles to U.S. police departments who are trained under Israeli occupation forces to learn how to suppress, how to assault people here on turtle. Island to learn how to use that same form of colonial violence here on Turtle Island. And so these organized Smyr campaigns, these organized campaigns of literal, like also physical violence against people who, against, you know, visibly Palestinian, Arab, Muslim people, but also anyone who goes out and protests is also something that we need to consider when, for example, we're organizing for Palestinian liberation, when we're organizing for black liberation, this is something that ties us together, something that we need to fight against together. And there is a

precedent for fighting this. There is a precedent, for example, at McGill, for McGill divesting from the South African apartheid. There is a precedent. And so we need to keep going, no matter how terrifying, and they are terrifying. These smear campaigns are terrifying. no matter how terrifying they get for just, you know, regular students like myself or any other student in university or worker. There was something that I wanted to add. It slipped my mind because I was getting so into what you were saying, Tara, but I will mention that, you know, you mentioned the police and just anecdotally from my own experience.

Back when I was doing my undergrad, I always, I know if you look at me, you wouldn't expect me to be in these organizations. But I was in the Middle Eastern Student Association, the Muslim Student Association, and Students for Justice in Palestine. Again, people, if you look at my pictures on Twitter, that would surprise you. But in any case, I was in them, and of course, I was always at all of the protests that we were doing. But if you would compare one of our protests versus a protest hosted by, for example, students for life, you know, the pro-life organization, when they would have their marches in, in favor of, you know, banning reproductive rights for women, there would be like one or two cops that you would see at their events.

There would be like dozens around when we would have ours, always, even if it was a comparable sized group of people that were taking part in these events. One group was calling for the liberation of Palestine. One group was calling for, you know, a ban on reproductive rights for women in the United States or whatever. They were calling for that specific day, you know, shuddering a, ocean clinics or whatever, the discrepancy in the police presence was palpable. You could really see it and you could feel it.

And that was actually what kept a lot of other white students like myself away from those protests because they felt like they had something to lose by being there. And that's one of the reasons why the police are there. Of course, they get their training and roughing up and brutalizing, you know, young protesters at events like that. but also they know that they just their presence is enough to dissuade a lot of people that otherwise might be in solidarity and would be at similar actions whereas you know students for life they have a similar protest and you don't you don't see or hear the police like you know

you have to really go searching in order to find them and therefore you have all of these white evangelical conservative people that go out there and they don't feel any fear that there's going to be any

repercussion to what they're doing but if you go to one of our Palestine solidarity protests you would see dozens of cops and you have to worry what's going to happen at that event

because it takes I mean we had people get arrested at many many of our protests and that was just part and parcel of being in solidarity

and doing what we could is knowing that those repercussions were going to take place. But, you know, that is something that happened. So I just wanted to add that in. I might think of what else I was going to say earlier. But like I said, your last answer was really excellent. So I kind of lost what I was planning on saying. But thank you for that, Tara. Adnan, feel free to go ahead.

Well, yeah, I just also wanted to say you covered a lot of very important ground and issues there. So, you know, I can remember when there wasn't really so much pushback in an organized fashion the way you're talking about the targeting and the organized attempts at suppressing Palestine solidarity, you know, in the diaspora in the West. So what do you think this portends? You know, why is this happening? What do you think the consequences of it are because while I think it's terrible that they're coming viciously after, you know, people who identify and support in a public way, I'm also in a way hardened by the fact that they seem to be scrambling to really attack people for showing solidarity with Palestine. I actually remembered what I was going to say, and it's related to what you were saying at none. So I'm going to just piggyback on, which is that if we see the repression on people that are speaking out in solidarity with Palestine right now, I had seen somebody, and I don't remember who I saw say this. So listeners, if you also saw this and remember, you can tweet it at me.

