October Seventh Fourteen Ninety Two / Mohamed Abdou

Patrick Farnsworth: We need an Islam and a Quran of the oppressed, and that's what my work focuses on.

Mohamed Abdou: Where is the Judaism that came with Moses, who stood against Pharaoh? Where is the Christianity of Jesus that defended Mary Magdalene, as fellow apostles were condemning her? Where is Muhammad, who stood with the oppressed? That becomes the question. And that is a central part of the narrative, because whether we like it or not, yes, it's a genocide, but it's also a war. And it's a civilizational, racial, and religious war. So we really need to reorient the terms upon which we are analyzing the listing right now in tandem and in relationship to over here, where we're at. I always say to people, listen, okay, I don't doubt your love for Palestine. You love it so much, right? The way that you do, and you're only focused on Palestine on its own, despite the fact that you're internally, go fight for Palestine. If you can get it, go fight for Palestine. But you're here. You're here. What are you doing about that here? You're here.

Patrick Farnsworth: Hello, this is Last Born in the Wilderness, and I'm Patrick Farnsworth. Thank you for joining me for this episode. Author and scholar Dr. Mohamed Abdu returns to the podcast one year after October 7th, 2023. Our discussion flows across various subjects, including Al-Aqsa Flood and the U.S.-Israel Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Islam and the Crusading Euro-American Imperial Project, Anti-Colonial Struggle as Resistance, Decolonization as Creating the World of Many Belows, and Dr. Abdu's participation in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, where he was targeted, threatened, and slandered by Zionists in the University Administration, United States Congress, and by prominent media figures. Dr. Abdu is the author of Islam and Anarchism, Relationships and Resonances. This was published by Pluto Press back in 2022. I interviewed him for the first time about this book at that time. He was hired to teach at Columbia University based both on his acclaimed anti-colonial scholarship and his years as a seasoned movement organizer. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Cornell, an assistant professor at the American University of Cairo, and a seasonal lecturer at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor at Queen's University. Dr. Abdu's work includes practical applications of his anti-colonial teachings with an emphasis on indigenous sovereignty and land back, Black self-determination, and the liberation of Palestine. Now, this last bit that I just read there to you comes from the website wearemuhammad.com. I'm going to read a little more from their website. This is in their FAQ page. Why is Dr. Muhammad suing Columbia University? Dr. Muhammad Abduh is one of the three Columbia University professors defamed at a congressional hearing last April for their support of the liberation of Palestine. Abdu was hired to teach at Columbia based both on his acclaimed anti-colonial scholarship and his years as a seasoned movement organizer. After slandering him on a global stage, Columbia President Manoush Safiq declared about Dr. Abdu specifically, quote, he will never work at Columbia again, end quote. The public ouster occurred on the same day that Columbia University students established a liberated zone encampment, which expanded to Hins Hall. and ignited a global wave of student encampment protests. So, all of this is to say, please, among all the things we need to be doing right now, I think supporting Dr. Muhammad Abdu is extremely important. And you can do that by going to wearemuhammad.com. By going to the wearemuhammad.com webpage, you will find all kinds of resources, including how you can support, not just for Muhammad, but many others that have been affected by this defamation campaign, part of a larger genocidal campaign, support people who work towards the liberation of not only Palestine, but of Turtle Island. So thank you to Muhammad for his time. Really appreciate everything that he has done, taking the time to have this, I think, just really important, insightful, and powerful discussion. Enjoy this interview with Dr. Muhammad Abdu. Mohamed, really good to see you again. Thank you for coming back on the podcast. It's really an honor to have you here. Thank you.

Mohamed Abdou: Jazakallah khair. Thank you. God bless you. And it's an honor to be with you too, Patrick. Assalamualaikum. Shalom Aleichem. Thank you.

Patrick Farnsworth: Muhammad, I think just first it's worth doing just the acknowledgement of the day. Today is October 7th, 2024. It's been one year since there's many different things that it's described as most kind of blandly or. What is the word? It doesn't really say anything, really, which is the events of October 7th. That's one way to describe it. Al-Aqsa flood. There was – or you can describe it by some point of view as being a terrorist attack on Israelis or on Jews. But we know what happened on that day, and it was – I think everyone who was paying attention and was witnessing it happening, at least from a distance, obviously the people on the ground that were experiencing it, of course knew that this was going to be a seismic shift. Like this was sort of like, um, almost like a container was breaking open. Something was spilling forth. And, um, in reality, this is an anti-colonial struggle. Um, the Palestinian people, um, Whatever manifestation that is coming from are seeking liberation and seeking to reclaim their land from an occupying force. And that's what this is ultimately about. I just wanted to ask you, you know, how are you... It's been a year. I mean, I'm not even mentioning, of course, the horrors that have been unfolding over the past year that continue to unfold in Gaza and in the region and just the horrible things that... beyond comprehension for many people to really just observe and see and to experience. But if you had any opening remarks, I really don't have a question here except just to ask you how you are today and how you are interpreting and understanding where we are a year on from October 7th, 2023.

