We’re “obsessed” with Israel because its crimes have dominated our newsfeeds for the past two and a half years.

Because we’re not being force-fed the importance of the U.S.-Saudi alliance 24/7 the way we are the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Because we’re not called antisemites, self-hating Jews, terrorist sympathizers, or enemies of Western civilization for opposing the violence of any country other than Israel.

Because we have not been gaslit for 78 years to believe that expelling Sudanese, Congolese, Yemenis, or China’s Uyghurs from their homes was a noble act essential to the survival of the Jewish people.

Because we are not told to disbelieve our own eyes when confronted with an endless scroll of decapitated bodies, bombed hospitals, starving children, mass graves, and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble anywhere other than in Palestine.

Because it is not the Saudi, Yemeni, Sudanese, Congolese, or Chinese head of state who is applauded in the halls of Congress while defending a genocidal campaign.

Because the Western media and political establishment are not working this hard to persuade us that the genocide in Sudan is not real.

Because the U.S. is willing to call Sudan a genocide instead of criminalizing protest against it and funneling all our tax dollars into perpetuating it.

Because news of forced starvation in Yemen isn’t actively suppressed by our State Department.

Because mentioning genocide in Sudan doesn’t see our livelihoods destroyed.

Because celebrities who advocate for China’s Uyghurs aren’t blacklisted in Hollywood.

Because right-wing billionaires buying up the media aren’t doing so to shield Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Congo, or China from criticism.

Because our power elites aren’t planning to build beachfront property over the corpses of Sudanese, Congolese, Yemenis, or Uyghurs.

Because our government doesn’t want to stop at supplying aid to Israel—it wants to wed our military to the one committing genocide.

We are not “obsessed” with Israel.

We are responding to the fact that Israel’s crimes are being committed in our name, with our money, and under our protection, while our institutions demand that we shut up and call it self-defense.

Israel’s proclaimed “right to exist” has long been used as a cudgel, either to deflect from the state’s crimes or to accuse its critics of promoting the mass murder of its people.

But over the past two and a half years, as the world has watched Israel wage its war of annihilation in Gaza and spread its aggression throughout the Middle East1, prominent figures from the left and right have pushed back against this claim in various ways.

In September of 2024, Ta-Nehisi Coates—while promoting his Palestine-related book The Message on CBS Mornings—was pressed by host Tony Dokoupil on the issue of Israel’s right to exist, to which Coates responded, “No country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force.”

A month later, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese similarly shut down a reporter by saying “there is not such a thing in international law like a right of a state to exist...What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

In other words, if Israel is recognized by the United Nations, does that justify its erasure of the Palestinians?

“Hell no,” she said.

Seven months after that, Zohran Mamdani, then-candidate for Mayor of New York City, stated his position on the issue when cornered by a moderator during an election debate. “Israel has the right to exist,” he said, “as a state with equal rights”—effectively rejecting the apartheid system that defines Israel’s sovereignty.

And most recently, ardent Trump supporter and MAGA figure Tucker Carlson ran The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes through the Socratic wringer by demanding she clearly define the question of Israel’s right to exist, after she posed it to him in an interview.

Minton Beddoes quickly backtracked, saying, “I don’t want to get hung up on the ‘right to’...”

But Carlson persisted, asking, “Where does that right come from?”

The idea that a nation has a right to exist originated with French historian Ernest Renan, but in modern politics the phrase is used almost exclusively in regard to Israel’s legitimacy as a state. Israel has repeatedly demanded recognition of this “right” as a precondition for peace negotiations—first from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which recognized Israel’s “right to exist in peace and security” in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and later from Hamas, which has indicated a willingness to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the pre-1967 borders but has not formally recognized Israel’s “right to exist.”

That’s because such recognition requires Palestinians to legitimize their own dispossession.

What Israel is actually demanding is not acknowledgment of some inherent “right,” but acceptance of its sovereignty as a state recognized by the international community. Yet calling that status a “right to exist” transforms a political agreement into a moral entitlement—recasting recognition, which states grant or withhold based on power and diplomacy, as something Israel is innately owed.

This “right to exist” has thus been deployed to justify countless acts of violence committed by Israel. If every atrocity is carried out in the name of security or self-defense, then the stakes—no matter how much suffering is inflicted—are always existential. To deny Israel’s right to defend itself is to deny its right to exist.

This “right” has now served to excuse Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its bombing of civilians in neighboring countries, and its ongoing occupation and annexation of the West Bank.

Here, Coates’s analysis is particularly instructive:

If no country in the world has established its existence through rights, claiming a right to exist is incoherent. But Israel and its chief benefactor—the United States—attract particular scrutiny because they weren’t created by indigenous populations who drew borders to establish sovereignty. They were created by settlers who conquered land, expelled people, and built states on top of them.2

In other words, they were created not through rights but through the violation of rights.

And they’re sustained through the denial of others’ humanity or outright existence.

Early Zionists, for example, encouraged Jewish immigration to Palestine by promoting the myth of “a land without a people.”

The ruling Likud Party’s platform, since its inception, has claimed that the entire area of historic Palestine—between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean—belongs to the State of Israel.3

Right-wing Israelis have routinely argued that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.

And at the height of the Gaza genocide, the pro-Israel New York Times issued a memo instructing its journalists to avoid using the word “Palestine” in their reporting.

All of this functions to carry out what Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling identified as politicide—the erasure of Palestinians as a political entity with legitimate claims and grievances.

And the United States backs all this not because it believes in Israel’s right to exist, but because it believes in the preservation of its own hegemony.

As James Baldwin wrote, “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.”

The migration of European Jews to Israel was more an act of voluntary self-expulsion than a program of protection by the imperial powers. Western nations set up Israel to ease their “guilty Christian conscience,” as Baldwin put it, while ridding themselves of the people they’d forsaken in the first place.

But Israel’s strategic function aligns cleanly with Theodor Herzl’s vision for a Jewish state: “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” The West resolved “the Jewish Question” while creating a proxy to ensure its influence in the Middle East.

Which is why the repeated war crimes and human rights violations by the U.S. and Israel are not just dark moments in history—they’re defining features of our present reality.

Israel continues to erase Gaza. It continues to terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank. It has displaced a million people in southern Lebanon. And alongside the U.S., it’s waging war to flatten and destabilize Iran.

As Israel shows repeated contempt for international law, the question is not whether it has a right to exist, but whether it should be expelled from the United Nations.

As historian Tarik Cyril Amar put it on Rania Khalek’s Dispatches, “We need a process of derecognizing Israel...No state has a right to exist. But in Israel’s case, the Palestinians have a right that Israel cease to exist.”

Israel supporters might hear that and think “extermination.” But the dismantling of apartheid South Africa did not erase the land or its people—it restructured the system into one of equal rights.

After the genocide in Gaza and the settler terrorism in the West Bank, however, most Palestinians may refuse to live in the same state as Israelis. And ultimately, it’s up to the Palestinians to decide how they should be governed. But a state that claims a “right to exist” while forever threatening the existence of the people it dispossessed cannot remain in perpetuity.

When Coates made his appearance on CBS Mornings, he was immediately ambushed by Dokoupil, who said the Palestine section of his book belonged “in the backpack of an extremist.” Dokoupil then launched into familiar talking points about suicide bombings, the Palestinian Intifadas, and hostile neighboring countries, which he framed as justification for Israel’s apartheid—and whose omission from the book he saw as a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.

What Israel supporters like Dokoupil don’t seem to realize—or maybe they do—is that invoking Israel’s “right to exist” in order to rationalize apartheid, occupation, and genocide implies the state can only survive through murder and oppression. They’re tacitly admitting that Israel is, by definition, a violent settler state.

Is it any wonder why Palestinian identity is one of constant struggle?

In an act of utter irony and hypocrisy over the past two and a half years of genocide, Western leaders have stood firm about Israel’s “right to exist” while denying an actual right enshrined in international law: the right of Palestinians to resist.

We’re constantly ordered to prioritize the concerns of colonizers over the rights of the colonized.

That’s why Tony Dokoupil demanded that Ta-Nehisi Coates provide “context” in order to justify Israel’s crimes.

Why Francesca Albanese was pressed to acknowledge the State of Israel’s right to exist while it violates the Palestinian people’s right to exist.

Why a New York City mayoral candidate was expected to support a Middle East settler colony’s status as an ethno-supremacist apartheid state.

Not because of any humanitarian law among nations.

But for “the salvation of the Western interests.”

If we want to talk about rights, what right do Western powers have to inflict continued atrocities on the Global South?

What right does Israel have to wage wars of expansion throughout the Middle East while the country’s officials tout plans for “Greater Israel,” from the Nile to the Euphrates?

What right does the U.S. Ambassador to Israel have to say it would be fine if Israel “took it all”?

Does anyone truly believe the Middle East would be more violent without the presence of a settler-colonial apartheid state? Or without Western imperialists’ determination to control the region’s resources?

What right do the U.S. and Israel have to wage an unprovoked war on Iran, making false claims about Iran as an existential threat while producing actual threats to global survival, through mass killing, environmental destruction, trade disruptions, surging energy prices, risks to the world’s food supplies, and possible nuclear escalation?

Are they really fighting for existence—or for its opposite?

UN Resolution 181—the 1947 plan to divide Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states—prioritized the national aspirations of a mostly immigrant minority over the rights of the indigenous majority. Jews comprised roughly one third of the total population but were to be granted more than half the land, including the most fertile coastal plains and the only good port. The Arabs were to be left with a series of disconnected enclaves, with severely restricted access to the sea and stripped of the most productive agricultural zones.4

And because the population within the borders of the proposed Jewish state was almost evenly split—roughly 55% Jewish to 45% Arab—maintaining the state’s Jewish character would require either the permanent subjugation or the removal of that 45% minority.

So, what the West frames as the Arabs’ “rejectionism” was in fact their refusal to validate their own erasure.

The UN Charter explicitly champions the right of people to determine their own destiny. The UN did not have the legal authority to carve Palestine into states without the consent of the land’s inhabitants. It can vote to recognize a state; it cannot vote to create one. The resolution was merely a recommendation—but its framework undermined the values laid out in the UN Charter.

While the Zionists saw the Partition Plan as a long-awaited birth certificate for their Jewish state, the Arabs saw it as an act of dispossession by a body in which they had no meaningful representation. At the time, the UN was dominated by Western powers. With much of the Global South still under colonial rule and having no vote, the UN sided with the colonial order on the partition of Palestine.

The result was not a peaceful transition to statehood. It was war.

When the Zionists enacted their plan to rid the proposed Jewish state of its Arab population, displacing at least 750,000 Palestinians, the UN’s endorsement provided a shield of legitimacy. The Zionists could frame their ethnic cleansing as the defense of an international mandate—and the indigenous Arab resistance as a defiance of it.

Which brings us back to Israel’s “right to exist.”

When a state’s very foundation is contested by the people it displaced, its “right to exist”—and hence its “right to defend itself”—takes on a circular, almost Kafkaesque logic:

The state is established by displacing an indigenous population.

The indigenous population resists its displacement.

The state invokes its “right to defend itself” against that resistance.

And by defending the results of its initial violence, the state treats the consequences of its creation as justification for its continued use of force.

The conflict always starts “today,” with a recognized state under attack by “terrorists,” rather than being acknowledged as a century-long struggle over the displacement that made the state possible.

But a state that requires the world to acknowledge its “right to exist” is a state that knows its foundations are built on injustice.

Which is why Israeli leaders have admitted that if they were Palestinian, they would resist too:

• “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel...we have come and we have stolen their country.” – David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister

• “Why should we blame [the Palestinians] for their burning hatred for us?...we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.” – Moshe Dayan, former Israeli defence minister

• “If I was [a Palestinian] at the right age, at some stage I would have entered one of the terror organizations and have fought from there.” – Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister

• “I would fight without limits against anyone who takes my land.” – Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service

• “We [the Jews] used terrorism to establish our state. Why should we expect the Palestinians to be any different?” – Leah Rabin, widow of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and participant in the 1948 Palestine war

Whether these Israelis believed (wrongly) that the land inherently belonged to them, none of them claimed that Palestinian resistance was motivated by Jew hatred. They understood Palestinian resistance for what it is—a struggle for self-determination.

Israeli empathy for Palestinian resistance is not necessary to legitimize Palestinian rights, but it does undermine Israel’s image as an innocent bystander to its own crimes. And it exposes Israel’s “right to exist” as a rhetorical maneuver meant to conceal the state’s culpability.

That should come as no surprise—because slogans uniquely applied to Israel tend not to stand up to scrutiny:

• It’s the most moral army in the world. (But it commits war crimes.)

• It’s the only democracy in the Middle East. (Actually, it’s an apartheid system sustained by military occupation.)

• It has a right to defend itself. (Not against people resisting occupation.)

The “right to exist” is a demand for exoneration—for a state that wants conquest without blowback, plunder without accountability.

Those of us who grew up in the United States know how easily a country’s history can be whitewashed—how, at best, we can be raised to believe its crimes are safely in the past. But a country born from genocide and built through slavery, a country that dropped two atomic bombs on hundreds of thousands of civilians, a country that bankrolls death squads and genocides and freely bombs and destabilizes other countries to serve its imperial interests, can’t claim “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” as anything more than aspirational. Our founding ideals are a brand statement, not a political reality. Not when resources, capital, and strategic interests are on the line.

So, it’s no surprise that the U.S. is Israel’s chief enabler. Our “most important ally” is a subcontractor for our imperial violence.

But Israel is also an independent actor running rampant with its own brutal agenda. It executes Palestinians in the streets and in their homes. It tries them in military courts without due process.

Palestinians say: We have a right as a people to exist.

Israel says: No, you do not. Our power supersedes your humanity.

So, I’ll leave you with this:

If, on October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters in full uniform had breached the Gaza border fence but had not attacked the Nova music festival, if they had not attacked a single kibbutz or a single civilian, if they had only hit Israeli military installations and killed hundreds of armed, on-duty soldiers, striking a devastating blow to the IDF, if they had never taken any civilians hostage and had taken only Israeli soldiers prisoner, if they had operated in full compliance with the laws of war—would Israel’s response have been any less violent?

Would U.S. support for that response have been any less enthusiastic?

Would Biden not have bear-hugged Netanyahu?

Would Lindsey Graham not have called for Israel to “level the place”?

Yes, I’m posing a hypothetical.

No, I can’t prove a counterfactual.

But think. Look deep within and ask yourself how the Western mindset would interpret that scenario—a forceful but lawful retaliation by Hamas against Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza?

How would Israel exercise its “right to defend itself”?

