A Call for Revolutionary Intellectual Alignment w/Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah

Adnan Hussein: Allah Rahman Rahim. Salam, marhaba, hello, peace to you all. Welcome to a very special edition, collaborative live stream. I'm Adnan Hussein, historian of the medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate world at Queens University and host of the program on this channel and co-host of Guerrilla History podcast. And I'm delighted to be collaborating with a wonderful colleague, comrade, Lara Shihai and Psychic Militancy. Lara, it's great to have you here. Please tell people about your program.

Lara Sheehi: Yeah, thanks for having me, Comrade and Adnan, for sort of suggesting we do this. And then, of course, our special guest, Dr. Ghassan, for always being willing to immediately say, yes, absolutely, let's do this. So this is streaming on Psychic Militancy as well. Make sure you subscribe to the channel. It's also streaming on EAST as a podcast. Share with a comrade, like. uh we try to do these things so that we can get the word out and and the conversation today is certainly about a different type of discourse a different type of knowledge production um different types of commitments to revolution as intellectuals so it feels like especially important for us to support each other in this like ecosphere that we have going on here with these podcasts about being able to disseminate information that our liberal counterparts perhaps are not as eager to do so.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, before we have you introduce and welcome our guest, I did want to mention to everybody also that we've been doing fundraisers for the Sameer Project and every program that we've been doing even before Ramadan, but especially here during Ramadan. And I just wanted to say that tonight, and perhaps it is already, almost or is evening in West Asia, in Lebanon and neighboring countries. And this is the 27th night for most people of Ramadan. And it's also known as one of the most likely nights of Laylatul Qadr, the night of power, the night of decree. And this whole month is a time for charity. And so we've been encouraging people, if you can, make a donation to the Samir Project, a wonderful Palestinian mutual aid group working in Gaza. And I've put the link up at the top of the chat, and I'll do so periodically to remind you in the chat. Their Ramadan campaign, which has just a few days left, still, you know, their goal was 500,000 pounds, and they're you know, not quite there. They've much more than half, but maybe with your help over the next coming days, we can help them meet that challenge. So thank you very much. And I will remind you at least at the end also, but I'm very much looking forward to this discussion. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest.

Lara Sheehi: Wonderful. Dr. Ghassan, thank you so much for joining us, comrade. We really appreciate it. For our audience, I mean, I have a feeling that most of you, if not all of you, know Ghassan well. He is a revolutionary thinker, a comrade. I'll say personally, being in community with him, one of the most generous people, both on a personal level and also intellectually, and a physician who's worked tirelessly both in Gaza and in Beirut. And he shared with us that this is his first day off in weeks. And so we're so touched that you joined us today on your day off. And we're discussing this piece that you and some comrades put out that's just been, I think, February 27th. It came out in Arabic. I'm going to drop the link for folks, the original sort of publication and then recently a translation on March 10th. And it's called Toward a Revolutionary Charter for Comprehensive Liberation, which you and intellectual comrades in the Arab world and certainly those of you who are a Palestinian put out. And that's what Adnan and I really wanted to discuss. I mean, I think we both were moved by it. Our comrades were moved by it. It feels like many of us have been waiting for this for a long time to just have like a larger, unbending, militant call um in support of resistance and a sort of where intellectuals fit into this um and you and your comrades have sort of provided a a blueprint in some ways but i'm wondering if you could sort of locate yourself, kick us off, anything you wanted to start with around this. And again, for listeners, Adnan had linked the English version in the show notes, but I'm going to also drop the Arabic version for folks to see, and that one was published first. So, Fadal, comrade, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Thank you very much. The piece came about after discussions with... comrades and friends who shared my concern and our collective concern that what was happening in the public sphere in the Arab world and particularly with regards to Palestine was a concerted project coming from both secular and religious intellectuals which tried to frame the post genocide stage that we're in as almost a post-resistance phase. i.e. the discourse that was coming out from multiple individuals, was to try to say basically that resistance is part of the past and that our job now is to envisage a post-resistance existence for the Palestinian people because resistance really has been so catastrophic. And that was really, it's the way these calls became a crescendo and seemed to be synchronized. When you kind of dissected the language, the essence was the same. And it was the essence, the language of, particularly of the Palestine Authority during the Second Intifada, of talking about the chaos of weapons, talking about the futility and not just the futility of resistance, but how it was self-defeating. And therefore, it was critical that a counter voice came out to basically remind people that this space, if left unchallenged, will be filled by these functional intellectuals. who were preparing the ground over the bodies of our people in Gaza, over the sea of blood and trying to capitalize on the suffering and the sea of blood to try to give a notion that somehow this is as a result of resistance. all of this genocide rather than a structural approach that sees the genocide as a critical part of the colonial project and an inevitable moment in the development of settler colonialism and firmly places the failure to foresee the genocidal moment in the Zionist project on Palestinian intellectuals who went down the rabbit hole of international relations and therefore failed in a kind of structure, then I prefer the Arabic word over the word structure, jazriya, rooted approach to understanding settler colonialism, the logic of elimination in settler colonialism, the imperative for genocidal killing as part of, as a... formative part of settler colonialism, and most importantly, to place colonialism as a formative component of European identity. And with that formative part of European identity, i.e. when Europe became Europe, it also became colonial. And with it, the genocidal instinct within European identity.

Adnan Hussein: i am so gratified to hear you put this in context because if you read this is like a really valuable framing for the document to really understand if you're outside of the region and not paying attention to the discourses you were talking about i don't think you would really understand what's at stake. And it sounds to me like what you're describing is the intellectual corollary, or at least the presumptions that are at the level of the Abraham Accords. It's like if there was this problem was just removed, then we could all be normal countries and have relations with the you know zionist entity as if that's some kind of stable arrangement that would be possible if not even preferable which is the way that they're sort of framing it that's very interesting to me the other point that you just raised that i have to you know say something about and then maybe you know ask you um you know, to take a little further, but I'm a medieval historian. So for me, the Crusades, the establishment of the Crusader states is a paradigmatic experience historically in Europe coming to be Europe in training its first settler colonial project. And that Zionism is just a kind of return to a Europe wide, west wide supported settler colonial project in the region. And it seems that the consequence of really having that kind of understanding that you were just elucidating means that our framework should be to see not resistance as abnormal, but actually the world as abnormal, the world situation, and that there isn't some solution to accommodating yourself to the regional kind of US bases everywhere, vassal, comprador states. So I'm wondering if maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on the problems or at least where these presumptions come from that fail to recognize what I think right now should be so obvious with the Iran war taking place, is that Palestine and the wider kind of US and Zionist imperial project in the region is the problem, not our relations, resistance in one pocket that is preventing normalization to take place.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: I mean, it basically hinges on the idea that all of these functional, compradorial intellectuals, their discourse hinges on the idea that resistance produces colonialism rather than that colonialism produces resistance. And the problem is that if you stop resisting, colonialism will somehow not exist because it's only in the eye of the beholder. And as grotesque as it is, it's basically saying that the rape victim, if they do not resist, then it no longer is rape. And therefore, if you just be quiet and just take it, then it becomes a different experience. And that's the essence of this discourse. The second issue is, and this is where a lot of work since that certainly since the 90s, since the Madrid conference and then Oslo worked on, which is this idea, this insidious idea that somehow imperialism, rather than being a material superstructure that determines the relationship between people in the Global South and people in the Global North, between people of color and notions of white supremacy, between the Arabs and the Europeans, and between people from this region and people from Europe and North America. somehow that this relationship that is imperialism is a misunderstanding and a mismanagement by the victim of their public relations strategy. And that if you somehow explain it away, then that misunderstanding will disappear. I try to always go back to the, certainly the founding principle for me in approaching everything in life and everything in life is political. And it is the idea that I've always believed that all oppression is extractive, all oppression. Oppression is an investment in creating the conditions of the different modalities of violence in order to achieve a material benefit, even if it's down the line. So even if it is a form of social oppression that creates material benefit down the line it's still all forms of oppression are extractive and therefore when trying to understand all oppression you need to see it as you need to look for where the money is who is making material benefit from that oppression. The micro oppressions and the macro oppressions and the superstructures of colonial and imperialist oppressions are all extractive and they're all create this flow of material benefit that had from our countries to the global north and within the global north, from marginalized and working class communities towards the ruling classes and the ruling bourgeoisie. And so for us to understand why this discourse is happening, we need to dismantle. Honestly, it's non-scientific approach. i.e. that somehow Israel has no agency, that if you don't poke the tiger, the tiger will not come after you. And it's that these misguided and adventurers who resist against the colonial powers bring doom and destruction on our peoples. rather than actually, and one of the things that we have to go to is in order to understand what is happening from Gaza to Iran, over the last three years is how they represent a new phase in late capitalist extraction. And so what we're witnessing is a historical process that started with Ghazi that represents real economic change in the way global capital extracts value.

