The Iranian players passed through the Mexican border checkpoint hours before their first World Cup match against New Zealand.

After facing off with American immigration agents, they boarded the bus and headed northbound, toward Los Angeles’ SoFi stadium: the site of their opening World Cup match.

Their competitors’ New Zealand arrived days earlier, free from the immigration orders and political scrutiny that fell on their shoulders. But for reasons beyond their control, this Iranian team were unlike any other team in the field.

Iran were not merely 1 of the 48 teams that qualified for the 2026 World Cup, but a side sidelined from the world’s greatest sports spectacle hosted by the United States – a nation at war with Iran.

While New Zealand stood as their athletic rival, the far more formidable opposition Iran would face were the president, the politicians, the media and marching legions that saw the Iranian government in the footballing men wearing the red and white jerseys. The weight placed on their shoulders came from outside and inside their nation, indicated by “168” pins bearing the memory of the schoolgirls killed in Minab by American airstrikes in February.

Despite their best efforts to focus on football, the Iranian players were political symbols for those who supported and reviled their government. They were stuck between these (and more) sides. Even before the thick of this war, the national team could not escape that straight-jacket, illustrating that sport offered no escape from the strife and script that surrounded them.

Still, they tried to break free from it. Team Melli’s talisman and captain, Mehdi Taremi, attempted to recapture the team’s image of national unity. He urged before the match,

Taremi’s words were emphatic and aspirational. But ultimately, elusive at an intersection when politics overwhelmed sport.

Playing in the World Cup during wartime, on the soil of the nation you are warring with, is extraordinary. Particularly when the opening match is taking place in a city, Los Angeles, home to the largest Iranian population, of which a considerable segment opposes the government and views the national team as an extension of it.

The Iranian team bus rolled into the stadium parking lot, greeted by opposition flags and signs that read, “This is not the national team of Iran.”

Days earlier, the U.S. government ruled that fans from Iran would not be admitted into the country to support their team. Hours earlier, several of the Iran’s coaches were denied visas and forced to remain in Mexico, splitting up the team and siloing it from its supporters.

For Iran, this was enemy territory. The intimidation from immigration agents, the Pahlavi flags and critical signs, the media scrutiny and presidential tweets, the American flag and orders to leave immediately after the match was over, screamed as such. Before the Iranian players could even think about the opposition on the pitch, New Zealand, they were forced to endure a field of rivals far more daunting.

Yet once the whistle blew, the politics that surrounded Iran gave way, if only briefly, to football. For ninety minutes, the question was no longer whether Iran could navigate border restrictions, visa denials, and political scrutiny. It was whether Team Melli could survive its opening test against New Zealand.

Iran’s 2-2 draw against New Zealand was more than a World Cup opener. It was a ninety-minute referendum on endurance, expectation, and survival. In a group already thrown wide open by Belgium and Egypt sharing points earlier in the day, the winner in Los Angeles would have seized immediate control of Group G. Instead, Iran and New Zealand delivered one of the tournament’s most dramatic early matches, a contest that ended level but felt anything but ordinary.

Twice Iran fell behind. Twice Iran answered.

The first response came through Ramin Rezaeian, whose early equalizer restored calm after New Zealand stunned the crowd with a seventh-minute opener from Elijah Just. Rezaeian’s goal was more than a finish; it was a declaration that Iran would not allow its World Cup ambitions to be derailed by the avalanche of scrutiny and suspicion coming its way.

Yet New Zealand struck again, and once more Iran found itself chasing the match. Enter Mohammad Mohebbi. In the 64th minute, the Iranian midfielder buried the equalizer, finishing a move that once again featured Rezaeian, who provided the assist. It was a goal born of persistence and belief, preserving a point that could prove invaluable when the group stage reaches its decisive final days.

The match ended in a tie. But considering the animus and opposition, distractions and directives to depart immediately after the match, proved a triumph for Iran. Team Melli could have easily folded.

