Dr. Omar Suleiman is a distinguished Islamic scholar, civil rights activist, and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. Today he joins to discuss the deep roots of Islamophobia in American politics and the moral consequences of U.S. foreign policy—particularly the genocide in Gaza. Dr. Suleiman explains how systemic dehumanization shapes American policy and what can be done to fight back. You can find the interview on the Current Affairs podcast here and videos here.

Nathan J. Robinson 

We are in a political moment that is ugly and bleak. I don't think there's really any way of disguising that or sugarcoating it. Donald Trump, who is a rancid bigot, has returned to the White House, and I think a lot of people are feeling—a lot of progressive people are feeling—very despondent and don't know what to do. How are you feeling about this particular political moment?

Omar Suleiman

In terms of the bleakness of the moment, from my perspective, every single part of me is disturbed by the reign of Donald Trump—Donald Trump 2.0. And obviously, American Muslims, we've been under attack. This was a man who came out of the gate the first time—Trump 1.0—with the Muslim ban. We took to the airports as unified coalitions to reject that executive order, which left people stranded in airports across the country and was just a horrifying introduction of his presidency to the American Muslim community. On top of that, obviously, there was a shooting that many people don't remember, a terrorist attack in Quebec against the Muslim community. A gunman killed six worshipers because he was afraid that, based on Trump's fearmongering, Muslims that weren't going to be allowed into the U.S. would go to Canada. And that's how Trump 1.0 started. So there's that element.

Obviously, Trump has a cabinet of neocons that will target the American Muslim community in every way institutionally. We do have a large immigrant contingent of the American Muslim community, even though our largest contingent is the indigenous African American Muslim community. But still, they’re targeting the immigrant population, and so there's a lot of fear about what that's going to mean for people.

I'm also a Palestinian American. My parents are Palestinian refugees, so I have relatives that have been killed in this genocide in Gaza. I have other relatives that are stranded in multiple places in the West Bank, which is starting to look like Gaza with some of the recent incursions. Trump is signing off on the most extreme elements of aggression against the Palestinian people. That's how he's coming out the gate. He's seeking to escalate the erasure of the Palestinian people. And so everything about him right now and what he represents is deeply problematic.

I think that he represents many of the fractures that we have in our American society, the demonization of the other, and has turned that into an ugly political momentum that should actually cause America to look in the mirror and say, what really are we? We'd like to believe that this was just some random space of Twitter, now X, where you had this type of bigotry that was so potent and profoundly embedded in the hearts and minds of people—we like to think it was a small quarter of the internet, but it's not a small quarter of the internet. Let's face it. At the Super Bowl, they put Donald Trump on the screen, and he gets massive cheers. The polls show the support that he has garnered in the American public, and I think it's important for us to recognize that. We shouldn’t be reductionist, [as if] people voted for Donald Trump because they're all racist bigots. But we should talk about some of the failures of the Democratic Party that led to Trump being able to exploit genuine frustrations. But many of those who voted for Trump and who pushed Donald Trump onto the American people and onto the world do not mind many of the things that he says about other people, including much of the legislation that he will push domestically and globally against people, especially right now the Palestinian people, which is something that weighs heavily on my heart and mind.

Robinson

Yes. You mentioned dehumanization, and what people can live with and are willing to overlook, even if they're not racist. I recently did an article on Pete Hegseth, the new Defense Secretary, and I read his book American Crusade. And in it, what struck me was the way he talks about Muslims. If someone talked this way about Jews, or they talked this way about Christians, we would recognize that they were a kind of Nazi-level bigot. I'll just quote a couple of the things he says. 

“Islam is not compatible with Western forms of government.” “Some countries want to stay free so they fight back against Islam's spread.” 

He dismisses the notion of a moderate or peaceful Islam. 

He says the United Kingdom is done for because cities have Muslim mayors. He says, as Muslim birth rates have grown, countries that permit Muslim immigration are being destroyed. 

