Decolonizing The World (w/ Amin Husain) | The Chris Hedges Report

Palestine, Professor Amin Husain says, is the blueprint for a future that embraces traditional colonialism carried out through violence and erasure.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Palestinian professor and activist Amin Husain knows what Western settler colonialism looks, sounds and feels like. Growing up in Palestine, Husain experienced the iron grip of Israeli force and came to understand how important it was to struggle against such a powerful imperial entity, even in the face of defeat.

In the United States, Husain applied his learned experience to organize and educate about how colonialism and imperialism not only exists in the modern world, but is intertwined in the economy and culture of the global capitalist world order. Husain joins host Chris Hedges to chronicle his story and his approach to fighting settler colonialism, which, after October 7th, led to his firing from New York University.

“A lot of people exceptionalize Palestine, but what Palestine does is clarify what is happening in the world. It’s one type of future,” Husain explains.

Some of Husain’s activism work involved organizing alternative tours in museums such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where the very layout and structure of the museum was challenged in a way that brought material change.

“You go into a museum and you think that that’s neutral but this is how the nation state narrative gets perpetuated from a very young age so that you think it’s normal. There’s nothing normal about a 36-foot monument that’s about imperialism and white supremacy,” Husain says of the infamous Teddy Roosevelt statue depicting the president riding on horseback accompanied by a colonized Native American and African, each wielding guns.

Husain’s work, which has been censored by the military-contracting Big Tech companies, demonstrates a model of resilience and education that can challenge power and cultivate community.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Victor Castellanos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

The most important struggle against settler colonialism today is the struggle for Palestine. The genocide has, on the one hand, raised public consciousness to expose the Zionist project for what it is — a racist, apartheid system where the indigenous people are dispossessed and exterminated. But this consciousness has failed to alter the iron support of Western governments for Israel.

Rather, Western governments have continued to send weapons to Israel, without which the genocide could not be sustained, and criminalized those who protest and organize to halt the genocide.

While the struggle to halt the genocide may be the most important immediate battle before us it is not the only one. Western societies are permeated with the poison of settler colonialism, including in academia, the arts, the entertainment industry and the political and legal system.

It is so ingrained that it is rarely questioned or even acknowledged. But if Palestine is to be free from the poison of settler colonialism, intimately tied to systems of patriarchy, it must be uprooted not only in Israel but in Western culture.

The Palestinian professor Amin Husain, along with Nitasha Dhillon, are founders of Decolonize This Place, which is an activist group that confronts the narratives, art and myths used to buttress settler colonialism. Amin, who has a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, a J.D. from Indiana University School of Law, and an LL.M. from Columbia Law School was fired from his position as an adjunct professor at New York University last year.

He lost his job for publicly denouncing the Israeli propaganda about Palestinians beheading babies and carrying out widespread sexual assault on October 7. Husain and Dhillon produced the film “Unsettling”, about land, life, and liberation in occupied Palestine. Joining me to discuss decolonization, the genocide in Palestine and the fight against settler colonialism is Amin Husain.

Amin, let’s begin with your boyhood because settler colonialism, although you’re an academic, was hardly an abstraction to you.

Amin Husain

No, it wasn’t. I was raised in Palestine and I was fortunate and unfortunate to be raised under occupation, Israeli occupation and I experienced the first uprising and that was really formative for me in terms of thinking how to live and the meaning of life and the ability to live in fear but find courage is something that I think has been super important to both have revolutionary optimism in thinking about the world and how you live. So that was my upbringing over there.

Chris Hedges

Talk about where you were. I was also there covering it as a reporter. It was different from the Second Intifada in that it was primarily nonviolent. They would throw rocks for which Israelis would shoot you, but there was not any kind of lethal violence, at least not on the part of the Palestinians for the most part. Talk a little bit about those experiences, how old you were, where you were, what you went through, and how it affected, obviously, the trajectory of your own academic work and your life.

Amin Husain

Yeah, I mean I come from a family that was lower middle class. My dad was a mechanic. Both my parents weren’t highly educated. My dad was working in Kuwait, opened up a taxi company, was a taxi driver during that time, during the first uprising.

