Indigeneity & Palestine w/ Nick Estes & Mohamed Abdou

Speaker 1: You remember Din Din Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Huckamacki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckamacki, unfortunately only joined by one of my usual co-hosts. We are joined by Professor Adnan Hussain, who is Historian Director at the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello Adnan, how are you doing today?

Adnan Hussain: I'm doing great, Henry. It's excellent to be with you.

Henry Huckamacki: It's nice to see you as always. Unfortunately, we're not joined by our other usual co-host, Brett O'Shea, who, of course, is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and the Red Menace podcast, as he had something come up last minute. But we are definitely looking forward to having Brett back on the program again soon to co-host these conversations. We have a really great conversation ahead of us today with two exceptional activist scholars. And before I introduce that topic and our guests, I just want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to keep making episodes like the one that you are going to hear as well as. or more than 150 others at this point by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A, history. If you're unable to contribute financially at this point, of course, you can always share our episodes and rate us on whatever podcast platform you use. That also is of great benefit to the show. You can also keep up to date with what Adnan, Brett, and myself are up to individually as well as the show collectively by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod with Gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. So as I mentioned, we have a great topic today and two excellent guests. The topic is going to be around indigeneity and the current situation in Gaza. We have two great guests, Mohamed Abduh, who is coming in to Columbia University and also is author of the fascinating book, which I know there's an episode of on the Majlis podcast, Adnan's other podcast. Islam and anarchism, relationships and resonances. So, Mohamed, it's nice to have you on the show. Thank you.

Mohamed Abdou: Assalamu alaikum, Henry, and I'm very honored to be with you all and with Adnan and with Nick. So thank you.

Henry Huckamacki: Absolutely. It's a pleasure. We're also joined by returning guest Nick Estes, who is a historian at University of Minnesota, author of Our History is the Future, does a lot of work with the Red Nation. Everybody loves Nick. And Nick, you're a friend of the show, although it's been a long time since we've had you on the show. I feel like we've kind of been negligent in having you come back on. But it's nice to have you on the show, Nick.

Nick Estes: Yeah, it's great to be back.

Henry Huckamacki: So I'm going to actually just open the conversation for broad discussion. I'm going to turn it over to Muhammad first, because this topic was actually posed by Muhammad to Adnan. And then Adnan, of course, forwarded this idea to all of us. And we were very happy to have this conversation. So Muhammad, can you introduce this topic for us and talk about why this topic was at the forefront of your mind and why you think it warrants the conversation that we're having today?

Mohamed Abdou: Well, thank you very much again. I'm very humbled and honored to be with you all. Let me start with just a Quranic prayer. And undo the nod in my tongue such that our speeches become legible and sort of accessible. to one another and certainly to the listeners. The topic really that I was thinking about, and obviously this is Moses' prayer on meeting Pharaoh that I just recited, but the topic really is, I think, is quite vital and quite important for several reasons. The question of settler colonialism, the question of indigeneity, which becomes really crucial and and its deployment both as a racial and ethnic construct, but also as a non-racial and ethnic analytic, if you will. But also what I personally find to be problematic in terms of the secularization of Palestine as a struggle, particularly given the significance, transnational significance of 1492. And if we're talking about decolonization, if we're talking about abolition, if we're talking about anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, then we need to be talking about transnationalism. And I think 1492 serves us in so many ways as year zero. And it's very interesting, obviously, the way that the U.S. constructs its history, more or less. You know, this is the premise, in a certain sense, of the 1619 Project and sort of the ongoing erasure of Indigenous people and their assignment as signposts to history versus, say, the so-called Canada. And obviously, I'm speaking from Algonquin territory at the moment, Anishinaabe territory. And the context of Ottawa. So that's sort of what sparked the interest, the situating of Islam as a quintessential other. Islam is not an exception, but it is made to be exceptional that way. And I think, yeah, those are some of the reasons, if you will, of what to do with Islam, what to do with Islamism. We're seeing a generation change. Zed, reading OBL's letter to America, we're seeing, you know, discussions of conversion to Islam, reminiscent of, you know, post 9-11. The question of, yeah, the so-called war on terror that I argue is a war on Islam and a war that's been conjured within Islam along racial and ethnic and sectarian lines. So, yeah, that's just very briefly what some of the dimensions as to why I proposed or thought through this discussion on Roundtable.

Henry Huckamacki: Before Adnan hops in with a question, because I know Adnan is going to have a lot more to say on the Islam front than I inevitably will during this conversation, I want to make sure that I bring in Nick early here also. So the key question here, one of the key questions anyway, is indigeneity, which is a question that comes up time and time again. And in this context, in terms of the conflict between Palestine and the so-called State of Israel, So the question of indigeneity is coming up more and more often, even than it has in the past, I think, at least in terms of what I'm seeing. But the question of indigeneity is a quite complex one. You know, it's not as simple as just looking and saying, you know, at time X, this people were here. We have to look at relationships between settler colonialism and people at a given time. But it, of course, does not extend to that. We have to look at the history, the relationships to the land. often get flattened into just this term indigenous. And people aren't really thinking through the complexities of this term. So Nick, being somebody who is far more qualified to speak on this topic than I am myself, I'm going to turn it over to you. Can you talk a little bit about some of these complexities of indigeneity and how they relate to the context that we're talking about here, just in broad sweeps? Because of course, we're going to dive in much deeper during the conversation as well.

Nick Estes: So that's something that we say as Lakota people, which just means hello, my relations. It doesn't mean like, hello, my human relations. It means everybody, everything. Right. And I start with that because indigeneity, as it's been defined by indigenous people, is fundamentally a way of relating. And if we understand that in the context of settler colonialism, we can understand settler colonialism and its specific intent to break relations, to destroy relations. And I was just recently in a conversation with Mark Lamont Hill and Nora Erekat about the definitions of genocide and the invocation of the Genocide Convention in 1948. And how that legalistic sort of international definition is both an accusation, it's both the prevention of genocide as much as the punishment of genocide. I think we forget the prevention piece, which maybe shows the inadequacy of an international body to actually prevent genocide. But I would I would dare to sort of like recast that definition and looking at like genocide in general and how we actually define it, because it speaks to indigeneity and the indigenous experience, because even Raphael Lemkin himself. And I was listening to your wonderful podcast episode with our friend and comrade, Sharice Bernstelli. And the definition, we charge genocide, right? And looking at the Black freedom struggle and bringing the, you know, invoking the Genocide Convention and trying to bring the sort of accusation and the charge of genocide to the United Nations about the U.S. sort of both its legalistic and sort of informal sort of vigilante terrorism against Black people through the form of lynching. And the sort of critiques of that movement, or excuse me, the criticisms and the attack, you know, and the labeling of that movement as, you know, communist and sort of this plot sort of speaks to a general sort of antipathy towards these particular movements and these accusations. But it also speaks to how genocide itself has been distorted. And specifically from the context of people who have experienced genocide and sort of the way in which it's sort of mobilized in this particular moment as a way to silence Palestinians. Because it's a way to, you know, we have the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism becoming the definition of anti-Semitism, saying that your anti-Zionist is now a social sort of accusation or it's become socialized in the sense that or popularized in the sense that it is now equivocated to anti-Semitism. Think about that. You can't speak about genocide against the actual perpetrators of genocide without being accused of anti-Semitism.

Henry Huckamacki: I want to hop in one quick second, Nick. Just, I believe yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu made a statement where he said that even investigating... Israel's, you know, potential war crime, quote unquote, potential war crimes. This is how he framed it. Investigating potential war crimes by the state of Israel is anti-Semitic in itself. Just the investigation of potential war crimes. So just to add that into this ridiculous definition that you just laid out, we even have people that are trying to push it even further.

Nick Estes: Yeah, and just to kind of speak to some of the topics you've all discussed on your show and the work that you've done, Domenico Lo Sudo wrote a book called War and Revolution. And I implore everyone to read that book because he shows how both anti-communism And the sort of genocide against, you know, Jewish and Romani people and the Nazi genocide against Jewish and Romani people sort of draws from, yeah, Henry's got a copy of it, draws, it uses the language of colonialism, right? 19th century colonialism to enact or to exact a sort of a political terror campaign, a racial terror campaign within the context of Europe. And I bring that up because even Raphael Lemkin, if you look at his, when he writes and defines genocide and he talks about specifically the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, he's using colonial frameworks to do so. Because that's the only language, that's the precedent for this all, right? It's using the technologies of colonialism, it's using the frameworks of colonialism, but also it's an inadequate framework in many ways because it's talking about the context of war. So typically we think of genocide as only occurring when there's a formal declaration of war happening. And that's not useful. I'm making a point here, but so I'm going around about way, but it's not useful for the context of, of thinking about indigenous people in the context of the United States and Canada, because sure. In the United States, there was a formal declared war for a hundred years from 1790 to 1891. There are 14 battle streamers on the U S army flag commemorating the the United States' longest military campaign, which was called the Indian Wars. In 1891, that's actually commemorated with the Wounded Knee Massacre in December of 1890. And so the United States understands, yeah, sure, there was this military campaign against indigenous people. But that's also an inadequate definition of genocide because it places genocide only within the context of war making. And I'm bringing this up because on October 6th, genocide was taking place in Gaza. On October 5th, genocide was taking place in Gaza. Genocide didn't begin after October 7th in Gaza. The conditions of genocide were already taking place. And it happens, and again, this legal framework is important, but it's wholly inadequate in understanding, even through Raphael Lemkin's definition, because he said there were two, there's sort of two definitions of genocide in his framework, and only one made it into the sort of international legal framework. It's vandalism, and mass slaughter in other words cultural destruction and mass slaughter right um cultural destruction is you know we can define that he defines it in a really kind of in-depth way but i think thinking about it in the context of settler colonialism the taking of children The indoctrination of them into, you know, a boarding school system, the erasure of our place names, the destruction of our languages are all part and parcel to a genocidal project. But I think from an indigenous perspective and what defines indigeneity, and I'll quote my comrade Justine Teba, who is doing a teaching here in Minneapolis. She's a Pueblo native. a Pueblo activist who works for Red Media and is part of the Red Nation. She said, had settler colonialism not happened, had the United States not invaded Tewa territory where she is from, she would just be Tewa today. That's all. She would just be Tewa. She wouldn't be indigenous. Because indigenous is fundamentally defined by a colonial condition and the experience of occupation and genocide. So on one hand, it has that sort of negative context, right? But it's as indigenous people, we struggle against those particular things. And even within the legal frameworks of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and how it's been characterized and defined within UN human rights law, Indigeneity is fundamentally about statelessness. And so our human rights and our rights within the context of international law will only be about statelessness in relation to our occupiers. So those are fundamentally prohibitive and limiting frameworks in terms of an articulation of liberation. And I bring this up because when we think about the Palestinian liberation movement, in its broad, you know, historical context, it began from the form of statelessness and defying, defining itself against the occupier, even to just, just to say Palestinian was, you know, a revolutionary act because it was under constant erasure. Um, and, and, when they allied with us within the indigenous movement in the late 60s and 1970s, we begin to see a different definition of indigenousness, right? And I would say it's wholly incomplete. It's something that should be struggled over and redefined. But I think in the context of what we define as indigenous in the context of Palestine, it's interesting now that you know, you have, I can't remember his name. I think his name is Herzog. He's the prime minister, I believe, of Israel, saying that the genocide against Palestinians is fundamentally about saving Western civilization. He's saying that on one side of his mouth. And then on the other side of his mouth, he's saying, we are also the original peoples of this land. How can you be saving Western civilization on one hand by committing genocide against the native population in Palestine, while also claiming to be indigenous. And I think what we're seeing here is the limitations of these sort of frameworks of indigeneity. And I always, in my personal opinion, I think indigenousness or indigeneity is sometimes a limiting framework and can be co-opted into these other sort of, you know, These are the frameworks of a Jewish national project that's fundamentally premised on the elimination of another people, right? So it's a very complicated thing. And I'm not saying that there weren't Jewish people who are indigenous to Palestine. There are, obviously. That's a silly question. But it also... To say that... there's a Jewish population that lives in exile and then must return, and then the people who are resisting them are anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic, fundamentally misplaces the blame because they should be going to Nazi Germany. They should be going to all of Europe and saying, This is what you owe us, right? Not displacing that sort of obligation onto people who had nothing to do with the genocide against Jewish people in Europe or the long history of anti-Semitism within the sort of European tradition. But I'll end it there.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, so many threads to pick up on on what you both have begun with. But just coming back to this, I mean, I'm so glad to have you on to talk about this issue about how the framework of indigeneity has been used and deployed in this context as a response basically to the success of political mobilizing and analyzing ideas Israel through the frame of settler colonialism. This is something that I think Zionist apologists and advocates, particularly in the West, have observed has been very crucial in reframing solidarity and political activism. you know, around, you know, thinking of Israel through the prism of a settler colonial project. And they want to deny that it is a form of settler colonialism by making these claims of indigeneity. And of course, this is all very important in the original Zionist narrative about the suitability of this particular land through these religious, you know, you know, documents and scriptures and, you know, judging, you know, that as a warrant for, you know, recolonization. And so I'll have something that I want to ask Mohamed about this, in particular about secularizing the struggle. But first, just your point about indigeneity, reframing it as fundamentally relational, I think is very important. And then also thinking about it as historical, as something that emerges and develops. as a product of various other factors and forces and as a response, as you alluded to, you know, Zionism is a response to millennia of persecution of the Jews in Europe, their marginalization, and in particular in the 19th century in the era of formation of new nation states and breaking up these kind of old land-based empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, all undergoing various pressures, and there were independence movements of peoples who had been part of multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic polities as subjects, as subordinates, of course, but as subjects integrated into these different kinds of polities were now demanding nation states. And this was seen as an antidote that the very framework of freedom, of political existence in history was having a nation, being a nation, and having a state to sort of ratify that kind of identity. And so it seemed to me the unique kind of problem here that's relevant relationally is that Those who developed this kind of idea of Zionism as a form of Jewish nationalism and as a political project did it to make themselves essentially Europeans or at least modern and enlightened Western people through this project of colonization. of settler colonialism. So whether or not they had historic and religious and ties to the land in various ways, through their cultural inheritance and so on, the project involves them going as colonizers very explicitly in order to remake themselves in the image of modern Europeans. And so they're inhabiting the role of colonists and they're very open and clear about that. And so I think that helps kind of understand the relational dimension here is that you don't have to deny that there is a historic connection and that Jews have lived in this land continuously because the political project, however, was organized in such a way as to make them European, as it were. And so I just wanted to have some kind of sense of that. And in terms of the larger kind of question, the other question here about secularizing the struggle is that in your remarks, Nick also related to something Muhammad was saying, was talking about, which is in a way it's the sanctifying of the state, you know. I mean, this whole kind of, association of Zionism with Judaism, you know, is you're taking a 5,000 year religious and cultural tradition and making it the same as, you know, a political ideology and a movement that has 150 year history. I mean, it's like a real, these are totally not comparable kinds of phenomenon, but what it's doing it is it's kind of sanctifying the state as like so if you charge you know israel should be without impunity because you know in netanyahu's uh words that you were quoting that even investigating it is anti-semitism is a way of sanctifying the state as holy, as not subject to reason, evidence, you know, any of these kinds of things of the kind of a modern political vocabulary is to say it is holy, it is sanctified, it is beyond, you know, critique. And that is the appropriation, you might say, of a religious tradition for, you know, a kind of secularized theocratic kind of position. So I was wondering if either of you had some kind of responses to the way in which settler colonial frame helps us understand each of those two things, you know, one about how to really understand indigeneity and as a frame that's useful or not, in what way, and also The way in which the struggle has been secularized, but yet it operates in this very kind of theological kind of space, you know, that's not subject to normal critique of reason and history.

