Producing Knowledge on Palestine feat. Dana El Kurd

Summary

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Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here – "Producing Knowledge on Palestine" feat. Dana El Kurd

Release Date: November 20, 2025
Host: Dana El Kurd (with guest Shireen Sekari)

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Overview

This episode of "It Could Happen Here" centers on the crucial topic of Palestinian knowledge production—exploring how knowledge about Palestine has historically been generated, preserved, and challenged within academic and public spaces. Host Dana El Kurd, a professor and researcher on Arab and Palestinian politics, is joined by Shireen Sekari, historian and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Together, they discuss the historical legacy and current obstacles facing Palestinian academics, the role of community and resistance within scholarship, and the increasingly fraught conditions under which Palestinian studies are conducted, especially in the wake of recent escalations in Gaza and heightened repression in U.S. academia.

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Key Discussion Points

The Role and Legacy of the Journal of Palestine Studies

• The Journal's Origins and Mission

  • The Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) was founded in 1971 amid a landscape of "erasure, denial, and urgency," aiming to create an international forum for free academic discussion of the Palestine question.
  • Founders included notable figures like Hisham Sharabi, Walid Khalidi, and Constantine Zreich (who named the Nakba, "the catastrophe," in 1948).
  • "The story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people... really confronting a landscape of erasure, denial and urgency. And occupying this kind of steady, incessant pain of the original inception of the Nakba." – Shireen Sekari (03:18)

• Knowledge Production as Resistance

  • The Journal provided groundbreaking research and was ahead of its time, publishing critical revelations such as the empirical basis for Plan Dalet (the destruction of Palestinian villages).
  • “A lot of our understanding [of the conflict] that are now finally starting to seep into the mainstream were first discussed in these pages...it is a form of resistance to erasure.” – Dana El Kurd (05:39)

Marginalization of Palestinian Voices in Academia

• Systemic Barriers and Surveillance

  • Both hosts discuss the barriers Palestinian scholars face—heightened scrutiny, the need for greater rigor, and an ever-present threat of harassment and surveillance.
  • “You have to show up 10 times more ready than anybody else. It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded." – Shireen Sekari (09:06)

• Personal Accounts of Harassment

  • Shireen shares experiences of online targeted harassment, especially post-9/11 and in light of increasing surveillance on Palestinian academics:
    • “I'd come out of my lecture... and I'd have 50 notifications, and it would just be one insult after another. And that's just part of the job.” – Shireen Sekari (15:25)
  • The historic attempts to police and silence critical discourse on Palestine are not new, and records of surveillance and harassment date back decades.

The Post–October 7 Context: Heightened Repression

• Increased Targeting within Academia

  • Since the recent escalation in Gaza, there has been a concerted effort to erase Palestinians from U.S. higher education and scholarship.
  • Widely publicized persecution of pro-Palestinian speech and punitive Title VI investigations on alleged antisemitism are discussed:
    • “There’s been a huge uptick in [Title VI] investigations... specifically about antisemitism and nothing else.” – Dana El Kurd (30:12)

• Weaponization of Antisemitism Allegations

  • The majority of these cases are shown to be “totally fraudulent,” a means of policing and silencing critical perspectives on Israel/Palestine:
    • “It’s a real policing of speech. It’s a real kind of weaponization of the charge of antisemitism.” – Shireen Sekari (31:29)

The Political Economy and Intersectionality of Knowledge Production

• Whose Knowledge Gets Validated?