But I think living under there, I had to experience what it meant to be unfree. And it was hard to tell because you are born into conditions, structural conditions of violence. But I remember walking to school in my town, Al-Bireh, and being stopped by Israeli soldiers. And there would be nationalistic slogans on the wall, and they would take your ID.

I was 12, and I would have to carry my ID with me and they would take my ID and they would say, “You see all this stuff on the wall? We’re gonna be back in an hour, it better all be erased. You’re not even in your neighborhood.” And I think a lot of people, what they would do, and I would do that too, is I would ask neighbors and people, “Do you have any water and soil?” And I would cover it up just so can get my ID back so can go back to school.

But it happened once and twice. Then, one of these days, because it was the uprising, one of these days I’m like, no. And I really got beat up really bad. But that refusal of refusing to do what they say was the beginning of a journey for me, of the ability to say no in the face of insurmountable power and violence.

That’s how I got radicalized. That’s how I got involved in the struggle. And the thing about the Intifada, of the Palestinian uprising in ‘87, is that it wasn’t about violence or nonviolence. It was clear what the violence was. The violence was structural. The occupation was present. The settlements were there. They were taking the water. They were putting curfews. They were taking the land.

So all of these things were experiences where people came together and they organized from the ground up against these forms of violence. And it created the kind of community that you would imagine we need now and people need in general.

Chris Hedges

So let’s talk about the process of… you end up investing tremendous amounts of time in terms of understanding the mechanics of settler colonialism, not only in Israel, but in Western societies. And I wondered if you could talk about that, that broader understanding of settler colonialism and how it works.

Amin Husain

Yeah, I mean, I think that my trajectory has been one in which to understand the structures of violence that impact my life and then how to get free. It’s always been very practical. It’s always been grounded. And I think that understanding the condition around Palestine, although it has the specificity of settler colonialism, it’s part of the modernity project that’s being imposed by the West.

And I think that that’s really important to understand, because a lot of people exceptionalize Palestine, but what Palestine does is clarify what is happening in the world. It’s one type of future. And that’s why you can think of Gaza right now and you could look at it and be like, “Oh, there’s a ceasefire. No, there’s not a ceasefire, there’s genocide and ethnic cleansing and this and that.”

Is it the only place? No. Is it to the extreme that we see? Yes.

Why is it so extreme? Part of it has to do with the kind of the technology that’s being used and this and that, but also they’re modeling a blueprint for what it is. So as a person who both lived in Palestine and now resides in New York City, almost like an exile, how do you fight for Palestine from where you are? How do you fight for your own liberation from where you are?

To understand, to speak of settler colonialism over there is to remember that we’re on stolen land over here. These histories are not erased. They are part of our present, and they’re important for the kind of solidarities and coalitions that we build in order to get free. So my study around understanding settler colonization is to also understand imperialism, but also our relationship to the land and to each other.

You can talk about people wanting to get free and they would refer to, well, we wanted to determine our own futures — economic, political, social. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do over here and we still can’t do it. So there’s the extremes of violence that I think are important that I’ve managed to learn from my study.

But being in New York, for example, or being in the United States as a settler colonial project that operates like an empire with internal forms and external forms of colonization means that I’m able to understand what’s happening in Palestine, that I can see that liberation struggle and actually understand it over here as part of my liberation struggle. And I find others who are trying to do the same.

The fact that these are separate nation states, with their own specificity, doesn’t take away from the fact that I think we’re thinking about shared horizons of liberation today. So my study has been around not so much exceptionalizing Palestine, but understanding these dynamics and histories that go back as far back as 1492, to be honest.

And to know that like enslavement and stolen land is how this place was built and then on the backs of migrant labor who then continuously are dispossessing or removing each other by policies is not very different than what we’re experiencing in Palestine right now. And that’s why people, let’s say from the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, when they went to Palestine, some of the testimonies that they came back with is that I understand my condition better now.

The fact that what’s happening in Palestine is the history of what’s happening here that remains ongoing means that for us there’s common ground to build on. So my studies, in short, have been around how to understand these conditions not as separate but planetary. And amidst all of that, how can people get free?

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about some of the activism and I’ll let you explain your work with the Natural History Museum in particular, but that’s just one example of a massive monument to settler colonialism that I think every school kid in New York City has to visit and it’s kind of unquestioned.