So I remember somebody had said that what we're seeing right now is the biggest repression for political beliefs in the United States and in Canada. since the Red Scare, the second Red Scare, the McCarthy Red Scare. And you think back and you know, you have had other instances where you would have repression in various ways for political beliefs, even, you know, ones that seem on face value kind of silly, but of course it's not silly for the people that it impacts, but like the Dixie Chicks back when they said F.U. George Bush and were embarrassed to be from the state of Texas like you are, they were banned by, from most country radio stations. That was their livelihood, you know, so that was something that we had seen previously,

but what we're seeing now law students having offers to jobs retracted, police records being made on people, various countries outright banning these actions and, and vowing to criminalize any of these actions. This is the biggest repression that there has been since the Red Scare, at least in the United States. So just to add that into what Adnan was saying. Well, also to add on to what you were saying, importantly, countries like France trying to ban the protests

and then failing, failing, like royally failing, hundreds of tens of thousands of people going outside despite whatever. I mean, I don't know. First of all, you're trying to ban French people from protesting. They do a protest every, yeah. They do a protest every other week, but also, I mean, first of all, there's a huge racialized population in France. People who have been, who have experienced firsthand the wrath of colonialism, people who identify with Palestinians, people who know that their state is directly involved in the genocide going on in Palestine, directly involved in Zionist, their colonialism, people who are willing.

to risk being arrested, risk getting fired, risk getting, you know, risk any form of repercussion. And we're not just seeing this in France, where they tried to ban protests, but also in the UK, also in Australia, also in Canada, where police chiefs were tweeting out threats and mayors were saying, there was a mayor that was saying that a rally was unsanctioned. you don't have to sanction a rally in Toronto in the first place. And so, you know, this metric that you're setting for having a rally approved is one that doesn't exist that you just came up with because it happens to be a rally for Palestine.

And so people are willing to risk facing repercussions that go from getting a job offer rescinded to literally being arrested, to being doxed online, because it's worth it. Honestly, this is worth it. The fight for Palestine and Palestinian liberation is 100,000% worth it. People know this, not just Palestinians know this, Arabs know this, racialized people know this. People know that something is shifting, that there's a paradigm shift, that something is changing when it comes to Palestine, that resistance in Palestine is. is very clearly organized, that there is a purpose to what is going on, that this is not just senseless violence, like Zionists try to say, that first of all, there is a psychological

shift in people's resistance consciousness, not just in Palestine, because, you know, when you grow up in these conditions, like I mentioned before, these are conditions that create resistance consciousness that leads you to take up arms. But people here, people here who are so far from being the target of Zionist settler colonialism are having their resistance consciousness elevated, our understanding why these things are happening and they're understanding that the liberation of Palestine brings us one step closer to the liberation of all of us.

It brings us one step closer to finally beating the U.S. Empire, to finally beating colonialism, to finally beating capitalism and how it's being and the way that it's used to subjugate people, the working class, not just on Turtle Island, but also in the third world, in the global south. And so there's recognition of that. People understand that Palestine is a central issue for anyone who is, I mean, I don't know, not so much anyone who's on the left because we've been seeing a lot of, like, mask off moments in the past three weeks. But for people who are truly principled in their stance on the left, people who are principled in their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics, know that when Palestine, not if when Palestine is liberated, when the people of Palestine are liberated, when Palestine is decolonized, when it's liberated, and when all Palestinians and return to our land, that this is going to bring about change for the entire world.

It's going to bring about change for all for all people of the third world and for people here on on Turtle Island who are like for example working class people. Racialized people who are facing the who are bearing the brunt of police violence. People who instead of having resource who instead of having the millions, billions of dollars that are being sent to propagate the U.S. war machine abroad, instead of having those dollars used to fund their public schools, to fund food programs, to fund affordable living complexes, these people are realizing that this affects them too.

It's really hard to organize the white working class in the U.S., but we're seeing, you know, with every passing year, people are understanding that these issues are interconnected in ways that we can't ignore anymore. We just can't ignore them anymore. And something is shifting. And I think everyone can recognize that, including Zionists. Well, yes, I think that's exactly why there's such an incredible backlash.

This seems to be a huge panic because they realize that a lot of the propaganda is not accomplishing its purpose. They're very worried, it seems, about the possibility. broad global support, and if Israel is a failed project, which of course ultimately it is, but as they begin to realize that it's a failed project, both people in Israel, but also its allies and the enemies of Palestinian resistance around the world are getting quite nervous and panicked. And so that's why they've doubled down on the media propaganda. on the restrictions on free speech, the open, naked, you know, attempts to suppress using the

