Pro-Palestinian speaker urges ‘destroy idea of America’

A panelist speaking at the “People’s Conference for Palestine” in Detroit on Friday called the United States “an evil country” and expressed a need to “destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads.”

Speaking on a panel titled “No Weapons for Genocide: The People Demand an Arms Embargo,” Sachin Peddada, a Ph.D. student in economics and research coordinator at Progressive International, repeatedly ripped on the United States as an “empire” motivated by greed.

In response to a question about how Americans can get more involved, Peddada paraphrased a quote by deceased Palestinian author Bassel al-Araj, saying, “The average American will never understand the plight of the Palestinian person because the state of Israel is a carbon copy of the United States.

“And, therefore, the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads so that they can see the humanity of everybody outside the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism and all these evil things.”  

As Peddada said these words, the crowd broke into applause.

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Peddada continued, saying, “We have to dismantle this idea of American exceptionalism, of supremacy, of being beyond reproach.

“I think it’s very important that we normalize criticism as a healthy process and learn from our experiments in the world to push the boundaries of what is possible, to continue to fight for more and more and to see how the empire responds to us, to continue to push farther and harder.”

At another point during the panel, Peddada declared, “We live in an evil country.”

He said that, since Oct. 7, 2023, “We can say with certainty that the…