It took a genocide for the world to see Palestinians’ humanity. It took thousands of murdered children for that—and for Western leaders to do the bare minimum and not even cut off military aid to Israel but simply start hedging their bets.

Would things have been any different?

Of course not.

Because of Israel’s “right to exist.”

And when a violent colonizer-state serving as a proxy for the world’s most powerful empire can claim an inherent right to exist—it can claim anything.

Including the life of every Palestinian.

By now, the rhetorical expectations of opposing imperial violence are simple:

To oppose the genocide in Gaza, you must first condemn Hamas.

To oppose the destruction of Lebanon, you must first condemn Hezbollah.

To oppose the war on Iran, you must first condemn the Islamic Republic.

You’ll still be straw-manned and smeared for voicing your opposition—called a regime agent or useful idiot. But to remain inside the window of acceptable critique, you must condemn all resistance to the violence, thereby neutering any talk of stopping said violence.

But in reality, opposition to war crimes doesn’t require a moral disclaimer. Whether Iran’s government is benevolent or brutal is beside the point. No country earns the right to bomb another by pointing to its internal politics.

Perhaps that’s why the rationale for this illegal war teeters between existential threat and oppressed population. But the central fallacy is the belief that the aggressors can bomb Iranians into revolting—that the people’s hatred for their government is so ingrained that “decapitation” will produce a groundswell of action toward regime change.

At the same time, U.S. officials stoke the fires of Islamophobia, painting Iranians as universally evil to mitigate the tragedy of their annihilation. Much the way Israel has portrayed Palestinians in Gaza as serving Hamas both as unwitting human shields and as gleeful supporters, the U.S. now offers the public similar options for characterizing Iran—whichever provides a more comforting rationale for the death raining down on the country.

When I visited Iran with my mother in 2018—just after Trump had torn up the nuclear agreement—Western media covered Iranian reactions with the usual narrative of outrage and hysteria: small but tightly framed crowds burning U.S. flags while chanting “Death to America.” Family and friends warned me not to go. Surely, there would be riots, upheaval, attacks on Americans. Maybe I’d be imprisoned on manufactured charges of espionage.

None of that happened.

When I arrived, I experienced all the myth-busting elements of Iranian society—Western music, bootleg alcohol, hijabs worn loosely, quiet criticism of the government. But none of that surprised me.

What struck me was the murals of Iran’s martyrs.

Across Tehran and other Iranian cities, walls are covered with large murals of men who died fighting in Iran’s wars. These first appeared during the Iran-Iraq War, what Iranians call the “imposed war,” because—much like the current onslaught—it was a conflict Iran never asked for but rather was decided by aggressive neighbors and imperial interests.

My Western reflex was to view the murals as propaganda. And in a sense, they are. They’re commissioned by the state to reinforce its narrative of sacrifice and resistance.

But when I asked our guide what she thought of the murals, her answer was more nuanced.

She disliked the government and complained openly about the social restrictions placed on Iranians. She loved Western culture and longed for greater freedoms. But when she talked about the men on those walls—those martyrs—her tone was not resentful or dismissive. It was respectful.

She’s only one person, of course, in a country of over 90 million—but her view is not unusual, even among those not aligned with the government. Commemoration of the country’s fallen warriors remains alive. And a deeply divided society can still unite against external threats.

The Iran-Iraq War was existential. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. Cities were bombed. Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians while much of the world looked the other way. Saddam Hussein’s war machine was financed by Gulf monarchies and quietly supported by Western governments that feared the spread of Iran’s revolution.

For many Iranians, the lesson of that war was simple: no one was coming to their rescue.

That’s why Iran built relationships with armed groups and governments across the region—Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria. These networks were meant to ensure that if Iran were attacked again, the battlefield would remain outside its borders.

That’s also what drove Iran’s proliferation of ballistic missiles and why it restarted the nuclear program begun under the Shah. It was not driven by some hegemonic aim to control the region—but by a determination to ensure that its survival is never threatened again.

Western media often portrays Iran as a society on the brink of revolt—a population desperate for outside intervention to topple the regime. Diaspora figures are regularly elevated as representatives of Iranian opinion, assuring Western audiences that ordinary Iranians would welcome U.S. or Israeli attacks if those weaken the government.

But Iranian society is complex, and public opinion is difficult to measure in an authoritarian system. And while there are certainly many people in Iran who oppose the Islamic Republic—with protests and uprisings, followed by brutal responses by authorities—opposition to the government does not translate into support for foreign aggression.

So, my point is pretty basic. No matter how complex or divided a people might be, killing their children and poisoning their skies has a unifying effect. People are far more likely to rally around the government defending them than around the nations attacking them.

As John Mearsheimer pointed out in a recent interview with Chris Hedges, there’s no historical precedent to suggest otherwise.

The martyr murals are a reminder of that fact. Western policymakers may see them only as propaganda, but they’re also something deeper: a visual memory of a nation that has already fought one devastating war against outside powers.

Iranians are a diverse people with multifaceted lives. But they live in a country shaped by the memory of invasion and sacrifice.

How many civilians can the U.S. and Israel kill, how many lives can they ruin, before everyone stops pretending this war is about liberation?

Iranians may disagree about their government—but why would they overthrow it for the nations attacking them? Why would they see the U.S. and Israel as partners in liberation?

The so-called Twelve-Day War last June did nothing to spark regime change. Nor did it boost support for Crown Prince Reza, Iran’s would-be leader in exile—who’s closely aligned with Israel.

And the truth is: the U.S. and Israel don’t want a free Iran. They want a devastated one. They want to divide, destabilize, and level Iran so their regional domination faces no opposition.

Their rhetoric grows more apocalyptic by the day. Trump says the Iranians are “among the most evil people on earth” (while seeming to conflate them with Hamas—and parroting debunked atrocity myths). U.S. military commanders have reportedly framed this as a messianic religious war. And on 60 Minutes, Pete Hegseth—channeling Patrick Batemen—said, “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.”

Hegseth, jaded by his military service in Iraq, has eschewed liberation in favor of vengeance.

And Israel wants to treat Iran like Gaza: just “mow the lawn.”

But as long as those murals remain on the walls of Iran’s cities, Western leaders should understand what they represent: not blind loyalty to a regime, but the memory of a country that once fought long and hard for its survival—and will likely do so again.

Hello friends,

I’m currently deep in the edit of a short film, which is taking center stage for the next several weeks.

Essays will continue, but at a slower pace while I tackle the footage in the editing room—which is actually my apartment, since I don’t have access to a high-priced editing suite with cutting-edge equipment.

I’m also posting Notes periodically in response to the chaotic news cycle.

In addition, I may post shorter reflection essays and film updates when I can. The film itself deals with some of the same themes I explore in my Substack writing, so I look forward to sharing more when it’s ready.

And if you’re a recent subscriber—or just catching up—this is a good time to explore some of my earlier essays in the archive. Many of them speak directly to the moment we’re living in.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging with the ideas.

We examine the rise of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, the bipartisan expansion of the border-security apparatus, and the quiet normalization of for-profit detention centers operating under a “civil” immigration system with fewer protections than criminal law. From children inside ICE detention to the erosion of due process, this system is not about isolated abuses. It’s about design.

When borders expand, freedom contracts. And if we believe the people already detained are equal to us, then the atrocity isn’t coming—it’s already here.

Subscribe to Right of Resistance on YouTube for videos of our episodes.
Become a Patreon member to support our work.
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Theme music by Josh Charney.

For me, the most paradoxical aspect of arguing about the genocide in Gaza has been the number of friends and acquaintances who’ve expressed betrayal because I’m speaking out for Palestine. While their anger has done nothing to weaken my resolve, their assumption that I would ever condone mass murder is puzzling, to say the least.

It usually begins like this: they see something I’ve posted on social media—anything from a protest flyer to one of my political essays—and they react with condemnation. A ranty comment. A heated info-dump. A spew of tangential facts meant to punish me for speaking out.

If I respond calmly, the exchange escalates. If I disengage, they slide into my DMs to continue the confrontation there.

Some, to their credit, are less overtly hostile. They ask cautious but loaded questions, or they calmly correct me on my “misuse” of the word genocide. It’s a war, they insist. A tragic one, perhaps. A just one that evolved into an unjust one. But a war, nonetheless.

That they assert this with such certainty—while countless genocide scholars, legal experts, and human rights organizations recognize genocide—is beside the point. The point is: I must be corrected.

I’m aware that some of them are truly struggling with a worldview so deeply ingrained that hedging is the only way they can grapple with this horrible reality. But when I’m reprimanded for my “insensitivity,” that gives the game away. We’re no longer dealing in facts or fundamental truths. We’re dealing in comfort levels.

And why would they ever be comfortable acknowledging genocide by a nation they support?

Perhaps Israel’s moral unassailability has been so taken for granted that they assumed I was on their side. They say, “This doesn’t sound like you.” Or, “You’re not the person I remember.”

This moral inversion is what makes genocide denial so potent. They genuinely see themselves as the victims.

One of them referenced her mother—a Holocaust survivor—as if my Palestine advocacy were an affront to what her mother had been through.

Others speak the language of safety, suggesting my opposition to genocide is literally endangering their lives or the lives of their loved ones in Israel.

Others give ahistorical lectures on how Palestinians have always said no to peace, or they blame Palestinians for rejecting partition in the first place—a claim that ignores the injustice of displacement and dispossession, not to mention the Zionists’ rejection of the Arab proposal for a single, equal-rights state as an alternative to partition. (The common Zionist rebuttal against a single state is the specter of “Jew hatred”—a sentiment Israel has sought to cultivate and instrumentalize through 78 years of brutalizing Palestinians in the name of all Jews.)

Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of these arguments will recognize them and others:

It can’t be genocide if it’s ethnic cleansing. (Not true: ethnic cleansing is widely recognized as a component or stage of genocide.)

Why won’t Egypt and Jordan take the Palestinians? (Because they don’t want to facilitate said ethnic cleansing.)

Americans are colonizers too. (Which is why we have reservations, treaties, land acknowledgments, and ongoing debates about redress for Indigenous peoples.)

Everyone gets colonized. (An excuse you’ll only ever hear from the colonizer, not the colonized.)

Another common maneuver is to lambast me for my privilege—for being in a position where it’s “easy” to side with Palestinians, as if opposing a genocide funded by my tax dollars is a luxury, not a moral obligation.

I’ve also been called out for daring to attend a press conference in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil while posting no complaints about antisemitism on the Columbia campus. Never mind that I was there on behalf of a Jewish organization I volunteer with—anyone active in Palestine advocacy knows that Jews who oppose Israeli occupation are dismissed by their critics as “self-hating” or “useful idiots.”

But my silence on Columbia’s antisemitism report was deliberate: its research was empirically weak, it ignored the many Jewish students who participated in the Gaza encampments, and it was ultimately used to punish rather than protect them.

In short, it was weaponized to crush pro-Palestine speech.

My critics expect my Jewish half to harbor automatic support for Israel—either out of cultural obligation or for my own self-preservation. Meanwhile, they ignore my Iranian half, at times repeating racist tropes about Iran and its “terrorist proxies”—in a mashup of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and support for Western-backed settler-colonialism.

They continue to cast themselves as the wounded party and me as a traitor.

As the complaints persisted, I showed less patience for them. I blocked people or immediately hid their replies because I saw the same rationalizations, the same bad-faith arguments, the same ad hominem attacks.

It became infuriating to deal with people who, two years into the genocide, spoke to me as if they were the first to make these arguments—and as if I hadn’t already witnessed all the horrors I’d witnessed.

Moreover, it highlighted enormous hypocrisy on their part. After October 7, Israel supporters demanded immediate recognition and condemnation from those still processing shock and confusion. Now they expect silence after more than two years of relentless images of murdered Palestinians. Meanwhile, many of them are demanding quick judgment on the anti-government protests in Iran, despite the morass of confusion about death tolls and external interference.

I prefer not to take aim at ordinary citizens. My focus is on power structures and the people who wield that power. But my critics were surely emboldened—at least in part—by the power structures on their side. The donors and employers who had Palestine advocates fired. The members of Congress who interrogated college presidents for failing to squash anti-genocide protests.

That’s how capitalism suppresses dissent: by creating economic insecurity. If people are terrified of losing their livelihoods, they don’t speak out. That’s also why capitalism loves democracy—not because of the civil liberties democracy contains, but because of the cover they provide. The economic consequences of speaking out make our freedoms inadequate—and leave the empire managers with nothing to fear.

So, as we speak out against our government’s complicity in genocide, we need to know whom we can trust. That’s why Palestine is not a purity test; it’s a litmus test—a measure of whether our moral commitments survive contact with social pressure and material risk.

Genocide does not require universal hatred. It requires enough people willing to rationalize it, excuse it, or wait it out.

The friendships that broke over Palestine didn’t fracture because of disagreement. They fractured because certain truths cannot be faced without consequence.

What we do with that knowledge—whether we speak, remain silent, or try to justify atrocity—will determine not just what kind of world we live in, but what kind of people we’re willing to be.

This is not an argumentative essay to prove that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. My piece “What It’s Like to Argue with a Genocide Denier” makes that argument at length.

This is an examination of why genocide denial is still widely accepted in American discourse. About half of U.S. voters believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and at the time of this writing, Wikipedia—the world’s largest online encyclopedia—treats the genocide as factual and ongoing. But the U.S. political establishment and the mainstream media tell a different story.

President Trump has granted wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu a spot on the Gaza “Board of Peace”—tasked with rebuilding and governing the Strip as it’s transformed into whatever macabre resort area Trump envisions. And this is not just a case of two corrupt leaders abusing their power. It’s a reflection of a political climate of evading accountability.

In The New York Times, on CNN, in the State Department, and among high-polling presidential hopefuls and the majority of Congress, genocide denial is not a fringe position. It’s one side of an ongoing debate.

Yes, genocide is a legal term, but it’s also an analytical one, and naming genocides is what has made it possible to prosecute them in the first place. Framing genocide denial as a mere difference of opinion has normalized ambiguity and provided political cover for U.S. diplomats to repeatedly block UN ceasefire resolutions—prolonging the destruction of Gaza even as the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures to protect Gazans from harm.

Meanwhile, the current ceasefire agreement has functioned less as relief than as a diversion, allowing Israel to keep killing Palestinians while it bars dozens of aid organizations from Gaza—effectively starving the population as Western media turns its attention elsewhere.

Which begs the question: why—during one of the most documented genocides in history—are those who deny it still treated as serious participants in public life?