Mohamed Abdou: And so far as your question goes. And there are so many insightful points that have been raised, obviously, with Nick. And this is maybe why, maybe I'll start off back to, or round us back to 1492. What happened with Muslims and Jews insofar as Andalusia and Spain. And their casting as both savages and heathens. And again, savage was obviously the racial derogatory sort of term that was being used in heathens as godless. Particularly by Ferdinand and Isabel as part of the ongoing crusading project. When we look, though, beyond that, the Columbus's conquester or invasion, and this is why I really prefer even Tiffany Lothabo King's sort of use of the term conquester or settler colonialism, because When they were conquering, obviously, the Taino people, Columbus had referred to the weapons that were being used by the Taino people, that were alfanjis, as simtar weapons, which were being used by Muslims against the Crusades. More than that, even Hernan Cortes referred to Aztec women as Moorish women. He very much said that well and described Aztec temples as mosques. He described Montezuma, the Aztec leader, as a sultan. We see a great deal of, again, analogies because of the world of Christendom that these conquester doors were arriving from. But it wasn't only the ongoing genocide that, again, settler colonialism was very much predicated upon in terms of indigenous people. But we also know that, historically speaking, a third to a fifth of the transatlantic sort of middle passage and transatlantic slaves were Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula and the west coast of Africa as well. So Islam was always hovering there in the background as sort of, again, a quintessential other that couldn't be destroyed head on vis-a-vis the Crusades, but rather had to be dismantled in a certain way within. And so we begin to even look at the Enlightenment scholarship, whether it's Hobbes, Kant, Rousseau and so on. And as Joseph Massad had pointed, there was two simultaneous logics that were being employed. Let's sort of racialize Islam, the various different formations of Islam and African Islam and Asian Islam and Arab Islam and pit them against one another. But also let's harp on the sectarian tendencies and Ahmadi Islam versus a Sufi versus an Ismaili versus a Sunni versus a Shiite and voila Iraq, right, or Afghanistan and so on and so forth. So I think in so many ways that also incepted in terms of, you know, the breakdown of, if you will, traditional formations of the Ummah that existed, and I use that term in terms of the global community of Muslims and non-Muslims together and various different manifestations of them that existed within 1,400 years of Muslim history, loosely speaking, whether we're talking about the Abbasid period, the Ottoman period, whether we're talking even within the context of the Ottoman so-called empire. And so again, there's a lot to disentangle there. So I'm not meaning to homogenize that history because of the different manifestations of the ummah and the significance of that in terms of the global polity, if you will, from a political theological perspective. But that also created a crisis of identity that choose is your affiliation to sort of a nationalist sense of identity, for instance, in the context of a country as Egypt. Are you an Arab nation? Are you an African nation? Where does that then place the Nubian sort of people? Where does that place the Siwa indigenous people? Where does that place Sudanese people who are Egyptians and so on and so forth? And even at a certain point, I mean, Gaza was a part of Egypt. Where does that place Palestinian Egyptians in the context of it all? Or do you have some sense of Muslim belonging? And that's the fracture. This is where we begin to see, at least in the context of North Africa, for instance, in just the broader Suwanna region, if you will, South Asia and North Africa, the split between sort of a pan-Islamist current, a pan-Arab and a pan-Africanist trajectory. And not that the two are irreconcilable with one another, but in a certain sense, different. the spiritual dimension that allows for a transcendence, if you will, at least from an Islamic theological perspective, the transcendence of a racial dimension in terms of the discussion, whereby indigeneity then, as an analytic, is conceived, at least within Muslim terms, as I write in my book, as synonymous with the concept of fitrah. And fitrah is the inclination that all human beings, unlike the original sin, Muslims believe that we're all born in the condition of fitrah, in the sense that we're born to connect with community, connect with non-human life, because we're all khulafat, we're all caretakers of the land, we're all caretakers of one another. So, It's not about a race to innocence, sort of a Shireen Razak sort of puts it. It's not as playing Indian or Indian grandmother syndrome as Philip Deloria had noted it, but rather sort of indigeneity has nothing to do with bloodlines. It doesn't have to do with color of skin. but actually the embodiment of fulfilling acts of compassion, and so far as rahmah, goodness, or what is referred to as ihsan, and to honor communal bonds and reciprocal non-authoritarian and non-materialist horizontal ethical, political, spiritual commitments in relationship to the land, the non-human life. I mean, it's ironic that, you know, there are many chapters in the Quran, for instance, that are named after non-human life, you know, the chapter of the sun, the chapter The chapter of the moon, the chapter of the ants and so on. But Muslims seldom think about the significance of that and our responsibilities, responsibilities, not rights, to non-human life that is a subject with a spirit and not an object that way that can be anthropomorphized. as property, if you will. And so there becomes a disconnect even insofar as our indigeneity in relationship to one another, our ethical, political responsibilities and relationships, but also in relationship to land as well, in which we are severed. Because that's, you know, the first object of colonialism is Patrick Wolfe. had noted, and even Fanon had noted this, is the severance of land, because you sever from land, you sever at the same time the conceptualization of gender, of a people's race, relationships, and so on and so forth, to that land, the conceptualization of masculinity, of femininity, of what constitutes, if you will, so-called or the privacies versus the public domains, if you will. So there's a huge distinction there and a paradigm shift, if you will, and hence a cognitive dissonance that is introduced, psychologically speaking, in a very psycho-effective, violent way to those that are occupied in relationship to land. And this is why somebody like Patti Kerouac, and I love the way that she praises it, the element of carrying our own bundles becomes very important because... Part of the dimension, and we go back to the question of why I really wanted us to get together and discuss this panel, because in so many ways, I'm also very perturbed, if you will, with two things specifically.

Adnan Hussain: Why don't we get into those if you're going to talk about solidarity? I definitely want to get to that topic. But let's pick that up in a moment, I think, because that's a big topic that I think we'll want to discuss. But thank you. Yeah.