violence of law, you know, and this is why I was saying it's so different from 15, 20, 30 years ago when I was, you know, a fairly lonely member of the Palestine solidarity groups because people self-censored then, you know, you didn't need to actively suppress because you felt so alone and the charge of just even the whisper of somebody saying, you're anti-Semitic, you know, or something like that was like devastating. And now you can see how it's been abused to cover the crimes of Israel that it doesn't have the same effect on people. So even though there's been all of this terrible media reporting and all that, it just doesn't seem like it's working nearly as well as they hope and expect. And that has to be, you know,

very encouraging because although, you know, Palestine solidarity could be more organized, we could be more effective in what we're doing. But clearly a lot has gone, you know, a lot has shifted. Like the good work that people have been doing, particularly as you've been pointing out, Tato, the use on the ground movements, forging solidarity with other anti-colonialial. and anti-imperial struggles doing the hard work of solidarity pays its dividends in educating others in these grassroots movements about the importance of the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle in Palestine. And so this has got to be good news. Even if all the news is terrible, something positive, we hope, will be accomplished by this naked, you know,

hypocritical and contradictory, you know, hypocritical and contradictory politics and in propaganda that we're seeing is that it's kind of evaporating for a lot of people. Even, you know, people who are not that politically up on all of these issues just see that the demonization of Palestinians is leading to just cold-blooded slaughter on a mass scale. and they don't feel comfortable with that because just basic human values suggest that, you know, something's wrong is happening here. So it seems to me, I'm wondering what you think are avenues and ways in which we can even make, you know, given that this, that sort of a tide is shifting, what can, what do you think can be done to really boost that, to direct it and to what kind of. of political purposes, should it be, you know, especially emphasized and organized to confront? Yeah. I mean, something is changing, even among liberal circles, even among the U.S. administration. Like, we saw just a few days ago, this guy from the Biden administration resigned. You know, I'm not commending him for this, but obviously, obviously he was like, you know, this time we did genocide way too much.

This time we did it way too openly. This time people are seeing what's going on and I just can't stand behind this. But all the other times we did it quietly enough and so it's okay. Right. Yeah, I mean, even the kind of self-interest of American empire, there's some contradictions emerging because, you know, like, You know, there's some sense that we're too closely identified with supporting or running interference and protecting, sending this, you know, aircraft carriers to intimidate, you know, other parties in the region from, you know, trying to intervene to help the Palestinian people and widen the struggle. It's so obvious that if the United States has sent its military forces in the region, they could easily, you know, stop. Israel from doing this, but they clearly don't want to. And that is very dangerous for the U.S.

project in the wider Middle East, you know, because, you know, they're not that many, you know, kind of liberals, you know, in the Middle East who have survived, you know, Iraq and the global war on terror, what they've done in Libya, what they've done in Syria, you know, like, I mean, there's who's still, like, you know, diluted in the Middle East. But if there were any people, at this point, it's just so open and obvious that, you know, the U.S. is sanctioning the genocide of, you know, Palestinian people. So that isn't a good thing. If you're, you know, an agent of the U.S. empires, like, this is, you know, a kind of a dangerous moment where things are being very clear and very clarified, who stands in solidarity with humanity and who's, you know, willing to sacrifice people for the sake of. of their power and influence. So I think, though, these are, like, you know, important signs, it seems to me,

that no amount of propaganda is really able to overcome. Exactly, yeah. Even from within the empire itself, it doesn't look too good on your resume right now to have been an active participant in the genocide of Palestinians. Even from within a Zionist settler society, I mean, there have been hundreds, these contradictions are just coming up, They've been coming up for the past year, but after after Netanyahu was reelected. But, I mean, it seems like they're reaching a boiling point within Zionist settler society.

They're protesting for a ceasefire to get their hostages back. They're protesting against their own politicians who are refusing, time and time again, refusing to receive any hostages. The past week, they were refusing to receive two elderly hostages. until they were forced to receive them because Hamas released them through the Red Crescent through a Qatar mediated process.