Here are six reasons the double standard persists:

1. Profit

Our tax dollars go into federal coffers, get routed to Israel, and are spent on weapons purchased from U.S. manufacturers. Bombs have no economic value—they’re built to explode, producing nothing but rubble, greenhouse gases, mass death, and human misery. But military aid allows our government to launder its subsidies through Israel, artificially boosting the stock value of the U.S. weapons industry. Genocide denial keeps the pipeline flowing without triggering legal constraints that would complicate future arms sales.

Once those weapons have wreaked their havoc, the ruins themselves become a lucrative market. Approximately 70% of Gaza is destroyed or damaged. Now, just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, that devastation can yield a host of reconstruction contracts—housing, utilities, roads, communications. Such contracts stand to enrich international firms, who launder their reputations by rebuilding what their policies helped destroy. The Trump-Kushner plan to turn Gaza into beachfront property puts this reality in full view. As they clear the rubble, they clear evidence of their crimes—leaving the remainder to be buried under plazas and high-rises.

Universities, meanwhile, benefit from relationships with weapons manufacturers, who fund research labs, sponsor faculty positions, recruit directly from campuses, and partner on federally funded projects. These relationships bring in large, stable streams of government-backed money, enhance universities’ prestige as “innovation hubs,” and help secure future federal grants. Acknowledging these companies’ complicity in genocide could, of course, shatter those relationships. And for some universities, fear of donor backlash and political retaliation reinforce support for Israel itself.

News outlets face similar financial predicaments in having to protect advertising dollars and avoid upsetting their owners, who often align with state power. Calling Gaza a genocide puts those relationships at risk and can rupture access to high-ranking officials, who themselves are a form of capital for media companies.

2. Geopolitical Interests

Despite our politicians’ insistence on the unbreakable bonds between the U.S. and Israel, the relationship between the countries is rooted less in shared values than in strategic objectives. Israel functions as the saber tip of U.S. empire, serving American power in ways that are illegal or politically costly for the U.S. to perform itself.

Israel provides continual intelligence for U.S. military operations in the Middle East. It also acts to weaken neighboring states and keep the region fragmented. Beyond Palestine, Israel has attacked six sovereign territories in the past two years—Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Qatar, and Iraq. Of course, Netanyahu seems intent on toppling every government that supports Palestine and obstructs the formation of “Greater Israel,” but these expansionist wars also destabilize or contain U.S. adversaries while allowing the U.S. to maintain plausible distance.

This arrangement was articulated—perhaps unintentionally—by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, where he was strikingly effusive in his praise of wanted war criminal Netanyahu. “I’ve had my disagreements with him,” Zakaria said, reducing Netanyahu’s crimes to policy differences. “Put aside the Gaza issue for a moment,” he continued, then proceeded to gush over Netanyahu’s dismantling of Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and Iran’s air power. Framing these power shifts as exciting achievements while relegating Gaza to a “humanitarian catastrophe” was itself a form of genocide denial. Gaza was presented not as a systematic campaign to erase a population, but as an unfortunate side effect.

International law is therefore contested—or outright condemned—when it threatens Western power. After Israel began its assault on Gaza, Senator Lindsey Graham argued that international law applied only to U.S. adversaries, not allies. And in January of last year, the U.S. State Department determined—without an ICJ ruling—that genocide had been committed in Sudan.

This discrepancy should come as no surprise. The U.S. has a history of downplaying atrocities by governments it supports. Genocide is named quickly when committed by enemies—but calling Gaza a genocide would trigger legal obligations the U.S. is actively avoiding.

3. Racism

There are plenty of racial slurs hurled at Palestinians on social media. But the racism that sustains genocide denial operates less through slurs than through the unequal distribution of credibility.

Palestinian testimony is discounted even when corroborated by journalists, doctors, satellite imagery, international legal bodies, data released by their assailants, and endless footage of their own destruction. Palestinians are dismissed as too emotional, too political, too biased, too violent—or simply disposable. Their mourning is scrutinized for sincerity. They must grieve correctly to be believed. This conditional empathy is a central theme in Mohammed el-Kurd’s Perfect Victims: Palestinian suffering—and therefore Palestinian claims to justice—are legitimized only when Palestinians express themselves in ways palatable to Western audiences.

Staffers close to President Biden made little secret of his empathy gap when it comes to Palestinians. And Trump has repeatedly called Senator Chuck Schumer “Palestinian” as an insult. But views like these are sustained by a much longer media tradition of speaking about Palestine while excluding Palestinian voices. A 2024 study by The Nation found that CNN and MSNBC coverage during the first 100 days of Israel’s assault on Gaza was significantly less humanizing toward Palestinians than toward Israelis.

In April 2024, a leaked New York Times memo revealed editorial directives instructing staff to avoid terms such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.” Even “Palestine” was largely off-limits. Palestinians could exist, but their homeland could not—presumably to avoid foregrounding expulsion, occupation, and dispossession.

While many Times staffers recognized the bias in these directives, the pattern is hardly unique to that outlet. The October 7 attacks have consistently been reported on without any context of Israel’s history of violence against Gaza, so Israel’s “self-defense” narrative continues to dominate. Palestinian testimony is routinely framed with qualifiers like “Hamas-run.” Israeli captives are “hostages,” while Palestinians held without conviction are “prisoners.” Israel can allege terrorism without evidence, while Palestinian suffering must be filmed and verified—and even then, it’s often dismissed as staged.

These center-left news outlets play an outsize role in shaping liberal discourse, and their framing choices carry real political consequences. The House of Representatives voted to ban the State Department from citing mass casualty counts from the Gaza Health Ministry, despite the Ministry’s data credibility with UN agencies and internationally respected human rights organizations—as well as The Lancet’s finding that the Ministry did not inflate mortality reporting. The baselessness of mainstream skepticism was further confirmed last week, when the Israeli military finally corroborated the Health Ministry’s numbers—after rejecting them for more than two years.

But perhaps the most telling example of bias is the speed with which elite media have moved to rehabilitate Israel’s image. Just two days after a designated ceasefire, The New York Times published a story about Israel’s efforts to repair its standing with Americans. By centering redemption without accountability, the piece privileged the perpetrator’s reputation over the victims’ reality, reducing genocide to “a charge Israel denies”—relaying opinion without investigation. The paper revealed not only where its sympathies lie, but whose humanity it recognizes.

4. Israel’s Moral Exceptionalism

Supporters of Israel often complain that it’s held to a uniquely high standard—perpetually singled out for criticism. Yet they themselves insist on its exceptionalism: “the most moral army in the world,” “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Israel’s claim to moral exemption is grounded not just in those labels but in historical traumas—above all, the Holocaust. Israel takes this real-world trauma and politicizes it into impunity across generations and state actions. Genocide is what the Nazis did; Jews were the victims of genocide—therefore, a Jewish state cannot commit genocide.

This reasoning is circular but powerful, granting Israel the paradoxical status of a settler-colonial state backed by the West, shielded by Holocaust memory, and framed as perpetually defensive.

That logic surfaced starkly in the remarks of former Democratic speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz, who argued that young Jews opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza are drawing the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. Their brains, she said, were being smashed by TikTok—that is, by relentless images of Palestinian suffering—leading them to mistakenly equate Israeli violence with Nazi violence.

For Hurwitz, “Never Again” doesn’t mean Never again for anyone. It means Never again for the Jewish people.

To support this view, she claimed that Holocaust education was intended primarily as antisemitism education. This rhetorical maneuver strips Holocaust pedagogy of its lessons about nationalism, authoritarianism, and genocide itself. By Hurwitz’s rationale, Jews who apply those lessons universally are not honoring Holocaust memory; they’re misusing it—and even contributing to antisemitism.

Taken to its extreme, her argument implies that calling Gaza a genocide is not merely incorrect; it’s a form of Holocaust denial. If anything can be genocide, then nothing can. For Hurwitz, the Holocaust must remain singular—to provide permanent exemption to a self-described Jewish state as it embarks on a war of annihilation.

Holocaust denial is grotesque in its own right—but for the Western political establishment, it’s taboo because it threatens self-identity. Before World War II, the imperial powers were fraught with antisemitism: European Jews—like Palestinians today—were seen as a problem to be solved. But Holocaust denial undermines the postwar moral order on which these Western states later built their legitimacy: we learned, we atoned, we protect human rights now. It challenges the story the West tells about itself.

Denying Gaza’s genocide does the opposite. It protects that story. Acknowledging the genocide would mean admitting Western culpability.

5. Weaponization of Antisemitism

Perhaps the most effective weapon in the genocide denier’s arsenal is taking a real and deadly prejudice like antisemitism and falsely applying it to those who demand an end to the genocide. For decades, antisemitism accusations have been strategically deployed to silence criticism of Israeli state violence and undermine solidarity with Palestinians.

By changing the subject from genocide to the motives of someone opposing it, the genocide denier shifts the burden of proof from the perpetrator to the critic—who’s then forced into endless self-justification while the crime itself recedes into the background. Because real antisemitism exists, the distinction between bad-faith and legitimate accusations is easily collapsed.

And since Palestinian testimony is already treated as suspect, Jewish feelings are routinely given more weight than Palestinian realities. When a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was murdered by his landlord, when a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl was nearly drowned by a neighbor, when three Palestinian-American college students were shot in a drive-by—and as the world watched Palestinian families get incinerated on our screens for over two years—did our institutions mobilize emergency task forces? No, universities ordered antisemitism investigations, and Congress demanded action to protect Jewish students.

There have been instances of antisemitism, of course. But the incidents reported in the wake of October 7 were promptly addressed by their institutions, and those occurrences did not support the overall framing of the Palestine movement as antisemitic.

If they had, Congress would not have felt compelled to introduce a bill equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and individual universities would not have adopted the bill’s same definition of antisemitism—from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The definition’s vague wording has been weaponized to silence criticism of Israel—a move opposed by its own author.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly inflated antisemitism statistics by categorizing pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic incidents.

And on the two-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks, Gavin Newsom signed a law to combat antisemitism in California’s public schools—yet another implementation of the IHRA definition, which may stifle teachers’ ability to speak about Palestine.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) challenged the statute, warning that its vagueness would make teaching about Israel and Palestine effectively impossible. In response, the law firm led by former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff filed an amicus brief grossly mischaracterizing the challenge by falsely claiming that teachers simply wanted to promote antisemitic views in the classroom.

ADC National Legal Director Jenin Younes discusses the California law on my podcast, Right of Resistance.

This distortion mirrors the law itself, which relies on complaint-driven enforcement. If antisemitism is defined by how an accuser feels rather than what was said or done, it becomes an all-purpose censorship tool.

Even more explicitly punitive is the group StopAntisemitism, which has made a practice of seeking to get people fired, expelled, or publicly shamed for pro-Palestinian speech. Its goal is not justice, but social and professional annihilation. Among its most notorious targets is beloved children’s educator Ms. Rachel, who was nominated by the group for “Antisemite of the Year.” Her crime? Advocating for Gaza’s child amputees.

This weaponization of antisemitism turns Jewish trauma into a political shield for Palestinian erasure and makes Jewish safety conditional on that erasure—an outcome that is morally grotesque. Meanwhile, anti-Zionist Jews—who oppose Israeli violence and occupation—are labeled “self-hating” or “useful idiots,” and Palestinians are forced to insist they’re not antisemitic before arguing for their right to live.

And none of this makes Jews safer. It just excuses atrocities, erodes the meaning of antisemitism, and fuels resentment by binding Jewish identity to a genocidal project.

6. The Palestine Laboratory

Palestine has long been a testing ground for new weapons. Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank provide live-fire testing that produces data, footage, and proof of concept. “Battle-tested” becomes a selling point as Israeli weapons manufacturers market their wares to foreign governments—and the fact that these “tests” are being conducted through war crimes does nothing to quell the weapons’ export value.

In fact, that very impunity seems to make Israel’s products all the more appealing—to dictatorships and democracies alike. As Israel faced allegations of genocide at the ICJ, and as ICC arrest warrants were issued for Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, the country’s weapons revenue soared.

In the words of Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: “Israel sells the idea of getting away with it.”

Loewenstein cites the late Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling in pointing out that Israel’s goal for Palestinians is politicide—their delegitimization as a social and political entity. The technology of occupation enables that process not just through weapons but through monitoring. That includes facial-recognition software, advanced surveillance for “predictive policing”—to identify “criminals” and “terrorists” before they’ve committed a crime—and targeting technology designed to make killing Palestinians “as easy as ordering pizza.”

Israel also exports enforcement methods. Since the 1990s, U.S. police departments have been sending their leaders to Israel to learn counterterrorism techniques, which manifest in surveillance, targeting, crowd management, and collective punishment. Israeli companies have been involved in U.S. border enforcement since at least 2004—not just supplying drones and other surveillance systems, but also offering combat training for what has become known as “low-intensity warfare” at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This militarization of law enforcement moves agencies from protecting citizens to crushing dissent. We’ve seen this most recently in ICE violence against U.S. citizens.

Genocide denial is therefore maintained because naming the crime would disrupt this imperial architecture, which is expanding to target political dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists. Designed for politicide, the Palestine laboratory offers ways not just to suppress resistance but also to erase entire movements. That’s attractive to any power structure wishing to preserve its hegemony.

So, the point isn’t that it could happen here. The point is that versions of it are happening here already. Gaza is a preview of the world being built.

Resisting the Denial

The above list is not exhaustive, but it illustrates how Western power and interests drive the denial.

As Omar El Akkad writes in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.”

To deny genocide is to reject any challenge to the current world order, which is not a rules-based order but a morally inverted one. Violence is normalized when it serves power—and named only when it threatens it.

Many were astonished when—at last month’s World Economic Forum—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged the fiction of the rules-based order. But he did so not because of the Western-backed mass murder of Palestinians, but rather because U.S. economic pressure threatened the middle powers.

His defenders excused this omission by noting that he was speaking at the World Economic Forum—not, say, the UN Human Rights Council. But his framing nevertheless placed interests before justice.

And Canada, like its peers, is still sending weapons to Israel.

Those who control resources and capital shape the moral horizon. They decide what’s reasonable, what’s extreme, whose lives matter, and whose deaths are acceptable. But what we’re told is the “mainstream view” is rarely what most people actually believe. It’s what the power establishment needs to be believed—and it’s enforced through reputational risk and fear of isolation.

But in the words of Malcolm X, “Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.”

We should be as vocal in our anger as possible. Protest by itself may not be enough, but those in power pay more attention to a loud public than a quiet one. Genocide must be named, again and again and again. Tone policing has always been a silencing tool—and when the curators of civility are running cover for the crime of crimes, they’ve forfeited any right to decorum.

