AIBU to think that the Palestinian people don't need to be gentle and tolerant in order to be viewed as worthy victims?
I watched an extract of an interview with Mohammed el-Kurd last night about his book “Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal.” As someone who has worked in DV refuges for many years his words really resonated with me. The majority of the victims I support are imperfect, often very violent and harsh themselves - that does not mean that they deserve the violence or brutality experienced towards them; often their violence is a symptom of their abuse and the situations they were born into. I still advocate for them wholeheartedly.
I’ve posted the extract of what Muhammed said below:
“We’re expected to be perfect and polite. Not only is it tiring, but it’s only a few of us that can actually be that way. Most of us are too busy surviving, are too busy fighting off settlers and soldiers to actually deliver a perfect script to a Western audience. We have kind of, like, instilled it in ourselves to always assume that the listener is suspicious of us. And this we don’t talk about the home demolition or the air strike without first setting up the conditions in which the airstrike was illegal or first, you know, polishing the victims of these things.”
“We have to be lawyers and doctors and journalists in order to be worthy of grieving. Our men have to atone for their gender by being good fathers and being gentle souls and like, have viral videos of them feeding cats, as if anything justifies brutality. So the very basic thesis of this book is to say: Even if our fathers were not gentle, and even if our women and children are actually involved in political organising and violent protest, nothing justifies occupation. Nothing justifies colonialism. Everything else is a symptom. And that’s the disease. The root cause of everything.”