Omar Suleiman
speaker
1,922 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2023
last heard Feb 2024
Omar Suleiman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But if you look at what has transpired and what they have said, they're attacking these ships in response to the occupation or in response to the genocide and saying that they will continue to do so, to stop business as usual until a ceasefire is reached. They have not killed anyone, right? They have seized ships. They have blocked the lanes. But they have said that if a ceasefire happens,
they will cease their activity. So instead of the United States trying to get a ceasefire through, the United States decided, let's go bomb Yemen too. Let's spend more money on weapons and killing innocent people, which shows you exactly where our policy always leads itself to, unfortunately. So I think that most reasonable people
would say that the problem is not with Yemeni rebels attacking ships. The problem is with Israel attacking innocent Palestinian lives.
So Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson was one of the few co-sponsors of a bill that has been on the floor of Congress for years, initially sponsored by Congresswoman Betty McCollum, to penalize Israel for its detention of child prisoners.
Thousands of children arbitrarily detained, put in military courts, solitary confinement, and yes, sexual violence that's been documented by human rights organizations against them, and there have been no repercussions. So I want you to think about this.
Just the thought of conditioning aid to Israel so that it doesn't indiscriminately bomb entire populations has not been able to find any home in mainstream American politics. For years, just trying to stop Israel from picking up children and throwing them into military prisons where they disappear for decades at times has not found any thrust in mainstream American politics.
Whereas any resolution that is pro-Israel will make it past both chambers relatively quickly. When people talk about Israeli hostages and then talk about Palestinian prisoners, there's already a problem with that framing. First of all, all 2.2 million people in Gaza are hostages. Every Palestinian that lives under occupation is a hostage.
But all of those prisoners that have been picked up, women, children, Innocent people with absolutely no process of making sure that they're treated right or given fair trials or even given a communication line with their families or with any government to help them is absolutely criminal. All of those prisoners are also hostages.
And when you already propose this idea that there are Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, you're already implying that one group is complicit in their own devastation, whereas another group has had devastation visited upon them entirely out of their own doing. And so it's important for people to learn about children prisoners who are indeed hostages to an apartheid system.
And even what happened during that four-day truce, which all of us hoped would be extended and become permanent, where 150 Palestinian prisoners were released, Israel just went and picked up another 135 in the West Bank and threw them in prisons. That's what I mean when I say you're not addressing the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the occupation.
The root of the problem is the apartheid. The root of the problem is the desperation that then drives the creation of all sorts of circumstances that will only further lead to the devastation of everyone, right? If you don't solve that problem,
And at the root of that problem is the dehumanization of the Palestinian, because no one is raising alarms for those Palestinian hostages in Israeli military prisons. No one's putting up their pictures and no one's talking about who they are and their human stories and the violence that's been wreaked against them. at every level.
So if you don't solve not just the root of occupation, but also the dehumanization that drives the occupation, which is unfortunately so pervasive right now in the discourse, then you're going to continue to have this gap in how the world sees the plight of the Palestinians and how unfortunately the American public sees the problem of the Palestinians.
Abraham Accords is nothing but an agreement in which you slap the name of Abraham on arms deals in exchange for countries being able to undertake their own unholy pursuits. They use one of the holiest names in history and continue to erase the main victims of this atrocity. And so the Abraham Accords are an insult to humanity, an insult to the Palestinians. and an insult to the name of Abraham.
If they're honest to the plight of the Palestinians, if they are honest to the roots of the problem, absolutely. Look, again, peace is sought, but peace cannot be used to silence. The entire peace process has been hung over the Palestinians all of these years while settlements continue to expand and their situation only continues to get worse.
Is Israel really going to remove the 700,000, 800,000 settlers, right, and suddenly change its tune on a two-state solution? Benjamin Netanyahu is saying right now, and he's speaking to, unfortunately, what is clearly a majority of the Israeli public, that there will never be a Palestinian state.
So these peace talks cannot be used to suffocate all of the work of justice and bringing Israel to accountability. The world has to act when they see apartheid. The world has to act when they see occupation. If the world fails to bring Israel to a place of accountability, then a few countries that have their own agendas
cannot put forth anything meaningful for the victims of Israel being the Palestinian people.
So in general, that framing relies on a sanitization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a vilification of Malcolm X that a lot of people do put forth and present as two polar opposites in how they approach the plight of Black people in America and resisting racism here in America.
When I taught a course at Southern Methodist University on MLK and Malcolm X, and Islam and the Civil Rights Movement, what I'd often do is I'd give my students a set of quotes, and I would say, assign this to Malcolm or Martin, and they'd always get it wrong. So you can find quotes from MLK in Breaking the Silence, and especially when he took a stand against the Vietnam War.
Showing 201–220 of 1,922 · page 11 of 97
← Previous
Next →