'We've been given the choice between a slow ethnic cleansing or an aggressive slaughter'

Dr Omar Suleiman is an American Imam, a widely respected theologian, human rights activist, champion of interfaith dialogue and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, a non-profit that "pioneers Islamic research in creative, cutting-edge formats tailored to meet people where they are."

These days, Suleiman is passionately campaigning for an immediate end to Israel's war on besieged Gaza and has already addressed multiple protest gatherings in the United States, including in the capital Washington, DC.

In an interview with TRT World's Baba Umar, Suleiman sheds light on Israel's war on Gaza, its use of scriptures and dehumanising language to target Palestinians, Western media coverage of the war, and the role of American politicians and civil society.

Your parents were Palestinian refugees and they must have told you stories about Nakba and Naksa or how their relatives were displaced. Does this kind of conversation still take place?

My father was born before the creation of the state of Israel. My mother was born just after it ... and they met in Texas. I was born and raised in the US. Every single Palestinian has a story of either their parents being displaced or themselves being displaced ... Growing up, I had the second grade wake-up call when I realised that Palestine was not on the map, and I had to kind of understand from my parents why that was the case. I had that conversation with my 10-year-old son just this month who didn't understand why Palestine is not on the map, and explaining to them sort of this ethnic cleansing project that is now almost eight decades old, and why it's so important for us to grow up with an insistence on not just the existence of our identity as Palestinians, but our persistence that the Palestinian cause will remain alive generationally until we realise our complete freedom.

Palestinians continue to suffer till today. So what has changed all these decades?

You know, since 1967 in particular, Israel has sought to basically ensure that the world is silent while it carries out its systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. And so if you look at a map and you go from 1948 until 2023, you will notice that all along, while this so-called two-state solution and these peace talks that never yield anything but more misery for the Palestinians are hanging over our heads, settlers are regularly pillaging Palestinian villages without any sense of accountability.

In fact, doing so in tandem with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. Until today, by the way, we have the most violent month in the West Bank while the world is paying attention to Gaza. So Israel has sought through various methods and mechanisms to make sure that it can basically carry out its business as usual of systematic displacement of the Palestinian people and the realisation of its complete ethnic cleansing without any type of objection from its Arab neighbours. Hence, you have the Abraham Accords, which have essentially become arms deals that ensure sweet business deals for Arab countries at the exchange of normalising with Israel, meaning that the Palestinians no longer have a seat at the table in determining their future, their future state and things that directly involved them.

And, of course, you have here in the US, unfortunately, where two parties cannot agree on how to feed the average American and how to just keep the government functioning, where you have numerous shutdowns that are taking place or that are threatened because these two parties cannot agree, over 400 congressmen from both parties could suddenly agree on continuing to bolster aid to apartheid Israel to continue the suppression of the Palestinian people. So whether it's a Republican administration or a Democratic administration, there is bipartisan agreement that Palestinians are not human beings and do not deserve equal rights.

We have been given the choice between a slow ethnic cleansing or an aggressive slaughter. And I think that at this point now, we're seeing that Israel knows it's not going to be held accountable by the Biden administration or by any US administration. In fact, US has given Israel a blank check to genocide and the leak is very clear that Israel seeks a final annexation of Gaza.

And when you campaign for the Palestinians' rights, you get the label of being anti-Semite. We saw Senator Ted Cruz targeting you as well. What do you make of this labelling narrative?

Well, first of all, Palestinians cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semitic. So it's an ignorant claim in the first place. Secondly, I think that it's the nefarious weaponisation of anti-Semitism which is a real problem and has historically been Europe's problem more than anyone else's.

This has been turned into just another Muslims and Jews fighting each other. And it's a convenient, reductionist, ignorant narrative that unfortunately resonates with much of the American public that has been fed an Islamophobic narrative just about Muslims being violent again, Muslims just wanting to cause trouble again. So Ted Cruz and those that are like him are people who have literally platformed neo-Nazis on the Republican platform and have campaigned with actual anti-Semites and normalised anti-Semitism in this country.

And at the same time, they have the nerve to try to shut down the voices of people who have stood with the Jewish community here. By the way, when anti-Semitic incidents have taken place, we have stood with the Jewish community. Synagogues or Jewish community centres have been targeted because they are campaigning for Palestinian dignity and for human rights for the Palestinian people. So it's a lazy claim, it's an ignorant claim, it is deeply reductionist, and it exploits the ignorance that many Americans have had up until this point of the history of Palestinian displacement. And frankly, I think it's not working as well anymore.

