There are so many issues happening in the world that it is hard to keep track of them all, hard to know which one to focus on—it is easy to become overwhelmed and to either dissociate or remain in our own bubbles. However, the reality is that dissociation will not save us, and that nothing exists in a silo. What is happening in one place has connections to what is happening all over the world, and we cannot hope to solve any of these issues without addressing how they are related. This is something that NOLA Freedom Forum co-founders and co-directors Adan Murad and Thafer Abu Qamir—who are also organizers with the Palestine Film Day event series and founding members and board members of Palestinian Youth Movement New Orleans—understand all too well. Since January 2024, NOLA Freedom Forum has hosted speakers from New Orleans and across the globe to discuss how topics ranging from public health, the surveillance state, and Jim Crow laws are tied to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and vice versa. As Murad explains, “We ask the speakers to connect whatever their topic is back to Palestine or to Louisiana or to New Orleans. And it just makes the distance between New Orleans and Palestine or New Orleans and Sudan or New Orleans and literally everywhere so small.” On an overcast day in late November, Murad and Abu Qamir sat down with me over coffee at Cafe Levant to discuss the first two years of NOLA Freedom Forum, education as activism, and how NOLA Freedom Forum is not only an educational series but also a tool for our collective liberation.
First, congratulations are in order: Y’all are almost at the two-year anniversary of NOLA Freedom Forum, is that correct?
Thafer Abu Qamir: I think when this comes out, it’ll be our two-year anniversary.
Adan Murad: January 25th or something.
When you started the Freedom Forum, did you anticipate that it would have this longevity?
AM: Well, when we started it, we were doing it weekly. And so, honestly, we didn’t think about the long term. And we were able to get pretty far in that weekly format until we realized we needed to reset and do this monthly and make it something that can last longer, make it more feasible for all of us and the community.
Can you speak more about how the Freedom Forum came to be?
AM: A professor from Southeastern University [in Hammond] and another one of our colleagues came up with this idea that Southeastern should hold this forum about international law [with Loyola University legal professor Dr. Ata Hindi as the guest speaker]. This was at the time when the ICJ [International Court of Justice] and other, massive organizations were calling what was happening in Gaza what it was: a genocide. It actually kind of had a traumatic beginning because right after they decided they were going to do this and it was going to be at Southeastern and it was approved, the murder of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar happened on the West Bank [of Palestine]. This was a kid from Gretna, who went to school in New Orleans, and he was murdered on the West Bank. After that, Southeastern got a little strange and said they didn’t want this event on their campus because they were afraid of community pushback. They said they were afraid for our safety and something happening to us, protests for us because of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar’s murder. That was never our fear. But they canceled that talk. We had to quickly find a new place and Café Istanbul welcomed us with open arms, which was really great because now we were in a more accessible part of the city. [It was] one of our biggest Freedom Forums to date, which set the tone for the need and appetite for a community forum like this. [With] the name NOLA Freedom Forum, we wanted to showcase many different struggles for global liberation. We wanted this to be a place where people can talk openly and freely, and then we were met with immediate suppression. And so, it was kind of allegorical to what was happening all over the world to Palestinian voices. But we didn’t let that stop us.
TAQ: I never intended to be hosting the Forum or organizing the events—I was really just brought in initially to do the branding. But Adan and I had already been talking a lot about the fact that what you see in Palestine is only possible because hundreds of other dominoes had to fall to create the conditions for something like a genocide to happen and to be suppressed in the media and to be supported and funded by Western powers. And those dominoes are all different struggles of other people historically. So even though we knew that we were not going to have a consistent location or a big team of people helping to put this together, we resolved amongst ourselves by that second week to take it over ourselves to continue. And so by week two, we were at JTLC [John Thompson Legacy Center]. We were actively finding speakers—
AM: In a week’s time—
TAQ: In a week’s time, yeah. This is when it was weekly. So it was happening very, very fast. But we believed that people needed this broader education, [and] there was this immediate appetite from people for education. And we didn’t want our work to just be protesting and cultural events. There has to be this gap filled in educating people so that when there are moments of urgency, we’re all educated enough to respond. There were so many people that didn’t feel prepared to advocate for Palestinians because they didn’t know enough. And a lot of lives were lost in that time spent trying to get people up to speed.
AM: Hearing you say that, there were also gaps within ourselves of our confidence in what we knew about the world and just the political part of it. I never felt like I knew enough about the politics of even my own struggle, but I did know how to put together an event.
One thing I want to go back to is the education-as-advocacy piece, because I think that often gets lost in the mix. I think sometimes people underestimate the importance of education and creating an educated populace. Can you speak more about that?
