Dyab Abou Jahjah official website
  • Home
  • Articles & Columns
  • Dyab's TV
  • Books
  • Contact

Let’s Go Urban is slechts het topje van de ijsberg

7/2/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
✦Opinie Dyab Abou Jahjah  (De Morgen 5 Februari 2020)

De vzw Let’s Go Urban is in opspraak, maar geen alleenstaand geval. Tijd om de uitwassen van de Vlaamse integratie-industrie aan te pakken. ​

Read More
0 Comments

Decolonise? Yes.  Decivilise? No!

4/2/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
 I do not know if it is an honour I should claim, but I believe that I am the first person to have introduced the term decolonisation into the national public debate in Belgium, not in relation to the liberation of the colonies in the third world, but in function of what was known in the early years 2000 as the “integration and immigrant debate”. 

Read More
0 Comments

Towards a new deal : On accepting the European "Native claim" .

18/1/2021

3 Comments

 
Picture
By Dyab Abou Jahjah

“ I went for a stroll downtown the other day, you can barely recognise the city with all these foreigners everywhere, it felt as if I was in another country”. 

I remember this conversation with my Lebanese neighbour in Sidon, as if it was yesterday.  It was 2013, I was still living in Lebanon back then, and I was still fully in the anti-racist activist mindset. So of course, I started preaching about tolerance and how we are all human beings. Since my neighbour was complaining about Syrian refugees I also added that we are all Arabs to my speech.
Looking back with some more perspective, I realise that my response to my neighbour was a bit arrogant and on the limit of insolence.  Of course we are all human beings, my neighbour was aware of that and does not need me to imply that he did not recognise the humanity of the Syrian refugees. And of course Syrians and Lebanese are as close as Flemish and Dutch, culturally, linguistically and historically, my neighbour knew that as well. Yet what he did that day was expressing a genuine sentiment that many Lebanese share since the massive influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon end of 2011 and in the years that followed. 

Read More
3 Comments

this is no more about freedom  of speech, this is about the right to life.

22/10/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture

By Dyab Abou Jahjah

"Samuel Paty's cause is my cause, and should be the cause of any citizen who loves freedom. Paty was not Islamophobic, he taught his students important values of tolerance and proportionality. The fact that some people cannot see him as a victim is also a reflection of the rise of dogmatic sectarianism and tribalism."

Read More
0 Comments

On "whiteness", "privilege" and other tropes of Minority Identity politics

4/6/2020

3 Comments

 
Dyab Abou Jahjah
​@aboujahjah
Picture
The events unfolding in the United States of America, and the growing momentum for the #BlackLivesMatter movement,  are a welcomed development for people, such as myself, who were on the barricades fighting racism for decades in Europe. However, the anti-racist struggle should remain a struggle for equality and human rights, and not be transformed into an elitist and dogmatic discourse on why one identity is good and the other one is bad. 

Read More
3 Comments

The Politics of radical love in Leonard Cohen's poetry

24/2/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Dyab Abou Jahjah​

It is a bit odd to me that Leonard Cohen passed away few months ago without me writing about it. The man has composed a big part of the soundtrack of my life.  But above all, and more than his music that is at times over-harmonic to be enjoyable, Cohen the poet is what interests me the most. Together with that of Mahmood Darwich and Nizar Kabbani, his poetry influenced me both politically and spiritually.  Cohen was very political, and I am not speaking about that moment in his life when he went to sing for the Israeli troops during the 1973 war in Sinai. That Cohen who thought to rediscover his Jewish identity by posing on a picture with a mass murderer like Ariel Sharon was just a short lived phase in the existence of a more sophisticated soul. 

Read More
0 Comments

« Poser les limites du débat » ? Non, c’est une entreprise de déshumanisation 

13/2/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Dyab Abou Jahjah a été chroniqueur au Standaard entre Janvier 2014 et Janvier 2017
​J’avais 4 ans lorsque j’eut ma première conversation politique. Ma mère et moi étions assis sur la terrasse de notre maison à Hanine, un village situé au Sud-Liban. C’était une journée ensoleillée et nous nous reposions à l’ombre de notre figuier. Par moments, les sons paisibles de la nature étaient interrompus par le bruit des hélicoptères qui vrombissaient derrière les collines. Ma mère voulut que l’on rentre à l’intérieur. Je protestais. « Dyab, insista-t-elle, les hélicoptères israéliens se rapprochent, c’est plus sûr à l’intérieur. » Je me souviens d’avoir demandé pourquoi. « Parce ce sont de mauvaises personnes, qui pourraient nous tirer dessus. », me répondit-elle. Quelques mois plus tard, ces mauvaises personnes nous prenaient effectivement pour cibles.

Read More
0 Comments

It is not about defining the boundaries of the debate, it is about dehumanisation. 

26/1/2017

2 Comments

 
Picture
​The first political conversation that I ever had was at the age of four. I remember myself sitting in in the porch of our village house in Hanine, south Lebanon, together with my mother. It was a sunny day, and we were resting in the shade of our fig tree.  The peaceful flow of natural sounds and sun rays was only disturbed by the thrumming noise of helicopters coming from behind the surrounding hills. My mom wanted us to go back inside, to which I objected. She then said, “ Dyab, the Israeli helicopters are coming nearby, it is safer to be inside”.  I remember asking her why? Why is it safer? And my mom answered “because these are wicked men, and they might shoot at us”. Few months later, the wicked men did shoot at us.

Read More
2 Comments

Ten points on the truck attack in Jerusalem

9/1/2017

22 Comments

 
Picture
By Dyab Abou Jahjah​

​A truck ran over Israeli occupation soldiers in occupied Jerusalem yesterday. Four soldiers died and some others were wounded. The driver was a Palestinian father of three. If you would read western newspapers and news outlets, the general tone is that this was a “terrorist” attack that targeted Israelis. Fake news are obviously not something that is limited to social media, it is also often being vented through the bias of the dominant news. That version of the story is not just occulting the reality of the occupation, it is defending it by establishing a link between the resistance of the Palestinians and terrorism. I reacted to this by stating that the Palestinian people has the right to liberate its occupied land by any means that it deems necessary. This was immediately taken by forces who are supportive to Israel in the Flemish nationalist right wing and presented as an endorsement of terrorism. Even Theo Francken, a secretary of state in the federal government, was tweeting about it hysterically. According to him I was glorifying ISIS terrorism and I should be fired from my position as columnist in the newspaper I write for. People who liked my Facebook post were also being threatened and intimidated. Therefor I want to clarify the following 10 points and I hope that this will be helpful to all the people that are confronted with these questions.

Read More
22 Comments

ISIS is destroying Arab-Islamic values and way of life and doesn't care about the rest.

5/4/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
By Dyab Abou Jahjah
​

« The terrorists want to destroy our way of life », or « they hate us because of who we are » are the most common held opinions by western politicians and opinion makers when it comes to explaining why attacks are taking place in Europe. However, if one analyses the vision and ideology of ISIS, based on primary sources and on its own literature, this line does not hold. 

Read More
2 Comments
<<Previous

    RSS Feed

 Dyab Abou Jahjah @2020
  • Home
  • Articles & Columns
  • Dyab's TV
  • Books
  • Contact