  • There is a recurring pattern that Palestinian perspectives are deemed legitimate only when echoed by Israeli or Western scholars.
  • “There’s an inherent suspicion about the Palestinian scholar, the Palestinian analyst, the Palestinian knowledge producer of some kind.” – Dana El Kurd (07:38)

• Palestine as Paradigm

  • Palestine is used both as a cudgel against higher education and as a paradigm for broader struggles, including class oppression, racialization, and the right to knowledge:
    • “Palestine is a class issue.” – Dana El Kurd (23:12)
    • “All of the struggles we stand in, in solidarity with... it is intersectional, and we didn’t need Trump to teach us that.” – Shireen Sekari (24:01)

• Students’ Lived Reality

  • Many public university students are indebted, working multiple jobs, and facing housing/food insecurity—conditions echoed in their empathy with Palestinian struggle and skepticism toward institutional narratives of progress.
  • “Our students are disgruntled, they want to learn. They’ve been promised something with this college education. And even the slight bit of social mobility... is too much for this right wing.” – Dana El Kurd (23:12)

The Importance of Centering Palestinian Knowledge and Agency

• Why Palestinian Scholars Matter

  • Beyond identity, Palestinian scholars “know best what questions are relevant and they have a unique perspective on the issue” (34:28). Excluding their voices makes scholarship poorer and limits understanding.

• Rejecting Dehumanization through Storytelling

  • Centering Palestinian voices is a way to resist their exclusion from humanity and counteract violent narratives:
    • “Once you exclude people from the category of the human, it’s much easier to kill them and make them expendable... telling of the story changes the angle of vision.” – Shireen Sekari (37:07)

• Decentering European Frameworks

  • “We have to really provincialize Europe as the means and ends of all things... ask different questions and look at it from a different perspective.” – Shireen Sekari (39:20)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Journal as a Tool of Resistance:
  • “Knowledge production is just... a form of resistance to erasure.” – Dana El Kurd (05:39)
• Personal Toll of Surveillance:
  • “I’m constantly... experiencing these things and just... swallowing it, right. Just getting along with the business of every day.” – Shireen Sekari (15:25)
• Weaponization of Antisemitism:
  • “95% of [Title VI] cases have been shown to be... totally fraudulent. So, yeah, it’s a real policing of speech.” – Shireen Sekari (31:28)
• Education as Community Defense:
  • “[W]e have to take care of each other in the communities that we build.” – Shireen Sekari (39:27)
• Guidance to Students/Scholars:
  • “First and foremost, study, read, learn. Those are the critical tools that you gain that will allow you to defend yourself in a world that is intent on making you stupid.” – Shireen Sekari (39:27)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 03:18 – Background and legacy of the Journal of Palestine Studies
• 05:39 – Knowledge production as resistance and Plan Dalet research
• 09:06 – Discussing historical surveillance and academic barriers
• 15:25 – Personal stories of harassment and adjusting to its reality
• 30:12 – Post–October 7 crackdown: weaponization of antisemitism allegations
• 31:29 – Discussion of fraudulent harassment cases and the “policing of speech”
• 34:28 – Why centering Palestinian agency and scholarship matters
• 37:07 – The dehumanization problem and the power of storytelling
• 39:27 – Calls to collective study, care, and community

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Final Reflections and Calls to Action

• The episode concludes with a passionate urging to defend knowledge, critically engage with Palestinian scholarship, and support Palestinian-led research spaces, notably the Journal of Palestine Studies.
• Academics and students are encouraged to remain vigilant, prioritize rigorous study, and focus on mutual care within their communities of learning and resistance.
• Dana El Kurd thanks Shireen Sekari and urges listeners to support the Journal of Palestine Studies' fundraising campaign, emphasizing such support as "a surefire way to help resist these dynamics." (40:58)

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For Further Reading and Support:
Visit the Journal of Palestine Studies and check the episode’s show notes for reports and fundraising links. The conversation is ongoing—both hosts exemplify the commitment to sharing truth and resilience in the face of deep adversity.