But they fought and played together, chasing that illusion of national unity that eluded them off the field. And for ninety minutes in Los Angeles, succeeded in bringing together disparate segments of a people divided along political lines

They boarded the bus back to Tijuana, leaving a country that had viewed them through a political lens long before they stepped onto the field. Again, forced to leave immediately after the match.

This draw was not merely a point in the standings. It was evidence of endurance. Twice Iran trailed. Twice it responded. And in a city where the team arrived carrying the weight of war, politics, and expectation, Team Melli left the field with something it had been denied long before kickoff: the opportunity to be judged, however briefly, on football alone.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, and the author of the forthcoming The Un/Beautiful Game: Power, Politics, and the World Cup, which will explore the intersection of racism, identity, and politics within the sport of football’s grandest tournament.

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The 2026 World Cup kicks off in 6 days.

But the most dramatic football moment took place on the last day of March, more than two months before the beginning of the tournament. The match featured a football rendition of David versus Goliath, which birthed one of the coming World Cup’s most compelling stories and stars.

Esmir Bajraktarevic took position before the ball. The towering Gianluigi Donnarumma, Italy’s goalkeeper and one of the world’s best, stood in front of the Bosnian winger and his nation’s 2026 World Cup aspirations.

Bosnia would advance with a goal.

The Italians would stay alive if Bajraktarevic botched the kick.

Italy entered the match as the heavy favorite. The storied Azzuri have won four World Cup titles, signified by the four stars spangled above the crest on their jerseys. Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation recognized more for history with genocide than football, has only qualified for the sport’s grandest stage one time before (in 2014).

Everything about this standoff, from its symbolic, sporting and existential dimensions, favored the Italians. They were the considerable favorite, and a World Cup mainstay. But the young Bajraktarevic, who chose to suit up for Bosnia over the United States, had history at his feet. Fourth in the order of penalty takers, a goal would seal Bosnia’s place in the World Cup and send the Italians home. Even more consequentially, a goal would make three-decades’ memory of the Bosnian genocide more current than ever, revitalizing it through the tales of their national team players and the global stage of the world’s most beloved sport.

Bajraktarevic stared down, toward the net, then struck the ball. Donnarumma guessed correctly, chasing down the ball as it paced toward the lower left end of the goal. Seconds and inches determined whether it would be Bosnia or Italy, underdog or giant, genocidal memory or present, that would find its place in the World Cup. It was the young Bajraktarevic, the son of genocide survivors who carries their wounds and the weight of a people stretching from Sarajevo to Saint Louis, standing at the center.

Football, unlike the arc of dominant history, sometimes follows a different course. During its most sublime turns, the sport can write against dominant histories and reverse predictable outcomes. Bajraktarevic’s ball moved beautifully in that direction, past Donnarumma’s outstretched arms and into the back of the net.

Bosnia’s second World Cup qualification followed. Bosnia’s grand narrative of genocide, stitching the personal history of players like Bajraktarevic and the milieu of memories of those inside the homeland and in the diaspora, found newfound relevance. History was no longer the past. But, with Bosnia upending Italy and the odds, history emerged into the thick of the present. The World Cup qualifier was the conduit, and Bajraktarevic’s and his teammates the authors of a rolling narrative rooted in genocide and survival, refuge and resettlement.

Football, for those who look beyond the pitch, is far more than sport. The Bosnian team, poised to kick off their World Cup march on June 12^th in Toronto against host nation Canada, manifests its depth and grandeur. The sport is far more than a game, but a delta where memories of tragedy run alongside roaring celebrations of triumph. The Bosnian players on the pitch that defeated Italy were never alone; the ghosts of ancestors taken by genocide and those alive still bearing its scars were always with them. The words of their players, particularly the star-boy from Appleton, Wisconsin, speaks to that.

“My parents lost many members of their family. It’s very tragic. It’s something I will never forget, obviously. Srebrenica is something I will never forget. It’s a part of me and who I am. I carry it in my blood.”

On that fateful March evening in Zenica, Italy was playing against far more than eleven men. But millions in the stands and beyond the stadium, within the bounds of the nation and the brains of a Bosnian diaspora scattered across the world by genocide.