Nick Estes: Just to build, I guess, a little bit off of that question, thinking about, I guess, the theological dimensions of settler colonialism, I can only speak to, I guess, the U.S. context. And what really comes to mind when we talk about this is the federal... you know, Supreme court cases specifically like the Marshall trilogy, which create the superstructure for what we know now as federal Indian, you know, law and the grounds in which that, you know, we're sort of like retroactively applied to justify conquest and taking and the taking of the land. And I think of, You know, the Johnson v. McIntosh decision, which is, you know, we're on the 200-year anniversary of that decision. It was 1823, the same year as the Monroe Doctrine, which, you know, they both kind of speak to each other in different ways. But this decision, this federal Supreme Court decision was, you know, at the beginning of Cherokee removal. And Cherokee, you know, the Cherokee Nation in Georgia at that particular moment in time had adopted, had tried to reflect the society that was colonizing it. It was called one of the five, quote unquote, civilized tribes. It had adopted a written constitution. It had created a writing system for its language. It had a newspaper. It had a parliament. It had everything that the United States had in terms of a government. And it even participated in a hierarchy of racialization. It had enslaved African people. It had created a small but not significant, compared to the US system, plantation economy. So it had adopted the very framework that the white settlers had adopted, right? It had even, you know, adopted Christianity in many ways and had, you know, implicated it within its own sort of belief system in the Cherokee belief system. But none of this prevented it from being removed because this, you know, I think it's important to remember that even though, you is you know the framework that we're using it's it's oftentimes we see in the news you know we'll talk about like how our languages have been destroyed how our spirituality and our sacred sites have been destroyed but that's not the intent right that's not they didn't destroy that because they just think that we are we are fundamentally different and therefore our things need to be destroyed there's a clear intent right to access land and resources right We're not racialized as indigenous people because of our language, what we believe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, our culture. We're racialized because we stand in the way of settler colonialism. We stand in the way of settlers to access our land. In this particular Supreme Court decision... under Chief Justice John Marshall, invoked the doctrine of discovery, even though he never really called it the doctrine of discovery. But nonetheless, that became the sort of retroactive justification. The United States was a quote-unquote secular, right? We have the separation of the church and the state. It was a quote-unquote secular state. that arose in fundamental, in its own sort of thinking, as a fundamentally different project than the so-called tyranny of Europe, right? In the monarchical traditions and the idea that the divine right of kings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. but nonetheless it invokes the doctrine of discovery which is a which comes from a papal bull in the 15th century because it claims that although we are not a quote-unquote catholic state we're not a quote-unquote christian nation nonetheless we inherit the the uh the principles of those who came before us those who have conquered before us um and this is you know the the doctrine of discovery was something that was debated in, you know, I think it was De Las Casas and Sepulveda, I can't remember the exact, I'm not like a theological sort of historian, but they were debating about the rights of indigenous people. Whether or not the church, you know, recognized, you know, the Holy See recognized indigenous people as possessing reason, as possessing, you know, the rights of, you know, rational sort of human beings or other, in other words, Christian people, right? Or Christian nations. And that became the basis. of international law. It became the basis because Christianity was synonymous with civilization. And so if you were not Christian, if you had not adopted or were recognized as a Christian nation, and therefore you didn't have rights, you didn't have property rights. So the doctrine of discovery as it is defined retroactively, you know, in the context of the 1823 Supreme Court decision says that because indigenous people were not recognized as civilized nation they were savages they were in a state of savagery they could only possess occupancy rights to the land meaning that they could exist on the land they had the right to live on it but they didn't have the right to possess it they didn't have the highest form of property relation which is alienation when you can alienate your land that is the exercise or alienate property that is the exercise of prop of not just private property it's the exercise of civilization and so I begin with this because while the United States may project itself as a sort of secularized nation, it's a liberal democracy, it's tolerant, the fundamental legal relationship that it has with indigenous peoples is based on theological doctrine. And it has not renounced those. It has not overturned it. So our lives are fundamentally dictated As indigenous people, when we go to Congress, when we go to the executive, it's fundamentally dictated by this theological premise that we are not entirely human. And no matter what we can even do within the legal rights framework that has been created for us within the federal Indian, you know, the trust relationship that we supposedly have with our colonizers, we can never fully exercise rights as a nation. We don't have true sovereignty. It's constantly, there's unlimited limitations that are always placed upon us and our, you know, articulation of ourselves as people. our relationship to the land. And so I bring that up because, you know, there are other elements to this. And, you know, there's a really wonderful book by my friend and colleague. It's called We Are the Stars. It's colonizing and decolonizing the Oceti Sakoi literary tradition. Her name is Sarah Hernandez. But she talks about even the writing of our language, whether it's Dakota or Lakota, it has been Christianized. Because the first people to transcribe our language and to write it into an alphabet form, to articulate the grammar, to write the dictionaries, were Christian missionaries. Because they understood that language was key to accessing our land and to colonizing us and to fundamentally... changing how we conceive of ourselves as human beings in relation to the land, but also how we sign documents. Because in 1851, there was actually a Dakota Treaty that was written in the Dakota language. And if you compare the English version with the Dakota version, we didn't have words for sale. There was no such thing as selling land. but they turned it into a gift. It's, it's all of a sudden it becomes a gift. Right. And there's, they, they also distort our perceptions of, you know, like we didn't have a holy, or we didn't have a great chain of being concept in our, in, you know, in our language, but then they invent terms or they distort our terms. Like what can Tonka, which actually just literally means like, Something that is so mysterious that we can't comprehend. And therefore it is sacred, right? And our entire sort of worldview is based on understanding and respecting things that we don't understand. That we will never as human beings have the capacity to understand. And it's not about knowing. It's about... Not knowing and trusting that there's something that's greater out there. Some people might call that God, but we didn't have that sort of hierarchy in terms of there was a monotheistic sort of God figure. It came later. And I'm not dismissing it. I'm just saying that that was the sort of concept. But nonetheless, when you invoke that and when you change the meaning, right, it was one of the first attempts to also translate the Bible into a Dakota, you know, into the Dakota language, thus altering the meanings of how we understand even our relationship to the universe and to the land. And I say this, you know, out of respect, because my grandfather was a, he was a, you a preacher and he and he even said he said the reason why we you know we adopted christianity was to save our language because that was the only place where we could actually speak and pray in our own language and so there is there was a resistance to it and i would say now it's like we don't need the church anymore to speak our own language we can we can do away with that concept but we also need to sort of decolonize our our own perceptions of what that language even means and how we interact, but also pushing back against how this Christian framework of domination governs and dictates our relationship, not only with the government that colonizes us, you know, the state that colonizes us, but also dictates our relationship to our own land and our own relatives. Because that framework was used, and I just want to, I was rambling earlier in my other question, but I just want to add this definition, something I've been thinking about a lot. I've been thinking about a lot about the question of genocide. So if genocide, if we reframe this according to our world views as indigenous people, as the destruction of our relationships, the annihilation and the targeting of our relations, it is both the targeting of our familial sort of Immediate kinship, human relations, the taking away of children, the separation of those children from their parents, the entire annihilation of families, as we're seeing happening in Gaza, the targeting of entire apartment buildings that hold entire families, the wiping out of lineages from a very human perspective. There's also the destruction of our relation to the land. That's the second point. Or what could be considered non-human relations. The annihilation of, if we look at it in the context of Gaza and Palestine, the annihilation of beings that are older than the nation-state concept itself. The destruction of olive trees and olive groves where human beings have had a fundamental... you know relation with those things that define them as people right and their relation to the land itself the the annihilation of our you know of the buffalo nation within the context of you know the great plains that fundamentally altered us as people so genocide shouldn't just include the human element it should also include the non-human element and the last point is a sort of temporal framing, because those are kind of spatial and kinship-based, but there's also a temporal framework, the annihilation of our conception of history, the elimination of how we understand. Think about how you understand US history. Think about how you understand Canadian history. No settlers, no history, right? There were indigenous people who lived here who could fill libraries of the knowledge that they've had living in relation to the land, right? There's a history that exists before. There's a history that exists in spite of, and there's a history that exists beyond what we now know as Canada in the United States and what we now know as, you know, the state of Israel. So there's the annihilation of the past, but then there's also the annihilation of a future that there can be no alternative to these particular systems, right? That not only are you annihilating Canada, or destroying an entire generation of children that represent the literal manifestation of a future of a people, but you're also annihilating even the dreams of having a future beyond the nightmarish present.

Henry Huckamacki: Just to hop in with a brief follow-up, and I appreciate that this is something that I also talked about on a recently released episode. I know we recorded it several months ago, but we held it until just today or yesterday at the time of recording. We're recording on December 9th, I should mention, which was Settler Colonial Law and Sue the T-Rex. And yes, listeners, those two topics are related. And if you listen to the episode, you'll know why. But one of the things that I talked about a little bit in that episode was was that when we're talking about genocide, a lot of people today seem to equate it just to like extermination of the population. Like they just look at population numbers without any of these other factors that you just talked about in consideration, Nick. And one of the most clear examples of not exterminating the people, but exterminating one of the things that you talked about, this idea of history is, one of the most stark examples is residential schools in North America, both the U.S. and Canada, because these residential schools, despite the fact that many Indigenous children died in them and then they were just chucked in mass graves that were then covered up from being discovered for decades afterwards because the government knew that at these residential schools, Indigenous children were dying, but they didn't care and they wanted to make sure that nobody else cared either. The point is, is that... in these residential schools, the reason that they functioned was that they would be able to take the next generation and eliminate any of that cultural history, that cultural conception of history, that collective history of their own people's that idea of what the future could look like and that understanding of that cultural conception of what the future could look like, and eliminate that by indoctrinating them with this settler knowledge, this settler history, this settler conception of the future, so that when they were out of these residential schools, That was lost. If they survived. If they survived, then it was lost. What that means is that, again, you are destroying that people culturally. You're not having to kill every individual of them to genocide their culture. And this is an important point. And that's just one example. Like I said in your last answer, you covered some very, very critical components. Land is another thing that is generally not thought about at all when the term genocide comes up. But these are critical components. And I'm very happy that you brought that up. And again, listeners, I appreciate that if you listen to that episode, you will have heard it relatively recently. And I talked a little bit more in that episode about it. But, you know, thinking about residential schools is a really stark example of just thinking about this is clearly genocide, even though at that point in time, the goal was not to kill every single one of them. That was something from a previous generation. But at that time, the goal was still genocide, just in a different form. Well, that's part of the... Yeah.