Lara Sheehi: Yes. One of the things that's not surprising to me because I know you and you and I have a lot to say about Fanon is there's this feels like a very unbending Fanonian approach to this issue because you're talking about inversions. Right. And you got you all say this in this piece. You say these are based on inversions. that work only to shore up and stabilize these structures that you're talking about, imperialism, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, under the guise of reason and rationalism, right? That somehow these intellectuals who engage in this type of work are actually the reasonable ones. They're the ones who might find a way out of this for us. And it's actually the militants who are messing up this entire possibility because they're being too unreasonable, they're being too militant, they're utopian, whatever version of this. So one of the things that is deeply refreshing about this is that I think sometimes it's easier to see the structure that is the imposition of imperialism, of settler colonialism, even though we know also folks have difficulty staying clear on that. you all make a specific point to say the native bourgeoisie, the native informants in our region are just as dangerous and sometimes even more so because we know how imperialism uses the examples of the native bourgeoisie actually to make targets out of those of us who refuse the boot of imperialism, who refuse to bend, who know that being militant is the way forward. And certainly meaning both in terms of intellectual militancy, but also in support of armed resistance and revolutionary action by people across the ground. So can you say a little bit more about this intent of all of you to really hammer home? Like one of the things you said is we need to name and shame. You make a call and you say, we call on all Arab intellectuals. to divest from these notions and then you also go a step further and you say those those who don't it's our responsibility as militant intellectuals actually to name and shame them to make sure and i find that as a way of like not allowing them to do this under the guise of innocence right not allowing them to engage in inversions without being challenged

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Absolutely. I mean, there's a kind of, you know, and we, you know, one of the things that brought the group together is a... a mutual notion that we really need in this historical moment to go back to not just Fanon but also to Cabral and see within these aspirations to Western modernism that these functional compradorial intellectuals have in dismissing the instinct of the masses to resist against their erasure as misguided. What is critical is that we need to return to these very masses as the only authentic voice and the only authentic compass that shows the way in the struggle against colonialism and not functional compradorial intellectuals who have had their sense of inferiority towards the West. implanted in them through this notion of modernity being centered and rationality being centered in Western discourse and Western international relations, thinking about where the Palestinian people, where the Lebanese people, where the people of this region have to go to end this seemingly endless cycle of repression, war and colonialism.

Adnan Hussein: I really found the reference to Cabral very important and relevant in diagnosing the vulnerabilities that the intellectuals pose. And Laura, that was essentially our question about how much they inhibit or derail the actual popular revolutionary aspirations of the people. I was also thinking through reading this piece, and maybe, you know, we should come to some of the specific points that you and your co-authors have raised and think about them a little further, but before getting there, I was thinking quite a lot about a piece that Edward Said wrote as a series of lectures that he gave, I think, in the UK. Representations of the intellectual is what they were published as. And he draws from a wide range of anti-colonial and dissident thinkers. And one thing he said that seemed to put some sort of a finger on what the proper role of an organic intellectual must be. And I wondered if you had any kind of thoughts or if any of this had been in the kind of background of thinking for you all. He was talking about He said, to this terribly important task of representing the collective suffering of your own people, testifying to its travails, reasserting its enduring presence, reinforcing its memory, there must be added something else which only the intellectual, I believe, has the obligation to fulfill. After all, many novelists, painters, and poets like Manzoni, Picasso, or Neruda have embodied the historical experience of their people in aesthetic works, which in turn become recognized as great masterpieces. For the intellectual, the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others. And he goes on, to talk uh you know about other cases and and so on but one issue that i had with it that i picked up in your account is that they're also maybe there's something insufficient even in what edward said is saying there because what you're calling for i got the sense please correct me is that there has been a kind of framing of Palestinians as victims that you also want and believe that needs to be countered somehow. And I'm wondering if that's how you would react to that kind of framing and what you would say about how to change from the status of victims to agents through resistance. And if that's what you're calling for, maybe you could elaborate if that's the case.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: I need a second to unplug and replug because I think we're going to lose the electricity. Just a sec. Okay.

Lara Sheehi: Welcome to doing live streams with folks in Lebanon, which is like a representation of the daily violences and indignities that we are talking about. I mean, this piece lays out and pushes for violence. a material understanding of the conditions that produces militants and revolutionaries. And if we're talking about structural inequities that are not just, that don't just fall from the sky, that are not just because of an, you know, underdevelopment that is like essential to the people of the global South, it is to think about the ways in which The lack of electricity for folks who might not know in Lebanon might go between, you know, 14 to 16 hours. And that is because with the support of the United States, the Zionist entity has entirely destroyed the infrastructure of electricity over the past decades, has bombed electric plants. And then the native bourgeoisie who own everything have also not distributed any money that has to do with rebuilding that infrastructure. And this is not done because somehow, again, the quote unquote leaders of the Global South are inherently corrupt. But because they are part of a ruling class, I think this is part of what this piece tells us, that the ruling class does not care about actual people and the infrastructure that might support their thriving. So Ghassan, welcome back. I was just giving some context to why the electricity is a problem.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Absolutely. So if we go back to the question so that I can concentrate beyond the electricity.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, just, you know, about, you know.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Yeah, so about Edward Said, it is, I mean, I think what needs to be captured is the pre-mid 70s discourse of anti-colonial struggles, not because of some kind of leftist impotent nostalgia that we like to kind of indulge in, but because Ghazi and the reason why the outrage about Ghazi was so global has shown that there isn't even a neo-colonialism. that colonialism just existed. It continued. They had spent the first half of the 20th century educating and building compradorial classes, and they moved on. But if we look at what's happening in the region, the number of bases american bases being targeted is not just about the targeting it's about the monumental number of bases in this region and the biggest imperialist base of all being israel and so we need to regain we we're not indulging in nostalgia we're trying to um we're trying to go back to the point in which intellectually these comparatorial intellectuals hijacked the discourse and took us in a different direction. So in terms of Palestinians took us in the international relations direction, in the state over liberation direction, in viewing the Palestinian liberation struggle not as the sum of the struggle of each Palestinian in every part of their diasporic existence or within occupation but as those who are a liability as Oslo viewed Palestinian refugees and Palestinians inside 48 and those that can become citizens within a nominal state. And so what we're trying to say is let's go back to that point and start again. We're not traveling backwards. We need a new discourse, but we need to go back and try to discover the point in which we got detoured. And the language of liberation was corrupted. And we need to from there go back and restart for this new phase. Because as I was saying, this is not just a geopolitical phase of imperialism. This is a new mode of capitalist extraction that we're witnessing. And so we need it needs to have its own mechanism for and its own analytical lenses for understanding it and for resisting it and for charting the way forward.

