From Boycotts to Power Plays: Shahid Bolsen on the Strata of Resistance

Everyone sees things according to their level, and they operate according to their level, and they judge according to their level. And the truth is that most of us are largely unfamiliar with how things operate at other levels. So to a certain extent, I think it's unavoidable that we will see things incorrectly and we'll judge things incorrectly. So, like, if you look at Israel right now, if you look at the economy of Israel and the political and social situation in Israel right now, from the perspective of say a neoliberal predator, you know, from the perspective of an economic hitman who's gonna be like look like like a lion looking at a wounded animal that strayed from the herd. That's what Israel looks like to someone at that level.

Now you and I are understandably focused on, Israel's ability to kill, but you're so focused on that, and maybe the Israelis themselves are so focused on that, that you'll fail to notice the extent to which Israel is losing the ability to live. They have the ability to kill, but they are rapidly losing their ability to live as a nation, as a country, as a so called Jewish state. Netanyahu has sacrificed the long term sustainability of Israel for the sake of his short term political career. In order for him to even have a career in Israel at this point, he's put all his eggs in the basket of fanatical Zionist lunatics like Ben Gavir and Smoltrich. And these are people who have a single political priority, which is to commit a holocaust against the Palestinians.

That's their only political priority. Well, you can't run an economy on that basis. A holocaust of the Palestinians is not a project that sustains a state, but they don't care. Netanyahu doesn't care. Like I've said before, they all think, these Zionist types, they all think that the Israeli economy is always gonna be propped up.

It's always gonna be propped up by American aid because it always has been. All they were ever required to do was to bomb and to kill and to destabilize, and they were always amply rewarded for doing that. So they think that this contract that they have with America is an indefinite agreement. You know? So they've never had to truly build an independent economy.

They don't they've never had to build a truly independent state. Israel has been a client state from the beginning. It's been a dependency from the beginning. And they made the mistake of thinking that that model, that client state model is permanent. I mean, the the the vulnerability of that sort of a state is obvious.

It's obvious. But the assumption of permanence made them think that that vulnerability didn't matter. But that's never been realistic. That's never been a realistic assessment. You cannot build your state and you cannot build your economy based on the assumption that the world is never gonna change, and the geopolitics and relationships are never gonna change.

You can be a thriving dependency only as long as you are useful to your benefactor. But the moment you cease being useful to your benefactor, then your dependency upon that benefactor becomes a liability to that benefactor. You can you can make hay while the sun shines, but you can't pretend that the sun isn't gonna set at some point, and the sun is setting for Israel. Committing the genocide in Gaza has completely blown a gaping hole, in the Israeli economy. Their debt is climbing.

It's climbing towards levels that they cannot comfortably sustain. They can't comfortably service. As I said before, their credit ratings are falling. They were downgraded, which means that they'll have to pay more for any money that they borrow from here on out. That's when a country starts to become willing to accept terms that they would have never accepted before.

They're under extreme structural fiscal stress, Israel is. Israel's 2025 deficit guidance sits at around 4.9% of GDP, and that could blow all the way past 6% or 7% if things continue to grind on as they have been and as Netanyahu has said he plans to do. You understand? Their debt is projected to be 70 to 71% of their GDP in 2025, 2026. That's from the Bank of Israel.

You have severe labor shortages in Israel because of their, calling up their reservists, their mobilization of, reservists, plus the loss of Palestinian workers. That's choked off construction, that's choked off services in Israel. Even with imported workers from, you know, India and elsewhere, Philippines, Bangladesh and so on, you're still something like a 100 and a 100,000 workers short. That's just the for the construction sector. About 10 to 15% of the Israeli workforce has either been called up as reservists or they're otherwise nonproductive because of, you know, mental illness, because of PTSD, suicidality, and what have you.

Not to mention how many of them have been killed, how many Israelis have been killed, and how many have fled the country. Okay. So that's the situation. Now, when you and I look at that, the only thing that we see is the damage. That's what we see.