Mohamed Abdou: So bismillahirrahmanirrahim and in the name of God, the most gracious and the most merciful. Insofar as to contextualize what we're about to speak about, I would reminisce, because this refigures into the conversation, because I'm quite exhausted, to say the least, with regards to, well, what do we need to do to stop this? I'm of the thorough conviction that most people, rightfully so, want the genocide to end and want to delineate the possibilities and potentials of being doxxed, experiencing Islamophobia, children being exposed to viral images. We're scrolling through genocide on devices mined from another genocide in the Congo. Copper and cobalt used to make our iPhones, our phones. I'm speaking to you today from the traditional territory of many nations, indigenous nations, including the Mississaugas of Credit, New Credit, Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, the Wendat people, even the Inuit and Métis who have lived on this sacred land. Sadly, for the most part, and one can never deny that October 7th elevated a degree of social, political, economic consciousness. However, for a great majority, and this is because Palestine was co-opted October 7th, I would argue, as the Black Spring was co-opted in its immediacy, as movements get co-opted, particularly in the context of Turtle Island, And given that America is leading this war, Canada is leading this war, Europe and America are leading this war, they're not innocent bystanders, and this isn't a political statement. It isn't merely the logistical support, the military support, the financial support, the social, economic, political gravitas, but rather are leading this war religiously, because this is a religious war, and ideologically. because of, as you know, my work on 1492, and we could sit down and elaborate why 1492 is so historically, materially, symbolically, spiritually significant. But most have not learned the lesson. Residents have put, and Palestinians have put, particularly in Palestine, everything that they have on the line. They have left nothing. Meanwhile, most people, particularly those in Euro-America, but let me stick to Turtle Island, are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Now, what do I mean by all this? Because I don't want to come off as abstract, perhaps lose some of the listeners. As I said, Euro-America is leading this war. America... particularly, is a crusading society. The same thing with Canada. When you think about doctrines of manifest destiny, of discovery. When we think about Terra Nullius, that this is an empty land. Columbus, who was a crusader, supposedly discovered it. When we read Columbus's diaries, when we read Hernán Cortés's diaries. It's very clear to me and to history that Diasporas over here, particularly settlers of color, and I'm going to focus on settlers of color, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants, are ambivalent to the fact that we are Zionists on stolen land. But I'm purposely using that phrase. How are we supposed to free Palestine when we are refusing to contend with the fact that we are settlers on stolen land? that the Indigenous genocide here has been ongoing for 533 years. Ongoing. It hasn't ended. And it's not certainly a cultural genocide, as Canadians and the Canadian government would like to phrase it. These societies are founded on anti-Indigenous and anti-Black foundations. And the refusal to contend with settler colonialism here, you see settler colonialism has become this blasé term just as much as intersectionality, just as much as defund the police, abolition, and so on. But I believe fundamentally that people do not understand, or the great majority do not understand what settler colonialism is. or are in a state of ambivalence with regards to their own privileges, because they would like to sustain their positions within society, because they believe that the Canadian and American, Australian, New Zealand, et cetera, et cetera, projects are reformable, as opposed to the fact that if we're arguing for land back in Palestine, that that means that it is only right, otherwise we're hypocrites and there should be land back here. Let me come about and expand a little bit more, and forgive me if I ramble a little bit. Somehow we all know that Abbas Mansour, that Palestinian Israelis, quote unquote Palestinian Israelis, in the Israeli Knesset are traitors, that the PA is full with traitors, Mahmoud Abbas onwards. And we understand that, and there is no question about that, at least for the great majority. However, we're perfectly all right with black and brown faces, with white masks, assimilating into empire, assimilating into the settler colonial project here, be it in the manifestation of squad members, particularly in the context of the US. And that speaks to, again, the dismal failure of understanding of the histories of the original sin of these nations, of these states, that is very much ongoing. Now, why is 1492 so important? Well, there are two things that happened in 1492, and the reason that I say that this is a religious and racial war. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabel conscripted Columbus to travel to India in order to gather riches in order to manifest a new incursion, crusading incursion in order to supposedly liberate Jerusalem. Ferdinand and Isabel obviously were also crusaders. They had forcibly evicted, murdered, converted, raped, pillaged Muslims and Jews in Andalusia, Spain. And so Muslims and Jews were put to the hands of the sword, so to speak. And that same year, Columbus embarks on this journey, arrives at the Caribbean, refers to the weapons that The Taino people were using at the time as alfandries, which is the Spanish term for simtars, which is the weapon that Muslims had used, the swords that they had used. When one goes through Hernan Cortez's diaries, one discovers that he's constantly comparing Aztec women to Moorish women. Aztec temples, Moorish mosques, he says. Montezuma, the Aztec leader, a sultan, he refers to him. Even the term Berdach that has been anthropologically projected onto two-spirit people, an Orientalist term, Berdach, was originally cast upon gender non-conforming Muslims. A third to a fifth of the transatlantic slaves are siblings who are Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula on the west coast of Africa, a third to a fifth. So how can we not talk about spirituality and religion? And this is what I say. Number one, there are many lefts. There isn't a monolith so far as a left. But leftists generally fail to recognize, and we had this conversation when my book came out, with regards to the criticality of spirituality. insofar as not only anti-colonial resistance, but also the question of decolonization, liberation. Folks are failing to contend with the difference between mobilization, organization, anti-colonialism, and decolonization. Now, there are many genealogies of anti-colonialism and decolonization that have increased by way of settler colonialism. But indigenous contributions to that discourse tend to be elitist. Now, we have a situation right now where for over a year, millions in the sum total in the grand scheme have been marching. And marching is a great thing, direct action. It is a form of direct action, but it is also reactionary. in so many different ways. And these enclaves of folks that are going out and are exhausted and are saying, well, protests have their limits. Well, of course they do. Some of us have been saying that for decades, let alone this past year. That's the difference between mobilization and organization. Kwame Ture had pointed this out, that mobilization is about issues. Organization is about understanding structures. Okay. And these mobilizations include conservative Muslims that are queerphobic, Right next to anti-Zionist Jews. Right next to an Islamophobic and anti-spiritual left that tend to also engage in anti-Jewish sentiments. I'm not going to say anti-Semitic because, I mean, Arabs are Semites too. And you have queer communities. Yes. and everybody's yelling free, free Palestine. Nobody can tell me what this liberated, free Palestine extensively means because they all have different visions. It's a rhetorical stance, no different than bread, freedom, and social justice in Tahrir. You ask two people, even within the same quote unquote ideological specter, and I don't believe that ideologies exist because that assumes that a single idea has all the answers to all the problems of the world, and no idea can account for that. even including Islam. Islam, even in the Quran, there is the verse, created you from different tribes and nations, including non-human life, so that you may get to know one another. So the process of getting to know one another and discovering the revolutionary horizon, as the Zapatistas would refer to it, is something that's critical.

Patrick Farnsworth: But there is a refusal, as it happened in Tahrir, because revolutions involve practical questions.

Mohamed Abdou: What are we going to do when somebody gets hungry? What are we going to do with the sick? What are we going to do with the nuclear power plants? What are we going to do with the police? Are we going to even have them? And so on and so forth. And so mobilizations have become this cathartic moment where everybody can pat themselves on the back and say, hey, I did my little bit for Philistine today. Sure. An organization is something different. We can talk about the encampments, the global encampments that happened, the student encampments, the Intifada encampments, and particularly the one in Colombia that I was a part of. But there are many lessons, unfortunately, that have not been learned. The value of spirituality. Al-Aqsa is not a pile of rocks. Islam has everything to do with it, given what I noted with regards to 1492, given the war on Islam and the conjured war within Muslims, sectarianism that's constantly being incited, particularly with the axis of resistance for and against and in the context of predominantly Sunni and Arab societies. So this is going to be very critical for the forthcoming stages of this war. I believe that this is the last war. We are witnessing World War IV, if we assume that World War III, as Zapatistas would note, it was the Cold War because it wasn't so cold for the Global North. For the Global South, sorry, excuse me. It was perhaps for the Global North, not for the Global South, right? So this is World War IV. It has commenced, because there's always the backbone. It's not going to end tomorrow, a month from now. God knows, perhaps a few years, we will see. But certainly, this is the last war. that the forces that be, that the worlds of the above, again, as the Zapatistas would refer, the worlds of the multipolar worlds, of empires, be they the axis of the Zionist-Wahhabi crusading alliance, or on the other hand, the Russian-Chinese axis, or any other that would aspire to become an empire, are longing for versus the world of the below, what the Zapatistas refer to as the world of the below, where all worlds belong or can belong, to put it that way. So unfortunately, not a lot of lessons have been learned. Our people, my people, are not dying for clout chasers, for celebrity activists. And there are thousands upon thousands of those that have been incepted overnight. And this is why I say October 7th. was a co-optation simultaneously also of Palestine. There's a difference between anti-colonial resistance and liberation, which we could sit down and elaborate a little bit more on difference between mobilization and organization. So all in all, it's, my heart is a graveyard. At the moment, I am hopeful, but I'm not hopeful because my hope relies on people. People will always fail. Individuals will fail, but certainly collectivities. My hope relies with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And ostensibly, I only wish that settlers of color would be able to put themselves on the line over here as Palestinians and people and our peoples elsewhere are already.

Patrick Farnsworth: I know this ties into the previous discussion that we've had after the release of your book. And I know you've talked about this a lot since then, various speeches you've given, interviews you've given. But you really are kind of focusing in on You say settlers of color. I mean, arguably within the kind of how we in the imperial core, however you want to call it, we would describe like, well, yes, they can be described as settlers, but they are the oppressed. And so in a way, they're just trying to survive. or they're trying to seek a place in this kind of hostile environment where they're just trying to, yeah, they're just trying to make do. And so trying to get them to, I'm in a way you're, you're demanding almost again, misinterpreting this probably, but sounds like, you know, you're putting almost more pressure on those that are, are people of color and, and, than on someone like myself. I am a settler, but I am white, right? I mean, so why such an emphasis on people of color, on Muslims, Arab Americans, right? Yeah, just to sort of clear that up a little bit.

Mohamed Abdou: No, thank you very much.

Patrick Farnsworth: That's a very important question.

