Mick Hartley

It’s just history…

"Indigenous" is a real concept applied with a fake standard.

The word means "the population already there when someone else arrived." Fine. The problem isn't the definition. It's that the people who deploy it loudest apply it to exactly one set of migrations and pretend the…

— Ahmed Al-Khalidi (@khalidi79397) May 17, 2026

The problem isn’t the definition. It’s that the people who deploy it loudest apply it to exactly one set of migrations and pretend the others never happened..

The Bantu expansion swept across half of Africa, absorbing or displacing the peoples who lived there first. No one calls Bantu-speakers settlers. The Turks arrived in Anatolia in the 11th century and replaced Greeks and Armenians whose roots there ran thousands of years deeper. No one demands they go back to Central Asia. Slavs pushed into lands held by earlier Europeans. Arabs spread from a single peninsula across North Africa and the Levant, Arabizing populations that had been there since antiquity. Anglo-Saxons displaced Britons. Han Chinese absorbed countless earlier peoples across what is now southern and western China.

None of these get the colonizer label. Each one is treated as just “history.” The label only activates for a narrow, politically chosen set. Almost always Europeans, and almost always Jews returning to the one place on earth where their indigeneity is older than the word itself.

And…

So why does "indigenous vs. colonizer" almost always mean Europeans, and almost never Bantu, Turks, Arabs, Slavs, or Han Chinese?

A few reasons, in descending order of how much they actually explain:

1. Recency and documentation. European expansion happened in the era of the… https://t.co/spsXbSXjCI

— Ahmed Al-Khalidi (@khalidi79397) May 17, 2026