08/27/14 – Dean Ahmad – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
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Our first guest today is Imad Adin Ahmad.
And he is a longtime libertarian activist, especially affiliated with the Libertarian Party and runs the Minaret of Freedom Institute at minaret.org, calling the Muslim faithful to freedom.
Welcome back to the show.
Dean, how are you doing?
Well, thank you, Scott.
I'm glad to be back here and I'm doing well.
Good.
Very happy to have you on the show.
And, you know, with the two 10 minute segments, we never can really cover everything we want to hear.
And then with me doing the interview, and that means we jump all around and it can sometimes be kind of a disaster.
But so last time that we spoke, I really wanted to give you a chance to talk about your own personal family history of life in Palestine and now out of it.
And, you know, your your part in the story of the Nakba, really.
And then maybe from there we can get back into some of that very early history of the establishment of Israel, what it's meant for the Palestinians.
And then maybe we'll find a way to segue into the current state of pseudo ceasefire as it exists here.
But first of all, can you just tell us about where you're from and how you got here?
Sure.
Well, my family is from Palestine.
My mother was born in Jerusalem.
Her name was Kudsiya.
My father was born in a tiny village near there called Bir Nabala.
My father had come to the United States when he was a little boy for economic reasons and went back to Palestine in 1947 to find a wife.
He wooed and wed my mother in late 1947.
But she did not want to come back with him to the United States.
She wanted him to stay there.
And he agreed at first.
But then in May of 1948, the massacre took place at Deir Yassin.
And my mother was a teacher, had a student from Deir Yassin, and she was pregnant with me at the time.
She decided that maybe it would be best to come to the United States because it was not apparently any easier in those days to get a visa than it is now.
She didn't get her visa until a month before I was born.
And at that time, of course, the airlines wouldn't allow her to fly being pregnant.
So she took a boat.
But I was born 10 days premature.
So I was born on the boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
And when I got to the United States, although technically I should have been an American citizen since my father was an American citizen and had been for more than 10 years and since the boat flying the American flag was technically American soil, the immigration official who met my mom simply didn't recognize my citizenship.
And so my father had to appeal.
And eventually I was given citizenship retroactive to the date of my birth, a very, very strange method of trying to prevent me from running for president, apparently.
Anyway, my extended family includes some people who remained in Palestine, some people who ended up in refugee camps, and some people who fled to other parts of the world, as my mom did, to the United States.
So in my own family, you got pretty much a microcosm of the Palestinian experience.
For example, I had one cousin who lived in Sweden for a long time before eventually settling in the United States.
I have some other cousins who are now businessmen and are men.
And I had some other cousins who were in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
So that's, in short, the story of my family.
But as you can see, it's not too different from the story of Palestinians in general.
Yeah, that's really something to have been made to be born at sea because you couldn't go back right at the time of the Nakba.
So now that means, what's exactly the translation there?
The disaster, is that right?
Yeah, the catastrophe is probably the most, yeah.
And so that included approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were removed, I guess, from their homes in what we now call Israel proper, excluding the Palestinian territories.
But so where did all the refugees go?
You mentioned Lebanon, and of course there's Gaza and the West Bank, but where else in the world do they have camps that are still full of Palestinian refugees and descendants of those refugees from the Nakba?
Well, there are also camps, some camps in Jordan, there are actually, I believe there are still some camps in the occupied territories.
And there are also displaced persons in Israel.
There are some people who, strangely enough, while not allowed to go to their home villages, are still in Israel, located perhaps only several miles away from their villages.
And then as I said, like my cousin who was in Sweden, you can really find Palestinians all over the world.
Not necessarily in refugee camps, that's I think probably a minority, although a very large minority of Palestinians.
There are others who have managed to make their way successfully.
I mentioned my cousins who are businessmen, and I'm a man.
My own cousins here in the United States are all people who are successful financially to one degree or another, but who are separated from their family members.
I was raised never having met my grandparents.
It was a weird feeling, because all the other kids in my school, most of the other kids who were really, really close to their grandparents, I just never met mine.
Now can you clear up for me a little bit about in Jordan, the Palestinians, I thought that there were, like in Syria, there are laws against them actually competing in the market.
They kind of have to stay in the camp and on the dole and aren't allowed to become successful in anti-competitive laws and that kind of thing, no?