And then when they released them, they said that they were treated kindly. And so these contradictions are just coming up and there's just no way to control them now. And another thing that I want to point out is that even the settlers who are protesting on occupied land in the settlement that's called,

Tel Aviv against their own government for the release of their own family members who are prisoners of war are being harassed by other settlers who just cannot accept that cannot accept a ceasefire coming from the Zionist state and they're calling these people traitors they're calling these people terrorists, terrorism supporters, terror supporters or whatever. And so we're seeing these contradictions within

the empire, within the belly of the beast, reaching a boiling point. And it's becoming very clear to anyone who's even remotely following at least multiple sources of news, like not just CNN or those, which I know that obviously your listeners are not, you know,

CNN watchers, CNN injoules, lawyers. But it's become clear to anyone that they are breaking down. It was also clear a few months ago when Ben Gvier said that something along the lines of the Zionist state is not another star on the U.S. flag. There are problems going on within Zionist settler society. There are contradictions within this colonizer society, people are refusing to deal with the fact that, you know, this violence is being committed in such openness, like overtly, maybe not as quietly as before, unintentionally, because, you know, no one could have predicted, for example, in 2014 that this was going to happen in 2023 and that we're going to see maybe a shift in

in the collective narrative or the collective opinion about Palestine or even the liberal idea of Palestinian human rights. And so, again, I mean, I know I've been repeating it, but it's because I really believe it something is changing, at least for those of us here who are watching this from the Imperial Corps. So I have a few things that I want to bring up. They're all related to things that you've talked about, but they're kind of disjointed. So I'm just going to put them all out there.

And if whatever you want to pick up, you can and whatever you want to ignore, feel free. So when you were talking about states banning solidarity protests with Palestine in terms of countries banning them. One example that I've been paying a lot of attention to because I have somewhat of a personal connection to it, although it wasn't mentioned so far, is Germany. I lived in Germany for three years. And anytime the word Israel comes up in Germany, the German political establishment rushes to its defense because they want to be seen as not anti-Semitic, you know, as if there's some equivalence between Zionism and, you know, being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic. A lot of people want to make that false equivalence. But let's be honest, there is no equivalence there. But recently, German police have been preventing any sort of solidarity actions from taking place,

including ones that are led by Jewish Germans. In Berlin, there was three or four protests in a row that had been planned by Jewish Berliners for peace in the Middle East, solidarity movements with the people in Gaza, that each of the protests was banned explicitly by the German police. And when there was actions that were trying to be taken, the repression by the police was very swift and in some ways just totally inhuman. For example, at one of the protests, there was people who were lighting candles in order to commemorate the people in Gaza who had been killed by the bombardment, the genocidal bombardment

by Israel. So what did the police do? They came and they stomped on the candles and kicked them around the street. This is like a, you know, a candle vigil for the people who had died in a bombardment. And the police are stomping on the candles to commemorate those who were dead. I mean, completely insane. But Germany always likes to portray themselves these days is a very nice, polite liberal society. Well, look at what happens anytime that there's a genocide that they're in favor of.

The police are willing to protect that genocide. That's a long German tradition, but that's neither here and or there. Another thing that you had mentioned was these hostages, these two elderly hostages who were released. And it's worth mentioning the Hannibal Directive very briefly. So Israel has a policy of where they don't try to save their own hostages. Instead, they'll just kill everybody. They'll kill the people who had taken the hostages and they'll kill the hostages as well. They think that it's tough and it shows it'll encourage people to not be.

taken hostage and it'll show the quote unquote terrorists in their words that they're not going to negotiate under any circumstances, et cetera, et cetera. But just think about that for a second. Think about if your state was saying we care so little about you. We care so much about our project, our political settler colonial project that you, the citizen of our country, we would rather kill you than negotiate to have you released. these two elderly Israeli women were

released via the Red Crescent as you mentioned and they said that they were treated very humanely they got to eat the same food as the members of Hamas who they were quote unquote captives of they were given good medical care the room that they were kept in was clean

this is all direct quotes from these women but you would never know that if you looked at the CNN headline I'm just bringing this up because you mentioned CNN. The CNN headline of after this interview had taken place was Hamas hostages. We went through hell. I quote, Hamas hostages. We went through hell. This is the headline that they constructed out of this interview in which they said continuously. We were treated very

respectfully. They told us they will not harm us because they are Muslims. They gave us food. They gave us water. They gave us good medical care. The room was clean. They kept us safe. They did this. They did that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was an entire interview. You can watch it. It was the daughter of the elderly woman was translating for her mom. Video is very easy to find. Just go on the internet. You can listen to this, this account of how humane the treatment was. And yet CNN somehow manages to contrive a headline that says we went through hell. And that is it. So that when people are scrolling through their news feed, they see this quote, hostage, we went through hell. They don't hear any of the things on the inside of it. This is that construction of that narrative.