There are hundreds of passages like this. And I think what disturbed me so profoundly is that, again, if we applied it in the context of other groups, it would be immediately obvious that this was a very extreme, toxic form of bigotry at the highest level of government. 

Suleiman

Yes. Look, one of the things about Islamophobia is that it's the most permitted form of bigotry in the mainstream in the United States. And I would argue that could be statistically proven because when's the last time you saw an anchor fired for anti-Palestinian bigotry? When's the last time you saw a journalist or a professor let go because of the things that they say about the Muslim community?

You have to understand that this is the culmination of multiple factors. One of them is that the Muslim community is racialized. We're a racialized minority even though we have white Muslims. Number two, we're not just “brown” in the American imagination and in the Orientalist framing of the Muslim world—and the immigration element of our community exaggerated—but we're also supposedly all carrying this dangerous ideology that makes us inherently suspicious. And so you can't trust a Muslim, even your really nice Muslim doctor—and Muslims are disproportionately represented in the medical [work]force—your really nice Muslim neighbor, the Muslim that you know at work or at school. There's a visible presence of Muslims across the country now. But you can't trust their smile, you can't trust their niceness, because they carry in them this regressive ideology to where, if they get the opportunity, they will harm you. They're just waiting for the moment to harm you.

And so there's the racialized element, and then there's the ideological element. That type of framing of Islam and the Muslim world has justified the crusades of the United States. If we really want to peel this back, you go back to the Bush administration and to the language that was used by Rumsfield and Ashcroft as they were embarking on these adventures into the Muslim world. They openly used crusader language. They use this type of language to erase the one million-plus victims of their Iraq War from the American public. The framing is that these are people too barbaric to be dealt with by normal human policy, and so the only way that you can deal with these people is to exterminate them. That's the level of dehumanization that exists here. Now we see how that's working in Gaza and anti-Palestinian bigotry, which is an extension of Islamophobia because it traffics in Islamophobia, even though Palestinians are not just Muslims there, there's a large Christian minority [also].

Robinson

Yes, secular Palestinians, and there are Palestinian Christians.

Suleiman

You listen to Reverend Munther Isaac and Mitri Raheb—you have a historic Palestinian Christian community that's been holding the keys to the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of Nativity for all of these years that has been taking care of those Christian sites, and they've been erased. So anti-Palestinian bigotry traffics in the same mechanics, if you will, of Islamophobia, which is that these people are too brutal, too beastly, too animalistic to be dealt with humanely. And therefore we have to accept the idea that we have to round them up, bomb them, and remove their human stories. How many Americans can name a single victim of the Iraq War? Think about that.

Robinson

Yes, I've heard you say that before. And really, the names of the victims are just not known, even though so many hundreds of thousands of people were killed by that war. They're not seen. It's just striking, the absence of the humanity of the other side in that war. There are no images that came out of that war that people remember. People even remember some images of victims from the Vietnam War. Not the case in Iraq.

Suleiman

Yes. And with social media now, you're starting to see some of the victims of Gaza, but they're only breaking through on very untraditional means, if you will. So, it's people's media and social media breaking through certain algorithms where you're getting some faces of the genocide in Gaza. But even then, if you just compare the way that Israeli hostages are spoken about versus Palestinian prisoners. Right away, that framing is so problematic. You have over 5,000 children Palestinian “prisoners.” Why are they not hostages? And the condition of Israeli hostages versus the condition of “Palestinian prisoners”—because Muslims are barbarians and Palestinians are vicious, violent human beings, and they just want to kill us all, and they want to kill you, too, and they hate the West because they hate America. Trump manifests that in the domestic sense. So the right wing takes that foreign policy framing and then channels it towards the Muslim community domestically as well, along with a host of other communities.