Amin Husain

Totally. It was unquestioned. And I think that what was… I mean, you have the American Museum of Natural History, but it’s very endemic of the kind of white supremacy storytelling that people are raised on. And then you wonder why everyone turns out to be racist in one form or another.

So you have a male horse and then it’s on top of it, Teddy Roosevelt, and flanked by an Indigenous figure and a Black figure both carrying guns and facing east, right? And first of all, it’s all male. And then it’s like, here’s these figures, right? The Indigenous and the Black folks with empire going east.

And it was unquestioned until we started protesting that in 2016 and we did anti-Columbus tours four years in a row and then it eventually got removed. The irony of its removal though is that they put a small plaque and they sent it to Teddy Roosevelt’s library in another state.

So the interesting thing about the American Museum of Natural History is that it’s a public institution. It’s one of the most highly funded and at the same time, it’s putting Black people and Black animals, let’s say African people and African mammals in a hall, Asian people, Asian mammals, these classifications of colonialism, right?

And you would have to go to this and it tells you your story of your people always in the past, except for Israel. There’s a section about Israel, right? That’s very digitized. But we used, here’s what’s interesting about the American Museum of Natural History, is that we use that as a site to connect our struggles. And so in the organizing in the city, we would meet different groups, we would go to different groups, we were like, this group, this hall is about your people, about your land, about your history.

Go look at it, tell us what you think. And that’s how we created these tours. These tours were also not, they were without permission. They were alternative tours that told a different history. They forced the museum to close so there was material consequences to the institution, right? And it was very well received by the people that would find themselves in the museum.

And in that way, you break the boundaries that the institution itself tries to mediate amongst people. You go into a museum and you think that that’s neutral but this is how the nation state narrative gets perpetuated from a very young age so that you think it’s normal. There’s nothing normal about a 36 foot monument that’s about imperialism and white supremacy.

And at the time we began protesting that monument, other people were protesting Confederate monuments. And that’s what was important about this monument. It was Teddy Roosevelt, the one that was part of the colonization of Puerto Rico, the one that’s very celebrated as one president, the New Deal and so forth.

But to us, this project of the United States is on flawed ground, right? And I think that the monument and the museum both were a site of struggle to address these issues and actually pedagogically build power with people on the ground in the city to both shape or shift the consciousness around it, build power and force an outcome.

That was beneficial to the people as a win. And I think that one thing I’ll say about wins in the context of the museum is that we had three demands. And those were demands that, let’s say, we worked on together in community to say, change the name of the day from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. That was important. Remove the monument, that also was important, but also respect the ancestors.

And I think in respecting the ancestors, we were pointing to the fact that they have Nama skulls until now in that museum. You know what I mean? Nama skulls from colonization. And they have many other things, whether medicine pouches that are not objects, that should not be there. So these grievances that otherwise are there became the reason for why a decolonial formation can develop in the city. And it could develop in opposition to something while it’s building relationships with each other and relationships of power.

Chris Hedges

Well, you’ve made the point that almost all the objects, not just in the Natural History Museum, but in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are looted.

Amin Husain

Yes, they are. And I think that’s what’s interesting about museums, right, so they’re looted. But what’s interesting about the modern museum is these were created at the end of so-called colonialism as a way to kind of almost wash that history away. It’s like, “Oh, this is no longer looted. This is being placed for good safekeeping. Everyone can go and see it.” Not true.

And what’s interesting about the Metropolitan Museum in comparison to the American Museum of Natural History, we call the American Museum of Natural History as a monument to white supremacy because you look at the Met, there isn’t a hall for white people. There isn’t a hall for Western people. But that’s where the galas take place and all of this stuff. So the looted stuff becomes ornaments for the people over here. And what kind of people?

Wealthy people. They are the ones that have the gala at the Met. And to think about this kind of, I mentioned this to you before, Ariella Azoulay has written, and there’s on Decolonize This Place YouTube channel, a video by Ariella Azoulay in which it talks about the modern museum and its role actually in washing colonization and imperialism.

Chris Hedges

And yet, of course, we’re rolling backwards all of the advances that had been made in terms of recognizing the numerous cultures that had gone into creating American society. And the universities and the museums and the public institutions have just, without a fight, capitulated during the Trump administration. So much of the work that you and Dylan and others were trying to do has just taken a body blow.

