M-L-M Mayhem!

I started writing the following post almost a year ago, in November 2023 in the early days of the genocide in Gaza, and forgot about it due to the whirlwind circumstances of my life at the time. In the months that followed (travel to Europe with the family to work on a research leave grant there for three months, return and reintegration, projects I needed to complete) I forgot I had even written this––it was itemized as a "draft" on my blogger dashboard. But I think it is worth publishing it now, almost a year later, because of the ways in which particular "left" intellectuals defend other "left" intellectuals despite the fact that the latter are defending colonialism. This post was clearly motivated by a fight over twitter with Katerina Katarina Kolozova, who was defending Seyla Benhabib's liberal refusal to sign a letter critical of Israel, an egregious refusal I had criticized at the beginning of November 2023 .  Since that time, Kolozova has delet...

At the end of 2011 I copy-edited the manuscript of Divided World Divided Class  (DWDC) by the then upcoming scholar Zak Cope. Although I ultimately disagreed with the conclusion of the manuscript (a rehash of the Third Worldist argument that there was no proletariat in the imperialist metropoles) I appreciated the expansiveness of the empirical data that at least proved the existence of a labour aristocracy. And in any case, it was not my business to agree or disagree––my job was merely to copy-edit. Then, in the fall of 2012, right after my daughter was born, I had the misfortune of having to lug 50 newly published copies of this book in a suitcase across the world, throughout the Netherlands on a train, and over kilometres of the cobblestone streets of Maastricht to the Jan Van Eyck Centre where they were being launched as part of a conference I was co-presenting at. I still remember the echoes of my clunking suitcase as I crossed the town early Saturday morning, causing the inha...

 In the days immediately following the October 7th assault on the concentration camp boundaries of Gaza, the Israeli state sanctioned atrocity propaganda machine worked overtime to depict the Hamas-led action as the most dire form violence so as to justify what quickly became an open genocidal war upon Palestinian life. Indeed, rabid Zionists are still calling it the worst assault upon Jewish people since the holocaust despite the fact that now––following tens of thousands of Palestinian lives lost to IOF ethnic cleansing, the targeting of hospitals and journalists and aid workers and children––the Israeli narrative of October 7th has been largely debunked or unsubstantiated. Back in early November I already noted that this narrative was dubious (the beheading of babies and similar such weird claims were already being debunked) but even more evidence has come to light since then––such as Sandra Ifrah, the main person behind the unsubstantiated stories of mass rapes, admitting that ...

In Gillo Pontercorvo's anti-colonial film The Battle of Algiers  there is sequence where three Algerian women plant bombs in cafes and an airport, killing French civilians. While notable because the preparation of this action eludes to Fanon's Algeria Unveiled , it also demonstrates how the actors of an anti-colonial struggle become locked into a particular logic of violence overdetermined by the original violence of colonialism. That is, this sequence takes place after a half-an-hour of the film's description of the colonial situation and is directly driven by the fact that French colonial police and civilians decided to bomb a civilian quarter of Algerians. Until then, the FLN had limited its violence to military targets; when it places bombs in European cafes and the Air France airport, however, it is because it is responding to the fact that all settlers are potential military targets. The film, while firmly on the side of the FLN, admits the tragedy of this civilian bo...

In my previous post  I noted how the unfolding events in Gaza are a litmus test for those who identify as radical thinkers. Recently Seyla Benhabib failed this test by publishing a screed that, while claiming she was all for a ceasefire, distanced herself from an open letter signed by many of her former colleagues that was in support of Palestinian self-determination. Such distancing was accomplished by reminding readers of who she was and how she has in the past "supported the rights of the Palestinian people for self-determination," and then regurgitating Israeli state propaganda. Published by The Hannah Arendt Centre, it was immediately lionized by other "progressive" academics, mainly Arendtians: Samantha Rose Hill claimed it speaks to "the need for moral clarity," and Katerina Katarina Kolozova celebrated its critique of "anti-settler reasoning."  But Benhabib should be ashamed by this letter, and Hill and Kolozova should be ashamed for t...

I've held off posting on the unfolding nightmare in Gaza because the horror show has filled me with great mourning. While the event of Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel's genocidal response provoked me to tweet and doom scroll at a feverish pace, my feelings about what was unfolding were too complex to write about in a sustained manner. (Also the level of mental exhaustion I've been feeling for the past few months have made it difficult for me to write anything substantial.) Besides, others did a better job of writing what needed to be written . This complexity of feelings was due to the fact that my political awakening was in the crucible of activist work around Palestinian solidarity. That is, Palestinian solidarity activism is what politicized me. And this politicization was personal because it was connected to the Palestinian activist I was dating at the time, who became the love of my life and my wife. And her family, like all Palestinian families, bears the weight of this long...