Defiant but Humane: Women of Resistance in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine, My Teachers Today.

Defiant Iranian, Lebanese & Palestinians set a high bar of revolution against the savage West, most specifically Israel-US Empire that has leeched on our collective humanity & the Environment.

In the last nearly 40-years I have lived, in Western societies - specifically the United States and the United Kingdom. As a foreign student, labourer, professional, father, and husband. In permanent exile, from my native Buddha-forsaken Myanmar.

Living in liberal democracies, if only relatively speaking, has exposed me to the dominant schools of woman’s liberation ideologies - particularly what has come to be referred to as “imperial feminism” or “glass ceiling feminism”.

Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton, among other a million names including celebrities and white feminist icons, spring to mind.

Mind you I started from a very low bar on issues of sexism and misogyny: my native Myanmar continues to be soaked in sexism and racism. I still reel from the stains of my own cultural upbringings.

Then of course there are “Third World” feminism and radical black feminisms, which I was insufficiently exposed to during my 8 years in US graduate schools 30 years ago.

I will readily admit that these are subjects I am least informed about. The more I open my mouth on feminism the more I will expose myself as yet another pig, trying to mansplain feminism.

Suffice it to say that I am grateful to friends and comrades who send me items which they think will help me grow as a scholar, an activist and simply a human.

Here I wish to share 2 conversations by revolutionary minds with organic links to West Asia’s liberation movements and anti-imperialist resistance:

1. susan abulbaha’s 20 minutes video-recording on anti-semitism allegations levelled at her and the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdadi’s errorneous condemnation of her, as a Palestinian to defend his own wife.

   

Watch susan abulhawa’s response (20 minutes) here.

Watch Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu .

The first involves a yet another high profile allegation of anti-semitism against the renowned Palestinian writer susan abulbaha (note the writer uses lower case letters for her name).

2. Vanessa Beeley’s discussion with two female revolutionary minds, the Iranian acaemic Setarah Sadeqi from Isfahan, Ian and the Lebanese academic and TV journalist Marwa Osman.

You can watch this incredibly informative and revolutionary discussion (1 hr and 12 minutes) here:

I want to write a backgrounder to the 1st item as the issue of nationalism - and the hatred, rage, resentment, contempts that pervade the oppressed circles are very dear and near to me. I grew up with the rage of the oppressed since I remember my formation of political consciouness as an anti-colonialist nationalist in Myanmar in the 1960’s. With age my rage against oppression - any system - has only grown stronger.

I completely and unreservely identify with susan abulbaha when she offered her no-holds-barred reflection on the rage and hatred that the oppressed feel towards their oppressor.

Where I differ with susan abulbaha is this: I do NOT feel I “lose” a friend or even a comrade, with each incident where in an old friend or colleague abandoned or cancelled me for my speaking my mind as someone who identifies unapologetically with the oppressed, whoever they are and whatever their identity.

In these incidents, as unpleasant as they have been, it is their loss, not mine. I feel cleansed spiritually and intellectually.

Here is the Palestinian confronts the latest coordinated attempt by nasty, twisted, pathetic Zionist Jews — who else!!? — who shot 3 birds with a single stone: attack the Muslim American mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdadni, his Syrian American illustrator wife Rama Duwaji.

The Palestinian writer and scientist doubledowned and responded to the unbearably faux and pathetic misappropriations of “Semite” “anti-semitism”, by dismantling the foundation of “antisemitism”.

Her words are damning, grounded in both greater empirical realities and her own personal experience, as well as her spot-on understanding what racism is, a system of power, not simply strings of hateful, angry, contempuous words directed at a demographic category that is centrally involved in, or, at the center of oppressive structure, for all intents and purposes.

In my own assessment, there is absolutely no ethical or moral red lines in Zionism and the Zionist Project, for its adherents since it emerged as a European nationalist ideology amonst Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews in the late 19th century.

That is, unless one believes in laying claim on someone’s land, acquiring it by terrorist violence, concotting biblical tales about God’s chosen people bullshit, and sucking up to the Western imperialist power like parasitical entity growing on multiple hosts.

The entire corpus of what came to be known as (political) Zionism was built on lies and lust for (other people’s) land and to be executed with loot of movable and immovable assets and blood-lust. In those days, spiritual Zionist Jews absolutely opposed this new nationalist ideology, that came wrapped in the religious discourse of Judaeism.