We have historic Jewish communities in the Muslim world that have lived and thrived for generations. Where is that counterpart in the West? This is Europe's crime of anti-Semitism, the West's crime of anti-Semitism. The Palestinian people are being penalised for a crime that they did not commit. And now the victims of the worst war crimes that we have ever seen on our screens on a consistent basis in our present time.

In protest gatherings in US, we saw many Jewish protesters ... American Jews coming out and speaking against the atrocities in Gaza. Has it happened before in America at this scale?

At this scale? Absolutely not. You know, you've had the largest Jewish anti-occupation protests in the history of the country happening in the last few weeks. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, this is not an insignificant minority of the Jewish community that is opposed to the occupation and opposed to apartheid. This is a community that is growing, especially amongst young Jews and they have been present at protests that we have been a part of as coalitions. And they've also held their own sit-ins at the state capitals. They've literally shut down metro stations in protest for the Palestinian people, saying, "Do not weaponise our grief for genocide." Those anti-Zionist Jews have been called self-hating Jews. And of course, they resent that label because they feel called to actually advocate for Palestinian human rights and to say that the historical trauma of the Jewish people should not be used as an excuse to inflict trauma on the Palestinian people.

And so this is a significant, definitely a minority, but a significant minority in the Jewish community that's especially growing amongst the younger Jews. And it's throughout the spectrum of Judaism. So you have very progressive Jews, you have ultra-Orthodox Jews, very religious Jews that oppose Zionism from a scriptural perspective.

The point is that I think this is where the anti-Semitism narrative really starts to fall apart because any protest that you attend and any polls that you read will show you that this is a growing sentiment amongst the Jewish community here.

Even Israeli human rights organisations like B'Tselem, who have joined the chorus of those that have now classed Israel as an apartheid state, shows that even amongst young Israeli Jews there are people that are now standing up to the war crimes that Israel has been committing against the Palestinian people over generations.

With regards to scriptures, we have seen Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu invoking scriptures to justify the war in Gaza. How do you see this tendency?

I think that it's always interesting to me because everything that Israeli propaganda projects on the Palestinians, the Israelis themselves have been guilty of. And so the massacres, the barbarity that Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians through generations, you'll find that those stories are then made up about Palestinians doing the same to Israelis.

And when it comes to the invoking of religious scripture, one of the earliest and most racist Israeli tropes is to say, "When they love their children as much as they hate ours, then the conflict will end, then we can have peace." So basically, to say, Palestinians are nourished in hate and that's why they're unable to ever see peace as a viable option and they don't actually love their children.

If you see a head of state invoking not just any religious scripture, but invoking religious scripture that justifies genocide ... imagine if that was a Muslim head of state that was quoting something from the Quran or quoting something from the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad [peace be upon him] to justify basically wholesale massacre. All you have to do is go to Israeli accounts on X and press "translate" you know, and look at what messages they put out in Hebrew. Look at what messages they put out to their people as they carry on this war. This is not one of self-defence. This is one of trying to completely break any type of self-determination that the Palestinians have and psychologically torture them as they bomb them with the worst of weapons, including chemical weapons, and commit a catalog of human rights crimes.

It is the grossest manifestation of religious extremism that exists in the world today. And I say that without any hesitation, but it has been completely hidden from the eyes of the American public and unfortunately, the Palestinian experience of it is not just one of rhetoric, but one of real consequence where people are committing genocide and utilising, unfortunately, scripture to do so. And that's coming from the prime minister [Netanyahu] himself.

Palestinians are also being dehumanised. They've been called 'human beasts', 'germs', 'children of darkness' and all that. Where does this lead to? What's the fear?

I think if you dehumanise them, then you can kill them like insects. The language of dehumanisation has not just come from Israeli politicians, it's been the norm for American politicians as well. They've talked about carpet bombing, finishing them off, doing away with them once and for all, turning Gaza into a parking lot. You know how a Republican representative responds to all of this, by putting a bill of deporting Palestinians. So it's like a new extension of the sick Muslim ban. We need to get rid of all the Palestinians, get them all out of here. So the unfortunate reality is that Palestinians are not just witnessing this dehumanisation, now, it's just become more obvious than ever before. And it is on the tongues of a broader set of politicians, including American politicians, that are making no secret of their genocidal intentions.

