Berlin 7.06.2025 | Mehringplatz
In a protest commemorating the Naksa day, 5 June 1967, this speech was delivered highlighting the dark history of European legacy of dehumanization and genocide.
Full text
In the 20th century, Europeans committed some of the worst atrocities in modern history. Germany committed two genocides alone. The European legacy was and is the dehumanization and exploitation of others. It is not democracy. It is not liberty. It is a disgusting past of colonialism and genocide.
The genocides of the 20th century happened under cover of darkness. The atrocities weren’t publicized. The victims had no say in how or if their story was told. And yet, when the atrocities came to light, it shook the world to its core. The world was never the same, or so they claimed.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was created after the atrocities of the Holocaust. The UN was established to protect human rights. And yet today, we have a live-streamed genocide like we have never seen before. Humanity has never witnessed genocide on this scale with this level of visibility.
The genocides of the 20th century didn’t have the audiovisual documentation we are seeing happen every day in Palestine. The world is watching as people are being blown into the sky, as children pick up pieces of flesh of their loved ones off the floor and put them in plastic bags just to give them a modicum of dignity in death. The videos are being published by the minute. Infants who are skin and bones, malnourished, their limp little bodies having barely the energy to breathe, let alone move. The mothers who cradle their starved children, helpless against the slow and painful death of starvation.
The atrocities do not end. Every morning we wake up to headlines of 10 dead in massacre at aid point, 5 shot by drones, 20 killed in air strikes on housing complex. The live-streamed genocide has showed us brutality that the world has never seen before, live and in colour. We have seen the flesh burn off of the bodies of hospital patients, charred and black. We have seen fathers lift the bodies of their lifeless children, some whose heads were completely severed.
And yet the EU has imposed no sanctions. The US has vetoed the Security Council resolution for the fifth time. The weapons are being shipped unobstructed by governments, and humanitarian organisations are still wasting time debating whether or not this is genocide.
Have you no shame, Europe? Europeans constantly want to distance themselves from their past. Yet the European Union is complicit now as their predecessors were then. I have no more words. Our society has become just as sick as the people over there waving the flag of a coloniser. They are a cancer infecting our communities.
You here are the only ones that give me hope in a future free of fascism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, and racism. But the tragic truth is many Palestinians will not live until tomorrow, much less see the day when Palestine is free.
May they all rest in peace.
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