Lara Sheehi: Absolutely. And this is part of why I love. And then I think after this, we want to go into some of these points that you all lay out. So folks who haven't had the chance to read it can sort of understand a little bit more concretely because you give us granular details. This is not an abstraction, which is, I think, part of what you were trying to say, that these things are not abstractions or commitments to material reality. You give us a sort of guide about what actions I think a lot of people end up asking questions. actions like what do so what do we do as intellectuals but I just wanted to read a couple pieces because one of the things that moved me the most is that in what you were saying Hassan right now you root us in the trenches in the tunnels and in the prison cells, right? So let me just read just a couple pieces. And these come up in different elements, but parts of the piece. So I'm not saying these show up right after each other, but they feel connected to me. So you all say, no representation without resistance and no mandate except revolutionary legitimacy. Its sole source is the social geography that sustains resistance, the trenches, the tunnels, and the prison cells. The shared destiny of the fighter and the intellectual transforms knowledge from an intellectual luxury into symbolic weapons that operate side by side with material weapons. This connection grants resistance action, its historical meaning, its existential horizon, and its moral legitimacy. I mean, that's, what else do we need to know? Like there is no separation between the intellectuals work and those who are in fighting, right? In the trenches, in the tunnels, in the prison cell. What has been the reception of this because you all are making very concrete claims to say there is no more hiding behind whether it's your moralization or your ivory tower or thinking there's a separation between theory and praxis.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: So the imperative and the exigency of the genocidal moment i.e that we are now a nation and by that i also include the lebanese that is facing extraction from this land and facing genocidal elimination because the colonial project has reached a genocidal moment in its development and has chosen genocide as its weapon of choice in the coming phase. And so the luxury of ignoring these voices is no longer there. The exigency of the genocidal moment means that clarity of thought, clarity of the message with which we address the masses who know. You know, people, there's a nasty, nasty storm that's hit Lebanon and Palestine today and yesterday, really bad winds, torrential rain. People in the tents in Gaza, People in the schools in Lebanon who've been displaced from the southern suburb and from South Lebanon know that this time round they're coming for them. It's not about being defeated. It's about being eliminated. And therefore, on one hand, one's biggest challenge is trying to hide one's disgust and disdain for these cultural for these functional intellectuals but two in trying to basically say we're really against the wire now unless we we come back to these masses we work through them because they have shown mythological bravery. They have shown mythological resistance and steadfastness against what is unimaginable, against a level of brutalism and violence that is incomprehensible but we witnessed it and therefore these masses are a reservoir of what we need to be able to abort the colonial genocidal project in the region because the strength that they have shown in their day-to-day lives is still the way that you find the way forward. They are the landmarks for the way forward. The people who are still in Nabatiya, the families that are still in the south, the families that are trying to sneak back into Jabalia and to Sabra and to Zaytoun and live in Gaza, not in tents, but in tarpaulin. These people are showing you the way forward. These functional intellectuals are knowingly and actively betraying these people and selling them to the West and telling them that they have to accept the new formula. And the new formula is this, that In the diseased mind, in the psychopathology of white supremacy, Palestinians and Lebanese occupy a rung in the racial ladder where they are biological entities that need to be fed and watered and housed in a basic way, the way you house animals, but that's it. They have no subjective existence that differentiates them from mere biological entities. And if these biological needs are met, then they have nothing more to complain about. And that's the future for those who survived the genocide. is to be watered and fed, and that's it. And so unless we, these functional intellectuals are calling for this, unless they are met head on and exposed for basically internalizing white supremacist racialization of the peoples of this land, of the people of this land, whether it's Palestine or Lebanon or Iran or Iraq or Syria, we will end up sleepwalking towards a series of Red Indian reservations like envisaged by Kushner and Trump in Gaza.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, I wanted to turn to some of the kind of key principles you mentioned that we need to recapture the kind of anticolonial heritage and continue the thinking and adapt and apply it to this current circumstance to short circuit those detours that you were talking about before. And you have in this document, you and your colleagues, six principles, a couple of them, Lara, sort of just referred to in terms of, you know, the first being, you know, where these concepts have to come from, you know, these locations, resistance locations of the trenches and the tunnels and the prisons and so forth. a second one is that you reject all forms or we must reject all forms of comprador based funding all those donors governments ngos foundation grants etc the third actors in the field must be reinstated as the sole and ultimate reference fourth comprador bourgeois cultural identity must be dismantled so that we're not looking for probation and career advancement in the imperial cores, institutions, and so forth. And fifth, a strategy of class alignment and transforming knowledge into material force. This one in particular, and the sixth one was, you know, boycotting those intellectuals and academics Laura mentioned, you know, calling out and, you know, really making the choice clear. But this fifth one, a strategy of class alignment and transforming knowledge into material force. I wondered if maybe you could elaborate and give some examples of what you mean about how the intellectual work that we- I mean, Lewis Gordon and Achille Mbembe.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: I mean people who have made a living by telling our people how wet the water is when they drowned. And then when the genocidal moment came, and my... my disappointment that has turned into anger towards Ashil is based on the fact that when I, on day 42, when I walked out at four o'clock in the morning from an early hospital, because we had run out of anesthetic and we had stopped operating and we decided to walk from Gaza city to the south of Gaza. And I remember walking out, And I remember walking through this for the first time because I had spent 42 days inside hospitals and inside ambulances through Gaza and saw the destruction. And I remember on that day thinking this is what he prophesied about Gaza being the death world. And therefore, for me, the shock... You mean Ashir? Yes. And so for me, the shock after leaving to discover that the colonial cat had eaten his tongue is, for me, felt a personal betrayal because I had walked through what he had described years before as an inevitability. So it made you realize that The difference is that the empire has been so successful because it's not just engineered its protagonists, it also engineered its opposition in the shape of people who, again, tell the masses how wet the water is while they drown. you know, it's the same. So what is critical now is in this genocidal polarization, for those within academia and within intellectual life to align themselves, i.e. if you've got the diagnosis, then you need to work on the treatment. You can't just pretend that diagnostics are a treatment. It's the equivalent of me sending someone for a chest x-ray and then telling them the chest x-ray has just cured your lung cancer. You know, you can go on your merry way. That's what that class that the empire engineered as part of its existence had been doing all of these years until it was called out by the genocidal moment in Gaza. And so it is critical that those who act as intellectual diagnosticians are forced to then participate in the curative process against this deadly disease that is colonialism.