Amin Husain

Yeah, I mean, it’s even more than that. I think of struggle as cumulative. I think that what we do matters. Every single thing we do matters. And it shapes futures, and it creates different courses of action. And people come after us, and there are people before us.

These are our lineages of struggle and I don’t want to, it may be related to museums, but not to minimize museums and universities and hospitals. They’re sites of struggle for a reason because that’s how… These are where people’s lives meet the state in the most immediate way. And what’s interesting about the United States is that all of these important places have oligarchs funding them.

So to understand, let’s say the moment we’re in, it’s taken a body blow, but it also demands for us consideration of where we are right now in the history of this project. In the, as Grace Lee Boggs would say, it’s like, what time is it on the clock of the world?

So it’s telling that it’s taking a body blow and more than that. And I think that you and I remember Occupy Wall Street and we were, in different ways, involved in it. And I think that one way to understand where we are right now is to think of it from a movement standpoint. Like Occupy Wall Street was at a time when you had Obama, right?

If there was any change that was going to happen that it was going to be positive and meaningful, the opportunity was there then. But Wall Street went over. So the arguments that were made around class and the discrepancy in wealth, that kept going with technological advancements.

On a movement standpoint, we knew, let’s say, that yes, this was about income inequality and capitalism and this was an anti-capitalist movement to a large extent before it kind of got absorbed and more wide stream.

But these corrective measures that followed, whether it’s Black Lives Matter and the movement for Black Lives or the war on Gaza and the immobilizations that happened in 2014, or Standing Rock and Indigenous sovereignty and the movement for land back and Idle No More, like these were all corrective measures for something. And our movements never matured enough to kind of bring all these things together, #MeToo at some level, even though very different.

So what happened then is like after all this organizing, all this work and we looked at museums and looked at universities as strategic sites because we wanted a little buffer from the state as we built power, right? And there was a way to kind of bring people together because it’s where, also, we have a stake, meaning we’re not outsiders to it. We’re both implicated and responsible and we have agency there.

So, come the pandemic and afterwards, and now there’s no recourse for any change. You know, you had Trump come, you had Biden stick through it all, and you got Trump again. And now they’re rolling everything back. But it’s much more than that. It’s a different project. On one level, there’s a failing system, and on another level, they’re ushering a new one.

And if you were to think about Elon Musk or [Peter] Thiel or all these kinds of people, they have so much money now that our institutions are beholden to them. I mean, I used to teach at New York University. Who was on the board? Who’s still on the board? Fink, [Blackrock CEO] Larry Fink. You’re talking BlackRock. And he, I’m sure he had a hand in me getting fired. So I say all this to say is that the work that we’ve done is not just about changing institutions. That’s almost secondary.

It’s using institutions to find each other and to develop an analysis and a praxis and then think about how do we get free. This is still the question. And by how to get free, and it matters now, like from this work around decolonizing the United States, for example, or decolonization as a whole as a movement, you focus on an institution, but your point isn’t to decolonize the institution, you know? The institution is where all our lives meet and where you have the worker and you have the financier and you have all of these things coming together.

So there’s power and there’s leverage. And so to think about the museum and to think about the work that we’ve done is to also make the argument to others that these sites are not salvageable. That you can’t engage in a liberation struggle at this moment in the United States, whether it’s for the United… I mean I engage in struggle here to free myself, to free others and to free Palestine. These are not in contradiction.

So when we make these efforts and then they roll back the clock, it’s also a testament now to what are people going to do about that. Because you can’t live a life without recourse, recourse to justice, recourse to change, recourse to whatever. You’re going to keep voting every two years when you know what that is?

I mean, people were making the argument way back about Citizens United and what money can buy. And now money can buy presidents and elections and you have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and you have these kinds of things. You have judges on the Supreme Court, you have the media being bought, whether it’s TikTok or so forth and so on, everything you cover on this show, on this podcast, is being played out.

DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] was something they introduced to lower the blow in 2020. They were like, okay, let’s not decolonize, let’s not abolish, but let’s do representative identities with no support for it to last. And then they took it all away.

These are the band-aids that they do all the time. You organize, organize, organize, they give you a little sliver and then they take it away when you’re looking away because everyone has to eat, everyone has to work, no one has time, everyone’s overwhelmed. So structurally they take advantage of that. So I think of the work that we’ve done and it’s done with others, many others, and it’s to think that even in 2021, we told people the Museum of Modern Art is a crime scene.

