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How to Fight the Israeli Backlash | Imam Tom Live
Join Imam Tom as he discusses the ruthless Israeli backlash that aims to criminalize dissent from the Israeli PR campaign across the US, and how to fight back against their oppression. We will be joined by Dr. Hatem Bazian, professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley and teacher of Islamic Law at Zaytuna College.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. which airs at 9 p.m. every Thursday night Eastern time. Please hit us back in the chat. We'll be interacting. We'll be taking questions. Let us know where you're viewing from today. Last week we took a little break. I was traveling in Washington D.C. for da'wah, and things have been heating up, some in good ways and in some challenging ways, when it comes to the increased backlash that many people are facing for speaking out against Palestine. So when it comes to this week and next week, we're going to be talking about how to face this backlash. Whether you're a student on college campuses, whether you are somebody who is in the workforce, right, and you have you're an employee at a certain position, you're going to have to navigate. Maybe your company is issuing statements in support of what Israel is doing in Palestine to our brothers and sisters. Maybe your school has disbanded an organization that you were a part of or is disinviting speakers. This is something that all of us face, especially if we live here in the West. It's a very trying time. Everybody is expected and challenged, I think, to find their courage and to find their voice. But the fact of the matter is that it can be very intimidating, especially when there is millions of dollars that is put behind silencing your voice and silencing my voice and silencing people who speak up about everything that's going on. So let us know where you're watching from today, and if you've had any sort of experience like this, if you have any sort of interaction with your employer, with your school, with your professors, or your teachers,
there was a comment, you know, a comment from someone who's a national figure here in the United States, where they told a story. They told a story, I think it was on Twitter earlier today, about how they, even when they were in kindergarten or first grade, that they had a teacher that attempted to hold them back for voicing out their concern about the Palestinians and the Palestinian plight. And it really touched me, this story. First of all, because the person who mentioned it, you know, they were talking about, they were just a kindergartner. But even myself, as someone who was raised not a Muslim, I also have encountered throughout my life resistance and sometimes the heavy-handedness of teachers and administrators for speaking up about things that are true, even if they're not popular. I'm seeing some people who are telling us, we've got people from Virginia watching, and people from Boston, Missouri, Indonesia, we have Illinois, the Netherlands, Maryland, Mashallah, we always have an amazing audience from all over the world. Springfield, Virginia, Houston, Texas, I still haven't been to Houston yet, can you believe that? Australia, Mashallah, Alabama, Malaysia, very good. I had the pleasure of visiting Malaysia for the first time this past year, and it was absolutely amazing. I hope to go back soon. South Africa, in the house, the 315, Waalaikumsalam, in the house, New York, in the house, Pakistan, Zindabad, right, we have Chicago, we have more people from Malaysia. If you're in Malaysia, you're in the AM, right, so good morning, good morning to everybody who's viewing from Malaysia and Indonesia. Austria, North Carolina, the Bronx,
Miami, Mashallah, India, well done, we have people from everywhere. So, you know, I'd like to share just a couple personal stories that I have. Oregon, New Jersey, I'm from New Jersey, Mashallah. Oregon, a place where I was able to visit, Alhamdulillah. Canada, I just got back from Canada a bit ago. Yes, Inshallah, I would like to come back to Malaysia as soon as I can, Inshallah ta'ala. So I'd like to share some of my own personal stories, because everybody needs courage, everybody needs courage in this time, and what's scary is when we stand up to authority, when we speak out, because part of what the shaitan does is the shaitan tries to get us to fixate and think about every bad thing that can happen, and we are tempted to think, well, this is going to be the end of my life, the end of my career, right, the end of everything for me, and that's not necessarily the case, you know, and we discount the ways that Allah subhana wa ta'ala can support us and aid us in unpredictable ways. So I was a young person, I was in eighth grade when 9-11 happened, and that was a big shock for me and a big sort of awakening. I started sort of trying to pay attention and understand current events and understand what was going on. I took some some stands after sort of educating myself, and I was just a teenager, you know, I came to be critical of the foreign policy of the United States when it came to its actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I actually did some things and took some stands and took some risks within my high school. So one of the things that I did is I stopped standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. This was something that everybody did every day in homeroom, right, and they recited it, and so out of protest I sat down. I sat during the Pledge of Allegiance, and this
is sort of why when BLM and sort of picked up and the taking a knee during the football games, you know, this was something that was very familiar to me because people vilified me for just doing a little symbolic protest in opposition to what the government of my nation was doing. So that was just one thing. We had another thing that we that used to happen in my school that I disagreed with, and this was when Iraq was about to be invaded, was that different branches of the armed forces would actually run gym classes. So there was an agreement between the school and, say, the army, for example. They would come in and they would run gym class for a day. They have everybody do push-ups and sit-ups and things like that, and so I actually, when the Iraq War started, I refused to participate in gym class when these sorts of days would happen like once a month or once every other month, and I had teachers threaten me with failing, threaten me to hold me back, threaten me with this and that and the other, but it was something that I believed that I was doing what was right, that I didn't have a voice. I didn't have, you know, very much that I could do. I didn't even have a license to drive at that point, but even my small sort of protest was something that forced a conversation to happen. It forced awareness for people. It started some conversations, and it took risk. It took risk. I risked sort of reprimand. It was very uncomfortable. Some people tried to punish me in certain ways. This is only something that, you know, continued throughout my life at various points in college and afterwards, where, you know, sometimes you have to take a stand for what is right. It's morning in Pakistan. Mashallah. Very good. Yes, so every single one of us has a different level of responsibility, right? You know, if you can't, maybe you're not somebody with a lot of political power. Maybe you're someone that