Lara Sheehi: Yeah, and another piece, I'm so glad, I mean, you know, I have a bone to pick with Lewis Gordon who decided to, you know, he's a preeminent Fanonian scholar for folks who don't know and decided that a couple of days after was the time to take Fanon offline for people insisting that Fanon was a Zionist. And this is not just counter-insurgent, this is a violence.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: It is a violence. I mean, when you remember, For me, what is etched in my mind, and when I think about these intellectuals who have betrayed us, what is etched in my mind is the letter Fanon's wife wrote to the editors of his books, asking them to remove Sartre's introduction because of his position supporting Zionism in Israel after the 67 war. And her words were, he is no longer one of us. And so one of us, and by that she meant herself and Frantz Fanon, is on the side of the Palestinian people, is on the side of the struggle against colonialism, whether it was in Algeria, in Guinea-Bissau, or in Palestine and Lebanon. So it's critical that now the genocidal moment has come that these diagnosticians are called out.

Lara Sheehi: That's right, yeah. And Josie, yeah, was unbending in saying that. In one part, you all say, our will cannot accept accommodating the existing order, but on dismantling its foundations, regardless of the balance of power. And I think this plays into that, is that, to me, whatever your theory has done over time, if at this moment, You are not mobilizing that theory into a praxis that can provide material support for those on the ground. It's worth nothing. And this is our comrade, of course, Basil Al-Araj also has always said that and sort of positioned that, but I think you all are expanding that further, right? You're saying here's what that looks like.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: And the exigency of the genocidal moment really means that we should not tolerate any of this. We don't have the luxury to tolerate any of this. You know, in my day to day work before this war, I had been working on a project treating 1,400 Lebanese children wounded by Israel in the previous war. But since the ceasefire, I treated 70 Lebanese children wounded by Israeli air raids that happened in the 15 months during the ceasefire. And it all merged into a single continuum of this current war, treating children wounded in this war while bringing kids from Gaza to treat here. So these children, their bodies being extracted, mined, the weapons that mine their bodies for value in the new phase of late capitalism have, you see them being harvested. These are bodies that are being harvested in a continuous process that has started on the 7th of October in this logic. I'm not saying that colonialism, but in this logic where as Ali Qadri says, settler late capitalism For late capitalism, colonial wars are no longer a tool to ensure extraction, but actually the mechanism for value production, i.e. that the killing and the wounding and the creation of human waste is now, in late capitalism, the main mode of profit generation in capitalism. And that profit is extracted from the bodies of these children and their families and their dead ones and their loved ones. as they were in Gaza, as they are in Iran. That's what now capitalism has entered the continuous war in the region, not as a geopolitical or a kind of international relations move, but actually as an economic mechanism of value extraction.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, I definitely felt through this that there was a lot of relevant analysis from Ali Qadri to the conditions that you're describing and why we're in a different phase and need new mechanisms and a new understanding to go forward. you provide some of that in this document by acknowledging that you can't just have this criticism of the bankruptcy of the intellectual class as it has thus been constituted and aligned, but try and offer what aligning with popular forces for liberation might look like in the cultural alternative of resistance. And you had three key principles here. One, rooting knowledge and lived reality. Two, intellectual sovereignty and dismantling the colonial lexicon. And then three, democratizing knowledge and turning ideology into material force. All of them sound very, very important. I'm wondering if maybe we could just start with that first one of what your concept was of what being rooted, and you've used this term before at the outset, in lived reality, what that looks like and how do we distinguish between it and these other more bankrupt, abstracted forms of knowledge?

Ghassan Abu Sittah: The exigency of the lives of Palestinians in the tents of Gaza, in the West Bank with the destruction of the majority of the refugee camps, and the ethnic cleansing through settler pogroms of the rural parts of the West Bank in South Lebanon and the southern border, the southern suburb of Beirut, that lived experience testifies to the historical exigency of the genocidal moment that we can no longer afford that gray zone in which there is a potential for a kind of dialogue with colonial powers. because these very colonial powers are actively participating in the elimination of the indigenous population of this land. You know, it's the dialogue between the knife and the knack. We cannot have dialogue between the knife and the neck. And since it's our neck, and it's the necks of our people in these tents, in the prisons, where a generation of 10,000 Palestinian young men and men who've had their lives stolen from them are being intentionally wiped out through hunger and through disease and now through a law that will allow for their execution and the same in lebanon where we witnessed humanity's largest crime of intentional mutilation in the Pager attack that took, destroyed the lives of 4,000 Lebanese and intentionally mutilated them, and then was celebrated in the most grotesque form by white supremacist psychopathology. Again, one of the other things that we have to, in returning to these roots, And in moving forward, we have to acknowledge in the Arab world the poverty of our understanding of Western racism and understanding of white supremacy and the way white supremacy functions and the way white supremacy acts is a political tool where people are racialized and then non-racialized as we saw with the Irish in the UK until the late 80s where they became white after the late 80s when it was necessary for the European Union project. So all of this says to us that there are intellectual pressing projects that we need to engage in in the Arab world, in looking at our comrades, African-American comrades, and understanding the anti-racist literature so that we understand the racialization of us, of our bodies, of our children, the ungrievability of these dead children on a scale that is only understood by properly understanding the way that you can no longer talk about capitalism without speaking about its racializing logic and racism without speaking about its capitalist engine. And so moving forward, there are a lot of projects that we need to recapture in order to be true to the lived experience lived ideal the lived experiences of people on the ground of our our people otherwise we will betray them you know you will betray them by overtly uh as these functional uh um intellectuals do or covertly by failing to address the struggle properly and to see that they do not have the luxury of your time, that that exigencies means immediate action is needed because their lives are being harvested. The whole idea And I did a paper. I was very fortunate to work with a Palestinian epidemiologist who works in the States. And I did a paper on him looking at lost lives, you know, three million lost human years. in Gaza. And if you take that and apply that to the social genocide of austerity in the global south and the global north, where you can see the difference in life expectancy between one group and another. And in Glasgow, where I have an appointment, where you cross the street, there is a street in Glasgow, if you cross it, life expectancy drops by 10 years. That metric of lost human years is what Ali Qadri calls the accumulation of human waste by shortening the lives of surplus populations, whether they're economically surplus populations in the global north or politically surplus populations in this region.

Lara Sheehi: which goes to your point of like the ethical imperative to root ourselves in the experience, because if you can cross the street and your life expectancy drops 10 years, what does it mean that we're not including that in how we imagine things unfold? What are the daily lives look like for folks and where the source of their resistance comes from? Right. And, and our commitment to that, why we need to be aligned.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Unless you're,

Lara Sheehi: This might be another Lebanese glitch here that we got.

