Omar Suleiman: evaluation

Transcript context

…ould’ve been justifying my murder right now. You would’ve been okay with my genocide. You would’ve been giving the talking points to the press to erase me. But you feel sorry because Wadea was killed. And I think this is when we say that anti-Palestinian bigotry is an extension of Islamophobia. If a mosque gets targeted here, people rightfully rush to protect that mosque and say, “This is horrible, and it shouldn’t happen.” But when you have an Israeli soldier bombing a mosque and laughing like a maniac on video, and it’s going viral on TikTok, and there’s no way to reign that in. And you don’t have a word of condemnation about it. In fact, you are standing in the way of a ceasefire, then you’re a hypocrite. There’s no way around it. You are a hypocrite. What’s the difference between a mosque here and a mosque there? What’s the difference between a Palestinian life here and a Palestinian life there? If you’re okay with me being murdered there, don’t say that you care about my life here. And so that hypocrisy has been laid bare. We have said multiple times, masks are falling, masks are falling. People that we thought were decent people, somehow have found it in themselves to justify a genocide. There is no shortage at this point of videos. And again, I could have made the excuse for you, maybe in the first few weeks, that you hadn’t seen enough. But with all social media suppression across all platforms, there isn’t a single platform that hasn’t suppressed Palestinian voices. With all that suppression, there are enough videos at this point of children whose heads have been blowing off. Of children walking around without limbs. Of parents carrying their kids in bags, not body bags, I mean grocery bags because they don’t even have body bags, and screaming out, and saying, “Why are you doing this to me? Make it stop.” And you come back, and you tell the person, ” It’s Hamas’ fault.” Where is your humanity? Where is your sense of decency? Isn’t that the logic of the so-called terrorism that you condemn? Yeah, you can wipe out entire populations. You should have talked to Hamas. It’s Hamas’ fault. All the kids in the West Bank… Where does this end? So, what are your moral boundaries here? If that’s the logic that you’re okay with, then, in that case, when there’s a mass shooter in a school in the United States, just bomb the whole school. In fact, bomb the whole town if you can’t find the mass shooter. Where does this end for you? And so when I say people have lost their humanity, they’re killing us overseas, but their hearts are dying. People have lost their humanity. They’ve lost any sense of morality and their moral boundaries, and being there, and participating in this funeral, it was anger. I’m not used to that. I’m not used to that. e have lost their humanity. They’ve lost any sense of morality and their moral boundaries, and being there, and participating in this funeral, it was anger. I’m not used to that. I’m not used to that. I’m an imam. I pastor to people. I went to Christchurch, and that was the worst I’d ever seen before where 50 Muslims were killed by a white supremacist, and he murdered them with such callousness. And I remember being at those funerals, and there was anger, but it was just profound sadness because at least the rest of the world could all come out in one voice and say, “That’s wrong. ” Now, most of the world sees what’s happening in Gaza and says, this is disgusting. Most of the world sees this, and says, “This is a genocide.” But we happen to live in this bubble here where we’re constantly being told, “We did this to ourselves.” And that’s the same logic that led to our initial expulsion, 1948. What was the crime of those 700,000 Palestinians that were driven out of their home in 1948? What did they do? They did not commit the Holocaust. They didn’t have a mass murder of Jews at their hands. What did they do? What crime were they paying for? And so, it’s been the consistent theme, this is the story of our people, not since October 7th, this is the story of our people for the last 75 years. There is a deep geopolitical connection between the United States and that part of the world. What is the role of US politicians in all of this?…

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