Islamophobia has become such a permitted bigotry in our mainstream discourse because our mainstream foreign policy and our mainstream domestic policy actually have inherent elements of Islamophobia. And if we're going to challenge them sufficiently, then we will need to peel back those narratives in a way that's critical of both the Republican and the Democratic Parties.

Robinson

I think what you’re saying there is so important. I identified the extreme, obviously bigoted rhetoric of someone like Pete Hegseth, who literally says, I believe in a crusade against Islam, we should all be a part of a giant global crusade against Islam. That's pretty explicit. But what you're talking about is the way that dehumanization goes far beyond Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. It permeates our culture and media. You wouldn't ever hear that same kind of rhetoric from Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, but with the question of how much you value people's lives and the policy, there is less difference than those who might like to cast Trump as an aberrant bigot would want to think.

Suleiman

So I travel the world frequently. I'm out of the country right now. I travel the Muslim world, and not just the Muslim world, but across the world. There's never been more anti-American sentiment that I can remember in my lifetime. And that was on Joe Biden's watch. Let's just be real here. America was viewed as a more racist country and a more bigoted country because people around the world saw the horror of Gaza, and that was on Biden's watch. And we never pulled back the bombs. We kept on funding the erasure of the Palestinian people. And if you just look at the United Nations and you look at the votes that come in, it's always a singular veto, and that was Biden's veto. It's always a singular nation that stands up against the self-determination of the Palestinian people. And so that happened on Biden's watch.

So while Biden wouldn't use the racist rhetoric of Donald Trump, I think it's important for people to take a moment and become more [familiar with] Dr. Martin Luther King's literature, for example. And I actually want to explicitly thank Dr. Bernice King for the stances that she took on Gaza. She said that this is what my father would have said about Gaza. Dr. King talked about not just racism but militarism and poverty. A three-headed monster of America. Militarism in the global arena is the number one manifestation of white supremacy, and what America did in that arena under Joe Biden was extremely problematic, and the entire world, I think, ingested that in a way that horrified them. So it's important for us to say that.

Look, there's no doubt that that Trump is an evil, lowly human being, a racist bigot who should be challenged in every way by a broad coalition of Americans of conscience. I agree with that. We need to step up to the plate. We have to show courage in the face of this bigotry. We have to be able to unite in the face of this bigotry and address it in all of its manifestations. But in order to do that, you're going to have to be very honest about why he was able to win the first place. And the reality is that many communities were extremely frustrated with the Democratic Party, and a lot of people stayed home. It's not just those that voted for Donald Trump because he exploited those frustrations. Many people stayed home. Many people voted third party because it was like, well, we don't want flowery rhetoric with the same types of brutal policies.

Robinson

I saw a video clip of you five months or so ago, before the election, giving this warning to the Democratic Party and saying, you have to understand that there are many voters in swing states who are disgusted, who are repulsed when they see the annihilation of Gaza, and they see it being funded and armed by the United States under the Biden administration and are not fooled by the fact that the Biden administration says they're working for a ceasefire. They understand that the Biden administration is keeping the conflict going by supplying the arms. And in the clip that I saw, you said, they don't want just some uplifting rhetoric about how the Biden administration believes in peace or whatever, they need Kamala Harris to take a stance, which she very pointedly declined to do. She wouldn't meet with Gaza families. She dismissed protesters with the “I'm speaking” thing when the protesters came up.

Suleiman

It wasn’t even tokenized. If I were a Democratic insider, I would say, use the DNC to at least tokenize a Palestinian community voice. [But] they didn’t even let a Palestinian speaker onto the stage. It was pathetic. And a mistake that's being made, and I want to be very open about that mistake, is there are those that are punching down and beating up on communities and saying, see, you refused to vote for Kamala Harris and this is what you get. No. Be self-critical, be introspective, and ask yourself why these communities that are in the direct line of harm—definitely a greater proportionality of that harm—of Donald Trump didn't vote for you? Why didn’t you listen to them? Be self-critical. If the Democrats are just going to continue to say, haha, we told you so, and, you get what you voted for or didn't vote for, you're never going to learn. You cannot speak in such a condescending way to the communities, the most marginalized and hurt communities domestically and globally, and then expect them to continue to buy into this lesser of the two evils.

