On Dehumanization...
On Dehumanization...
“Intense anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and what the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said described as “Orientalism” have underwritten the West’s perpetual wars, sieges, and onslaughts against the Middle East, wars that America’s client state, Israel, has helped manage for multiple generations. This racism has normalized America’s and Israel’s war crimes in the Middle East”. - Hammer & Hope
One of the themes that comes across throughout the pages of our April selection, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, is how clearly the process of dehumanization has impacted the people of Palestine to the point where they are barely regarded as human by the Israeli government and settlers who have taken their land, restricted their movement, and subjected them to degradation and abuse for decades.
Today, we see how this decades-long process of dehumanization has impacted those in the United States who continue to unequivocally support Israel, even as the death toll inflicted by Israel on Palestinians continues to rise, where it is now approaching 35,000 people, of whom 70% are women and children. We see how this dehumanization has even impacted the reporting of statistics like these, with Joe Biden callously saying last fall, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Yet, while it has been abundantly clear that Joe Biden and the members of his administration have no empathy or feelings toward the people of Gaza, we know that the process of dehumanizing not just Palestinians but the entire Arab population has been an ongoing project of the United States government for decades.
This week, as we’re reading A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, we’re also reading selections from the current issue of Hammer & Hope, which focuses exclusively on the struggle for Palestinian liberation. One of the articles that stood out to me as deeply connected to this month’s book is the first article in the collection, Anti-Arab Racism and the U.S. and Israeli War Machines. This brilliant piece examines the U.S. government’s decades-long process of cultivating anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia within the United States to justify their wars - all to maintain their supremacy in the global capitalist empire. While many can rightly trace this to George Bush’s “War on Terror,” the intentional process of dehumanization began much earlier and continues today through the messages we receive from Joe Biden, as he casually licks an ice cream cone on late-night TV while musing the possibility of a ceasefire, or as he now wholly denounces the pro-Palestinian uprisings taking place across university campuses.
Of course, this process of dehumanization as a tool of empire can be traced back to the earliest formations of what we now call the United States, from the genocide of the Indigenous people living on these lands to the centuries-long enslavement and brutality inflicted on African people through the state-sanctioned institution of slavery. Dehumanization is a tool the state has weaponized again and again; its effectiveness is evident in the racism and xenophobia that undergirds American society.
This week, we hope you’re finishing A Day in the Life of Abed Salama in preparation for next week’s discussion. We also hope you’ll look at the fantastic selection of articles in Hammer & Hope. connease and I look forward to seeing you next week for our discussion! As a reminder, we’ll meet on Tuesday, April 30, at 6:00 PM Eastern. If you haven’t yet registered, click the link below to sign up. Until then, we are with you in solidarity.
Alan & connease
Alan & connease