{"id":96678,"date":"2023-10-10T12:12:08","date_gmt":"2023-10-10T17:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=96678"},"modified":"2023-10-10T12:12:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T17:12:08","slug":"96678","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=96678","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

This Is What \u2018Decolonization\u2019 Looks Like<\/a>
\nFancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds. Words make nightmares.<\/em><\/p>\n

On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel,\u00a0Najma Sharif<\/a>, a writer for\u00a0Soho House<\/em>\u00a0magazine and\u00a0Teen Vogue<\/em>,\u00a0posted<\/a>\u00a0on X: \u201cWhat did y\u2019all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, Sharif\u2019s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times\u2014by, among others,\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s global opinions editor,\u00a0Karen Attiah<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The point was: Don\u2019t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you\u2019re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers.<\/p>\n

All this is a good reminder that when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously. Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds.<\/p>\n

Here is how\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0editor Claire Lehmann\u00a0put it<\/a>\u00a0on X, formerly Twitter: \u201cFor the past decade I\u2019ve been told that jokes, words & scholarly debates need to be suppressed because they may cause \u2018harm\u2019 to vulnerable minorities. Yet when a global minority is butchered, tortured & maimed, those who suppress words shrug as if war crimes are no big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real decolonization is a physical process. It is about removing bodies from a place.<\/p>\n

The meaning of Sharif\u2019s post\u2014a very tidy, very millennial encapsulation of the old Bolshevik spirit\u2014is: the ends shall justify the means, and if that bothers you, well, you\u2019ve probably been infected by some bourgeois, liberal fungus.<\/p>\n

Nor was she alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,\u201d a speaker at a Democratic Socialists of America rally in New York\u00a0proclaimed<\/a>\u00a0to whoops and laughter. (DSA members include representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.)<\/p>\n

\u201cDecolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories,\u201d Jairo F\u00fanez-Florez, an assistant professor at Texas Tech,\u00a0posted<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s about a Free Palestine. It\u2019s about liberation and self-determination. It\u2019s about living with dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>
A pro-Palestinian rally in New York\u2019s Times Square. (Photo by Bryan R. Smith\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Columbia student groups\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the attack on Israel \u201can unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza, who tore through the wall that has been suffocating them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A joint statement issued by dozens of Harvard student organizations\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe Israeli regime\u201d is \u201centirely responsible for all unfolding violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShabbat shalom and may every colonizer fall everywhere,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0Barnaby Raine, who received his PhD in history from Columbia and now teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.<\/p>\n

The writer Mohammed El-Kurd, the Palestine correspondent for\u00a0The Nation<\/em>,\u00a0stated<\/a>: \u201cWhat is happening in occupied Palestine is a response to weeks and months and years of daily military invasions into Palestinian towns, killings of Palestinians, and the very fact that millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are besieged under Israeli blockade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rania Khalek, a Lebanese American journalist,\u00a0wrote<\/a>: \u201cWatching armed indigenous people take their land back from their colonizers is something else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Self-styled \u201cjournalist\u201d Mariam Barghouti\u00a0said<\/a>: \u201cGaza just broke out of prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis\u00a0suggested<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives\u2014both Palestinian and Israeli\u2014begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0decided this was the right moment to run a story\u00a0headlined<\/a>\u00a0\u201cGaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade.\u201d The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0was good enough to note that the blockade was made possible not only by Israel but by Egypt, but it failed to mention Israeli forces\u00a0withdrew from Gaza<\/a>\u00a0in 2005; that Palestinians\u00a0elected<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Hamas to rule them; that Israelis routinely give Gazans\u00a0notice<\/a>\u00a0before attacking to minimize loss of civilian life; and that one reason (maybe\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0reason) so many Palestinian children have died during Israeli air strikes is Hamas uses them as\u00a0human shields<\/a>\u2014the better to generate sympathetic news coverage.<\/p>\n

Then, of course, there were the moral relativists, those who provide a patina of legitimacy to the alleged freedom fighters. Amnesty International\u2019s Agnes Callamard\u00a0called on<\/a>\u00a0\u201call parties to the conflict to abide by international law and make every effort to avoid further civilian bloodshed.\u201d Representative Ilhan Omar\u00a0reminded<\/a>\u00a0everyone, \u201cGaza doesn\u2019t have shelters or an iron dome\u201d (one wonders if she mentioned this to the Hamas leadership in Doha or its patrons in Tehran before the violence commenced). Or Jeremy Corbyn, Britain\u2019s national embarrassment,\u00a0declaring<\/a>, \u201cwe need a route out of this tragic cycle of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the ersatz activists of Hollywood and Silicon Valley are eerily quiet. The people who turned the Ukrainian flag into their avatars, those who worry about misgendering and triggering and safe spaces, those who insist words are violence (those for whom violence is apparently not violence)\u2014they\u2019re busy ignoring all this.<\/p>\n

We should listen closely to these latter-day Bolsheviks and their many enablers. They are being honest. They are saying exactly what they believe and what they want to see happen.<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Which means the next time some academic or media personality on cable blithely informs us that Palestine must be liberated \u201cfrom the river to the sea<\/a>\u201d\u2014that means from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, i.e., the whole of the Jewish state\u2014we should ask them whether they are okay with all the girls who will be raped, all the old people and toddlers who will be mowed down or strung up. We should ask if they believe that as a \u201csettler-colonialist\u201d entity, the United States awaits a similar fate.<\/p>\n

What would this death cult do if it could do anything? We have glimpsed that over the past 72 hours. We know what they are capable of, and we know that they have many defenders here at home. Those who imagine themselves fomenting the long-awaited revolution. Those who know that the beloved academic language of decolonization means nothing if you\u2019re unwilling to see it enacted in flesh, and especially blood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Is What \u2018Decolonization\u2019 Looks Like Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds. Words make nightmares. On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel,\u00a0Najma Sharif, a writer for\u00a0Soho House\u00a0magazine and\u00a0Teen Vogue,\u00a0posted\u00a0on X: \u201cWhat did y\u2019all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.\u201d So far, Sharif\u2019s … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-moslems-jihadis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96679,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96678\/revisions\/96679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}