Link to last week’s reading group post.

Summary of this book.

The first book for this reading group will be Perfect Victims, by Mohammed El-Kurd. I’ve pasted the summary below.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

This book touches a lot on how Palestinians are constantly expected (especially by Europeans, who invented anti-semitism) to apologize for being Palestinians, and for being victimized by Jewish people.

Comrades who can’t afford to buy the book should definitely not go to annas-archive (dot) org and find a digital copy there, since that would be wrong and we are all law-abiding, copyright-respecting citizens.

Sorry about the delay posting this thread. I wanted to wait until after the New Year and then recent events happened.

    • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      18 days ago

      I’m glad we’re doing 1 chapter a week because everything is so heartbreaking it wrecks me and I need to take a break.  I could read a fiction book this size in a day or 2.  I think it’s going to take me pushing to do 1 chapter a week of this one at this rate

      • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        18 days ago

        I expect that might be what I’ll have to do as well cuddle There’s only one other text that hit me like this and it was a news article that I had to read for school narrated by a woman who survived a massacre in El Salvador in the 80’s.

        In this book, In the case of the first page, I felt a sense of banality behind the terrible things he was describing which made it all the more horrific. I really hope that the people who NEED to read this are doing so

        Edit: I mean in the author’s chosen narrative style

        • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          18 days ago

          Was it El Mozote? Because I read about that in 2019 in an Intercept article and it still haunts me. The Reagan admin belongs in Hell, because it would take an eternity of torture to pay for what evil and sadism they committed.