What many people said this election was, if the lesser of two evils is genocide that's disguised with rhetoric of concern, then I don't want the lesser of two evils. At some point, the lesser of two evils becomes too evil to bring people in, and saying you’re warding off the greater harm is your fault. They need to be introspective and to ask themselves why that happened. And you can't hide.

Look, according to Lancet, which is a respectable medical journal, you're talking about over 200,000 people who have been killed in Gaza—60,000 is just what's been found. People are going back to their homes now for however long the ceasefire lasts, and they're finding skulls in the rubble. They're finding their loved ones buried. We don't have an accurate count. You can't hide all these dead babies. For many Americans of conscience, it didn't take much to just see, at what point is a war crime a war crime, and why does the whole world see Gaza differently than our politicians? Because the reality is, there's not a country on Earth that speaks of this conflict the same way the United States does. So either the whole world has got it wrong and the U.S. is this beacon of moral truth that somehow figured it out, or we have a fundamental problem with the way that our politics and our policies work. And I think that most people of common sense would say that the latter is true.

It doesn't take much humanity from a person to see what happens in Gaza and to be horrified by the fact that those are our tax dollars. The Biden administration did not once say to Netanyahu, this deranged lunatic, an international war criminal, that enough is enough.

Robinson

Netanyahu was applauded in Congress in the middle of the killing.

Suleiman

It's incredible. It's disappointing. It's disheartening. I think that most Muslims would tell you that they've lost a lot of friends in the last year and a half because many of the same people who said that they were horrified by Donald Trump's rhetoric and Trump 1.0 somehow justified—morally justified—the annihilation of Gaza. And what I tell people, and one of the things I said when I went to D.C., is that the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States is an incredible multi-faith movement. In fact, most of the encampments had a sizable Jewish presence. Almost all the encampments had a larger Jewish presence than a Muslim presence. When I gave the Friday Sermon in front of the White House, sometime in November or December 2023, there were more non-Muslims there than Muslims. In the protests, we had over 300,000 people come out the first time, and over 400,000 people come out the second time, so we're talking about two of the largest protests in the history of D.C.

I get these news alerts where my name is mentioned in an article or whatever it may be, and my name was mentioned in an article, and it happened to be that one of the Palestinian victims, a child who was killed, had my name. And what people in Gaza were doing was they were writing with markers the names of the children on their arms so that, if they had to pull them out of the rubble, they could be identifiable by the names of the children on the arms. And so I wrote my name on my arm.

And I wanted to put forth that, look, I'm as New Orleans of a boy as they come. I love New Orleans. I grew up in New Orleans. My cuisine is New Orleans. Everything about me is New Orleans. But I'm also a Palestinian American, and my parents are victims of that same displacement that Donald Trump is suggesting now: let's just go empty out Gaza and send these people elsewhere—open ethnic cleansing plans. That child could have been me. My parents met separately at the University of Houston, and they ended up in New Orleans, and that's where I was born. If that didn't happen, that could have easily been me. 

One of the hardest things that happened is, one week after October 7, Joe Biden parroted the lie, which is now an openly discredited lie, that there were 40 beheaded Israeli babies. This is factually untrue. At this point, every commission has found it to be a complete, baseless lie. When the president parroted that, what happened is that there was a man in Chicago who murdered a 6-year-old Palestinian boy. He stabbed him over 20 times and stabbed his mother 13 times. Murdered the boy, and the mother barely escaped death. Wadea al-Fayoume was a 6-year-old boy, and when he saw his landlord, he ran up to him to give him a hug because that's what the nature of the relationship was like before this all happened. But that man was listening to the news, and he had ingested, unfortunately, this idea that these people are going to grow up to behead us, and he wanted to take revenge on this innocent 6-year-old Palestinian boy who ran up to him to give him a hug.

