Weaponizing Islamophobia against Palestine

Hassanal: Hi everyone, so welcome, thank you for joining us today for this webinar organised by the Movement for Liberation from Nakba. My name is Hassanal and I am one of the representative members from the Liberation from Nakba itself. Just a few house keeping things I wanted to share with you all. For everyone’s information, the webinar was supposed to be live streamed. Right now we are having technical difficulties with the live streaming setup itself. So, one it is able to live stream, we will notify everyone of the live streaming webpage in the chat and also, the meeting will be recorded and will be setup at a later time also. And also for the webinar itself there will be a Q&A session based on the time table here and during this Q&A session we will provide an opportunity for attendees to address their questions and for resp. presenters to respond during their allocated Q&A session. I would like to ask every attendee, if you have any questions to share in the Q&A bar under your control panel and to also keep your questions courteous. So with that I will leave and pass the floor to the moderator, Steve Liddle, who is an independent researcher from New Zealand, and also a member from the MLN. Steve I think the floor is yours.

Steve Liddle: Thank you Hassanal. Good evening, Good morning, Good afternoon. We cover all time spans or time zones for this meeting. Welcome to MLN Movement for Liberation from Nakba, Weaponizing Islamophobia against Palestine. I am going to cut short my remarks, so that we can be closer to time. But I’ll just first of all go through what we are going to do in order. The first speaker will be Ilan Pappe on the role of Islamophobia in the making of Israel. The second speaker from London Ahammed Hussain, Islamophobia and Zionism in Britain today and the third speaker is Junaid Ahmad, Islamophobia, Coloniality and the Politics of resistance. At 5.30 Q&A i.e. 1030 this time, and closing remarks by Nida Arif and she is in India, on Islamophobia the way forward.  I have been asked to give a small introduction, for those of you are not aware of the advocacy group, MLN. Movement for Liberation from Nakba is a coalition of organisations and individuals from South East Asia, South Asia, and Middle East – West Asia if you don’t like Middle East, Palestine, South Africa, UK that aims to spread knowledge about Palestine particularly in Asia and yes now also the Indo-Pacific Australia and New Zealand, thank you Boris Johnson.   The purpose of MLN is to raise critical awareness of the history of Palestine, of the 1948 Nakba catastrophe and the plight of the Palestinian Minority inside Israel, the Occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza strip, and of course, the plight of millions of Palestinian Refugees. The MLN project wishes to provide information about the history of the Palestinian struggle for Liberation and therefore is very much in solidarity with it.  As an introduction to tonight’s topic, weaponizing islamophobia against Palestine, I leave most of the introduction to Ilan Pappe but a couple of remarks about advocacy groups focusing on the way Israel is weaponizing anti Semitism. And it’s done this in order to stifle debate. And that of course is paid little attention to the fact that it also involves Islamophobia for the same purpose. Israel’s main method is to associate terror with Islam in general and the Palestinian political Islamic groups in particular. Hence, Hamas is part of world Islamic Terrorism with Al Qaeda and Islamic State. A terrorism determined to destroy the Western civilization that Israel represents in the Middle East. In fact, the Muslim communities identify with the Palestinian struggle in the West is not only because the majority of Palestinians are Muslims but mainly because Palestine is the last place where western colonialism still reigns in the midst of Arab and Muslim worlds. Support of Muslim communities for Palestine’s struggle, smeared or branded by Israel as Islamic terror is not only Muslim, but one part of a global network of support. This is the common thread of previous webinars and tonight’s, the Global Struggle for Human and Civil Rights for all in historical Palestine.  I’d now like to briefly bio or introduce the speakers on the topic beginning with Professor Pappe. Professor Pappe is an expatriate Israeli historian and socialist activist. He’s now a professor with the College of Social Sciences, an international studies at the University of Exeter in the UK. Director of that university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies and co-director of the Exodus Centre for Ethno Political Studies. He’s born and educated in Israel, prior to coming to the UK around 12 years ago. He was a senior Lecturer in political science at the University of Heifer from 1984 to 2007. And chair of the Institute for Palestinian and Israel studies in Haifa for 2008. He’s the author of twenty books. He’s on his 21st at the moment. And these include the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 2006, the modern Middle East in 2005, the history of modern Palestine: One land to peoples in 2003. And Britain and the Arab Israeli conflict in 1988. I’m going to cut short my introduction now. It’s just so that we can keep to time and ask Ilan Pappe if you would like to begin speaking now. Professor.