Transcript

[Shireen Sekari]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Ed Helms]

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[Shireen Sekari]

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[Josh Zieman]

A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught, the answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zieman and this is Monster Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the Son of Sam. Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maggie Freeling]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Ed Helms]

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[Maggie Freeling]

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Listen to heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maggie Freeling]

Cool Zone Media.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Hello everyone. My name is Dana Al Kurd and this is it could happen here. I'm a professor and researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics and a senior non resident fellow at the Arab Center, Washington. Today we're joined by Shireen Sekari, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital, Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine explores economy, territory, the home, the body. She's also editor in chief of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Today I wanted to invite Shirin on to discuss the importance of Palestinian knowledge production and Palestinian spaces for writing, researching, analyzing, et cetera. So yeah, Shirin, thank you so much for coming on.

[Shireen Sekari]

Thank you for having me.

[Dana Al Kurd]

So let's maybe start with a very basic question. What is the Journal of Palestine Studies? Could you give us an overview?

[Shireen Sekari]

Sure. So the Journal of Palestine Studies is the flagship journal of Palestinian studies in the English language. It was established in 1971, so that makes it 54 years old. First, it was part of the then Beirut based, and still Beirut based Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University, which sponsored what was understood at the time as an international forum to discuss all aspects of the Palestine question and the Arab Zionist conflict. And really, the people who established it were looking for shaping a space that could discuss these matters freely. And the story of the founders is a really interesting one because they were people like Hisham Sharabi, Walid Khalidi, Burhan Dushani, Fouad Saroof, and Constantine Zreich, who actually was the person who coined the way that we name the Nakba in his book Mana Nakba that he wrote in 1948, in which he coined this term the catastrophe. To think about 1948, which would be our ongoing condition. And I think the way to think about these people in the way that they began the Journal, is to think about them as really confronting a landscape of erasure, denial and urgency and occupying this kind of steady, incessant pain of the original inception of the Nakba. You know, think about it. In 1971, it was not that long before a decade and a half.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, right.

[Shireen Sekari]

And I think what's important about, you know, in the last couple of years, people have been kind of making demands about Palestinian studies as part of, you know, some of the student movements and the staff and faculty movements. And I think it's really important for people to know that this comes from a much longer tradition of the production of knowledge as a real insistence on existence.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Absolutely. Palestinians have been producing knowledge about their state of affairs. You know, just like today, academics in Gaza are producing knowledge. Right. And I am always, like, struck by how just ahead of its time, the Journal of Palestine Studies is. A lot of our understanding of the conflict that are now finally starting to seep into the mainstream were first discussed in these pages. Some of the research findings about the history were first articulated in these pages. And so that kind of knowledge production is just. It is a form of resistance to erasure.

[Shireen Sekari]

Absolutely. And just, you know, some of those would be, for example, Plan Dalit, which was the, you know, the plan which would lead to the destruction of 450 to 537 Palestinian villages. And this plan would come to be recognized through the work of Benny Morris as Israeli historian, who had access to Israeli documents. But it's actually was Walid Khalidi who had been evidencing and showing the empirical foundations of Plan Dalit. And it was in the Journal of Palestine Studies that he published those findings.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Right.

[Shireen Sekari]

In that case, I think that again, for people who are really engaging the movement for free Palestine and free Palestinians, we really have to be approaching the political economy of who gets to speak and whose knowledge production is uplifted as legitimate and worthy. And I think you see a lot of this kind of centering of Israeli voices. And I think we really have to, in this moment, it's urgent to center Palestinian knowledge production.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, there's just so many ways that we witness this all the time that it's not something worthy of discussion unless an Israeli voice says it. And there's an inherent suspicion about the Palestinian scholar, the Palestinian analyst, the Palestinian knowledge producer of some kind. Now, of course, the last two years have been a true upheaval. The genocide in Gaza, a tragedy that we honestly, we haven't really absorbed and possibly can't. And we've seen in the last two years a concerted effort to erase Palestinians further from the American academy, but from also scholarship, generally speaking. But before I get into that, I wondered if you could give your impression of what did doing Palestinian studies look like before October 7th? Was it easy? Was it acceptable? I mean, I know the answers, but I'd like you to say them.

