Am I Your Savior?

I have a morning routine that involves, among other things, writing at least 750 words of “stream-of-consciousness” content.¹ I’ve been doing this for about five years with very few misses, so that’s a lot of words. It’s essentially never actually stream-of-consciousness, though. I have almost never (maybe never?) written anything without thinking about, and accommodating, how a potential reader might interpret it.

Paranoia? Maybe. But whatever it might say about my psyche, that’s the truth.

I decided to cut & paste what I wrote this morning and send it to you all because I need to get it off my chest, but as you might understand when you read it I don’t want to spend extra energy centering myself on this Substack. So what you read below is my very lightly edited (one name and one unnecessary sentence removed) entry for today.

I’m also always open to feedback, so please do tell me if you think I’m rationalizing or justifying bad behavior. Just be prepared to defend the accusation, because I argue!²

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Well, I’m still stewing about <redacted> accusing me of “saviourism” yesterday. I did my interview with Robin Andersen about The Complicit Lens, which I thought went pretty well overall, but at one point Robin shouted out The Voice of Hind Rajab as being an important film.³ In that 30 seconds I had to make a choice about whether to push back and potentially start an argument that derailed the conversation, or bite my tongue. I chose the latter. Nobody who knows me would expect me to do the latter. As I told <redacted> I have been accused of being argumentative to a fault. My every instinct was to push back. That is who I am and what I wanted to do in the moment. It was a sacrifice, in my mind, to let it slide. I’m not saying that to be like “oh look how great I am” anymore than I kept my mouth shut because I think I know better than Palestinians. I kept my mouth shut because I had to assess half a dozen different concerns in one second. What will the author think? What will other authors who consider coming on think? What will Paul/T4P think? What will the audience think? Who would served by this? What impact would it have on our organization if I threw Watermelon Pictures under the bus to score a rhetorical point against an author gracing us with their presence? As I told <redacted> I would, I sent a follow-up email to the author and encouraged her to read Samantha Youssef’s piece and reconsider her support for the film. She replied that this was reasonable and that I was welcome to edit the discussion to remove her comments. I don’t know if I want to do that. I’m not sure what my responsibility is. Not because I think I’m anyone’s saviour, but the opposite. I am just a fucking human being doing his best in every situation. Sometimes you have to stand down in a battle so you have the position to win the war. Is this what I was doing? Was I preserving my platform? Was I preserving my platform for myself, or for the cause? I believe I was doing it for the cause. I think if I had started an argument about the film I would have been virtue signaling. At the very least I would have opened myself up to that critique. I didn’t want to appear to be showing off my knowledge and virtue. Like oh you wrote a whole book on media complicity but you’re sitting here promoting propagandistic Hollywood trash? Did all these things really go through my mind in that 30 seconds? I don’t remember. All I know is that I had to make a split-second decision as to how to respond and I chose to stay silent. I could say that I wish I hadn’t but I’m not sure that’s true. As I mentioned I certainly would have preferred to push back, but that doesn’t help me decide whether it would have been the right course of action. I think what annoys me most is that someone would lodge a criticism like “saviourism” when they don’t even know me. Oh you read a couple of my Substack posts and we had a couple conversations so now you feel qualified to assess whether my commitment to the cause is self-serving? I suppose one could argue that the act was an example of ‘saviourism’ without necessarily condemning my activism on the whole, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I always think of that guy at the People’s Conference in Detroit who asked me whether I would continue standing for Palestine if others in the movement told me I was unwelcome, and I said that of course I would because a) I’m not doing it “for them” and b) I know other Palestinians who appreciate my effort. That’s why I cringe a bit when people say “listen to Palestinians”. Listen to which Palestinians? Because I’m pretty fucking sure that Abbas and Sinwar would have given somewhat different answers to the same questions about what we should do. I’m glad I had this opportunity to vent, but I’m not sure it’s out of my system yet. I’m going to have to write a Substack post about it, probably. Ask my community for validation. (Sarcasm)

1. Based on the idea of “Morning Pages” from The Artist’s Way, which I learned about during a brief phase of obsessively attending to “building a second brain”… it’s a long story.

2. I would be remiss not to point out that this is only the second time in 2.5 years of full-time advocacy—in collaboration with many Palestinians—that I’ve been accused of saviourism, so while I’m always open to criticism I take this particular accusation with a grain of salt.

3. I explain why I don’t support the film in a previous post.