'What Will People Do When Palestine Isn't Trending Anymore?'

Today in What Now: talking about Palestine and solidarity with writer and podcaster Nashwa Khan.

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Hi all, welcome to another Monday edition of What Now! Today we've got a really interesting conversation on Palestinian solidarity and media bias from the "imperial core," with writer and podcaster Nashwa Khan.

Nashwa is the host of Habibti Please, a podcast about feminism, activism, and the Muslim diaspora -- or as she puts it, “something for the girls.” Khan grew up in Florida, but moved to Canada before high school and is currently based in the Toronto area, and focuses her current work on under-covered social movements as well as Canadian and American politics and plenty of cultural commentary to boot. 

Nashwa is also one of the newest members of the Discontents collective, which we’ve been working with for most of this year, so this seemed like a perfect time to chat. 

I wanted to talk about Palestinian solidarity, and how it’s viewed in the wider Muslim American and Muslim Candian diaspora. Muslims in the West are very much not a monolith, but I think they’re kind of treated as such by the U.S. media a lot of the time, particularly in regards to issues like Palestine. So I just wanted to ask, in your experience, what role that issue has played in the diaspora in general?

It’s unavoidable that in pretty much every Muslim space, Palestine will come up. Moving to Canada was so interesting because my first understanding of oppression, and why Islam has principles of social justice, was through hearing in the mosque, from childhood, about what goes on to Palestinians.