"The minimum we owe is solidarity" w/ Asli Bâli

Makdisi Street

Bayt al Makdisi

Politics, News

4.9 • 643 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The brothers welcome Aslı Bâli, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and President of the Middle East Studies Association. They discuss the increasingly repressive academic climate in the United States over the question of Palestine led by private sector as well as the current Trump Administration, how anti-Palestinian racism is used as a wedge issue in contemporary culture wars, how Zionist and rightwing organizations seek to criminalize dissent by claiming that it is discriminatory, and then how this politics is connected to the increasingly repressive Pax Americana in the Middle East itself. Finally, they discuss the stakes of fighting for international law and human rights, and the minimum duty of solidarity with Palestinians incumbent upon ethical scholars committed to justice.

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Date of recording: January 28, 2025.

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Music by Hadiiiiii

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We have access to archives, access to travel funding, access to research, etc.
0:03.6	The minimum thing we owe is solidarity.
0:06.0	The minimum thing we have to give back is not only solidarity with the populations that we're studying,
0:11.5	but also solidarity with our own colleagues who don't have any of these luxuries
0:15.6	as a consequence of the policies of the country where we pay taxes,
0:19.0	beginning with Ghazan scholars where we began this conversation,
0:22.3	whose entire higher education sector has been destroyed, whose colleagues and students have been
0:26.5	killed, and expanding all across the region, every displaced scholar in the region has been
0:30.8	displaced in one way or another is a consequence of also policies of the United States, also
0:35.4	funding by the United States. People have faced destruction
0:38.0	from Libya to Iraq to Yemen to Gaza to Syria as a consequence of the taxes we pay.
0:45.8	Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of Magdisi Street. Today we have a very special guest,
0:51.6	Professor Asla Bala, who is the Howard Holtzman Professor of Law at Yale Law School.
0:57.8	Usla's teaching and research interests who included public international law, especially a focus on human rights law and the law of international security order, and comparative constitutional law with a focus, of course, on the Middle East.
1:10.6	Prior to joining Yale's Law School, Asla was a professor of law at UCLA School of Law, where she served as a founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and was also the director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
1:24.6	Usla is also, in addition to being an extraordinary scholar and public speaker,
1:29.0	Asla is the president of the Middle East Studies Association,
1:32.6	which is the largest association, scholarly association,
1:36.2	dealing with the Middle East.
1:38.6	And so, Asla, it's a great honor for us to have you here with us today on Magdice Street.
1:49.5	So, Asla, welcome to Magtisi Street. We're really delighted to have you. And I guess the first question we would ask you is, given where you are at
1:55.3	Yale and where you've been at UCLA, and your authority as an expert in international law and also as president
	...

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