Episode Transcript
36.1: Asking Liberals: “Do You Condemn Imperialism?”
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew with another episode of Antifascist Dad Podcast. This is 36.1. It's a short bonus episode following up on my interview with Nour Hadidi. It's called Asking Liberals: Do You Condemn Imperialism?
I'm really grateful for your support. I hope this project is bringing some joy and hope and utility to your works and days.
You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And if you're listening to this episode on the day that it came out, you are on the Patreon for this show at antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to every second part of the main feed episodes, including this one. And if you're listening to it on the main feed, then you know that I release them to the public anyway because this is an educational project. And just a reminder, my book, Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times is now available. The link is in the show notes. If you've got it, please consider giving a review.
Now if you didn't catch my interview with Toronto based Canadian Jordanian standup comedian Nour Hadidi, I recommend listening to that first before continuing here because there's a thread dangling from that interview that I want to tug on.
Hadidi, as you might recall, was subjected to an attempted cancellation campaign by people protesting her inclusion in a comedy event hosted last fall by the Canadian Jewish News. For their harassment campaign, the protesters unearthed a few social media posts from Hadidi to prove her alleged antisemitism. And get this part, this one kills me — her eliminationist views.
One of those posts really haunted me. Nour posted clips from an interview of Al Jazeera journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh, who is the bureau chief in Gaza. He went on CNN to be interviewed by Christiane Amanpour about reporting from the siege after having lost his wife, his son, his daughter, his grandson to Israeli strikes.
Amanpour's angle was human interest. You know, like how do you keep going? It must be hard and so on. But then she asked him, basically, do you ever wish Hamas had not committed October 7th? Because it's brought hell down on you and Gaza.
And very calmly and deliberately, Al-Dahdouh refused the premise entirely.
Before October 7, he explained, Palestinians were not living in safety or peace. Five wars, blockade, unemployment above 45%, children unable to travel for education, land theft continuing daily in the West Bank, women being dragged in Jerusalem's streets.
He said that Amanpour's question isolated a single date to treat it as the origin of all suffering, erasing the occupation that preceded and caused it. And even he, a professional journalist of recognized integrity, could not escape being targeted, nor could his family. How then would the common people escape? The issue, he said, was of course deeper than a single date.
Now in her caption to that post, Hadidi said that his answer conveyed patience and strength in the face of demeaning lines of questioning by someone who benefits from the empire.
But Hadidi's attackers framed this as her defense of October 7th, and that she was calling Palestinian terrorists — not the journalist Al-Dahdouh — patient and strong.
Now before I unpack that, let me tell you about the weird research hitches involved in understanding this scenario.
When I was trying to find Al-Dahdouh's statement, I could only find it on one mid-sized YouTube channel for a progressive leaning news aggregator publication called Almost Mag, founded by a woman who used to work for Buzzfeed. Now Almost Mag seems a little bit stalled out. They haven't posted in a while. It's not very regular. But they preserved this moment, which is important because it appears that CNN has scrubbed it. It's not available on any of the broadcast segments for that day on the CNN channels. And in the day's transcript, Amanpour's question and Al-Dahdouh's statement cannot be found. They literally took it out of the transcript.
Now why would that be?
Did CNN have its thumb on the scales in its Gaza reporting? Well, obviously it did. As friend of the pod Adam Johnson pointed out in his book and on our episode called How to Sell a Genocide, CNN was a top manufacturer of consent.
The network consistently prioritized Israeli narratives and engaged in dehumanizing language toward Palestinians.
For instance, anchors Sara Sidner and Hadas Gold repeatedly platformed the fraudulent claim about 40 beheaded babies on October 7th without skepticism.
The on-air talent in general equated Hamas with ISIS 350 times during the conflict's first month, and internal directives from CEO Mark Thompson mandated that reporting frame Hamas as the immediate cause of all subsequent horrors and required all copy to be approved by the Jerusalem Bureau, which is subject to Israeli military censorship.
Adam Johnson also documented the linguistic double standard of CNN, referring to Israeli deaths as a massacre 225 times in the first 30 days, compared to only 16 times for the deaths of Palestinians, and how the network adopted an unprecedented editorial standard after the Al-Ahli hospital bombing, which refused to attribute strikes to Israel without positive IDF confirmation and without checking GPS geolocation. He points out that the networks would never trust, for instance, Russia's word on military strikes on Ukraine.
And then Johnson also highlighted the erasure of Palestinian voices on programs like State of the Union, which featured zero Palestinian guests over a one year period, while Israeli officials practically had their own makeup rooms.
I can't prove that CNN deliberately scrubbed Al-Dahdouh's moment from their records, but not only do I think it's a reasonable speculation, it also makes content sense, given that Amanpour's question is a highly charged version of the famous challenge that echoes throughout global north media: do you condemn Hamas?
In his book and in the foreword by Noura Erakat, Johnson labels the interrogation do you condemn Hamas? as a pervasive media strategy used to discipline Palestinian voices and shift moral culpability.