[Shireen Sekari]

So I think one of the things that's been interesting to observe, and I would date this as happening around Covid, when our colleagues in various disciplines started confronting the reality of their archives closing. So I'm a historian, so I speak from that place. You know, people who study Europe, people who study the United States, kind of confronting the reality that they might not access archives that they're accustomed accessing. And in a similar way, facing the kind of targeting and surveillance, the bipartisan targeting and surveillance of academic knowledge production and trying to explain to people this is what we've existed under all along. Now, I think there are similarities across communities of knowledge production. So I think people who work in black studies, who work in indigenous studies, who work in queer studies, gender and sexuality, have also been under the duress of surveillance and targeting. I think for those of us who have been doing Palestinian studies, what does it mean? Especially if you're a Palestinian doing it. But whoever you are, it means you have to show up 10 times more ready than anybody else. It means you have to conduct yourself as if you are always being recorded.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Right.

[Shireen Sekari]

It means that every single word that you say, you should be able to stand up for in a court of law. And all of those kinds of restrictions. Actually, you know, you give us lemons, we're going to make lemonade. Because those restrictions have imposed on us a kind of rigor that is the least that we can do.

[Josh Zieman]

A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught, the answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zieman, and this is Monster Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the Son of Sam. Available now listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu. Every single episode.

[Maggie Freeling]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Shireen Sekari]

You're like, wait, stop. What?

[Josh Zieman]

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[Shireen Sekari]

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[Ed Helms]

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[Dana Al Kurd]

What was that like for you to.

[Maggie Freeling]

Soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

[Maggie Freeling]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half truth is a whole lie.

[Maggie Freeling]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Shireen Sekari]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Maggie Freeling]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Ed Helms]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

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I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or.

[Ed Helms]

Burn or any of that other stuff.

[Dana Al Kurd]

That y' all said.

[Shireen Sekari]

They literally made me say that I.

[Maggie Freeling]

Took a match and struck and threw it on her.

[Shireen Sekari]

They made me say that I poured gas on her.

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From Lava for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Ed Helms]

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[Maggie Freeling]

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[Dana Al Kurd]

We call the shots.

[Molly Lambert]

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[Shireen Sekari]

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[Shireen Sekari]

It also means, I mean, I think for a lot of us, yourself included. Right. I was just, somebody was interviewing me yesterday about, oh, have you, have you faced harassment or censorship or so, And I think, at least in my case, I'm. I'm constantly, you know, experiencing these things and just kind of swallowing it. Right. Do you know what I mean?

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, yeah.

[Shireen Sekari]

Just getting along with the business of the everyday. So, you know, there was this moment back in 2015, 2016, where for whatever reason, every couple of months, one of the bots of one of these surveillance websites would start highlighting me and insulting me on Twitter, you know, liable, calling me names, going after how I look like really vulgar, misgendering me, that kind of thing. And I'd come out of my lecture, you know, and, you know, I teach big classes and I'd come out of a big, you know, 250 person lecture, which requires so much focus and energy and being present and, you know, that adrenaline rush. And I'd look at my phone and I'd have 50 notifications, and it would just be one insult after another. And that's just part of the job. Yeah. And that's just how it's been. Right. Like, you know, from the beginning, at least, of my graduate career and I started grad school. You know, September 11th happened when I was in grad school and I was in New York when it happened. And, you know, we've been under surveillance. We've been named, we've been watched as part of what we do, as you said. And in fact, I got my master's at the center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and they wrote a book back in the 80s about the surveillance, and I think it's called they Dare to Speak.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Oh, right, right. Yeah.

[Shireen Sekari]

These early accounts of the concerted attempt to silence us. And so what I like to remind people is at this moment, you know, you said, oh, they're trying to erase Palestinian scholars. I mean, at least they're trying to erase voices who are putting forward a critical take on Israeli settler colonialism and genocide. And I think what I like to remind people is that there is way more of us now than there's ever been before.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, good point.