Of course, the power elites are pushing back by buying up media outlets to try to regain control of the narrative. CBS News has an openly pro-Israel agenda under the leadership of David Ellison and Bari Weiss. TikTok is flagging critiques of Zionism as “hate speech.”

But these moves, while alarming, also show their vulnerability. TikTok users are leaving for platforms like UpScrolled, and CBS News faces historically low ratings.

The power elites can hoard wealth and buy up information spaces, but they cannot control consciousness. Gaza has woken us up, and we’re not going back to sleep. The more they try to gaslight us with language, the more they lose public trust.

When they tell us something isn’t possible, that’s not pragmatism—that’s protecting their own interests. They don’t want us imagining alternatives to a world that prioritizes domination over dignity.

We don’t need an empire. We need healthcare and education.

We don’t need military outposts across the Global South. We need friends, neighbors, and trading partners.

We don’t need endless war to prop up stock prices. We need economic systems that allow people to live without fear—at home and abroad.

That’s why prioritizing Palestine is not being a “single-issue voter.” It’s refusing a system that makes genocide not just a reality, but a requirement. It’s rejecting an order that demands mass death abroad to preserve comfort and control at home.

So, when we ask, “Why is genocide denial still mainstream?”

What we’re really asking is, “What do empires require of us to survive?”

Empires don’t just depend on weapons and money. They depend on silence. On euphemism. On the willingness of ordinary people to look at mass murder and call it “complicated.”

The real function of genocide denial is not to hide the crime, but to make it tolerable for those who benefit from the system that commits it.

Last week, after news broke that Iran’s anti-government protesters were demanding a return to monarchy—led by Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah—I posted the following on social media:

“I’m not in Iran, but it’s hard to believe a population 3/4 of which are under 45 are risking their lives to be ruled by the exiled son of a king who was deposed 47 years ago. That sounds like an external fantasy, not a popular mandate.”

Most people understood my point. I support Iranians’ struggle for freedom from a brutal theocratic regime, but I’m deeply skeptical that they want to hand their future to Prince Reza. But because I led with “I’m not in Iran,” I was flooded with responses from people—also not in Iran—telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

For the record: my mother is Iranian. I’ve been to Iran. I know the history. And I’ve always supported Iranians’ right to freedom. But that includes freedom from outside interference that serves foreign interests at the expense of Iranians who are risking their lives.

Recent reports suggest Iran is, at best, bitterly divided over Reza Pahlavi. Some protesters have chanted “neither shah nor clergy,” while prominent dissidents have called him “the opposition against the opposition.” Others report harassment and threats from his loyalists. That’s not the profile of a unifying democratic figure.

Unlike many of my critics, I’m explicit about what I don’t know. I’m not on the ground in Iran. The Internet’s been shut down. Communications are restricted. That’s precisely why skepticism toward outside narratives is the responsible position.

But when I see Pahlavi doing photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu—who has bombed Iranians and killed civilians—or aligning closely with U.S. and Israeli power, I recognize a familiar pattern. These are the same imperial dynamics that helped produce the conditions leading to Iran’s current regime in the first place.

Supporters insist Pahlavi doesn’t want to be a monarch, he wants to help guide the democratic transition. But in October, Haaretz reported on an Israeli influence operation aimed at installing Pahlavi as the next shah. And since the protests erupted, social media has been flooded with posts accusing Palestine advocates of being “silent” on Iran.

It’s unclear whether these posts are part of a coordinated campaign. But they employ the same whataboutism used for the past two years to deflect from Israel’s genocide in Gaza—undermining the Palestine movement’s claims to humanitarianism while diverting attention from Palestine entirely. It’s hard not to see these dynamics as connected.

Iran’s current crisis cannot be separated from outside interference. In 1953, the U.S. and UK orchestrated a coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister so they could control Iran’s oil resources. That was followed by 25 years of repression under the shah—his brutal secret police, his shallow modernization, his lavish celebration of Iran’s 2,500-year “empire,” flaunting his wealth while many Iranians remained in poverty. Discontent eventually boiled over into revolution.

My critics present Iran’s future as a false binary: theocracy or monarchy. They ignore voices that complicate their story, like Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s most celebrated filmmakers and a fierce critic of the regime. Panahi has been jailed multiple times, faces yet another sentence, and still plans to return home because he loves his country. He wants a free Iran—but insists change must come from within, not from foreign intervention or externally imposed leadership.

Iran is not monolithic. It is a diverse society with competing political visions. But the United States will amplify only the voices that align with its geopolitical aims. What appears in mainstream media is rarely the will of the people; it’s whatever serves power.

The Iranian Revolution led to decades of repression, violence, and economic despair. But it succeeded in its initial aims: overthrowing the monarchy and rejecting U.S. imperial domination. That rejection was one of the twentieth century’s great insults to American power, and the U.S. has sought the Islamic Republic’s undoing ever since—not to liberate Iranians, but to settle the score.

The same United States that now postures as Iran’s liberator helped Saddam Hussein use chemical weapons on Iranian civilians, imposed sanctions that devastated everyday life, and deported Iranian asylum seekers back into danger. Why, now, should we believe that Trump or Netanyahu has Iran’s best interests in mind? Trump, who kidnapped Venezuela’s leader to seize control of its oil and now openly fantasizes about conquering Greenland. Netanyahu, who has waged expansionist wars throughout the Middle East.

The same day I expressed skepticism about Pahlavi’s popularity, I posted about Iranian New Wave cinema—one of the clearest examples of resistance to Western cultural imperialism. Iranian filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi himself, forged a distinct identity without Western assistance and in spite of government censorship. Because of their efforts, Iranian cinema is celebrated throughout the world.

Iranians have the right to determine their own future—and to do so free from Western interference masquerading as liberation.

Free Iran.
Free Palestine.
Free the world from imperial domination.

On January 6, the Israeli military raided Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank and opened fire with live rounds, wounding several students, in an operation to disrupt a supposed “gathering in support of terrorism.” The gathering was a solidarity event for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held incommunicado in Israeli jails—along with a screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab.

The next day, in Minneapolis, ICE gunned down a 37-year-old mother of three in her car, claiming she had “weaponized her vehicle” by trying to drive away. ICE and the Israeli military have exchanged tactics in violence and control for years. Both organizations speak the same language—framing their aggression as self-defense and retroactively labeling their victims as terrorists.

I used a photo of Birzeit University in the 1970s for my Substack about reading Palestinian stories as a way to resist the dehumanization that is central to occupation and colonial violence.

But the dehumanization imposed on Palestinians for decades can happen anywhere an imperial state wants to exert its control—which is why it’s happening here and has been happening to marginalized people throughout our history. Abolishing ICE is essential, but this is not a problem that can be solved by removing a single agency. It requires dismantling the system that depends on such agencies to function.

That system is a system of cry-bullies who adopt the mindset of self-victimization while they have their boot on someone’s neck. Case in point: ICE agents complain of being doxxed, of having their home addresses leaked, when their job is to hunt people down and subject them to indefinite detention—where a number of them die—or facilitate their deportation to torture prisons in countries they have nothing to do with.

These enforcers are not armed to protect. They’re armed to terrorize. When a woman tries to leave and is shot through her windshield, that’s not “defending the homeland.” It’s punishing resistance.

This same brittle self-victimization is what fears solidarity with political prisoners—or a film about a little girl murdered by a powerful military. I wrote about that too, and judging by the responses from Israel’s defenders, it’s clear why the most powerful military in the Middle East doesn’t want people to see it.

These systems believed they could carry out their crimes in plain sight—that we would accept their lies, look away, or be too afraid to speak. We cannot allow ourselves to be terrorized by institutions that mistake violence for authority and oppression for legitimacy. We cannot let them murder our neighbors, erase entire peoples, or criminalize solidarity itself.

Watch my conversation with sociologist Heba Gowayed about ICE, border enforcement, and growing authoritarianism on Right of Resistance.

Look, what’s happening in Gaza is horrible—but calling it a genocide is inflammatory. That’s a very specific charge.

Okay, then here are the specifics. The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that constitute genocide if committed with intent to destroy a group:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Israel’s actions plausibly meet the threshold for the first four acts—and arguably all five.

But it has to be explicitly announced upfront. The dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

That definition says nothing about an explicit announcement. But genocide is a crime defined by international law, not Merriam-Webster. The Genocide Convention doesn’t require a verbal announcement—because perpetrators lie. Just as a first-degree murder conviction doesn’t require a confession by the murderer, a genocide ruling doesn’t require an admission by the perpetrator.

Well, to your point: genocide is a legal determination. If you start using it as a slogan before a ruling, you’re not helping Palestinians. You’re just polarizing people.

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice already decided that it was plausible that Israel was committing genocide. And the court ordered it to protect the safety of civilians in Gaza.

That’s not true. The court just said the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide.

If they have a plausible right to be protected from genocide, that implies a plausible occurrence of the genocide they have a right to be protected from.

Then why hasn’t the court issued a final ruling?

A final court decision could take years. The whole point of the Genocide Convention is to recognize genocide as it’s happening so every state can act to stop it—which they’re obligated to do. Now, more than two years later, few except European dockworkers, aid flotillas, and Yemen’s Houthis have intervened. The governments of the world have failed.

To prove genocide, you have to prove they intend to destroy a people—not just that they’ve committed war crimes or acted with reckless disregard.

Israeli officials have broadcast their intent multiple times—from Netanyahu’s Amalek speech to his goal of thinning the population of Gaza, to President Isaac Herzog’s insinuation that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, to Defence Minister Gallant’s announcement of a “complete siege” on Gaza and his “removing every restriction” on Israeli soldiers, to calls by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich to expel Palestinians from Gaza—and, in the latter’s case, for “total annihilation.” There’s a mountain of evidence—that’s why the South African legal team was able to produce an 84-page document to support its case at the ICJ. And since then, Israel has only escalated its atrocities—bombing more hospitals, killing more children, blocking vital food aid.

South Africa’s case isn’t neutral. They clearly don’t like Israel.

Committing genocide tends to make a state unlikable.

Oh, please. It’s legal warfare! Their motivations are political.

Israeli officials called South Africa “the legal arm of Hamas.” Does that sound neutral?

What do you expect Israel to do? After a massacre like October 7th, any country would respond militarily.

Many genocides happen in response to attacks. That neither justifies genocide nor mitigates its criminality.

My point is: this all started because Hamas attacked Israel.

Again, not an excuse for genocide. And this actually started decades before October 7th. Israel has periodically launched large-scale assaults on Gaza—what Israeli officials call “mowing the grass”—and 2023 was the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the West Bank before October 7th.

So, Israel shouldn’t defend itself? How can it be safe without destroying Hamas?

Again, self-defense doesn’t make it not genocide. And Hamas offered to release the remaining hostages and relinquish governance of Gaza as part of an end to the war.

Ah, see? You called it a war.

Yes, genocide usually happens in the context of war.

But you still haven’t proved it’s a genocide.

The “war” against Hamas—a militia with no air force that uses guerrilla tactics against the most powerful, technologically advanced military in the Middle East—does not preclude Israel’s deliberate targeting of the civilian population through mass killing, forced starvation, and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure. The fact that some Palestinians are fighting back doesn’t negate the genocide. Jewish armed resistance during World War II didn’t negate the genocide of the Holocaust.

Are you seriously comparing Hamas terrorists to Jews resisting Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto?

I’m using an analogy to make the point that genocide doesn’t stop being genocide just because some members of the targeted group are armed.

Look, I’m not denying civilian suffering. But you need to be precise. Especially when you’re using a word as loaded as genocide.

The Israeli military’s own data imply that roughly five out of six Palestinians killed were civilians. That’s an astonishing rate of slaughter. That doesn’t happen by accident.

Hamas embeds itself in civilian areas. They fire rockets from schools, hospitals, apartment buildings. That’s a war crime! Israel isn’t targeting civilians; Hamas is using them as human shields.

What good are they as shields if Israel kills them anyway?

Their deaths make the world feel sorry for Palestinians.

If it takes a genocide for the world to sympathize with Palestinians, what does that say?

If this were a genocide, Gaza’s population wouldn’t have increased since October 7th.

We have no idea what the population of Gaza is now, and available data—including The Lancet’s estimates—suggest the body count may be tens of thousands higher than what’s already accounted for. But are you saying we should wait for the genocide to be complete to call it a genocide?

Israel has nuclear weapons. If they wanted to commit genocide, they could just drop a nuke.

Gaza is right next to Israel. If Israel nuked Gaza, the fallout would kill thousands of Israelis.

Still, Israel could kill Palestinians a lot faster if it wanted to commit genocide.

Israel cares deeply about its image on the world stage—even as it shows contempt for international laws and institutions. It’s not going to kill Palestinians faster because that would make its sleight-of-hand trick impossible for Western leaders to play along with. It’s called plausible deniability. Not that any sensible person believes that anymore.

Are you calling me stupid?

The reasons for your denial are your own business.

Well, then, what makes Israel’s “deniability” any less plausible than your so-called genocide?

Israel dropped nearly as many bombs on Gaza in a single week as the U.S. military dropped on Afghanistan in an entire year.

Ah, see? If it dropped that many bombs intending to commit genocide, there would be no Palestinians left.

Or it has precision weaponry and AI-assisted targeting systems to help determine whom and how many people it kills—while employing approaches like the Dahiya Doctrine, where it deliberately targets civilians to create terror and crush resistance—

Not to wipe out the population. See? Not a genocide.

Not immediately. Over time. Or Israel will just wipe out enough Palestinians to force the rest out. Both cases are consistent with the definition in the Genocide Convention. But Netanyahu has no incentive to “finish the job” through total extermination because his entire political career (and possibly his freedom from prison) depends on it. And Israel’s image as a democracy depends on maintaining just enough ambiguity to keep U.S. weapons and aid flowing. The slow pace of slaughter is not proof against genocide; it’s proof of how carefully calibrated Israel’s campaign is.

We don’t know what Netanyahu’s personal motives are. But Israel has repeatedly made clear its intention is to disarm Hamas.

Do you always believe the perpetrator?

I don’t believe Hamas—that’s for sure.

No one’s asking you to believe Hamas. The UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have documented Israel’s systematic crimes against Palestinians and concluded it’s committing genocide.

They have their own motives.

You mean: trying to stop a genocide?

They’re antisemitic.

B’Tselem is Jewish.

Not real Jews.

What does that mean?

They’re anti-Israel.

They’re Israeli.

Well, why are you so fixated on Israel anyway?

It’s natural and human to fixate on states waging extermination campaigns with our tax dollars and live-streaming the killing for two years while the governments of the world do nothing.