TAQ: I think protests are a great way for popularizing a movement and really bringing people in, but they’re not necessarily the best place for politicization and for providing historical context. We know that so many things are connected to Palestine, [and] not just in the patterns that we see in terms of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
AM: NOLA Freedom Forum breaks down incredibly complex and intentionally confusing histories into an accessible, relatable format. The more you go to these Freedom Forums, you start putting together things that other speakers have talked about. You can’t have hope if you don’t know that these problems have already been solved and [what] the roots of these problems are.
TAQ: It’s easy for us to feel hopeless when something like a genocide is happening, but then understanding in a historical context that people have struggled through things like this and overcome them [helps]. Systems of apartheid have been dismantled already. I think being able to see our struggle in the context of all the other struggles gives us hope that there is a future for Palestine and for our people. There is hope for liberation and return. Something that’s also really important to us is that we don’t necessarily want people to only be focusing on Palestine. As Palestinians, we love to see support for our people and for our cause. But we don’t want people to start getting tunnel vision on Palestine, because there are so many struggles that had to be endured in order for what’s happening in Palestine to exist in the first place. And we don’t want people who are from other oppressed communities to feel like their stories aren’t being heard or that they’re being left behind. It’s what I say at the beginning of every forum: Because all these struggles are connected, no matter which struggle you choose to commit yourself to or advocate for or organize for, you’re advancing every liberation movement. But in order to truly do that, you have to understand how your movement, how your struggle is affected by and affects other struggles. We’re very focused on Palestine, but we also recognize that what’s happening in Palestine is mirrored in Sudan and Congo.
One thing that strikes me about the Freedom Forum is that it’s not just about people sharing their knowledge, which is important, but it’s also about encouraging dialogue afterward.
AM: It makes me emotional at the end [of every Freedom Forum] because of people starting to put things together like they didn’t before. One of our recent speakers, Imani Jacqueline Brown, is a professor and activist who maps former plantation sites in rural Louisiana and finds the burial grounds of enslaved people. She makes sure that these people are honored and also protected, and that the living people around them, their land is protected, their health is protected from these giant plastics or oil companies who have bought this land with such a horrific history. One of the people in the front row was our friend from Gaza. And she said, “My family’s likely dead and murdered under rubble. But if Trump somehow succeeds in getting this [Gaza] Riviera built on top of my people’s land there will be people like you to find where they were buried, there will be people like you to make sure that they live on when their lives are cut too short.” They can’t take away the goodness from people—there will always be good people doing the good work and they’ll never be able to take that away.
TAQ: [The Freedom Forum] gives you a space to ask questions that maybe you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking in any other setting. And that’s kind of the point—we have to tease at these seemingly simple questions that don’t always have an easy answer. And so we really love when people come in really open and wanting to interrogate their own biases and their own ignorance in whatever ways they feel comfortable, because there’s probably somebody else in that audience who has the same question as you. It really becomes a community effort to tear down these mental barriers between oppressed people and to show more clearly how we’re really all fighting the same thing.
Imani Jacqueline Brown gives a NOLA Freedom Forum presentation, “Constellations of Corporate Extraction & Ecological Solidarity,” at the Promise of Justice Institute on November 21. (Photo by Stephanie Tarrant)
The Forums are also creating an intersectional community, then.
AM: [At each event] we get 50% new people, 50% people that have come already… if we can grow this platform and bring in people who have never been to anything like this, never done political education, that’s when we’ll know we’ve really succeeded.
TAQ: We’re slowly expanding our reach and popping that insulated bubble a little bit and actually bringing in people who have never been exposed to these conversations and have never had a place to get a foundational knowledge from somebody with expertise or lived experience. And it just provides a really direct route to understanding the human consequence of colonialism and white supremacy.
You’ve covered many topics over the past two years and 28 Freedom Forums. Which ones, in particular, would you like to highlight?
AM: We did [a Freedom Forum] with Southeast Dignity Not Detention. You know, people were still talking about ICE, but it wasn’t as prevalent then. We also talked about queering the front lines and of breaking down the propaganda [that] Israel is the only place for queer people in the Middle East.
TAQ: Yeah, that conversation was really special because it was led by someone who I spent time with in Palestine. And the discussion was really just that no matter which struggle you look at, you’ll see queer people on the front lines because it’s always the most marginalized of the marginalized that are putting themselves at the highest risk. And so it was just great to have a queer Palestinian speaking about Palestine through a queer lens, highlighting the role that queer people play in liberation struggles, no matter which struggle it is. We [also] did health equity in West Africa, which was one of our earliest forums and was really fantastic because Dr. Denrick Cooper was able to draw so many connections between the effects of colonization on public health and Palestine. The genocide had just started, and he was able to say, these are the kinds of health consequences you’re going to see unfold in the next few weeks, months—not expecting that it would be years. And pretty much everything he said has happened.