Mohamed Abdou: Sorry, I was going to say, I was just going to add that that's part of the hegemony that's being exercised or the hegemony of hegemony so far is, again, that's the liberal hollowing out of words in so many different ways. This is the euphemisms too, like that are enacted and so far is, you know, the access of evil, the war against terror, simulated drowning, preventive war, civilians killed are referred to as collateral damage, CIA kidnappings are referred to as extraordinary renditions. Even Muslims, I mean, when we talk about sort of, again, that's the violence of translation, mistranslation as well. That's Saba Mahmoud or the late Saba Mahmoud as well as Spivak and so many other folks had discussed, which is there's also an internalization of that by the other, by the colonized other. Like, for instance, Muslims often, and we all hear this term, regurgitate the fact that Islam actually means submission. Although the word for submission in Arabic is khudu'a. Islam comes, of course, it means peace, but from the root, which is to willfully give or to offer or to surrender, which is based on choice that way, right? And so taking away that element of choice or willful deliverance, if you will, and assigning it a submission reifies, again, that savage trope of these folks don't reflect, they don't critically think, they don't engage cognitively with what it is that they supposedly embrace. So that's part of the severance insofar as language itself. And again, it's relationality. Language isn't just language, but rather it's relational sort of perspectives with regards to non-human life, with regards to all relations, with regards to our kin. And this is part of the problem, the internalization of that and the mimicking of that by people of color as well. Unfortunately, without a reflection on dimensions of what that means in terms of the preservation so far as our frameworks of sovereignty, and so far as when we pledge allegiances to, say, the nation state, territorially, spatially, temporally, in God we trust on the dollar bill, Protestant conceptualizations of poverty, Victorian mores and sexuality. So it's a means of not just disciplining, but also organizing and controlling people of color that then end up reifying these manifest sort of, again, secularized Christian enlightenment and obviously, Christianity is an Eastern tradition, but in very Euro-American ways that are just replicated over and over and over again. And this is part of the lure, say, in the context of Palestine, that we do see the reality that there are Arab Jews and Arab Zionists that have occupied the lands of their kin who are Palestinians. We see even African Jews, despite the fact that, again, Israel acknowledged that, Ethiopian women being sterilized in a certain sense as part of the demographic control of white supremacy within Israeli society. We have the history of Haskalah in which European Jews had already argued and made the case for the fact that why they are European and Jewish. And yet, nonetheless, the problem wasn't the fact that, well, there weren't Jewish people, as was discussed earlier, as Nick and Adnan and And we all had pointed out, but rather the fact that we were talking about a blonde haired, blue eyed man that showed up on on the shores. This was the issue. And this is what constantly gets reproduced in terms of, again, all the racial hierarchies, the ethnic hierarchies, the relationalities and so forth. place, dispossessed, as far as Palestine, and the continuing sort of evocation of an oppression Olympics and a competition between struggles that is constantly being reenacted then by other populations within the context of Palestine, within the context of Turtle Island, because of what refugees, because of what migrants see, because of what white supremacy has in terms of an impact. unracialized bodies that are, if you will, cast out of a sense of belonging. whether it's with regards to land, whether it's with regards to space, whether it's with regards to time itself. We regard it as out of time and out of space simultaneously. So, yeah, but I just thought that I'd add that little bit with regards to just language. And this is, you know, maybe to talk about just very generally, this is also the problem with sort of the element of the state, because the state is not this abstract entity that exists and hovers around. You know, it's not even a set of institutions that are set over and above us, but rather represents a complex web of sort of complicated relations in which we each govern one another as a species on a horizontal level. And that's how that part of that violence is just constantly being reenacted as well across all kinds of racial, gendered, sectarian lines over and over again. So, yeah, I think, yeah, that becomes very important in order to include into that context. that analytic of, again, of indigeneity, of how that manifests and so on, versus, you know, there's the abstract term of just indigenous.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to follow up with the, you know, what we've been talking a little bit about is also that thread of a different kind of concept of history, different sets of cultural relations, and so on. But just from all the way back, just to remind listeners that there was this theological doctrine of discovery that Nick was mentioning, and it was a series of papal bulls in the 15th century, right on the cusp of the two things that Muhammad has been mentioning, the importance of 1492, right on the cusp of this European... kind of expansion into the Atlantic world. And they've already, of course, begun, you know, raiding the West Coast of Africa and so on. And this is where they started to have to develop some kind of techniques of law and justify them on the basis of some sort of religious theological orientation. So you have the Pope Nicholas, Dume Diversas in 1452, and Romanus Pontifex, a very important bull from 1455, so in the middle of the 15th century, and then Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, 1493. And these kind of together are papal bulls that formulate what becomes this kind of classic doctrine of discovery. But what I'm kind of – why I wanted to mention all of that is because, Mohamed, you had mentioned that there are all these resonances where when they're coming into the Atlantic world and they see the Aztecs and kind of characterize them as a sultan and all that is that, of course, they've already had this experience of confrontation in the medieval Mediterranean world, right? both in Spain, but also through the establishment of a frontier settler colonial state, the Crusader States in the Levant, because again, they had these religious claims that they actually were indigenous because it was Christ's territory and they as the inheritors of Christ and You know, they even frame themselves as, you know, the Franks, you know, we Latins, we are the most Christian people, you know, and so we are the, you know, sons of Christ. And so, you know, there's a way in which there's so many parallels between... you know, this kind of pre-modern Latin Christian crusader history and ideology that distills itself into some way of approaching the Muslim, even in the, like, you know, the crusader states that then gets somewhat exported into the Atlantic. And the reason why there is some ambiguity initially, what I think that language is reflecting is that they had encountered established states. They had encountered societies that were sophisticated and resistant. And so that was a vocabulary they could use, you know, to try and kind of frame, you know, encounter with more, with polities in the new world, right? But it was ambiguous where, how exactly, and there were these debates, you know, are they human? Do they Or are they barbarian? And so it doesn't get resolved until later with the doctrine of discovery more finally. But initial reactions are like, okay, if you're meeting, you see Mayan pyramids and you're dealing with a kind of clearly politically organized, stratified Society is, okay, well, how do we think of them? And so they drew upon these resources that they had from this long sort of encounter over hundreds of years. But getting back to this kind of question of history, the return to what kind of history, indigenous history versus these other kinds of conceptions of history, is just to note that Zionism really – saw itself as an antidote to the problem of Jews not having history after the biblical period, right? When the Jewish kingdoms are destroyed, when they're subordinated to the Romans, and then their temple is destroyed, this marks an era of diaspora, of exile. And in this Christian sort of framework, and I'm drawing here on work by An Israeli scholar, Amnon Raz Krokotzkin, who talked about how the Zionist movement was a kind of Orientalist, colonialist attempt at returning to history. And what they meant by history was importing a kind of Western history. kind of modern notion that depends on the state you don't have history if you don't have a state which is exactly what we're speaking about indigeneity kind of inhabiting vis-a-vis the occupier this position of statelessness so the whole framework which is why nick what you were saying so resonated with me about the need to decolonize even what is understood as you know uh you know, native peoples of the Americas, they're having their history and their culture back because the very framework was one of dynamic, you know, relationship to this imposition, this colonial, you know, occupation and violence. And so for them, you know, the only way to restore a kind of presence in history was to found a state, right? colonial state. And that's why there's so many kind of resonances, it seems to me, between this period and these pre-modern kinds of experiences that reinforces the point that you've been making, Mohamed, that what we're talking about is a kind of secularized version of Christian culture, right? So even if it's denuded of some of the theological language, the bedrock conceptions are being carried forward. And you see that in international law, you see that in You know, all of these kinds of conceptions, you know, that what they needed to do was essentially create their own version of a Euro secularized Christian almost kind of sense of what it would be to be Christian. You know, like it doesn't have that much to do necessarily with the 5000 years of and especially the post temple, you know, post Second Temple Jewish diaspora, which is why so many of these Orthodox Christians. religious communities are anti-Zionist, you know, is because for them, Judaism was something else. It wasn't a political nationalism. It was a theological and a social and a cultural, you know, experience, you know, for centuries, which is exactly what Zionism was meant to, you you know, erase because that was the hated, despised Jew of the antisemitic Europe. And so what we end up having is this, you know, way in which this the way in which this salvation history of Europe goes from Latin Christendom into Europe, but the narrative structure of it is really still the same, which culminates in this apocalyptic kind of genocidal event in Europe, which is to you know, remove the Jews from, you know, which is exactly parallel to the Christian Zionists of today who fantasize about, you know, the end of Judaism and Jews and Judaism by the means of supporting, you know, the state of Israel to, you know, precipitate some Armageddon. And so you may have like secular Jews kind of versions of this kind of you know of this process and you can have you know religious theological ones but ultimately Christian Zionists and secular Zionists are you know you know, on this kind of same plane, you know, of trying to erase that previous history and start a new one of like basically a European society in the Levant, starting with the foundation of the state. And so that's, You know, I think very important for us to kind of recognize those sort of parallels that are deep in Western culture, which is why when they say that they're trying to save Western civilization, it maybe makes sense is because these are deep rooted parts of the narrative, the self narrative and self identity, you know, of the West. Anyway, sorry, you guys raised so many interesting points that I wanted to bring up some of those connections. But I know I interrupted earlier. Mohamed, you were going to talk about some critiques that you had in the politics of how this is working out now. And so I want to... you know, allow us to get onto this kind of question of the politics of solidarity, indigenous and pro-Palestine solidarity, and, you know, what you're, you know, kind of viewing here and what your critiques are. And maybe to get your reactions to frame it for you is just that in a recent recording, Alex Avina was writing an article about, you know, kind of Israel and Latin America, really interesting, and about borders and border walls and this kind of thing. And he quoted journalist Todd Miller's conversation or his report on Dr. Mazen Koumsia. who visited the Southwest. And his comment was about talking about climate change as a global Nakba. And he said, they want us to be divided and not a joint struggle. I don't like the word solidarity. I'm not in solidarity with Native Americans. Their struggle is my struggle. And I wonder what your reactions are to that, because there's a lot telescoped in that kind of comment that he made that might be worth unpacking from your different perspectives about solidarity.

Mohamed Abdou: Sure. I wanted to address a little bit about the state, if that's all right with you all. I don't mean to take too much time, but to really return just to this concept, just because it becomes very important in terms of, again, what we were talking about insofar as the violence of language. But the question of the state becomes, I think, something that's very important, not only in terms of divide and conquer, not only in terms of Sykes-Picot and the entire history of that, but rather even in terms of the replication of concepts as the Islamic state. Because that term is just a dehistoricized term. It never existed in pre-modernity, right? And the problem is, as part of our conflation of words, because if we ask any Muslim or your average Muslim or your average Arabic speaker, speaking, individual with regards to what is the word for state, they usually use the term Daula. But that's a misinterpretation and a mistranslation of the word state, because Arab nationalists have used actually the word Daula as a post-colonial term to refer to each Arab and individual state. Even ISIS has used that term, al-Dawla al-Islamiyya. But obviously, Daula stems from the verb, actually stems from the Quranic term, And within that, the term falls between dal, which morphically as well as semantically falls between the Arabic dar, to rotate, and the verb zal, or to go away. We then have a word for state. And even temporarily, temporality and succession were essential connotations of the word duwail. And it's even used in the Qur'an on at least two different occasions. The chapter, the surah al-Hashr. chapter 59, verse 7, in terms of the Prophet's distribution of the spoils of war, but also in the family of Amran chapter, the third chapter, verse 140, in which is referred to the different conditions constantly circulating from one day to another. One day we have our health, the next day it wanes away. But that becomes very important, again, insofar as, again, the internalization of these terms, of these logics, their displacement or their misuse by modern Muslims, projecting it onto pre-modern terms and pre-modern terms being projected into the present. And then the question of, again, sovereignty for being critical of the state, then what forms of sovereignty then exist and govern it beyond the state if we're to undo this nightmare of a mess. And so far as the question of solidarity, I think it becomes a very important one at this point because of the difference between, if you will, Solidarity is a verb, right? And to me, again, it's exercised during times of peace and not during times of war. And a part of what's a little bit frustrating is the conflation, because Kwame Ture had very much distinguished between organization and mobilization. And maybe if there's something that we need to learn from, say, the three-year Black Lives Matter, it's not Black Lives Matter don't matter anymore. And this is part of the irony. Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Michael Brown. This is a current sort of ongoing anti-Black project. And that's one of the pillars of settler colonialism. It isn't just anti-Indigenous dispossession and the even pitting of Indigenous people against Black people and Black people being conscripted towards Indigenous extermination. But this also shows us vis-a-vis sort of these massacres and competitions between struggles of how the white supremacy deployed that Afro-Indigenous future ideas are very much entwined. But to get to this point, right, is this element of mobilization versus organization. Mobilization usually, you know, organization usually is about long-term sustainable and ongoing relationships of solidarity. It's not about crisis management, as in short-term solidarity. And that inhibits possibilities for transformative solidarities, because that means... a relocating of our positionality and situating onto the land that we are. America and Canada are leading this war. Israel is but an instrument and Israel again in Zionism is a white supremacist interpretation of Judaism just as much as arguably Wahhabism is a white supremacist interpretation of Islam. If that is the case then ultimately what is the position and if we're having people march out on the streets and I find very valiant and very incredible And I love mobilization, and I love direct action, and I love the blockades. But again, if we were to learn from the legacies of North Dakota, I don't know more, what connects all these struggles, and particularly in relationship to Palestine, if America and Canada are leading this war? If the fact that you have a lot of settler immigrants Who are settlers on stolen land? And I'm speaking here particularly to Muslims. What are their responsibility insofar as land back, insofar as abolition in the context of Turtle Island? Because we can't be hypocrites if we're arguing for land back in Palestine, and we should, because that is the honorable and ethical and political and I would argue even spiritual Muslim responsibility. to uphold, then what is our responsibility as settler immigrants in the context of Turtle Island? Because Indigenous people and their struggle for self-determination and sovereignty, and we have to be honest about this too, have become tokenized at the expense of personal and organizational and structural and systemic levels. The result of this is the replication in so many ways in which the settler colonial states use also Indigenous people and their cultures to perform to perform land acknowledgements in superficial ways of occupied lands, of resources, through opening ceremonies that sometimes don't integrate actually a critique and an explicit challenge of Canadian and US settler coloniality. And so they normalized the violence of these states and were part of that normalization process. Right. So, you know, Dana Alwan, who you and I know, and who is a Palestinian thinker and organizer and fellow colleague, you know, she talks about how this type of solidarity, you know, doesn't transform our relationships with one another or with the land on which we live. nor does it require our sustained long-term and wide-ranging commitments to work that is at times difficult, uneasy, and complicated. This type of solidarity is comfortable. It is felt affectively, but never experienced materially, situationally, or historically. While enticing, this form of solidarity doesn't move us closer to those whom we wish to be in alliance with, nor does it move us directly to confront or transform the conditions under which we come to encounter one another." The irony is a lot of also, and this is the power of the so-called American dream, that as Malcolm X had called it, was always an American nightmare, is that it's so seductive and lucrative in terms of its upward mobility, right? Because at the end of the day, it maintains that promise of that dream of, oh, ultimately, America can be reformed. Ultimately, the dream is salvageable, right? We just need to engage in different kinds of representative politics. We just need to outvote certain members or create even a third system and a third party or a third party. as opposed to the fact that, well, how about we relate insofar as our kinship relationships to one another on the land? I mean, I question the billions, if not millions of dollars that were spent towards soft imperialist Zionists as Bernie Sanders, right? If those billions were, say, invested in, and I hate this idea of buying land, by settler immigrants that was then put at a land trust to avoid being interested and remitterated to Indigenous people. Where would we be now insofar as the relationships of alternative governance that were established if we were to do that on the land with Indigenous people, with our Black kin, that would actually disrupt the sovereignty of the U.S. and Canada on its very own soil and actually act as more of a threat within empire, if you will. This is not to take away again from the importance of direct action or blockading and so on, but for us to think about alternative ways of being with the land and being with one another as opposed to living on the land, which is a different form of political existence and philosophy. So the question of, you know, what are we doing here? Where are we geographically located, given that we're at the heart of the serpent coil of empire? And how can we go about, in terms of disrupting that, spiritually, ethically, politically, in a relationship to, again, those who, because we do have black, red-skinned, brown-skinned people with white masks who have disconnected and do not wish to reconnect with their indigeneity, how can settler immigrants, diasporas, refugees, and so on, reconnect with our indigeneity where we are in the spaces and places that we are, temporally speaking? to act more effectively in disrupting the machine of Zionism, but also the crusading project and the very bosom of how it manipulated both, again, Islam and Judaism and pitted the sister religions and faiths and spirituals against one another. That becomes the point of... of investment to me. And that's hard work because it involves actually spending time with indigenous people on the land. But most people of Qatar are within the urban metropolis. We can't, I mean, we're talking about divesting also from capitalism and racial capitalism. And capitalism is a religion of itself in the state, as we know, this is a religion of itself. And a lot of people have, particularly settler immigrants, have come to worship these forms of religion in so many ways, because we're in survival mode, because we're in resistance mode, which are reactionary, both we're not thinking about thriving, we're not thinking about liberation, which are active forms of thinking, again, about the world and our situating within it. But ultimately, then, what does that mean insofar as how do we grow our own food? How do we develop our own autonomy when we even lack the skills in a certain sense, when the very geography of the land has changed? Because we're not going back to 1492 either. The geography and the landscape of the land has changed. So how do we begin to disrupt this simultaneously as settler immigrants in kinship with Indigenous people, with our Black kin? That becomes the question in order to disrupt ongoing Zionism and ongoing white supremacy globally, really.

