Pirates & emperors, terrorists & presidents

Reading Augustine alongside Mohammed El-Kurd's "Perfect Victims"

They asked the Pharaoh, “Who made you a pharaoh?” He replied, “No one stopped me.”¹

There is a moment, late in his urgent book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, where journalist and poet Mohammed El-Kurd gives voice to an exasperation many of us feel:

So here we are in the final hour, if there was ever one. The task is difficult, or difficult to define. And I’m not preaching from a pulpit, but speaking while suffocating under the weight of my own helplessness, trying to understand what I should do, trying to understand what it is that I am doing.

That El-Kurd—an engaged, fearless Palestinian journalist—feels helpless, even a little useless (“It is hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun”) is at once unsettling and oddly encouraging. It is unsettling because it is humbling: that someone like El-Kurd, who is doing so much, risking so much, feels he’s not doing enough makes people like me—comfortable academics enraged by what’s happening in Gaza and now the U.S.—ashamed by comparison. What have I risked? On the other hand, if El-Kurd also feels helpless, unsure just how to respond, then I feel a little less alone in my perplexity. How to respond? How to resist?

“What’s happening” now is the asymmetrical reality of a genocide in Gaza and a new presidential administration in the United States determined to quash any who dare tell the truth about this reality.

Sadly, the genocide is old news (Kenneth Roth’s analysis and argument is a good place to start). That Israel’s military campaign is undertaken with U.S. weapons and broad bipartisan support is a sign of how sick our political system is. Zionism might be one of the last bipartisan orthodoxies in the crumbling American experiment.²

What is new is the federal U.S. government’s blatant strategy of quashing dissent and free speech that dares speak this truth. I am thinking primarily of ICE’s extra-judicial disappearing of student activist Mahmoud Khalil. Equally shocking, however, is the complicity of elite private universities in their acquiescence to such intimidation from the Trump administration, all in the name of preservation of capital. So Columbia University is willing to barter student dignity and freedom of speech for federal grant monies, and Yale Law School is willing to preemptively comply with authoritarian intimidation. What should we be doing in the face of this?

One of the great lies of neoliberalism—a “mystification” of capital, Marx would say—is to individualize responses to social problems. The political economy of capitalism creates collective, social problems but then sells us the lie that each of us must do something individually to solve the problem—which means that any real solution becomes a collective action problem. (So, for example: The response to global climate catastrophe is you choosing to your soda cans.) The same happens in the face of something like the genocide in Gaza, U.S. (and citizens’!) complicity, and the government’s determination to silence dissent. Atomized by the political economy of capital, we each ask, helplessly, What can I possibly do? Even writing this post falls prey to this atomization, as if a blog post could be expiation. The only hope is that a movement arises from the frisson of our individual efforts to respond and mobilize—the hope that resistance and response becomes socialized.

The “Humanizing” that De-Humanizes

One thing El-Kurd has very concretely done is write this searing book. Perfect Victims is like The Fire Next Time + Black Skin, White Masks for our generation, written with a disarming directness and unflinching commitment to telling the truth.

The “thesis,” you might say, is that the hegemony of Zionism as embraced by Western governments means that the only Palestinians who get a hearing are those who play the role of “perfect victims”: they suffer without agency; they suffer without questioning the status quo; they suffer without daring to hate. Only those Palestinians who first establish their bona fides as non-threatening are granted the politics of appeal.³

So the media labors to “humanize” the Palestinians who will be granted the right to the politics of appeal. We are told their backstory (“just like us”) which will assure us that these Palestinians “are not terrorists.” But as El-Kurd argues, this actually de-humanizes Palestinians by denying them the very human trait of resistance to injustice. The irony is that our “humanization” is de-humanizing insofar as it denies Palestinians the right to complex desires and motives. “We are robbed of the right to complexity, to contradictory feelings, the right to ‘contain multitudes.’”

Perhaps above all we deny the Palestinian the right to violence that we preserve for western states and the IDF. El-Kurd puts this sharply: “The problem is, if you want to humanize the Palestinian, you have to defang the Palestinian.” The only Palestinians allowed to be human are those who play their assigned role as passive victims. In this colonial logic, only victimhood humanizes them. “We are not human, automatically, by virtue of being human—we are to be humanized by virtue of our proximity to innocence.” The Palestinians we see as “humanized” are those who not only suffer at hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces but are also careful not to suggest the world could or should be otherwise. We humanize the “perfect victims” who earn their humanity by obliging as victims. Only these perfect victims can be mourned. “Obituaries,” El-Kurd observes, “demand that we sew the wings of angels on the Palestinian’s back, so that he will then, and only then, become mournable.”

Humans who suffer such systematic oppression, surveillance, violence and incarceration would hate such oppression and their oppressors, would they not? Is this not the most human of human responses to exploitation and violence—to fight back? To rage against the boot on one’s neck? But it is precisely such a human response we deny the Palestinian who refuses to be “the perfect victim.” Any Palestinian not willing to play the role of “perfect victim” is labeled a terrorist, animal, scum—regarded as bodies to be bulldozed and bombed to the hell they deserve. Any Palestinian who questions the right of settlers is denied humanity. Their defiance and resistance is taken as proof of their subhuman status, confirming settler-colonial logic.

El-Kurd carefully amasses evidence of western media’s complicity in this logic. “Passive voice is king,” he points out.

When a 2014 Israeli airstrike on a cafe in Gaza blew eight Palestinians to shreds, the headline from the New York Times was “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup.” Whose missile? Whose gunfire? Who is the sniper?

Coverage of IDF violence largely reprints the press releases of Israeli authorities, chasing all the red herrings they plant (not to mention the weapons planted beside victims of Israeli snipers).⁴ “We waste our time fixating on whether the knife was planted next to the slain—which it often is—instead of fixating on why the slain might have sought to pick up the knife in the first place.”