Not in Jordan.
In some of them, unfortunately, sad to say, in some of the Arab countries, the Palestinians have not been welcome, and there are such problems.
But I'm not aware that there are any such laws in Jordan.
In fact, the fact that there are no such laws in Jordan is one of the reasons the Israelis have claimed Jordan is the Palestinian state, and there should be no other Palestinian state.
There are a very large number of Palestinians in Jordan, that can't be denied, but the fact is that they are people who were born across the border, and some of whom still have their homes and others maybe have their homes destroyed, but who would like to go back to their own land.
I guess maybe I was making a bad assumption just on the fact that there are still huge refugee camps for Palestinians in Jordan.
It seems like if they don't have to stay in the Palestinian camps, but they could just live in a Palestinian part of town, but participate in this society otherwise, then why wouldn't they?
Well, that's an interesting question, and one that unfortunately I can't give the answer to.
I do know that on my one trip to Palestine, we visited one of the refugee camps, but it was not a social visit, it was not a fact-finding tour, so I made no investigation into the story of those people, of why they were still there, but I think you've got to realize that there's a combination of factors that might be at play.
First off, there's a cycle of poverty.
You know, when people are denied, have everything taken away from them, and don't have personal contacts by which they can become apprentices in some field or another.
So in other words, they're free to leave, but they've got nowhere to go, really.
Exactly.
Right.
I'm sorry, but we've got to hold it right there, Dean, and take this break, but everybody hang tight.
We'll be right back with Ahmaud.
Dean Ahmaud.
I said it wrong, I always do, but minaretoffreedom.org is his great libertarian Muslim website.
Check it out.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Latest update I got from Antiwar.com is that all is quiet in Gaza now.
They have a truce.
It's not, I don't know how solid it is or how long it's expected to hold, but it's a bit more than a ceasefire, they're saying, and it seems to be holding for now.
We're talking with Imad Adin Imad, and he's at the Minaret of Freedom Institute.
That's minaret.org, and he's a Palestinian-American Muslim libertarian.
We're talking about the history of his family and how it came to be that he's an American is because of the Nakba, the stealing of Palestine by Israel back in 1948, and talking about the plight of the refugees around the Middle East, still living in camps in many places around the Middle East and how they're suffering.
But now I guess we got to talk about the recent Gaza war that's been going on for the last couple of months here, basically, but seven or almost eight weeks of very one-sided fighting there, Dean.
And then also, there's what is to be done and all of that kind of stuff.
So I guess, first of all, can you talk to us about, you know, what do you think we really need to understand about the recent war in Gaza, if you call it that?
Sure.
If I might, before I answer that question, I wanted to say one other thing about the refugee camps.
Apart from the problems of just getting out of poverty, which is what getting out of the camps is all about, there's also the fact that some people just want to go back home, and they consider that, you know, any economic success they might achieve in this world is only a substitute and not an adequate one for getting what was stolen from them.
And that also can impede them from getting out of their situation.
Having said that, let's go to your question about Gaza.
Now, Gaza is an example of a place that really was and has been called an open-air prison, the largest open-air prison in the world, because of the fact that the Israelis, for many years now, usually with the collaboration of the Egyptians, have cut off the Gazans from being able to deal with the outside world, being able to import, you know, to trade, to get goods that they need in exchange for the goods they produce domestically, unable to get construction materials and so on, all under the excuse of an understandable embargo on weapons.
But the fact is that it's not just weapons that have been blockaded from Gaza.
Now, what's interesting about this recent warfare there, which caused a lot of pain to both sides, especially to the Gazans, who overwhelmingly had civilians killed, compared to the Israelis, but the reason that Hamas held out so long for the open-ended ceasefire that has just been put into effect this week was that they wanted, as a condition of any ceasefire, that this siege be alleviated, that they be allowed to trade for the goods they need in order to get construction materials, and also for their fishermen to be able to fish in the coastal waters off of Gaza, since, you know, Gaza is a port city.
It's a tiny place, a very dense place.
It's twice the size of Washington, D.C., but has, you know, millions of people in it.
And that fishing is very important to them.
So what's fantastic about this current ceasefire and why, from the Gazans' point of view, it has been accepted and so far is holding, is that they've gotten concessions on those points.