Henry Huckamacki: You know, everything you said is great, Mohamed, but I think that if we just put more money into a political campaign, we'll probably be all right. Anyway, I just wanted to go in there with that flippant comment. Nick, go ahead. I know you probably have something to say, but I couldn't help it.

Nick Estes: Well, no, I was actually just like, kind of like, this moment is bringing up a lot of memories for me. One, as Mohamed was speaking, was sitting in the Standing Rock camps, in Ochete Chalcoy camp, and one of our spiritual leaders, he was sort of the last person medicine men, you know, for lack of a better term, of our generation. He passed away last year. His name is Leonard Krodog. And he was, you know, the spiritual leader for the American Indian movement. But I remember there was this particularly brutal and violent eviction that happened in October. There was, you know, the police came in and just beat the crap out of people, you know, desecrated you know ceremonial items attacked um the camp and then we were holding um what was called a uh a host or excuse me a horse ceremony it was a horse dance it's kind of complicated to explain but it was something i'd never seen before first of all but anyways he he was um they brought him and arvo looking horse to the center of the camp circle and And the first thing that, you know, he spoke in Lakota and then the first thing he said in English was, all you white people, all you non-natives, you are now traitors of the United States government for being here. And I was just like, I was like, that was like an interesting, because you could kind of see it like settling in their face, you know, like this, this thought that they are now being considered enemies of the country that they, you know, that they've come to, you know, identify with. And it wasn't saying that he's like, you know, you're just kind of like committing treason or whatever. It's just like, just by being with us on the land, you're now considered enemies of the United States because we are the oldest enemy of the United States, right? The literal founding document. of u.s the u.s declaration of rights or excuse me the uh the declaration of independence calls us merciless indian savages uh because of our so-called you know savage war against white settlers or whatever so it makes invasion look like self-defense and i think it's interesting because the idea of a water protector is an allegiance that goes beyond a nation state It goes beyond the settler colonial state. And that's why they hate it so much. That's why they've criminalized it so much. That's why they called it a jihadi-inspired religious movement. That's the language that the state uses, is to criminalize, is to other it. because it recognizes the power of non-native people white black muslim it doesn't matter of identifying with something that's different that came before right that's beyond just this this you know current sort of state of things and we saw that in the george floyd uprising where there was so much attention paid to people like kyle rittenhouse and whether or not he had the right to murder White kids standing up for Black lives. That became the topic. And then we see the backlash of woke, right? The identification of woke as being you know, a liberal elite sort of politics, completely decontextualizing it from its, you know, this important alliance between, you know, I mean, for lack of a better, you know, kind of framing of white kids and Black people and the Black movement. Because we know that in, you know, in the George Floyd summer, the majority of people who were marching in the street were white kids, right? I mean, just the demographic difference That was just the demographic reality. And that was so reprehensible. That was so against what the elites wanted, is an identification between these groups of people, between the oppressed and these sort of socially positioned oppressors. If you're not going to buy into white supremacy, we're going to beat it into you. That's where we're at right now. That's where Zionism is at in this country. If we look at Cop City, perfect example, read George's Attorney General's indictment of charges against Cop City protesters. Where does it begin in terms of this conspiracy? It begins on May 25th, 2020, the day that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. It is creating a conspiracy that the alliance of non-Black people, of abolitionists, of water protectors, are somehow conspiring and creating, you know, they use RICO charges against them. are creating a criminal network, right. To essentially overthrow the United States government. This is the conspiracy that the, uh, the, the attorney general's office of Georgia is putting forward. And we can see that in the context of how, in this moment in time, Even the declaration of a white Jewish person in this country of saying that they're anti-Zionist or that the state of Israel doesn't represent all Jewish people, right, even if they're not white Jews, that is now going to become a criminal act. It's resulting in expulsions. It's resulting in silencing, right? And so we see how they criminalize solidarities. They criminalize identifications, right? And they criminalize the sort of treasonous, like what we should all be declaring treason against white supremacy, right? We should all, everyone should declare, you know, treason against white supremacy. But if they don't, and when they do that, they're going to beat it back into them, right? You see the proliferation of anti-protest laws within the United States against white protesting pipeline infrastructure, essentially criminalized being a water protector, using the same model as anti-BDS laws, anti-boycott divestment and sanction laws. You now have to sign, in certain states, essentially... a loyalty oath to the state of Israel that you will not protest it. There's one that exists here in this state against targeting, specifically targeting Israeli companies. It doesn't exist for anything else. The fact of the matter is that this state actually boycotts us. On the books, there are removal laws that have not been overturned that disallow Dakota people from establishing a presence here in this state. We might think, oh, well, that's, you know, something that exists in the past. And it's like, if it didn't, if it wasn't overturned, then why can't we return? Why can't we have a restoration of our treaty rights or original, you know, rights to this land, right? So this is, I think this is the important crux here to understand, like, why... I don't even know if it's solidarity. I think solidarity is incredibly important because solidarity doesn't mean, as Mohammed just said, doesn't mean just doing a land acknowledgement. Any settler can say a land acknowledgement because they do it out of relative comfort, knowing that just saying that is not going to change the social economic reality of indigenous people within the context that they live. It's not going to actually return land, right? But when we say something like, zionism is a form of racism zionism is a genocidal logic then that becomes you know that becomes oh we can't say that because the truth of the matter is it exposes a weakness within that system why react that way if israel is such a great powerful state then why is it so threatened by words Why is it so threatened by the presence of Palestinians? Why is it so threatened by the comparison of, you know, of acknowledging the truth that it draws inspiration from the United States for its settler colonial project? Oftentimes we think of settler colonialism as sort of the collapsing of the metropole and the colony in the sense that there's no overseas sort of mother country, for lack of a better word. I don't know if Mother country is the right word. Parent country, we'll just say that. There's no parent country, right? But if we think about how settler colonialism in the context of North America was attached to Europe in the sense that the expansion of chattel slavery, of plantation slavery in the South, the expansion of the United States ever westward, created more resources and raw materials that actually raised the standard of living in Europe. They directly benefited from it. Sure, they fought here and there against the British or whatever, but there was a direct sort of material benefit, economic benefit of Western expansion and settler colonialism. So Europe has always been the the the parent the parental country of the united states and canada i mean i go to canada it's more explicit you guys have like the queen or i don't even know you have like these weird british like monarchs on your on your on your uh you call it the crown still it's so such a joke it's so hilarious but um but and it's the same with israel all obviously you know the united states supported the settler design a settler colonial project in 1948 um from the get-go but it didn't really see, and I recommend everyone read this book by Norman Finkelstein called The Holocaust Industry, because he really maps the sort of history of when it became sort of profitable for the United States, both financially, militarily, culturally, to begin openly identifying with Israel as sort of a project of Western European imperialism. Joe Biden said explicitly when he was a senator, if Israel didn't exist, we would invent it. That shows you that there's deeper interests there. And the main benefactor of of uh israeli or zionist settler colonialism is the united states is canada is europe you can just see in in the recent vote that happened like at the security council when anthony uh guterre antonio guterres brought to vote a ceasefire resolution that the united states invoked its veto power to crush it so literally we can we can Debate all we want about the analysis of settler colonialism, but the truth of the matter is that it's an imperial project. And so decolonization is not just an Indian problem here in the United States. It's not just an indigenous problem. It's literally holding the world hostage. We can see that at COP28 when you saw world leaders walk out of events or walk out of talks. It was Palestine that was the wedge issue. It wasn't, you know, these, you know, how we, you know, what do they call it? Net green or net. I can't remember what the carbon neutral, whatever arguments that they're making. It was Palestine. It was decolonization. That was the dividing line. That was the wedge issue at cop 28. That should, that should key us into like, this is a bigger problem than just, you know, a transition economy. It's, it's the fundamental relation, not only the, the people of the world have with each other and where we align our solidarities. It's the fundamental dividing line. It's the millions versus the billions. And we need to be explicit. In the climate movement, Greta Thunberg, say what you will about that, but she got up in front and said, Palestine is an environmental justice issue. It's a climate justice issue. And look how she's been sort of demonized for that, just for saying something that we've always been saying, you know? So I think this notion of solidarity, and I agree with what you said, Anand, about how this framing, it's like, I think how it's articulated is, yeah, that's true. There's something that has to be, you know, deeper and, you know, in a kind of Marxist tradition or in a left tradition, we say like comrade, right? Comrade. Um, is, is a political relation, you know, in our, in our sort of understanding, we say comrades and relatives, right? Meaning that it's, it's an expansive sort of framing. Uh, and we do believe that Palestine, they are relatives to our struggle. Um, you can't have decolonization in Palestine without having decolonization in turtle Island.

