Refusing Genocide

‘And the other trick that happens in that Pete Davidson monologue is that, and Danya points this out in our conversation on Twitter, is the insidiousness of invoking his personal narrative and tragedy, right when he was a child, losing his father who worked as a rescue worker. Right. That’s not something that I think any of us would – many of us who are looking at the rescue workers in Gaza, who are refusing to evacuate in order to save lives, can look at what happened to Pete Davidson’s father and feel the immensity of sadness, personal loss. But that’s what we’re being invited to feel. And in being invited to feel that we’re being invited to think of what Naomi Klein is encouraging us to think of, this like, feeling bad for children experiencing violence. Versus attending to the very intentional, very thoroughly, bureaucratically, corporately, militarily implemented violence, totalizing violences of states, in order to maintain power, and to annihilate people who stand in the way of power. So to invoke this idea of the child, as a victim of 9/11, and to really – another writer commented that this is an attempt to really drum up nostalgia among people in this US settler colony, among US settlers, to have nostalgia for the aftermath of 9/11. And really lean into an affective, you know, disaster response or emergency response. I would say, resist the humanitarian crisis framing. And the feels bad industrial complex nostalgia, which is in the continuity with that right wing Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian racism, this idea that it’s a foregone conclusion, that the people of Palestine will be annihilated, and that it becomes, you know, a humanitarian disaster that then becomes, you know, the United States will participate in administrating the crisis or administrating the aftermath of the mass grave.’

— Rasha Abdulhadi, in ‘Best of 2023: Refusing Genocide w/ Rasha Abdulhadi’