That is precisely how Bajraktarevic found himself in Appleton, Wisconsin instead of Srebrenica. His parents fled the massacres that claimed thousands, rescuing themselves and their yet unborn son. If they would have stayed, the name Bajraktarevic would not have found itself at the center of the football world. It would not be emblazoned on the back of the national team’s royal blue jerseys, but like tens of thousands of others, listed across the tombstones of young Bosnian men lined up in mass cemeteries.

Football had its own plans. The beautiful game tracked a course that disrupted the design of genocide, and delivered a counter-story that struck back at it. For Bajraktarevic, a young man who has become a Bosnian everyman, embodying what and who the boys, teenagers, and young men massacred by the genocide could have become. He represented them, his people, and a national tragedy pushed to the margins of history.

“There was a plan so that his boy could never be born,” Emir Suljagic, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, said of Bajraktarevic. There was a Serbian design, thirty-one years ago, that systematically murdered more than eight-thousand Bosnia – the majority of them boys and men.

Again, football had other plans. It birthed a story of a Bosnian American boy who had history at his feet. He rose to the moment because it was made for him. Victory was sealed before he struck the ball. Bajraktarevic embodies the afterlife of a genocide that could not kill a people; that could not abort subsequent chapters of scattered survival, transcendence and triumph.

Italy never had a chance.

Bosnia, anchored by team legend Eden Zheko and Bajraktarevic, the native son who delivered the nation its second World Cup bid, march onward. The past and the present, politics and play will blur together, powerfully, when Bosnia takes the World Cup pitch this month, rewriting the darkest chapters of history under the beautiful game’s brightest lights.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and writer. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, American Islamophobia: Understnading the Roots and Rise of Fear. He will be covering the 2026 World Cup on Substack, social media, and beyond.

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Lamine Yamal is one of the most world’s recognizable names and faces. The eighteen-year-old Spanish footballer, who helped FC Barcelona claim its 29^th La Liga title after defeating rival Real Madrid, is already one of the sport’s top players. With icons Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo nearing the end of their careers, Yamal is poised to succeed the pair as the next global face of football.

The passing of this torch will likely take place this June, in North America, the site of the 2026 World Cup. Spain, one of the favorites to win the tournament, will feature Yamal as its talisman, setting the stage for the Muslim star-boy to become football’s leading man. A status that is far bigger than sport, and as illustrated by Messi, Ronaldo, Maradona, Pele and the select few who rose to the beautiful game’s highest strata, creates opportunity to impact the world beyond football.

Until that moment comes this summer, another took place this week that was just as seismic. During Barcelona’s victory parade that circled around the city, Lamal celebrated alongside his teammates before crowds of supporters that collected around the buses. A Palestinian flag emerged from the crowd, riding high atop a wooden pole held by an invisible hand in the crowd. The presence of the flag was no surprise, this was Spain after all, which has become the popular and political center of the pro-Palestinian movement in Europe under the leadership of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Even more, this was Barcelona, the capital of Catalan and its local culture of resistance, which roots a more intimate affinity for the Palestinian struggle and the human tragedy in Gaza.

The flag moved closer, then closer to the bus and Yamal. The Palestinian flag no longer stood at the margins of the panorama viewed by billions around the world, but swayed alongside FC Barcelona logos and the recognizable faces of the footballers celebrating atop the bus. Particularly Yamal, a product of Barcelona’s working-class Rocafonda neighborhood, where pro-Palestinian graffiti is as ubiquitous as the working-class immigrants who call it home.

While young, Yamal was familiar with what the flag represented, and the perils it posed on and especially off the pitch.

Yamal moved toward the flag, and the ultimatum it presented. He could turn away from it, like Messi and Ronaldo, fearing the political responsibility and brand risk that came with it. Or he could heed the request and raise it up, assuming the responsibilities and risks as he stands stood atop the championship bus and on the brink of becoming the face of football.

In fact, waving the Palestinian flag could even undermine Yamal’s natural progression of becoming the athletic and economic face of football, even if his sublime talents merit that status.

