Holy Week on Anishinaabe land (the corner of MLK and Rosa Parks in Detroit, MI).
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Yesterday, I drove forty miles to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for a conference called "Islamophobia After Gaza." Students and faculty from around the country gathered to address the elephant in the classrooms on campuses that have long been weaponizing antisemitism to protect the Zionist interests of the pedophile oligarchy.
The morning began with a keynote from Dr. Hatem Bazian from UC Berkeley, who said that there is a question that refuses to leave his conscience:
What does it mean to be a faculty member of a university that's supposed to be committed to truth, but instead insists that there is not a genocide happening in Palestine, where thousands of children are still buried under the rubble?
Dr. Bazian said that Gaza is the outcome of a colonial system that is functioning precisely as it is supposed to function. In the Western consciousness, Palestinians are killable, disposable and narratively suspect. The dehumanizing is held together by a dense Western infrastructure of complicity, from mainstream media outlets to university administrations to both major political parties.
Dr. Bazian reminded us that more than 276 journalists have been murdered by Israeli forces, mostly with American-made bombs. Just a few days ago, it took three missiles for the Zionists to murder Fatima Ftouni, a young Lebanese journalist who wore a hijab and a helmet and a vest with PRESS chiseled on her heart.
Dr. Bazian connected the dots and told the truth about his employer. Scientists from UC Berkeley get paid big bucks to invent big bombs for the u.s. empire at both the Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories. Every campus in America is, in fact, part of the colonial geography, part of the colonial imperative to distort, disfigure and destroy Palestine, and the rest of the Global South.
Yesterday, Dr. Bazian quoted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 58th anniversary of his assassination. From his jail cell in Birmingham, Dr. King wrote a letter to clergy members on the margins of a newspaper. He lamented that he had almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the greatest stumbling block in the Black stride toward freedom is not the KKK, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.
Dr. Bazian said that, today, you can just replace "the white moderate" with the cautious academic, who stays neutral even in the face of the genocidal occupation of Palestinian territories.
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Yesterday was Holy Saturday in the Christian tradition, the day after Jesus is crucified by occupation forces.
It’s a dark day. Jesus is dead.
His tortured and pierced body is in the tomb.
I learned from Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann that the tomb of Jesus was sealed with cords anchored at each end with clay so that the authorities could tell if anyone tampered with it. Breaking the seal was a crime against empire.
Bill says that the tomb of Jesus was not airtight. It was politically tight.
The emperor set his seal of approval on Jesus’ death and guaranteed it with troops. The resurrection broke the seal, broke the power of death, broke the dominion of inflated, aggressive imperial authority.
Bill says that the resurrection was against the law.
Today, the resurrection empowers people of faith and conscience to break the imperial seal of death wherever we witness it.
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Yesterday, the morning session of the conference on Islamophobia concluded with a panel of four Muslim undergrads who are breaking the imperial seal of death.
A student from Ohio State University named Mohammed Mustafa spoke into the mic with a moral clarity that collectively summoned the adults in the room to lean in. He said that six months after the genocide began in Gaza, he was praying at the Ohio State Gaza encampment. He was lying prostrate with his face to the floor. A cop in riot gear came up behind him and slammed his knee on to Mohammed's neck.
The cop zip-tied his hands behind his back. While he was being escorted off campus into a paddy wagon, Mohammed heard police copters overhead and saw state troopers with AR-15s and soldiers with sniper rifles on the roofs of buildings.
Mohammed said he was detained in something the size of a dog kennel for eight hours. He remembered wondering how imperial forces could get away with this kind of violence and aggression with college students who are committed to the same nonviolent tactics as the Civil Rights Movement. He wondered how most students at Ohio State could go to class the next day and pretend like everything is just normal.
A few months later, Mohammed was enrolled in a course that required students to read a book called The Virtue of Nationalism, which was written by a Jewish nationalist and Zionist who boasted of the success of the Israeli project. He sent the professor an email detailing his grave concerns that the class was assigned a text glorifying the foundational trauma of the Palestinians.
Mohammed said that the email he sent was gentle, just like the way Moses confronted Pharoah in the Koran. Mohammed chose his words very carefully. He asked his professor if they could also read something from someone who was indigenous to Palestine. His professor replied that this would be “outside the scope” of the class.
For weeks, they sent respectful emails back and forth. The professor was a nice guy who was not going to change his curriculum. It does not make any logical sense. But that's exactly how Zionism works.
Mohammed said that the aggressive encampments raids and the respectful email exchange with the cautious academic are fused together. By the time all these students got to the campus of Ohio State University, they had already spent years in classrooms, learning – one way or another – that Islam is a threat to Western Civilization.
That Mohammed is a threat to America.
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In the Easter story, the women go to the graveyard at dawn to anoint the crucified body of Jesus. When they arrive, the stone has been rolled away from the tomb. It is empty. Two men in dazzling clothes suddenly appear and they say this:
Why do you look
for the living
among the dead?
Easter faith interrogates us with this question.
I think most Americans are taught to look for the living among the dead.
I am absolutely convinced that, yesterday, I was looking for the living in the right place.
Yesterday, on the land of the Anishinaabe, Wyandot, Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, and Miami with Zaynah, Eman, Salma and Mohammed.