doesn't have a lot of money, but maybe the one thing that you can do, the one conversation that you can have, the one sort of stand that you can make to start a conversation, to change someone's mind, it might have enormous consequences that you don't even foresee, that only Allah subhana wa ta'ala knows. So these are days for courage, and everywhere I go, and I've talked to a lot of students and a lot of college students and anybody who will listen, I try to explain that these are times for courage, that we have to absolutely be courageous. We have to be brave. We have to speak the truth. We have to bring awareness to the truth, and we can't fear the blame of the blamers. We can't fear people who are counting on our silence. They're counting on intimidating us in order to silence us so that they can do things that are wrong and that are untrue and that are false. So with that, we have a very, very special guest today, and he needs no introduction, but we'll introduce him anyway when he comes on, and that guest is Dr. Hatem Bezian. Dr. Hatem, as he's entering the program now, is a legend. He's a legend. He's the author of many very important books. He is somebody who is a founder of multiple organizations, Zaytuna College, which you're probably familiar with, AMP, and many others. He's an author. He is a columnist, occasionally. He is a thinker and a public intellectual. He's a professor activist, and I'm ashamed to say on a personal note, I'm ashamed to say that this is the first time that we're meeting virtually and sharing a screen, but I am a huge admirer of your work, and I pray that Allah ﷻ protects you and increases your work and accepts it. So thank you so much for joining us today, and welcome
to the program. As-salamu alaykum. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Thank you for the invitation and for being with you. So hopefully that our virtual meeting will end up us actually meeting in person, inshallah. But thank you, much gratitude for this conversation. Barakallahu feekum. You know, I had to drive up to Utica today to do this, and one thing that I do when I'm driving is I catch up on all the YouTube things that I've missed, and one of the two things that I watched on the way was the House Congressional presentation, or the hearing rather, of the Means and Ways Committee. And I got through probably three quarters of it, and this was a committee for people who are unaware. That has to do with tax-exempt status. It has to do with sort of where money in the United States is allocated to. There was a lot of talk. It was frustrating. Let's just put it that way. It was a very, very frustrating thing to watch. It was very one-sided. One could say it was it was a circus. And you were presented, unfortunately you were maligned, as somebody who has founded and runs organizations, and they're attempting to tar you and to smear you with accusations that you are tied to groups that support Hamas and support terrorism. Now, this is a generational thing that's happening, where we have a new generation of activists that are passionate about this issue. A lot of people, maybe they're not aware of the Holy Land case, of the climate that existed after 9-11, all the sorts of pieces that were in play when it came to setting the stage for today. Would you be able to walk us
through a little bit of the history about maybe the Holy Land Foundation or the trial, or how are they trying to make this claim and basically shut down Muslim organizations and charity organizations that are in any way critical of Israel? Thank you for the question. For people who are coming into the Palestine work now, if I want to position what we are experiencing over a 30-year trajectory, I would say the critical moment really comes to us in the early 90s. As the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid South Africa, the victories in ending apartheid and Central American solidarity movement, what we found is it's needed to reposition itself. 1993 is very important. This is also the time where we get the book from Huntington, Clash of Civilizations. Actually, initially, it's an article in Foreign Affairs, and then it later on makes it into a book. The Clash of Civilizations thesis is Bernard Lewis's thesis, and it was in search of a post-Cold War framing for U.S. foreign policy. We need to know that these are individuals that cut their teeth on the Cold War, on anti-communism, and now they need to position themselves. In the positioning of themselves, both the Clash of Civilizations as well as Israel, Islam became the focus point of trying to rally U.S. foreign policy establishment thinkers and so on. People think it's 9-11 that begins the process of
demonization of Muslims, Islamophobia. I need to remind people that Clinton passed the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. That law that Clinton passed was based on the events that took place in Al-Khalil in 1994, where Baruch Goldstein walks into an Ibrahimi mosque in Al-Khalil and shoots 29 Muslims who were praying Fajr prayer during Ramadan and injures 125 of them. That was a response to the Israeli right-wing attempting to torpedo, to derail the Oslo peace process. A year later, an Israeli right-winger also kills Rabin, who was part of the Oslo peace process. As a result, a number of attacks takes place in Tel Aviv. Clinton declares a state of emergency in the United States. Still, this is one of the unique circumstances in the legal history of the United States, that events taking place in Palestine result in the U.S. declaring a state of emergency in the U.S. and we get the beginning of the process of designating terrorist organization and freezing accounts of people. Move forward to 9-11. As soon as 9-11 took place, the pro-Israel organization groups that were well-positioned with the neocons immediately targeted the Muslim charities, organizations, individuals, holy land, kind hearts, and others, and also individuals. I had an individual that gave a paper here at UC Berkeley, who was an ex-CIA agent. He said, post 9-11,
he estimates 93% of all the legal cases in the United States targeted pro-Palestine activists, organizations, and individuals, who had nothing to do nor any connections to 9-11. This is where we get the material support prosecution. We get the entrapment cases from the government. We get preemptive prosecution that was used against individuals. Now, literally, the legal system shifts. Muslims are guilty that they have to prove their innocence rather than actually being innocent, having to be proven guilty. This is the 2000, post-2000, and continues to accelerate and unfold in this way. Now, we're getting another moment, both of 1996 and 9-11, where you see the apparatus of the government being directed to implement Israel foreign policy objectives in the United States. That's in terms of just looking at the long history of what happened. Fantastic. That's a very, very impressive summary of a long period of time, just within a short bit. I think it's worthy also pointing out how much money is to be made from warfare. When people are saying, without an enemy, we're saying coming out of the Cold War, what reason is there for people to want to pivot to find a new enemy to these things? Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex, contracts, contractors. These things entered into some people's vocabulary only after the invasion of Iraq. There's enormous amounts of money to be made in war and defense