Mohamed Abdou: You know, as you know in my work, and that builds off others, Binesh Jafri and just so many others, that there's a difference between privilege and complicity. Is the Muslim who comes from Afghanistan because of ongoing events, be it the Taliban, American interventionism, imperialism, and so on and so forth over here, do they enjoy, do I enjoy the same privileges as somebody who's white? Absolutely not. And Salihur to me is an analytic more than it is an identity. So it's a means of ontological epistemology. It's a way of being wherever it is that you're geographically choosing based on agency in a certain sense, because there is agency, there is choice that cannot be denied to be. So does that mean that I have the same privileges as somebody's right? Absolutely not. Does that mean that I am not complicit in indigenous dispossession? Of course I am. This is stolen land. It's no different than, let's reverse that logic for a moment. I mean, Palestine on October 7th, again, Palestine is screaming lessons to us. Lessons of 1492 or alternatively of 48 of 1917, but I don't buy the 48 and 17 narrative because that assumes that Palestine is to be confined within the geography of British colonialism and imperialism and so on. And if a Palestinian state was to arise tomorrow, I would be against it. So this becomes part of the logic. So just to reverse now for a moment. There's a difference between privilege and complicity. If we look at the context of the Israeli or the Zionist entity, does it engage in de-Africanization campaigns? Absolutely, against Ethiopian and all kinds of African, Jews, Sephardic. that have moved there, Arab Jews that have moved there, Arab Zionists and African Zionists. Do these Arab and African Zionists get treated as white Ashkenazi Jews? Absolutely not. There's a tier of citizenry. Palestinians, of course, are at the bottom, but nonetheless, these African and Arab Zionists now are complicit in the dispossession of black and non-black Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Mohamed Abdou: same equation. Again, do they enjoy the same privileges as somebody who's Ashkenazi? No. They've been exposed to de-Africanization campaigns, forced sterilization, for God's sake, so that the Zionist entity may preserve its white demography. And of course it plays insofar as dons masks of blackface in order to give an image or assert an image of multicultural, liberal, democratic, aspiration, civilizational paradigms of supremacy and that depict it as an alliance and inalienable from American European values. This is why Netanyahu, this is why Biden and Europe, generally speaking, are constantly reasserting how this is a Judeo-Christian turn-of-the-century logic, paradigm frame, and we are fighting savage, barbaric human animals. Muslims and Jews were the first to be referred to as savage and heathen, savage being the racial descriptor and heathen being the religious, that emerged out of a gang. Spain, and that particular encounter that I described. And that was projected onto indigenous people who are savages and heathens. What Silvia Winter refers to as the construction of man one, man two. The biologically inferior man, the biologically inferior race, but also the one that is also spiritually inferior. Both simultaneously reinforce one another, and this is why one can't really understand or contend with race, or critical race theory, or black studies, or indigenous studies, without understanding the confluence between indigenous studies, black studies, and religious studies, and vice versa. Of course, religious studies has a lot to learn from indigenous and black studies and so on. So at the end of the day, those that aspire, and yes, I'm particularly pointing at settlers of color, because to be quite frank, October 7th, yet again, reasserted certain dimensions of struggle. Number one is the question of violence and the question that it's not about mass movements. Now, what with regards to the question of violence? Well, Fanon had said, colonialism isn't a thinking machine. nor it is a body that's endowed with exceptional reasoning faculties, if you will. It is violent in its natural state because it manifests in the form of the state. And it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. Decolonization, hence, is an inherently violent act. Now what Hamas is engaged in, Hezbollah is a form, I would argue, of anti-colonial resistance, right? Survival is reactionary, anti-colonialism is reactionary. That doesn't mean that you're engaging in a decolonial project, because decolonization rests on thriving. It rests on the fact that, okay, what are alternative governance models or economic or social or religious narratives going to be? So this is why in my work I focus on the Islam of the oppressed, because ultimately I have an issue with the conservative Islamic interpretations that emerge out of the Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or the mullahs in Iran and so on and so forth. But I'm not going to feed into white imperialist interventionist policies as a solution to those conservative strands of Islam. Now, there are many strands of Islam, and I hate the term political Islam because it assumes that Islam is... It assumes that Islam is inherently political or Christianity. Any idea is inherently political, for God's sake. I don't believe in political nihilism, et cetera, right? Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist and so on. And even if he were, I mean, if he was, he would have written on the patterns of butterfly wings, and even that would have been a testimony to non-human life, and this is a political act. Non-human life are spiritual subjects, too. The land is a spiritual subject. They're not an object, right? And there are many chapters in the Quran, as you know, and I've written this very clearly, that are named after non-human life, the chapter of the bees, the chapter of the sun, the chapter of the moon, the chapter of the thunder, but Muslims have reneged on that. So this is why I'm calling on settlers of color, particularly Muslims. You've abdicated your responsibility as Muslims. You have pledged allegiance to a sovereignty that is white supremacist, that is alien, that is disfigured, that is liberal. And liberalism permeates even the left out of a false or non-existent even critique of settler colonialism in a basic foundational way that would undermine or that would provide alternatives to state discourse. particularly in the context of Canada, the U.S., and this is why we have this fetish, for other forms of empires, like Russia, like China, and so on, that exist. The left is very happy feeding into that multipolar narrative because it supposedly weakens American empire simultaneously at the same time. Okay, fair enough, it weakens it and it emboldens others.

Speaker 3: Hmm.

Mohamed Abdou: And so far as the ravaging and pillaging of Africa, what the Uyghur are not being exposed to ethnic cleansing, well, look at what's happening in Chechnya. Look at what's happening to the Rohingya in the context of Myanmar. This is how, look at Hindutava in the context of settler colonial Kashmir. Look at, look at, look at. Islamophobia has become the slinchpin for everybody. So, no, the Islamic Jihad's interpretation of Islam, which tends to be more anti-capitalist, is different than Hamas's interpretation of Islam that tends to be more capitalist and so on and so forth. So even these, there are variations within them. And so far as the axis of resistance. And this is what Muslims, particularly settlers of color who are Muslims, who hide our aspirations, because, again, everybody on some level had a choice to come here. The only people that did not have a choice, and this is why they are not deemed to be settlers and they cannot be referred to as settlers. And again, I emphasize settlerhood is an analytic. are black siblings or descendants of the Middle Passage or the transatlantic slave trade, because they didn't have a choice. They got shackled and brought here, the bottom of slave ships and boats if they didn't die across the Atlantic. So no, there is an incumbent responsibility. Why do I not address people? Because the addressing of white people is implicit, is explicit, and it is irrelevant in a certain sense to me. Revolutions are not about numbers. Again, the Quran says, and of course, white supremacists and right-wingers picked up on this, what I'm about to say, when I said it in one of the talks at Columbia very early on with Rula Jibril, actually, and Zachary Foster, as we were being undercover recorded at one of the talks. You only need a small in order to defeat the dominant order. How much did Hamas send in terms of its soldiers, warriors, martyrs, whatever name, resistance fighters, terrorists? How much did it send? a thousand and so odd, and look at what have they appended of an entire world. You had aircraft carriers, F-35s, 32s, 16s, nuclear submarines, all of Euro-America and its might and its military, all for Gaza. All this for Gaza? All this for Palestine? Look at what a thousand or so managed to do in a pan of the world. The Zapatistas are not large in numbers. Malcolm was not large in numbers. Neither was MLK. Neither, neither. And one can give many myriad examples. It's the few, but the prepared, the organized few, who have a strategy or a plan. And this is why I talked about organization. Organization means that you have a plan, you have an agenda. The left talks too much. It expends so much resources and power and time and energy into voting, into uncommitted movements, into let's try and change this opinion and that opinion. And let's go or mobilize out on the streets.

Patrick Farnsworth: Okay.

Mohamed Abdou: Why aren't you buying pieces of land, putting it in a land trust, remitreating it to indigenous people, working towards indigenous sovereignty and black self-determination? Don't you think that that would be more of a threat to settler colonialism? If that was the case? I mean, this is the irony. Indigenous people are only used in this continent and they are used to in the form of the tokenization. Oh, look, they're leading our marches. And it's not just me that says this. It's Palestinian diaspora scholars who regard themselves as settlers of color as well, because we refuse to contend with the violences that we are complicit in over here. And again, the genocide is ongoing here. Are we attentive to that? Do we care about that? Oh, let's just solve Palestine first. Well, you can't solve Palestine first because, again, Euro-America is leading this war. So whatever way you want to put it, you come back here to the imperial core. And what needs to be done here at the imperial core? and what folks are refusing to do because they genuinely believe and they have bought into the American dream. It's understandable. It's 533 years old. It's not a hundred years old. So the settler psyche is entrenched within upward mobility, progress, narratives, et cetera. And this becomes, and this is the sad natural state of this order that a lot of immigrants, a lot of diasporas have brought an into. And until they do the hard work that needs to be done of building with indigenous people on the land and fighting towards black self-determination, nothing in Palestine will change. It won't. The genocide will not end. And this is where I come to say that I thoroughly believe that people care more about stopping the genocide. I never finished that statement at the beginning. People care more about stopping this genocide, understandably so, than they care about the question of liberation.

Speaker 3: Hmm.