Adnan Hussein: Looks like it's frozen. Hopefully we can reconnect.

Lara Sheehi: Hopefully he'll come back. But maybe in the meantime, Adnan, like just some thoughts that you have as we're, because I know you and I both sort of looked at this document and- That's right. Yeah.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, well, one thing, and I was thinking about also in this is it's very important to figure out what the critical apparatus for self-evaluation here is, because I think there are a lot of people who will believe that they are, in fact, by working in various, universities, NGOs, because they personally feel in solidarity and against Zionist occupation and oppression, they will feel that this critique doesn't really apply to them. I mean, a lot of people... imagine that what they're doing is somehow resistant or contributing and i think this is a much more radical ethical demand that's being asked for here and so i think that's going to be something important is how do we turn this reflection to analyze what we're doing to make sure that we actually align ourselves with the people in the ways that this document recommends but i believe that he's uh restored his

Lara Sheehi: Yes, exactly. Maybe we can take that up after this. The second point that you all make in the cultural alternative to resistance, Ghassan, is intellectual sovereignty and dismantling the colonial lexicon. I'm wondering if you can sort of flesh that out for folks. And again, folks, I dropped the link in the chat and it's in the show notes too, so you can follow along as Ghassan sort of walks us through it.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: So what is critical, and again, to go back to our kind of anti-colonial heritage, is to understand what has happened to these intellectuals through the eyes and the work of people like Amy Cesar. who, with Fanon, writes about the way these intellectuals internalize that racial hierarchy and accept the rung in which that they occupy and their people occupy. And what we're witnessing is a new, you know, just like the colony moved with people of color to the global north, The compradorial intellectual moved from the colony to the colony in the global north and the compradorial intellectual of color. But these people have internalized the racial ladder and have accepted their place and their rung. And what they attempt to do is to try to, as compradorial classes always do, offer themselves as the intermediary between the colonial power and become the kind of local scribe in dealing with the East. And what they try to do, these compradorial intellectuals of color is ventriloquize these masses. Pretend that they still speak in the name of these masses. And then offer themselves maybe in a rung that's slightly higher than the rung of these unwashed masses, but still accepting that they need to occupy one of the rungs in the social hierarchy. And we saw this with Mamdani in the last few days and Sousa Naboul Hawa. Any rooted structural understanding of the way colonialism works will needs to understand that reformism is a protective mechanism for the colonial empire it is not a it's not a victory. Reformism prevents real change and these reformist characters that come along when the empire needs them to prevent the potential for real revolutionary change. will betray you that's their job because they accept the empire in its widest and they they even more dangerously will tell you that we are the boundary of opposition and there's nothing you know it's like a fat flat earth approach if you go beyond me you'll just fall off the edge of the earth And so these reformists, this new generation of reformist intellectuals and politicians of color are now offering the empire to try to sap up like blotting paper the consequences of the genocide and prevent real change from happening.

Adnan Hussein: it's why sorry go ahead then oh no i was just gonna say yeah um that's why we're going to see a flurry of like studies you know that will be coming out in literary and theory and all of that that invoke you know gaza the genocide but um have all of the features that you mentioned that you've been criticizing and it's just part of

Ghassan Abu Sittah: It's historicization. One of liberal colonialism's most important tools is historicization. The problem is, while these liberal institutions were engaging in an orgy of historicization, where everything, including the soft furnishings, were being decolonized, there comes Gaza's genocide, and suddenly they return to their raison d'etre. i.e. as institutions that were built on slavery money, that grew fat on colonial theft, And they had to very quickly backtrack and go to their original aims, the original aims under slavery and under colonialism. And so historicization is a critical tool for the liberal wing of the empire. where you kind of shake your head and you say, you know, but it's going to be different now. And that was the past, but this is the, you know. And then they were saying that when they were decolonizing everything. And then Gaza happens. And we discovered that, you know, white supremacy and European North American political identity had not evolved an inch over the last 200 years, not an iota over the last 200 years. And so all of this historicization was exactly that, a part of the largesse of the victory that has happened since the middle 70s, the mid 70s. first against anti-colonial movements in the Global South and then in the late 70s against organized labor in the Global North. But once that luxury of excess power and victory disappeared and there was the potential for real radical change as a result of what was happening in Gaza and the steadfastness of Palestinians, that meant that the project went on for two and a half years, as opposed to was over in a few months, as was originally planned, you needed to go back to reformism. You needed the Oslo moment in the global north. You needed the Mandela walking out of prison moment in the global north. And behold, you have a new reformist who's the son of an immigrant.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, well, you had the leader of the U.S. empire who was the son of an immigrant, right?

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Yes, but I mean, the son of a colonial indigenous immigrant.

Adnan Hussein: Yes, yes. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting that you say this technique or tactic of historicization. Now, you know, as a historian, of course, I have to try and come to grasp with the way you're talking about the use of history. that is to turn it away from drawing a kind of these, you know, kind of maybe from similar to the point that Edward Said was making is that actually you have to take the specifics of the experience to connect it with some larger universal principles and demands and change. I wonder if you still see a place, like I think history can and must be a radical resource for struggle. Like, you know, we must learn from... Absolutely.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: But it's the trick that somehow there's a rupture within Western behavior between the past and the present. That's what I mean about historicization. It's the pretend history belongs somewhere to another paradigm in another universe, rather than history is a continuum that we live now. And unless we dismantle the mechanisms and the processes and the the extractive economic dimension of these processes of colonialism, i.e. Western capitalism, we will live history. I mean, you know, for my generation of Palestinians, we were living the genocide, but we were also reliving what my father went through in the Nakba. i.e. realizing, understanding my father 17 years after he died, 15 years after he died, understanding what it meant for him in his early 20s to have to rethink what it means to be Palestinian as a result of the Nakba, the way I and every Palestinian, and also every individual who identifies as Palestinian, have to rethink what it means to be Palestinian in the genocidal age.

Lara Sheehi: Yeah. And before then, before we move to the last point, which I think you can take up, I love that you said this new generation of reformists, because I think that precision is actually really important because you're drawing out the mechanics of of this project that has always been around. And that's part of why you all start with sort of poking holes in the constitutive limitations of words like apartheid or something like that. And then you all sort of insist that we need to be precise. Talk about lexical, right? Dismantling the colonial lexicon is that relying on these concepts that in and of themselves have constitutive limitations as a part of the shoring up project These are the specific things that also birth these reformists, also not a new phenomenon, right? We can call them counterinsurgent. So Mamdani's sort of rise is a counterinsurgency. It takes energy from the revolutionary movement.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: The pretense of change as the most important part to aborting change.