[Shireen Sekari]

Ten years ago, people like you and me wouldn't have jobs in the academy. It may be in a couple years we won't have jobs, but I don't know, like, I'm not. I don't want to sit on our laurels and think, oh, okay, we've arrived. In any case, the whole concept of arrival and career arrival at this moment has completely changed for me. I don't know how it is for you, but the effect of the genocide has made it so that the bankruptcy of the institutions we work for, the, the. The rapid a ways in which they are engaging with obedience and authoritarianism.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yep.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yeah, it's like what we've worked for our whole careers. It's like, well, I don't think this makes sense actually. Do you know?

[Dana Al Kurd]

Right.

[Shireen Sekari]

So I would say it's been like that all along. People even saying to you things like, oh, there, what do you mean? You study Palestine? You know, like, what is that? Yeah, so, yeah, yeah.

[Dana Al Kurd]

I mean, I'm in a different discipline, but certainly it was. I remember as a student hungry for information, I mean, it was rare to find something about the Middle east to be taught, let alone Palestine, the level to which they delegitimized Arab and Palestinian sources or questions of importance to Palestinians and Arabs, normatively speaking, politically speaking, also theoretically speaking, I mean, the amount, I mean, I can tell you so many stories. Like every person who has ever wanted to study Palestine, especially as you said, if you are Palestinian, is discouraged from it and is told not to, is told, this doesn't fit, is told. You know, I'm in political science. The theories don't account for Palestine. It's just outside of space and time and theory. And you can't account for it. You can't discuss it. And the harassment, the harassment campaigns all of us have been facing, I mean, it's, it takes such a mental and emotional toll, and yet we produce, and yet we get tenure, and yet we teach our classes and we're excellent in our teaching and our students love us and want to learn. But you know, as you said, like, it really has exposed the degree to which these universities, because they have been, well, one, like we are in America, but also because they have been so divorced from their actual missions, like how meaningless the space this has now become. But that's like on the harassment and like kind of these kinds of obstacle side. I also think, like, people don't recognize, like the resources that are needed to teach and study and, and research Palestine that other people in the academy, other knowledge producers get very easily. And there is so little for people who study Palestine. And of course, that impacts what kind of academics are able to do this and how many people we're missing from this discussion. Right. I agree with you. That has been the condition before October 7th. I think now after October 7th, that after they have attempted to use Palestine as kind of a cudgel to attack the higher education generally. Now people are recognizing it maybe more, but that has always definitely been the case. Oh, also, I just wanted to remind listeners and, and, and bring it up. Like, I remember Barry Weiss, who is now the head of cbs. I mean, she made her claim to fame attacking Arab and Palestinian professors in Columbia as an undergrad.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yeah.

[Dana Al Kurd]

And that's seen as totally valid.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think, you know, Palestine is cudgel. And also, you know, I've, I've been saying this for a while. Palestine is paradigm. Right. You know, if you look at the Memdanian, I think it reveals also kind of what Palestine also stands for, which is the way that both the Democratic and the Republican Party have really no link to the popular realities on the ground. Right. And that in effect, part of the Trump base was really responding to this disparity. Right. This lack of investment in the political system. And I think that for me was the. I don't have hope in electoral politics, and I don't want to be cynical or anything, but I think what the Memdeni win shows us is that people are disgruntled and they're sick of the kind of extractive billionaire class doing what they want to do at the expense of the rest of us. And I think the media is really complicit in all of this. Absolutely complicit in the genocide. It's been absolutely complicit since the war on Iraq, since the second war on Iraq, in rendering news as entertainment. You know, and. And it's like you could see the freak out that people had the media had about Mamdeni right across the board. It wasn't just the Fox News. No.

