Link to last week's reading group post.
Summary of this book.
The first book for this reading group will be Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd. I've pasted the summary below.
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
This book touches a lot on how Palestinians are constantly expected (especially by Europeans, who invented anti-semitism) to apologize for being Palestinians, and for being victimized by Jewish people.
Comrades who can't afford to buy the book should definitely not go to annas-archive (dot) org and find a digital copy there, since that would be wrong and we are all law-abiding, copyright-respecting citizens.
I really will try my best to post these weekly from now on.
The direct comparison of Western media treatment for Palestinians and for Ukrainians was sickening. How ever much you hate the imperial stenographers, it isn’t enough. The psychologist quoted by the New York Times in particular made me have to step away from the book. It’s so bewildering that there are philology and race science books from two hundred years ago that have more impact on what can be said about current events than any history or economics. i guess that’s orientalism at work. The median liberal idealist is so wrapped up in stories that they think Eastern Europe and the Levant are mythical, far off locations, and the happenings there have to be relayed by specialized, expert translators. It’s such a suffocating épistémè that even the author and other writers who rejected American-washing Shireen Abu Akleh still felt the need “to exculpate her from the crime of being Palestinian” with her press equipment. i think it’s very telling that the approved, Zionist experts referred to her as “armed with [her] camera”. The master translators that work at Western news outlets and universities can take any victim and make them a perpetrator, or vice versa. And every single thing that happens east and south of the Imperial Core is incomprehensibly foreign to the Anglophone and Francophone common sense, so you have to listen to the ‘experts’. It’s almost sublime, in the sense of a small figure staring at a tidal wave of lies encompassing the horizon.