Mohamed Abdou: for people of color, or for Palestine themselves. Because nobody's asking themselves, what does the day after look like? And this is the reactionary dilemma. Decolonization is an active sense. To think of thriving is an active project. It's not a passive one. It is not one that is reactionary. And it's certainly one that has to be met on the land. Most people of color are in the urban metropolis. We don't even know how to grow our own food to feed ourselves and our families. And yet we're talking about the collapse and demise of capitalism. But who owns the land? You look at Canada or you look at the US any post-election day. Look at the amount of red on the map. the I-4 Rust Belt corridor, the extension, all the way basically from Oregon and California to New York and to the East Coast. It's all painted in red. white farmers with white decrees from a white settler colonial society in order or armed to the teeth and ready to go yuha. And they are the ones that feed the urban metropolis. We don't possess the means and tools for our own liberation because again, we have bought into, whether we recognize it, are conscious about it or not, into white civility and civilizationism. So you remember the opening to the book. And I called to question a query and a conundrum, a contradiction, sort of paradox. Sister Ilhan Omar, and this does not condone the sexist, the false anti-Semitic, the anti-Black tropes that are leveled against her, being flacked by Dr. Angela Davis, who is now asking us yet again, on top of 2016, to vote against As if the lesson at the time it was Hillary Clinton and she scolded us and said, well, I'm not too narcissistic or arrogant to not vote for Hillary Clinton because of the fear of Trump. Well, tell me, please, what is the difference between the blue and the red? If that is not evident now, which certainly has been evident for a lot of us for a very long time, it should be evident now. But now we also have third party politics. Joel Stein and Dr. Ware. Well, again, in what world are you going to defeat the military, the pharmaceutical, the agrochemical, the prison school, the industrial complexes? And what third party politics they've worked in the context of New Zealand, where you have a Maori party? Well, you don't have land back there. We have multi-party systems in Canada. Has that worked here? How has that worked for Indigenous people and Black self-determination? But we seem to move through these endless series of causes, you see, from Tahrir to, and before that, Seattle in 1999, the anti-war protests, and then we move on to, you know, again, Tahrir, and of course there's, I don't know, more, you know, there as well. There are all kinds of different manifestations. There's, you know, Occupy and what the hell was Occupy when we're talking about stolen land, and this is why Oakland transformed. decolonize oakland and then we moved on to the black spring well we had no dakota before that and then we moved to the black spring and no we're not going back because of coed and normalcy and so on and so forth we need to reevaluate the very structures that govern our lives and yet look at us look at the degree of population so i know i've diverted a little bit from your question so far as well why settlers of color and are they dispossessed they're dispossessed But what is to be expected more that somebody who has tasted the monstrosity of oppression, but to ally themselves with somebody insofar as their sibling, insofar as their kin that is equally oppressed. But no, we don't do that, do we? And so this is why I tend to be harsher insofar as settlers of color, because we should know better, but we don't.

Patrick Farnsworth: I mean, we were talking about this a little bit before. We were talking about Canada and the United States, and something you appreciated about the U.S. is it's pretty open in its brutality. It's pretty open in its... And for what it is, I think, it's pretty on the face, while Canada can be a little bit more hiding behind a veil of liberalism, multiculturalism. We're kind of feeling sorry about the bad things that we have done, and now we're trying to reconcile. It's... It's a different game and it feels it's dishonest, right? And there is that sense that I get that feeling when you're describing Settlers of Color. It is a sense of like, well, maybe if we're good enough, we'll succeed and we'll become white, you know, and we'll have this privilege. But that seems like it's not even a game worth playing, right? It's... Yeah, anyway.

Mohamed Abdou: It's putting your life on the line. Sorry to interrupt. It's putting your life on the line. It's going beyond BDS, which isn't just about Palestine. BDS is an anti-capitalist tactic. It's a non-capitalist practice, really, when fundamentally one looks at it. It's about learning about blocking ports, about blocking railways. It's about, you know, yeah, stopping the shipping, the commerce, the travel, the trade, the ruining some white liberal's day or a liberal's day, period. But it's about building alternatives. What alternatives are being built? There are none. Nobody can point me to alternatives. And again, I'm happy to stand corrected to alternatives on the ground. As his apathesis had been teaching for over 25 years, since 1994. So that is the difference there. What is the creation of alternatives? And that's hard because, again, protests provide an opportunity for us to get to know one another. But we don't work through our differences. We don't work through our disagreements. There is a lack of an ethics of conflict resolution. There's a lack of an ethics of friendship. We don't visit each other's homes. We don't break bread, etc. Again, this is what made the encampments different, at least the encampment at Columbia. But people are thinking of the logic of resistance, not liberation. So, you know, that involves dealing existentially with internalized Islamophobia, particularly Islam, because of the way that it is regarded. It's not that Islam is exceptional. It's how it's been regarded as a quintessential other in the mind of modernity, in the mind of white supremacy of Europe. So this is not a war between Muslims and Jews, but rather one that Muslims and Jews have been conscripted into vis-a-vis whiteness that appropriated Christianity and Eastern tradition underneath Constantine, then projected that image that white supremacist image of an Eastern tradition that usurped onto Islam in the manifestation of Muslim brotherhood and Wahhabi thought and so on, as well as into Judaism in the manifestation of Zionism. So, but, but this is why solidarity becomes very important, but you have to invest in the project of getting to know and the people on, on, on people whose land you stand on that you're reaping rewards and privileges and in relationship to. But how many people know Indigenous people, let alone spend time with them, let alone build with them? And that's what becomes crucial for the building of a better world.

Patrick Farnsworth: I want to tie into what you... I want to talk about your experiences with Columbia University, but not just to describe your own experiences as an isolated or... frankly, even an exceptional experience, except just to say that it was part of a larger campaign, right? It was part of a larger effort to, yeah, shut down any sort of acknowledgement, the things that you've been describing up to this point, right? I'm sure you were sharing these these perspectives and ideas with your students and with those in the encampments. I'm sure that this was what was being recorded in those secret recordings you were describing, right? Undercover recordings. Your name getting dragged through the mud. I mean, these sort of common tactics. I was thinking as you were talking, of what I feel is a very legitimate, it's a fear, which is the fear of counterinsurgency, the fear of the reprisal, the thing that will happen to you and your family if you do engage in this kind of resistance. And I was thinking of a book I've been reading by Orsami Burton called Tip of the Spear, talking about the Long Attica Revolt. Yeah. And while I haven't gotten through it completely, he's describing these waves of prison revolts in New York State in the early 1970s, Attica being, of course, the most famous one. But really what came out of that in the long term was that this became part of war, the state's war against revolutionaries, against black people in particular, anyone who was engaging in any revolutionary activity, organizing and whatnot, Black Panthers, Young Lords, and so on. So what I was thinking about is how did you, if you can understand your experience and the experience of those that you were in solidarity with, what exactly, because if we're going to talk about organizing, if we're going to talk about engaging in this truly solidaristic struggle with Palestinians and indigenous folks of Turtle Island and so on, if we're going to do this, we need to understand the apparatus of the state. understand the kind of counterinsurgency tactics that have been deployed on some level. And I think that that was what, you know, I don't think people necessarily should have been shocked, but nonetheless, it is quite shocking when you are a student at a Ivy League school and police show up and they start hitting you and spraying you and throwing you in a van. And you have a Zionist fascist basically showing up and shouting at you and threatening you with violence. So, if we could talk a bit about your experience through that larger lens and as far as learning lessons in a very practical way of what we could do now that we're one year into this genocide, how we can move forward, what, what lessons can be learned, what lessons can be picked up from, from this past year. You could talk a little bit about that.

Mohamed Abdou: Well, thank you for that question. And to put the spear is a great book. Um, You know, I think everybody should be reading right now Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Chase on Guerrilla Warfare. I think and the U.S. counterinsurgency manual. I would highly recommend those three books, to be quite frank, on top of, obviously, Tip of the Spirit. I think they become very fundamental. Sun Tzu would say, or said, if you fail to recognize the scope and the nature of the enemy, you will succumb in every battle. This is, again, very, very crucial as to the question of violence within itself that I want us to go back to. Nelson Mandela gained, you know, or managed, was politically accepted at the expense of economic apartheid that continued. It was assimilated into the system. So talk about, you know, he was the one that said if the apartheid state decided to use peaceful methods, the ANC would also use peaceful methods. It's up to you, you know, but it's not us. It's not up to us to renounce violence. So what is violence, right? And the question of the state that prefigures into this. So let me come and talk about the encampments and myself and lessons. I think there's something that was particularly triggering to the dominant order because I wasn't being doxed and the degree of viciousness, the brutality of the violence that eyewitnessed was not just because of my propensity in politics, but because it was precisely making the connection to center colonialism here. And this is why David Rubin, Jesse Waters, Shai Davidai, I mean, the list is very endless, right?