Why not focus on real genocides, like the ones happening in Yemen, Sudan, and Congo?

The Gaza genocide is as real as any other, and there’s widespread advocacy for victims of the ones you mentioned—including in Palestine solidarity circles. But Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. We’re funding its genocide.

Calling Israel genocidal only fuels antisemitism.

Israel committing genocide fuels antisemitism.

Ah, see? You’re conflating Israel with the Jewish people. That’s antisemitic.

Israel conflates Israel with the Jewish people.

Because it’s a Jewish state.

—which is committing genocide.

Saying Jews are genocidal—you see how that’s antisemitic?

What’s antisemitic is a state that claims to act on behalf of the Jewish people while it commits genocide. In any case, fearing antisemitism is not an argument against fact. This is a genocide, whether or not it fuels antisemitism.

What about the Bondi Beach shootings?

The suspects were affiliated with ISIS, not the Palestine movement.

And the Israeli embassy shootings in D.C.? Or the man who attacked the pro-Israel demonstration in Colorado. They explicitly shouted “Free Palestine” or said they were doing it because of Gaza.

No mainstream Palestinian rights organization has endorsed those attacks.

But your rhetoric encourages them! You say, “Free Palestine.” The embassy shooter said, “Free Palestine.”

And Israel’s Likud Party says, “From the river to the sea.”

You also say, “Globalize the intifada.”

There’ve been numerous explanations of what that actually means. Both Intifadas against Israeli occupation began as largely nonviolent popular uprisings, and in both cases the violence emerged primarily as a reaction to Israeli repression and provocation—most notably following Ariel Sharon’s storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in 2000.

That’s all equivocation. The term is code meaning genocide of the Jews.

But explicit statements by Israeli officials don’t mean genocide of the Palestinians?

We all saw what happened with the Second Intifada.

We all see what’s happening with the genocide in Gaza.

Why won’t you condemn that slogan?

Why won’t you condemn this genocide?

Israelis are fighting for their lives. This has nothing to do with Palestinian liberation. Hamas hates Jews.

I think Hamas just hates occupiers and wouldn’t care if they were Christian or Muslim or Atheist.

Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

Hamas’s original 1988 charter showed ideological confusion and antisemitism, but its later political platform makes clear its opposition is to Zionist occupation—not Jews as a people.

Hamas never officially revoked the original charter.

Political movements are judged by what they say and do now, not by every document they’ve ever written.

Dress it up however you want—but “Zionist” is code for “Jews.”

Actually, Judaism is a 4,000-year-old religion and cultural tradition. Zionism is a 130-year-old political ideology.

That’s a red herring. Trying to separate Zionism from Judaism is like trying to separate Isaac from Abraham.

Jewish opposition to Zionism is as old as Zionism itself.

That was before the Holocaust made Zionism essential and inevitable. And that’s why your “genocide” accusation is such a grotesque smear. Jews hear “genocide” and think of the Holocaust. That trauma doesn’t disappear.

And the horrors of the Holocaust don’t make other genocides disappear.

Gaza is not the same as the Holocaust.

So, there has to be another Holocaust for us to stop a genocide?

You’re twisting my words.

Well, you seem more offended by the word “genocide” than the genocide itself.

Do you even oppose antisemitism?

I oppose all forms of hate. What about you?

Of course.

So, you’re equally concerned about the anti-Palestinian racism that drives Israeli apartheid, occupation, and settlement expansion?

Comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is offensive to people who actually lived under apartheid.

Apartheid is not a feeling—it’s a legal system. International law defines apartheid as an institutionalized regime of domination by one racial or ethnic group over another.

The West Bank is occupied territory, not sovereign Israel. And the situation is about security, not racism.

So, the fact that Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank—burning homes, stealing land, kidnapping children, killing livestock—all with the protection of the Israeli military, is purely a matter of security? And Israel within its pre-1967 borders doesn’t operate on a system of hierarchy that places Jewish citizens above non-Jewish citizens?

There are nearly two million Palestinians living in Israel with equal rights. They vote. They serve in parliament. Some even sit on the Supreme Court. There are no signs that say “Jews Only” or “No Muslims.” How can you call that apartheid?

There are at least 65 Israeli laws that treat Palestinians as second-class citizens. And Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law explicitly declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It downgraded Arabic from an official language to one with “special status” and defined Jewish settlement as a national value.

In other words, it legally codified a system that prioritizes Jewish identity over all others. And in any case, the fact that Israel maintains a permanent apartheid regime over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank makes claims of “full equality” within its pre-1967 borders beside the point.

Have you read the Quran? It’s a horrific book. It says “kill the Jews” and “hate all Christians.”

That’s a distorted reading, but it’s also beside the point—

Calls for violence are beside the point??

Explaining a political conflict by pathologizing a religion isn’t analysis—it’s racism. Collective punishment based on religious stereotypes is exactly how genocides are justified.

If Islam explained this, there wouldn’t be Christian and secular Palestinians resisting occupation—and Israel wouldn’t be killing them too.

Okay, if Islam is so lovely, how come Hamas throws gay people off buildings?

You’re thinking of ISIS.

Well, Hamas doesn’t treat gay people well.

Genocide treats them worse.

Israel gave Gaza back to the Palestinians in 2005. None of this would be happening if the Palestinians had used that opportunity to build a viable state.

Israel didn’t give Gaza back. The 2005 disengagement removed settlers, but Israel retained full control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, coastline, population registry, and trade—keeping Gaza under occupation and strangling its economy.

There’s no occupation. Jews haven’t lived in Gaza since 2005.

Occupation is defined by control, not civilian presence. By your logic, a prison isn’t a prison if the guards go home at night. Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections in a contest judged free and fair by international observers—and Israel responded by imposing a blockade.

Because Hamas was an obstacle to peace. Israel withdrew from Gaza to make peace.

Ariel Sharon’s senior aide, Dov Weisglass, said the purpose of disengagement was to put the peace process in “formaldehyde”—to freeze negotiations indefinitely and take refugees, borders, and Jerusalem off the table. It wasn’t peace; it was containment.

Palestinians still bear responsibility. Israel has offered them a state repeatedly—1947, 1993, 2000, 2008. They’ve said no every time.

At Camp David in 2000, Palestinians didn’t reject peace—they rejected an offer of disconnected bantustans, no control over borders, no sovereignty in East Jerusalem, no right of return, and permanent Israeli military presence. Even U.S. negotiator Robert Malley admitted the “generous offer” was a myth. Israel expanded settlements throughout negotiations, undermining the possibility of a state.

That wouldn’t have happened if Palestinians hadn’t screwed up Oslo.

Oslo never promised a real state. It divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, with Israel retaining control over 60% of the land, all borders, and most resources. Israel failed to complete its withdrawals, stalled final-status talks, and dramatically expanded settlements. Oslo managed Palestinians—it didn’t liberate them.

Palestinians chose terror over negotiation.

Why should an occupied people have to negotiate for their freedom? The occupier should end the occupation. When largely nonviolent mass movements—from the First Intifada to the Great March of Return—are met with beatings, mass arrests, and sniper fire, people turn to armed resistance.

What would you have Israel do? Live next to people who want to wipe them out?

Live with the people it expelled and dispossessed. Give them their land back. Let them return home.

Jews and Palestinians could never live together in one state.

Two million Palestinians live in Israel right now.

They’re different. They don’t hate Israelis.

Why not?

Because they’re not living under military occupa— I mean… Look, if Palestinians won’t recognize Israel, why should we believe they can live in peace?

Why should Palestinians recognize Israel as a nation-state when Israel won’t even recognize their basic humanity?

Israel’s constantly under attack—by Hezbollah, the Houthis, Syria, Iran. Why won’t they leave Israel alone?

Why won’t Israel leave them alone?

It does.

Israel has carried out military strikes across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq since October 7th.

Because those entities want to destroy Israel.

Hezbollah was founded in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Hamas was founded in 1987 after decades of occupation and mass killing. This past year, Israel bombed Iran unprovoked.

Iran posed an imminent threat.

U.S. intelligence concluded Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.

What about 1967? There would be no occupation if Arab countries hadn’t attacked Israel.

Israel started that war.

After heavy provocation.

Israeli leaders later admitted there was no imminent existential threat. Menachem Begin said the war was a voluntary decision—not a last resort. Three months later, Israel began building settlements in the West Bank.

We’re getting off track.

You got us off track.

We’re arguing broader geopolitics when the issue is whether Israel is committing genocide. And your whole argument falls apart because—since October 10, 2025—there’s been a ceasefire in place.

Ceasefires are pauses, not reversals. They don’t undo mass killing, displacement, starvation, or the systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, and infrastructure that makes civilian life impossible. Genocide is assessed by patterns and outcomes, not by whether violence is momentarily suspended.

It sounds like you want the fighting to resume so you can keep calling it a genocide.

What I want is accountability. And the killing hasn’t stopped. Israel is still targeting schools, blocking food aid, and destroying shelters so babies die in the cold. Genocide doesn’t require continuous bombardment to persist. The destruction of a society can continue through siege, denial of reconstruction, forced displacement, and the long-term impossibility of return—all of which remain in effect regardless of a ceasefire announcement.

Then why isn’t Israel attacking the West Bank?

It is. In the West Bank, there’s no ceasefire at all. There are settlement expansions, military raids, land seizures, mass arrests, and lethal force against civilians continuing unabated. Treating Gaza in isolation obscures a single, unified system of domination across all Palestinian territory.

You spend too much time on TikTok. You clearly don’t know the history.

Condescension isn’t evidence.

Well, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Placing all the blame on Israel is absurd. None of this would be happening if the Arabs had agreed to partition in 1947.

That’s the root of the problem. You won’t acknowledge that Palestinians rejected a partition plan imposed by British colonizers who had no right to carve up their land—because they didn’t want to be removed from half the territory on which they lived.

You won’t acknowledge that Zionism’s founders openly conceived their project in colonial terms: Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish state as “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky insisted colonization had to proceed in defiance of the will of the native population. David Ben-Gurion approved plans to remove Arabs in order to secure a Jewish-majority state. And Moshe Sharett admitted, “We have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.”

You won’t acknowledge that Israel’s founding relied on the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians—the Nakba—not as an accident of war, but by design. That history is documented not only by critics of Zionism, but by the celebrated Benny Morris, who supports the Zionist project and admits the ethnic cleansing.

Nice try. Palestinians didn’t even exist as a people back then. They’re really just Jordanians.

Jordan absorbed Palestinians after they were expelled from their homes during the Nakba. Palestinians trace their ancestry to historic Palestine.

You won’t acknowledge that early plans for a Jewish state openly discussed “transfer”—i.e., the ethnic cleansing of Arabs—or that Israel inherited and refined colonial counterinsurgency tactics designed to crush indigenous resistance through collective punishment.

Your rejection of the word genocide isn’t just about what Netanyahu is doing. It’s about what the word exposes: that a state built on exclusive sovereignty required expulsion—and, when expulsion failed, destruction.

What Israel is pursuing now is what Jabotinsky envisioned: military domination first, peace dictated later—from behind an iron wall. But until the original injustice is confronted, there will be no resolution to this so-called “conflict.”

Western powers have spent decades silencing Palestinian voices because the myth of Israel—and U.S. empire—depends on their erasure. But that myth is collapsing before our eyes.

It’s collapsing with every dead Gazan baby held by grieving parents.

With every wounded child who has no surviving family.

With thousands still likely buried under rubble, many crushed or suffocated as they screamed for help.

And in the voice of five-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped in a car beside her dead relatives, calling desperately for help before being killed by sustained Israeli tank fire.

These are not “casualties of war.” They are the result of a system that has treated Palestinian life as disposable for decades.

No amount of debate will change the reality unfolding now. And the refusal to recognize—much less correct—this historic injustice is why, alongside the genocide that is its inevitable culmination, Israel is becoming a pariah on the world stage.

In this episode of Right of Resistance, host Kuros Charney is joined by scholar, journalist, artist, and organizer Chenjerai Kumanyika for a wide-ranging conversation about media and empire—and why mainstream journalism so often fails to explain the world it claims to cover.

Drawing on his work as a Peabody Award–winning podcaster (Uncivil, Empire City) and editor of Hammer & Hope, Kumanyika explores mainstream media institutions as terrains of struggle, where political education is often absent and official narratives crowd out structural truths. He breaks down what journalists actually need to understand in order to report the daily news, how “public safety” is weaponized to scare voters, and how capitalism and empire produce a fictional understanding of the world—one that too often leads to violence.

The conversation also covers Palestine solidarity on campuses that suppress dissent, Zohran Mamdani’s shifting positions on policing, the hard realities of coalition-building on the left, and why you shouldn’t look to tech bros for insight into masculinity.

Don’t miss this urgent, incisive conversation with one of the sharpest media critics working today.

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Writer, actor, and public speaker Najla Said joins host Kuros Charney to explore that question and much more. Drawing on her work in theater and memoir, Najla speaks candidly about the political pressures placed on Palestinian artists, the increasing censorship on U.S. college campuses, and why she no longer feels obligated to make Zionists “comfortable” in her storytelling.

She also reflects on the rapid evolution of Palestine solidarity among young people, the significance of Hollywood’s boycott letter, and how generational shifts—cultural and political—are reshaping the narrative landscape. And yes, she offers her take on what her father, Edward Said, would think of Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City.

It’s a conversation about art, courage, and the power of telling the truth when institutions fail to.

Catch Najla onstage in DC in her show Imperfect Allies: Children of Opposite Sides, December 11–14, and follow her on Instagram @kittybubble

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Theme music by Josh Charney.

On Thanksgiving, I posted a short reflection about how the comforting American myths we’re raised with can obscure histories of genocide, extraction, and empire. I connected that myth-making to the present—namely Gaza, Congo, and Sudan—because those atrocities share the same imperial logic.

The responses I got were largely supportive. But one comment—which I’ve kept anonymous here—was a clearcut example of the kind of Zionist rhetoric Palestinians and their allies encounter constantly: emotionally charged, historically inaccurate, rhetorically draining, and structurally designed to shut down conversation.

I want to walk through that comment—not to denigrate the person, but because this rhetorical style plays a major role in muddying the central issue of our time.