Yamal met a definitive crossroads a month before the World Cup would kick off his sporting ascendency, manifested by a flag that would map his public profile moving forward. If he took hold of it, the teen would become the talk of prime ministers and politicians, an accosted people in Gaza and far right officials in Israel.

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The decision, bigger than the world’s most beloved game, would begin to mark Yamal’s political positionality among the Mount Rushmore of football’s signature faces. Would he follow the footsteps of Messi or Maradona? Veer wholly from politics like the former in order to maximize his corporate bankability, or submerge himself wholly into it like the latter Argentine – who famously embraced Palestine during his final football act by stating, “I support Palestine without any fear.”

The football world was Yamal’s for the taking, and the rapidly approaching decision only his for the making. The Palestinian struggle cost footballers’ endorsements, millions of dollars, and in some instances, closed doors on careers. Zidane knew this well, not only dodging the Palestine while sitting atop the sport, but also veering from the rife racial and religious currents in France that unfolded in the very belly of the Marseille banlieue that made him. Zidane traded in his political voice for mainstream acceptance and commercial bankability, at a crossroads when he won the World Cup and his face was emblazoned across the Arc d’ Triumph while Arab, Amazigh and Muslim communities in France faced lived at the margins of French society.

By tuning out his political voice, many claimed that Zidane turned his back on his past and the people that did not make it out of the La Casetellane projects and the constellation of French ghettos that resemble it. Zidane honed his sublime football ability on the very streets where he learned to fight, but as his star rose, found greener pastures by leaving politics alone and never looking back.

Yamal and Zidane share far more than otherworldly playmaking skills on the pitch, but similar ancestries and origin stories. Despite his branded “304” hand gesture that symbolizes pride for his Rocafonda roots, the political road traveled by Messi, Ronaldo and especially Zidane would pave the way for endless commercial opportunity and mainstream acceptance, peaks especially rare for Muslim footballers.

Yamal took hold of it. With both hands.

Grabbing the flag from anonymous hands, then lifted it up high to crown the victory parade and the next face of football. The image went viral, instantly, and Yamal evolved into something far greater than the next football icon. Accepting the Palestinian flag was as much an expression of personal recognition as it was political defiance: Yamal embraced who he truly is, the place he comes from and the people he cannot leave behind during that victory lap in Barcelona.

The act marked a moment of a boy announcing himself as a man of his own making. With converging wars and instability, the coming 2026 World Cup could be the stage for his most powerful political acts yet.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, and the author of the forthcoming The Un/Beautiful Game: Power, Politics, and the World Cup, which will explore the intersection of racism, identity, and politics within the sport of football’s grandest tournament.

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Rivalries sell fights. But the one circling Khamzat Chimaev and Sean Strickland doesn’t just sell peddle a prizefight, it traffics in something older, uglier, and far more durable than sport that mars our current politics: racial hatred.

Chimaev walks into the octagon already written. A Muslim man, Chechen-born, embodying the visual and political script of two decades of American Islamophobia and media mythmaking. Unlike Strickland, he doesn’t need a microphone. The story is imposed on Chimaev just like it is on all visibly Muslim men: he represents menace, extremist, threat. His violence is not confined to sport, but read as cultural, political and civilizational. Every media appearance, press conference, and in-cage takedown is folded into a script that predates him.

Strickland, meanwhile, writes in bold ink; and the UFC hands him the pen. In the buildup to UFC 328, the white middleweight challenger has leaned hard into the language that makes Chimaev legible as civilizational enemy rather than an opponent. “Terrorist” and “Taliban.” “Goat-fu**er” and “third-world dog” spew freely from his mouth, accompanied by the UFC logo prominently showcased on the mic in front of it and the banner behind. These are not metaphors tossed off in the heat of promotion, but a steady vocabulary that collapses Muslim identity as the enemy of America. In one exchange, Strickland framed Chimaev as “raised in violence,” implying that Chimaev’s background, not his training, explains his invincibility and unbeaten record.