It's really interesting when you see the tide turning to an extent with media right now. Even Wolf Blitzer, who has not been kind to Palestinians, to say the least, in his coverage when he was interviewing a spokesperson from the IDF after the bombing of the Jabalya refugee camp. And even he expresses some level of of shock, "So you mean to tell me you just wiped out 400 or 500 Palestinian refugees, just dropped a bomb on an entire refugee camp because there might have been one Hamas commander that was somewhere there."

So, we're no longer just collateral damage. We are, in fact, targets of destruction because the very existence of Palestinians still stands in the way of the Israeli settler-colonial project. And so you have to dehumanise them in order to inflict the heavy casualty tolls that you are inflicting right now without the West stepping in to intervene.

Joe Biden could have stopped this a long time ago. If he called for a ceasefire, it would happen. But the American government is complicit in this genocide and that's why the genocidal rhetoric is found both on the tongues of Israeli politicians and American politicians. And unfortunately, that puts anyone who is Palestinian in harm's way, whether they are in Palestine or even here in the United States, because we are looked at as savages that could tick at any moment and that can't be trusted, and that could suddenly wreak havoc. Therefore, before we can wreak havoc on people, havoc has to be wreaked on us, which is the language that has been used to exterminate people in the past and is being used to exterminate us now.

In all this, how do you see the media coverage?

The way Western media has covered this is absolutely shameful. It has fed into the dehumanisation. What stories of the people within Gaza have you heard? What stories of the journalists have you read? I mean, you would think that with over dozens of journalists now having been killed, having been murdered ... you would think that the Western media would stand up in the name of protecting free press. You would think that when the death toll now from the Palestinians as we speak has risen over 10,000, that there would be the stories of Palestinian Americans who have lost 20, 30, 40 relatives, have had entire generations of their family wiped out. You would think that there would be interviews of those Americans on front page who have lost everybody in their family. I know people in my own community that have lost every single member of their family. Now, you would think that the American press would be shedding light on the toll that this conflict has had, again, on Americans. But all of that is not present.

There has been a complete focus on Israeli humanity and a complete neglect of Palestinian humanity. And you can barely find the images of Palestinian dead on the sites of some of these legacy media outlets. So it is disgusting and it certainly is playing a role in shaping the American public's view of what is happening right now, because, again, it plays to Islamophobic tropes. You know, the Islamophobic framing is that these people that these Muslims, these Arabs, these Palestinians are too violent to be treated like normal human beings and to be trusted as neighbours. And therefore, they deserve a level of brutality in order to protect the world from them. And so once you accept that type of a framing, then you accept the images of thousands of people being bombed in hospitals, bombed in UN shelters, bombed even if they belong to the press. You accept chemical warfare, you accept in 2023 2.1 million people being starved to death and the world does nothing.

I mean, could we really have anticipated that we would arrive to a point where the world cannot intervene, when people literally have their water, food, electricity and fuel cut off? We're not even talking about the death toll now. We're talking about the trauma of those who somehow survived this. We have sat back and watched 2.1 million people traumatised in a way that is not ambiguous to the rest of the world. Yet, no one is doing anything about it. And so I think that the legacy media outlets are complicit.

When I went to Chicago to attend the funeral of the six-year-old boy, Wadea, I asked the press there. "Have any of you been here? This is a Palestinian community, one of the oldest Palestinian communities in the United States. Have any of you been here over the last week where dozens of these community members have lost their families back home?" And the answer was, "No."

We are seeing the consequences in the US. There's been a surge in anti-Muslim hate crimes. There's a doxing truck targeting students. Livelihoods and careers are being targeted. People are being reported for their posts on social media. Is it a post-9/11 scenario 2.0?

In some ways it felt that way that we're kind of going back to a post 9/11 scenario where every Muslim or Arab or anyone that looks like a Muslim or an Arab has to look over their shoulder constantly and worry about things happening to them, the targeting of religious institutions, the silencing of free speech on college campuses.

In some ways, it definitely resembles that. I think, though, we're not the same community that we were 20 years ago. And, we also saw the harm of letting our rights be taken away from us as a community without a sufficient response and sufficient legal defence. I think that the post-9/11 reaction of the community was hide. Now the reaction is we can't afford to hide. So I think that the community is not accepting the framing and is institutionally better equipped now to try to form a legal defence and to try to push back on the narrative that led to so many of the devastating consequences in the post 9/11 era.