Lara Sheehi: That's right. That's exactly right. And derails us from our commitments to the trenches, to the tunnels, to the prison cells, to the camps, right? And it didn't take very long for him to actually make that known. So I think sometimes folks get... upset. And I think this is also a function that you all are drawing out for us, that this internalized racism and this internalized imperial sort of white supremacy positions us to be happy when we get crumbs. And instead, what you're saying is that this very, this crumbing, this bread crumbing that we have accepted as normative is is actually part of the problem because I mean, talk about the parallel process that like you can sort of subsist off of crumbs, but you're not going to thrive and you're certainly not going to be able to bring into being the region not only that we deserve, but that we demand that we demand our region to be transformed. We demand our region to be free of the powers of imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism. And I think this is why I love that precision of you kind of going back and saying this is not a new process. This has always been around. It's precisely why we need to demand a new way forward.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: Absolutely. And we need to understand that the other side goes through phases. where they require reformist moments in order to survive. And so the genocide is as much an intrinsic part of the settler colonial project, the Zionist settler colonial project, as was the Madrid Agreement, as was Oslo. They were both critical. There were both Part of the different phases. And therefore, if you accept crumbs and these crumbs might be large today because they need to feed you enough to shut you up. there will come a day when they come for you to wipe you out because the logic of elimination as patrick wolf told us the logic of elimination is critical to understanding the relationship between the settler and the indigenous population if not today then tomorrow If they want to feed you up, they're just fattening you for the slaughter on another day. And that's what Oslo did to the Palestinians. Oslo altered, as we saw during the genocide, structurally altered Palestinian society inside the West Bank and decapitated its ability to resist in a in a positive and meaningful way. And that was the critical job of Oslo. And we saw it. And what Trump wants is to engineer that process in Palestinian communities inside Gaza to prevent that revolutionary movement from happening again by completely dismantling it. What Zionism wants to do in the region now is change the essence, the sociological makeup of those communities where resistance has always come. It's beyond, it tried mowing the lawn and the lawn is growing faster than the lawn mower can recharge and come back. And therefore an intentional attempt at permanently altering the sociological makeup of communities identified as breeding grounds for resistance. is what is being engineered now. And whether these communities are the refugee camps in the West Bank, the villages of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza, the whole of South Lebanon, the Shia in Lebanon, all of these communities are now going to be subjected to a quantity of violence that induces sociological change. But what we have in our favor and what we're witnessing now, we've witnessed in the last two weeks and what we've witnessed in Gaza is that All of the technology, all of the AI, all of the electronic reconnaissance where they can even read your mind if they want to. All of this, all of this information that they have on you through your phone and through CCTV and through your feces and through everything. cannot alter the fact that their racism towards you blinds them to your ability to resist. That's the bizarre thing, that cognitive dissonance that exists in the mind of the decision maker, whether it's Trump, whether it's Netanyahu, whether it's the Israeli military or the Pentagon. They view us through racialized eyes that cannot comprehend our ability to be equals in terms of resistance. And that negates the majority of the technological advancement that they have. So rendering them blind, not because they don't know everything about us, is that their brain cannot process it as a result of their racism.

Adnan Hussein: I think that's an absolutely important point. It is the racism, it's the Islamophobia, it's the Orientalism that led them to choose these various tactics to be unprepared for resistance, both in Gaza and in what we've witnessed the last few days, the last two weeks in Iran. I think that's actually a very hopeful component, you know, of what we're witnessing. And it reminds me that it seems like it's so difficult, you know, for these people compromised and compradore intellectuals i mean i feel like how can they not see that uh we are all targets you know that this is the progress of what's happening who thinks that they can be you know they can somehow buy their way this is what a lot of these gulf states thought is that somehow they could buy their way into whiteness into acceptance within you know the the empire that they could be like the zionists okay you know we can create a little haven No, that's a separator from the rest of the region, separator from the peoples of the region, artificial states and artificial intelligence that go hand in hand, that this is the kind of economies that they have. You know, it just seems like those delusions have to be being rent by, you know, ripped apart by what's actually happening.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: And that's what I mean about the poverty of... anti-racist discourse within Arab anti-colonial projects. We don't understand the overwhelming majority of Arab intellectuals, even the revolutionary ones, really do not understand the psychopathology of white supremacy. And that the critical, one of the many critical projects is to embed that in our anti-colonial thinking for the future, for the present.

Adnan Hussein: absolutely i mean i think that's part of the reason why is because if you just take the history and the framework of racism in western hemisphere as a product of the atlantic you know world system and enslavement of black africans and believe that that's the only frame under which racism operates within white supremacist logics then you will neglect the fact of the you know the continuing legacies of colonialism in Asia, in West Asia, South Asia, et cetera, and also why I like to take it back to an era even before the dominance of European kind of power, which is again, getting back, I know I'm a medieval historian and I always have to bring up the Crusades, but to me, this is the training ground for a longer of this project and process where, you know, Islam, Islamophobia, there was Islamophobia basically being developed, you know, anti-Arab, anti-Eastern peoples. And this is definitely something that we need to incorporate. But it leads me to, you know, maybe want to come to this third point here in democratizing knowledge and turning ideology into material force, especially, I mean, I think we can all understand democratizing knowledge and you've been undermining this division between the intellectuals and the people as a false division that has been created for these people who want to be in relation to power, in relation to privilege, or who have absorbed. So if we democratize knowledge from the trenches, from the prisons, and so on, this will be very valuable, invaluable in the struggle for liberation. But turning ideology into material force, this was a very interesting kind of idea. How is the... kind of recognizing and understanding of these actual realities and of the framework that you're trying to provide for analysis of them, capable of acting as itself, you know, a material force that contributes to liberation. What were you thinking here in this point, in this section?

Ghassan Abu Sittah: It is that, unfortunately, And part of the way the empire ensured that it can tolerate critical theory discourse within corners of academia, that critical theory discourse or that anti-colonial discourse or that discourse that analyzes coloniality and racism never seeps into the masses. is by getting these people to invent a new language that nobody understands in their writing. I mean, I challenge any public intellectual who's not an anthropologist to understand what the fuck any of these people is talking about, unless they have a glossary of these words. I challenge anybody within the kind of mainstream public intellectuals to understand 90% of the very useful and the critical lenses that a lot of these academics were look using, but they had accepted to create the language of super specialization, so that the masses never understand so that the general public never understands or the general public of intellectuals never understands what they're talking about. And so at least if your is from the start of you seeking knowledge, your intention is liberatory, then your language has to be liberatory. And so your language is liberated, not in a condescending way and assuming that the masses do not understand, but in preventing yourself from inventing a Klingon language that makes sure that nobody understands. And so what you do is you basically... piss into the wind, you'd think that you're pretending that you're discussing something that is profoundly anti colonial, anti capitalist, but you're using a language that nobody else can understand. And that's the danger. That's what's happened in the last 10 years, in the kind of anti colonial studies, critical theory studies, anti racial studies, even in some of the feminist discourse and feminist discourse of color. You need to talk the way regular people talk. And there's nothing wrong with regular people. It's you that's fucked up. It's you that's invented the language that insidiously alienates them so that they don't understand what you're saying. because what you're describing is their daily lives. You're not inventing a new material. What you're basically saying is, here's a lens, put it on, see these lives. And all of these theories and all of these discourses are akin to an old style optician who used to kind of put the lenses in front of your eyes until you could see clearly. That's what they are. And unless they intentionally or they stop themselves from intentionally alienating the masses through the specialist language, then they will be insignificant. and they will be collusive in the oppression of these masses. That's right.