Erakat quotes author Hala Alyan as saying that the question amounts to an audition for humanity, and that no Palestinian guest could appear on legacy media without being asked this question.
Johnson showed that elite outlets like The Atlantic selectively platformed Palestinian voices who passed that audition. So if they said yes, I condemn Hamas, they could be quoted.
While thousands were being murdered in Gaza, these outlets prioritized the demand that Palestinians condemn Hamas rather than allowing them to demand a ceasefire.
Johnson also covers an incident that butts up against Nour Hadidi's world of comedy. The satirical publication The Onion ran the headline Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.
And when Michael Eisen retweeted the Onion piece, he was fired from his job at the journal eLife.
Do you condemn Hamas? is such a successful rhetorical ploy that if someone figures out how to dodge it, flip the bias, the engine that produces it is gravely threatened. And that's what Al-Dahdouh did. His answer was to essentially ask: do you condemn imperialism?
What Al-Dahdouh faced that day has a long lineage in liberal interrogations of justice movements.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes how the colonized intellectual is always pressured to validate their existence and humanity by adopting the cultural and moral frameworks of the colonizer. And you have to perform reasonableness and embrace Western values before being heard in the ersatz dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed. Fanon writes: in the colonial context, the colonist only quits undermining the colonized once the latter has proclaimed loud and clear that white values reign supreme.
In Charles Cobb's great book This Nonviolence Stuff'll Get You Killed, which is about how armed self-defense made the nonviolent civil rights movement's success possible, Cobb shows how the demand for political actors to condemn violence showed up in the tension between national civil rights organizations and local grassroots movements.
So the national leadership of organizations like the NAACP and the media tended to pressure activists to maintain a strictly nonviolent public image to preserve political legitimacy and foster public sympathy. Meanwhile, grassroots groups like the Deacons and even Martin Luther King Jr.'s own personal detail knew that being well armed was essential to movement safety and facing down violence from white supremacists.
There's an excellent book chapter on the mechanics of how this works in the scenario of the adversarial broadcast interview, which is the context in which Al-Dahdouh was facing off with Amanpour. The book is from 2020. It's called The Discourse of Indirectness: Cues, Voices and Functions. It's edited by Livnat, Shukrun-Nagar and Hirsch, and the chapter is titled Do You Condemn?: Negotiating Power Relations through Indirect Questions and Answers Design in Ethnopolitical Interviews. And it's by a guy named Zohar Kampf, Associate Professor of Language and Communication at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Now I want to be clear here that there are Palestinian and Arab voices on this topic — Edward Said, Noura Erakat, who I just referenced, and Ramzy Baroud. And the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has a terrible track record on the Palestine file. Documented institutional support for the occupation of the West Bank and for the wars against Gaza, special programs for the IDF, discrimination against Palestinian students, training students in hasbara even. But Kampf seems in this research to be a real empiricist who's interested in the science of the speech act in asymmetrical dialogues, and especially what this asymmetry forces interviewees to do.
And he uses the term interactional ritual to describe the demand for condemnation in these interviews between Jewish Israeli journalists and Arab Israeli representatives. And he studies hundreds of them. He uses something called epideictic rhetoric, or the rhetoric of praise and blame, to explain how these exchanges supposedly model proper civic conduct. And he says that the demanded political condemnations verify that the act in question is transgressive. So condemning Hamas means that October 7th is a uniquely criminal act, for example. And it also sets the taboo of shame front and center to establish whether the interviewee can be taken seriously. And so if they are suitably ashamed, everyone can proceed.
Kampf says that in the Israeli media context, the do you condemn? question forces interviewees into what he calls an avoidance dilemma, where they must choose between their civic duty to the state and their national sentiment toward the Palestinian people and toward basic justice.
Journalists exercise interactional power through these questions, which often form into cascades or even Gish gallops that push for a specific response that appears to be consensual but really isn't.
And I found Kampf's clarity on all of this to be really illuminating because by examining hundreds of these exchanges, he comes up with six options that interviewees have, and they all fall under what he calls indirect answer design.
So first of all, the interviewee can just resist answering — they just refuse to be placed in an inferior interactional position of defense.
And if that's the choice, that determines whether the next five options are relevant. Because if the interviewee just says, fuck off, I'm not doing that, it's over. If they don't, if they proceed, they've got five options.
So first of those, number two on the list, is shifting from the general to the personal. So the interviewee rejects the political dimension of the question so that they can pivot to a personal stance such as, well, I wouldn't do that myself.
Third on the list is that the interviewee can replace condemnation with a different speech act. So they can just change the subject by offering a message of condolence instead of the condemnation that they're being asked for.
Fourth, the interviewee can refer to a previous action. A lot of politicians do this. They point to a past statement or a press release or to some other office making a statement, and that avoids performing a real-time condemnation.
Number five is that they can express a general opposition to violence, which establishes a kind of universalist moral position under which the assessment of the event in question can just be assumed. If you generally condemn violence, then you must be generally okay.
But it's the sixth one that I really want to draw attention to because this is the one that I think works.
