We are not silent. We are being silenced. The students who, during the last academic year set up encampments, occupied halls, went on hunger strikes and spoke out against the genocide, were met this fall with a series of rules that have turned university campuses into academic gulags. Among the minority of academics who dared to speak out, many have been sanctioned or dismissed. Medical professionals who criticize the wholesale destruction by Israel of hospitals, clinics and targeted assassinations of health workers in Gaza have been suspended or terminated from medical school faculties with some facing threats to revoke their medical licenses.
Journalists who detail the mass slaughter and expose Israeli propaganda have been taken off air or fired from their publications. Jobs are lost over social media posts. The tiny handful of politicians who condemn the killing have seen millions of dollars spent to drive them from office. Algorithms, shadow-banning, deplatforming and demonetizing – all of which I have experienced – are used to marginalize or ban us on digital media platforms. A whisper of protest and we are disappeared.
None of these measures will be lifted once the genocide ends. The genocide is the pretext. The result will be one huge step towards an authoritarian state, especially with the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The silence will expand, like a great cloud of sulfurous gas. We choke on forbidden words. They killed you. They are strangling us. The goal is the same. Erasure. Your story, the story of all Palestinians, is not to be told.
The Zionists and their allies have nothing left in their arsenal but lies, censorship, smear campaigns and violence, the blunt instruments of the damned. But I hold in my hand the weapon that will, ultimately, defeat them. Your book, “If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose”.
“Stories teach life,” you write, “even if the hero suffers or dies in the end.”
(more)
READ MORE: The Chris Hedges Report
