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 inhabita

 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 she