It’s a crime scene. Everyone on that board, from [Ronald] Lauder, who was responsible for the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance], to Larry Fink, to Leon Black, [Jeffrey] Epstein connections, and so forth and so on. We said that there’s nothing that MoMA can offer. We have to actually create our own futures, right, but in opposition to those because those things are not neutral and they’re complicit in what’s happening and art washing and doing all these things.

Chris Hedges

I mean, they did throw a lot of money into the campaign to defeat [Zohran] Mamdani, and they failed. And Mamdani’s first act was to revoke the IHRA.

Amin Husain

100%. And that was a good move by Mamdani. And I think that we heroes and saviors is not the moment we’re in. That said, there is no site that we should withdraw from. The elections, it’s just to recognize that elections and politicians are beholden to that structure. What we need, I say we, the people that don’t like the direction that we’re headed, which seems to the right and more to the right and what used to be the possibility of left or just something liberatory moving this way is that we create, we need the other direction, the other project.

And I’d say that one way to think about it, and because you mentioned Mamdani, like his father [Mahmood Mamdani] is a person that I used to teach in my course, very important in terms of a thinker. But there’s two projects going on. One of them is assimilation and extraction that uses the nation state to do all these things, right? And it’s depth-oriented. And you see, this is the future that they’re ushering us into. And its stark example is what it’s enduring right now in terms of real estate. It’s a beachfront. It’s Elon Musk can have his little thing over there. This is how they’re thinking of the world.

And then people like us, it’s about your needs and they know better, right? Then there’s this other project. It’s one of de-assimilation. It’s one of liberation. It’s one of the ability of us to create futures that are amenable to our existence, that are related to land, water, air, that have to do with the planet. Mamdani, right now as mayor, has an orientation towards what I’m talking about, but he’s a politician. And why do I say that?

Because yesterday he’s done good things and bad things. The good things you mentioned, for example, the IHRA definition, to stop criminalizing boycotts, good things. Bad thing was that he agreed to tell the police commissioner [Jessica Tisch], who he kept from the last administration, who’s a Tisch, and her father owns the hotel that Netanyahu stays at. And she also comes from a millionaire family who’s a Zionist, to review whether to create First Amendment zones away from synagogues, right? Why First Amendment zones?

Chris Hedges

This is, let me just interrupt, is, correct me if I’m wrong, but what’s happening in select synagogues is they are selling or holding land sales for Gaza, and this is the issue, isn’t it?

Amin Husain

Totally, Yes. So what’s happened in New York City and in [New] Jersey and places like that is that settlers hold land sales to do with Gaza or the West Bank or both in synagogues. So people in the city have picketed, protested in front of those synagogues. What are they protesting? The event of the sale of stolen land. And it includes Jewish people and includes non-Jewish people on that.

So the curtailment of that right of the First Amendment is something super dangerous. And we would hope a person like Mamdani wouldn’t curtail the First Amendment, especially now. Because one of the few things that people have is the ability to speak up, to speak out, to come together, clarify what’s going on, to shed light on it. So good and bad on the spectrum of pointing towards freedom and liberation and justice.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about what has to be done in this age of rising authoritarianism, even fascism.

Amin Husain

You know, I’m like everyone else. I mean, I spend day and night thinking about this and I don’t know. I think that we have to come together and figure it out. What I do know is that we all have an understanding of why things are really bad from our own material condition. And I think that we have to resist and you have to refuse, right?

And I think that the history of our movements here have somehow, they’ve been cumulative, but the moment now is to point to another future, one that isn’t mediated by ballots. One that we can enact. It can be in opposition. People have to eat. People have debt. We know these conditions, but we also know that there’s many of us right now who are unhappy with what’s going on. We’re unhappy in our life.

We’re unhappy with the prospect, our younger kids are unhappy and they’re capitalizing on that. So these are some of the conditions that I think are important for us to really think even about October 7th. Like October 7th and the resistance was a refusal. Leave aside everything else. It was a refusal for a course that almost seemed like you can’t refuse. And people organized and they’ve been organizing for years.