Patrick Farnsworth: Yeah.

Mohamed Abdou: sat down and would say, oh, he not only wants to destroy Israel, he wants to destroy America. And what they don't understand is the fact that abolition and decolonization are about creation. They're not about destruction. But they basically got the point that America, Canada would cease to exist. Israel would cease to exist. The identity American, Canadian, Israeli would cease to exist. And this is what's necessary in these contrived formations.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Mohamed Abdou: The dream is irrecuperable. It's always been a nightmare, as Malcolm had called it. It's always been. For me, then, I cast a certain aspersion at the Ivy League brochure, the organizing with the students. I've been in touch with some students already before I arrived at Columbia. To be quite frank and honest, I always operate, and I always say this, people of color have to recognize... That we are born into conditions of war, whether we come to recognize it or not. We learn to humanize the white man before we recognize our own faces in the mirror. We have so much internalized self-resentment that we bleach our skin white with white bleaching skin creams. Very prominent in the context of India. So this is the degree of internalized hate, of internalized phobias of all kinds.

Patrick Farnsworth: Now...

Mohamed Abdou: There's a lot that, again, one can say in terms of myself, but I want to move it more towards the students. The fact that I was in touch with students that I was building, that I was discussing with them, the difference between mobilization and organization. And trying to think through together as we learned together, because I don't mind at all to learn from my students. It's always a mutual process. It is a verb. Learning is a verb. It's not like education, which is a noun in which students would be submitting themselves for me to educate them. But it's a matter of how they learned, how we learned how to dream dangerously. And what I mean by that is not only were they going about and criticizing a real estate corporation called Columbia University, because Columbia is merely an Ivy League institution that is an extension of the settler state. So the students were very well aware from their list of demands of land back, of fighting de-gentrification or gentrification, sorry, in the context of Harlem that Colombia is complicit in as well, that this also goes beyond, you know, protecting a bunch of badly managed assets or investments in Lockheed Martin or Heiko or BlackRock or Google or Microsoft or even dual degree programs with Tel Aviv University that Colombia is invested in. Right. This had to go beyond fighting the dystopian outrage that was leveled at them and at protests to actually putting themselves and their lives on the line. And this is what the valiant, the courageous students very much understood. I mean, there was more learning that was happening at the encampment itself. I'm talking also prior to encampment, but certainly in the encampment, they were certainly in isolated classrooms. You know, what connects the struggle in Kashmir to Palestine, the Congo to Palestine, 1492, whatever it is that you needed to learn, you could learn right there collaboratively within community. You know, the feckless alliance that we saw between Manoush Shafi, the former president of Colombia, Elise Stefanik, a member of Congress, Joe Biden, as well as Colombia, really embody and hence go beyond certain McCarthyism. It goes to the very core of how Islamophobia is a basic tenet and foundation, if you will, to the settler colonial society. Right. So, and if I may just say, because this becomes very important for ostensibly the fight back and the context of war, because again, you have to, I started off with Sun Tzu's statement, because again, we have to know and understand what the enemy is. So the U.S. has secret black site prisons exclusively for Muslims, not for Jewish people. The FBI regularly surveils mosques, not synagogues. State legislators are always targeting what is abstractly referred to as Sharia law. Sharia is merely the corpus of all Islamic adjudications over the course of 1,445 years, right? So there is no ultimately monolithic Sharia law. But nonetheless, state legislators are obsessed with its banning, and they do that, and not with regards to Talmudic law. when we see foreign policy so far as Muslim majority nations and immigration bans for Muslims. The government's funding of counter-surveillance programs and counter-extremism programs that target only Muslim communities, not Jewish communities. Homes get raided, our homes get raided by the FBI, defying acts of free speech, couched in concerns for terrorism. And the government funds all these programs. Hate crimes against Muslims require a much higher bar for believability, and that doesn't mean that anti-Jewish acts don't occur. It's just that our bars tend to be a lot more higher. And anti-Muslim racism gets weaponized very easily by the police, again, to criminalize, to surveil Muslims, to police us constantly all the time. So this is part of the context. that we're discussing and part of the context that ostensibly the students were very well aware with regards to. Now, when we talk about what actually happens, well, what actually happened is you had the use of microwave hearing LRAD systems that were being used to suppress dissent, that were used to evict, suspend students who were exposed to police terror and brutality, not once, twice. The first was April 17th, the same day of the congressional hearings. And I was walking in between that pathway between the one encampment or the one lawn and the other lawn where the encampments actually ended up being at Colombian. Right. And I was seeing and witnessing my students be arrested by the NYPD who trained with the Israeli military and so on and so forth. And we know a lot has spoken with regards to that history that doesn't need regurgitation. We saw the forbiddance of student journalism and hence the Forbiddance of independent lenses by which alternative narratives could be posited. President Shafiq, or former President Shafiq, Baroness Shafiq, called in the police twice. And it was the first time since 1968 that this had happened, that the NYPD were actively on campus and were given carte blanche to do whatever it is that they wanted. Meanwhile, because it was a circus, no matter what it is that I described, by the way, of you, it's nitpicks here and there, because actually live it was an outer body surreal experience.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Mohamed Abdou: that I'm still grappling with up until this day. And this is part of the remnant violence that I'll constantly have to contend with. And many of the students, no doubt, right? You had every person on earth, every politician, every clout chaser trying to give a speech. You had Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaking of the steps of Columbia right across from the encampment. And who was he accompanied by? On the right side, he was accompanied by the founder of the Proud Boys, And they're hovering with other Christian nationalists, white Christian nationalists around the camp. Very aggressive. They're trying to scale the gates because the same day there was a protest outside that was called by white supremacists and Zionist supremacists. Yelling, go back to Gaza, calling students monkeys, etc. Now, of course, again, we have the confluence of Corporate power in the case of the UCLA, if I may project that a little bit, right, where you had Bill Ackman and friends, including Jessica Seinfeld, who's the wife of Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, hiring protesters, particularly Iranian monarchists. You know, as part of a pro-Israeli group, just because of the old alliance between the Shah of Iran and Israel. But in the case of Colombia, we had Eric Adams, Baron Menouche, if you will, of the Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio kinds, who's second only to Donald Trump in his wanton mendacity and who wants to settle in the Golan Heights, right? That he believes is a part of Israel, despite the fact that it's Syrian occupied territory. But anyways, that's where he wants to retire. So you had over 300 arrests and close to 2,500 nationally of students. But look at the dominant order and its functioning. It wasn't just the police brutality and the violence, right, of tearing down tents, of taking students' property, of putting them in a lot where you'd have to go bring in a faculty member in order to act as some kind of guarantor for you to show your ID in order to grab your possessions that were confiscated, that were ramaged through, and so on and so forth. This is part of the collecting of surveillance project. And by the way, we do already all that for the state when we're photographing, when we're videoing. Again, this news cycle flashed during protests. This is the inanity of this performance, right, that is never ending. The left really needs to shut up and go underground for a while and just build for a while, as the right have been doing for decades. But nonetheless.

Patrick Farnsworth: Mm-hmm.

Mohamed Abdou: What was the narrative then that was being pushed to counter the narrative of, well, that the police were brutal and that they were engaging in acts of terror against students? Well, they were talking about professors radicalizing students. And we can imagine who those radicalizing professor students were. I was certainly one of them. So Adams was confessing to he's breaking the First Amendment. So the hell with free speech. But then they moved on and they would use and they pointed to the use of praises as professionals. Right. That were being used and that outsider agitator tropes. Now, of course, this outsider agitator trope is a racist trope that and a concept with that was used by racists in the Jim Crow South as a way to demonize the civil rights movement.

Patrick Farnsworth: Right.