But an economic hitman, a predatory investor, they see opportunity. Opportunity for control, opportunity for leverage. See, this is a hard thing for most of us to wrap our heads around. That's what I was talking about about how we look from different strata. So resistance and opposition looks one way on one strata, and it looks a whole other kind of way on another strata.

You understand? It depends on what level you're at. It depends on your level and it depends on your resources. So for us, for most of us, at our level, from our strata, our opposition and our resistance looks like protests. It looks like boycotts.

It looks like, you know, death to the IDF and so on. But on a higher strata, on a higher level, with greater resources and so forth, resistance and opposition operates entirely differently. It can even look like the opposite of resistance for those of us who are on a lower level, you see. So for us, we boycott, for instance. We don't buy.

But when you're in the strata of an economic hitman, when you're on the strata of a of a predatory investor, you don't boycott. You do buy. You buy. You supply. Because at the level where you are, you can purchase dependence.

You can buy disempowerment. Do you understand? So say for example, you become, the manpower supplier for the Israeli labor market that is short of labor, especially for construction. So you become, or or you say you buy or you establish two or three or four different firms, manpower firms that provide labor, imported, or or exported manpower from another country, migrant labor. You sign MOUs with Indian and Filipino recruiters, and now you control 25 to 30% or 40% of the migrant labor pipeline going into Israel.

That's control. That's a dependency. You identify a weakness. You identify a vulnerability, and then you become the solution for that vulnerability. But that means that you never let them solve their weakness.

You never let them solve their vulnerability by becoming stronger independently, by becoming invulnerable. No. You keep them weak, you keep them vulnerable precisely by being the solution to that weakness and to that vulnerability. Do you understand me? So they never have to fix it.

They never have to fix it themselves. They become dependent upon you as the solution, as the fix for their weakness and vulnerability. That's power, that's control, that's leverage, that's resistance and opposition as it operates on that level, as it operates on that strata. Now to us down here at our level, well, we'll say it looks like collusion, it looks like collaboration, it looks like support. Why would you be supplying workers to Israel?

Right? That's that's from our our perspective. We want them to be without workers. We want everything to stop in that country. We want all of their industries to shut down.

Okay? That's myopic. Because the problem is gonna be solved one way or the other. Their shortages problem, their economic problems and so on, it's gonna be solved one way or the other because that's what countries have to do. It's either gonna be solved by themselves, either they're gonna solve it themselves, meaning they're gonna fix their vulnerability, or else someone is gonna come in to become the solution that keeps them vulnerable and keeps them dependent.

Now you tell me which one is better. Would you rather them become invulnerable or remain vulnerable by having someone else solve their problem for them and make them dependent upon the problem solver? So, like, for example, if I was a GCC investor, for example, that's what I would do. I would become the labor supplier for Israel. I would make deals with recruiters and with Israeli companies with a clause that says that we have to be the exclusive provider of labor for this or that company or for this or that project.

I would tell the Israelis, okay, look, I understand you need workers. You need workers badly. Your reservists are all called up. You've locked the Palestinians out of your labor sector. Now construction is bleeding.

Housing costs are exploding. Okay. No problem. We'll solve it for you. We'll set up a fund.

We'll call it, say, the workforce stability fund or workforce stability initiative. We'll front the cash to bring in tens of thousands of workers. We'll pay for that. We'll pay for their flights. We'll pay for their housing.

We'll pay for their training. All you have to do is guarantee our investment. You can do that through your pension funds. Your pension funds can guarantee our investment. So every month, a cut of the the workers' paychecks will go right back into the fund, back to us, to The UAE or to the GCC or what have you.

That'll be automatic. Okay? That's Israeli money being siphoned off to go to GCC financial institutions. Money taken from them and given to us. And if too many workers quit, well, repayment comes out of your pension funds, not out of their paychecks.

Then suddenly, mysteriously, you start having reports of labor abuses in Israel, human rights violations against construction workers, and so on. You know, your government is not protecting laborers. It's a shame. Then we have to shut down the worker pipeline, but you still have to pay us from your pension funds. No more visas, no more flights, no more nothing.