We also have movements and infrastructure and our relationships and there are churches and there are mosques and there are… a person like Mamdani could help people actually exercise their First Amendment in parks, which is curtailed. These modes of coming together right now are essential to figuring it out. I do think that the strike is an important tool. I think refusal is important.

I don’t think that you have to leave your job. It isn’t about purity right now. We’re all both oppressor and oppressed. This is the structure. This is the modern colonial condition we’re in. That said, we don’t have, I mean, coming together to unsettle everything, to think of ungovernability as a strategy, to think about “globalizing the Intifada”, to think about boycotts, ways of creating our own clothes. Good people also have money. We know this from Occupy Sandy so much. We knew this from another campaign we did, which was strike debt.

In a span of two or three days, we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from people that didn’t have much. But this is also telling of the moment we’re in and that’s why people need to come together and to think because that’s why they’re passing domestic terrorism laws, right? And me, I can’t use PayPal. I can’t use all the ways of sending money. I’m not allowed to use.

Chris Hedges

When were you blocked?

Amin Husain

I was blocked in 2020. Yeah, a lot of these things that we’re seeing now… I was under investigation in 2019, federal investigation, and didn’t find out until 2020 through Google. Google was saying it was sharing my information for a whole year with the federal government. Taking people’s phones at the airport, the kind of Islamic character, terrorist financier, these kind of things.

These categories, the RICO charges against Stop Cop City was a prelude also to these kinds of things. All of that is in the package right now of the [NSPM-7] memo from this Trump administration. So, I mean, they’re treating our existence, if you refuse or question, as counterinsurgency. But we haven’t thought of ourselves as insurgents.

And I think we all, and it’s not about what we do, it’s about how we think about what we’re doing, right? And the example I always give is like, I took out some student loans, right? I was working at the law firm and realized that it will take me a really long time before I can pay them. At some point, I stopped paying them. They said I’m in default. And I thought to myself, I’m on strike.

These modes of consciousness, of liberation consciousness, something that we cultivate over time, it’s how people in Palestine are able to survive until now. It’s not out of victimization and victimhood. It’s about a recognition of they have a whole way of valuing things differently. When we’re in movements, we feel that way. When we’re not together, we don’t. We’re in a moment right now where we’re bombarded by all sorts of information.

We’re afraid, we’re more isolated, we’re more in debt, they’re more ruthless. And yet we have no choice. And I think this is what’s important. It’s like we have no choice but to resist. And this mode of resistance isn’t about violence. This mode of resistance is about a refusal of having an allegiance to something that’s killing you. Just that.

Wherever we are. From there, space opens up. A different conversation can be had. We’ve had so many movements. We have so much analysis. It’s not about a diagnosis of the problem right now. It’s about how do we build power and how can we sustain it over time. The thing about the United States is most of the ways that we thought about the world is that it’s always insular to the United States.

And Palestine showed us that it can bring us together. It can have a compass for liberation for what’s right and what’s wrong. And these things have influenced what’s going on over here. But to think of Palestine as an issue amongst many is really not where we need to be. There’s a strategic engagement to Palestine that actually has material connections to New York. It has material connections to our wellbeing. It can bring people together. It can clarify what’s going on.

And there’s much that could be done here, but we still are thinking in issue silos and we’re overwhelmed. And the final thing I’ll say just from my, this is just my experience and I don’t know, I mean, I don’t have answers, but these are some of the things that first come to mind is that.

I mean, we went from like defund the police to giving us [former NYC Mayor] Eric Adams. You know, we went from like a million other things that we fought for and it’s always the equivalent of, you’re never going to get what you want. And that means that we’re at a point right now that we have to really think about how our struggles are interconnected.

But in the interconnectedness of our struggles is how we fight back. It doesn’t mean that elections are naught. It means that our trajectory is different. Look at how many people work at a museum. On the front end, they’re all being exploited. On the back end, they have no choice to be creative. At the top are people with money and they mean… MoMA is a great example.

Here’s MoMA, and then here’s a building with luxury condos right next to it, it’s the MoMA building. They sell those apartments with a back door to the museum. They never have to go out on the street. That’s the kind of world we live in. Those same, many of the settlers in the West Bank are coming from Brooklyn. That’s why we were talking about the synagogues and why they’re holding these land sales.