It's called shifting the blame, which is a matter of identifying the real violation, such as the occupation, as being the source of the trouble. And this introduces a symmetry that exonerates or at least contextualizes the original act.
Now I have never been in Al-Dahdouh's position, or Noura Erakat's, or Edward Said's, or Malcolm X's, or Fidel Castro's, or Ho Chi Minh's position, or anything like it. But as an instinctual anti-Zionist — meaning I knew Zionism was wrong, political Zionism was wrong, before I knew why — and an instinctual anti-imperialist, someone drawn instinctively and morally to freedom struggles for as long as I can remember, I know these six responses, like I've given them over and over again in countless discussions of justice and resistance and how oppressed people should seek and choose their own means of liberation.
And I know that only two of those six do not feel like caving.
So here's how it's played out for me. Maybe this is resonant for you.
In a discussion with a liberal about the fighters of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, I was told that the militants must be indoctrinated, brainwashed, compelled to act against their own morality.
And so my first response was to say that if you consider them as military forces as opposed to individual actors, attacking can be a rational action, even if it's debated or maybe even unlikely to succeed, or it might provoke a huge backlash. But my interlocutor kept going at it. These young men, why would they throw away their lives?
And my answer was, well, the apartheid system already threw away their lives, so they're making a bet that this will improve their lot.
And that was a psychological opening. He said, what would you say to one of those young men on October 6th?
And this brought out all of the fallacies because I shifted from the general to the personal. As I imagined counseling a young resister, a young militant, I focused on the affect of the attack to the exclusion of its purpose.
And I must have said to my interlocutor a dozen times that, of course, my personal ideal was that violence would never be on the table.
And then my argument as a comrade, as a supporter, an ally, I could feel was split and conditional, like, I would never do such a thing, but they might have to. And that's a lot different from saying, I support people who fight back against their oppressors. And if I were in the same position, I would too.
What Al-Dahdouh did with Amanpour is that he went hard on that sixth option. And maybe Kampf put it at the end of his list because it's the most radical. You take the accusation at the heart of the demand and say, no, I do not accept the framework of condemnation because October 7th was not the beginning.
What will happen, however, is that the interviewer who is in the pocket of the powerful will immediately call the defensive inversion of terms whataboutism — a tactic to deflect accountability by pointing to something comparable.
Now to that, I would say there are two types of whataboutism.
You've probably been on the receiving end of the bad whataboutism, defined by how it punches down. Here's a common example. You take a position against genocide in Gaza, because of course you do.
But the centrist or the liberal or the Zionist says, yeah, but what about Sudan and the Congo? Don't you care about them?
And this can be very disorienting because this person is shaming the empathy you feel and the actions you're taking toward a situation you know about and are invested in. And if you're American or Canadian or from a lot of other places, your politicians are actively profiting from it.
And so this person is turning your concern into naivety and hypocrisy. They are telling you you are too stupid to care about what you care about while showing their own stupidity in equalizing all of these mass murder events with each other. It's not a good defense. And it's punching down because they themselves probably do not care about Sudan or Congo except to score points. And so what they're really doing is weaponizing their hand-waving lack of care for the global south in general to present themselves as rational arbiters of what you should care about.
But there's another kind of whataboutism that slides into Kampf's number six category.
You've probably faced a version of the question posed to Al-Dahdouh about the Hamas attacks of October 7.
In that number six mode, we heard Al-Dahdouh's answer — very long, very dignified, very eloquent — and you along with him would be fully justified in replying: do you condemn the condition of apartheid and calculated starvation on October 6th in the Palestinian territories? What about that?
Because you cannot be guilty of whataboutism for naming the structure of oppression in response to a ritual demand that pretends that that oppression doesn't exist.
Punching down or sideways is saying look over there. But punching up is saying, look at yourself.
Now when you don't take the bait on Hamas, they think they have you on record stating a negative. But number six from Kampf means that you imagine you had the confidence to flip it.
Imagine having the confidence to say they refused to condemn imperialism, they refused to condemn apartheid, they refused to condemn genocide. You state your terms as facts because you have facts. You don't need accusations. You don't have to wait for a legal decision at the ICC.
You know that governments of the global north won't follow those rulings anyway.
When Jean-Paul Sartre said that the fascist does not care about the meaning of words, he's talking about how bullies use language.
And I believe the bright shadow of that statement, which came from an existentialist after all, is that you can and must authorize truth and justice through the words you use.
And that means you can stop playing defense against bullshit.
You know, my favorite part of my interview with Nour was hearing her describe the moment before the CJN event where she's walking around and suddenly feels the burden of the attacks lift a little bit. Because somehow she is able to see herself clearly as she is.
And there's a mystery there that connects the individual realization with an historical revelation.
Somehow she remembered that she was okay, that she knew herself, that she wasn't a hateful person or an antisemite at all, that the campaign against her was made of lies, that she was just a person having a human response to cruelty. And in that private, lonely moment, she knew she wasn't alone.
Take care of each other, everybody.