Lara Sheehi: Yes. And it's you're sort of calling on a divestment from like turning away from power, which is what it is. It's soft power. Like you are choosing to link up with power and stabilize that, whether that's through your career or advancement or or a disidentification from people fighting on the ground as though what we do is more superior or whatever the course is. to a recommitment to what it actually means, right? And if you don't do that, to at least not be able to gatekeep in a way that also showcases that somehow you are innocent and I think this is the piece that is so important is that we are at the time I think it's what you call the luxury you don't have the luxury anymore we are at the time now and I've said this before I think psychologically you know in our fields that there's always this like oh and and this is a meme of course that you have to hold on to nuance and all these sorts of things it's like under the crash of of fascism, splitting forfeits its pathology. You need to take a stance. You need to choose a side.

Ghassan Abu Sittah: It's not pathology, it's collusion. It's collusion. All of these are forms of collusion.

Lara Sheehi: That's right. Exactly. And that's all it is. So I just want to read this part from your charter because it's so important. And this gets to Adnan's point about these Arab states is that it's the same sort of innocence. And in what is happening right now is a demand that like there is a price that you cannot that your safety was actually always predicated on the backs of those that are most vulnerable. And it can't be Lebanese and Palestinian and Yemeni and Sudanese people who carry that without you feeling what it means to actually be in collusion with empire. So I'm going to read this one piece here. And then I think Adnan... has a question and then we can sort of move towards wrapping up. But if Hassan is not with us, I'll just read this for the folks as well who haven't had the chance to read the piece. It says, this charter calls for reclaiming national decision-making from elites, accustomed to acting as intermediaries and agents and returning it to the masses and the social environments that sustain resistance and shape history through their sacrifices. It is a call to move beyond the politics of begging towards the dismantling of colonial structures. And I just feel like that encapsulates our conversation.

Adnan Hussein: Absolutely. That's an excellent crystallization of what this call is really about, right? And why it is a radical liberatory move, because it really is... Demanding that we all, whatever, you know, this is about intellectuals and, you know, that sometimes, you know, annoys people. Well, you know, like what's so important about them? Actually, the problem is the intellectuals. They are actually so complicit and collusive. And part of the kind of apparatus of confusing many, you know, people is, um that uh it um you know has to actually be analyzed and understood in some way to because you know, it is doing actual damage, right? It's not just that they're irrelevant because they're cut off. They're actually doing damage to the prospects of resistance. And this is not easy to kind of convince, you know, academics that this, intellectuals, writers, and so on, that they are somehow participating and contributing You know, we don't want it to be all about, you know, calling everybody out for everything that they've done. Everyone has to work within what they're capable of in an honest and committed way. But that's the problem is that there's so much dishonesty in the obfuscation, in the kind of pretenses that mask the way in which, you know, you are compromised by your relations with these institutions and that if you're not clear, uh you know about that then a lot of the work that you're doing is going to be uh counter-revolutionary in some important way so yes yeah yeah exactly um it looks like we might have you but not your uh video right now can you hear us Maybe we don't have the audio either.

Lara Sheehi: I have a sense that his phone cut out from power and he's trying to get into the...

Adnan Hussein: Yes, yes. But... Through his laptop, I guess.

Lara Sheehi: Oh, here we go.

Adnan Hussein: This is the problem is that I don't know if... If we just have the audio, we can kind of maybe have another question and conclude. So I wouldn't worry too much about the video. Ghassan, if you can hear us and if we can hear you, that's the most important for the moment.

Lara Sheehi: You know what? Why don't I just call and have him be on?

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, that's possible. Yeah, let's manage that. Meanwhile, I just want to remind everyone of the importance of supporting Palestinians on the ground. I know people have been very generous. over the course of the last two, two and a half years. But from the organizations that I'm in contact with and the appeals that I see, I know that focus and attention has gone, you know, many other places. And of course, there are so many needs in our societies and our communities and When, you know, Palestine isn't front page news, it sometimes doesn't occur to us that these people are still essentially suffering under blockade, and they need our support and I really recommend the Samir project because it is a mutual aid organization that works for providing collective solutions to help Palestinians stay on the land and maintain their resistance as existence. Their very existence in the land is resistance, and we can do much to help support and be in solidarity with them. So I want to recommend, again, the Ramadan campaign. Right now, the Ramadan campaign is at close to 400,000 pounds. Oh, it's just gone above 410,000 pounds. Their goal is 500,000. And there's a few days left in this month. If you can contribute and support, even if it's only $10, $15, $20, it's going to be so much appreciated. So please join me during this broadcast if you can. I've put it in the chat, the link, for you a couple of times. And I'm doing so one more time here while we have this moment just to remind you to please donate and be generous if you can. We have him here, but maybe... Can you hear us, Hassan?

Lara Sheehi: Okay, looks like, yeah, his phone... Yeah, phone died. Yeah. So we're trying to see here if there's anything that he'd like us to sort of end with and figure out one way to sort of end with his words. But in the meantime, was there anything else, Adnan, that you... wanted to pick up or think about?

Adnan Hussein: For further thinking, and I would love if he's able to come back to hear his thoughts on it, but for further thinking, especially since he was among his most recent remarks, he was talking about the importance of being able to speak in a comprehensible language of the people, i.e. ordinary language and not a lot of like very abstracted, jargon-ridden kind of ways that alienate people from the analysis, the understanding of reality that is necessary for liberation to really see conditions for what they are. But one thing that I wondered about and, you know, it's not that I think is characterize it in any incorrect way in what's actually said in the document but is an area for further thinking about the relevance and how to adapt this very radical kind of understanding and to connect if you want to align with the masses and if we're thinking about this moment when resistance is taking place is how to connect with for example religious language with the kind of popular beliefs and understandings that I wouldn't say can be separated from their experience of resistance and is an non-Western anti-colonial framework that is indigenous for their own self-expression of their demands their liberation of what they're seeking and why they fight and the drawing upon those resources what can a document like this for example say to us to help us connect with that you know present reality of the culture of resistance as it is as it has developed and unfolded, you know, in West Asia for Palestine, we know for, you know, Southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, you know, the Islamic resistance in Palestine, and of course, also the importance and significance of anti-colonial resistance against the empire that Iran is waging right now to decolonize the region. So that would be something that I think would be interesting to talk about. The document doesn't itself say, oh, we need a secular vision of liberation. It doesn't say that, but its language and its concepts are very much using and developing from ones that would be familiar to anti-imperialist, anti-colonial left secular kind of doctrine, theory, writings, and so on, Fanon, Cabral, and so on. So I just wonder what's the relationship now in our kind of contemporary resistance culture and how we can connect these things. That's kind of my main thought. Yeah.