They are going to be allowed to trade, they are going to be allowed to get construction material, and the fishermen, for the first time, are going to be allowed to go up to six miles offshore in order to fish.
So this is really the most hopeful ceasefire that has come down so far.
Boy, and at such enormous cost.
And I wonder whether, I mean, is there really anything that the Israelis got out of this other than, you know, their bloodlust satiated a little bit?
Well, their intention, they said their intention was to destroy Hamas.
Well, but that was never true.
They also said, no, we don't really mean that because, of course, we don't want to destroy Hamas.
Well, I never believed it.
But the fact is, if that was their intention, they utterly failed in that.
And then some of us suspected that their intention was just to accelerate the misery of the Gazans in the hopes to drive them out the way that so many other Palestinians have been driven out of the rest of Palestine.
But they didn't succeed in that either.
The Gazans are actually quite surprisingly tough in this matter, quite awesome and inspiring in their resilience.
So what did they get?
Well, I think the only thing they got is something they didn't want, that they got a propaganda nightmare.
I have never, in all the years of all the atrocities committed by the Israelis, I have never before seen such a degree of criticism from within the United States.
For example, just yesterday or very recently, after the ADL, the anti-defamation league, put an outrageous ad in the Hollywood Reporter in which they quoted Golda Meir saying something to the effect of, we can forgive the Palestinians for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for making us kill their children.
Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, was so upset by this ad that he published in the Hollywood Reporter, the same place that published the ad, an article providing a translation of what the ad really means.
And he said, basically, what the ad really means is that, you know, we're going to try to end the Palestinians' anger against us by killing their children.
And he said that, you know, that's crazy.
You don't end somebody's anger with you by killing their children.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and that is just one example.
You know, even on TV, it's because of Twitter, I think more than anything, people can push right back on reporters about, hey, you just said this, but the proof is opposite.
And here's the link in such an immediate kind of way and in front of everybody that at least the journalists who have some integrity, like Jake Tapper, for example, he's a real reporter, not just a news anchor.
He does real journalism.
And when people call into account, he's somewhat accountable.
I'm not, you know, I mean, he's a CNN guy.
Don't get me wrong.
But as far as that kind of thing goes, you know, people like him are reachable, you know.
There have been many decent journalists who have tried to write objectively about this situation in the past, but they don't get past their editors.
And the fact that, you know, and that's still true to an extent.
I think there was an NBC reporter who got pulled back, called back to the United States after reporting from Gaza about some of the atrocities taking place.
But the fact is that to a degree I've never seen before, editors are allowing little glimpses of what's really going on to get published in the press.
All right.
Now, OK, we're short on time, so let's skip ahead to how too little too late that all is.
The West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem been occupied for 47 years.
The West Bank is already, you know, completely colonized pretty much.
It would basically be impossible to have a contiguous separate state there without the Israeli government actually removing all of those Israeli Jewish settlers from those settlements and giving them back to the Palestinians, which is obviously, you know, politically impossible.
Not going to happen.
They don't want to do it anyway.
And so what's the future now that Kerry's bogus talks have failed again?
What's going to happen here?
What should happen here?
Well, there's only one thing that's going to resolve this situation, and that is for the United States to end the blank check, the unconditional aid to Israel.
As long as that aid is there and as long as Israel sees it as being unconditional, they have no motive whatsoever to work for a peaceful resolution of the dispute.
You can see this in, I mean, one of the most interesting things to me, you've often heard people criticize Hamas because the Hamas charter says they, you know, don't and will never recognize the state of Israel.
But what you never hear them point out is that the Likud party also shares that view, that they will never recognize a Palestinian state.
And why is this never mentioned?
It is obviously, the sticking point to the same degree that Hamas is intransigent is a problem.
So is the Likud intransigence a problem?
Why is this never addressed and dealt with?
My answer is, because Israel sees that aid is unconditional.
As soon as that aid becomes conditional, and as soon as Congress, you know, shows some commitment to the interests of America as opposed to the interests of, perceived interests of Israel, then I think you're going to see the Israelis become reasonable and start to negotiate in better faith.
Yeah, I think that's probably right.
I'd like to hope so.
Anyway.
All right.
Well, we're out of time again, but great to have you back on the show, Dean.
I sure appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
All right.
That is Imad Adin Ahmad.
He's at minaret.org, the Minaret of Freedom Institute.
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