Odenplan
Author: Jan Olof Bengtsson
Spirituality - Arts & Humanities - Europe
Intervju med Hasan Piker
Strax efter sin intervju med Molly Crabapple i maj gjorde Simone Zimmerman i sitt program Beyond Israelism också en intervju med Hasan Piker, som är viktig även för dem som har problem med en del av hans uppfattningar; några som jag själv finner problematiska framskymtar och tangeras också här. Intervjun går dessutom ibland in på detaljer om amerikanska namn och händelser på senare tid som åtminstone för mig är mindre kända och därför mindre lätta att följa. Men den är värd att höra främst därför att Piker länge framstått som en mycket betydelsefull figur i den amerikanska debatten och opinionsbildningen när det gäller de frågor om sionismen och antisemitismen som Zimmerman fokuserar på.
Den bidrar därför till att ge en klarare bild av situationen på detta centrala område i det land där radikal förändring är allra mest nödvändig för västerlandets framtid och världens fred.
“On the latest episode of ‘Beyond Israelism’, Simone Zimmerman sits down with Twitch streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker – arguably one of the most influential left-wing voices in American media today. Seven days a week, eight to 10 hours a day, Piker talks to millions of young people about income inequality, capitalism, imperialism, and Palestine. Yet, rather than being celebrated by Democrats desperate to reach young voters (didn’t they want a ‘Joe Rogan of the left?’), he has become their most convenient target. Hasan has been smeared as an antisemite, allegedly subpoenaed by the Trump administration (he denies actually receiving a subpoena), and attacked relentlessly by the hasbara industry. Most recently, he was even barred from entering the UK for allegedly criticizing Israel.
Despite being called an antisemite on a near-daily basis, Piker remains one of the most consistent voices against antisemitism, tracing its roots in right-wing ideology with precision most commentators don’t bother with. His position is simple, and he states it plainly: no group is a monolith, and the fact that a multimillion-dollar industry exists to conflate Jewish identity with the State of Israel is proof enough of that. This is a conversation about independent media, political courage, and why the left cannot afford to silence its own …
CHAPTERS: 00:00 – Intro 5:04 – Hasan wears suits now 6:40 – Hasan’s background 10:10 – Islamophobia 13:03 – How are U.S. politics shifting? 20:02 – Attacks on free speech 31:12 – Jonathan Greenblatt is obsessed 33:35 – Criticisms of Zionism 36:55 – Antisemitism accusations 41:18 – Why is Zionism faltering? 44:01 – Tucker Carlson & Nick Fuentes 50:23 – The Democrats”
Aleksandr Gerasimov: Roses
Politiska inlägg 2023
History of the Three Internationals
The World Socialist and Communist Movements from 1848 to the Present
Av CPUSA:s kände ledare under partiets storhetstid, William Z. Foster. 1955.
Caleb T. Maupin: William Z. Foster and the Communist Party
Independently published, 2025
Publisher’s Description:
Dive into the gripping true history of the American radical labor movement through the life of William Z. Foster – the militant organizer who helped build the CIO, fought fascism, challenged racism, defied corporate America, and stood firm through McCarthyist terror. This powerful narrative follows Foster and the Communist Party USA from underground meetings and epic sit-down strikes to FBI infiltration, international betrayals, and the bitter ideological split of 1956.
In roughly 100 pages, Caleb Maupin gives you all kinds of important information, telling you everything you need to know about the Communist Party’s influential years and William Z. Foster, the man who lead it.
Grand Hôtel Pupp, Karlsbad
Eyal Weizman: Ungrounding
The Architecture of Genocide
Penguin Press, 2026
Publisher’s Description:
From an acclaimed architect and investigator, a devastating, meticulous accounting of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and crimes against its people
Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict, and the built and natural environment. As director of the organization Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers have spent decades investigating and documenting acts of war and human rights violations around the world, including extensive work in Weizman’s native Israel and Palestine. Since 2023, the group’s efforts have focused on producing evidence for the International Court of Justice’s case against Israel.
In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that original and extraordinarily comprehensive research to bring us on an eye-opening journey through the “deep cartography” of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarized topography, settlements, and barriers. He catalogs, in unflinching and exacting detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unlivable for the Palestinian people. Taking us through the broader geographical and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between colonizer and colonized – and how Israel’s actions have escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.
Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.
Reviews:
“This impressive exposé from Weizman, founder of human rights investigative group Forensic Architecture, outlines how Israel uses environmental destruction as a tool of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians … the author offers a myth-busting history of Gaza’s tunnels that presents them as necessary civic infrastructure used to connect bifurcated refugee camps and subvert blockades … It’s a sickening look at Israel’s systemic erasure of Palestinian life.”
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“A timely and crucial contribution tracing the trail of the Israeli architectural, ecological, and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip. The ruthlessness and inhumanity detailed in this extraordinary book, nonetheless, also hold hope for turning the future soil and grounds into spaces of liberation and reconciliation.”
Ilan Pappé, author of Israel on the Brink
“Ungrounding is a brilliant, shocking, and urgent book for our times, as well as a precious warning to future generations.”
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and author of Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance
“In the face of overwhelming state violence, Forensic Architecture is becoming an indispensable tool of international law and human rights, as well as a new approach to history. Ungrounding is a work of profound moral clarity and scientific precision, based on years of tireless collaboration and advocacy. Urgent and essential reading.”
David Wengrow, co-author of New York Times-bestselling The Dawn of Everything
“Ungrounding powerfully reveals the architecture of the genocide in Gaza within its century-long context. But with a forensic architect’s precision, Weizman excavates, reassembles, and ultimately lays the foundations for an architecture of liberation.”
Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction
“Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman proves that decolonization is not revenge, but a condition for justice and, in the end, for the liberation of both Palestinians and Israelis.”
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur and author of A Moon Will Rise from the Darkness: Reports on Israel’s Genocide in Palestine
“Ungrounding leads us between layers of earth and history, soil and infrastructure, elucidating both the long history of Israeli aggression against Gaza and the histories of Palestinian resistance … Weizman cuts through obfuscations and horror, and helps us to see something of the truth.”
Isabella Hammad, author of Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
“A wake-up call to the world and the international community – a very important book.”
Shawan Jabarin, general director of Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq
About the Author:
Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, in 2005, he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Conflict Shoreline and Forensic Architecture. He is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” a Peabody Award, the European Cultural Foundation Award, and numerous other awards in human rights, investigative journalism, art, and architecture. In 2019, he was elected Life Fellow of the British Academy.
Requiem pour la French Theory
På den utmärkta nätlanseringen nyligen av den engelska versionen av denna viktiga, två år gamla bok framgick att den försetts med en längre inledning av John Bellamy Foster, vilket gör att det i första hand måste vara den som bör beställas.
Att förstå den betydelsemättade ironin i användningen av den amerikanska termen “French Theory” i titeln. I första kapitlet förklarar Monville dess uppkomst och kommenterar bl.a. att “Il y a forcément une sorte de décalage, qui frise l’ironie, voire la blague, dans le fait d’utiliser le terme en anglais, et je ne suis pas sûr que les lecteurs anglo-saxons en aient toujours conscience.”
Judisk socialism och antisionism
Texten med frågan “Jews Against Zionism?” som kommer upp på bilden till detta Molly-avsnitt av Marc Lamont Hills program UpFront på Al Jazeera English är lika märklig som den nästan identiska, “Jewish Anti-Zionism?”, som kom upp för Simone Zimmermans motsvarande avsnitt av Beyond Israelism. Den judiska antisionismens förefintlighet, och dess radikalt olika versioners, är ingenting nytt och den har också alltid varit ganska välkänd, långt före Molly, ja redan från början.
Men Molly, Molly, Molly. Vilken ofantlig förstärkning hon dock har givit den judiska vänster som representerar den, främst i USA men, hoppas man, mer och mer även i Europa (hon kommer till Stockholm i höst), genom sin enastående kunskapsspridning om Bund och dess historia. Och därmed sitt bidrag till återuppväckandet och förnyelsen av dess socialistiska riktning och program som en politisk och kulturell kraft idag.
I denna intervju ligger tyngdpunkten litet mer än i tidigare på det sistnämnda. Man vill höra mer om det nu. Om en neobundistisk rörelse i hela västvärlden, utvecklad i ljuset av och som svar på och alternativ till hela den sionistiska erfarenheten.
“Founded in 1897 in the Russian Empire, the General Jewish Labour Bund was a revolutionary socialist movement that organised Jewish workers and championed Yiddish culture and democracy while standing against Zionism.
But what remains of its memory? And is its vision finding new life in the Jewish left today?
This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill speaks to Emmy Award-winning artist and author Molly Crabapple.”
