“Start with yourself” by Basel Al Araj is a reflection on the mind of the oppressed that calls for inwardness as a path to awakening and confrontation.
To start with yourself is to interrogate what has settled inside you without consent. The softened language. The lowered expectations. The slow normalization of what should have never been normal. It is to ask how defeat learned to speak in your voice.
It is uncomfortable work. It strips away the illusion that the struggle is always “out there.” It forces you to face the subtle ways you accommodate, justify, and delay. The ways you inherit limits and then defend them as if they were your own conclusions.
But this is where clarity begins.
Because liberation is not only seized in the streets, it is first reclaimed in the mind. In the refusal to think like the structures that seek to dominate you. In the discipline to align your inner world with the truth you claim to stand for.
To start with yourself is to refuse fragmentation. To refuse to live one life in principle and another in practice. It is to close that gap until what you believe, what you say, and what you do become indistinguishable.
Working on yourself also means refining your character. What good is speaking for something noble if your conduct contradicts it? You cannot carry a just cause with arrogance, dishonesty, or ego and expect it to remain pure. Integrity is not optional or something you use as a buzzword by calling out others as unprincipled…it is the foundation. If your words call for dignity, then your behavior must reflect it. Otherwise, you’re not advancing the cause, you’re undermining it from within.
And from there, everything changes.
Not loudly, not performatively…but with a quiet, unshakable coherence that cannot be easily manipulated, distracted, or absorbed.
Before you speak of liberation, begin with yourself. As a direct confrontation of your nafs. Because a colonized mind cannot imagine freedom, only a softer cage, a more comfortable version of the same chains.
Basel al-Araj warned us: the occupation is not only on the land, it is in the mind. And when the mind is colonized, even our dreams are policed, we begin to confuse liberation with recognition, resistance with performance, and dignity with approval.
That is how liberalism seeps in and teaches you to be palatable instead of principled. To debate instead of confront. To organize optics instead of real outcomes. It convinces you that being seen is the same as being effective, and that speaking loudly is the same as speaking truth.
And don’t let them confuse you into believing this is your limit. Don’t let them convince you that you can’t do more just because they chose not to. They will try to shrink the struggle to fit their comfort, reduce it to their dressed up social events and safe performances because that’s where they can survive without sacrifice.
Especially in diaspora spaces, it festers. People build identities around causes they barely embody. They become untouchable for doing the bare minimum, allergic to criticism, intoxicated by their own reflection. Ego becomes the loudest voice in the room, dressed up as “leadership”.
But liberation demands something harsher. It demands that you break the walls inside before you pretend to break the walls outside. The walls of ego that make you defensive. The walls of comfort that make you compromise. The walls of illusion that make you believe this is enough.
Because it isn’t.
You cannot carry a liberated people with a colonized mind. You cannot dismantle systems of oppression while protecting your own petty fragility. And you cannot speak of freedom while embodying the very limitations imposed on you.
Our fight is bigger than their limitations. Bigger than their fear. Bigger than the small spaces they try to confine it to.
Real liberation begins where ego dies. Where comfort is rejected. Where you stop performing resistance and start living it.
“Shame on my hand if it shakes a hand that has struck the necks of my people.” — George Habash
This cause has red lines, and too many of you have crossed it.
What we’re watching in the diaspora today is the slow erosion of that boundary under the weight of liberalism. Everything becomes a conversation, every crime becomes a perspective, every oppressor becomes someone you’re expected to “engage.” And in that process, people convince themselves that sitting across from those who justify colonization and massacres is somehow principled, even courageous. It isn’t. It’s normalization.
You don’t debate someone who defends your dispossession. You don’t share a platform with someone who rationalizes your people’s death. The moment you do, you’ve already accepted the premise that this is a disagreement between equals instead of a reality of oppression. Liberalism thrives on that illusion. It trains you to value optics over truth, access over integrity, performance over principle.
Revolutionary traditions were built on the opposite: principled refusals. A refusal to legitimize the oppressor, a refusal to blur moral lines, a refusal to turn injustice into a topic of debate. This isn’t extremism or purity politics, it’s clarity. Because once you shake that hand, once you enter that “dialogue,” you’ve given away the one thing your enemy seeks most: legitimacy.
People love quoting revolutionaries, turning them into captions and aesthetics, but they abandon their most basic lesson: there is no neutrality or half-measures. You either stand with the oppressed or you help normalize the systems crushing them. Today, normalization doesn’t only come through agreements, it comes through platforms, panels, and debates that dress oppression up as discourse.
A principled refusal is not silence. It’s not weakness. It’s discipline. It’s drawing a line and refusing to let it be crossed, no matter how palatable the alternative is made to seem.
Because the line was never meant to be negotiated.
Talk to whom?
To the settler who stands on stolen land and calls it a “dispute”?
To the empire that drops bombs by day and asks for dialogue by night?