Henry Huckamacki: Just to add in, you mentioned that we need solidarity. There's a lot of solidarity in the United States. Unfortunately, historically, the solidarity that has won out has been the solidarity of the United States government with other settler colonial regimes. And it's always worth keeping that in mind, that solidarity is not just something that can happen from the ground. That is also something that happens from states, and particularly settler colonial states that have a shared vested interest. As you mentioned, Nick, And again, I apologize, listeners, because this will be two episodes in a row that you hear this. This episode hasn't come out yet that I mentioned this, but the episode that we recorded with Alexander Avenia yesterday, I say this exact same thing, which is that you brought up the quote by Joe Biden that if Israel didn't exist. The United States would have to create an Israel, but many people have heard that quote, but many people have not heard the follow-up. At least on one or two occasions, the follow-up immediately after that was, so that, so the United States would have to create an Israel so that we could protect her interests, which really goes to show, like you said, Nick, that there are greater interests at play. What we have to think about, though, is that her interests are not solely Israel's interests. These are settler colonial interests. And this goes to connect to that point that when we think about solidarity, it's important that we consider, you know, we hear this word solidarity and we tend to think of it as a good thing of people that are standing up with other oppressed people. But that is not the only form of solidarity. And often the solidarity that has preponderant power and ends up winning out until eventually our small, poorly funded solidarity works. over decades or even centuries is able to topple the solidarity of the well-funded governmental structures of settler colonial regimes. The solidarity that generally wins out in these struggles, at least in the short term, is the solidarity of settler colonial regimes with one another. And it's really important to remember that because as you remember that, you start to draw these connections of why some of these decisions are made. Like, for example, you've mentioned the ceasefire. This just happened yesterday. Again, at the time of recording, this episode will come out in about two weeks, I think. Um, You know, the United States stands up and says, we're going to utilize our veto power to crush the ceasefire bill, this immediate ceasefire call at the United Nations. The Security Council voted 13 votes in favor, one abstained, which was the UK. But the United States has veto power and therefore was able to crush the resolution. Why would they crush this resolution? Because it is in the interest of another settler colony and a settler colony that they have always stood in solidarity with. And, you know, not to beat the dead horse, because it's kind of something that we talk about all the time is that settler colonial interests often run in parallel with other settler colonial interests. And so keeping that in mind is really crucial to thinking about why some of these decisions are made, why some of these statements are made, and how we can understand what is likely to happen until we are able to dismantle the settler colonial structures at play.

Nick Estes: i also think that it's inseparable you can't separate the interest like that of course and it's this i mean that's the thing it's like that's why you can't have decolonization in palestine without decolonization here it's like those interests are so it's not just the line they're they're inseparable the end goal is like inseparable and i think that's the point here it's like these you know these terrorist settlers are kin They see themselves as kin. If you look at even the, the, where did, you know, like when they did the call up for reservists, there was these photos that was, I think it was in the New York times. I can't remember AP or something. And they showed photos like of a lineup of people in Brooklyn, like getting on flights to go fight. And I was like,

Henry Huckamacki: One of my favorites of those was a plane full of white South African reservists coming in. Like, look at the confluence here. We have white South African Israelis flying in from South Africa to Israel to... you know, carry out that that task of suppressing the indigenous population there, like, really, it doesn't get more stark. I mean, Brooklyn is one thing, but white South Africans are like, that's a whole other level there. And we have a couple episodes on apartheid, one that's already come out one that will also be coming out by the time this episode drops.

Nick Estes: Well, there's, you know, there was that Onion article that was, it was, you know, satirical, but it was actually the truth. It was like, you know, apartheid born billionaire kisses apartheid ground for the second time in his life. And that was when Elon Musk visited Israel, you know, and I think it's also important to point out that there is, you know, he not only like, it's just not just Elon Musk, but These capitalists, the billionaire class literally holds the future hostage in terms of what also happened in COP28, what also happened with the rejection of the ceasefire. You get the announcement of the Cybertruck. This luxury EV that's going to help. Green energy transition is now a luxury item. It's completely inaccessible to the rest of the world. And that's the future. There's a lot of things to say about it, but I think it's just so symbolic of the decadence and the utter disdain for an alternative. Because we know, even here in this state, they're revamping mining in the iron range there's literally they're calling them tesla mines to to mine the materials the nickel, the copper, et cetera, to build this energy for this energy transition. Because Biden has this kind of one-to-one energy transition plan where it's like, we're going to keep the car economy, right? It's like, wait, what? So yeah, we're going to transition every gas guzzling car into an electric vehicle because that's the only alternative. We're literally locked into this consumption pattern. So where do you get the components for these electric vehicles? You can't recycle the copper that goes into them. It actually has to be copper ore. It has to be mined from the earth because they haven't developed the technology to even use recycled components. Lithium has to be extracted, right? The colonial relation is still the same.

Henry Huckamacki: Wait, so Nick, you mean fully automated luxury communism is not what we should be aiming for?

Nick Estes: Oh, that's an op. I'm sorry.

Henry Huckamacki: Again, my snarky, flippant comments. I must be... I don't know.

Nick Estes: Well, I think life would be a lot easier if we... I mean, I hate this sort of denigration of poor people and consumption. I think there's this idea that somehow poor people shop at Walmart because they're bought into this consumption pattern. It's like, well, we don't have an alternative, right? And we can't blame the poor. We should be blaming... the the billionaires who literally have strangled any alternative or attempting to strangle an alternative and we do have to talk about consumption but we also have to talk about work and we have to talk about quality of life we have to talk about what the the bolivians you know will call bien vivier like the good life like redefining that not around consumption patterns but redefining about quality of life like how are we actually living life in relation to other people and the planet

Henry Huckamacki: Well, you know, Nick, that's talking about individual consumption and, you know, making judgments about poor people's choices of what to consume and where to consume and how much to consume, etc., etc. I mean, this is just liberal conceptions of the world 101, individualizing every problem as opposed to looking at structural issues. I mean... I'm not going to get too deep into it because, of course, again, this is something that spans the entire show's history in terms of we touch on the fact that this is what liberalism is in basically every episode that we have. But individualizing problems is always going to lead to these very... undercooked analyses, and to transition into, you know, something that then will get us kind of back on topic, because we seem to be going off a little bit, not that I have any problem with that. But You know, when we talk about individualizing consumption patterns, that's one thing. But we also have this individualization or individualizing, rather, of what's going on in Israel. So we have a lot of liberal commentators, for example, saying things like, well, you know, it's kind of too late to really do anything about the fact that Israel exists and that Israelis are there. But we can all agree that maybe Netanyahu is not a very good guy and his government is full of maybe not so good people. But that doesn't mean that we should call for the extermination of the state of Israel. That's a step too far. Again, this is what we see from kind of even in many cases, more progressive liberals, but liberals nonetheless, is this individualization of these structural issues. The structural issue is the settler colonial regime of Israel. It is not the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is in charge of that settler colonial regime. The settler colonial regime itself and that state that it is founded on is the issue. And that is another thing that we have to you know, really push back against this individualizing of these issues when we have to look at the structures.

Nick Estes: And it's just pure projection. I mean, it's so strange that we, why does, you know, Israel can, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu can go in front of the United Nations and show a map of Israel that completely erases Palestine, advocate for the elimination of Palestinians, advocate for the elimination of Palestine as a concept, right? And then carry out a carpet bombing campaign, carry out decades of torturous sort of imprisonment of Palestinians, the abduction of Palestinian children. But yet it says that, no, it's actually Palestinians who want to commit genocide. It's actually, no, it's like, that's not a, you know, this idea that like to even say equality, I mean, the sort of basic sort of normative assumption, even within like Western liberal democracy. Okay. Grant equal political rights to everybody. That becomes a genocidal framework because equality, even within their liberal thinking is a form of oppression and they can't think beyond equality. eliminating palestine but they project that onto onto us onto palestinians they even when you say things like land back people will say well what about settlers and it's like that's a that's pure projection because your only alternative is to is that somehow we're gonna do what you did to us that we're going to remove you, we're going to put you into concentration camps, etc., etc., etc., even while you have done that and are continuing to do that. That's a you problem, not a me problem, right? Or an us problem. But I always think about that, even within that framework that you pointed out, Henry, it's like there's this categorical assumption that what Israel is doing is defending itself from a genocide while it's actually committing a genocide. And that takes some really... powerful ideological indoctrination to believe that, but also to scare entire populations into believing that and accepting that as the reality.

Henry Huckamacki: Well, this projection and I'll turn it over to Mohammed then after I make this other quick comment, which is that this projection is something that we see even from, again, nominatively on the left people. So, again, Twitter is a very bad gauge of like what is in popular discourse. But this is something that was directed at me. And I've talked about this in the past, but a couple of months ago at this point. something that was directed at me is, well, you know, you're calling for the liberation of Palestine. What do you do with the Jews in the area? what's your plan for the Jews? I said, okay, well, first of all, I'm an American living in Russia. Why is my plan relevant to this at all? But okay, if you want a plan, here you go. I attached some photos from the strategy for the liberation of Palestine from the PFLP, where they lay out what their goal of liberation of Palestine is. And I've read it before on the show, like this excerpt, and I'm going to read it again right now. Listeners, if you're looking at the strategy for the liberation of Palestine, it's on pages 102 and 103 of the Foreign Languages Press edition of it. Bottom of 102, top of 103. But I attach this and basically what it says is, hey, we're against the state of Israel. We're not against Jews. We want Jews in our society to have the same rights as Arab Palestinians in our society, because that's what having a democratic state means is equal, equal citizenship, equal rights for all people there, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of their religion. That is not what Israel wants. And this person then responded to me, well, I didn't ask what the PLO wants. I asked what you wanted. I said, well, look, obviously I attached these photos because this is more or less in line with what I am trying to tell you. They said, well, there's no way that that would happen. If you gave power to the Palestinians, they would get rid of the Jews. I said, that is what happened. Israel has done to the Palestinians. That is not what the Palestinians have done to the Jews of the region. Prior to the state of Israel's existence, there was Jews in the area. They weren't in camps the same way that Palestinians have been sequestered into them by the state of Israel. That thinking is projection of what Israel has done. Just to underscore that point that you made, Nick. Mohamed, I'm sorry, we've been making sure that you haven't been able to talk recently. No.