Suddenly, of your construction sites all go silent. They all go quiet. They all become still. And you have a liquidity crisis because you have to pay us. And the same goes with energy.

You know, everyone's talking about this $35,000,000,000 natural gas deal between Israel and Egypt, the Leviathan Field and so on. First of all, like I said before, this is a preexisting trade relationship. They were already buying gas from Israel. It's been going on for years already. That's treachery.

Right? They're supposed to be boycotting. Egypt is supposed to be boycotting. I mean, after all, energy is one of the few sectors left in Israel that can still bring in some money. So shame on Egypt.

Right? Again, that's the view from our strata of resistance, from our level of resistance. But look at this. This is a what I think is a fifteen, twenty year contract locked in. Okay?

Now this deal was always based on the idea that Egypt's rising consumption needs, their energy consumption needs, needed this from from Israel, this gas from Israel. They needed it for domestic use. That's always been the understanding. I think currently, supplies 15 to 20% of Israel's I'm sorry, of Egypt's gas consumption. Egypt is Israel's biggest export customer for natural gas.

Okay. But this is a mutual dependency. You understand? Egypt needs the gas, yes, but Israel needs to sell the gas. So Israel is economically dependent on Egypt.

They're dependent on Egypt as a stable and a large customer. Okay. So what happens when Egyptian need has alternatives? Because Egypt is actively pursuing alternatives right now. And there's no doubt that in the long term, that's exactly what will happen.

They will have alternatives. They will have other means of meeting domestic consumption. If they begin to increase their own domestic gas production, which they can do, or they secure alternative natural gas supplies from say Russia or from Qatar or from Turkey or what have you, this is gonna allow Egypt to buy Israeli gas primarily for their own LNG export, meaning, Egypt will, be the one profiting from Israeli gas. Not to mention, this is gonna make Egypt a strategic choke point for Israeli energy exports to the global market because Israeli gas destined for export would be routed through Egyptian infrastructure, Egyptian pipelines, LNG terminals, and so forth. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Do you follow me? It ties it completely with Egypt's domestic policies and their infrastructure capabilities, but there's more. The Israeli company that is involved in this deal with Egypt is called NewMed, and The United Arab Emirates is already in negotiations to buy half the shares in that company. They're gonna build a pipeline to ship the the the gas to Egypt, And that's gonna cost more than Israel can possibly finance, especially after the last two years. So again, this is an opportunity for leverage.

It's an opportunity for control because a pipeline is a choke point. Infrastructure is a choke point. Egypt is becoming a choke point. We've learned from our own experience in oil and gas and so forth that the resource itself is not in fact the main lever of control. It's the extraction, it's the processing, it's the refinement, it's the shipment of that resource.

Those are the levers of control. That's how the West has subjugated us despite the fact that our resource wealth vastly surpasses the West. But they've been able to control us by controlling all of these other means. They've controlled the means of extraction, the means of processing, the means of export, and so forth. And now that's what is being set up regionally, to subordinate Israel.

But it doesn't look like that to us from our strata. But this plays out the same across multiple sectors, logistics, ports, storage, trucking, health care, construction, like I said, desalination, sanitation, on and on and on. Every single one of these sectors in Israel are vulnerable now. And the longer Netanyahu runs that country, the more he is running that country into the ground, driving the economy off a cliff. Every single sector in Israel, every single industrial and economic sector in Israel is gonna be ripe for economic conquest.

Conquest by the GCC and conquest by BRICS, by China. But from our strata, we see this conquest as Israel being propped up because that's how it looks like from our position, from our level. But it's not being propped up, it's being locked up. But most of us don't understand economics. Most of us don't understand investing.

We don't understand business. And to be honest, of us have a very simplistic vision of what Israel's defeat is supposed to look like. We wanna see Israelis all scrambling on the beach, you know, for dinghies and rafts and whatnot in the Mediterranean Sea trying to escape to Cyprus, trying to, you know, row row their way to Greece or Cyprus while Tel Aviv burns. Because we don't understand how conquest actually works in the twenty first century. We don't understand how things work on that strata of wealth and power, of economic hitmen and and predatory investors.