I think one of the most poignant Freedom Forums we’ve done was with Decolonize Sudan. We had four Sudanese people come to speak about their country, to provide historical context for it, to teach people the proper language to speak about their struggle with, which is something that is really important to us when speaking about Palestine as well. And as we were hearing them speak about Sudan, there were so many instances where if you closed your eyes, you would swear you’re hearing about Palestine. The parallels are so strong. And just being able to do that [with] them was so enlightening for us and also created this bond with those other organizers where we’re able to amplify each other’s messages and actually offer tangible support to each other. And so in addition to creating the connections via education, it’s connecting organizers from so many different struggles and allowing us to show up for each other and embody that connection in protest or in anything else we do.
AM: We had Reverend Nontombi Naomi Tutu, who is Desmond Tutu‘s daughter, speak. with Iyad Burnat, who is an organizer from the West Bank of Palestine. His brother created Five Broken Cameras, the documentary. It was this incredible conversation with these two people who had experienced apartheid. And Reverend Naomi actually said—she and her father agree—that the apartheid in Palestine is much worse than the apartheid in South Africa. Not to compare the two, but to say that the same care and regret people have about apartheid in South Africa is like the same action they should be having about Palestine. And we had [a Forum on] Jim Crow juries [with the Promise of Justice Initiative], with several people who came out of Angola fairly recently or a while ago after spending decades incarcerated, talking about their experiences basically being in slave labor, or taken away from their families [when] they hadn’t done the actual crime, or even if they did [and] they owned up to it—
TAQ: They didn’t get a fair trial. You know, [having] them come out and spend their time with us that evening to talk to our group of people, knowing what they went through, that one had me in tears. That was a good opportunity to bring the conversation home. We do spend a lot of time speaking about global issues, and then to be able to say, this is happening in our own backyard, was really poignant.
Reverend Nontombi Naomi Tutu speaks at the NOLA Freedom Forum presentation “Hope Beyond Apartheid” at Café Istanbul on July 8. (Photo by Temple Blacksnake)
What other topics would you like to cover in future Forums?
AM: If you know anything about these topics, let us know! We’d love to cover Haiti, we’d love to cover Cuba, we’d love to cover Ireland.
TAQ: One [topic] that I’ve really been wanting to do and haven’t found the right person or group to stage this event with is the effects of war on the climate. When we’re seeing so many tons of bombs dropped in one little area, it takes no imagination to understand that it is affecting climate and rapidly accelerating climate change. But we would love to have actual research and evidence to support that. [And] any topic that somebody feels passionate about and is able to make connections to other struggles, we’re so open to hearing them and talking about them and hopefully bringing them to the community.
Going into the second year of Freedom Forum, what goals do y’all have? How would you like to see it grow?
AM: A [physical] space. I think the difference between mobilizing and organizing is what you leave behind and institutionalizing things. We want an institution. And of course, that requires a lot more of Thafer’s and my time, and it requires funding. And we don’t want to become a nonprofit because we want to keep this a very free space for the long run. I think another one of our goals is to bring this to every city in America. Like NOLA Freedom Forum could easily become New York Freedom Forum or Austin Freedom Forum… I’ve had people come up to us and just be like, my life changed because of Freedom Forum. People have gone off to law school because of Freedom Forum. People have gotten married because of Freedom Forum, or will be getting married because of Freedom Forum. People have been so open to spending their Friday nights learning about things. This is so needed, and I think as long as the community recognizes that, we’ll keep going.
There seems to be a hunger for it—there’s a hunger for knowledge, there’s a hunger for community.
AM: And there’s free food! People come in and they get free food because we’re asking them for their Friday nights. And they’re getting this like, literally Ivy League education—a lot of our [speakers] are regular people and a lot of them are Ivy League professors… It’s a little bit hard to sustain, but it’s still worth it for us because, again, our liberations are tied. The most Palestinian thing we do is, like, we’re drowning, but we’re putting on someone else’s life vest. That is what Palestinians do. If you see any video out of Gaza, that is what they’re doing. And I think the best way we can honor our people is to fight every day for us while not forgetting that everyone else in the world has a struggle that they’re dealing with.
The next NOLA Freedom Forum will be held at the Promise of Justice Initiative 1The print version of this feature incorrectly lists this venue as Promise of Justice Institute (1024 Elysian Fields Ave.) on Friday, January 23 at 6 p.m. Eyes on Surveillance and Alliance for Affordable Energy will discuss Big Tech’s takeover of Louisiana, with a focus on data centers, bitcoin mining, and how it affects us all. For more info, follow @nolafreedomforum on Instagram.
Top photo left to right: Thafer Abu Qamir & Adan Murad (photo by Stephanie Tarrant)