contracts and this sort of thing. It's very difficult to separate the interests between law and war and profit. Let's go into now, specifically, the Holy Land case, which has been described by neutral observers as a show trial, something where there was secret evidence admitted and a retrial in which new witnesses were allowed to, anonymous witnesses, were allowed to speak. Basically, I think what most impartial observers would call a travesty and a miscarriage of justice. What specifically happened with the Holy Land Foundation? How does that set us up now where we've got people that are putting your name and your face up on a diagram trying to link you to Hamas? Well, let's say the following. 9-11 made it possible to get the Patriot Act passed and begin to target individuals on this whole concept of material support, which is not only extending financial support, but now it's also in the area of having or sharing content, ideas, and so on. Now, the key is that in here, it allowed the government to use its long hand to target Muslims in a structural way. Important. Law is born out of social conditions. Law is born out of social conditions. We are living since 1996 in what I call Islamophobic social imaginary. It is not what you have done. It's basically because we have a legal framework
that is originated in the social imaginary. It is not what Holy Land Foundation did. It's who they are is the primary. The government wanted to go after them because Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the time in the White House asked President George Bush to close and shut down the Holy Land Foundation. That process has to be understood. Now, the government has to find the mechanism in order to actually prosecute individuals because of a request from a foreign government, a Prime Minister in the White House. As such, we need to understand that this relationship that targeted 93% of the cases targeted Palestine, Holy Land, Samuel Ariane, and others, really was an attempt to undermine pro-Palestine advocacy, pro-Palestine positioning in the U.S. Let me go back again to Huntington. In page 20 of his book, he says, unless we hate what we are not, we can't love who we are, which I actually argue that they actually put Christian theology on its head because they've understood Christian theology. One aspect of it is love, that God loved the human being so much that he sent his son, Jesus. Again, that's not our belief. I'm just talking about Christian theology to be sacrificed for the sins of mankind. But what Huntington is saying is that the only way for me to realize self-love as a Western society for him is I need to find an object for my hate. The object of Huntington's hate is basically the Muslim. He also added the Chinese in there. So that becomes the foreign policy that is to be implemented. And the government rolls out all of its infrastructure, political, legal, media, in order to bring about
the demonization and positioning the Muslims as the go-to target for terrorism, prosecution, and so on, including secret evidence, including manufacturing evidence altogether, entrapment, having crawlers in mosques in order to actually create that we have a massive threat domestically. Sleeper cells and so on, even though the FBI own study in 2009 says that the primary domestic threat in America comes from white supremacists, white nationalists that are heavily armed and so on. Yet the FBI that hired many agents and many informants, almost 14,000 in terms of what figure that was pushed, all were deployed against the Muslim community in a massive way. So that's where some of those, you know, dynamics that govern some of these cases that we have, Holy Land case and others. Now, and I will go back to the military industrial complex, because I think it's very important for us. As the Cold War ended, it is very difficult for a bureaucracy that has suckled itself on a massive military contract to unwind that process. So rather than change our economy into a peace economy, into a live, giving and sustaining economy, I say that we rewired ourselves to find a new enemy in order for us to continue producing death machines. We are a death machine making economy, including again, I'm at UC Berkeley, and the UC system we have that we run, not we, again, I'm on the opposition. We run the two U.S. military lab, the Los Alamos and Livermore lab. And estimate again is in the hundreds of
millions that come through the university system in order to be literally vested in a death economy and in the death of producing process altogether. So from 1993 onward, if we look at the military budget, it's actually just mushrooms. I think if my figure is correct, this coming year is $845 billion that are there. Lastly, on this question, Muslims should actually be courageous and actually should remind people the following. We said post 9-11 that the United States should not invade Afghanistan. Literally, I said, we should send them food rather than actually bombs. They laughed at us. They demonized us. They continue to put our names all over. In 2003, we mobilized against the Iraq war, some of the largest demonstration. We said that it's an illegal war. It's a manufactured war, the United States. And I would say the Israeli, pro-Israeli, I remember Netanyahu coming and testifying in the Congress, urging the United States to invade Iraq. We said it will be a mistake, it's a disaster, so on. So I would say the Muslims who stood on that position and really made the argument, we were actually the ones that have identified the wrongness of the foreign policy rather than those who were celebrated and began to be really, as soon as they left their government job, began to take positions in academia, think tanks, and so on. So I would say the Muslim community in America should celebrate that they were on the side of justice and on the correct side of history. And the United States, the neocons, the pro-Israel spokespeople, those who celebrated Netanyahu coming and giving talks around the country, urging the U.S. to enter Iraq, they have to be held responsible and actually