But okay, that is what's happening at that strata. That's what they're doing. And they know what they're doing. And it's positive for Palestine. And it's positive for a regional sovereignty and regional independence, political independence, economic sovereignty.

And it's positive for the evaporation of Zionism. So what about your strata? That's what you really need to worry about. That's what you really should be thinking about and worrying about. What are we doing at our level?

You know, everyone's always talking about what they think that the people at higher levels, higher levels of power and authority and influence, we always talk about what we think they should be doing, or what they should be doing more, what they're not doing and so forth. Always critical of this, how they're not doing enough and so forth. But okay, but what about you? How about you? Because you're not gonna be asked about anyone else.

You're only accountable for what you're doing, for what you have done. And I can tell you the Muslims at the higher levels of authority, the the Muslims at the higher level of power and wealth, they're doing more than you, without question. You think that they're doing less than you, but they are doing vastly more than you. That's a fact. And it's not just because they're capable of doing more than you because of their wealth and power.

No. They are doing more. They are risking more. They are coordinating more. They are organizing more with what they have in terms of assets and options than what people at our strata, at our lower strata arguably, what we are doing relative to our assets and options.

That's a fact. I mean, what has activism meant so far, particularly in the West? What does activism look like these days? It's hashtags, tweets, you know, raising awareness, online activism, street protests, boycotts, and so forth. Now, I'm not belittling any of these things.

These are all important things, no doubt. But do you imagine that this is the utmost? I mean, the reality is that you are only limited in your options for activism, by your own conviction and by your own commitment and by your own willingness to face consequences. These are the only barriers to doing more than what you are doing, to doing more than what you have done. And as I said before, if you are in the West, especially if you're in America, no one should be doing more than you.

No one is more responsible than you. No one is more accountable than you because this is an American genocide. It is a Western genocide. Israel is an American colonial project that you are paying for. So like I say, boycotts.

Okay. You personally decide that you're not gonna patronize this or that store, this or that, cafe, this or that company. Right? You're not gonna buy their products. You're not gonna buy their goods and services and so forth.

Maybe you even learn the, like, the bar codes and whatnot so that you can identify when a product comes from Israel and so forth. Maybe you take the BDS list anytime you go to the mall or anytime you go to the grocery store or what have you so that you can be a conscientious consumer about your purchases. Okay. Great. But I mean, would essentially be doing the same thing if you were just health conscious and on a tight budget.

That's not activism. Not really. Let's be honest. That's just doing the minimum of what your conscience demands you to do. That's not activism.

That's basic. That's that's that's making basic moral decisions with your money. Activism means being active. That's the whole point. Like instead of just not giving a company your money, activism would mean that we're talking about actively preventing that company from profiting at all.

Okay. Yes. To a certain extent you're doing that by spreading awareness about a company's involvement or connection to Israel. You spread awareness about that so that other people can also choose to be moral consumers, to make moral decisions with their money. Sure.

But I'm talking about boycott enforcement, Not just, I'm not going to shop here. No. You take it to the point of no one is going to shop here. This company, this shop, this outlet is not going to be allowed to profit, is not gonna be allowed to operate, is not gonna be allowed to function. I'm talking about system disruption because anyone who can disrupt a system controls that system.

I thought that leftists, for example, were all pro Palestinian. I And also thought that that leftists were all connected to or embedded in labor unions. Well, how can both of these be true if we have not had universal labor union shutdowns in relation to Israeli linked companies? I mean, in a few places, mostly in Europe, as far as I know, we have had, like, example, dock workers refusing to load or unload ships that are carrying goods or carrying weapons that are bound to or coming from Israel. That's happened.

But why are these things sporadic occurrences? Why is it only happen once in a while? We only hear about it once in a while. Why isn't there a unified position across all unions? And let me quickly address this fake news that was going around by the way about the Saudi ship that was allegedly carrying weapons bound for Israel.