Mohamed Abdou: So, you know, it's a boogeyman narrative in so many ways. The laws and ordinances that were being directly involved and used, you know, were ones that are extrapolated from enslaved insurrection laws. And again, this isn't happenstance. You had NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chinn. who was central to the planning and execution of both raids at Colombia, right? This man had murdered Artesanso Bovel, a person of color, Hispanic, in 2008. He shot him in the back in cold blood. We have 10 top NYPD Deputy Commissioner Daughtry, who officially mocked, essentially, the fact that he found amongst the texts that were found in the student library was an introduction to terrorism by the renowned historian Charles Townsend. And he said that this text was radicalizing students. Right. But he referred to it as a guide. You have the tear gas, flash bombs, batons. Right. You have the fact that the NYPD and Sergeant Chill, who shot Orto Sanso, his firearm went off while they were going into his hall. So one of my students, one of our students could have been murdered. So this is what we are contending with, ultimately. But not only that. We had the fact that the NYPD crackdown on Columbia U students was led by a member of the school's faculty, Rebecca Wiener. And she's a Columbia professor that is still there. And she leads the NYPD Intel division that maintains an office in Tel Aviv. And Wiener consistently has made a point of saying that student rhetoric necessitated the violent rate. Of course, there's Shai Davidai and so on and so forth. Now, the building that was taken over, Hamilton Hall, that was renamed Hinds Hall, and Hinds is a six-year-old girl in Gaza who was murdered by hundreds of shots of Israeli bullets that pierced through her frail body. As she was calling out for her family, for an ambulance, for anybody, including paramedics who were also murdered, to come and help save her and get out of the car that she was hiding in. And a building was taken over. A building was taken over. And this building, Hamilton Hall, had been taken over numerous times. Because, again... there had been a history of takeover insofar as Hamilton Hall that happened on at least five occasions during the civil rights era, protesting apartheid, when students were trying to establish the critical ethnic studies department and so on and so forth.

Patrick Farnsworth: So this isn't new.

Mohamed Abdou: All right. And in this case, it was being done in the name of Hindrejab, in the name of Palestine, and in the name of a genocide that is very much ongoing up until now. So this is what we're contenting with in terms of violence. So this teaches or should teach us several things. Again, the question of narrative, the question of narrative that becomes very important because the dominant order, the settler state with its university, with its police institutions, they have access to legacy media, they have access to a particular discourse that they can disseminate then on public en masse. And what the students did in the encampment was they built an alternative world, Patrick, a world where, as the Zapatistas say, all worlds belong. It wasn't, it was this anarchistic space in which there weren't leaders because the leaders or the main organizers were all arrested in the first encampment. And it was a scene that was reminiscent of Tahrir, that you can plan this even if you want it. Here it is, the first group of organizers being captured. Arrested. I'm in the middle between two lawns. And all of a sudden I started seeing students jump the barricade onto the other lawn. Nobody told them to do that. Nobody yelled out, let's jump over the barricade or over the fence. Sorry, it wasn't even a barricade, but over the fence onto the other lawn. Let's pitch our tents here. And the students, in fact, weren't allowed to pitch their tents the first night and it was raining and so on. But it's the logic of care that breaks through the carcerality. It's that anti-authoritarian logic. Niche, impulse, instinct, gravitas that we all have within us to recognize oppression, to recognize domination, to recognize the role of death power versus life power. Death power is the one that is crystallized, is hierarchical, operates top-down. Mm-hmm. in totalitarian and deeply fascistic ways, but it all recognized life power and the possibilities that come as well. So this is part of the beauty of the spontaneity what was created vis-a-vis the encampments. You had Muslims and Jews and Christians and all kinds of people praying together, worshipping together, celebrating one another. It wasn't, it was, you know, people assumed that anarchism means that there are no rules, that there are no ethics or politics, but to the contrary. You had the abide by a certain code of conduct if you were to enter into those camps. Students were celebratory. They were joyful. They were learning new ways to walk the land. new ways to mourn, new ways to express their joy, new ways to dance, new ways to connect with the earth. They had their own library. They had their own medic station. At a certain point, they suggested, well, why don't you have a community garden? Why are you relying on aunties and uncles bringing you food as much as the food was very delicious? But let us think, if this is a liberated zone, then you're asserting the means of your own autonomy. But this is why I'm saying that they were going against a settler state and not just Columbia University, because Columbia was never going to sign off onto BDS and was never going to divest. It simply wanted to find a blasé way, at best, a band-aid way, to substitute the plaster for the cracks to prevent the building from completely collapsing. But this is part of what the dominant order uses in its manufacturing of consent. So now we're in a situation where we can't protest peacefully. We can't boycott peacefully. You can't hunger strike. You can't block traffic. You can't self-emulate. You can't heckle politicians and account of risk visibility politics. You can't march. You can't dissent. You simply, we can't be. So again, amidst this shroud of war and violence that we have been born into. It becomes necessary to address that violence head on, but not in a reactionary way. And what I mean again by that is trying to take the spirit of the encampment elsewhere into our neighborhoods. Why aren't we using money in order to buy buildings to establish social centers, cooperatives, workers cooperatives, to begin to develop alternative ways of being and living within the land? You want to talk about violence, right? Again, violence is a tactic, it's not a strategy. So the question of, again, what is to be built as an alternative becomes something that's very, very fundamental and important. You can't say that you're not going to have an explosion when you leave the conditions, the ingredients still there. in terms of violence and all that and impoverishment and so on and so forth. And you can't stop this machina, genocidal machina, with love. Because that love has to be anchored in, I mean, as much as I'm hopeless romantic, in practical, pragmatic actions, including self-defense. And again, by any means necessary, but you need to be able to defend what it is that you built. So what have you built? You know, I'll go back to the chapter, the last chapter, number five, if you remember, the book where I talk about qital, which means to fight in Islam, jihad, the smaller jihad and red and black power. What did the panthers do? They built and they armed themselves and the breakfast programs, neighborhoods. alternative schools. The same thing with Zapatistas. They didn't just emerge on the scene in 1994. They'd been building for a decade before. They had a program. And then after that, defense becomes something that's more facile because you have something to defend. This is why even the Quran says, only a few of you shall go out to fight. Because if all of you go out to fight, then what are you leaving behind and who will care for those that are left behind? But violence is a de facto condition for people of color, and if you want to talk about violence, well, Rodney was assassinated in Guyana in 1980, Lumumba was assassinated in 61, MLK in Memphis, Tennessee in 68, Malcolm in 65 in Manhattan, Sankara in 87. Hampton being drugged and shot and killed in his bed in a pre-dawn raid by the Chicago Police Department in 69. They condemned Matt Turner until they didn't. They condemned Nelson Mandela and the ANC up until they didn't. They condemned Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution up until they didn't. Even Netanyahu said Hamas is good for us. So they condemned Gandhi despite his anti-blackness, his misogyny, or All these things, but up until they did it, yes, there are fought in the PLO or condemned up until they did it, right? But the question for, again, people of color or for people generally, here is what does it mean to be, as Audrey Lord had put it, what does it mean to be a supposed citizen of a country who is on the wrong side of every liberation struggle on this earth? And we could sit down and talk about the endless massacres since the founding of this settler colony, let alone Israel, because Israel is merely an instrument that this settler colony uses. Waltz said in the last debate very openly, Biden said it before him decades ago, if Israel didn't exist, we'd have to find the means, the will, the ideology to found it. Waltz says, well, we have to help Israel further expand to greats. So now you're going to have 10% of Lebanon, 10% of Jordan, 10% of the Arabian Peninsula, 10% of Sinai and Egypt and so on and so forth.

