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.
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Appearances
Gaza has been described as the world's largest open-air prison, unemployment, blockaded from all directions, no airport. Um, regular added restrictions placed even on their ability to fish. So every aspect of Ghazdan life has been under occupation. I would argue that it's an injustice to even call it an open air prison because
Inmates are not bombed in prisons routinely by the most sophisticated weapons in the world. Regular bombardment of Gaza, every single person in Gaza has lived through multiple rounds of bombardment. It is deeply distressing. I remember in 2021, there was an image that I will never forget of children having to go back to school after the bombardment of 2021.
And next to them, they would have the empty chairs and the posters of the child that used to sit in that chair. I think what encapsulates it most for me An image that I grew up with was the image of Muhammad al-Durra, who was in his father's lap over 20 years ago. And his father was begging for Israel to spare his child. And Muhammad was murdered in his lap.
And you know what happened this last round? His other kids were murdered. So Muhammad's brothers were murdered, and his father's been on the run. Every single person in Gaza has witnessed multiple wars, has witnessed the greatest suffocation of occupation, has even had their diets restricted, and has suffered under Israel's state policy, which is called mowing the lawn.
And everyone should look this up. This is what Israeli ministers refer to as routine bombardment of Gaza, mowing the lawn, which shows you that before they called us animals, they considered us insects. And unfortunately, the casualty counts get higher and higher every time. And people become more and more desperate, more and more helpless.
Gaza has been, unfortunately, the worst manifestation of anti-Palestinian bigotry. I mean, 60% of the population is a refugee population. What that means, and people do need to understand this, is that people move to Gaza from other parts of occupied territory to find refuge. And we're practically living on top of each other.
There are people that are in the Gaza Strip that know that they had homes right beyond that apartheid wall, and those homes were stolen from them, and they can't even enter that territory anymore. And they know that on the other side of that wall, there's life. On the other side of that wall, there's opportunity.
On the other side of that wall, you have a passport, you have an airport, you have the ability to travel, you have the ability to export and import. You can dream, but behind that wall, You are to live until the next airstrike. You are to live until Israel mows the lawn again and hope that you're not part of the grass. That's what Gaza has been all of these years.
Because you know that it's around the corner. You always know when you live in Gaza that it's only a matter of time before the next bombs drop. You know if you're in Gaza that... you are waiting for your death. People dream about going out in the world and pursuing education. People dream about going out in the world and pursuing economic opportunity.
In Gaza, your idea of opportunity is an opportunity to see the next year. That has been the case. And so when we talk about this not existing in a vacuum, if people only hear about Gaza on October 7th, that is a major part of the problem. And that is, again, part of the problem of our ignorance and our apathy.
Why is it that the plight of the people of Gaza is not brought up until an attack happens on Israel?
You have over 100 destroyed mosques. Every university in Gaza has been demolished. We're seeing TikTok videos of Israeli soldiers laughing and singing as they press a button and we see the demolition of every single university in Gaza. Schools have been reduced to rubble. There's a cultural genocide as well. And I want you to think about what you saw in Ukraine.
Look, imagine coming back to school in Gaza in some destroyed building. You're missing legs. You're missing arms. You have white phosphorus burns. Have you ever seen what white phosphorus does to a person? There's a reason why it's a war crime. You have white phosphorus burns. Your mom's dead, your dad's dead, all of your uncles and aunts are dead, all of your siblings are dead.
Somehow you got pulled out of the rubble. In my own family, my father's in-laws, my father remarried after my mother passed away, and they're in Gaza. All of them were killed in an airstrike, except for an elderly aunt who somehow made it out of the rubble a day later. If you're a child that's been pulled out of the rubble, what are you going to grow up with? I mean, what are you supposed to feel?
What are you supposed to think? And then you have racist commentators that say they could have turned that into a Singapore. The Palestinians are the authors of their own destruction because if they wanted to, they could have turned this into a place of prosperity, but they keep on bringing destruction upon themselves. So at the root of this is a bigotry.
And again, this idea that Palestinians are savages, they're animals, and the only way to deal with them is to continuously mow the lawn while simultaneously expanding the occupation and erasing anything that was ever called Palestine and any human being that was ever called a Palestinian.
I mean, look, any child that is under that type of oppression is going to hate their oppressor. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you are. But here's my problem with how that gets brought up. You're talking about the future of the security of Israel.
Even some people that speak about it seemingly from a place of being well-meaning that say the only way that Israel can have its security is to stop killing Palestinians. And so the future of Israel depends upon Palestinians not hating Israel so much. And so we've got to stop tormenting these people so that they don't grow up to want to torment us.
You've already decided then whose life is worth more than the other. And so instead of talking about the future of Israeli lives, why don't you talk about the present of Palestinian lives? Instead of talking about whether or not your state will be secure in the future, talk to me about why you're killing children now. Two thirds of the 30,000 civilians are women and children.
And so we can't talk about what these children are going to grow up with. We should talk about whether or not these children are going to grow up in the first place. And that should be what dominates our conscience right now and what drives our policies and what drives our emotions right now.
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