articulate the fact that they took the country with $8 trillion since 2001 till now. So I think we need to remind people because now it's another cycle of demonization because people don't want to listen to both our advice, our counsel, and to point that this is the wrong-headed approach for the United States. And President Biden is committing almost an atrocious, deliberate effort by being on the side of genocide. And I think what we need is to remind people of those issues as we speak. Excellent. So much comes to mind through your reflections. One thing is how this works with the sort of conflict of interest that is inherent to having your best customers have an incentive to go to war, right? So if we were to imagine that the United States, you would probably know the numbers better than me, but the last time I checked that the United States is the largest supplier of weapons the world over. 56% of the global trade of weapons is the United States. We have 56%. Well, last year it was about $1.84 trillion. Literally, we have 56% of that. Yeah. SubhanAllah. Not something that we would really take pride in or hope that the average person would not take pride in. And so then if this is big business, if you say the number one industry of the United States economy is, quote unquote, we euphemize it and call it defense, it's really supplying the world with weapons. Now the clients and the customers that we sell those weapons to, now what's going to stop them from coming and having, you know, they're in the ear of congressmen, they're in the ear of presidents, they're in the ear of the government with false stories, false flag operations, with whatever it is in order to
keep this sort of lucrative business transaction going, more targets, more weapons, more money, et cetera, et cetera. And the point I'd like maybe you to elaborate on is how ransom or how held hostage the United States government is to this whole paradigm of foreign policy and interacting with the rest of the world. One thing that you've shown us and that the world has seen, I think, in the last, you know, three to four weeks has been how the interests of foreign nations are actually dictating the policy of the United States and the things that the president and the congressional representatives say. Maybe I could, in my thinking, I'm going to focus on both colonialism decolonization. I think we'll be in error if we think that this is Israel war against the Palestinians. It is not surprising that all the colonial powers of the past have stood behind Israel with supplies, weapons, political protections, and so on. And we need also to remember that the creation of Israel predates Second World War. At the time of the thinking of the creation of Israel, you could say some of the early Christian theologians that began to argue for it, was at the intersection of dismantling the Ottoman Empire. The French, the British, also the Russians had a hand and so on. So it was how to dismember the Ottomans and for the British in particular, how to actually guarantee their trade that was passing through the Suez
Canal. The British occupied, colonized Egypt in 1882, but 1882 is not the period of their control domination. They actually began in 1807. 1869, the Suez Canal opens up as a way to move European trade, especially the British and the French. India was the critical piece for Great Britain. They took out of India close to $45 trillion worth of material and wealth. When they colonized India, India was about 23% to 24% of the global GDP. When the British left it, it was 3%. Palestine was the last settler colonial project to be commissioned by European powers. And actually in my book, Palestine, Something Colonial, document how the British in their arrival to Palestine in December 10, 1917, prior and during that campaign, they articulated the campaign as a continuation or coming to an end of the Crusades. And literally in their propaganda material, in their front page, it says, we returned to Palestine after 672 years of Muslim control. This gets us into the dispensationalist theology that is still dominant within the evangelicals with certain segments who believe that the reconstituting of Israel is the stepping stone to the second coming of Jesus. That tends to be used as a cover to continue the military industrial complex to Western intervention in the region. And this gets me to the second major point. The Middle East and Africa are the richest regions in the world, bar none. The resource material concentrations in Europe has no resources whatsoever. If we read
even Pope Urban, the second discourse for launching the Crusades, he says, we don't have any resources. This land of ours is literally covered by mountain peaks and valleys that we don't have resources. That's why we fight one another. So let's our fight stop and go down on a Crusades for the Muslim world. So it was a resource base and that resource base is still there. Second is the network of waterways. You cannot move any products around the globe without passing the critical choke points, the Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, Strait of Malaga, and then Gibraltar. Therefore, the Western world utilizes Israel in a constant divide and conquer. And then they come appear. On the one hand, they sell weapons so we kill one another. On the other, they send us the diplomats that are trying to actually negotiate peace. Peace is not something that is inherent in Western European policies and they have been at it for quite some time. And therefore, I'm always when somebody says, why Muslims are violent? I said, we don't even qualify to the sweet 16 of violence because all the sweet 16 spots are taken by Western world. What are you talking about? Literally today, I was talking about my lecture. I said, let just me be remind people about, because they have a graph about whose violence, the Quran is violent. I said, let me remind people what World War I is that belongs to us or to those who project themselves as being peaceful. World War II, Vietnam, right? Vietnam was so debacled that we actually threw Agent Orange on our own troop, the United States own troop, that they came back with cancer. Then we talk about colonization. We talk about the Congo, 50% of the population of Congo wiped out. The colonization of the Americans, close to 20 million.
The dismemberment of Africa, the death and destruction built on India, some estimates about 13 to 14 million. But that gets to be, again, if you are engaging in the contemporary world, literally you have to go into a mental laboratory to discuss history because the assumption is that history begins with the morning with materials and therefore we have no discussions whatsoever. So you need to constantly remind people as a matter of historical record, because we often get into apologetic. Well, Islam is peace. I'm huggable. If you tickle me, I'll laugh like you. Those discourses basically assumes, right, that there is such thing as a global world community, which for me, and again, when the United States and the G6 meet, they don't represent the world community. They present a small minority of the world community, yet they project power and continue to do so. So for me, the war, Israel's war on Gaza and the Palestinians, I do believe that President Biden can pick up the phone and literally in less than half an hour can stop the war. I know for a fact, because the way that they reacted to Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed us what is a U.S. with its allies, NATO and so on, what they could accomplish. But in here, Israel is seen as the favorite child, as a success project for the Western world, theologically and politically. And we often don't understand this as we speak, because we assume the propaganda to be the firm basis of the policy, rather than to understand the policy and counter or discuss the propaganda, but not actually base our analysis on the propaganda. So we often actually follow the propaganda rather than the sound analysis of the policy.