Lara Sheehi: Yeah. And I hope that Hassan is able to join us or at a follow up or anything. But I was also sort of you and I had had this discussion a little bit before we started. And, you know, Hassan immediately when he started was saying, you know, both secular and religious, like these compradore class. And I think that's actually really important because the point is it derails religion. the actual movement on the ground. And I think that part of what the, for me, what the document does, particularly in the context of the region, and I think this is a call out, a locale call out, right, that is rooted in a sort of tradition of Arab intellectualism that has been taken up around these issues is saying that if you support the resistance, it's obvious who the resistance is right now. Like those of us, you know, the Communist Party in Lebanon has not been active, right? And so I think if there's any way we're talking about, or when we're talking about disarmament, who are we talking about? When the Lebanese state, is gung-ho about following through with disarmament conversations and calling it, I think, what does the document say? It says like weapons, weapons regulation that like intellectuals end up and come use that language that is like a little bit less you know inflammatory or looks purports to not actually be agents of the state because the state is using disarmament but it's one and the same thing and I think that For us, if we root this in the region, it's clear who is being talked about, right? That there are only specific factions and people and militants that are taking up arms. And we understand what that means, which is a reconfiguration of the access of resistance in the decades, of course, definitely in decades since we can think about whether it's the 60s or 70s or anything like that, that we were talking about that, that right now we understand who the people are that are taking up arms and fighting a liberation struggle. I think there is a call for intellectuals to sort of not do the work of discrediting or disidentifying or moving away from this just because it runs through Islam, right? And I think there's something to contend with that has come up and it's a debate certainly that has existed in our region and beyond our region for a very long time, but we are in an inflection point where this needs serious study and what does it mean for us to be able to continue uh this debate but also who are we locking arms with i mean i think that's the call is like there's a decision point here and who are we locking arms with is a really important question for me being from the region, is that there seems to be, I think, what you are sort of positioning us to look towards is what is the portable logic that can be carried forward, right?

Adnan Hussein: Indeed.

Lara Sheehi: We can stop hearing our own voices and hear it directly from you.

Adnan Hussein: Oh, you're muted, perhaps. Or something, the sound, we're not hearing you, the sound. No, unfortunately, we see you.

Lara Sheehi: You know what? Can you?

Adnan Hussein: Yeah, unfortunately, we're not hearing you. We see you well. Okay, let's try now. If you speak now, perhaps we will hear you. Oh, no, sorry. Yeah, we aren't, unfortunately.

Speaker 4: Can you call Ghassan and tell him to check which mic is inputted? Which one is inputted, Ghassan? Check which one's selected under the mic. Well, I can't hear you, so.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Is there an onboard one? Okay. You don't have any other ones? You don't have another mic you can plug in?

Lara Sheehi: Real time. Okay. Ghassan, is your phone working? Yeah. Can I call you? Or is it charging?

Speaker 4: Charging.

Lara Sheehi: He said charging, yeah.

Adnan Hussein: Right.

Speaker 4: It's charging, yeah. Can you check your sound settings in your computer to see if it's muted, if the actual mic is muted? Everyone gets to see how the sausage gets made.

Lara Sheehi: Exactly. This folks, welcome to troubleshoot.

Adnan Hussein: Yeah. You're getting an exclusive behind the scenes look at, you know.

Lara Sheehi: Which our comrade Jay is having a great time watching because he knows the drill too. That's right. Millennials are killing capitalism. Make sure you follow them.

Adnan Hussein: Oh, Steven with a good one. Sina Ex Machina. Don't feed his ego, okay? It's already too outsized. Don't put him in the deus role here. Deus Ex Machina. He'll be a monster.

Lara Sheehi: Is Sina the one also putting these on screen?

Adnan Hussein: No, I just put that on. Yeah, yeah.

Lara Sheehi: Appreciate your patience, folks. No, we can't hear you. Sadly, sadly. If you want to type any last words, we just want to give you the last word and appreciate your time and you, you know, beaming in from Lebanon with all.

Speaker 4: You can get him to record a voice note. Just get him to record a voice note and we'll play it. Can you do that yourself?

Lara Sheehi: His phone is charging.

Speaker 4: Oh, the voice is charging. Oh, my. Libnan strikes again. Oh, my.

Lara Sheehi: Exactly.

Adnan Hussein: Yes. Aluta continua. The struggle continues. Indeed. Indeed.

Lara Sheehi: Yeah, that's right. That's right. We want to give you your evening back. We will have follow-ups. We appreciate you and your comrades so much. I want to personally and publicly say I am committed to this call. Any risk that comes with being in locked arms with our comrades on the ground and never separating the intellectual from the revolutionary praxis. And I urge those of us to listen to what Hassan was saying about what is upon us right now, the urgency, what is demanded of us, and what it means to dignify the sacrifices that people have made. And we know who it is who have made the sacrifices. It's clear as day to all of us, and it's our ethical responsibility to be not just in abstract solidarity, but in material solidarity with them as well. Adnan, did you want to say anything else?

Adnan Hussein: No, just by way of conclusion to thank you so much, Hassan. It was a real honor to be in conversation with you and to learn from you. This is a very important call and document. and we hope there will be continuing response and reaction uh you know to people thinking about these important issues and taking a self-critical examination of their position and how they've been engaging with these things because i think it's easy for many people to imagine that they agree but then not look carefully at the ways which they may also be falling short this is not a call to tell others what to do it is a call for us to all adopt this just as uh lara was saying and we thank you for that reminder and for the analysis that you've given a lens for us to think about and also hopefully inshallah you know some very key uh principles by which we can continue and go forward uh and be you know among the school of resistance rather than the school of subservience no matter what your beliefs your sect your religion uh etc you can be in the school of resistance and you must avoid and we must defeat uh and isolate and marginalize the school of subservience so thank you so much everyone thank you

Lara Sheehi: Thank you.

Adnan Hussein: And thank everyone for being here. The chat and the discussion taking place in the comments was remarkable and wonderful. It's always so difficult when you're talking together to do more than maybe highlight a few comments, but there were many points that were raised that could have been, and questions even asked, that would have been really interesting to take up together. I hope this will be part of a continuing discussion about basically the key issues we're dealing with. This is why it was so fundamental to have this conversation. And we thank you all for coming. Lara, how can people, you know, kind of continue to be connected with psychic militancy?

Lara Sheehi: Yeah. Well, I want to thank you because you have been going hard for all of us. I know you have another recording today. Adnan kind of shows up on our, our, our streams almost every single day and they've been life sustaining Adnan. And that's, that's the, that's part of the work. I think that Hassan and his comrades are sort of talking about a psychic militancy. You can follow us on YouTube. We stream everywhere. There are podcasts. Instagram, but psychic militancy pod, you can become a patron, make sure you subscribe and subscribe to all the comrades shows, right? So East is a podcast is also streaming this ad nun show millennials are killing capitalism and all the red nation, all the folks who form this sort of ecosystem of resistance and a discourse and a public facing production of knowledge that sort of runs counter and to mainstream news sources, but also is unabashedly anti-imperialist. And I think that's the piece that we're talking about, is what does it mean to actually practice that, to be unbending in our positions around that, to understand that as part of our ethical call, and if nothing else, to make sure that none of these systems can continue to work under the guise of innocence and without being challenged and antagonized. Black Liberation Media, yes, thank you. Our comrades at Black Liberation Media, Derard and Renee, who are in the chat as well. All of them are fucking awesome.

Adnan Hussein: So again, everyone, thank you for coming. Stay tuned. A lot more coming on all these spaces and channels. Resistance is Fertile, collaboration that I'm doing on Iran versus the Epstein empire. We'll have more episodes there and other conversations. Stick with us. And until next time, peace with justice and solidarity to you all. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.

Speaker 4: Great.