So the connectivity of what’s going on in Palestine to New York or what’s going on in the Middle East to the United States, they’re not separate. And we saw this articulated in Italy, and maybe you can share your experience, but even in the two days general strike that was in October, I think, they connected things that are happening in Palestine, right, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing in Palestine, to the fact that their government is funding and supporting that and their conditions at home are not good.

They have grievances. These kinds of connections are important. They’re important to make. And I think that they’re a basis by which a coalition can come together. And we’re also at a moment similar to Occupy Wall Street or right before. At some level, the right and left, right, is dissolving on the material conditions on the ground. And that’s an opportunity because there’s structures of violence and of oppression of racism, let’s say, and white supremacy.

They’re vertical and horizontal. The ones that we enact on each other are actually created by the system. That’s how it keeps going. But to actually have a systemic understanding of that and be on the ground and create spaces in which people can step out of those “identities” is really important right now. Because I think that everyone agrees they don’t want an authoritarian government here, that the First Amendment is super important, that ICE is fucked up and supporting a genocide is unethical. And we act like an empire, but our condition is worse than ever. Something is not being articulated in a positive way for people.

Chris Hedges

That was why they killed Fred Hampton. He was out in poor, white communities building coalitions based on class, not on race, not that race isn’t important. And that’s dangerous. I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about.

Amin Husain

Yeah.

Chris Hedges

I want to just close by talking about your experience at NYU. One of things that’s been so nauseating for me about these academic institutions is they essentially advertise themselves as generators of diversity. Although it tended to be diversity based on race or ethnicity, not on class.

But nevertheless, and then the moment Trump snarled in their direction, they couldn’t shut it all down fast enough. I, as you know, got a master of divinity from Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Divinity School had, I think, a pretty good center in terms of building relationships with the Palestinian community, and they closed it. Harvard just shut it down.

And this was what you were attacked, vilified for saying what we now know is true, and that is that there were no beheaded babies. There were no beheaded babies, there’s no evidence of systematic sexual assault on October 7th. You made this case and you lost your job.

So talk a little bit about academia because… and they’ve shut down all the encampments, they’ve criminalized free speech, and these are important centers, I think, both like museums, like I always think of [Antonio] Gramsci, these institutions that replicate ideas. That’s what so much of your work has been confronting. But talk about your own particular case, and then just the wider case of what’s happening within university and college campuses.

Amin Husain

Yeah, I mean my experience at NYU is that I was teaching there for eight years and I taught courses like art, activism and beyond, art and the practice of freedom. Decolonization is not a metaphor and it was always well received, never got a complaint, always oversubscribed. I taught in multiple schools and departments.

And then the treatment was one in which, a few days before I’m supposed to teach, I hear from students before I hear from the university. And I’m under investigation and they wouldn’t even tell me why for the longest time. And then as you said, it was those things, but it was also things that are not in my name, meaning Decolonize This Place has an Instagram account, I was being questioned and interrogated by two lawyers about, you have control over what this account publishes?

Something Meta, by the way, took away the same week that I got suspended and then later fired. It had 400,000 followers, it would reach millions. It was kind of like an influencer account. Again, no recourse there but I was being criminalized for thoughts and ideas that weren’t even part of class, that weren’t even part of… and I’ve had Jewish students in my classes, never complained because universities are supposed to be places of learning and questioning and these kinds of things.

So what’s happening at our universities is really both alarming and not surprising. The influence of money and what people had years ago referred to as the university becoming a corporation. Like they’re taking it seriously. And that’s why you have so many administrators, like a class of administrators that are acting more like cops that line themselves up next to riot police in Columbia and NYU and all these things and raided their students who are paying to go there to get an education.

It’s bonkers. And then you think about NYU and you’re like, well, why is Larry Fink on the board? What does he know about education? You know, because he’s giving money. So then they have a say in what our institutions can do. Okay, so these universities that are supposed to kind of create good people that are well thinkers, that are in part of like the society that we’re imagining as a good society. That’s all not going on right now there.

It’s a form of brainwashing and it’s elevating certain disciplines, like what? Militarism. Data, data computation. Nothing of liberal arts unless you have a trajectory of working for a corporation. These departments around art, liberal arts, these kinds of things, were always low funded. But now they’re going to become extinct.