Excellent, excellent analysis. And I love that you approach it from a decolonial angle and your work approaches it from a decolonial angle. A story for an in-person meeting, you know, that's actually what led me to Islam was my study of colonization, European colonization and post-colonial theory. I want to ask, we see now, and I saw in the congressional hearing, so much of that sort of Islamophobic frame is assumed, right? When it comes to the discursive interventions that people are attempting to make, when they're trying to say that the violence of Palestinians is irrational violence, right, is that it's just pure evil. It's just completely, and we're not justifying, obviously, you know, anything that is done necessarily wrong or incorrect. But to deprive it of rationality is to put it on this plane of just pure evil that doesn't even make sense. This brings us back to the Bush era. They hate us because of our freedoms, that, you know, they just hate our way of life. And that really de-intellectualizes and decontextualizes what are the legitimate grievances of the people that are living there in Palestine, for which they would perhaps resist in whatever way, right? Can you speak to a little bit how this sort of, you know, how people are trying to, for people who didn't watch the hearing, how people are trying to criminalize speaking out against this? How are they trying to criminalize critiquing a foreign nation, Israel in this case, and make it seem that even speaking against Zionism or speaking against the Israeli government is sympathy for terrorism? We have to look at
some of the conversation that comes from Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Israel Foreign Ministry, and also the recent conversation that comes out from the ADL and other groups that basically point that Israel standing in the U.S. is no longer tenable, that they have lost considerable ground. In particular, what he called Greenblatt is the TikTok generation, meaning the current generation that is no longer taking its news and its information from what we call the mainstream. And the mainstream, I think the last four weeks, they have completely discredited themselves across the board. Even some of these mainstream news, their highest, what you call, rating programs might have two and a half million. You have some social media influencers that are in the 30 million and more that are expressing the support. And also the news and the information is coming to people unfiltered. Israel's inability to argue facts have made it shift to try to make the messengers, the speakers, as the object of its demonization. And this starts much earlier than this. Again, if we remember, there were 34 states that passed anti-BDS legislation. So that was a peaceful protest, peaceful engagement. So they passed a resolution. Why? Because they cannot argue that Israel is an apartheid state. Because you cannot actually say that I am like Israel's spokespeople, that I am supportive, supporting 65 different laws inside Israel that differentiate between the right of a Palestinian Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen. I cannot,
as an Israeli spokesperson, they can't argue where the Knesset law 2018 passed a law that says that sovereignty in greater Israel, he writes, Israel only belongs to the Jewish people, including the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights, and so on. It's indefensible. How can you defend the constant expansion of settlements and settlers? So Israel's playbook, I would say it begins much earlier than 9-11, but definitely 9-11 is to utilize Islamophobia, demonization of Muslim individuals and activists, and try to do what you call, I call it 99 degrees of separation because 99 divine names. They try to do 99 degrees of separation to try to link organizations and individuals. Now, we know for a fact, this is not a theory, that the Israeli government does not have any evidence whatsoever that links, for example, students for justice in Palestine and Hamas. We know this, why? Because Netanyahu's office, the prime minister's office, sent an email to this character called Stephen Emerson, who was a sorry excuse for a journalist, he's not a journalist, but he sends them an email to try to discover if he could find any evidence that links SJP to Hamas. That just is a, if you want to have a smoking gun, not that I want to, maybe we'll have a smoking cheese, right, that literally it says that the Israeli government itself does not have any evidence, but that should not dissuade anyone that wants to engage in propaganda. So the hearing of ways and means, literally they missed the way and they have misplaced the means in order to actually have a sound discussion about Palestine,
the Palestinians, pro-Palestinians, at a time where the American public is being asked to fit the bill, $14.5 billion dollars extended to Israel. So I'm not surprised that they resort into a McCarthyist strategy in order to muzzle the critique of Israel and muzzle the critique of a genocide that is unfolding. To comfort people in this, I would say it is no longer working, that the shift in public opinion across the grassroots, across also certain segments of the society, is no longer reversible. And you cannot throw money on what I consider an epistemic shift that has occurred, both in the United States that we're not seeing yet in the various arenas of political influence, but across the world there's an epistemic shift that even if Israel throws millions of dollars to try to change the public opinion, that is no longer reversible. Second point, and I think we notice what is occurring, that people have become emboldened in their stand for justice. Especially the young students, the young crowd, people are coming in numbers and in ways that we have not seen since possibly the 2003 opposition to the Iraq war. That does not bode well for a, I would say, pro-Zionist, pro-Israel organization that are accustomed to not actually confront such a massive transformation. And I do think that as we move forward, there are going to be massive pressure taking place. I think there are more people are going to run for political office on this Palestine question because they see the
contradiction wide open, as we say. And the fact that AIPAC is going to put 100 million to try to defeat the 20 plus, I think that shows how insecure and unable to actually argue the point. So they think if they just can get rid of these individuals, then the platform or the arena will be open for us. And I think they are not realizing what is occurring, not only in the U.S., but across the world. The numbers that you're seeing, the type of political mobilization, you know, Belgium today, the Norwegian parliament has a resolution today to recognize Palestine as a state. The Belgium government wants to actually forward charges of war crimes. The prime minister of Spain, likewise, is to forward claims of war crimes and possibly genocide to the International Criminal Court. Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile, today Belize also kicked the Israeli ambassador and cut diplomatic relations. And Nigeria, likewise, South Africa. So we're dealing with not an isolated, but rather a wide spectrum change at a global level. 156 countries in the UN voted in support of Palestine. Only five countries, two of them you could say have standing. The other is basically the Marshall Island and a couple of other islands that are literally U.S. territories. So the shift that is taking place is overwhelming. The use of the hearing is basically to try to see if they could demonize the individuals that are been very effective in speaking and advocating and working for Palestine. But I do think that, you know, not the train, but the camel caravan has left the train