They got targeted by dock workers in Italy and Genoa. Okay? That ship was never going to Israel. It was going to The Emirates and it was going to Egypt. Even in the articles about that incident can't substantiate anything about that ship delivering anything to Israel.

But either way, are sporadic occurrences. Why are they sporadic? You're supposed to be working with the unions. You're supposed to be helping to organize with the unions. And even when there are no unions to work with, you're supposed to be doing that.

Look, you can enforce boycotts, you know. Those products on the shelf that you're not gonna buy because they're on the BDS list, those products that you're boycotting, well, they had to be put on the shelves in the first place. Think it through. They had to be offloaded from some container ship, They had to be transported. They had to be stored in a warehouse somewhere, and then they had to be delivered from that warehouse to the outlet, to the store where the shelves are.

At every point in that process, there are opportunities for disruptive activism. Again, especially if you have unions involved or just even, non unionized workers involved. But even if you don't, it just depends on your commitment. Like I say, it depends on your commitment. It depends on your imagination.

And like I said, it depends on your willingness to face the consequences. Okay? You've got the whole supply chain that you can work with. You've got the whole domestic supply chain in your country, in your state that you can map and you can identify points where you have the potential to disrupt. That goes for any company.

It doesn't matter, any company. Because every company is a system. It's a system. It depends on the smooth running of that system in order to profit. So you've got the supply chain that you can work on, then you've got the physical location of the vendor.

Even the physical location of any vendor, of any company, of any store, what have you, they rely on a system in order for them to succeed, and you have to learn how to break this down. I mean, how to understand and dissect this. How to understand and dissect the system that that store relies upon. So let's say a store or a coffee shop or what have you. Look at that location.

Look at the actual location. Look at what that location needs in order to make customers even wanna go there. It has to be clean. It has to have, you know, furniture, tables and chairs for example. It has to have air conditioning most likely.

It has to have lights. It has to have plumbing, it should smell nice, it should generally be quiet, it should be comfortable, it should be relaxing and so on. Okay. Every aspect of that is disruptable legally. I'm not saying that you should do anything against law.

I'm saying that there is plenty that you can do if you use your imagination, if you use your creativity, you can interfere with the smooth operations of any business. Any business that's supposed to be boycotted, you can enforce that boycott by means of disruption. And again, obviously, if workers are themselves recruited, who work for those companies, work for those shops and so on, you recruit them into your efforts, obviously, it's gonna be much more effective. As I've mentioned many many times, just look back at the tactics of the early labor movement in The United States or or even in Europe. Because the truth is that every system of power is dependent upon a whole sort of web work of connections, and this web is actually quite delicate and quite vulnerable.

Look, honestly speaking, in the West, and especially in America, this is the this is the fact. You all are gonna have to start learning much more forceful, much more militant, and more strategic, and more creative tactics of activism. I mean, just overall. I'm not just talking about Palestine. But generally speaking, you're gonna have to learn these sorts of strategies, these sorts of tactics because your situation is gonna start to get very intense very soon.

And the authorities are counting on you never really being able to respond except through, you know, online whinging, hashtags and what have you on the one hand, or sporadic acts of violence and chaos on the other hand, riots and looting and so forth. Neither of these approaches is gonna help you. Notice I said militant and forceful, I did not say violent. You have to learn tactics of system disruption that's different from violence because it's generally not gonna be in your interests to actually use violence. Any violence from your side is just gonna feed into the already existing momentum of the of of of militarized domestic security.

Disruption gives you leverage. Destruction does not give you leverage. Remember that. Now you have to learn how to tactically exploit the weak points in any system so that you can cause cascading failure while staying within the law. I'm saying that activism in the West, in America, is gonna finally have to become something much more than recreational, which is what it is now, let's be honest.

It's gonna have to become more than expressive. It has to be more than just something that you do to make yourself feel better. Understand that you are facing a major challenge in the West, in America, and take that seriously, actually seriously. You have to think like an engineer of political and economic pressure. That's how you have to think of yourself.