I went to that funeral. I've been I've been closely in touch with Wadea’s mother since. There was legislation that was attempted to be passed—it was a whole circus. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and the rest of that bunch immediately erased Wadea. They pretended like Wadea’s mom wasn't even in the chamber and just started talking about campus protests and things of that sort. That 6-year-old Palestinian American boy, stabbed over 20 times—for all practical purposes, beheaded. His mother was in the hospital and not able to come to the funeral. She was in the hospital recovering from her own injuries.

I suddenly got a bunch of my allies—“allies”—from the first Trump administration, when we fought that bigotry together, cross coalition, saying “I'm sorry for your loss,” and “it's devastating,” and “I saw that you were there in Chicago at that funeral.” And my response was, what's the difference between Wadea and the tens of thousands of Palestinian children that have been killed? And then, what's the difference between Wadea and those tens of thousands of children and me? What is it with the selective condolence of yours? Because you're actively justifying the murder of Palestinian babies back there.

So it's important for people to reckon with their moral inconsistencies. If we're going to form true societal harmony, then we need to humanize each other beyond the moment of political opportunism. Because Muslims felt like a convenient checkbox in Trump 1.0. The Muslim ban was just something that you could rally progressives and rally liberals around. Muslims were a convenient checkbox.

Robinson

Right. And what Biden did to Gaza is much more consequential for human beings than even the Muslim ban. The Muslim ban is morally horrifying. But you mentioned the 200,000 estimated dead in Gaza, and that number is going to increase. Obviously, a lot of people have injuries. And it doesn't even begin to count injury and lifelong trauma from the things that people have seen, the annihilation of every part of the infrastructure of Gaza, the consequences of living in tents, in rubble. It's really difficult to even comprehend. And then you had, as you mentioned, Biden pushing things that were false. He was also casting early doubt on Palestinian death statistics. He was saying, the Hamas run Ministry of Health, we don't trust what they say. Well, it turns out the death statistics are a massive undercount. 

Suleiman

Yes. And by the way, in the lead up to the election, it's important to actually note that when Democratic candidates came to the Muslim communities, what they said was, we know that you all are unhappy about Gaza, but remember the Muslim ban? It's like you've got to be incredibly unaware, or just nefarious, to try to minimize what's happening in Gaza by saying, remember the Muslim ban and how bad that was and how we came to your defense? That does not work.

Now, I find it morally indefensible to support Donald Trump, no matter how frustrated we were. I want to be very clear. But I also think that it's important, again, for a critical reexamination of how Islamophobia has actually been tolerated and embedded into policies across the aisle now, and there is no greater manifestation of that than anti-Palestinian bigotry. We used to talk about the viability of a Palestinian state. The two-state solution is dead. Netanyahu openly talks about how we will never allow a Palestinian state to happen. The idea of a Palestinian state is dead in terms of the two-state solution. Now we're just talking about Palestinian existence, and these people are openly trying to erase Palestinians. And so it's important for everyone to understand that most American Muslims that you will meet see themselves in the Palestinians. We're not separating ourselves. We understand that if this group of people can be dehumanized to the extent that every imaginable form of torture can be carried out against them using our tax dollars, and most people will turn a blind eye to it, then it could happen to any one of us. It could happen to our entire American Muslim community. That's not to say we're the only targeted community.

That's not to say we're the only community at risk here. We're absolutely not. But that is to say that it's important for Americans of all backgrounds to recognize just how consequential this genocide has been on how American Muslims view themselves in the greater fabric of society.