Here is the comment in full:

“If the Oct. 7th War is a genocide, what’s the difference between an actual genocide and any war where civilians are collaterally killed (because, for example, one side is hiding among civilians, which is a war crime)? A genocide happened to my family when 90% of Eastern European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis. In this war 30K Hamas were killed and 35K civilians they were hiding behind were killed. How did Hamas so successfully fool you, and so many others, into co-opting Holocaust language and calling the war in Gaza a genocide when 98% of the Gazan population is alive after the war -- as apposed to 90% Jews of Eastern Europe dead after the actual Genocide of The Holocaust? You don’t see a difference there? And what would you have the Jews of Israel do under these circumstances. Step off the earth on masse? How can Jews, who are from Judea, colonize Judea? That’s like saying Cherokie are Colonizing North Dakota by simply moving back home there, and then defending themselves when the actual colonizers then attack them and try to kill them. In the Middle East’s case that was Islam’s conquering the Levant by the sword and forcibly converting the local population. Who’s the colonizer? A violent Muslim history that erased hundreds of local cultures and, today, The Muslim Brotherhood -- that’s the colonizer. You do understand that Hamas wants all the Jews of Israel dead or exported, yes? They have no interest in living peacefully with Jews. The Palestinians were offered a State four separate times. What do you suggest Israel do? And if you say ‘Israel should not exist’ , reflect on whether-or-not what you’re saying is bloodthirsty. The Jews could no more live peacefully next to rabidly anti-semitic Arabs who sought to kill them than they could live peacefully in Warsaw with the Nazis rounding them up. The difference here being that the Jews, finally have the mechanisms of a state and can organize to defend themselves against the Muslim Brotherhood; who in fact had signed alliances with Nazi Germany. Also, the irony is that you are a colonizer in America lecturing the Jews for returning to Judea; which is the exact opposite of colonization.”

Normally, I ignore comments like this because the structure of the argument makes conversation impossible. It’s saturated with trauma, misinformation, projection, and moral inversion.

But this is also a perfect teaching moment—a case study in how this type of rhetoric shuts down dialogue. So, let’s break down what’s happening—to understand the rhetorical machinery at work.

1. Weaponized Trauma

“The Holocaust happened to my family.”

Holocaust trauma is real and profound. But here, it’s turned into a moral shield:

Our history of suffering justifies anything.

Criticizing Israel endangers Jews.

This is not dialogue. It’s an emotional barricade that blocks accountability and halts conversation before it starts.

2. Collapsed History

The comment leaps from Nazi-occupied Europe to modern-day Palestine—different eras, different lands, different people—collapsed into one mythic continuity.

• Jews today = Jews of 1940s Poland

• Palestinians today = Nazis

• Israel’s assault on Gaza = Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

• Every conflict = Holocaust sequel

This transforms a settler-colonial project into an eternal battle of Good vs. Evil.

The commenter also invokes the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed “alliance” with Nazi Germany. This is historically inaccurate: there was no formal relationship, and any sympathy the Brotherhood expressed toward Germany in the 1930s was driven by anti-colonial anger at the British, not fascist ideology. And that sympathy nevertheless dissipated once World War II began.

Furthermore, the Brotherhood was an Egyptian movement with no authority over Palestinians. While Hamas later emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, that branch had no involvement with those earlier dynamics. In other words, none of this has anything to do with the rights or status of Palestinians today. The commenter’s claims are a dishonest rhetorical tactic meant to graft ancestral guilt onto an entire people to justify violence against them.

3. Mythic Ancestral Claims

Another rhetorical move here is to say, “Muslim conquerors took the land from Jews, so modern Zionists are simply reclaiming what was stolen.”

It claims that Jews around the world are “from Judea,” and therefore Jewish settlers cannot be colonizers—thus, Palestinians are the real interlopers.

But the historical record is clear: the people living in Palestine today descend from those who lived there continuously for millennia—Judeans, Samaritans, early Christians, later Christian communities, post-Judean Jewish communities, and, from the 7th century onward, Muslims (most of whom were local converts, not new arrivals).

In other words, the people changed religions. They weren’t expelled or erased. The “Muslim conquest” narrative ignores this continuity, denies coexistence, pretends modern land rights derive from ancient empires, and casts today’s Palestinians as foreigners in their own land

That’s not history. It’s yet another justification for settler colonialism.

4. Fabricated Statistics

“30,000 Hamas fighters were killed.”

This number appears nowhere in credible reporting. It’s an exaggeration deployed to minimize the civilian death toll.

And yet the commenter tries to do two incompatible things: On the one hand, they frame the deaths as mere “collateral damage,” insisting genocide language is inappropriate because “98% are still alive.” On the other, they claim that 35,000 civilians were killed as human shields.

You can’t simultaneously downplay civilian deaths and also justify them. This narrative oscillates between whichever claims protect Israel from moral scrutiny.

5. Dehumanization

“Rabidly anti-Semitic Arabs.”

This is classic dehumanization. It suggests Palestinian resistance arises from intrinsic, irrational hatred—antisemitism emerging in a vacuum—rather than decades of dispossession and brutality.

Not to mention, it conveniently ignores the anti-Arab racism that informed Zionists’ efforts to kill or displace Palestinians and take control of the land.

Dehumanization is not an argument. It’s a permission structure for violence.

6. Bad-Faith Hypotheticals

“Would you accept an Arab apartheid state over Jews?”

This question mires you in all sorts of contradictions. It reframes Palestinians as the instigators, distracts from the occupation under which they live, forces you to defend against a hypothetical scenario, and derails the actual issue: the real-life, documented apartheid imposed by Israel on the Palestinians.

That’s not a question. It’s a trap.

7. Projection & Moral Inversion

As critics of Israel often say: “Every accusation is a confession.” This commenter makes numerous accusations that behave in the same way:

• the occupier becomes the “defender”

• the occupied become “terrorists”

• the genocider becomes the survivor

This rhetorical reversal erases power imbalances and produces a narrative where Israel is always the victim—no matter how many hospitals it bombs, no matter how many children it snipes, no matter how many families it starves or how many homes it bulldozes to make way for settlers arriving from abroad.

8. Patronizing Tone

Whatever real trauma this person might be carrying, the tone here is scolding, moralizing, and accusatory. It’s not righteous anger calling out injustice; it’s condescension rooted in false narratives.

In other words, the commenter’s tone is not a product of indignation; it’s a rhetorical weapon. Their barrage of assertions positions them as the enlightened adult and the reader as the naïve child—in order to shame, embarrass, intimidate, and confound. The aim is that, if extraordinary claims are delivered with enough confidence, readers will begin doubting their own sense of reality.

So Why Not Engage?

Because none of this is designed for conversation. It’s designed to overwhelm, confuse, retraumatize, redirect blame, collapse history, and exhaust anyone seeking clarity.

It’s not a debate. It’s a script from the hasbara playbook.

Our energy is better spent educating those who ask real questions, building solidarity, telling the truth, and standing with the oppressed.

Not wrestling with bad-faith narratives engineered to drain us.

In this episode of Right of Resistance, civil liberties and free speech attorney joins host Kuros Charney for a rare, unguarded conversation about how dissent is being targeted from multiple directions: through the courts, through legislatures, through institutional panic, and through well-funded campaigns that seek to destroy the careers of anyone who challenges Israel’s violence or the ideology behind it.

Drawing on her own family history and her frontline legal work, Jenin offers a candid look at the human cost of staying silent—and the risks and responsibilities that come with speaking out.

Tune in for a conversation about power, fear, and the people still willing to resist both.

Support Jenin’s work at adc.org and follow her on Twitter/X at @JeninYounesEsq.

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Theme music by Josh Charney.

In this episode of Right of Resistance, Dr. Sabreena joins host to explain why being pro-Palestine isn’t enough—and why liberation begins with naming the forces that stand in its way. She connects the struggle for Palestine to the global fight against systems of oppression that reach deep into our own institutions and minds.

A scholar of criminology and sociology and a leading DEI expert, Dr. Sabreena brings both academic rigor and activist insight to expose the crimes of empire and the social conditioning that lets them endure. Together, we examine how colonial logic continues to shape Western thought—and what it truly means to decolonize your mind.

As we confront the ideologies we’ve inherited from centuries of empire, this conversation calls on all of us to unlearn, resist, and imagine freedom beyond the colonial world.

Find Dr. Sabreena at:
https://drsabreena.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Dr.Sabreena
IG: @drsabreena_gs
X: @sabreenaGS

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Theme music by Josh Charney.

Van Jones infuriated a lot of us with his recent appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, when he made a joke whose punchline relied on referencing Diddy in between repetitions of “dead Gaza baby.”

Jones’s assertion was that what’s “dividing” the West over Palestine is that TikTok users are seeing nothing but images of Gaza’s dead—interspersed with the occasional Diddy legal update—and this division is due to a “disinformation” campaign by Iran and Qatar.

Inherent in his remarks are two absurd claims:

1. The two years’ worth of documentation of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza is fabricated.

2. The only reason people care about dead Palestinians is that we’re being manipulated by foreign governments, not that it’s natural and humane to oppose genocide.

Bill Maher blamed one of his favorite bogeymen—critical race theory—for the surge in sympathy for Palestinians, so Jones, attempting a paradoxical defense of both Israel and racial justice, pinned the blame on foreign interference.

Whether these media insiders actually believe what they say is an open question, but they obviously believe in the gullibility of the public if they still think we’ll buy the propaganda they’ve been pushing for the past two years. How long do they hope to rely on accusations of “wokeness,” antisemitism, and brainwashing by foreign governments to undermine one of the most clearcut human rights issues of our time?

Jones later issued an apology—the sincerity of which I’ll leave for a higher authority to determine—but he still failed to acknowledge the fallaciousness of his claims that tens of thousands of dead Gazans are “disinformation” and that the world only cares about them because of psychological manipulation by Qatar and Iran.

I don’t know what he meant in his reference to Qatar—a U.S. ally—but he was likely referring to Al Jazeera, a legitimate news outlet with journalists on the ground in Gaza, many of whom have been killed by Israel while reporting on the horrors that Jones calls disinformation.

When it comes to Iran, however, Jones has long had a geopolitical fetish, portraying the country as a perpetual threat to U.S. security and pushing for further confrontation.

On June 23, hours before President Trump began bombing Iran’s nuclear sites on the heels of Israel’s own unprovoked attacks on Iran, Jones went on CNN to shame his fellow liberals into supporting a U.S. attack. His reasoning was not the cold pragmatism of realpolitik but a disingenuously earnest claim that attacking Iran was a logical expression of progressive values.

Progressives, he insisted, underestimate how dangerous Iran is, and they should “get on board” with military intervention.

“Iran is not a normal country,” he said. “Normal countries don’t blind women because they showed some hair.”

Jones was presumably referring to Iran’s violent crackdown on the “Woman Life Freedom” protests, which erupted in 2022 over the killing of Mahsa Amini for allegedly violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law. About 120 protesters lost some or all of their sight after being wounded by shotguns, paintball guns, and tear gas canisters fired by Iranian agents to suppress dissent. The authorities’ actions were brutal, to be sure, but Jones’s suggestion that Iran blinds women as a matter of policy is simply untrue.

Furthermore, what rational person would take Iran’s hijab laws to mean Iran is going to start a nuclear war with the United States? How does Jones draw a line from mandatory hijab to nuclear annihilation?

He went on to say Iran mustn’t get nuclear weapons “because they say, ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel,’ and ‘Death to all the Jews.’ One of those should offend you if you’re progressives—at least one should offend you.”

You might think “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are enough to rile U.S. progressives, but most mainstream analysts understand those to be expressions of outrage against U.S. imperialism and the Zionist system, not calls for extermination of the nations’ people. Jones presumably knows that. So, to make his case for a U.S. attack, he included “Death to all the Jews.”

The problem is, there’s no evidence that the Iranian government ever said such a thing or encouraged such utterances among the public.

In fact, Iran has the second-largest Jewish population in the Middle East. That’s not to say they’ve never experienced persecution, but their very existence collapses Jones’s claim.

And yet, as Israel exterminates the people of Gaza and bombs apartment blocks killing children in Tehran, Jones portrays Iran as an existential threat and spins its intentions as genocidal.

Is Iran’s government authoritarian? Yes. Does it want to wield influence in the region? Most likely. But the idea that it seeks to exterminate its adversaries doesn’t square with its actions.

Jones failed to mention that it was Trump who pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, despite its effectiveness in curbing Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. He also failed to mention that Iran was in renewed negotiations with the U.S. when Israel assassinated Iran’s lead negotiator, and that Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence had reported just months earlier that Iran was not building a bomb.

Jones wants us to believe that Iran has no rational motives or interest in self-preservation—it’s just a suicidal regime willing to sacrifice anything to destroy its enemies.

He used that same technique in October of last year, when he went on the podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt and spoke about the October 7 attacks. He insisted that, while Palestinians deserved “all the support in the world” for their dream of liberation, their movement had been hijacked by Hamas, which he called a “Nazi organization.”

Even if Jones disdains Hamas’s ideology and tactics, to ignore the many facets of the Palestinian liberation movement—both in Palestine and around the world—is to paint Palestinian resistance with a broad brush: all violent and tyrannical. Of course, for Jones, Israel is free to commit mass slaughter and sexual violence to defend its brutal occupation, but Palestinians aren’t permitted to take up arms to liberate themselves. However, even putting aside the UN-recognized right to armed resistance, Jones makes no mention of the many peaceful efforts, such as Gaza’s Great March of Return, in which nearly 200 unarmed Palestinian protesters were shot dead by Israeli soldiers—and thousands more were wounded.

Jones just holds up his “progressivism” against the “savagery” of Palestinian resistance.

“You gotta remember,” he said of October 7, “I’m a progressive, so Hamas attacked my people. Those are my people. On the kibbutz. Those are liberals. Those are my people. Those are my people. I’m a progressive.”

For Jones, being “progressive” is not about moral clarity. It’s about repeating the word like a mantra.

While doing so, he simultaneously identifies the pluralism of Israeli society and reduces Palestinian resistance to acts of terrorism. And once it’s established that the resistance has been “hijacked,” he can safely say that nothing can be done. The Israeli occupation must persist. The apartheid must remain. And the focus must be on destroying Hamas, thereby allowing Israel to mass murder Palestinians.

While Jones aims his criticism at Hamas and the Iranian government—not the Palestinian or Iranian people—his refusal to view those organizations as rational actors with coherent political goals reinforces the myth that diplomacy isn’t possible. There is only one option—their destruction. And the violence required to deliver that has brought a terrible cost to the people Van Jones says deserve “all the support in the world.”

Jones’s weaponization of progressivism to justify such slaughter is an ongoing problem when Israel shows every sign of wanting to draw the U.S. into more conflict in the Middle East. As journalist Rania Khalek posted on X recently:

“The Israelis are beyond mad. They murdered 26 journalists in Yemen in a targeted attack on media offices and the world barely cared. It was one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in history. After bombing Qatar with zero repercussions, they have threatened to make the entire world a battlefield, US war on terror-style. No one even notices the ongoing slaughterhouse in Gaza anymore. Genocide is background noise as it expands to the West Bank. Where does it end? Who will stop this insatiable monster?”