I do have one other thing that I want to say, but it's completely unrelated to these two things. So I'll just stop here and maybe I'll loop around to the other thing in a little bit. In case you want to pick up either of those. Yeah. I mean, that press conference backfired so tremendously that Zionist officials went on TV or in interviews or release statements saying that they should have sent directives to the families of the hostages not to say that they were treated kindly, even if they were because it damages propaganda. And so, I mean, what I'm expecting now going forward is that designers state will not want to enter into negotiations to receive any hostages. Instead,

they're going to keep killing them. because they've already killed 22 of them in airstrikes that were sent to Ghazir. 22 hostages already killed by the Zionist state. Why? Because there was a very clear purpose from taking

prisoners of war. I mean, this is a war. But also, they were housed in regular homes. These people were put in the same homes that people in these homes were evacuated and the captives were put there. And guess what? The homes

were airstriked because the Zionist state indiscriminately bombs Ghazid. They do not care. They didn't care after there was news of their hostages being killed. They don't care after there's some sort of loose, soft, international condemnation from organizations like Amnesty or UN or the UN or other leftist, quote unquote leftist organizations. And they're not going to care. when two hostages are being offered for release for humanitarian reasons. I mean, Hamas literally said, we want to release them for humanitarian reasons. They are old and we don't want to keep them anymore because it would be better for them to be released and they were refused for a week.

So imagine you're one of those hostages and your state cares so little about you that they're going to keep bombing the Gaza Strip, knowing that you're staying in someone's home. Not knowing where you are exactly. And then when you are released, you're being reprimanded by the state for what you said in your press release. So yeah, I'm sorry. I forget actually the first question that you had because I was so distracted by the hostage. It's okay.

I get distracted all the time too. Adnan, feel free to go in. Well, that actually reminds me also of the support. of the account by one of the survivors of the initial attack that was published on electronic intifada when it was taken down from Israeli state radio. I'm forgetting the name of this survivor, but she gave this kind of interesting account that also accorded with the idea that while they were being held by, Palestinian resistance fighters they were treated

reasonably well of course they were totally frightened and it's not a happy situation but they did remark that they took care of us they tried to calm us down they gave us you know

they treated us humanely and in terms of this Hannibal directive you know which I think was originally something designed for Israeli military personnel, and it's an Israeli military policy to avoid members of the armed forces being taken into captivity. I don't know what kinds of experience they have

in the past with civilians being taken captive and so on. But in that light, her account seems to suggest that, you know, Israeli forces with impunity just started a massive firefight, even bombarded with a couple of tank shells, the home in which she and 10, 12 others, were being held captive, and that as a result, everyone else died. She had been, you know, kind of taken separately, you know, by somebody who was ready to give themselves up, and so she wasn't in the house at the time. Now, this account has received absolutely no attention, it seems to me, and is dismissed out of hand. Now, it's hard to assess it because we haven't heard other confirmation from other people who may have survived these attacks about what happened when the Israeli military finally, after many hours, actually arrived on the scene. But what do you make of this account and the fact that, so, you know, so it's not just the manufacturing of a particularly slanted perspective on some of these survivors' accounts, but it's also the suppression, which I guess we'll start to see more of since when they're speaking about their experiences.

It's not good news for, you know, Israeli propaganda. do you make of the suppression of this account and have you come across other media stories about it? Has anyone covered it in your experience besides, you know, the electronic intifada? What do you make of this story? I mean, personally, I've only seen electronic interfaida cover this account specifically of Zionist forces shooting towards, I mean, after arriving, after many hours, like you said, just shooting and going crazy over just shooting indiscriminately, even killing hostages and the people that they're supposed to protect. But what do I make of this suppression? I mean,

it's not working in favor of the Zionist propaganda machine. It's backfiring so badly for them. and it's only natural that the one hostage or the one survivor who I mean I don't see any reason a survivor would say the thing that she said after being after surviving and being in a safe situation for any reason other than this is the truth and this is what happened and this person is clearly traumatized and saying what they went through and so there's also no reason to suppress that other than This doesn't follow our editorial line. We've been releasing headline after headline talking about quote-unquote Hamas terrorists, beheading babies. We've been releasing article after article unverified claims about Hamas building tunnels under hospitals. After and a few hours later, those hospitals get bombed and flattened. We've been interviewing Israeli officials. We've been interviewing U.S. Army officials.

