Mohammed El-Kurd
speaker
488 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2023
last heard 24 May
Mohammed El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And this is what I'm trying to do with this new book.
I wouldn't say activism. I would say journalism. Just making sure, disrupting the flow of the sentence to insert a statistic or insert... a historical fact that should be implied and should be a household name, but it's not. I can't just say the Nakba. I have to say the Nakba.
The 1948 near total destruction of Palestinian society at the hands of Zionist militias that later formed the Israeli military that now terrorizes us today. And there is like three-tier legal system, blah, blah, blah. I can't just say the Nakba. I have to give all of these explanations. And that's heartbreaking. And people are out to do better. People are out to do better. This is not...
It's not what my literature should be limited to. It's not what anybody's literature should be limited to. It's the job of news reporters to report the news. But a lot of the time they use looted language, they use passive voice, they obfuscate facts. And it's on the shoulders of us, the heavy carrying.
Terrible job. Horrible job. What's the... They don't do their job whatsoever.
Not mentioning that... a town is occupied when you're reporting about an occupied town. Not mentioning that a settlement is illegal or a settler is illegally present in a Palestinian village when you're reporting on them. Only quoting
Israeli officials and only quoting Israeli politicians and police officers and framing your entire analysis with Israeli officials and only interviewing Palestinians when they have been brutalized and victimized physically. Yeah, those are some of the issues. There is plenty.
And then like saying things, you know, like Israel will bomb a hospital in Gaza and the press will say like Hamas run hospital. And this negative association with Hamas will remove any sympathy from the reader towards the victims of this hospital bombing. A lot of things, and a lot of them are sinister.
I have many friends, many journalist friends, and I've seen many journalists online speak about their experiences when talking about Palestine, the censorship that goes on into it. And I have many journalist friends, some at the New York Times, some... They used to be at the Washington Post who tell me the kinds of battles they had to do.
They had to go through with their editors to let them even utter the word Palestine. And not even in news pieces, like pieces about, let's say, a Palestinian artist or a Palestinian chef or whatever. There's a lot that happens behind the scene that is not reported on. Because when it comes to Palestine, the rules and the laws of journalism...
are bendable, you know, passive voice is king, emitting facts is acceptable, anything goes.
A recent study came out and said that 52% of Palestinians have depression. I would argue that the number is much, much, much higher. I think it would be absurd for someone to live under the conditions we live under and not contemplate Many things. Many things. Not just suicide, but many, many, many things.
And if people were to put themselves in our shoes for just one day, they would understand where all of the rage and all the resistance is coming from. It's not an easy life.
I'm surrounded by good people, and I'm... I'm surrounded by good people and I don't even think of it as a strength. I think of this as my obligation. It just feels like the thing I have to do. I don't need inspiration. I don't need strength. I don't need... It's just my obligation. There is a great travesty taking place in the world. And I and few others have been put in a place where we're
able to talk about it to a few more people. And it's just my obligation, I have to do it.
What gives me hope about the future of Palestine is taking a look at history and understanding that across history there has not been an injustice that lingered endlessly. Everything comes to an end. There's not necessarily a perfect resolution for everything. But nothing continues in the form that it started in the occupation and colonialism in Palestine and Zionism.
All of these things are not at all sustainable whatsoever. So taking a look at history. You know, a lot of what I'm saying today and what I have said in your podcast, many people would be pearl-clutching hearing me say what I say. But I always try to remind myself that during Jim Crow, during slavery, during the Holocaust, during the occupation of Algeria, during...
any point of colonialism in the African continent, people did not possess the moral clarity they possess today when they talk about these things. And all of these things were contested and controversial and in many, many, many cases legal. And today they are deplorable, condemnable, and people say never again, and they don't remember them.
So that's what gives me hope, is believing in the inevitability of justice.
I think just the unabashedness of Palestinians. We're a people who are told, and at some point we're told by the large majority of the world that we should shrink ourselves, that we should be ashamed of who we are, that we are monsters, that we are terrorists, that we are blah, blah, blah. And Palestinian people don't really give a shit. They're continuing to live as they do.
Showing 461–480 of 488 · page 24 of 25
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