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Perfect Victims

And the Politics of Appeal

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Perfect Victims

By: Mohammed El-Kurd
Narrated by: Mohammed El-Kurd
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About this listen

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

©2025 Mohammed El-Kurd (P)2025 Tantor Media Freedom & Security Israel & Palestine Middle East Politics & Government

Critic reviews

“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”—Robin D. G. Kelley
All stars
Most relevant
Poetic, powerful and heartwrenching, I wish this book could movilize us all into world action. I does what it can, the rest is up to us.

Heartwrenching

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Well written; concise, precise, academic and a very important read.
Thank you Mohammed.
🇵🇸
Free Palestine

Excellent must read

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It may not be the last word on strategy or solutions, but what it offers is a firmer foundation: a vocabulary of resistance, a map of the traps by which narratives are constrained, and an invitation to move beyond performative empathy toward something more just, more demanding, more real. highly recommend and free Palestine.

beyond profound

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This book is necessary, truthful, a humbling mirror that forces us to see ourselves more honestly and the men (particularly) and women and children of Palestine as people denied every right including the right to their rage, It has much to teach us about what it means to be /survive as a human in a world intent on dehumanising all of us by manipulating the narrative around Palestine. Very grateful to have heard it in the author’s voice.

The dignity of rage

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this should make you feel uncomfortable, sad and angry. it's the unapologetic unacceptable story of what is happening in our world as the West does nothing other than justify it.

listen to the truth

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