Subscribe Today
Request a Clip
In a panel titled "Palestinian Resistance and the Path to Liberation" held at the People's Conference for Palestine in Detroit, speakers glorified armed resistance against Israel, the October 7 attacks, smuggling sperm from security prisoners in Israeli jails, and the forced evacuation of Israelis from Northern Israel.
Sarah Abdelshamy, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement in Montreal was the moderator of the session. Abdelshamy described the scenes of October 7 as "scenes of our heroic people breaking down the siege that has suffocated the Gaza Strip." She said that the struggle for Palestinian liberation from the River to the Sea is one that involves the "entire Palestinian society."
Abdaljawad Omar, a Palestinian writer and professor of philosophy and culture at Birzeit University said that without the events of October 7, current "political possibilities" like the student movement, the recognition of a Palestinian state and the legal proceedings of the international Criminal Court (ICC) and international Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague would not exist.
Ashraf Taher, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement from Britain explained that the Palestinian masses and resistance are "one and the same." He added: "Liberation only comes from armed struggle."
Tara Alami, a Montreal-based Palestinian writer and activist, lauded Palestinian security prisoners smuggling sperm out of Israeli jails, as in the example of terrorist Walid Daqqa, whose wife was the keynote speaker at the conference. The audience applauded as she discussed the Iranian drone attack against Israel on April 14, the escape of six Palestinian terrorists from Megiddo Prison in 2021, and the forced evacuation of 250,000 (sic) Israeli civilians from northern Israel.
Another speaker on the panel was Rajab Abdelhaq, the co-founder of the Quds News Network. Abdelhaq has been a featured speaker at MAS Youth Center in Brooklyn and MAS Staten Island Islamic Center.
The panel on resistance was streamed live on BreakThrough News on YouTube on May 25, 2024. It is worth noting that the keynote speaker at the conference was Sana' Daqqa, widow of terrorist Walid Daqqa, who died from terminal illness while serving out a life sentence in an Israeli jail. Daqqa was part of a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) comprised of Arab Israelis who kidnapped IDF soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984, gouged his eyes out, and castrated him before shooting him dead. Other speakers at the conference were U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, mayor of Dearborn Abdullah Hamoud, and PFLP member Wisam Rafidee.
Sarah Abdelshamy: "In the past eight months, we have seen incredible images of victory from witnessing the families of political prisoners reunite with and embrace their loved ones for the first time in years, to scenes of our heroic people breaking down the siege that has suffocated the Gaza Strip for more than 17 years.
"At the heart of the strategy for Palestinian liberation is the conviction that in order to be victorious, the struggle must transform and involve the whole of society on all levels, and indeed the story of our struggle is one that has always involved the entirety of Palestinian society.
[...]
"It has also shown that this is a protracted people's war of liberation and that the only one that is capable of sustaining it is the Palestinian resistance, which will continue to fight until liberation from the River to the Sea."
[...]
Abdaljawad Omar: "One of the most pervasive attacks against all forms of resistance – especially armed resistance – is the claim that Palestinians' use of armed resistance destroys the possibility of solidarity and tarnishes the image of our people. They say it diminishes our chances for support for our rightful cause. This narrative, echoed even some of our own intellectuals, must be addressed.
"Firstly, without the events of October 7th, regardless of our feelings of those events, the political possibilities we now witness would not exist. The rise of the student movement in the United States in North America and Europe, with demands for divestment and boycott of academic institutions, the recognition of the Palestinian state, the moves by the ICC and ICJ, and the significant shift in global opinion, none of these would have come to pass.
[...]
"No single moment has opened so many doors of political possibility like the events that transpired after October 7th. Secondly, the discourse of human rights and victimhood will only envoke pity. Pity is a fragile and feeble foundation for political movements. Our strength does not lie in eliciting pity, but in inspiring various acts of resistance, through various forms of resistance.
[...]
"But let's look at the scene after October 7th. Israel has tarnished its image as a democratic and liberal society in the midst of a sea of monsters. In fact, the world has come to recognize Zionism in its horror.
[...]
"October 7th and the promise for liberation it holds would not have manifested in our conference today, in our gathering today. Without the capacity to resist and its regeneration through time, there would have been no story, hero, hope, or future to dream of."
[...]
Ashraf Taher: "Another really beautiful example is the example of Odei Tamimi. Odei was a young Palestinian from the Shuafat Refugee Camp in Jerusalem, who performed what we would call a 'low lying operation' in October 2022.
[...]
"He was embraced by the community, hidden, and kept away from the occupation's grasp.
[...]
"And while the masses relies on the resistance, and the resistance relies on the masses, it is also important to understand that the resistance and the masses are one in the same. Actually, to bring you to the current moment, Gaza is where the popular cradle is the strongest, and it is precisely for this reason that Gaza is placed under siege.
[...]
"We know from the history of Haiti, from Vietnam, and Algeria, that liberation only comes from armed struggle."
[...]
Tara Alami: "Sperm smuggling is a revolutionary process through which people within the Zionist dungeon are able to transgress the literal walls of these colonial dungeons, and conceive a child with their partner on the outside. Right now, there are over a hundred Palestinian children that have been born through this revolutionary process. One of them, of course, is the daughter of our revolutionary martyr Walid Daqqa, who this room is named after.
[...]
"A few weeks ago, when Iran had sent drones to the occupied 1948 lands, and, you know... In the same night, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank literally broke through the Beit El apartheid crossline. And it's also how six Palestinian political prisoners were able to dig their way through one of the highest security Zionist prisons, to escape for even just a few days, and to reproduce this revolutionary consciousness among the masses.
[...]
"And so along with these transformations happening in the Palestinian collective psyche, Zionist settlers dialectically experienced their own collective transformation as well, and it's evidenced most recently by the over 250,000 Zionist settlers who had evacuated the north of occupied Palestine."
Latest Clips