Silence is not an option. Hiding is not an option. It's important for us to say once and for all that we do not accept this framing of the Muslim Arab Palestinian community. And we intend to fight back against this narrative with whatever we have institutionally set ourselves up to be able to do. We tend to work with other people who are tired of this dangerous, lazy narrative as well.

And also, I think that we're not just concerned about American Muslims, we're not just concerned about protecting ourselves here. That's kind of my job as a religious leader as well, to put that forward that your responsibility is not just to protect yourselves here, but you have to do everything in your power right now to stop this atrocity that is on your screen that is taking place in the US. So we have to do better, not just to protect ourselves here but to protect people from the hatred that we are starting to see raise its ugly head here and ugliest manifestation in places like Gaza.

You said if Biden calls for a ceasefire, there would be a ceasefire. So, is there any sense of betrayal among American Muslims regarding support for Israel from the Biden administration?

Yes, I think, Biden in particular has been deeply disappointing in this administration, not that anyone didn't know that he was a Zionist and that he was pro-Israel. He has made that very clear over the course of his career. But I think the one-sidedness of this, all the unconditional support that's been given to Israel to carry out this genocide, the refusal to actually make any meaningful demands to stop it, the level of ignoring the Palestinian catastrophe and the Palestinian community here, has definitely yielded a sense of anger and betrayal within these communities.

He couldn't even say the word "Palestinian" until he decided to accuse Palestinians of lying about their death toll. Suddenly, the word Palestinian was found in his vocabulary when he said that he doesn't trust the numbers that are coming out from the Palestinian Health Ministry. Before that, this was all Israel-Hamas, Israel-Hamas, Israel-Hamas, and that is a deliberate erasure of the Palestinians.

So it's interesting because whether Israel is making peace or Israel is waging war, the Palestinians are being erased. When Israel is making peace with Arab neighbours, the Abraham Accords, the Palestinians are being erased. And when Israel's at war, it is at war with Hamas, the Palestinians are being erased. But in both of those situations, the Palestinians are the ones that are facing the brunt of the brutality of the state of Israel.

So Joe Biden has deliberately ignored Palestinian humanity. He has given a blank check to genocide. He has been an active participant in this genocide. It's American weapons that are being used. It is American sanction that is protecting this ongoing assault at the international level. And for him to try to launch anti-Islamophobia initiatives and to talk about protecting Muslim communities here while he continues to put forth those narratives that harm the community there and here is nothing but a doublespeak. We are just not willing to accept it.

I wanted to actually say that the president himself is complicit as well in the murder of Wadea, the six-year-old Palestinian American boy. Why? Because the man who murdered him, the landlord who murdered him, had done so on the basis of fake news, debunked news that was repeated by the president himself. Biden claimed that he saw images of 40 decapitated Israeli babies. And then the White House walked that back quietly because he didn't see those images, this 71-year-old landlord, decides to go and practically decapitate a six-year-old Palestinian American boy because he's been binge-watching mainstream media and he's hearing lies that are even being repeated by the president himself.

And so at that funeral, some of the extended relatives were actually saying, "Joe Biden, you did this, you did this." That rhetoric has consequences here, and it has consequences there. And Biden cannot expect to then turn back to the Muslim community, to the Arab community, and pretend that this all didn't happen and say that he's interested in protecting us here when he is participating in obliterating us there.

And it has declined his popularity as well, polls show. Many Muslims are saying they will not vote for the Democrats. What do you make of this frustration? And are you frightened to think about the alternatives Muslims have?

I think we're sick of the lesser of two evils. I think we're sick of being told like "vote this or else." Not that anyone is under any illusion that, you know, Trump or some of these Republican candidates would be any better, but at the same time, we have dignity. You have to earn the vote of the Muslim community. And if you're going to deliberately ignore the Muslim community and ignore their frustrations, then you cannot bank on that vote anymore.

We're maturing as a community to where we're just not going to go for, you know, vote for the one that wants to kill you slower and nicer. We need to do a better job, I think, of holding people accountable, and I think that Joe Biden is being held accountable. You just can't use the Republican boogeyman anymore for the Muslim community. That's not going to work. It's already not working anymore. We're a maturing community. We know who the Republicans are. And we're going to make sure that anyone that wants to earn our vote listens to us, sees our humanity, or else we're not going to see them on the ballot in 2024.

Watch the full interview here 👇