station way to, you know, for them to catch up with it. And they're, you know, they're, I don't want to don't advise them. But if you have Netanyahu as your salesman, I'm sorry, no one will buy the cars from him. Now, Netanyahu is the salesman that Israelis themselves don't want to buy the product between him, Smoltish, Ben-Gavir. You have, again, one of the worst type of sales team for a bunch of lies and a bunch of propaganda that is not sticking. People are instantaneously debunking every piece that's come out from the Israeli military or the Israeli government. And then we see even the opposition saying to Netanyahu, he needs to leave. So that's the dynamics that we're dealing with at this point. Excellent. We're going to go to questions in just a minute. Anybody who's watching, you can type in your question in the chat and we'll take them, inshallah ta'ala. SubhanAllah, one of the things that this reminds me of is the story of Firaun and Musa alayhi salam about how every step that Firaun took to avoid his fate ended up being the step that would lead him to his fate. And you see the government of Israel continue to lie, continue their attempt at institutional capture, continue with the fabrications. It makes them look worse and worse and worse and worse as the day goes on. And we see, you answered my other question, I think I was going to ask if you think that we have reached the point of no return. And it seems that you think that this is different. We're starting to see defectors, even from that are more mainstream that, you know, folks like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and other people. There's an appetite, I think, for people in the United States that they want politicians that
aren't going to be beholden to foreign interests and beholden to these sorts of things. They see the amount of money that's being spent and they're taken aback. So inshallah, I agree. I mean, you've been in this much longer than I. If I may add one also significant change that I forgot to add is that a sizable segment of the young Jewish population, 35 and below, has departed Zionism. They have already taken the position of being anti-Zionist and no longer see Israel, its policies, its approach, its discourses to be reflective of both their deep held Jewish faith and Jewish identity. In the past few weeks, if you notice the sit-in at the New York subway station, the central station. Today, the blockage of the Bay Bridge, the attempt to blockade the Democratic central offices in D.C. We are seeing large numbers of Jewish Voice for Peace, if not now, and others that are mobilizing. That is also irreversible, which means that a large segment of 35 and below are also conceptualizing and thinking of a different horizon between their relationship and their relationship with Israel on the one hand, but their relationship with the Palestinians, their relationship with the Muslims, which possibly also get us to understand. I'm very critical of the so-called interfaith dialogue, which is interfaith washing. And what we need is to specifically say we need interfaith work for justice. And we need to identify those individuals that come from a faith perspective and understand the centrality of faith as a
mobilizer for justice rather than a mobilizer for public relations discourse. So that, I think, is a very significant change that we're witnessing in front of our eyes. Brilliant, brilliant. Abrahim asks, how can students fight back against the special interests that keep attacking students and academics? Well, I would say that if you are on campus, make sure to create a large cross coalition that includes different student groups, not only Palestinian or Muslim, but a large coalition. Bring in the faculty, bring in the staff. You have on campus the staff unions that are there that already can take a very strong position. And then also, I would urge you to make sure that you contact some of the legal help. I chair the Muslim Legal Fund of America, MLFA. We have also extended our resources for this. You also have Palestine Legal, which we work with. You have CARE that also has a large number of legal teams. The good thing is that we do have legal help for you. The university administration often asks, we have checkpoints in the West Bank administration. I call them that they have checkpoints on campus. The checkpoint is to actually target students, makes their work difficult, try to put impediments in such a way to make your life difficult. And then sometimes after they do this, oh, why don't we have a dialogue? We sit you with the Zionist students. So our issue, again, is not a miscommunication. I don't have a miscommunication with somebody taking my land. I don't have a miscommunication with a settler coming in the middle of the night and throwing Palestinians out. I don't have a miscommunication with Israel killing about
5,000 Palestinians, Palestinian children. 70% of those who are being killed in Gaza are women and children. I have no miscommunication. What you have is miscommunication relative that you're trying to act as if the university is a desk of Israeli foreign minister. So you need to also navigate and not allow the university, because of its own priorities, its own priorities of its own contract, its own priorities with donors, its own priorities with upward mobility for politically positioned staff, especially at the administrative level, to use you as an instrument for that process. So again, make sure to call the legal help if anything that is presented to you. It is an uphill battle for sure, but I think it's a winnable battle because you are actually defending some of the most important values, value of free speech, freedom of association, the ability to actually articulate your position at the university. Even sometimes people who might disagree with your position will actually support your right to express it. So I think what you need is to approach it within that framework, and I think you will have success in pushing back. Excellent. I'm really very, very happy with what's taking place in even Columbia University. They shut down SJP. Now for people who don't know, I was one of the founders of SJP in 1993 at UC Berkeley, right? So that was the first SJP. So they shut down SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, but as a result, 40 student groups got together, and now you have a massive coalition that is putting divestment of Columbia University from having any relationship with the Israeli economy. So again, another misstep, right? Trying to shut down two student organizations resulted in the
birth of a large 40 student organization coalition with faculty and staff. So again, for me that organizing is a process, it's not a finality, and I would say you always have to look at all the different possibilities of positioning student organizing. Excellent, excellent, very thorough. And just to reiterate for the viewer, make sure that they don't depoliticize you, right? You see a lot of times they want to have a film screening, again, this sort of portrayal of the issue. Exactly, exactly, that this is just an issue of hate. If we see this person can understand each other, and we have an Israeli and a Palestinian friend, and many documentaries, many sort of movies, many films, many things are along this line of depoliticization that is a trap to get you to give up the concrete issue of justice that's at stake here. So it's just an extension of everything you've already said, Dr. Hatemel, bless you. We're getting short on time, but there's a lot of good questions. Let's see, Zora F. asks, how can we advocate for BDS in an organized and systematic way? Yeah, for me, the BDS is, we have to understand, individually, you could make a choice about your money of what you want to buy. So individually, you could make the choice to look at what is Israeli product and so on and engage in BDS. But for a BDS campaign, we are for targeted campaigns of BDS because it actually can be the most impactful way to engage in the BDS. I am very hesitant and critical of sending like a 2,000 list of companies and say, engage in BDS. For many people, that is an immobilizing tactic, because the person looks, basically everything