That means that you have to study the mechanics of the system that dominates you, not in vague terms. You have to study that down to the smallest operational dependencies and learn how to target those dependencies. I mean, you have not mapped the systems that you're up against, then there's no point in trying to decide on any sort of action. There's no point in trying to mobilize for any sort of action. That's what everyone does in the West, in America.

You just select from the existing menu of standard activist options, like I said, protest, boycott, letters to politicians, hashtags, and so forth. No. There's no way for you to decide what sort of an action you're gonna take until you have fully examined the system that is involved in the injustice that you're trying to fight. You have to understand the system. The authorities have a have a have a fortress mindset, so they're gonna assume that you're gonna attack the walls of the fortress head on, and they're prepared for that.

They expect you either to be compliant and obedient or to be noisy, and predictable in your defiance. You should be neither one. You have to learn how their logistics work. You have to identify the choke points in their supply, in their communication, in their coordination. You have to find the, what you can call the procedural bottlenecks.

You know, the fragile chains of reliance where the whole system depends on. See, this is basically the same approach that's being taken at the higher strata of resistance and opposition. As I talked about earlier, it's basically the same approach. You know, most activists are too emotional, but they need to be calculated. I mean, talk about resistance, but you don't treat yourself like a resistance movement.

You don't act like a resistance movement. A resistance movement understands the risk, understands the threat if they fail. They understand that the stakes are high and they focus on substantive actions, not symbolic actions. I mean, point is not to show the power structure we disapprove. No.

The point is to stop the power structure from even being able to do what you disapprove of. They don't care what you approve or disapprove. They don't care about your opinion. They only care about what you have the power to stop, what you have the ability to stop. You know, you always talk about what they say speaking truth to power as if power doesn't already know the truth.

They know. They know what they're doing. And if all you're gonna do is tell them what they're doing, then all they're hearing from that, all the the only thing they get from that message is what you are not doing or what you are afraid to do. And as soon as they know what you're afraid to do, they will just make sure that the ability to stop them lies beyond that threshold of what you're afraid to do. So that's the space that you need to live in.

You understand? Because this goes both ways. We already know what their threshold is. They have a threshold too and we know what it is. Their threshold is unprofitability.

So you have to force them into that space. That's the space that they don't wanna go to. Yes, you have to be forceful. Forcefulness in this context does not mean violence, it means that you apply pressure that they cannot absorb without making concessions. You know, militancy means that you operate with discipline, with precision, and with unity.

It doesn't mean that you operate with rage and upon impulse. Creativity means that you never settle down on one strategy so that they can develop a counter strategy because you keep changing your angles. That's creativity. And like I say, you remain within the law because staying within the bounds of the law forces them to reveal themselves whenever they retaliate against you. You keep the high ground and you keep your movement intact.

Your aim is to make the system malfunction, malfunction in ways that they cannot openly acknowledge without exposing the fragility of that system. And like I said before, you actually need to be using the law in your resistance, not abusing the law, using the law, not violating the law, you need to be invoking the law. Lawsuits are gonna be critical for you moving forward, whether it's for the Palestinian cause or for anything else. And yes, all of this, everything that I'm talking about, all of this requires serious on the ground grassroots community building. That's something that you need to take very seriously, community organizing, getting off the Internet and getting into the streets, getting off your phones and getting into each other's homes, face to face, not face time.

You can actually dissect everything that has been done to you through social engineering. Everything that has been done to you to render you impotent and docile, and then reverse engineer it. You understand me? Become exactly that version of yourselves that the power structure has always worked diligently to invert. You understand?

They made you impatient, so become patient. They made you impulsive, so become, disciplined. They made you frivolous, so become serious. They made you lazy, so become energetic. They made you distracted, so become focused.

Become the opposite of what they have always tried to make you. They made you addicted to entertainment, so disconnect. Read, study, research, learn. You understand? They've given you millions of ways to waste your time.