we've been pushing this editorial line and it is a conscious editorial line you know, it is the politic that they're pushing is Palestine or Palestinians equal terrorism versus Zionism and the Israeli state has the right to defend itself equals liberation for the Jewish nation equals quote unquote

the only democracy in the Middle East And so there's a very clear side that's being picked, and it contradicts completely with the reality of what's going on. Like if I was a reporter at CNN, and I would never work for such a corporation, but if I were, for some reason, a reporter for CNN, and I saw that one of the survivors was ready to do an interview, I'd jump on that, and I try to get that survivor on TV as fast as possible, but they know that she's not going to say what they want her to say. And so it's not productive for them to do this. And so, but luckily, you know, we have social media. Luckily, the internet is forever. And luckily, these videos are going to be circulated forever, essentially, until there's no reason to circulate them anymore, which will only be after that the suppression no longer exists.

Sticking with narratives, one of the other things that I've seen being pushed out there is that the goal, and of course this is not the case, listeners, but the goal of Hamas and the other groups that are within the Palestinian resistance movement, the goal is to ethnically cleanse the area, to massacre all of the Jews in the area. This is the narrative that's being perpetuated. Of course, it's nonsense.

But even people that are on the left have been perpetuating this kind of idea, like Hamas is this crazy group that wants to just genocide all of the Jews. You know, yeah, what Israel is doing in Gaza is bad. And, you know, maybe I'll even equate that to genocide. But if Hamas had the upper hand, they would be doing something similar. First of all, no. Second of all, you're feeding into the Zionist propaganda handbook.

But I also had this directed directly against me. I'm not Palestinian. I mean, I'm somebody who's a long-time activist in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, but like I don't see why I'm the one who's catching the heat here. But I had somebody who followed me on Twitter for a couple of years, by the way, so they may even be listening to this. And if they are, they're going to get mad at me for kind of airing this out there. But this is kind of, it's not about me.

This is just indicative of what we're seeing in society right now. This person is clearly on, quote, unquote, the left. They've been listening to the show for several years. And they had tweeted at me because I've been tweeting very, very pro-Palestinian things lately. And so, you know, the Zionists have been coming and I just block them. This person tweeted at me and said, okay, well, what is your plan for what to do with the settlers if, you know, the Palestinian resistance movement wins? and I'm thinking to myself, why is it about my plan? I'm some American who lives in Russia.

I'm not the one who should be making a plan. So all I did was I sent them pictures from strategy for the liberation of Palestine from PFLP that lay out exactly the line that that group takes. And also, Hamas, let's go back to Hamas for a second. also has a charter. What does Hamas call for? They don't call for the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people from the Mediterranean area. They call for the removal of settlements and moving back to 1967 borders, like a very, very mild thing. You would not think that it would be that mild in the Hamas charter, but that's what it is. But I'm just going to read an excerpt from the strategy for the liberation of Palestine because I feel like probably a lot of the listeners haven't read it, although they should. Again, this is from the PFF. The Palestinian Liberation Movement is not a racial movement with aggressive intentions against the Jews. It is not directed against the Jews. Its object is to destroy the state of Israel as a military, political, and economic establishment that rests on aggression, expansion, and organic connection with imperialist interests in our homeland.

It is against Zionism as an aggressive racial movement connected with imperialism, which has exploited the suffering of the Jews as a stepping stone for the promotion of its interests and the interests of the interests of the interests of the imperialism in this part of the world that possesses rich resources and provides a bridgehead into the countries of Africa and Asia. The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations that will constitute an integral part of the progressive democratic Arab national presence living peacefully with all forces of progress in the world. Israel has insisted on portraying our war against it as a racial war, aiming at eliminating every Jewish citizen and throwing him into the sea. The purpose behind this is to mobilize all Jews for a life or death

struggle. Consequently, a basic strategic line in our war with Israel must aim at unveiling this misrepresentation, addressing the exploited and misled Jewish masses, and revealing the conflict between these masses' interests and living peacefully and the interests of the Zionist movement and the forces controlling the state of Israel. It is this strategic. line that will ensure for us the isolation of the fascist clique in Israel from all of the forces of progress in the world. It will also ensure for us with the growth of the armed struggle for liberation and clarification of its identity, the widening of the conflict existing objectively between Israel and the Zionist movement on the one hand and the millions of misled and exploited Jews