This is an important theme that El-Kurd picks up from Mourid Barghouti who notes a little “linguistic trick” in our narratives about war, violence, and terrorism: start the story with “Secondly…”⁵:

Start your story with ‘secondly’ and the arrows of Red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with ‘secondly’ for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous as opposed to justified or even admirable.

Start the video at the reaction to the original violence of the settler/colonizer and the response looks like first blood. Or become effectively blind to the mass violence carried out by the state and only decry as violence what is undertaken in response to military action—then call it “terrorism.” Such ideology conditions our gaze. In this strange form of perception, the sniper’s bullet and the bomb’s blast don’t count as “violence” because they are “justified.” As if, by definition, the state could not terrorize.

Augustine’s Pirates

In this context, I often think of a remarkable passage in Book IV of Augustine’s City of God.⁶ Augustine suggests that our distinction between republics and gangs might not be as stable as we imagine.

“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms?”

We imagine the difference between “the gang” and “the kingdom” [insert “terrorist” and “state”] is a distinction of justice, authority, and legitimation. If only, Augustine says. The only difference is scale. So many kingdoms, he argues, are just wildly successful gangs that “scaled up.” The gang starts with a modicum of social organization for nefarious ends. Then:

“If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity.”⁷

It is in this context that Augustine recounts a kind of ancient urban legend about a confrontation between Alexander the Great and a captured pirate. It’s worth citing Augustine’s re-telling of the pirate’s “witty and truthful rejoinder”:

“The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor.’”

Who gets to be called an emperor? Who is impugned as a pirate? Whose violence is legitimated? Whose violence is “terrorizing?” Start the story with “secondly” and Native Americans “terrorized” settler populations. Start the video from the beginning and the invaders drew first blood with their impunity. October 7 is “secondly.” How could anyone imagine that the population of Gaza has not been terrorized by Israel’s (U.S.-made) bombs and snipers? Who could possibly fail to see the current President of the U.S. as pirate-in-chief? And when the state merely serves capital, what country isn’t a kleptocracy?

Illogic and Propaganda

I really urge you to read Perfect Victims. You need to hear El-Kurd’s voice, not mine. I cannot reproduce his granular attention to the names and faces of those who suffer in Gaza and the occupied territories. The scenes of children carrying their sibling’s body part in a grocery bag; the grinding anguish and hunger in detention centers that should rightly be called concentration camps; the smell of burning flesh. This is the Palestinian’s story to tell.

El-Kurd also undertakes a meta-media analysis of the way we talk about (“cover”) such violence, with a stinging critique of mainstream western media (especially the New York Times). All of this is urgent and necessary.

I’ll close by highlighting his important discussion of the insidious ways we are susceptible to propaganda. Propaganda is not just “spin,” an alternative set of selective facts about a situation. Propaganda has its own logic, even its own mode of perception. “The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction.” The propagandist, if successful, suckers us into refuting what doesn’t even deserve our attention: “propaganda is, by design, a diversion.”

“Distraction from what? The focal point: colonialism, siege, military occupation. Our children’s remains collected in shoeboxes.” We are subject to incessant, sensationalized coverage of the “pirate” and conveniently blind to the mass, systematic, perpetual violence of the “emperor.” We are lulled into “[s]ubmission to the colonial logic that vilifies the violence of the oppressed and turns a blind eye to the oppressor’s violence.”

What can we do? Perhaps, as a start, we can look the emperors in the eye and recognize their piracy. I give the last word to Mohammed El-Kurd:

I cannot help but think that this consequential moment calls on us to raise the ceiling of what is permissible, that it demands that we renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth, unflinchingly, unabashedly, cleverly, no matter in what conference room, no matter in whose face. Such bravery is asked of us now, not when gardens grow over our martyrs’ graves, not when the debris is swept up and sculpted into memorials, and not when the bloodied press vests of our fallen journalists rest eternally in shadow boxes. Those of us with platforms, with some level of protection, with some social capital or actual capital, must dare to shift culture and not only talk about the necessity of shifting culture. Because Gaza cannot fight the empire on its own. Or, to use an embittered proverb my grandmother used to mutter at the evening news, “They asked the Pharaoh, ‘Who made you a pharaoh?’ He replied, ‘No one stopped me.’”

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Out and About: Updates

A few upcoming engagements, in case I might be in your neighborhood:

• I’ll be in conversation with Jeff Chu about his new book, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand on March 29, 2:30pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids, MI. You can register for free.

• I’ll be giving a keynote address at a conference hosted by Providence College called “Great Things Beyond Searching Out: Transcendence in the Modern World,” April 25-26, 2025 in Providence, RI.

• I’ll be speaking at “Visible and Invisible,” a major symposium on theology & the arts hosted by the Duke Initiative in Theology and the Arts, September 4-7, 2025 in Durham, NC.

1. A proverb muttered by Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother.

2. I trust readers of Quid Amo are not susceptible to the sloppy reasoning (ubiquitous as it might be) that confuses anti-Zionism with anti-semitism. As El-Kurd points out, “Zionism weaponizes antisemitism” (p. 154). The remarkable irony is the way (actual!) antisemites can weaponize this weaponization. Welcome to America.

3. Consider our national reverence for a redacted version of non-violent MLK versus the infamy of the Black Panthers.

4. When Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot while wearing her Press Kevlar vest, she was later described as “armed with a camera.” Metaphors matter.

5. I noted a similar theme in Emmanuel Carrère’s coverage of the V13 trial when one of the defendants says to his accusers: “It’s like reading the last page of the book; what you should do is the read the book from the start.”

6. I am not alone in hearing this echo. See Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New.

7. Can one imagine a better description of the IDF?