Justifications for U.S. and Israeli aggression are predictably common among hawkish neoconservatives, but the most effective salesmen are self-identified liberals like Jones, who use their progressive bona fides to make the case for war. During his CNN appearance, Jones caricatured Iran’s support for “gangs” and “proxies” that “fire rockets and rape people,” presumably referring to Hamas and Hezbollah, who target Israel not because of irrational hatred but because of its occupation of Palestine and Southern Lebanon—and because of its genocide in Gaza. Serious analysts can give an honest accounting of militant groups’ objectives regardless of their tactics or ideologies. But Jones, the “progressive,” is well positioned to pretend such groups were born in a vacuum, concealing their political goals and painting them as chaos agents who want nothing more than to undermine Western democracy.

Meanwhile, the great irony of his TikTok disinformation claim is that—whether or not Iran and Qatar are using the platform to spread propaganda—pro-Israel billionaires like Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Rupert Murdoch are buying stake to control the platform itself.

This is not surprising. Prominent Israel supporters have been telegraphing their desire for media control for some time. Last year, the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt complained of the pro-Palestine “TikTok problem,” and Mitt Romney openly told Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, that TikTok had caused Israel to lose control of the narrative—suggesting that was the reason the U.S. government sought to ban the platform.

Now Israel is recruiting influencers to post pro-Israel content on TikTok, and all TikTokers who even mention Hamas must literally condemn the group to avoid having their content suppressed.

This pro-Israel push doesn’t stop at social media. Skydance CEO David Ellison—son of Larry—is putting Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News, having reportedly cited her strong pro-Israel stance as one of the main reasons for her appointment. He’s also looking to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which would place CNN—an even larger TV news outlet—under his control.

And now, as it turns out, Van Jones himself has served as a mentor in a post-October 7 journalism fellowship to help win the information war for Israel.

But we’re supposed to worry about Iran and Qatar’s undue influence—sowing compassion in the hearts of young Americans and moving them to stand against genocide.

Will anyone fall for this? Or is this media conglomeration blitz too little too late? The relentless blood-soaked imagery of the past two years has rendered “messaging” obsolete. We’ve borne witness. We’ve seen too much. The atrocities have been carved into our memories and stored in the vault of history.

The ruling class’s efforts to bully, shame, gaslight, and silence us have failed, and Van Jones’s rush to do damage control after his Real Time debacle shows that public opinion still matters. The line between progressivism and genocide is impossible to straddle, and liberal branding can no longer manufacture consent.

We may not be ready for revolution. But warmongers and genocide deniers may no longer be ready for primetime.

As Charlie Kirk’s murder has Americans calling for blood and Israelis naming streets and missiles after him, Israel continues its starvation of Gaza. At the same time, a flotilla of activists from 44 countries—among them climate activist Greta Thunberg—sails through international waters to deliver food in the hopes of saving Gazans’ lives.

This is the third humanitarian-aid flotilla in three months, but this time it’s not one boat—it’s 50. The lead ship, carrying many of the activists from the first flotilla, has already been bombed by drones—whose operator is officially unknown but who we can safely assume is Israel. Thankfully, the activists survived, and they continue onward.

They know what awaits. The first flotilla, back in June, was intercepted by the Israeli military. At the time, one of the strangest reactions in Western media came from Piers Morgan, who had finally seemed to be acknowledging Israel’s goal of annihilation, only to return to factory settings and go on the attack—fixating on Greta Thunberg and calling her a “narcissist” for risking her life to deliver food.

Thunberg had been illegally taken captive in international waters, yet Morgan’s outrage focused not on the crime but on her word choice, bashing her for describing her situation as a kidnapping (which it was). His creepily intense tirade—on which he later doubled down—was not a spontaneous outburst. It was a calculated attempt to discredit her efforts as a publicity stunt.

Morgan was basically parroting the rhetoric of the Israeli state. Its foreign ministry mocked her mission as the “selfie yacht,” while Morgan alleged that she had done nothing to help the people of Gaza and was only seeking to elevate her brand. Consider the amount of rhetorical self-deception required—or, to put it less generously, the amount of arrogance and disingenuousness—for Piers Morgan, 20 months into a genocide, to attack one of the only public figures willing to physically transport food to starving Gazans, then claim he’s smearing her on behalf of Gazans themselves.

Morgan had used this logic against her before, framing his attacks as serving the people she was advocating for, after she railed against growth-obsessed economics at the UN. She’s been dismissed by other commentators on similar grounds, whether for her climate work or her ongoing support for Palestine. But Morgan’s criticism highlights a common tactic used against activists, painting them as “privileged” because they have the “luxury” to devote their time to good causes—instead of sitting in their multimillion-dollar TV studios, concern trolling those who try to help.

The implication, in other words, is not that they should use their privilege where others can’t. It’s that their activism is a performative gesture and they don’t care about the causes they claim to support. Whether shaming activists themselves or sowing doubt among allies and observers, the end goal is to destroy solidarity and render the movement impotent.

The second flotilla, in July, carried Christian Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He, too, was abducted, and as the sole Black American on board, he was separated from his comrades—except for one Arab activist—and thrown into a cell where he was tortured and verbally abused by Israeli soldiers.

Smalls had taken up the exact same mission as Thunberg and framed his abduction in the exact same way, but this time Morgan wisely remained silent. Of course, so did the rest of the mainstream media, along with most labor leaders and politicians. Rashida Tlaib and Summer Lee spoke up, as did Nina Turner and Jamaal Bowman, but Bernie Sanders and AOC—allies of Smalls and supposed champions of labor and progressivism—said nothing.

That silence severed a crucial connection between Palestine and organized labor, which was no small failure. Smalls had gone toe-to-toe with Amazon, one of the largest corporations on the planet, and won. His abduction should have been front-page news. Instead, it was buried.

The assumption is that this third flotilla—the Global Sumud—will also be intercepted. By the time you read this, it may already have been. At best, the mission will further expose Israel’s crimes and highlight the illegality of its blockade—but this time, Israel’s threats are more extreme. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has vowed to imprison the entire crew as terrorists. This is where we are, thanks to the cowardice and complicity of Western governments.

But amid all this, there’s a ray of hope. Dockworkers in Genoa have pledged to “block all of Europe” from shipping to Israel if the flotilla crew is harmed or the aid doesn’t reach its destination. Workers in France have staged similar boycotts. The media might obscure or ignore the connections between labor, Palestine, climate, and empire, but as governments fail, workers of the world unite. Hardworking dockhands are ready to stop the bombs with their bare hands, while ineffectual politicians won’t lift a finger to make a phone call.

Media as Consumer Protection, Not Worker Solidarity

In April 2024, when Palestine activists in the San Francisco Bay Area blocked traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, CBS News spun a story of disorderly protesters and inconvenienced commuters. That’s not to say the impact on motorists wasn’t newsworthy, but if protesting a U.S.-backed genocide amounts to nothing more than a traffic report, what does that say about the role of a free press?

Some might defend this as local news just doing its job. But local news has no problem finding time for stories about kids launching climate campaigns or community recycling drives. Global consciousness is fine for local news—unless its sights are trained on the machinery of empire.

Bill Maher used his sizable platform to push a narrative similar to that of CBS, suggesting that protesters who had time to block traffic in the middle of a workday must be privileged. Maher, of course, has made his support for Israel very clear, so there’s no reason he would think protesting a genocide is more urgent than getting to work.

The framing didn’t entirely succeed. Some commuters acknowledged that their inconvenience was nothing compared to the “inconvenience” of being under Israeli bombardment. But the media’s efforts to make them think otherwise persist.

The same pattern holds nationally. The following September, when ABC World News Tonight reported on the hotel workers’ strike, the focus wasn’t workers’ grievances—it was how the strike might ruin Labor Day travel. In December, when Amazon workers struck, the story didn’t lead with exploited laborers—it led with delayed holiday gifts and disorderly conduct.

The mainstream media is not a monolith, of course, and workers’ demands weren’t completely absent from the narrative. But overall, the script was a familiar one. By framing strikes as an inconvenience to consumers, the media alienated viewers from the working class—encouraging them to see workers as obstacles to happiness rather than allies against capitalist exploitation.

That framing is especially useful to corporate elites because—even if they view workers as cogs in the machine—organized labor has the power to bring that machine to a halt. That’s why dockworkers refusing to load ships is so dangerous to empire. That’s why Republicans demonize unions as “Big Labor”—casting ordinary people who band together as a hegemonic monster on par with oil, tech, and pharmaceutical barons. Ninety-nine percent of us are much closer to going broke than becoming billionaires, but the media feeds us the perspectives of power—not the voices of the oppressed—so we’ll relate not to working-class allies but to wealthy elites who want to keep us from rising up.

Disorder as Distraction

Layer racial discrimination onto the protest paradigm and you get the smearing of Black Lives Matter. During the George Floyd protests—the largest in U.S. history—coverage fixated on burning cars, broken glass, and looting.

The narrative was one of chaos. Protesters weren’t people responding to centuries of injustice—they were rioters threatening stability. Of course, the overwhelming majority didn’t break anything or set anything on fire. But even when polling showed that most Americans approved of burning down a Minneapolis police precinct, pundits clutched pearls over property damage rather than discussing the violence that sparked it.

Looting, arson, broken windows—those aren’t the disease. They’re the symptoms. When people cry out in pain, the answer isn’t to scold them for being loud; it’s to treat the wound.

Critics like Coleman Hughes counter that for every Black person killed by police, there’s a white person killed by police in a similar way. That claim is deeply misleading, of course, because Black people are a much smaller percentage of the population and are therefore still disproportionately targeted. But even if his claim is taken at face value, he doesn’t use it to build cross-racial solidarity against police violence; he uses it to delegitimize Black Lives Matter by arguing that the movement is overstating its case.

Meanwhile, right-wing media has criticized BLM’s Marxist origins, presumably to conjure thoughts of Stalinist terror rather than solidarity through class struggle. This was the same playbook used against Martin Luther King. When he moved from civil rights to the Poor People’s Campaign, the FBI tarred him as a communist agitator.

Biden nevertheless promised sweeping police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. But when the protests subsided and Congress let the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act die, the Biden administration scaled back its ambition. What we got instead was a narrow executive order applying mostly to federal officers—symbolic progress that left the broader system of American policing untouched.

Coattail Liberalism

This is the central challenge of protest movements. On paper, the goals are simple: stop genocide, halt climate collapse, end racist policing. But these goals run up against entrenched systems built over decades to resist them. The problem is not just the slow-moving beast of legislative action. It’s narrative warfare and the absence of political will.

But we have no choice but to keep pushing. As MLK warned from his Birmingham jail cell, the real stumbling block is often the “white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice.”

History shows the pattern: once the dust settles, everyone claims to have always been on the side of justice. Today, liberals are proudly against segregation, proudly for LGBTQ rights. But at the time, they counseled patience, civility, moderation. Every movement is framed as disruptive and unreasonable until it wins. Then, suddenly, it becomes common sense.

This is coattail liberalism: applauding movements only after activists have paid in blood, sweat, and tears. Columbia University embodies this hypocrisy—celebrating its Vietnam-era protests while expelling students protesting the Gaza genocide.

I often get criticized for being too hard on liberals—especially now, with increasingly threatening rhetoric from Trump and his allies. But I do believe that establishment liberals’ indifference—or hostility—toward the left helped pave the road we’re on. They refused to hold Biden and Harris accountable for enabling genocide. They dismissed disruption as counterproductive. And they looked the other way until it was safe not to.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. At a June town hall with Congressman Jerry Nadler, I called on him to support an arms embargo on Israel. I was joined only by a young woman from Gaza who had already lost dozens of family members. The crowd of about 500 tried to shout us down, more annoyed at the disruption than at the genocide. And yet, two weeks ago, Nadler finally endorsed a ban on offensive weapons. Coincidence? Maybe. But even minor progress like this rarely happens without pressure.

We can call for “unity,” but not if we mean silence. If we can chant “No Kings,” we can chant “No Genocide.” And if we’ll risk arrest for climate or immigration, we can risk it for Palestine.

Yes, things are shifting. Dockworkers are refusing to load weapons onto ships. The UK has banned IDF officers from its elite military academy. Hollywood creatives are boycotting Israeli companies implicated in genocide and apartheid.

But empire continues to push back. The Israeli film industry issues self-pitying statements. Paramount issues outright condemnation. Netanyahu is still welcome on Fox News. The system will still shame us, scare us, confuse us, beat us down—anything to shield its atrocities.

But as Greta Thunberg put it on election day: “Americans, you must do everything in your power to call out this extreme hypocrisy and the catastrophic consequences American imperialism has on a global scale. Be uncomfortable, fill the streets, block, organise, boycott, occupy, explicitly call out those in power whose actions and inaction lead to death and destruction. Join and support those who are resisting and leading the change. Nothing less will ever be acceptable.”

History owes no debt to those who counsel patience. It owes a debt to those who refuse to be silent.

I didn’t want my latest essay to be about Charlie Kirk—not while a U.S.-funded genocide continues to unfold in Gaza—but after the events of the past two days, I feel compelled to address what’s happened.

Much has already been said about Kirk’s politics and behavior. A good primer on what made him such a polarizing figure is Chris Stein’s article in The Guardian.

What I want to talk about is something different: what this moment reveals about power.

Shortly after Kirk was pronounced dead, President Trump took to the air praising Kirk and declaring war on the left. At that point, no one—not Trump, not law enforcement, not the media—had any idea who the shooter was, what their motive might be, or whether they’d acted alone. But that didn’t stop Trump from blaming hateful rhetoric on the left and vowing to root out “radical leftists.”

This is textbook fascism. Rabblerousing 101. It fits neatly into the long history of the U.S. government waging war against the left—often with the help of the mainstream media.

My last essay only scratched the surface of that history, and one thing I didn’t emphasize enough was the police brutality unleashed on campus protesters. Officers tear-gassed, tasered, and fired rubber bullets at students. They body-slammed professors. My focus was on the protest paradigm—the way media framed demonstrators as dangerous and illegitimate—but that framing has real consequences. Smearing creates justification, and justification clears the path to violence.

That’s what’s happening now to people on the “left”—a category stretched to include everyone from centrist Democrats to genuine leftists (whom centrist Democrats themselves despise). The well-paid right-wing commentators stoking this fire will not be the ones to take up arms; they’ll leave that to the same kinds of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. But when the president himself is calling for revenge, the greater danger isn’t lone vigilantes—it’s the machinery of state power.