on the other. That is not genocidal folks. Just listen to what the PFLP says. So just to kind of end this story, I tweeted this at the person and what was the result? They unfollowed me and said, I don't care about the PLO's line. Okay, again, why do you care what my personal view is? Obviously, I tweeted this at you because I would agree with that. But we should be listening to groups in Palestine and taking on board what their strategy is. The PFLP is a communist group that's in Palestine. They have their own strategy for the liberation of Palestine.

read it you know take it on board maybe you can disagree with one or two points here but i circled the relevant point for the person and said here you go and okay i guess they're just not interested because they have taken on board this exact narrative which is pointed out in this excerpt which i circled for them that this is not aimed at ethnically cleansing the jewish people from the area. This is towards integrating these people into a progressive democratic state with equal rights for these people. But some people have taken the narrative on board so much that they see just giving them this information as like an attack against their preconceived notion of what the objectives of the Palestinian resistance movement are. So Tara, I guess my question

is how do you combat this? How do you take when people are so engrossed with a specific narrative that they're unwilling to take on board that they're actually wrong here, that this is not actually what these groups are advocating for. These are not what these groups are fighting for. And again, this is somebody who says that they're on the left and is in favor of the liberation of Palestine, but they don't know what to do with the Settlies afterwards because They think that it must be genocide, and therefore we can't, like, fully support it.

This person's from the Netherlands, you know. Okay. So, Tara, go ahead. Yeah, so that's a really important perspective, not just about, you know, Hamas and the PFLP, which I highly recommend the PFLP strategy for the liberation of Palestine for anyone who hasn't read it yet. It's such a really available online for free. It's a great text that still, that ages, you know, beautifully today even over 50 years after it was published. But I think one of the main reasons why the answer that you gave or similar answers are rejected so vehemently is because people sometimes do not want to understand Palestinians as not a monolith.

different resistance groups exist. There are several factions of resistance groups. There are several factions of political groups in Palestine, in the West Bank, and even within the Gaza Strip, it's not just Hamas, you know. And these groups have different geopolitical affiliations. They have different politics. For example, like you mentioned, PFLP was founded as a Marxist-Leninist party. they have different affiliations to the PA,

the Palestinian Authority, for example, like Fatech. They have different affiliations to each other. They have different politics and charters when it comes to what they see as the solution for Palestinian liberation. And so when people are confronted so clearly with this falsehood that they try to spread about, you know what what what Palestinians are trying to do is just to do a reverse genocide you know it's like

reverse racism on on their occupier on their colonizer um when you show them so clearly this is very much not the case again not just for pflp but also in the hamas charter as well since hamas is like the hot topic now they can't accept that because it doesn't align uh with the narrative and so the easiest thing to do is just to pretend that it doesn't exist um and if you pretend that it doesn't exists, it doesn't make it less real. It doesn't make it less real that the struggle is a struggle of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist liberation rather than some attempt to mimic the colonizer's violence, an attempt to project the colonizers' militarized violence towards them.

No, I mean, revolutionary violence has a very, very clear aim, very clear purpose. it's fundamentally different from the violence that the colonizer inflicts on the colonized. And so to try to equate Palestinian revolutionary violence, Palestinian armed struggle to Zionist, state-sanctioned, U.S. funded, bankrolled by the empire violence is not an equivalence that can be accepted. I mean, anyone, anyone who thinks about this rationally can understand that these two are not on the same plane of existence. We have violence that is inflicted by the colonizer on the colonized, and then we have violence for the sake of liberation and for the sake of livelihood and for the sake of land, love for life, love for land, and love for land, and love. love for liberation. And so the important thing is just to point out that this equivalence is from the beginning. It's fundamentally wrong. And we cannot accept it. We cannot put Palestinian the decision of any colonized people to choose violence. And I guess, I mean,

I'm trying to invoke Phenon here. The decision of any colonized people to choose violence cannot be equated to the colonizer's violence. Well, we've spent a lot of time with your excellent analysis, Tara, critiquing and exposing the problems with not only mainstream media portrayals and narratives about Palestinian resistance and the situation ongoing in the struggles for liberation. But I think, you know, it would be helpful to have, as a final thought from you, where you would direct listeners of this show to better sources of information, where you can find counter-narratives, dare we say, you know, the truth about what the Palestinian people are both suffering and what they're trying to do about it so that we can build even greater solidarity.

