DEMOCRACY NOW
Acclaimed scholar and activist Tariq Ali joins us for a wide-ranging conversation. In Part 1, he responds to Trump’s support of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the U.S.’s capitulation to Israeli aggression in the Middle East and the rise in right-wing authoritarianism around the world. Ali says Donald Trump is “the most right-wing president in recent years” and exposes “in public what his predecessors used to say in private.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to renew Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, saying the Israeli military will return to, quote, “intense fighting” unless Hamas agrees to release all remaining hostages by Saturday noon. This comes after President Trump said “all hell is going to break out” if the hostages aren’t freed. Hamas has accused Israel of repeatedly violating the ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Trump on Tuesday met with Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House, where Trump repeated his threat to take over Gaza and displace the entire Palestinian population. Reporters questioned Trump about his Gaza proposal.
REPORTER 1: Mr. President, you said before that the U.S. would buy Gaza, and today you just said we’re not going to buy Gaza.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re not going to have to buy. We’re going to — we’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza.
REPORTER 1: What does that mean?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s no reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it.
REPORTER 2: Mr. President, take it under what authority? It is sovereign territory.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Under the U.S. authority.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump, sitting next to a grimacing King Abdullah of Jordan, who later wrote that they will not accept the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And the president of Egypt, President Sisi, canceled his trip to the White House next week after these comments.
We’re joined now by Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books, including, just out, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us on this side of the pond. But I do have to ask you: Mick Jagger wrote that Rolling Stones song for you, “Street Fighting Man”?
TARIQ ALI: Yeah, he wrote it and sent it to me, a handwritten version, saying, “Could you put this in the paper? I just wrote this for you.” I edited a radical newspaper at the time. “And the BBC are refusing to play this song.” So, we did publish the song. And, of course, a few weeks later, the BBC did play it. I mean, that was a time when politics and culture, radical politics, radical culture, were very mixed up together, in a good sense.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to Gaza. You have President Trump doubling, doubling, tripling, quadrupling down, saying he doesn’t even have to buy Gaza, he’ll have it, he’ll take it. He’s also said, originally said, “The world’s people will be there, yes, including Palestinians,” now, “No, Palestinians have no right of return.” Your response to what’s going on there?
TARIQ ALI: It is so appalling, Amy, what is going on now. Trump said, says it in public, what his predecessors used to say in private, that, effectively, they are going to let Israel have its way, both in Gaza and, believe you me, in the West Bank. They will both be ethnically cleansed. That has been Israeli policy for decades, and now they feel they’ve had leaders in the United States. Trump is, of course, shameless and open about it. Biden did exactly the same thing. For six months, Hamas had agreed to the ceasefire plan. Netanyahu didn’t want a ceasefire, and Biden backed him.
So, one problem we have today, that the reason you have Trump is because the previous administration was so weak-willed and so weak-minded, incapable of doing anything, whereas in this very country we had Reagan, Bush, Truman calling Israel to heel when they exceeded what was considered to be decent, honorable, according to United States policies. When they refused to obey, they were called to heel. Neither Biden and now Trump calling these people, “Enough. The whole world has seen what you’re up to. Enough. We will not tolerate it.” Netanyahu threatening to break the ceasefire, and the response of the United States president is what? The response is nothing to do with the ceasefire, but “We’re going to take Gaza. We can.” The Israelis have got it for you by killing over 100,000 people. “And now we’ll do with it as we please.”
I mean, if this is the way the United States Empire is going to carry on functioning, there will be more and more — not immediately — there will be more and more resistance. If even the king of Jordan and Sisi in Egypt, who have so far backed the United States, are getting slightly scared, it’s not because they’ve changed greatly. It’s they are scared there will be an uprising in their countries. Jordan is three-quarters Palestinian anyway. And the Egyptian masses are seething. So, you have a really extremely serious situation building up in the Middle East, where they publicly, in front of everyone, want to expel the Palestinians. No cover-up. Netanyahu says, “We’re going to do it.” The U.S. president supports him.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, the famous Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said was a friend of yours. You’re write about him in your memoir. Said was prophetic in many ways in terms of his skepticism of the possibility of a two-state solution. What is your sense of how he would have responded to what’s happening today?
