Mohammed El-Kurd: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you love most about Palestine? What are maybe little things that you remember from your childhood, from your life there in East Jerusalem and elsewhere that just brings a smile to your face? I think just the unabashed-ness of Palestinians. We’re a people who are told and at some point were 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. 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’ll say, “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’re trained to break our spirits. 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. 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 in their philosophy of prisons, they understand that these structures, these buildings were built to break your spirits. So what do you? You don’t allow it to break your spirits. You resist it. You continue to hold onto 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. The prison has not broken your spirit. All of these structures and system that is 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 the home in Jerusalem and the people say, “Don’t worry. We’ll build another. You demolish it and we’ll build another.” That’s what I admire most about the Palestinian people. It’s this resilience. And people love to say resilience, but I think it’s stubbornness. I think we’re such a stubborn people, and I think that’s great. Well, Mohammed, thank you for being a man who exemplifies this unbreakable spirit. Thank you for the words you’ve written, the words you’ve spoken, and thank you for talking today. This is an honor and thank you for educating me.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.