Where do you go to look for information? Where would you like our listeners, you know, to seek out better sources of knowledge, information, and analysis on Palestine? I mean, the best source is people in Haze who are documenting what's going on right now. There are journalists on social media who are trying to document what's going on

as much as possible with very sporadic access to internet. There's Dr. Gassan Abu Sete, who's documenting the struggle on the healthcare front, the hospitals that are being bombed, given warnings

for evacuation of thousands and thousands of people who are sheltering in hospitals. And of course, there are grassroots movements and organizations like Palestinian youth movement, like Palestinian feminist collective

who are providing really salient and important analysis that we need right now that needs to be that needs to be disseminated right now and yeah I mean I would just recommend that people keep their eyes

on Gaza. The demand from the people of Ghazir right now including from resistance groups is ceasefire so that negotiation can happen, ceasefire so that hostages can be released in safe conditions. I mean, there has been several statements from Abu Abida, the spokesperson of a Palestinian resistance group, saying that hostages will not be released until appropriate security conditions are met. That means stop the bombing, stop the genocide on Gaza so that we can, first of all, negotiate the release of hostages so that we can negotiate a prisoner's exchange.

And importantly, so that we can open the humanitarian corridor so that humanitarian aid can get into Ghazd so that the people of Ghazda can have access to literally water, to food, to basic needs that are now resources that are limited. I mean, these resources are not infinite in Ghazir, and they're running really low. And so the call right now from Ghazir is to end the genocide, call for a ceasefire. If you go to, if you have a protest where you are, go to a protest and join, join Palestinian people in their fight for liberation and their call for right now and immediate ceasefire, but also for the long term, the liberation of Palestinian land and people. Yeah, I think that that's an important note to end on. Again, listeners, our guest was Tara Alami, who is a writer from Palestine, from occupied Jerusalem. Jerusalem and Occupied Jaffa, currently living in Montreal.

Tara, thank you for coming on the program. It was really a pleasure getting to, quote, unquote, meet you, you know, virtually anyway. I know that we've been talking back and forth for a little while now, but it was really nice to have this conversation, and I really appreciated all of the analysis that you did over the course of this conversation. Can you let the listeners know how they can get, you know, find your work, keep up to date with what you're putting out and follow you on social media? Yeah, I mean, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I've been a long time listener and a fan of the podcast. So this is really cool that I'm here, you know. But yeah, I mean, you can find me on Twitter. It's Tara X-R-H, T-A-R-A-X-R-H. And then I have a little link tree link in my Twitter bio where you can find some things that I've written, other social media accounts, and also.

So a mutual aid account for Rzde that does distributions on the ground. And of course, we'll link to that in the show notes so that you can find all of, well, the things that Tatar just mentioned. And of course, thank you for coming on again. I'm glad that you were our longtime listener. You're welcome to come back. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other excellent podcast? Well, firstly, yes, the honor, and pleasure was ours, Tara, so do come back.

We obviously will keep talking about Palestine, and so we'd like to have your voice back on some time soon. But people can follow me on Twitter at Adnan, a Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and if I ever get around to doing another episode, I do actually have a couple planned. you can listen to the M-A-J-L-I-S for Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim Diaspora affairs. I think we have an upcoming episode that we'll be recording on the history of the Ood. A new book is out documenting the history of this beautiful instrument. So do check it out, the M-A-J-L-I-S. I am really looking forward to that. I previously had done courses in world music, and I'm a big proponent of world music.

And the Ood has always been one of my favorite instruments. So really looking forward to that one at none. Like Brett said, he had to leave a little bit early. But you can find all of his work and his podcasts at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-1-995. you can pick up your copy of Stalin history and critique of a black legend at Iskrabooks.org. Reminder, the PDF is available for free. So you can just download it and read it from there if you want.

As for the show, you can help support us and keep us up and running so we can keep making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. Gorilla being spelled, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan Brett and I are putting out individually and collectively. by going to Twitter and search it for at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A- underscore pod. So until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.