TARIQ ALI: Well, yeah, Edward was a very dear friend. We often discussed Palestine. And he felt, as did many others, that the only serious solution for that region was a one-state solution with equal rights for all its citizens — male, female, Jews, non-Jews, etc. — that that was the only way we could proceed, because a two-state solution had become a joke. I mean, if you look what’s been happening in Gaza for a year — an open genocide — if you see what they’re starting to do to the West Bank now, a two-state solution is impossible. No one will believe in it.
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In-Depth Interview with Tariq Ali on His New Book, “You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024”
DEMOCRACY NOW
We speak at length with Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker. He is an editor of the New Left Review and the author of over 50 books, including his latest, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980–2024.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We continue with Part 2 of our conversation with Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books, including, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024. He has just come to the United States, did a big event at the Brooklyn Public Library, interviewed by our own Nermeen Shaikh, who has known him for decades.
I want to really focus on the book. I mean, your years of antiwar activism, your writing, your involvement with the arts. First, start with the title, You Can’t Please All.
TARIQ ALI: Well, it’s our life as dissidents, Amy, you know, constantly going against mainstream opinions of politics on a global and domestic scale. And this is a plea to people who, you know, think, “Maybe we should move. The world is not looking in our direction.” And it’s a message for them and many others, saying, “You can’t please all. You have to say what you want to say. Don’t try and please anyone. Just speak the truth.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, this is a sprawling memoir, over 800 pages, but about a third of the way into the book, you have a section on your family, which talks about how you became engaged in politics in your home environment. Could you talk about that a little bit?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I was very lucky. My sort of extended family was an old feudal family, pretty conservative in politics. None of them were religious extremists in any sense, but they were conservatives. And what would have happened had my parents not turned out different, I didn’t know, because that shaped my biography considerably — is that in the late ’20s and ’30s, when India was still occupied by the British, both my parents became radicals, even though they belonged to the same family. And my father joined the Communist Party in the ’30s, my mother later on. So our house was filled with two types of people: one, those related to the family, who could be chiefs of police, generals, leading politicians, etc. — usually, one had to be polite to them, though I avoided mixing in that company too much — and, secondly, trade union leaders, peasant leaders, poets, Bohemians of every sort, who were great fun and didn’t patronize us, even when we were children. And that was my parents’ milieu, politically speaking. And so I grew up in that. There was no big rebellion, as far as I was concerned, against my parents, except in the sense that they were orthodox CP members, and when I came to Oxford, I became a Trotskyist, which I think irritated them, but they took it. So, it had an effect on me.
My first meeting was attending a May Day rally in 1949 when I was under 6 years of old, and the big chant at the rally was “The Chinese are going to win.” China’s revolution was on the march, and everyone was chanting, “China will win! Long live Mao Zedong!” And, of course, sitting looking at China in 2025, it’s an obsession with the United States now and the West, because this country has taken off in a huge way and is seen now as the biggest economic rival to the United States. So, one wonders whether a military solution will be attempted there. It would be totally crazy and would lead to a world war, if some crazies from here tried it. So let’s hope they don’t and they keep the competition to an economic level. But that was my first big meeting which I attended. And those chants of the people for China still echo in my ears sometimes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering also, you spent so much of your life in the U.K. and the — probably the greatest demographic change of the 20th and early 21st century is the migration of people from the Global South to the metropolises of the colonizer nations. To what degree has Indian and Pakistani migration changed or transformed the United Kingdom?
TARIQ ALI: To a considerable extent. For one thing, Juan, when I arrived in Britain to study at university in ’63, the food was truly awful. It was so bad that it was impossible to eat. I had to teach myself how to cook. But one of the great contributions of migrants from all parts of the world, especially South Asia, but also the Caribbean, has been that the food culture of Britain has been totally transformed. I don’t think future generations, whatever the color of their skin, will be able to live without this food and revert to what was being eaten during the war years and after.
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