The insinuation is clear: the Chechen’s rise to champion was reared by savagery, not skill. Tropes emboldened by the War on Terror, and dangerously made explicit by Donald Trump and the far-right movement he ushered in. Strickland, a fighter and follower of that movement, takes every opportunity to racialize his rivalries. This time, tapping into the virulent strains of Islamophobia dominating the American political discourse to demonize Chimaev.

Racism wins votes and elections within the realm of politics. In the UFC, it wins legions of rabid fans and the promotional wind at your back.

Strickland’s persona thrives on escalation and animus. He has repeatedly used homophobic slurs to signal contempt for queer people, cast LGBTQ visibility as cultural decay, and laced interviews with misogyny that reduces women to symbols of a “degenerate” society. None of this is accidental. It is a performance that converges with the UFC’s strategic alliance with this White House. An alliance that, according to MMA journalist Luke Thomas, “whitewashed Trump’s image” in order to win his second presidential term. That transaction not only benefitted Trump’s presidential return, but will be paid back to UFC boss Dana White this June 14, 2026, with the “UFC Freedom 250” card hosted on the White House lawn.

Strickland’s embodiment of an Americana steeped in racism and nativism is, with that historic event in one month, a prequel.

But what makes this rivalry combustible is not just what is said by Strickland, but how it is received. Strickland’s rhetoric is framed as raw, unfiltered, real, and most dangerously, to be protected as “free speech.” Chimaev’s identity, on the other hand, is framed foreign, suspect and menacing. One man’s words are excused as personality; the other man’s presence is treated as politics. Strickland’s hate is protected by “free speech,” while Chimaev’s political views clash with the partisan allegiances and geopolitical alignments of the UFC and its broadcast partner, Paramount.

This is the UFC’s promotional alchemy: converting prejudice into promotion by leveraging a selective enforcement of free speech. The more Strickland invokes “terrorists” and “Taliban,” the clearer the storyline becomes for a segment of the audience primed to see Chimaev as more than an MMA fighter, but a civilizational enemy. Strickland’s press conference performances makes this patently clear, particularly when he shouts “America, America!” to fans that rage back with cheers to his rhetorical red meat.

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No major sporting league sanctions this brand of hate. Despite the UFC’s rapid climb in popularity, and the organization’s emergence alongside the NFL, NBA, and MLB as a leading sports attraction in America, it carries the distinction of not only refusing to punish the unhinged racism trumpeted by the likes of Strickland, but featuring it prominently as a marketing strategy. Therefore, Strickland announcing that Chimaev represents “the takeover of Sharia Law” and Muslims like him want to “wrap their wives in towels” are not the aberrant views of one deviant fighter, but unfiltered projections facilitated by an organization that united with the far-right and its principal mouthpiece, Donald Trump, as corporate strategy.

Sean Strickland won the fight. But UFC won something larger: a spectacle where racism is not a liability, but a marketing asset. And in June, with Donald Trump presiding over as president and ringleader, it will parade violently across the White House lawn.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and writer. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. He will be covering the 2026 World Cup on Substack, social media, and beyond.

In a matter of days, the fate of Syria was transformed. Bashar Al-Assad, who presided over an authoritarian dynasty that ruled with iron fists for more than five decades, had fallen.

Before his demise, statues of his father and portraits of his own were shaken to the ground and shredded, marking a new day for the nation sanctioned from outside and silenced from within.

The glee that erupted was not merely political. It was deeply emotional. Al-Assad contributed to inhuman suppression campaigns that led to the slaughter of 600,000 Syrians, the displacement of 15 million internally and more than 4 million pushed into refuge and statelessness beyond Syrian borders.

The war crimes of the recent past were hardly forgotten. Instead, they fed the real-time support for the elements of change that stormed across Syria, then swiftly unseated the dictator.

The catharsis that poured out the cries from mothers and the songs of Syria’s scattered sons and daughters were celebrated globally, as the war criminal’s plane departed toward Moscow while the fate of the nation moved in the opposite direction.

Syria would start anew. But at the fore of transformative change on December 8, 2024, and the frontier of new possibilities, sobering developments were already unfolding in parallel.