They've given you millions of ways to waste your time because they're scared to death of you using your time seriously. They want you to only ever be productive when you're on their clock, you know, when you're punched in on your shift to make money for them. That's the only time they want you to be productive. But your free time is supposed to be wasted and they've given you countless ways to do it. They've given you countless ways to waste your time.

So you need to reject all of this. You need to reject all of this as the poison that it is. You understand? I'm telling you that you have a lot of work to do in the West and on people on on our level, and we have a lot more that we're going to need to do. The Muslim world and the global South, they're doing the work already.

They're doing the work that needs to be done at every stratum, at every level. You don't need to worry about that. Don't worry about what the Muslim world is doing or what the global South is doing. They're working on diversification economically, dedollarization, multipolarity, strategic investing, sovereignty building, on and on and on. They're working on coordination, diplomacy, on acquiring leverage, etcetera etcetera.

We're busy on our end, doing the needful. By comparison, the people in the West are sleepwalking. They're sleepwalking and calling it a victory march. No. You need to step up your game, not just for Palestine, but for your own selves.

I told you before, we're on our way out. In the global South, we're on our way out of colonial tyranny. But you're on your way in. You're heading into the same kind of oppression that we are just now getting ourselves out of because the colonizers are coming home. Colonization is coming home.

And you're even less equipped and you're even less capable and you're even less prepared for what is coming to you than we were when the colonizers first invaded our lands. So you have a lot of catching up to do, you have a lot of getting yourselves up to speed to do, and you have a lot of building work ahead of you. Building yourselves as individuals, building yourselves as communities, and building yourselves as a resistance movement. And while you waste your time, your enemy uses their time. In fact, your wasted time is in fact them using their time because getting you to waste your time is already a victory for them.

All the time that you waste is, is their time well spent. Understand, they take you more seriously than you take yourselves. It's true. That's why they work so hard to neutralize you. That's why they work so hard to infantilize you, to desensitize you, and to traumatize you.

They work so hard to preemptively tear down the person that you might someday build yourself to be. So you need to stop lecturing the Muslim world, Wallahi. Stop trying to lecture the Muslim world and the global South and start learning from the Muslim world and the global South. Because like I said before, we've been through what you're just about to go through. You don't know anything about what we've survived and what we are surviving, but we know everything about what you're about to suffer.

So it would be much wiser for you to connect rather than to condemn the Muslim world. Don't lob attacks at us, but attach yourselves to us and gain or try to gain some of the skills and some of the knowledge that our struggle has taught us so that you can possibly navigate what your society is going to become and is becoming. We know what we're doing in the global South, in the Muslim world. Having you criticize us and criticize our leaders, well, Lahi, it's like watching an abused wife posting happy couple pictures on Instagram. You know, pretending to be a a a relationship coach while she's got a black eye.

Believe me, none of us has got time for that nonsense. We don't have time for this nonsense. No one listens to that nonsense. And you don't have time to waste being nonsensical. You need to be more serious.

This is not a drill. The fight against injustice is not a school competition where you get a participation trophy just for showing up and shouting a slogan or for forgoing a frappuccino. It's called a fight because it is a fight. That's what it is. It's a fight and you can't phone in your resistance.

Resistance means doing things that you don't like to do. It means doing things that you're afraid to do. Things that are uncomfortable. Things that require time, money, persistence, resilience, diligence, and vigilance. It requires discipline and discomfort.

In other words, requires all of the qualities and all of the traits that the system has tried to completely erase from your personality as an American, as a westerner. Like I said, look at the kind of person that they have tried to make you, that your society has tried to make you, what they've tried to make everyone, and understand that all they were ever doing was trying to program you to be a slave. That's the personality type that they've been trying to create. And so then you have to know that the opposite qualities and the opposite characteristics are exactly the kinds of things that you need to be cultivating in order to make yourself actually formidable. So let everyone work where they are.

You work there and we'll work here. And let everyone work at their level, whatever level they're on, knowing that we are all working in the same direction and we are all working against the same enemy.