Ghassan Kanafani said it clearly: this is a conversation between the sword and the neck.
Empire wants dialogue because it launders violence into “perspective.” It turns occupation into debate, genocide into an argument, and resistance into something that must ask permission.
There is no conversation under domination. There is no neutrality in colonization. There is no balance when one side is buried and the other is broadcast.
Our people were not martyred so we could sit across from their killers and exchange ideas. They did not endure siege so we could legitimize the language of our own erasure.
You do not debate a system built on your disappearance. You confront it. You dismantle it. You refuse it.
Talk to whom?
The only answer empire understands is resistance.
Everything else is normalization.
They quote the martyrs like poetry, but ignore them as soon as it’s convenient.
Ghassan Kanafani told you exactly what this is: a conversation between the sword and the neck. Not a dialogue. Not an exchange of ideas. A relationship of domination, where one side cuts and the other is expected to speak.
And yet today, people who call themselves “activists”sit across from those who justify occupation, dispossession, and bloodshed and call it courage. They package it as awareness. They dress it up as intellectual warfare. But it is none of that.
It is normalization.
You don’t invite the one who uproots your people to a table and grant him legitimacy through your presence. You don’t humanize an ideology built on your erasure. You don’t turn a reality of violence into a performance of “both sides.”
Our martyrs didn’t die for this diluted theatre.
They didn’t sacrifice so their struggle could be reduced to content, clipped into debates, and consumed by an audience that forgets by the next scroll. They lived the clarity people today are too uncomfortable to uphold: the enemy is not a perspective to entertain.
There is a deep contradiction in praising resistance while engaging its opposite. In glorifying revolutionaries while rejecting the discipline of their principles. In romanticizing sacrifice while fearing the consequences of standing firm.
The line is simple, and it has always been simple.
We do not normalize with those who justify our oppression.
We do not sit, smile, and exchange with those who deny our humanity. We do not debate the legitimacy of our own existence.
Because some things are not topics.
They are realities. They are crimes.
Realities and crimes like these are not debated, they are resisted and prosecuted. They are paid for in blood and justice.
Oppression does not fear debate because debate, in the wrong setting, protects it. It pulls it out of the realm of the unacceptable and places it into the marketplace of ideas. It grants it a seat, a microphone, a tone of reason. It allows it to exist not as a structure to be dismantled, but as a position to be argued.
And that is normalization.
Normalization is not just agreement. It is familiarity without consequence. It is the repetition of an unjust position until it feels ordinary. Until hearing it no longer shocks. Until responding to it becomes routine.
A colonizer does not need you to concede.
He needs you to engage.
Because engagement signals that there is something to discuss. That there is room for interpretation. That the crime has not yet been settled in the moral consciousness of the audience.
You don’t invite a criminal to debate his crime. A crime is not a perspective. This is normalization. Full stop.
Debating Zionists is normalization. We don’t debate genocidal maniacs. We don’t sit across with them and engage with their ideas. We don’t intellectualize our cause into a debate. We don’t engage with the enemy as equals when the conversation is between the sword and the neck. We don’t normalize theirs ideas. We don’t normalize a conversation. We don’t normalize.
Abandoned by their own, their world, and the world itself, they did not disappear; they endured, rooted deeper, and became the unbreakable spine of resistance.
@arabconferenceharvard claims to represent Arab voices. But look at who it stands with.
It is partnered with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, led by Erez Manela, an Israeli liberal Zionist whose work normalizes the IOF by reframing occupation and violence as complexity and moral dilemma.
At the same time, they invite figures like Abdulla Al Khalifa, representing regimes that openly embrace normalization, alongside Lebanese anti-resistance elitist Saleh Al Machnouk who recycles the same logic as Western and Emirati agendas, dressing submission up as pragmatism.
An Arab conference rooted in institutions that legitimize oppression, and that platforms voices aligned with it, is not creating space for liberation.
It is managing it.
@arabconferenceharvard
The Ivy League Laundromat: How the HAAA Sells Out the Arab Street. The Harvard Arab Alumni Association (HAAA) has long paraded itself as a prestigious beacon of Arab thought and leadership in the West. Yet, a closer look at the platforming at the Arab Conference at Harvard reveals a far more insidious reality: the intellectual laundering of imperialism. By rolling out the red carpet for normalization advocates and regime proxies, the HAAA has transformed a gathering meant for Arab solidarity into a sanitization machine for Zionist apologetics.
The shame is indescribable. Decades of massacres and pain endured by a people whose resilience is insurmountable, only to see their flag raised beside the enemy’s, and their honourable blood used to lubricate the filthy hands of traitors, serving genocidal maniacs. The Lebanese government has always been known to be spineless, self-serving, and corrupt. This, however, is yet another reminder that nothing has changed since Sabra and Shatila. The same powers, the same interests, still reign. And once again, it is the same heroes, the same people, who pay the price.