And none of this is new. Trump declared war on the left long before Charlie Kirk’s murder. He declared it in his campaign. He declared it during his first term when he labeled journalists “the enemy of the people.” Project 2025 is that same rhetoric on steroids. It’s not the official policy of the Trump administration, but much of Trump’s agenda follows its blueprint.

I’m also weighing in on this moment because it is, unfortunately, tied to Israel and Palestine—both through conspiracy theories that sprang up online and through Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to insert himself directly into the story. Appearing on Fox News, Netanyahu blamed—without evidence and without challenge—“radical Islamists” and “ultra-progressives,” going so far as to falsely link last year’s assassination attempt on Trump to the same bogeymen.

Why would he do that? There are several possible reasons:

1. Because he’s a narcissist.

2. To stoke animosity toward Islam and the left.

3. To distract Americans from his escalating extermination of the Palestinian people.

4. To deflect right-wing speculation that Israel was behind Kirk’s murder.

5. Because Israel was behind Kirk’s murder.

I’m not going to investigate that last claim right now. While I wouldn’t put it past Israel or Netanyahu—the worst human being on the planet—there’s no compelling evidence that Kirk was assassinated because of his shifting views on Israel. And even if that were true, it wouldn’t change the fundamental fact: Israel is committing mass atrocities against Palestinians, as it has for decades.

At the time of this writing, a suspect has been apprehended. His motives are still unclear. But as we wait for more information, a few things remain certain:

• If he acted alone, the hate between right and left will continue to fester.

• If he was part of a larger conspiracy—that opens a whole other set of dangers.

Either way, the broader takeaway is the same: we live in a political and media environment so saturated with deception that even when the government or press isn’t lying outright, it’s hard to believe we’re ever being told the full truth. We can blame social media for spreading conspiracy theories, but our political and media establishment must answer for their own complicity in sowing confusion and destroying public trust.

It can feel tempting to disengage entirely—log off, tune out, stop following the news. And there’s value in shifting focus toward the local, toward building initiatives in our own communities that deliver tangible results. Those efforts can ripple outward in ways that national politics rarely does.

But it’s also hard to tune out when Washington’s decisions target us no matter where we live or how we work. Just as we shouldn’t let irrelevant spectacles consume us, neither can we afford to be caught sleeping on threats that directly shape our lives.

That’s the essence of empire: it drains our resources for wars and projects far away, often invisible to us, yet ones we bear responsibility for—and that inevitably come back to haunt us. That’s part of the uproar around Charlie Kirk. He was amplifying much of the supremacy that sustains that system. And for those who had never heard of him until he was shot, his death is a reminder of what getting caught sleeping can mean.

Kirk’s controversial views and influence may have made him a target, but the truth is that any of us can become targets—of violence, of scapegoating, of policies designed to strip away rights. What Trump is vocalizing in the wake of Kirk’s death isn’t new; it’s an extension of the threats that already exist.

Civil society is fragile, and there is no road map for keeping it from splintering. But what we can do is stay rooted in the causes we care about and recognize that fear, anger, sadness, and despair are inevitable companions when confronting injustice.

Peace and prosperity in this system were always illusions—temporary calms before the next storm. Today’s storm feels especially dark because the rhetoric spewing from the White House is so venomous. But whatever comes next will be, at best, a balm, not a cure.

So, stay strong. Keep thinking. Keep learning. Keep finding ways to help. Hold close what you value and whom you love.

And as always, Free Palestine.

As students return to campuses this fall, many of us are waiting to see what protests erupt over the genocide in Gaza—and how universities and police will try to crush them.

Over the past two years, mainstream media coverage of anti-genocide protests has followed a predictable arc: initial hysteria over possible violence and antisemitism, followed by a near blackout. As support for the protests grew, coverage retreated almost entirely to independent news outlets, podcasters, and social media users.

Not that those don’t matter. TikTok’s role in “radicalizing” young people for Palestine is partly why the political class has panicked over it. But the legacy media still wields greater influence: sowing confusion, silencing dissent, and reinforcing the narratives of power.

The distortions began almost immediately after October 7: stories of Jewish students at Cooper Union barricading themselves to escape a pro-Palestine mob, accusations of an antisemitic curriculum developed by Brown University, allegations by a pro-Israel student at Yale that she was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag.

None of these were true.

A Cornell student struggling with mental health disorders did post threatening messages online, but authorities were immediately alerted and took him into custody. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Meanwhile, violence erupted against Palestinian Americans. A six-year-old boy in Illinois was stabbed to death by his landlord, and three Palestinian college students, wearing keffiyehs, were wounded in a shooting—one of them now paralyzed.

But college presidents were dragged before Congress to be interrogated over protesters’ calls for “genocide of the Jews”—of which there was no evidence—and two of those presidents were pressured into resigning.

So, by the spring of 2024, when student protesters intensified their efforts by setting up encampments, occupying campus buildings, and calling for their universities to divest from companies that support Israel’s war machine, the groundwork had been laid: The students weren’t conscientious activists. They were chaos agents trying to collapse higher education.

In media studies, we call this pattern “the protest paradigm.” The mainstream media has a long history of undermining protests—one of the most basic exercises of democratic rights—by highlighting disruption rather than the legitimate social causes behind the protests.

In the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, police killed 10 unarmed steelworkers striking for union recognition, but news outlets suppressed footage of the shootings and instead portrayed the workers as a riotous mob. Three decades later, Memphis sanitation workers striking over dangerous conditions were cast as disorderly agitators, while officials like Mayor Henry Loeb were framed as responsible leaders.

Similar distortions marked the civil rights era more broadly: coverage emphasized “law and order,” portraying marches in Birmingham and Selma as threats to safety, with nonviolent activists labeled radicals. Sympathetic attention grew only after protesters exposed the brutality of police chiefs like Birmingham’s Bull Connor, forcing images of repression that would “shock the conscience of the nation.”

The same pattern recurred across later movements. Vietnam War protests, particularly at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, were framed as lawless “invasions.” Feminist activists at the 1968 Miss America protest were reduced to the “bra burning” myth, while the 1969 Stonewall uprising was sensationalized as deviant spectacle.

More recent coverage has been no different: Occupy Wall Street was dismissed as chaotic and unfocused, Standing Rock activists were depicted as confrontational, and Black Lives Matter was framed as violent unrest—even while George Floyd’s murder forced conversations about racial inequities.

Those are the tactics of the protest paradigm:

• Emphasize conflict over the cause

• Delegitimize protesters as threats or outsiders

• Allow public officials to dominate the narratives

• Minimize or erase protesters’ grievances and political goals

The commercial motives for this sensationalism aren’t hard to understand. “Chaos in the streets” makes for more exciting copy than “Workers have demands.” But when the protest paradigm is used to crush opposition to genocide, the motives aren’t just about ratings and newspaper sales. They’re about empire.

Right-wing outlets like Fox News and the New York Post label the protesters “anti-Israel mobs,” as if opposition to Israel is driven by irrational hatred rather than disgust with apartheid, occupation, and genocide. More centrist or liberal outlets—like CNN and The New York Times—maintain the illusion of objectivity while employing coded language and selective framing to spin stories of antisemites and terrorist sympathizers.

They also seek to neutralize the protests’ momentum with their bias toward fairness—presenting balanced coverage of opposing views rather than investigating the veracity of each side’s claims. A week after the Times published a piece by Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov finally acknowledging that Israel is committing genocide, the paper published a cynical rebuttal by Bret Stephens arguing the opposite. Never mind the 21 months of photographic evidence or the overwhelming consensus by genocide experts and human rights organizations.

Diversity of opinion may be foundational to critical thinking, but when it ignores expertise and material realities, that’s not objectivity—it’s journalistic malpractice. As journalism professor Jonathan Foster famously put it: “If someone tells you it’s raining and another tells you it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman did just that. As directors of the documentary The Encampments, they embedded with protesters in the Columbia University encampment, chronicling their experiences and giving voice to their demands. That’s not to mention the extensive efforts by Columbia student journalists. While mainstream media spent their time wondering whether Columbia’s president should resign, Pritsker and Workman, student reporters, and other independent journalists countered the narrative of “misguided” protesters by showing a coherent vision for Palestinian liberation.

Of course, that didn’t stop a swarm of middle-aged men from trying to explain the student protesters’ mindset. NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway made the rounds on cable news to argue that students wouldn’t be protesting if they were having more sex. Bill Maher repeated his weekly routine of ascribing ignorance, narcissism, and terrorist sympathy to the protesters. Fareed Zakaria dismissed the protests as evidence that colleges are not the communities they once were—as if keeping silent about genocide is the best way to build community. Columbia professor John McWhorter insisted the protests were “not justice” because they made teaching his music humanities class impossible—setting hard limits on “acceptable” protest and thus undermining the urgency of stopping a genocide. And writer Gary Sernovitz drew on his experience as a finance executive to criticize the encampments’ divestment aims, telling students to “move those efforts to the lecture halls”—i.e., squash direct action in favor of mere debate.

The students weren’t looking for a panel discussion. They were trying to stop a genocide.

Yes, many of their actions have violated school policies. Others have broken the law. And critics seize on those facts to condemn the protests because such violations aren’t protected by the First Amendment. But that’s why we have the term “civil disobedience”—trying to halt mass murder is a case where rule breaking is morally justified. And it’s clear from critics’ focus on tone that they’re opposed to the cause behind the protests, not just the tactics.

Two high-profile examples of these distortions came from Piers Morgan and Dana Bash. Morgan, on an episode of his popular talk show, dragged Palestinian-American activist Nerdeen Kiswani through a tired interrogation about the words “intifada” and “from the river to the sea”—tone policing the Columbia protests while ignoring her insights because she didn’t indict the protesters. Kiswani was followed by Cornel West and Cenk Uygur, both of whom lambasted Morgan for his racist framing. Morgan reacted defensively, failing to recognize his vastly disproportionate focus on pro-Israel students’ discomfort rather than the unspeakable horrors in Gaza that the protesters were trying to stop.

Meanwhile, on CNN, Dana Bash anchored a segment comparing UCLA’s encampment to Nazi Germany while producing no evidence of violence or hate speech. In fact, the encampment itself was violently attacked by pro-Israel counter protesters. When activists later disrupted a bookstore event to call out Bash for her unethical reporting, her colleague Jake Tapper defended her on social media, helping to bolster her propaganda by predictably suggesting her critics were antisemitic.

Those incidents happened over a year ago. The dam now seems to be breaking. But only on public opinion, not on policy or media coverage—and at the cost of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.

NYU has codified its suppression of dissent by adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, whose vague wording can and has been weaponized to silence criticism of Israel.

And just a month ago, Ezra Klein minimized Palestinian suffering while interviewing Mahmoud Khalil—perhaps the most prominent symbol of the consequences of pro-Palestine protest. After Khalil complained that—during Israel’s initial assault on Gaza—Columbia showed sympathy only for Israelis, not Palestinians, Klein lectured him that Jewish students needed to be reassured after the massacre of October 7—as if reassurance for them is incompatible with sympathy for Palestinians.

As put it: “If you’re more concerned with the low probability of prospective violence against one group than with actual violence against another, then you believe the first group is inherently worth more than the second. This is textbook racism.”

Khalil’s friend and fellow Columbia student Maryam Alwan was subjected to similar prejudice. Alwan, a Palestinian American, was suspended for joining her school’s encampment and was later accused of discriminatory harassment for contributing to an op-ed demanding the university divest from Israel. In interviews about her ordeal, she was pressed to answer questions about campus antisemitism. While watching her own people be exterminated, she—like so many other Palestinians—had to center the feelings of American Jewish students who felt unsafe over protests against the genocidal actions of the Israeli government.

Now, let me be clear: I’m not suggesting there’s been no uptick in antisemitism since October 7. Nor am I questioning the sincerity of pro-Israel students’ discomfort, regardless of how vehemently I disagree with them and how indefensible their support for the assault on Gaza has become. But the issue, here, is the dishonest attempts to frame the Palestine movement as broadly antisemitic in order to undermine a legitimate stand against genocide.

There was much controversy around Columbia’s report on campus antisemitism, which I’m not going to relitigate here. But even if we take the report at face value: that there were some threats and physical aggression against Jewish students, slurs uttered and posted, breakdowns of relationships over differing views on Israel—all plausible consequences of such a volatile and divisive issue—none of these examples support the overall framing of the Palestine movement as antisemitic.

In fact, if they did, why would NYU have to redefine the meaning of antisemitism? Why would Columbia have to change its protest policy to justify suspending pro-Palestine organizations? Why would universities punish so many students for violating protest rules and not for violence or hate speech?

These are exhausting refrains after two years of fighting stale propaganda, but they are crucial—because even feelings about antisemitism are being used to manufacture consent for the real-world extermination of Palestinians.

Palestinians have been telling us—and showing us—what’s happening to them since the beginning of this genocide, yet mainstream media continues to duck and dodge, prioritizing its critique of Palestine solidarity over reporting on Israel’s atrocities. After having seen so many atrocities, you might think these obfuscation efforts are ineffectual, but it’s still hard for many people to resist the claims of power.

Ask yourself: how many people in your life understand the specifics of the protesters’ demands? Do they think these students are just “mad about the war,” or do they know about the students’ divestment demands? Do they know that MIT students, through nonviolent action, got their university to divest from Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems? Or that University of San Francisco students got their school to divest from Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace, and RTX Corporation—all producers of military technology for Israel? Are they the least bit troubled that educational institutions have such investments in the first place?

The students’ demands should be front-page news, not hiding in paragraph 12. But when the story involves challenges to empire, the mainstream media continues to bury the lede.

Even as the gaslighting efforts collapse, the distortions continue. Social media algorithms give us the illusion of consensus, while mainstream outlets convince us we’re in the minority—or just one half of a contentious debate. And now free-speech hypocrites like Bari Weiss—who as a Columbia student co-founded a group that tried to purge pro-Palestinian professors under the banner of “academic freedom”—are being rewarded with ever larger platforms.

Her outlet The Free Press has already pushed some of the most cynical coverage of this genocide, including an infamous story denying Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza. Now, with a pending deal to be acquired by CBS, she’s poised to move into the upper echelons of legacy newsrooms, where the very people who spent their careers policing pro-Palestine speech will be invited to define what counts as “responsible” journalism. The propaganda pipeline is only growing stronger.

But what choice do we have? To stop speaking out? Palestinians are being bombed, starved, hunted down. They need us to keep resisting, keep exposing, keep demanding.

Palestinians have the right to live. And we have no right to despair.