Syria was, for better or for worse, always more than just about Syria. This is the unfortunate fate of so many nations in the Arab world, and beyond its bounds, countries that sit atop fractious lines of imperial interests and latitudes of regional competition.

Syrians, like any people, deserve the right to self-determination. Even more, a people aggrieved by unimaginable slaughter and compounding grievances are entitled to more than just removal, but justice. Al-Assad is, at best, a war criminal. And at worst, a murderous tyrant who leveraged the strategic regional and geopolitical importance of Syria to safeguard himself from those hands of justice.

The domestic blurred with the transnational, and for Syria, the former dictated by the changing winds of the latter.

Genocide came crashing down on Gaza. The Iranian axis stretching into Lebanon stilted the status quo in Syria upward, seemingly securing Al-Assad and his regime for the short term. Iranian interests proved cover, again, until political reforms in Tehran and significant blows to Hezbollah shifted those interests. The allies to the west in Lebanon and east in Iran would not join the fight, this time, in Syria, leaving Al-Assad on an island.

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An island where the United States, Turkey, Arab Gulf States and Israel smelled vulnerability, and plotted then pounced swiftly to fill the vacuum left by Iran and Russia. Deals were certainly broken as the shadowy Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) made breakneck gains from the north, into the Homs, before finally storming into Damascus on Sunday. The group received a makeover from Washington, DC, and its leader Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani reclassified from terrorist to “moderate rebel” by American state and media gates of power, virtually overnight.

This brought absurd new meaning to the proverb: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” For the CIA and the State Department, it conveniently readapted its terrorist into its chosen freedom fighter, securing him primetime CNN features and glowing Washington Post headlines.

What seemed to be an organic rebellion smelled like an orchestrated play. Imperial and regional powers, from the United States to Russia, Israel and Turkey, converged upon Syria to deal and trade, with each gaining skin from a game that opened the door into Damascus for the Trojan Horse marching from Homs. Some would cure their domestic immigration problems, others would have access to annexing new lands, while all would benefit from dismantling an Iranian sphere of influence that marred their respective interest in the Arab world.

State soldiers defected while others fled, and there was no serious fight to be had for HTS in Damascus. The regime was a paper tiger, likely defanged by agreements signed in anonymity that sealed Syria’s new fate.

Al-Assad’s Syria was no more.

The celebrations that swelled across Syria were sublime, as were the images of fractured families rejoining and freed captives rejoicing. Acknowledging the poignantly human theatre unfolding upon Syrian squares and digital platforms should not take a back seat to any political analysis. However, realpolitik stormed in as celebrations unfolded, with Israel storming across the southern border to seize territory, issue curfew orders in several border villages, and bomb strategic sites in the newly liberated capital city.

These immediate acts of aggression, only minutes after Assad fell and simultaneous with the celebratory rallies, were bellwethers. They manifested a sign of what would descend into Syria, alongside the retrenchment of Iranian influence and incursions of renewed American imperial designs on a coveted plot of Arab land that stood at the center of resistance to Israel, and rebelling against the regional trend of normalizing relations with it.

None of this was the fault of the Syrian people. Populations are born into the political constrictions and geopolitical crossroads, and in authoritarian nations, inherit leaders instead of electing them. Therefore, anybody committed to the principle of self-determination must laud a people’s longing for it, particularly against a bona fide war criminal. But, thinking people must also examine what the cost of that self-determination means, and what value it holds for imperial and regional interests conspiring in the shadows, more than willing to invest in it for their gain – not the gain of the Syrian people.

Syria is not Iraq.

Syria is not Libya.

Syria is Syria.

This is an undeniable truth. But modern history and neocolonial case studies from adjacent lands with the identical antagonists provide wisdom that should not be flippantly cast aside.

Especially within a shifting landscape where Israel is poised to claim more land and carve out a new landscape in the region.

Yet, while interlocked between that paradox of seeking liberation and not falling into the new trapdoors of new tyrants, truth reveals that politics are not romance novels. Particularly within the genre of Arab politics, where the marching prose of rising perils reopen the wounds of old poems.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his social media platforms at @khaledbeydoun.

