A Redacted Requiem for the Wretched of the Earth

Poetry and text by Ismail Khalidi Music by Hadi Eldebek Film by Jenny Zander

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The 'war on terror' has cost millions of lives and displaced tens of millions more over the past 20 years. Trillions of dollars spent to kill and maim, to pollute, occupy and torture, to displace, surveille and censor. Large swaths of the Arab and Muslim world lay in ruins. Meanwhile, poverty, plague, hunger and inequality stalk the United states. Equipment used to subjugate abroad is funneled back home to unaccountable police departments. Before he was MPD, The man who killed George Floyd was military police at Fort Benning, the beating heart of torture training, coup-plotting and counter-insurgency for the Western hemisphere. This is no coincidence. Arms and Prisons, the Pentagon and policing; it is all part of the twisted economy of impoverishment and extraction, subjugation and distraction, white supremacy and empire. These things are inter-connected. So must be our mourning. And our resistance. The dead are with us, the disappeared by our side. This is our poem, our lamentation, our requiem, our mawwal.