that they have is there. It would take somebody who's what you call a shopping specialist to go through that list. So follow the organizations that engage in campaigns on the particular BDS and plug into it. For example, for us in the Muslim community and AMP, we have to take the date boycott, because it's very important during Ramadan. We want to make sure that our Muslim stores, groceries, mosques, and so on do not buy dates that are coming from the Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, Palestinian land that is taken. And therefore, during Ramadan, that is our season. During the year, we continue to work. So that is a very important way. So link up to an existing. On the college campus, for people who are working on the college campus, one is you look at the university investment. Second, there are many different programs that are linked the university to Israeli academia. And what you need is to be very critical. I saw that on November 3, the Israeli military bombed Al-Azhar University. It flattened the whole university. Not a single academic institution in the United States, not a single U.S. president of a U.S. university uttered a word. And therefore, you need to go back to them and say, in here, academic freedom, you always told us that you can't engage in PDS, we have to academic freedom. So where is the academic freedom? Israel actually demolished and attacked the academic institution. So this is where you say that university relations with Israel is at the expense of the Palestinians, including that Israeli universities are complicit in furthering the occupation, in facilitating the research, in also literally having their archives
filled with Palestinian stolen books, where literally whole archives. I know that the historian Mohammad Nimr's archive from Nablus were completely taken and it's the Israeli university archives. So make sure that your engagement with the PDS is very clear and you understand the target. The second is that don't get caught that we need to completely eliminate either the companies and so on. What you need is to affect their bottom line. And the bottom line can be affected in a very, what you call, effective way in certain markets. So they also have to examine what it is to understand also the financial picture, but also how to be effective in undermining or in understanding the effect of the bottom line of particular companies. And if there are competitors, there actually will be very good. I remember I wrote the resolution that launched the boycott of Coca-Cola during the South Africa anti-apartheid regime. And we created the process both at the United States Students Association, and I was the chair of the National Students of Color Coalition at the time. And it literally, in a short period, Pepsi began to put their proposals to universities that were not in South Africa. And they also included our social responsibility clause. For me, that was Pepsi became the advertiser for our campaign. So you also have to be strategic in pitting various market forces against one another to be effective as a strategy because you're organizing for success. You're not only organizing for self-satisfaction. You have to organize with an eye of success and what success looks like in both the short and the long term. Fantastic point. There's a lot of great questions. Unfortunately, for time, we're only going to take one more from Ibrahim Robel, who asks the million-dollar question. He
says, there's an enormous global support for Palestinians. How can we channel this support into a Palestinian state without first undertaking a major reform of the UN Security Council? Well, I say politics is a contact sport, right? Meaning that if you just realize the moment that the world was in complete, almost silence, complete heedlessness, complete almost the most important thing, which was what concert people want to go to, right? Literally in the last month, the transformation that has occurred across the globe is a moment that will have what you call residence. What we need is to begin to actually, what are the things that we can do specifically that would bring this transformation? The debate about the United Nations Security Council, I think the United Nations has become completely discredited as an institution. The fact that the 114 of UNRWA's United Nations staff has been killed, yet the United Nations still is ineffective. I would say it's a total collapse of the Western world, exceptionalist history and so on. The human rights paradigm of the World War II has completely been demolished. The adherence to the poor Geneva Convention is demolished. So we have an opportunity to re-articulate what the new world. So this will require for us to actually host conferences, symposium, write, put out material and begin to re-imagine a different world. The world majority is with Palestine. The American public is with the ceasefire, 68%. Don't allow the small talking heads with powdered face, fair and lovely from TV,
give you the perception that you are in the minority. They want you to believe that you're in the minority. You're not. You're in the majority in here. You're actually in the majority globally, right? So act as if you are representing the majority in order to conceptualize a different world. And I think that's part of the hard work that we need to engage because we're good at mobilizing numbers, but we're not good at translating the numbers into effective conceptions of ideas and begin to implement programs. So I think that's where some of the heavy lifting in the next few weeks or months, possibly years for us to undertake. But I'm very comforted that the global community is shifting, that some major, major openings are taking place. I think I'm confident with the development in Brazil, the development in South Africa, development in Chile, even the development in Mexico, right? Discussions here, you know, we had the Richmond City Council pass a strong resolution that was used immediately a week after in Ann Arbor. Change comes back from the bottom up. And we also, as Muslims, we have to change. Again, if you allow me a few more minutes, we all are saying if Salahuddin can come, right? But the thing is that if Salahuddin comes, right, he will find us all sitting at Starbucks drinking latte, right? Change is from the bottom up. It's transformative. It's dialectic. It's congruent of both the circumstances that people have and the readiness to step out. This will be my last statement, the following. I want for every Muslim that is listening and understanding that you are on the side of the divine. The divine is al-adl. Every time you step out to take a position of justice, know that Allah is with you because he is al-adl. He is not with dhulm because Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala said he prohibited dhulm on himself. Inni harramtu dhulma ala nafsi.