Chris Hedges

Well, look at The New School. They’re just shutting them down.

Amin Husain

Exactly. This is not, to your point, this is not an isolated thing. This is a transition of an economy with an idea of a future, foreseeing the system that they’re ushering in as people say the empire is falling. They’re not waiting. They’re ushering in something new. And when I look at my condition, I think it was, it was penalizing me, but it was also a deterrence.

It was a deterrence on speech and a deterrence on action, meaning watch what you say and behave. Otherwise you’re never going to get employed anywhere, which, you know, that’s part of it. And it doesn’t stop me from doing this, but I’ve made harder decisions earlier. My kind of thing at the university is that I would sit with students first day and I’d be like, why are you here? This is why I’m here.

You don’t need to buy books. They’re all available. But if you want to support the author and you can, you should, right? Why are we going into debt? What are we learning from this? So the space of learning was one in which we learned together and one in which we learned from each other what’s happening. And I remember something that Baldwin, James Baldwin, said once at the British Museum in a video that is no longer on YouTube because they’re cleansing all that.

But he said something about the enslaved being on ships. He’s like, “The reason they would put their backs to each other and they would make sure they didn’t speak the same language is because if they did, they probably would have known what was happening to them. And they may have figured out something about what to do and the outcome may have been different.”

So I think about what’s happening at our universities and think that there’s a purging that’s going on. There’s a disciplining that’s happening. But also, in the world that I’m imagining, I don’t want to be disciplined by anyone. I mean, people like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and all of these kinds of thinkers have talked about universities as being precinct, and Jasbir Puar, as being precinct-adjacent. I mean, you got it.

I mean, our students would go in there and they would be afraid about their grade. They didn’t care about each other or the world. The ethics in which they’re promulgating over there is one like you would get at Silicon Valley. It’s one in which you would get… it’s not a world that’s amenable to life and to each other and to different kinds of relationships that are nourishing.

So when I went to Palestine and I told them I got fired and I told them why, and people in Palestine were like “mabrouk!” It’s like, congratulations.

Chris Hedges

Which means congratulations, right?

Amin Husain

And I think if we had community, and community is something that we construct and we construct and struggle, that’s what you would hear. And you wouldn’t feel worthless, right? You wouldn’t feel like you did something wrong. You’d feel like you’ve done something a little, but it’s in the right direction. And that’s what this all is about. There are so many more of us than them.

And there’s so much more thoughtfulness and thinking and love and care than what they have to offer. But they’re converting these museums and these universities and these schools and changing the curriculum. Think about it. You were talking about the Gaza peace plan. First point, de-radicalization, makes sense.

That’s why we don’t learn about this being stolen land or about enslaved people brought over here and built this economy. That’s what Israel is doing or wants to do with a genocide that’s still ongoing as they speak peace.

So I think about my experience at NYU and I think about: here’s a real estate developer that’s taking advantage of no taxes and that’s producing people in debt, right? Producing people in debt, one of the highest institutions to graduate undergraduates with huge amounts of debt is NYU, right? So then what does it mean to be free? We don’t.

This is one thing we would talk about in our class. I mean, freedom is about time, and freedom is about space. Debt is about future labor. And what they’re doing is that they’re taking all, in Arabic, “Muqawamat al-hayat” [essentials of life], all the things that have to do that are life-sustaining — healthcare, housing, these things, these things are now, the prospect of even owning a house is absurd right now.

In fact, the whole economic model with Blackstone and BlackRock is no one’s going to own homes. So then you have this debt, and then they’ll criminalize the debt. And so think about these kinds of relationships. And then you have students going into NYU to learn about freedom while they go into debt. And they graduate having to work with the same people that are oppressing them while their taxes go to pay and fund a genocide. That’s what’s going on.

And that’s not something that feels good. And it’s not something, I’m not happy that I was fired, but I’m happy that I was, that I made the right choice and I didn’t silence myself and people should, everyone has to figure out what’s doable.

But solidarity and your own liberation and fighting and refusal is never comfortable. People have to step out of their comfort right now. And to think that we’re all individually going to save ourselves doesn’t work that way.

Chris Hedges

Great, thanks Amin. And thank you to Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones], Sofia [Menemenlis], Victor [Padilla], and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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