[Dana Al Kurd]

New York Times, everybody.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yep. And. And all of the, you know, television media, too. So it's just. I think it's. I think there's also a link to higher education in that way, because I think there has been in making people stupid.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Right? Yes, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's exactly what I was going to say is the Palestinian issue and Palestine studies and research and knowledge production. The fact that there exists the few Palestinians in higher education has been used to attack higher education. But it's not really about Palestine. I mean, it is a little bit about Palestine. Of course these people are anti Palestinian, but it's about preventing social mobility. So you're saying, like, there's all this disgruntlement in the public space. Our students are disgruntled, they want to learn. They've been promised something with this college education. And even the slight bit of social mobility that has existed as a result of higher education is too much for the Trump administration. It's too much for this right wing. So Palestine is a class issue?

[Shireen Sekari]

Absolutely. No, it absolutely is, as are all of the kind of struggles we stand in, in solidarity with. You know, it's like, really, it is intersectional, and we didn't need Trump to teach us that. But that's the lesson that keeps being delivered time and again. And one of the things that's really struck me, and this has been the case for the last 10 years, 11 years, long before Trump. And I think one of the challenges we face today is not to over determine the Trump administration as the site of all of the catastrophes that we're in today. And one of the things I've noted for the last 14 years is I don't have to teach students that history isn't about things always getting better. That's not a lesson. They need to know. They understand that teleology and the fallacy of advancement is a lie. They understand that because they live it. As you say, you know, they're in debt, especially those of us who teach at public universities. Most of our students are indebted. A lot of them have two or three jobs. They are housing insecure, their food insecure. They don't have a clear vision of the future.

[Dana Al Kurd]

And if they protest genocide, they're labeled anti Semitic. Their universities crack down on them, they're doxed. I mean, it's so outrageous. Obviously, I don't need to tell you.

[Shireen Sekari]

Their identification with Palestine is also about their own experiences with oppression.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Of course.

[Shireen Sekari]

So I think that's the. That really is the momentum, you know, that we're witnessing is. Is that kind of identification?

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Josh Zieman]

A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught, the answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zieman, and this is Monster Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the Son of Sam. Available now listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new SNAFU Every single episode.

[Maggie Freeling]

32 lost nuclear weapons.

[Shireen Sekari]

You're like, wait, stop. What?

[Josh Zieman]

Yeah.

[Ed Helms]

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Scheer made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so stunned, psyched you're here.

[Dana Al Kurd]

What was that like for you to.

[Maggie Freeling]

Soft launch into the show?

[Ed Helms]

Sorry, Jenna. I'll be asking the questions today.

[Maggie Freeling]

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

[Ed Helms]

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's, let's, let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pop.

[Shireen Sekari]

Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

All I know is what I've been told, and that's A Half Truth is a Whole Lie.

[Maggie Freeling]

For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Shireen Sekari]

I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.

[Maggie Freeling]

We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.

[Ed Helms]

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

[Maggie Freeling]

My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

[Josh Zieman]

I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or.

[Ed Helms]

Burn or any of that other stuff.

[Dana Al Kurd]

That y' all said.

[Shireen Sekari]

They literally made me say that I.

[Maggie Freeling]

Took a match and struck and threw it on her.

[Shireen Sekari]

They made me say that I poured gas on her.

[Maggie Freeling]

From Lava For Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

[Ed Helms]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava For Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

May 24, 1990 A pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

[Shireen Sekari]

I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded. I felt it rip through me with.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Just a force more powerful and terrible.

[Shireen Sekari]

Than anything that I could describe.

[Ed Helms]

In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why she received death threats before the bombing. She received more threats after the bombing.

[Shireen Sekari]

The men and women who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of.

[Ed Helms]

Militant protest against logging practices in Northern California. They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods. The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area. But more than it was the culture.

[Shireen Sekari]

It was the way of life. I think that this is a deliberate.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Attempt to sabotage our movement.