God prohibited. Nothing can limit God. God prohibited himself from engaging in injustice. So when you go out, don't think that how mighty what is in front of us. Think how mighty that which is behind you and with you. We often get to be weakened in that way because we think the odds are overwhelming. The odds are overwhelming to the other side because they don't know the power of justice. They don't know the power of Moses walking into the court of Pharaoh. They don't know the power of every group. They don't know the power that is there. So we have to change conceptually how we see ourselves walking with confidence and with I don't want to say that you are actually manifestation of al-adl as you walk for causes of justice. So I never see myself that I am in the minority because the minority of one with Allah is the majority at any given point. So that for me is the purpose when you are actually in justice because that's what our tradition calls upon us and what we need is to uphold the skills of justice at every moment and Palestine is at the crux of this call for justice today. Allahu Akbar. Dr. Hatem, it was a pleasure and an honor to have you with us. We hope to see you again soon and keep the conversation going. May Allah bless you. Jazakumullah khair. Salam alaikum. So we'll take I'll take questions for the next five minutes about but I wanted to extend one of the points that Dr. Hatem was making there at the end when we're talking about the need to put all of our heads together.
This is an all hands on deck moment. It's going to take us leveraging all of our skills. It's going to take all of our brain power to even if as an ummah if we have differences to put aside our differences and to think in a mature and exploratory way how to chart a path forward. If you look at the different sort of the Dawa sphere, the different figures, the different organizations, Alhamdulillah we have so much talent. We need to make sure that we continue to and Alhamdulillah there's been a lot of great synergy going on lately. People are uniting in a way that maybe we haven't seen before. We need to continue that unity and that cross pollination and talk to one another and figure out where to go from here. And so we ask Allah to make us all sincere and especially to be aware that the Shaitaan and our enemies want us to fall into infighting. They want us to fall into bickering. They want us to get in our own way to fracture us in order so that we are ineffective. Dr. Hatim was talking about being effective and this is what we're after. If we put all of our skills and talents together, if we are completely sincere to Allah subhana wa ta'ala and we do our best then we can at least turn it over to, we can turn it over to Allah subhana wa ta'ala and trust that he will deliver us victory by his grace. Last chance for any questions before we sign off here tonight. I know we went a little bit over but there was so much to talk about and at this moment it's particularly important that everybody find their voice and find their courage and find each other.
And find each other because I know many of the questions that came through are talking about facing oppression, facing sort of being silenced, facing people who do not want us to use our voices. And one of the advantages of social media is that now we can see in real time other people using their voices as well. If someone gets fired for taking a stand on Palestine then tens of thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands of people get to know about it. If somebody tries to intimidate you then you've got a hundred thousand people in a few hours that are on your side, maybe somebody who knows someone else or can put you in touch with an organization that can assist you in order to be able to protect yourself. So I don't see any other questions that are coming through the chat so I guess we'll wrap it up here for the night. But I will say that we have some very, very exciting guests that will be coming on in the next few weeks so I encourage you all to make sure that you tune in at 9pm New York time, that's 8pm Central time, wherever it is you are in the world we have people from all over. We have people, future guests include inshallah ta'ala some of the college students or recently graduated college students in New York City that are going to give us an on the ground view of the moves that some of the colleges have made to try to disband student organizations that have spoken out about Palestine.
We'll also be talking about normalization and the role of sort of the Arab states or the Arab governments or the Muslim rulers whatever you want to talk about and sort of let's, I don't want to reveal everything but we're going to have a thorough discussion on the specter of normalization and what it means and how it is a betrayal of our brothers and sisters in Palestine. Let's see Fayazuddin Sayyid asks salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah how do you cope with the pain that we are seeing and then find the strength to show courage to the Muslim community? You have to let it become your motivation, right? For every word that you read and write and every conversation that you have you have to think of those little boys and girls, you have to think of the shivering babies, you have to think of the people who have been martyred. It stops becoming about you, right? The scarcity mentality that we get pushed into that stops us from courage and stops us from speaking the truth is one that's only concerned about us, what's my career, what's my life path, what do I have to lose? You realize that when you stand up and when you speak up and when you stand for the truth you're not just speaking for yourself, you're actually becoming the voice of the voiceless, you're someone who's standing up for those other people and that's the least that you can do for your brothers and sisters. If it has to do with you taking a personal risk in your career, in your comfort, right, then so be it. Really there's a greater cause and this is what connects us all as an ummah is these feelings of, I guess, mutuality, this geography of affection that we have between us.
That when I'm acting or I'm speaking up at a college campus or at a rally or here on a live stream, I'm not doing it for me, I'm not doing it to hear my own voice, I'm hoping that I can push the conversation forward, that just one person who's watching feels a little bit more courageous when they go and they have a conversation. And if everybody has that attitude and reaches somebody else and encourages somebody else, then collectively we can make a difference, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala can put barakah in it, can put blessing in it and it can have a huge effect and we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for guidance, for protection and for success. So with that I think we're going to wrap it up for tonight, thank you everybody for tuning in. Until next week, salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
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