Didier Fassin > Quotes

“Why, then, is it so crucial to have ethnographies of urban policing? The answer to this question certainly becomes clearer now. It is not simply that ethnography provides a sort of immersion in the world of law enforcement, allowing us to understand what happens when the police are in the field. It is perhaps more importantly that it produces a vision of a world that has been made either invisible or opaque to most of us.”
― Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing

“Without a doubt, what will haunt memories the longest, including perhaps in Israel itself, is how the inequality between lives has been paraded on the stage of Gaza, ignored by some and legitimized by others. That this supreme injustice - one life being worth less than another - is widespread in our world is a reality evident in peacetime and wartime alike. But there is hardly any previous instance in which the governments of Western countries so ostentatiously avert their eyes from it, to the extent of justifying it and silencing the voices that criticize it.”
― Didier Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

“Notwithstanding the Jerusalem Declaration, conflation of criticism of Israeli policy, or criticism of Zionism, with antisemitism remains the rule for Western governments, mainstream media and academic institutions. This has resulted in the democratic paradox that to criticize a government comprising far-right ministers, which promotes religious supremacism, fashions discriminatory legislation, rejects international law, and carries out massacres of civilian populations, is to expose oneself to the accusation of iniquity.”
― Didier Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

“Language is damaged when demands to stop killing civilians are 'antisemitic', when an army that dehumanizes its enemies is 'moral', when an enterprise of obliteration is a 'riposte', when a military operation openly conducted against Palestinian civilians is the 'Israel-Hamas war'.”
― Didier Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

“This is perhaps the ultimate key to interpreting the consent of Western countries to the obliteration of Gaza: atonement by proxy for their participation in the genocide of European Jews, even if it means allowing a second Nakba to be inflicted on a population whose sacrifice the world had already accepted.”
― Didier Fassin, Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza