53 years ago, on a sunny July morning in Beirut, Lebanon, Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani got into a car with his 17-year-old niece Lamees to drive her to the offices of the American University of Beirut, hoping to help her register for classes. From the University, Kanfani and Lamees would go to the offices of Al-Hadaf (‘The Goal”), a weekly newspaper he edited for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a communist and arab nationalist party that he was a member, though not a leader, of. Kanafani never held a gun in his life, never ordered anyone to do so, and was a vocal internal critic of the Palestinian liberation movement’s attacks on civilians, but when he turned on his ignition that morning, a grenade attached to it triggered three pounds of plastic explosives placed in the exhaust pipe; he and Lamees were gone in an instant. The neighbourhood spilled out into the streets at the sound of the explosion and the fireball which followed in its wake. Lamees’s body had been flung across the street, contorted and charred almost beyond recognition, while Kanafani was liquified, nothing but bones and ash in the scrap.
Police officer inspects the wreckage of the car after the body has been removed. Source: AP
The New York Times reported on the assassination in that morning’s paper:
“A leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the guerrilla organization, was killed here today in an explosion in his car.”
The entire blurb was less than 200 words long, dwarfed in the margins of page seven dominated by an ad for a new collection of women’s blazers on Fifth Avenue:
“MEMO TO BLAZER COLLECTORS:
We have some important new additions for you. Blazers with a truly superb, truly beautiful fit…”
New York Times on day of assassination. Source: New York Times Archive
No obituary was published.
Thirteen years later, in October of 1985, Alex Odeh, a Palestinian-American who served as the West Coast regional director of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee walked into the Committee’s Santa Ana offices. As he unlocked the door to the office at 9am, a wire attached to the handle activated the fuse on a pipe bomb on the other side of the door. The second floor of the office building was completely demolished, as glass sprayed across the busy street, injuring 8 people, with seven of them surviving with minimal injury. Alex Odeh was not one of those lucky seven. Upon the bomb’s detonation, Odeh was thrown across the hallway from the force of the blast and was sprayed by the shrapnel which it produced. Two hours later, he was dead.
Source: University of Michigan
It was always clear who planted the bomb. When the FBI arrived at the scene, they gave the names of two men suspected of committing the bombing, seen fleeing the scene: Robert Manning and Keith Fuchs. Both were known members of the far-right organization the Jewish Defence League and a month after the bombing an FBI spokesperson publicly attributed the bombing to the group, though this was swept under the rug and no further mentions of the group were ever given by the Bureau. Fuchs and Manning were never even taken in for questioning for the bombing and though Manning was later arrested for the bombing and murder of a woman. But when Israel agreed to extradite Manning in 1993, it was on the condition that no charges would be brought against him in the Odeh case.
The next day, the New York Times briefly covered the assination on page five, with a third of the article being dedicated to a statement given to the Times by Irv Rubin, the head of the JDL, who said “no Jew or American should shed one tear.” The Times has only mentioned Odeh’s assassination a handful of times, once when it happened, once in a letter in the editor the next month, and once in 1991 when discussing the extradition of Manning for the killing of the white woman, in which Alex Odeh is mentioned passingly as “a supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.”
In the week following Kirk’s assassination the New York Times has published over 150 separate articles around Charlie Kirk’s assassination. These ranged from an editorial titled “Charlie Kirk’s Horrific Killing and America’s Worsening Political Violence” to the opinion piece “Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics the Right Way”, and “Charlie Kirk’s Killing and Our Poisonous Internet.”
His death has become a political spectacle, one man shot while sitting under a tent in a regional Utah university has received hundreds of times more coverage from the Times than the at least 422 Palestinian casualties on the same day, many of them walking to get food from aid sites. Kanafani, one of Palestine’s most well-respected authors, was given 179 words, Odeh, a few hundred, those nameless Palestinians in Gaza were given around 2,000, Kirk was given hundreds of thousands. October 13th will become a national day of commemoration for Kirk, cementing his budding position as the Alt-Right’s Horst Wessel, the German Nazi party’s official martyr, whose death was used annually by the party to intimidate its political opposition and create a founding myth for German fascism. While the world is urged to ignore and forget the genocide of Palestinians, it is urged to never forget the death of Kirk.
For both supporters of Kirk and his liberal critics, a wealthy, white American like Kirk is allowed to be a father and a husband, whereas Kanafani is a “militant” and Odeh is a “supporter” of terrorism, their families are irrelevant to their killings, while Kirk’s deserve our thoughts and prayers. After October 7th, Kirk called Palestinians “savage animals” while spreading a fake statement from Hamas saying: ‘We have kidnapped the girls, we killed the ugly ones and we’re raping the pretty ones.’ Around the same time any reader of the Times would be greeted by the now infamous article “Screams Without Words,” a now debunked ‘investigation’ in which the Times hired a former Israeli intelligence officer to fabricate evidence of Palestinian fighters committing systematic rape on October 7th. To those at the New York Times Kirk’s life was worth hundreds of thousands of times more than Kanafani’s and Odeh’s, millions more than Lamees’s, and hundreds of millions more than that of any Palestinian unlucky enough to be killed on a given day in what they call a “war.” The dehumanization of the Arab people and the For the American political class, of which Kirk helped redefine and which the Times acts as a mouthpiece of, the body of an Arab, be they an American like Odeh, a refugee like Kanafani, or a child like Lamees, exist as obstacles. Their bodies must be pushed aside, their governments must be overthrown and then they must be punished for trying to flee the violence that they caused. They see Arabs as rapists and animalistic, entering the fascistic dichotomy of being simultaneously an existential threat and fundamentally inferior to the West. By doing this, the West is able to stomach the genocide and colonialism which underpins its socioeconomic system and allows for its citizens to live in relative luxury, while those in the developing world are forced to engage in a daily struggle for survival.
To this bipartisan bloc, the life of an Arab is worth less than a hair on the head of an Israeli and less than the dirt on Charlie Kirk’s shoe. The death of an Arab will only be remembered by the ash it leaves behind, not worth the paper that the Times is printed on. It is incumbent upon everyone in the West to not fall into this trap; to express compassion and solidarity towards each other and to build the monuments to ourselves that they will never build for us.
