Hi everyone!
The People's Conference for Palestine was held in Motor City, Detroit over the weekend where a bunch of people who hate Jews and want to see an end to the nation of Israel called for the destruction of the United States.
"This conference has reaffirmed a truth that I know to be true," said one woman closing out the conference, "that our people will see freedom but we have to struggle to get there." She wore a keffiyeh tied around her waist. "History does not just happen, it is shaped through our actions." She called for attendees to "bring the fight back home" to their own cities and towns to push for Palestinian liberation here in the US.
Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib said "Every genocide enabler, look at this room motherf*cker, we ain't goin' anywhere!" And got a standing ovation for that. "We are just growing, and growing, and growing. We are brining siblings from other movements with us."
Another man, speaking to the conference, said "Gaza need to be saved now. It saved all of us, liberated all of us, it is time for us to pay back, and stop the criminals, the perpetrators, the child murderers and we all know who they are." He called for them to be "locked up, taken out," and who was he talking about? American leaders in Washington, as well as European and Israeli leaders. The man is calling for Trump to be "taken out" and this is an ideal that's being backed by Democrats in America. The man then had the nerve to say "we're not saying this out of hate, we're saying this out of love, love for the children."
This man, Nidal Jboor, spoke out against Christians, as well, saying "we need to take the thrones of power from them and we the people need to create a better wall and better humanity for everyone." The conference featured terrorists as well, men who had been released from Israeli prisons as part of prisoner exchanges for the release of hostages from Gaza.
Sachin Peddada said outright that "we have to destroy the idea of America in our heads, in our neighbors' heads, in our comrades' heads, in everybody's heads in this country. We have to work towards problematizing and getting away from the normalization of the military industrial complex that is baked into these supply chains," he said, "and we have to actually present an alternative that is appealing and meaningful to people."
He paraphrased Palestinian writer Bassel al-Araj, saying "I'm reminded of this Bassel al-Araj quote where he basically says that the average American will never understand the plight of the Palestinian person, because the state of Israel is a carbon copy of the United States, and therefore the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in America's heads, so that they can see the humanity of everybody outside of the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism and all these evil things.
"We have to dismantle this idea of American exceptionalism, of supremacy, of being beyond reproach. I think it's very important that we normalize criticism as a healthy process, and learn from our experiments in the world, to push the boundaries of what is possible, to continue to fight for more and more, and to see how the Empire responds to us, and to continue to push farther and harder," Peddada says.
Um, no. We don't want that. We don't want this nonsense. We don't want to destroy America. We don't want to let go of American exceptionalism. We don't want our heads messed with. I say fight back against this, do not normalize hatred of our nation, of our values, or of our freedoms.