[Ed Helms]

Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dana Al Kurd]

I think it's important for listeners to know some of the contours of the what has happened after October 7th? And like you said, it's not a Trump thing. It started under Biden about how Palestine has been used in the academy. I mean, as I said earlier, I have Done an episode on this, so I will link that. But also, you know, there is now evidence and data around how this issue has been weaponized. So the aaup, the American association of University Professors, alongside the Middle East Studies association, just put out a report on this exact question about how Title 6 investigations. So investigations of alleged discrimination, specifically about antisemitism and nothing else. First of all, there's been a huge uptick in them and have been used to target these universities. Vast majority of these cases has to do with faculty extramural speech. So, like these faculty members having an opinion about genocide outside the classroom. I mean, honestly, I always remember, I think Edward said, like, being a Palestinian in the academy is like being an outlaw. That's like how it feels. That's how it feels.

[Molly Lambert]

Yeah.

[Shireen Sekari]

It's fugitive labor for sure. Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the findings has been also, I don't know if it's 95% of the cases have been shown to be.

[Dana Al Kurd]

To be fraudulent.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yeah, to be totally fraudulent. So, yeah, it's a real policing of speech. It's a real kind of weaponization of the charge of antisemitism. And honestly, sort of one of the things I think that really happens too is that students don't get the tools to, to actually recognize and understand actually existing antisemitism. Right. As it is being rehearsed in like these show trials that we saw in Congress and is in the rhetoric of many of the, you know, people affiliated with the admin, in the kinds of alliances that even the Israeli state. Right. Has made with various right wing anti Semitic states. So it's like, I think one of the things that it's kind of like watching a train wreck just hitting one train after another and just being like, what is this absurdity? You know, I myself was accused of being anti Semitic for having a history of anti Semitism. So what surprises me is the way that people are allowing and facilitating this to happen, you know, and the way that they're not able to recognize how high the stakes are, what it means to be Palestinian in this moment. You know, when you've been sitting watching for two years, your people being shredded, and you're facing the reality of what the stakes are in this moment, which is the annihilation of Palestine and the annihilation of Palestinians, your threshold for shock becomes very high. Yeah. And so, I mean, I'm sure it's the same for you. I don't know if, like, what it's like a constant trauma response, you know.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Absolutely.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yeah. There my emotional Reactions are shut down and I'm in a state of being in the present. Okay, we got through today, hopefully we'll get through tomorrow. I don't, I, I kind of am prepared for the worst at all times. And you know, it's a condition of vigilance that I think people, when they continue to feed this kind of right wing agenda of making people stupid and eroding even the possibility of higher education, it's the kind of condition that will be much more general, you know.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah.

[Shireen Sekari]

And all these ICE raids at the same time, you know, it's, I just saw, I haven't been able to listen to it, but a scholar who powerfully is talking about the Mexico Palestine border and the, and the links between ICE and the IDF and the, and the ways to think about these two things together.

[Dana Al Kurd]

And please share that with me. I haven't seen it. I mean, yeah, as you said, when we take away Palestine from the academy, when we use Palestine to attack the academy, as imperfect as the academy is, it is this larger attempt to take away people's analytical tools and frameworks to understanding their reality, to understanding how their reality intersects with these other things because they don't want you to be able to solve it. They don't want you to be able to mobilize. And then of course there's this, as I said, this class dimension of wanting to keep people in their place. There are too many black and brown people in the academy now. We can't have that kind of social mobility. I just want to emphasize for the listeners why it's so important for Palestine to be researched and studied and things like that. It's self evident. I don't need to explain it, but why is it so important that Palestinians are the ones who do that? I mean, again, it feels self evident, but I'll say it like Palestinians have agency and they are full human beings and they know best what questions are relevant and they have a unique perspective on the issue of Palestine as well as other issues. And so not only are you engaging in the erasure of Palestinians when you don't amplify that kind of knowledge production, but you are making scholarship poorer. You are limiting what you know about this issue. Yeah. So what do you think? You know, kind of broadly speaking, students, scholars, sympathizers, what, what do you think they should do in this moment?

[Shireen Sekari]

I want to just go back to the point about why is it important to have sure. Palestinian voices? Because when we say that we're not doing it in an identitarian way. Right.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Of Course, yeah.

