Author: mara.ahmed

vietnam, laos, cambodia, bangladesh, chile, east timor, argentina, bolivia, uruguay, angola, mozambique, iran, iraq, afghanistan, palestine… disastrous interventions, support for murderous military dictators, torture, genocide, and the destabilization of entire world regions. “the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer,” he said famously. war criminal henry kissinger is dead. may he rot in hell.

I have known Ali Sajjad since he was a student in college and am proud of the crucial work he is doing for children’s education. This is the kind of investment in young people that we should all support. Pls consider making a tax deductible donation.

In Faisalabad, the historical city of Lyallpur, a team of socially conscious educators run a school that provides the kind of education we often dream of: meeting local and global needs while being holistic, building critical thinking, teaching science, mathematics, languages and technology, including music and the performing arts in the curriculum, and encouraging extracurricular activities (from sports to debates). It’s a school that focuses on inclusivity, social justice, and democracy as core values both in its student body and its staff.

Broadwood Central School is a testament to what Pakistan’s future can be. On account of its egalitarian/inclusive mission and the scholarships it provides to a large number of students, the school needs support to continue its work in the Faisalabad community. Please invest in the school and its students by making a tax deductible donation here.

More info at www.broadwoodcentral.edu.pk

the bombing of the baptist hospital in gaza: (1) israel asked for the hospital to be evacuated so they could bomb it, (2) israel had already bombed part of the hospital before this strike, (3) IDF spokesperson hananya naftali triumphantly tweeted that the air force had struck a terrorist base inside a hospital in gaza right after the bombing (the tweet was later deleted), (4) the israeli military/ government lie pathologically to manipulate the optics of their own violence (most recently they lied about beheaded babies).

but all of this does not matter. it is a distraction.

the leveling of gaza and the forced transfer of its population is ongoing. the blockade of food, water, fuel, and electricity is ongoing. the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the palestinian people is ongoing. israel continues to bomb mosques and UN school shelters, both war crimes under international law.

stop bombing gaza. end the genocide. no more racist settler colonialism. free palestine

I appreciate all calls to end the horrific genocide we are watching in Gaza, but some of the logic people formulate is extremely troubling.

For example, a ‘senior Israel-Palestine analyst’ on Twitter (who’s skirted around Zionism in the past) posted this:

“You don’t need to be a military expert to know that killing thousands of people with nowhere to go will leave entire generations scarred, will harden hearts and will breed more hate and violence.”

What a twisted, racist rationale for stopping a genocide. Any genocide.

It reminds me of an oft-used talking point during the War on Terror, which killed millions, that droning people of color will only create more terrorists. Well-meaning liberals recycled this argument with endless fervor as a reason to end drone strikes.

This is a racist argument.

The reason for not committing genocide is not that “they will hate us more for killing them,” but rather the fact that genocide is morally repugnant and inhumane. Genocide is mass murder, it’s the destruction of an ethnic, racial or religious group of people. It causes “serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicts on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” This is why genocide is considered the “crime of crimes” under international law.

Why are brown and black bodies only viewed as either recipients or perpetrators of violence? Meaning that they can either be droned/genocided or they will drone/genocide themselves if subjected to “heart-hardening” suffering.

I find this unimaginative racist framing to be a narcissistic projection of the West’s own criminal tendencies onto the other.

End the genocide in Gaza because it is immoral, criminal, and vicious. It is the murder of families and communities. It is violently deranged and anti-life, and it also turns the perpetrator into a grotesque caricature of what it means to be human.

cannot sleep. using twitter to stay informed. apparently egyptians in arish which is 80 kilometers (50 mi) away from gaza are reporting that their houses are shaking from the bombing. israel has intensified bombing, while cutting off all means of communication. absolutely no news from gaza. there is no fuel or electricity either. it’s a complete blackout. israel has also initiated a ground invasion. i use this word carefully and deliberately, but what we are witnessing right now, with the gleeful support and encouragement of the west, is nothing less than evil. i don’t mean evil in a religious sense. i mean complete human depravity. i mean a well-planned genocide that will finish the job of settler colonialism. i mean shameless racism and islamophobia and a perverted supremacy that’s ugly to behold. i mean israeli influencers mocking palestinians by daubing their faces with fake blood, painting their teeth black and showing off their water bottles (there has been a blockade on food and water in gaza). these videos have gone viral. i mean that in the west bank, israeli settlers and soldiers tortured and humiliated three palestinians men for 6 hours, stripping them naked, taking their pictures, beating them, urinating on them, burning them with cigarettes. this is the thingification aime cesaire wrote about. this is the dehumanization that comes with colonialism. it did not start on october 7th.

In Scorsese’s film ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ a strong connection is made between the terror and murder faced by indigenous Osage people (with access to oil money since the early 1900s) and the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 which annihilated Black Wall Street and its wealth.

I want to take these connections further and compare Tulsa to Gaza. Images of the violence enacted on both cities speak for themselves (the first three are from the Tulsa massacre and the last three from the ongoing genocide in Gaza).

There is immense, unbearable loss of life in Gaza right now (more than 5,000 dead, half of them children). There is also an imperial destruction of all fundamental aspects of human life – social, political and cultural structures, housing, commerce, employment, transportation, familial and community networks, etc. This razing of the infrastructure of life, as we understand it, also happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in countless Native villages all across America.

The destruction of human (and non-human) habitats and ecology seems central to capitalism. Large swathes of humanity must be forcefully locked in ghettos of precarity and poverty in order for a small percentage of white elite (and their stooges) to enjoy unseemly wealth and privilege.

Black poet and activist Pat Parker understood this. In ‘Revolution – It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,’ she wrote:

“The rest of the world is being exploited in order to maintain our standard of living. We who are five percent of the world’s population use 40 percent of the world’s oil. As anti-imperialists we must be prepared to destroy all imperialist governments; and we must realize that by doing this we will drastically alter the standard of living that we now enjoy.

…The equation is being laid out in front of us. Good American equals Support Imperialism and war. To this, I must declare—I am not a good American. I do not wish to have the world colonized, bombarded and plundered in order to eat steak.”

When we stand in solidarity with Palestine and other peoples and places being crushed by imperial greed and its technologies of extermination and containment, this is something we must consider.

Thank you Clarissa Brooks for reminding me of these powerful lines during a discussion on ‘Black Feminist Writers and Palestine’ organized by Black Women Radicals.