Robinson

Trump and his press secretary have been justifying their plans for the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza by putting pictures of the destruction of Gaza up and saying, look, it's completely destroyed. There's nothing left. It's a demolition site. They say, look, it's uninhabitable, people can't live there, and that factually is true. But now we have to get rid of the population. We have to move them out. And what I think it makes clear is that U.S. policy for 50 years has been building to this point of unconditional support for Israel. Biden cleared the way for Trump to endorse this plan—whether that can actually happen, given the strong opposition of every country around Israel, which hopefully will hold up under Trump's efforts to coerce and bribe and threaten. But it seems like we were moving to towards this point. And certainly, you can see in Israel the policy for a long time has been to take an inch, take another inch, take another inch, and hopefully, eventually we can get rid of Palestine.

Suleiman

Yes, and Trump's largest donor is Miriam Adelson out in Dallas. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars for the annexation of the West Bank. This is clearly where Trump is going. It's not just Gaza. It's the full annexation of the West Bank and full removal of the Palestinian people. I do think that Trump greatly misunderstands the Muslim world. As you said, can these countries hold up under his bullying tactics? I'm going to be real with you. I don't think that they will hold up out of a moral position. I think that they will hold up because their people would not tolerate them buckling. It would spell the end of their regimes. They're between a rock and a hard place because of the popular support for Palestine and for the Palestinian people, especially in the wake of Gaza. There was definitely a dwindling of support for the Palestinian cause before this genocide. It was almost being accepted by many quarters in the Muslim world, like, look, this is just a new reality, we just kind of have to deal with it. But because of the scale of destruction and brutality that people have been exposed to, if these governments buckle to Trump's bullying tactics, their people will revolt. It could spell the end of their regimes, and I think they're afraid of that, so they have to figure out now how to walk this tightrope of not becoming Trump's enemy number one while at the same time not losing the support of their people. So it's going to be an interesting few years how it plays out in the global arena.

There has to be a point where the American people, in the global arena, separate themselves from the policies of the American government. When I travel the world, I try to make it a point to speak about the pronounced anti-Zionist Jewish contingent of the pro-Palestinian movement. They are incredible. There are Christians, there are Jews, there are people of conscience, there are progressives, there are even some conservatives that are morally horrified by what is happening right now. So it's not America. It's, unfortunately, the Empire of the United States, but not necessarily the people. I do have more hope in the younger generations to reject not just the bigotry but the policies that stem from this bigotry, but we'll see where it goes.

Robinson

have always been not only a theologian scholar, but an activist, and your faith informs your activism. You have been on the front lines of Black Lives Matter and of protests in favor of immigrant communities. You've always taken seriously the obligation to confront, to get into the streets, and to resist. And so we haven't given people anything yet in this conversation about what happens now. I'm sure you've thought about strategy, tactics, and obligations. A lot of people will be coming to you and asking, Dr. Suleiman, what do we do?

Suleiman

I'd like to take a step back and share a story that I think many people don't know about New Orleans, since this is a New Orleans-based broadcast. While Hurricane Katrina was not the same as the hurricane Trump, we came out of that hurricane and rebuilt in ways that were absolutely incredible, not just with the neglect of the federal government, but in many ways being targeted by the federal government with policies that were meant to keep us in devastation. We built ties as communities. We came to know each other. And there was something that disaster brought out in terms of the potential of human rebuilding.

I remember in 2008, with the rise of Barack Obama, there was a cross that was burnt, and this was kind of the resurfacing of David Duke in Metairie. At the time, there was a cross that was burnt on the lawn of a black family in a predominantly white neighborhood, and we came together as faith leaders. We restored that lawn, and we formed the East Jefferson Interfaith Clergy Association. And in 2011, on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, instead of succumbing to the tired rhetoric of what surrounded 9/11, we came together as Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and we renovated Rivertown at the time and restriped the roads. You and I were talking about the Super Bowl and how there was a lot of restriping of the roads. 

Robinson

Indeed. All of a sudden.

