The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn’t have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn’treal?
I like Hakim’s content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.
Have all the secular and Christian Palestinians given up on life?
this was already posted before but i don’t think you can discount the role religion plays in giving people a source of hope and strength where there otherwise isn’t any. Maybe you could do the same thing another way, but I’m at a loss as to how. We all know that religion plays a large part in the lives of a large portion of the world population.
It’s obviously not the a ONLY reason they fight back but it doesn’t hurt the cause at all imo.
But isn’t religion a source of false consolation? The real consolation would of course be the improvement of material conditions.
It certainly helps people cope with day to day life under capitalism, but eventually it needs to go.
Isn’t hakim’s argument that religion helps people keep fighting for better material conditions because they can bare the struggle better?
That is still poor analysis. People can have religion, but to chalk up a people’s survival to it is absurd and horrifically bad material analysis.
I think in cases where religious institutions are actively organizing and encouraging people to engage in struggle, political or armed, to change their circumstances, it doesn’t make much sense to call it false consolation.
Even when religions assert a kind of cosmic justice outside the scope of individual earthly lives, it’s not always true that religion serves mainly to console, even in matters of personal psychology and belief. Christianity certainly falls into that pattern, but John Brown was not as consoled by the prospect that justice would be achieved in the afterlife as he was convicted by his religious morality that the earthly evil he saw in slavery had to be combatted by all means available, immediately.
I do think that desperate situations drive people to religious belief as a way of upholding the just world hypothesis in the face of powerful cognitive dissonance. But that’s just one factor among many in promoting religious belief, and as a general tendency, it doesn’t necessarily address what religion inspires or motivates people to do in particular circumstances.
Through a collection of a peoples wills and faith in their country, people, and survival? Literally what the Soviet Union did during WW2? Very few Soviets thought that God would save them. They knew that their own collective strength would save them.
This belief gave them hope.
but for every group that did it without religion, how many relied on religion, or worse didn’t come together to believe in themselves?
Can you give examples? That’s just an open ended hypothetical that no one can answer. I really don’t get what your argument is here.
Don’t forget that faith has been used as a tool of oppression and placed at the height of state, the entire “Opiod of the masses” spiel. Of course people will turn to it if that’s all they know… many wouldn’t if they knew the alternatives.
you have to understand that the average age of palestine is 18, so not many people get to compel in theory. religion plays a huge role in muslim populations, hakim is right here. it brings people together. of course the resistance is not just al qassam brigades, there’s pflp, dflp etc. but that is a luxury at this point.
on the other hand if you look at the demographic of the palestinian prisoners inside israeli prisons, the situation is complete reverse. there are people there for like 40 years. they did have the privelage to study theory.
I’m not criticising Palestinians for their religiosity. I’m criticising Hakim for his idealist assertions in the community post.
ok, that is valid. but still, in times like these, if you don’t have a guiding body, a stronghold, then people will eventually resort to means that they already have. i know you get this, but hakim lived through something similar, so it’s understandable that what got him through all this is very important to him while constructing his lens looking through this situation.
i live in a muslim country and anti-imperialism here -mainly- arises from infidelity of the us. if the us was a muslim country slaughtering non-muslims, the reaction would be different.
I feel like I’m either deluded or turning into a plain old Western atheist chauvinist scrolling through these comments.
But everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that Hamas was specifically propped up by the Israelis (multiple quotes from Israeli leadership attesting this) in their struggle against the secular PLO because the PLO was a bigger threat to Israeli plans for domination. Except in the past decade they’ve gone off the chain so to speak. Kind of like the mujahideen sponsored by the United States in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet friendly government, which also went off the chain and started attacking the US.
Israel wants palestine divided with a militant Hamas in the west that they can crush/conquer with impunity, and a weakened/coopted PLO in the east that cannot resist creeping colonization. But as far as I can tell the high point of hopes for a palestinian state were back in the 90s when there was a broad secular coalition under Arafat and a strong PLO.
lol u are late to the struggle session. Most of the discussion happened in a hexbear post.
I don’t really either, I found out from the matrix group (genzedong.xyz, sadly currently down). https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2619156?scrollToComments=true
This is straight up proselitysm. From supposed ML to people he is trying to expose to ML. Wew.
He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second.
How do i put it… it cast shadow of doubt on his materialist analysis, since he clearly is not a consistent materialist.
Also his recent content is pretty disappointing, instead of even reuploading his old videos which were pretty useful he’s doing debunks of random wackjobs.
He’s good at reading books and sharing knowledge, idk about doing his own analysis.
Looking at the OP, he’s got kinda problem with that too, now. And even reading and sharing will necessarily be filtered through his brain.
Sure, but it looks like he is reading Islamic works and sharing information from them. I wonder how familiar he is with anti-theist arguments and works.
