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
They continue to resist. They continue to write. They continue to do all that they do. And I love that the most. And I love our ability to laugh more than anything else. One thing that's misunderstood in American culture about Palestinian culture, or just Western culture in general, is martyrdom culture.
A lot of the time people will broadcast images of Palestinian women cheering when their sons have been killed by the Israeli forces and they will say, you know, these people glorify death and these people are eager to have sex with 70 virgins in heaven and so on and so forth. But that's not the case.
The whole idea of the occupation, when they are killing our children, the whole idea is that they are trying to break our spirits. So these mothers whose hearts are broken, who are anguished, who are so... in so much pain, when they are cheering, they are not celebrating. They're not cheering. They are letting the occupier know that you have not broken my spirit. I have not yet been defeated.
And I think that is beautiful. It's the same thing with our prison culture. You know, Palestinians are fascinating in the sense that Palestinians go to prison and they study and they come out with degrees, they can find ways to participate in civil society, they can even smuggle sperm from prison to give a life outside of it.
Because they understand, in their philosophy of prisons, they understand that these structures, these buildings, were built to break your spirits. So what do you do? You don't allow it to break your spirits. You resist it. You continue to hold on to life. You continue to hold on to your love of life. You continue to hold on to your love of freedom.
And you come out of prison and you're celebrated by your community. And the prison has not broken your spirit. So all of these structures and systems that the Zionist movement has put into place, be it the shoot to kill policies, or the prisons, or the demolishing our homes, that were meant to kill our spirits, They don't.
You demolish a home in Jerusalem and the people say, don't worry, we'll build another. And you demolish it and we'll build another. That's what I admire most about the Palestinian people. It's this resilience. And, you know, people love to say resilience, but I think it's stubbornness. I think we're such a stubborn people. And I think that's that's great.
Thank you so much.
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