[Shireen Sekari]

Anybody who wants to study Palestine should study Palestine. In doing so, you should be centering the lessons that Palestinians have offered us, first and foremost in this moment, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And in my own practice at the Journal of Palestine Studies, what I've tried to do in each of the editor's notes is really lift up all of the testimonies that we've received from Palestinians in Gaza, written and social media and all of these, but also lift up the international voices of Palestinians like yourself and the many, many, many people who are writing and giving us tools to understand and analyze. And the reason that's important is because the main problem that we face, I believe, is the way that certain people are more susceptible to being excluded from the category of the human. Once you exclude people from the category of the human, it's much easier to kill them and make them expendable. And I think our work really, in centering Palestinian voices rejects that logic. Right. Rejects the logic of, are we human or not? Are we going to evidence our humanity or not? No, we just tell our stories. And I think that telling of the story changes the angle of vision. If you're looking at what's happening in the Gaza Strip from the perspective of people who are living it, you will see different things than if you're looking at it from a drone or a geopolitical lens. So that's one thing, I think another thing that's really important is, you know, I mean, Mohammed Darwish said this actually in an interview in Journal Palestine Studies. He said, you know, the Palestinians are talked about because they're facing Israeli Jews, because the Jewish question is the question of Europe.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Oh, that's right.

[Shireen Sekari]

Yeah. And I find that one of the things that continues to be an issue until now is that what scholars and thinkers and analysts are adjudicating is the question of Europe and the question of the sustainability of European values and European notions and all of these things. And I'm not interested in that. I want to center the question of Palestine and what kind of other tools that might offer us. So I think in a way linked to what the earlier conversation about a political economy of value of scholars. Right. There's a kind of also here a political economy of concepts. And I believe that we have to really provincialize Europe. We have to provincialize Europe as the means and the ends of all things.

[Dana Al Kurd]

It is not generalizable.

[Shireen Sekari]

No. Just ask different questions and look at it from a different perspective.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah.

[Shireen Sekari]

In terms of what do I think? Students and scholars and all of us should do is it's going to sound strange, but first and foremost, study, study, read, learn. Those are the critical tools that you gain that will allow you to defend yourself in a world that is intent on making you stupid. We all have to reject that. I think that it's a moment where there's a temptation to slide into sensationalism or to slide into circulating, especially on social media and that whole economy. Right. So I think we have to be vigilant, I think we have to be rigorous and I think we have to study. And I think more than anything else, the lesson I keep coming back to is we have to take care of each other in the communities that we build.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think you begin arming yourself with the tools to understand this moment and think of ways to defend yourself and your community. And you can't do that without being grounded in this knowledge that came before you. So, listeners, please crack open a Journal of Palestine Studies and of course I'll link to all of this in the show notes. Shireen, I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for your time. This has been really enriching.

[Shireen Sekari]

Thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do.

[Dana Al Kurd]

Thank you so much, listeners. I'm going to also put in the show notes a fundraising campaign for the Journal of Palestine Studies. So if you can, you have the capacity. It's a surefire way to help resist these dynamics. All right, this. Thanks so much. Take care. It Could Happen. Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Josh Zieman]

A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight. So why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zieman and this is Monster Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the Son of Sam. Available now listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maggie Freeling]

The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went, went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

[Ed Helms]

America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.

[Maggie Freeling]

Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.

[Molly Lambert]

Jenna World, Jenna Jameson, Vivid Video and the Valley is a new podcast about the history of the adult film industry. I'm Molly Lambert and I'll be your tour guide on a wild trip through adult films. We get paid more than the men.

[Dana Al Kurd]

We call the the shots.

[Molly Lambert]

In what way is that degrading?

[Shireen Sekari]

That's us taking hold of our life.

[Molly Lambert]

Listen to Gentle world on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ed Helms]

Join me Danny Trejo in Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Shireen Sekari]

This is an iHeart podcast.