Speaker 3: It's

Mohamed Abdou: So we have to think as warriors in this war, what are we fighting against and what are we fighting for? What are we fighting? Are we just fighting about capitalism? Are we just fighting Israel? Or are we fighting something that is far greater? The serpent snake that's staring at us, the monster, the big monster staring you and I in the mirror, as opposed to the small monster that we like to point out or point to over there. Yeah, that monster is horrific. Not that monster is near mirage and image of the monster over here that we don't want to contend with. So in terms of, there are three things that are necessary for any movement to really be revolutionary. You have to create, you have to create alternatives. You have to alternative schools, hospitals, different ways of life. You want to convince people to join your cause. You have to create that world, a world of many billows or, where all worlds fit, as Apatiste has put it. Number two, propaganda. You have to have a means, an alternative narrative. What is it that can act? Palestinian, indigenous, black, people of color, queer, feminist, you know, struggles across the board with what historical marker, with what narrative from a spiritual, ethical, political... To me, I could give a damn, and you and I talked about this before, and you know my view with regards to it. I'm not going to platform a Palestinian simply because he's Palestinian or somebody who's black simply because it's a black spring. That is probably the most racist, insulting thing. And it speaks nothing but reeks of liberalism and representation of politics. I'm not going to ally with a Palestinian because they're Palestinian. They're Palestinians or Zionists. There are queer people who are homonationalists and engaged in pinkwashing, and there are Islamophobes. There are anarchists who are misogynists and racists. There are Marxists who very much, yeah, could care less about spirituality. So to me, that's not the impulse, you know, of solidarity. The question beyond identity or what are the spiritual, ethical, political commitments that inform whatever sets of identities that we subscribe to, that becomes the question, and that becomes the... the premise upon which I'm trying to build an ummah in the global sense of the world, or a community, a community of believers, a community of warriors, again, that are building on the land, stolen land here, with indigenous and black siblings, towards something that is far greater. We will be and constitute more of a threat that way. We will really be saving a lot of resources. If you think about the hundreds of millions of dollars that were raised during the Black Spring, if those were poured into neighborhoods and abolitionist trajectories, where would we be right now? This is the landscape generally, the psychological damage that we're constantly contenting with, the hurt, the pain, and I'm sure the students internalized a lot of that, a lot of faculty that jumped on board the encampment, when they recognized or when they were shamed into doing so, a lot of elite academics across the board that won't even speak with regards to Palestine or that don't want to connect the dots or that were opposed to certain forms of direct action because it tainted the image of the movement. But this is where, again, students or the youth and particularly the youth become very important in terms of the spark but we're also speaking to a youth that is for the most part privileged that they're attending ivd schools at least the case in colombia right how do you begin to address again those who are younger in high school those that are within their own neighborhoods the children again that is when we have a jamal says are being born from immortality and are the earth that we shoot towards infinity This is what becomes a question. And the only way you could do that, what gave the students gravitas and the ability to do this for the most part, Because I saw them. They were meeting in each other's homes. They were eating together. They were spending the night at each other's homes. They were doing their homework together, their assignments together, organizing their actions. You don't see that amongst the older generation because the older generation, the more that we get older, the more we get invested into debt power. We care about the car, the house, the kids that I got to take to school, the this, the that, my salary. six figures, whatever apartment or house that I have, paying the bills, and so on and so forth. So this is, the students, it's not that they don't have responsibilities, but they're less shackled by the pressures of the dominant order and the de facto condition of normalcy that breeds acquiesced passivity that breeds docility, that breeds fear. They were, to the contrary, fearless, imaginative, unbound, unrestrained by the carceral prison walls that perhaps adults, consciously or unconsciously, tither ourselves to every single day of our lives. And God bless them. What they managed to accept, what they managed to inspire us collectively, dare I say, that just doesn't happen overnight. The encampment was not a product of just this you know, day or week or afterthought, to the contrary. But imagine if that's what, as the amount of planning that takes within a campus, imagine what it takes to actually sustain and to build a community. Because you have to deal with insecurities that you have in relationship to one another. your fears of one another, the stereotypes that you have internalized of one another, regardless of whether you're students or adults. So if you're not willing to put in the labor and the energy and the effort and to overcome or to transcend differences while addressing differences, then something like this is not going to work. So, you know, these are, I would argue, some of the lessons that the students embodied are, And that exuded life, life worlds, you know, that we all saw, that we all witnessed, that I lived, that was seen in Gaza, that was appreciated, that was a turning point. The question is, how do we make this far more sustainable and beyond the Ivy League? That is the question.

Patrick Farnsworth: Well, I really... I almost want to leave it there, but I do have one thing, because I think that's a really beautiful way to, in a way, encapsulate the past year and these encampments and the movement against not just genocide, but it seems like there was a blossoming of a deeper consciousness in this sort of... building of something that really was trying to incorporate, I think, what you've gestured towards and what you've described up to this point, making these connections and why I think you were particularly a threat, at least in the eyes of the institution in the state. So I do want to ask, though, in relation to that, Um, I mean, you, I want to, I mean, just out of my concern for you, of course, I want to know like what you're looking towards, what you're doing. You were forced out of Columbia basically. And you are now, I mean, there's been a lot of solidarity and support for you in particular. There's a movement, uh, we are Muhammad, uh, there's a website, uh, um there's a i think a lawsuit that's in the works if i'm correct in that against columbia on your behalf so if you just if we just begin by or sorry just finish this this this discussion if you could talk a little a little bit about that um and uh how we can support you and and what else you would ask of the listeners uh as we conclude thank you very much um

Mohamed Abdou: There, I'm currently, my lawyers have launched a lawsuit against Columbia on August and Manoush Shafiq, given that it happened on her watch. And of course, Manoush Shafiq now works for Starmer's government in the UK as a foreign policy advisor.

Patrick Farnsworth: Beautiful.

Mohamed Abdou: Of all tasks and jobs. But nonetheless, the lawsuit is against them both. This is a matter of not only clearing my name, but this is a matter of asserting a particular discourse and narrative that I believe I was being doxxed as a couch of. The campaign is called We Are Muhammad. I didn't come up with that name. I'm not that much of a narcissist. And there are students that are involved with my media comms team. And I'm very grateful. I mean, my media comms team is just amazing and kind and humble and sweet and generous. I don't know where I'd be... Without them, I mean, they made them more upside and just everything from correspondences with, you know, perhaps media and otherwise. I mean, I have to say there's been, well, you and I talked about this, a lot of gatekeeping of support from the left because of my political views as well. academics that didn't even want to circulate or even sign on my petition because they didn't agree with my political views and so on and so forth. So it has been lonely. It has been polyester. I am broken in ways that I'm still trying to understand the violence has not ended it's ongoing socially politically otherwise not just with regards to me but because i don't operate in a vacuum either right uh the idea of having to walk into courtrooms to give depositions the fact that my public and my private life will be a fodder for everybody or is fodder for everybody right um but this is the nature of the manufacturing of consent machines right um You know, this is, and the lawsuit is a one to two year process because practically as well that a lot of judges died during COVID and hence, you know, the judicial system in the U.S. is backed up. We're, Columbia does have a copy of the lawsuit and the press release is available online. So is the lawsuit. So anybody could take a look at it. So is the We Are Muhammad campaign. uh of course that carries more details but this will be at least a one to two year process they have 12 months to respond so hopefully by mid-october end of october we should be hearing anticipated that they'll try and get it thrown out uh at that point hopefully as my lawyers believe uh god willing we'll be able to launch an appeal um look the the most important thing to me is to support our youth for us to collectively think away so far as liberation. But it's also to engage the work, to engage the thoughts of ideas, because we should be able to engage in this free flow of ideas pertaining to faith or a lack of faith without the architects of animosity being a settler state, to be corporations like Colombia, or even politicians being able to intervene. We should be able to disagree and be able to operate from not just in foreign positions, but knowledge-based positions. But I really would extol us to also think about, and I want to return to this, because as Harsha Walia, my kumpa and sister had said, encampments are not only, and they're not just leader-leading encampments, but she was referring to that, but I think it's her words could be applied really more generally, more abstractly. Encampments are not only zones of demands and refusals, demands and refusals of ourselves, but also processes of communing, of making decisions, coming together, of enacting solidarity as a verb, of embodying autonomous and collective liberation. They are zones of imagination and connection, of pre-triggering life, new worlds that are now being pathologized. And we really need to think then what that means in terms of Martin Luther King, when he said in a letter from Birmingham, right, jail, you know, the white moderate or moderates, including people of color, are more devoted to order than they are to justice. And that's what Martin referred to as a negative piece. But what we need is a positive piece, which emphasizes the presence of justice. So when you see people calling themselves revolutionary, they're always about destroy this, destroy this, destroy this, but never talking about building or creating. They're not revolutionary, right? They don't actually understand the first thing about revolution. And this is Kwame Ture, who also believed that religion is fundamental, right, to revolutionary organizing. So this is, I think, part of the dimensions, perhaps, that, you know, if we're gonna be galvanized and we're gonna galvanize others, we need to understand the nature of this war. The youth who constantly leave me bereft and grieving, but full of hope because of their values and principles, My students were attacked by chemical attacks. It's so ironic, maybe even satirical, that Colombia settled with two of its students who are members of the IOF who engaged in chemical attacks against some of my students and some of the students at Colombia who are pro-Palestinian. But of course, when it comes to people of color and people like myself and being fired, although I was never really terminated, and that's a different discussion in the entire circus theater that went down in Congress, right? Because everything that was said was basically a lie, right? But this is what we're contending with, right? So how, again, can we take that spirit that was embodied, that our youth reminded us of, Elsewhere, you know, it follows that a thing, if a thing is not a building, it certainly is decaying, that life is revolution. The world would die if we don't read and act out its imperatives. That's George Jackson, our martyr. So if we're very aware of how empire operates vis-a-vis euphemisms, if we're very aware, as Malcolm said, that the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people that are doing the oppression, then we have to come up with an alternative narrative. And this is why I'm extolling people to really rethink what they know of each other, what they assume, what we assume, but particularly in relationship to 1492 and relationship to indigenous struggles, black struggles, and to Islam. We need an Islam and a Quran of the oppressed. And that's what my work focuses on. We need, where is the Judaism that came with Moses who stood against Pharaoh? Where is the Christianity of Jesus that defended Mary Magdalene as fellow apostles were condemning her? Where is Muhammad who stood with the oppressed? That becomes the question. And that is a central part of the narrative because whether we like it or not, yes, it's a genocide, but it's also a war. And it's a civilizational, racial, and religious war. So we really need to reorient the terms upon which we are analyzing the Palestine right now in tandem and in relationship to over here where we're at. I always say to people, listen, okay, I don't doubt your love for Palestine. You love it so much, right, the way that you do, and you're only focused on Palestine on its own, despite the fact that you're internally, go fight for Palestine there. If you can get it, go fight for Palestine there. But you're here. You're here. what are you doing about that here? And given the history of Turtle Island. So to me, I think that that is most important, you know, for me, because I feel that there's a great deal of reinventing of the wheel that people need to learn the lessons, the history, you know, and the most important lesson is humility. Sorry, students and youth, you know, you're not the first activist in the world. There's an entire genealogy and generation, if you will, that came before you. The past 25 years alone were huge. Learn from them. Learn from us, many of us, if you will. who are veterans, and our elders are still around. Shanti Alston and many, many others. There are so many that are still around. And don't think that you got it all figured out and that you're doing this for the first time. It's been done many times before. Try and build on the legacy that is there. Appreciate our ancestors, yes, but realize that our ancestors were also fallible. whether it's Patrice de Mamba or Kwame or Walter Rodney or Sankara and so on, you know, Fred Hampton, all of them. So we need fresh eyes and fresh ways of looking at our struggles because we're far removed from even where they were in the 50s, 60s, 70s and so on. So this is what becomes key. Can we imagine a world without states? And how can we do that right now and live that right now? We don't need to wait for the day after. We start by doing it today, by doing it now. And again, you don't need large numbers, as we were saying, either. How much of a small group defeated a larger enemy? It's always David and Goliath. But the Qur'an also says, Prepare. for them what is necessary in strength. You need to prepare what October 7th just happened. I mean, again, Hamas was very clear. This took more than two years to plan. This has been in the plans for a very long time.

