31-07-2025 - Pep speech
Hi, I’m pep
It is Saturday, August 21, 1831, in Virginia, USA.. Nat Turner and his companions, armed with knives, axes and clubs, killed about 60 people over the next two days. They killed ten kids under five years old, including babies. Nat Turner himself killed a woman. They made no distinction: every man, woman or child they could find who was white, they killed.
Do you condemn Nat Turner?
Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I do, for what it’s worth. But most of us in the Netherlands have never heard of Nat Turner and his atrocities. What we *have heard of* is chattel slavery. At the time, there was the abolitionist movement, people who wanted to end slavery. The leaders of this movement did not condemn Nat Turner. They said: we told you this would happen.
If you treat people like this, you run risks.
You can say: chattel slavery was worse than the Israeli occupation of the last eight decades. So what? The point remains: if you treat people like this, you run risks. Nat Turner was never the real problem here.
36 children died on October 7th, though we don’t know how many by Israel and how many by Hamas. What happened in the months before that? Between January 2023 and September 2023, Israel killed at least 38 children in the occupied West Bank, the deadliest year on record. Most of us do not know this because Israel killing or crippling children without repercussions has been the norm for 8 decades. Imagine if Israel killed 38 Dutch children. Would it have made the news? Would we accept that lying down?
If you treat people like this, you run risks.
The root cause of this genocide can be summed up in one line: Israel through Zionism wants all of the land and none of its people.
This is not new in human history. The European colonists in North America wanted all of the land and none of its people. They called it manifest destiny, and the result was the genocide of millions of native Americans. 96% of all native Americans were annihilated.
The American colonists had all sorts of mental tricks to justify their crimes. The natives were godless, evil savages. Today, Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular are evil savages in the minds of the majority of Israelis and their Western backers.
This is not an empty accusation. This is polling data. 64% of Israelis believe there are no innocents in Gaza. 47% want their military to kill every man, woman and child in places they conquer. You do not get a genocide without genocidal intent.
Our politicians support this. Our media have mostly covered this up or made excuses for this for 22 months. Your neighbours, your friends, your family members, your co-workers pay for this. And your neighbours, your friends, your family members, your co-workers, they ignore this. They ignore the Holocaust of the 21st century. But you don’t ignore this. You are here. Thank you for being here.
But please, convince them. The streets and squares of the West are the only help that’s coming for Gaza. We are the only help that’s coming. That means we have a duty to grow as big and loud as we possibly can.
FREE, FREE, PALESTINE