Rob Lemkin, my old neighbor and friend at East Oxford, UK, contributed a recorded piano recital to the FORSEA public online event in support of Palestinain people at the start of Israel’s Gaza Holocaust in 2023. Rob described his observant Jewish granny the late Rachel as “a lifelong opponent of political Zionism”: she was secretary for the KinderTransport committee at the West London synagogue during the Nazi genocide.

Any entity that is ideologically and psychologically linked to such a vile criminal land-thieving ethnic cleanser state of Israel can never be virtuous.

Therefore, Zionism, Zionists, and Zionist entity, big or small, any entity is utterly devoid of any moral foundation as such.

There is no such thing as a good, virtuous and moral Zionist.

As a matter of fact, from the perspective of formerly “Third World” liberation struggles (e.g., my own native Burma, under the British rule for 124 years between 1824 and 1948), whereby the colonized non-European (that is, non-White and non-Christian) peoples fought by any means necessary to liberate themselves from the serfdom of European colonial domination, control and exploitation, Zionism and Zionist Project cannot be considered an ideology of emancipation as opposed to the struggles waged by the Burmese, Vietnamese, Indian, Kenyan, Indonesians and so on.

For nationalism had a singular objective of freeing the colonized and kicking the colonizer of the former’s native soil. Third World Liberation movements did not suck up to Western imperialist powers and perpetrate ethnic cleansing of unwanted population from the land to which they are organically and ancestrally tied.

The Zionist Project that birthed Israel is more akin to Hitlerite “Mein Kempf in reverse,” from its very inception.

Much ink has been spilled over this subject for me to further elaborate. Just have a watch: Rev. Munther Isaac’s dissection of Israel a terrorist settler colonial state which I recorded in Shephard Fields, Bethlehem a year ago.

Buy the book here.

After thanking her Zionist slanderers for giving the tailwind of publicity for the bi-lingual book of 18 life-stories told by a group of Palestinian women in Gaza, she laid into Zionists and their weaponizing of faux anti-semitism or bogus alternative to the term “racism against Jews”.

Here is susan abulhawa in her own words:

I want to speak about this accusation of antisemitism against me, also about antisemitism and the requisites of racism in general at the most basic level, i will start with the word Semite.

Unlike the white Ashkenazi jews attacking me, i am an actual Semitic person. Semitism is just another part of our identity, that they have stolen. Zionists have dispossessed of our home, our land, our ancestral cemeteries, our orchards, our artifacts, our books, archives, photos, our resources and so, so much more.

They wear our skin from their skin bank which they’ve built from the mutilated bodies of our martyrs, and they wear our skin figuratively from the indigenous stories they have appropriated, culinary and sartorial heritage that these European Jewish colonizers claim as their own.

So, I will instead address anti-Jewishness, and the nature of racism in general.

Because the most fundamental characteristic of racism, in fact, the primary and maybe only prerequisite is a power gradient, a power differential. that facilitates the power of abuse and oppression from those with power to those without power. Thus racism is unidirectional

It can only flow from those with power to those without power.

The mistrust or even hatred that occurs in reverse is something else. It is the most natural reaction to the sustained and systemic abuse, oppression and violence from those who deem themselves superior, better, divinely, favoured and so on.

Our feelings or words in response to this 78-years of barbaric colonial violence, are NOT reprehensible, they are not antisemiticm and they are not anti-Jewish.

Palestinian refugees (British Mandate of Palestine – 1948). [Photo from https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/practice-history/writing-history-in-a-time-of-genocide/ ]

Despite everything they have done to us, despite the fact that overwhelming majority of Jews, both inside and outside of Israel, support this Zionist carnage and domination. We still have the tender human sense to recognize those Jews however minority they might be, who do not support Israel and to embrace, however smaller minority, who are anti-Zionist, in fact, people like Illan Pappe, Richard Falk, Mark Purlmutter, Aaron Mate, Katie Halper, Marx Blumenthal, Naturei Katar, the Jews who expend their skills and labour to expose Jewish Supremacist Zionist criminality. We have kept our humanity despite the unceasing and layered violence against us.

The feeling we have of pain, rage, contempt or hatred coupled with the impotence to make the suffering stop is what we call in Arabic qahr It is a reaction to the kind of violent racism that one does not have the power to meaningfully alter or alleviate.”