Patrick Farnsworth: A very long time.

Mohamed Abdou: So it's hard work. It necessitates that we all transform, mature, engage in the project of metamorphosis. This is what we learn from our shiny black prince by the name of Malcolm. That man was beautiful and we all revere him because he wasn't an ideologue. The hell with ideologues and ideologies. But we have to change. We have to change our ways of living, our way of being. We have to learn how to walk with the land, not on it. And the land where we're at, we have to embrace it. visions of indigeneity that relate to our cultures, our traditions, our roots. And yeah, that's, that's what I would suggest and say, and, you know, you know, sort of some, some concluding remarks. I'm hopeful, but yeah, What we're going to be witnessing, whoever wins the election, to be quite honest, is going to be a lot worse because the worst is yet to come. And this is soon Muslims will be in concentration camps here because the idea, to put it very bluntly and very just rapidly, because I don't want to... keep either of us too long. This is a way to destroy any political manifestation of Islam that is anti-colonial, let alone decolonial, liberatory, to completely annihilate that. Of course, there was an attempt to do that with the Arab Spring, if you recall, and we can sit down and talk about the Khrir in 2013, Rabban Nagda, the massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood that I witnessed. I'm no fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, but for a society to call for its own genocide of its own people, that's a whole different other of fascistic madness, if you will. But the idea was floated then that the most dangerous thing that came with the Arab Spring is, again, this idea of freedom and what Islam may have to do with it. And If we all go back to when Trump's first visit, which was to Saudi Arabia, surrounded by Arab dictators, as well as Gulf monarchies, the demand was made, let us end this Muslim Brotherhood. But they weren't referring to the end of it within their own regions and territories, which they managed very well and effectively. To them, they want it to end in Europe and America. That effectively means, if you haven't read this book, read this book. It's called A Quiet Revolution by Laila Ahmed. It was published in 2011. That means every single Muslim student association on every single campus. from here to Europe. That means the Islamic Society of North America. That means CAIR, all these big organizations, because they are founded on MB thought, regardless of the fact that they may have different politics. Some are more progressive, some are liberal, some are more conservative than others, but they're all founded on MB thought, ultimately. And so it will be, let us throw, as the French say, those Baucho Islamists, the leftist Muslims, into concentration camps. Anybody who is not a Muslim and Zionist, because that's the arc of the Abraham Accords, is headed towards those concentration camps. So this is the danger of where we're at, particularly with ISIS. Well, it doesn't really matter. But I feel personally with Trump, I think he will polarize society in a way, actually, that will be quite helpful and useful that having Kamala will not necessarily. So, but yeah, I'm digressing now. So.

Patrick Farnsworth: No, you're fine. I wanted to bring this again, we could probably talk for another hour, but let's just try to try to find an ending to this discussion for the sake of time. But yeah, I just want to just bring I thought about bringing in the context of the US election and how important it is. Um, but in a way it doesn't matter in the way that we often are conditioned or the way that we're supposed to talk about or think about it. And that to me, yeah, you know, in my own life it's, it's a bit difficult to try to, to, um, articulate that to a lot of folks because the the stakes aren't the stakes are high but not in the way that it is being narrativized and that's very frustrating because it does come down to in fact the other day I was blamed like because I said I wasn't going to vote for example and they told me that it was going to be my fault if Trump wins, right? It's like, it was going to be my fault. Everything's going to go to shit. And I'm like, well, I don't know how to, I don't know where to even begin with that. So we'll just, we'll just, we'll just let it, we'll let that lie for now. It was one of those weird situations that I occasionally get into. Anyway,

Mohamed Abdou: Well, Arab and Muslims, don't worry about that. Arab Muslims are very clearly going to take the majority of that blame. I mean, we see the black versus Palestinian and even the black versus black Muslim. You're prioritizing your religion over race, etc. This is part. This is why the narrative becomes very important, because, as you noted, it's irrelevant in the way people are talking about it. Right. But there will be relevance in other ways. Yeah. Maybe for another discussion somewhat.

Patrick Farnsworth: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we will, I'm sure reconvene. Um, and I, I just thank you for everything you've said. Thank you for making this time. Um, just, you know, bless you. Thank you so much for, for everything really, truly. Thank you so much. Um, I really very much look forward to speaking with you again and, and, I don't know what to say. We are doing this again. I just want to bring it back to what I said at the beginning. This is being recorded October 7th, so it's been one year since... Since this particular phase or however you want to describe it, this part of this war, this genocide has really started. It's been a year since then. So it's just been... If there's anyone I could talk to right now that I'm at least familiarized with for this podcast, it was you. So again, thank you for suggesting this day. Thank you for having the time to do it on this day. And I will make sure that people, I mean, just as far as you specifically in your case, I will make sure people know how to support you in everything.

Mohamed Abdou: Thank you so much. I appreciate you very much. And thank you for having me on. I'm very grateful and indebted. May this coming year, I mean, Shana Tova to our Jewish siblings, may bring about the ushering of genuine freedom, decolonial freedom for all of us all over the world.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Patrick Farnsworth: Last Born in the Wilderness is a 100% listener-supported project, so thank you so much to the patrons, to the supporters, for helping to keep this work going. If you are enjoying the work that I am producing for this podcast, consider heading over to the Patreon page if you haven't done this already at patreon.com backslash lastbornthewilderness and become a backer at whatever level you feel comfortable with. All the resources and notes for this episode and every other interview I've produced for this podcast can be found on the respective episode pages at lastbornthewilderness.com. The music for today's episode is produced by Nick Vander. You can listen to Nick's