Hasnain says:

Always speaking truth to power. Her words are always so powerful. I do have to note that PEN refused to link to her speech when it announced the award on its social media.

So hard to pick one quote from here. Read the whole thing.

“Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator. Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.”

Posted on 2024-10-13T03:38:45+0000