Mohamed Abdou: No, no, no, no. But that's part of, you know, maybe just picking up on that thread, Henry, that you and Nick were discussing. That's part of the mass psychology of fascism. And that's what makes fascism so dangerous, because it operates at all tiers and all levels, right? From the state all the way down to the below, or the world of the above to the world of the below is dangerous. as the Zapatistas were saying, I mean, we're just talking with you all, we're just talking with a bunch of the special interests that are particularly shared. I mean, look at, for instance, how, you know, the Gulf monarchies, but particularly as Arab Zionists, right, are very much colluding, um, including Egypt, colluding with Israel, colluding with the U.S., colluding with Euro-America. And it's not out of love of Palestinians. I mean, you have Arab Gulf monarchies that are using alfalfa fields in Arizona, particularly the context of Saudi Arabia that's collaborating with U of A, University of Arizona, in order to feed its 100,000 cattle, if you will. And because of the analogies that are drawn and so far as well, you're making our desert bloom just as much as we're trying to make Arizona bloom as well, right? And that relationship extends back to sort of the early 19th century. But also because of the fact that it's a resentment of what Palestine stands for spiritually, ethically, politically. And what I mean by that is if we take the context of, for instance, what is going on on the Rafah border and Egypt is being the second or the second jader of Gaza and complicit that way, right? Sisi is not doing what he's doing because he's keen on Palestinians not being displaced in Sinai, but as a matter of fact, because he does not want Hamas or any form of political Islamic resistance to exist on the soil, given his mandate and how he's He came about in 2013 at the first place, right, which is his desire and the mandate to eradicate any kind of Muslim brotherhood that, let me put it more broadly, political Islamist thought. And this is part of the project within the region is to destroy any manifestation of political Islam. Now, that's... big word that obviously I'm using because I find that the term Islamism or political Islam to be highly problematic because any idea, particularly the spiritual, is inherently political. But that's part of the issue and part of maybe to go back to our earlier discussion of the schizophrenia, the double consciousness that exists at least within the region. And so far as this question of race and religion, are you an Arab or an African or are you a Muslim or Christian or Jew and so on and so forth? As if these two things are inseparable, as if they ferment binaries as opposed to the fact that they can become conjunctive ants. But this is part of the dilemma, the pit trap of Tahrir, insofar as the secular dimension that a lot of, for instance, leftists played into, revolutionary socialists, anarchists, Marxists, liberals, feminists even, and that resulted in sort of the biggest mass slaughter in modern Egyptian history of the Muslim Brotherhood and the two encampments of Rab'a al-Nahda. Massacres in which a lot of members of the Muslim Brotherhood were completely just wiped out and were genocided, for lack of a better word. But this is also part of how, again, the Gulf Egypt would like to deal with this question because of who controls narratives over particularly Islam, because, again, the state of exception that it ferments given its historical significance, material significance, spiritual, symbolic, in relationship to 1492. And this is what then, you know, whether it's Hezbollah, whether it's Hamas, and so on and so forth, offers itself or offer themselves as sort of a thorn in the side and including sort of, you know, Iran within itself, right? as a status manifestation of, if you will, Islamist thought. Because ultimately, again, as Muslims, we are constantly weaned. And Adnan knows this. I think any Muslim really is brought up with this concept that was evoked earlier in the conversation with regards to this idea of the Ummah, the global polity of Muslims and so-called non-Muslims alike or believers alongside of them. living together in a relationship to land and so on. But that also transcends the idea of a state. And this is, I think, part of the conundrum that facilitates, I guess, and I'm not condoning it, I'm trying to understand or we need to understand it, of the Jewish settler, but also sort of all kinds of responses to, well, you know, what would happen if there is a single state or one state, which I don't even believe is possible for all sorts of logistical purposes. But also it opens up the possibility of can there be alternative paradigms to the state? Those are Euro-American models of conceiving, of hierarchizing the world. Can there be sort of what does Epictetus describe? A world of many belows that are simultaneously living together. And this is how we transcend the element of identity politics, because we have a lot of Muslim Zionists. whether it's on the street, whether it's in the world of the above that are billionaires and so on as part of the capitalist class, right? And again, we run into challenging difficulties because... Three months ago, two and a half months ago, and some people may think, well, why is this relevant? But this becomes relevant as to what a liberated Palestine, what a liberated Turtle Island might mean. Three months ago, prior to just before Palestine, you know, at Hamas on October 7th, A group of conservative Muslim scholars had issued a statement that this was a huge thing in the context of the U.S. and Canada, had issued a statement condemning queer Muslims and calling them as, you know, outside the fold of Islam and so on and so forth. And the same Muslims now are marched, obviously, with, you know, the Million Family March in addition to that. some segments of the indigenous community aligning themselves with the alt-right, and yet these same scholars, these same individuals, these same conservative Muslims are out on the streets now, alongside queer Muslims, alongside all kinds of queer folks, and so on and so forth, and they're all chanting pro-Palestinian slogans. But then that scares me because, in a certain sense, as much as it's wonderful seeing solidarity for Palestine, There are meanings to Palestine that are still emptied out just as much as bread freedom and social justice in the context of Tahrir. What do these things mean in relationship to Tahrir, in relationship to Palestine? You ask different people and you'll get different responses. And this becomes the question. And so far as these are the conversations, I think, in terms of to return back to the point of solidarity that we need to discuss. we need to also develop an ethics of disagreement amongst ourselves insofar as dealing with the differences that we may be having with one another. And an ethics of hospitality because a part of white supremacy has done is introduced sort of misconceptions that we have of one another. And this is why this really has to happen also at the level of ideas. It has to happen on the land. A free Palestine means anti-queerophobic commitments, anti-sexist commitments, anti-so many different things in terms of commitments. And it means then that we also need to develop, at least from a Muslim perspective, decolonial abolitionist readings of Islam. While I might be with Hamas and support the resistance, absolutely, and so on. But there are certain junctions and force in the road that I think me and I think a lot of other Muslims, whether we speak about it or not. And this is not for white supremacists or white liberals to use this point that may have issues with in terms of certain levels of authoritarianism or queerophobia and so on and so forth that need to be discussed. But these are the kinds of conversations I think that become very valid and very important. And why the political theological discussion, particularly as it relates to Islam, also needs to manifest. Because, look, we have the neoliberal manifestations of Islam that are peddled by Gulf monarchies, that are peddled by states like Turkey and so on and so forth. And we have the new conservative, the new fundamentalist conceptualizations of it with various different degrees, right, that range from Al-Qaeda to ISIS and so on and so forth. And this becomes the idea, you know, Iran wants to ultimately see an Ummah. That's a beautiful thing, right? And the Ummah means different things to different Islamist, again, manifestations because the Ummah rests on the ethical political commitments that inform it ultimately, right? ISIS had a totalitarian vision of it that even excluded Sunni Muslims and so on and so forth. But this is why, again, this question becomes important because just because you call yourself a Muslim or a Jew or a Marxist or an anarchist for that matter, makes you a part of my Ummah or a part of, if you will, the community of below because you could be Marxist and anarchist and misogynist. You could be again, we're Muslim and you could be Zionist and there are those and so on. So I think these kinds of discussions, when we are in the streets, when we are together, We should really expend an effort to have these conversations. Otherwise, unfortunately, or at least from my experience, both in 2011 and 2013 in Tahrir, we risk what had happened in Egypt in 2013, or we risk these becoming single issue causes, or we risk Palestine simply becoming a slogan. that is emptied and hollowed out of the manifestations of different meanings to different people, because we also have internalized and compartmentalized ourselves, unfortunately, or a lot of people have, within ideological underpinnings. So unless we have these difficult conversations with one another, what does a free Turtle Island mean? And certainly indigenous people have said, well, that doesn't mean that settlers need to get back. Well, some European races might have to or whatever, but that doesn't mean that settlers need to leave. But then you need to, as Andy Kerrick says, you need to carry your bundle. And as indigenous and Afro-Indigenous scholars have said, well, Black people, particularly those that are part of the Middle Passage, they also have a sense of belonging because they were stripped of that choice and agency. But the lure and the seduction is always there. And I think it's mitigated vis-a-vis the state. And what the state teaches us in terms of, again, a politics of rise and are throwing off of our responsibility in relationship to one another, where it's not to be back onto state logic and representational politics. And I remember, you know, at least in one incidence, and this is not to condone sort of. the false anti-Semitic charges that are leveled against her, or the anti-Blackness that is leveled against her. But Ilhan Omar, at the height of BLM, in which she's stating, well, this country was founded on genocide. Actually, it's ongoing genocide, sister. And this country is founded on slavery. Actually, it's afterlife to slavery, project sister. But look at me, she continues. I'm an example of the American dream. This becomes the problem and the element of seduction. as if, again, we don't have as BIPOC people our native forms of governance, as Zapatistas have shown over their two decades since they arose onto the scene in 1994. And I think this is what requires a radical form of imagination, if colonialism has stripped anything of people of color. it's our ability to re-dream dangerously again. And I think we really need to take that seriously of dreaming pluriverse worlds of below that are horizontal, that are anti-authoritarian. And this is where the ethical and political commitments and spiritual commitments should supersede whatever sense of ideological underpinnings, I guess, that we might ultimately see ourselves in relationship to. And if, you know, if not for ourselves, then as Mumia Jamal says, then for our children that come from immortality and are the arrows that we shoot towards infinity. So I think, you know, the solidarities of below become very important given, as you all noted, the solidarities that are happening at the level of the above and the way that the above always plays on the insidious, again, misconceptions that we have and the fears and the insecurities that we have of one another because of a Jew or a settler Jew is saying, or if a settler is saying, even a settler immigrant is saying, well, I'm afraid of the so-called disappearance of the U.S. and Canada and all that I've bought into of imaginary under... that comes from a place of insecurities, of fear, and not being able to be exposed to a different world and a different way of belonging that they have thought through. And a constraint of even, you know, what democracy is and meanings of democracy is, and our disconnection even from history, to go back to that word, our histories and different ways of being with the land. So I just, yeah, I just wanted to touch, you know, and just... emphasize that element, what does Black Lives Matter mean in the context of Africa, that is the size of, you know, East and West Europe, that is the size of, as well as China and Japan, that's how big Africa is. So it's more than just renaming Confederate bases, it's more than It's more than a lot of things, right? And restoration of some kind of like civic rights. And that's the work of, again, that we really need to invest in. And I hope from an organizational standpoint and not just mobilizing standpoint that we think through. And I think the dominant order is also counting on our fatigue, our psychological and physical and mental and emotional exhaustion, because it's not easy being out on the streets. But this is why I think panthers left us with a legacy of Zapatistas and many other of our ancestors and movements. What are the alternatives? And we need to create those alternatives now, because I think that's what threatens the dominant order as much as possible. That's why the Black Panthers were so threatening. in so many ways, because they created the breakfast programs. They were armed and prepared to protect their communities and their neighborhood. They established community councils. This is where we were at in Tahrir at the beginning. But then we relinquished that responsibility and returned the agency back to the state. Well, you figure out how you're going to feed us. You figure out what's going to happen with the garbage. You figure out what's going to happen with the health care, et cetera, because that's what revolutionary questions actually involve. They involve the development of alternatives and they involve individuals, wanting to change the way that they breathe, the way that they eat, the way that they conceive of intimacy, that's the level of responsibility that it bears. This is why the Quran always states, and all Muslims know this verse, God does not change a people until they change themselves. So people need to be willing to take up that responsibility and that agency. The same Egyptians that marched in 2011, 2013, And I just got back from Egypt. And this is part of the sad thing. Yes, we have a dictator, a dictator that so many people were complicit in terms of bringing to power. But the same agency that was exercised in 2011 could have been exercised now. We could march over Rafah. We're in the millions of people. But again, it's the level of fear that supposedly Egyptians thought that they overcame in 2011 that takes over. And it's the question of, well, we don't want to end up being like Syria and we don't want to end up being like this. And therefore we have to acquiesce. to the authoritarian rule that exists over there. So again, you know, it's a complicated and but also very simple, my rate, I think, of questions that we need to be contented with of what solidarity is about, because it's about intent, purpose and action. I will say that again, intent, purpose, and action. And we need to think through, I think, these different questions for our kin that are in Palestine. And it doesn't take a lot of people. Again, look what 1,500 did. They brought in the Sixth Fleet. They brought in the aircraft carriers. They brought in nuclear submarines from all over Euro-America. But they were organized, and they worked in stealth mode, and they divested. And nobody expected that this was the direction that Hamas and the Hamas leadership, or at least the political leadership, was going to take. But look what a dedicated few. And the Quran even says this, you know, how much of a small group had defeated a larger enemy, if you will. It's a David and Goliath thing. but it has to involve a degree of organization and dedication and full belief in the cause that way, and a vision for an alternative future aid that includes everybody, and hence a political project that generally does include everybody on a transnational and on a global scale, because what we're facing are these global kinds of issues and collaborations by a dominant elite equally at the same time. And, you know, as Nick said, you know, particularly if we're seeing, again, residences, you know, Indigenous land defenders are being referred to, or water protectors, sorry, are being referred to as jihadi terrorists. And Black protesters are being referred to as Black extremist groups. So, yeah, we need to think big and be able to see the force through the trees as well, right? And not just below our feet. We need to think strategically that way insofar as the solidarities that we enact and the worlds that we are seeking to give birth to at the same time. So forgive me for my little bit of a ramble there.

Adnan Hussain: Well, I mean, no one could accuse us in this conversation of narrowly limiting the consequences and significance of the Palestine question and of what's really at stake here. I really think that was a very capacious kind of set of connections and challenges that there are a lot of things to consider here. in this question of solidarity and if we're going to be thinking through, you know, analyzing this particular situation through the lens of settler colonialism, there are a lot of responsibilities, you know, upon us. And, you know, listeners, if you've got something, I think, of a pricey of some of the kind of key points in your book, but I do, you know, Islam and anarchism, but I want to encourage people to go and read it and get it, because they'll be provoked to think about exactly some of those questions that you were just putting on the table. But I'm wondering, Nick, if you have any concluding thoughts on this conversation that you want to leave listeners with about how we imagine and understand the interconnections between resistance to settler colonialism across Turtle Island and Palestine.

