cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/69616
The same logic that bombed a novelist's car in 1972 is now embedded in today’s content moderation policies, platform architecture, large language model training data, and the deliberate severing of a fibre-optic cable.
On the morning of July 8, 1972, a car bomb exploded outside of a house in Beirut. 36-year-old novelist, editor, and poet, Ghassan Kanafani, was killed, along with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees Najim. He had served as a spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Mossad—which built the bomb, wired it to the ignition, and waited—justified the murder as a retaliatory response to the PFLP's Lod airport operation that May. Kanafani never fired a gun in his life, but his dedication to militant anti-imperialist struggle rendered him a culpable target.
Understand what that means: a state with a nuclear arsenal, an air force, and the backing of the world's most powerful military did not send its soldiers after Kanafani, but opted instead to use a car bomb to silence a prominent writer and militant intellectual. Ghassan Kanafani wielded his pen as his weapon of choice, and that pen had become, in the calculus of the Israeli settler state, a genuine strategic threat
Read more via Scalawag: The Assassinated Word: Kanafani at 54.
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