Suleiman

We did a lot of that in Rivertown. Restored the buildings, restriped the roads, redid much of the landscape, and then we got together at night and had Kosher and Halal gumbo in New Orleans fashion. It was an incredible scene, and we built relationships. What I would say is that we have to resist becoming a part of that dehumanization by relegating ourselves to the digital world and not getting out there and actually meeting other people who are impacted by these devastating trends that we have in society right now. We have to form relationships. We have to build. We have to get to know each other. We have to know each other's frustrations. Because otherwise, these are relationships of convenience where there isn't an actual understanding of the frustrations, like when I said a lot of those that “were opposed to Islamophobia” did not see that by supporting the genocide of Gaza, they actually were supporting one of the greatest Islamophobic projects of our time. They didn't make that connection. And so you're not going to understand that unless you actually seek to understand me and understand my frustrations and understand where this is coming from. So it's important to actually get out there to know one another and to resist that dehumanization, resist the echo chambers that allow for an algorithm to shape your worldview. Those algorithms will inherently disrupt the potential harmony that we could have in our communities.

Now from a political strategy, what I would say is that it's important for Americans—especially in a moment where Gaza is the moral question of our time—that are activists from within, that are trying to reshape domestic policy in the United States, to think about how that ties into foreign policy, to really dig deep into the global south and north and what that divide is starting to look like, and to envision a future America within a better world. An America that's less harmful to the world, an America that actually puts the brakes on some of the global threats that threaten the existence of humanity as a whole. We're not just talking about dehumanization of sectors of humanity. We're talking about the viability of the planet at this point. So I think this is where, for many Americans who used to maybe think only American in terms of the domestic policy of the United States, this shatters much of that. How many people could locate Greenland on a map before Trump talked about taking it over? So now you're talking about Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal and the Gulf of—I guess it's called the Gulf of America now, but we'll still call it the Gulf of Mexico. But our whole sense of geography is being ruptured by these political fault lines.

And so, I give the example of Black Lives Matter. Look, Cori Bush, who was an incredible voice in Congress, was removed by AIPAC. AIPAC loudly claimed the victory of removal of Cori Bush, one of the most steadfast voices for Palestinian dignity in Congress. Cori Bush talked about how it was in Ferguson that Palestinians, who had lived under the suffocation of the tear gas canisters that were thrown at them by the IDF, gave them tips on how to protect themselves against those same canisters that were being thrown at them now. Our police departments are trained in Israel by occupational forces. The knee that went on the neck of George Floyd—that is a tactic directly taught by the IDF to our police department. So we have to start to think about how these domestic forms of oppression play into foreign forms of oppression and break down, I think, limited geographical thinking, even in our own forms of activism here in the United States, and start thinking about what it means for the rest of the world. So I think this is what the opportunity presents for us. There's going to be a lot of comfort that is needed across the board. I play the role of not just being involved in that sense, but also playing that pastoral role, of reassuring [people].  It's the idea of resilience, and it's one thing that I talked to my faith community about, to Muslims about.

Look, for the people of Gaza, when you have kids who have now lived through four wars—they're 9 years old, and they've lost everyone in their families, but they're still willing to say, I'm going to pitch my tent here, stay the course, and I'm not going to leave my land. There is something about that resilience that anyone can appreciate. We, too, can perhaps inculcate some of that resilience. And so that's probably hard for many who have unfortunately viewed the Palestinian people through the lens of terrorism, to actually not just see the Palestinian people as not being a threat, but actually a source of great resilience. They have stood in front of a mighty army and said, we're not going anywhere.

And that's what Trump doesn't understand about the Palestinian people. That's what a lot of these people, when they talk about it, don’t understand. Ironically, there's this clip of Marco Rubio in the 2016 debates where he said, the Palestinians are not a real estate arrangement, Don.

We have stories, I think, even in the United States, and New Orleans is a great story of rebuilding across communities. We have stories of resilience, and when it's all said and done, when the history books have been written, some of these coalitions of virtue and justice will also be documented as reasons for which the complete moral disintegration of the United States was not possible. And so I think that we have to stay the course. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.