Nick Estes: I think the indignity expressed by indigenous people in this particular moment around the genocide against Palestinians not only demonstrates our international kind of scope of indigenous resistance, but it also demonstrates this unbroken continuity of indigenous resistance in North America. There's a reason why the state, if we were inconsequential, if we were so minoritized, if we were such a demographic inconsequential quote-unquote threat to the state or to settler colonialism, then why does the RCMP need to create a special operations group inspired by what happened at Standing Rock, to police water protectors, to police land defenders, Wet'suwet'en land defenders, and to surveil, monitor people who are fighting for their land. Why do they need to create a special operations group? Why do they need to create laws to prohibit us from protecting and exercising our relationality with the land? Why do they need to constantly undermine those political projects, those social projects, those spiritual projects, those spiritual movements? Why do they need to do that? If we're such a minority threat, why is it that my comrades are getting shot at protests to remove statues celebrating colonizers? Why is it that we pose a sort of threat to that social order? Like, why is it, if we're such an insignificant minority, then why is it that you need to constantly undermine, constantly kill, constantly kidnap, constantly take and remove us from the land? If we were such an insignificant thing, then you wouldn't need to do that, right? So I think that's what it represents on one hand, and it's become more clear in this particular moment And that's why we created indigenousforpalestine.org. Go check it out. We have a letter that more than 600 indigenous people, activists, there was even some politicians from our communities that signed this and signed on to it, even some celebrities. But it shows you that there is widespread support amongst indigenous people. And it's not reflective by our leadership, those who have allied and collaborated with the settler state in this genocide. Look at our Congress people who are elected, our indigenous Congress people who are elected into the US Congress, nearly all of them. They're not just like pro-Israel. They are like extremely Zionist, even the democratic versions of them, right? And that's not reflective of how indigenous people are viewing this particular moment in time. So I just, I wanted to point that out. And lastly, I just want to say with this, because there is, we saw this happen in George Floyd. we saw an election cycle completely suck up all the energy in the room, suck up all the air, and channel it into electoral politics. And we're sort of seeing that in this moment. I think there's a fatigue. There's an expectation that people will just forget because the United States and Canada have normalized genocide. They've normalized it in ways that I think we should learn from. And not just combating it in the cultural realm, but combating it in the organizational realm. And thinking about this as long-term struggles. Because I will never forget the names, the peoples, and the faces of those who have green-lighted this and acquiesced to this genocide. And we should never forget them. We should make lists. In our professional organizations, we should make note of who is silent, who is stridently opposed to a ceasefire, the bare minimum sort of thing. We should remember them. And remember this particular moment in time so we don't make the mistakes of sort of casually falling into these alliances with them in the future. Because we know at this critical juncture, their solidarity is through white supremacy. It's through genocide. It's through U.S. imperialism. And we should take note. And this younger generation, I would say, is really beautiful in that regard. But we should also... not let this sort of numerical devastation of our Palestinian relatives just become a number, that these are people, these are people with dreams, these are children. The images, we should not look away, but we should also not accept this as a reality, that sons and daughters and children are literally bringing their parents in bags, their body parts in bags to hospitals because they're literally being dismembered by these bombs that are paid for and bought and funded by the United States. And that these are people with dreams much like ours, their dreams are dreams of freedom. And we should also not flinch away from the right to defend oneself. There's been so much hyper-focus on the oppressed's use of violence, that it's overtaken this massive genocide and onslaught against Palestinians, that we should stay hyper-focused on the oppressor's use of violence, not after October 7th. We need to stop exceptionalizing that date as somehow the key, the way that we talk about Palestine, and to understand that this is a 75-year occupation, It's a century, more than a century long counterinsurgency campaign, a colonial campaign against Palestinians. There's a deep history. And we know that within decolonization movements, we know that there's not a single sort of event that constitutes decolonization. There's not sort of a single event that constitutes revolution, that this is a process. It took them 500 years to complete what they see as the decolonization and subjugation of our people. A decade is not going to undo that. So this is a long-term struggle and we have to gear ourselves to that mindset that we may not, in this moment in time, reap the benefits of our resistance, of our organizing, but knowing that we are here to ensure the coming of the next generation, right? That this is a continual sort of struggle. That's what I learned from my sort of movement elders. You know, I'll just say this again. I say this everywhere, but it's totally apt for this particular moment and this particular conversation. Madonna Thunderhawk was once asked by a young Native activist, you know, why did you sacrifice your own sanctity, your own right to life, to have a normal life, to join a revolutionary struggle, the American Indian movement, and do what you did. She was talking about in the context of her strained relationships she had with her own family because she dedicated to the movement. And Manana Thunderhawk never flinched. She said, because I wanted to be an ancestor to future generations. Because somebody in the past sacrificed their life so that I could be here today. And I think that's what we need to do, whether it's for climate justice, decolonization, that we want to be good ancestors to future generations. Because what we do in this particular moment in time, sure, we're going to be criminalized. They're going to do all kinds of things. They're going to put us in camps. They're going to assassinate our friends. They've assassinated our friends. They've literally targeted poets, writers, presidents of universities. They're trying to wipe out knowledge and the very language that we use to articulate our expression as humans. They're trying to wipe that out. And we have to remember that this moment in time is critical in terms of how we respond and act, but also try to be... connected not only to our ancestors in the past, but try to be future ancestors to generations that they can look at us and say, hey, at least they tried. And I want to be like them in that sense. It's not that you're just constantly romanticizing the past, but you're understanding that you're part of a long tradition.

Mohamed Abdou: And I just add one more thing to what Nick graciously said. I think the importance of honouring our martyrs, because they are shohada, and shohada, for those that don't know, are witnesses to history, right? And that goes across sect, that goes across race, that goes across... But I think we need to also celebrate our livingness and our defiance. and the awe that Palestine has left us with, and the awe of human beings that are young, like Pleistia, like Bassan, like Mu'taz, who are citizen journalists. We need to celebrate doctors like Ahmed Mughrabi, Ghassan Abu Sitteh, and Ahmed Mughlilati. We need to mourn but also celebrate, you know, our brother, our companero, the poet, the writer, the thinker, Ri'fat al-Arir, who himself is a light in Gaza. and a light extending from Gaza everywhere. And yeah, I want us to also think about our livings because we deserve to also honor that livingness and not only live in states of mourning and states of trauma, but to also be inspired in order to, again, think about our future 80s and to think about thriving and to think about liberation beyond just surviving and beyond just resistance. So I hope we can dedicate this episode really to all our ancestors, but particularly our Palestinian sisters and brothers and families that are in Gaza, that are in the West Bank. We didn't talk. I mean, the West Bank often gets excluded from the conversations, particularly insofar as what's going on in Palestine, despite the atrocities that are also being committed there and the genocide that is very much ongoing there. And yeah, all the way to Turtle Island. The two can only be freed in relationship to one another and everything that is in between and so far as the Atlantic. So Africa is there too and extending beyond that. So thank you. It was an honor to be a part of this conversation.

Henry Huckamacki: I think that those are great notes to end on. And I want to again thank our guests, Muhammad Abdu, author of Anarchism and Islam, as well as Nick Estes, author of Our History is the Future. Thanks very much, comrades, for coming on to the program. I just want to make sure that listeners are aware. I know Nick had mentioned indigenousforpalestine.org and he mentioned that there was this letter that came out of Indigenous Solidarity with Palestine. There was a really great episode of the Red Nation that talked about that letter. So if you are interested in hearing more about that with Nick, check out the Red Nation's feed. We'll have it also linked in our show notes. So check out that episode if you're interested in that. But Mohammed, can you tell the listeners how they can follow you and keep up to date with any of your new work that you're doing?

Mohamed Abdou: Thank you, Henry. I'm not an avid Twitterati, but my Twitter account is adminwe in G major. I think it's M-I-N-U-E-T-I-N-G-M-A-J-O-R. My account on Instagram is at slightly drifting. You could just Google Muhammad Abdo Islam and anarchism and a whole bunch of stuff will come up. And the book is available vis-a-vis Twitter. Pluto Press. So I'm not that hard to find, and I'm not seeking to hide out either. So, you know, as specialized people, yeah, there's no really no real point.

Henry Huckamacki: So absolutely. And of course, we'll have that all linked in the show notes as well. Nick, thanks again for coming on the show. Again, we'll have to invite you back again in shorter measure than we did last time. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you and more of your work?

Nick Estes: Yeah, just check out the Red Nation podcast, Red Media. I'm on Twitter. You can find me there at Nick W Estes. I think that's my social media handle for across platforms. But just support the Red Nation. We're a native run organization. Support our podcast. It's native run. We literally just, you know, We literally just survive on subscriptions. We don't have some secret donor. We don't get that much, but we would do it without the funding even. But we appreciate all those who do support us. Also listen to Guerrilla History. I'm a subscriber to the Patreon and Guerrilla History. And Rev left. And I try to support as much as I can all these really radical formations, because actually, I just wanted to say this. Thank you all for this conversation. This is one of the most enlightening conversations I've had, both in a historical sense, but also in a political sense about this issue, because there's such mass censorship and fear mongering about just having an objective conversation. And it speaks to this time, but also it speaks to the importance of platforms like this, where we can have an honest and intellectual and a political conversation without smears, but as comrades. Yeah, appreciate that, Nick.

Henry Huckamacki: We're going to shamelessly rip that and use that as a promotional thing on social media, just so you know.

Mohamed Abdou: Well, you know what the Zapatistas say, Henry, you know, holding each other's hands, we ask one another what each of us knows, you know, and this is how we don't leave anybody behind, right, in terms of our growth, in terms of our nurturing, in terms of maturity. And I think if there's anything that I loved about your show, and I appreciate about Nick, about Adnan. The concertability, again, to mature, to grow. The element of humility that I think is a fundamental character of both our ancestors and anybody who's seeking and striving to be engaged in a kind of revolutionary becoming. Because it shows that we're not dogmatic. It shows we can be anti-authoritarian. It shows we know how to hold one another and learn from one another and listen to one another and not just hear one another. And I value that a great deal. So thank you again.

Henry Huckamacki: Appreciate that. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcasts?

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, I just want to thank both our guests so much for a rich, stimulating, and challenging conversation. And one thing that I appreciate so much about their work and their perspectives on it is that you can speak about these political, historical issues with genuine analysis, but also that the spiritual, the emotional aspects Those cultural components that are so important and also are what make the struggle sustainable over the long term by having that sense of brotherhood, comradeship and connection to something a bit bigger than us individually is so much a part of their work and their approach. And so I appreciate that very much. Thank you both. We're coming on. If you want it, listeners, find me. I'm on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. I come out of hibernation occasionally to vent during the past couple of months. So you can follow me there. And also check out the Mudge List podcast that has also been on a bit of a hiatus. But we're going to have an episode very soon on the history of the oud, a beautiful instrument that sometimes – you know, for me has started to become a bit of a solace in this world to, you know, connect with something a little bit different, Arabic music. So check out the Mudgeless, M-A-G-E-L-I-S, on the usual platforms and look out for this upcoming episode.

Henry Huckamacki: Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it. For our co-host who was not able to make it, Brett O'Shea, you can find all of his work at Revolutionary Left Radio. And of course, I highly recommend everybody to do that. And we're looking forward to Brett being part of the next conversation. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K 1995. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter to keep up with each of us individually, as well as what the show is doing collectively at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. And you can help support the show financially and allow us to keep the lights on and keep putting out more episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash Gorilla History. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. And just as another mention, if you're not financially able to do so, but you would like to help support the show, nonetheless, you can do so by sharing our episodes. That's probably the best way to help the show get more new people's ears on the show, as well as if you're able to to give the show a rating. And if you are having the time to do so, write a review for it on whatever podcast app you use. That's really helpful for juicing the algorithm, which we're generally quite bad at. But we can try. All right. And until next time, listeners, solidarity.