This is precisely why I wrote this book, Eyes on Gaza: Witnessing Annihilation, which is available for pre-order now.

The book is the first to be published on Gaza since the beginning of the genocide, pairing analysis of the morbid events across the besieged Strip, Lebanon, and beyond with the artwork of acclaimed Palestinian artist Mohamed Sabaaneh.

It is far more than a must read. But given the scale of censorship and severity of erasure of Palestinian stories, a book that marks the moment. A book that not only speaks truth to power, but also resists the very forces conspiring to write Gaza out of history. An intellectual form of genocide that stands alongside the airstrikes, tanks, white phosphorus bombs, and military campaign to erase a people.

Pre-Order Eyes on Gaza Today

Intellectual genocides are a companion to the mass killing we see, vividly, on our timelines today, and for 385 days before.

As Chinua Achebe stated, “History will always glorify the hunter until the lions have their own historians.”

This is a time for lions. For historians rising from the bottom to reclaim our stories, and write back at empire and affirm that our people in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Yemen, and accosted places beyond and in between are not erased. Not erased from their land, and from the bloodier terrain of history.

Eyes on Gaza makes that very stance.

It is far more than a book, but an act of intellectual resistance forged by words and art. It is a standing testament that the genocide will not be forgotten, and a living history that this catastrophe will not be forgotten.

Pre-Order Eyes on Gaza today. Make sure your family and friends, classmates and colleagues, children and parents learn about the genocide in Gaza. And more than just learn, absorb what western media outlets, Meta, the US and Israeli governments don’t want you to know.

Order Eyes on Gaza today by clicking this link.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a professor and author, and shares his daily insights on social media at @khaledbeydoun.

On October 13, the world was once again confronted with the stark reality of brutality in Gaza, as Israeli forces launched a horrific assault on the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza. One year and one week into this genocide, the world just witnessed one of its darkest chapters.

Eyewitness accounts describe a scene of unimaginable horror—civilians, including the most vulnerable, trapped and burned alive in an institution that should have been a sanctuary. This atrocity is not just another tragic event in a long history of violence; it is a chilling manifestation of a calculated strategy to obliterate Palestinian life.

After 373 days of genocide, horrific incidents like this one are no aberration - but a bleak expectation.

Al Aqsa Hospital, a symbol of resilience amid devastation, has served as a refuge for countless families seeking safety from relentless bombardment. To target such a facility is a grotesque violation of human rights and a blatant affront to humanity itself. A week after the one year anniversary of genocide in Gaza; this attack may be among the most vile. It is a deliberate act of terror designed to instill fear and hopelessness in the hearts of a beleaguered population. The images from that day are haunting—a stark reminder of a reality that the international community often chooses to ignore or, worse, normalize.

People were burned alive, many of them children, while still tethered to IV’s and hospital beds. The attack was a deliberate one, leveled upon civilians in need of dire medical attention and clenching onto life.

The grotesque violence inflicted upon Gaza is not an isolated occurrence; it is a continuation of decades of colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing. This systematic assault on civilians reveals the true nature of the Israeli state: one that prioritizes military might over human life and perpetuates a narrative of dehumanization. The callousness with which these acts are carried out speaks to an ideology rooted in supremacy, one that seeks to erase the very existence of Palestinians.

Yet, equally complicit in this ongoing nightmare is the United States. The U.S. has long provided unwavering support to Israel, enabling its violent expansionism and reinforcing a status quo that disregards Palestinian lives. The recent horrors at Al Aqsa Hospital are a direct result of this complicity; every bomb dropped and every civilian life lost is a stain on American foreign policy. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights rings hollow when it is juxtaposed with such overwhelming support for a regime that systematically commits war crimes.

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The international community’s response to these atrocities often falls woefully short. While expressions of outrage surface momentarily, they are frequently followed by silence or ineffective measures. This reluctance to hold Israel accountable not only emboldens its actions but also perpetuates the suffering of Palestinians. It is a glaring example of how power dynamics shape global politics, where the lives of the oppressed are viewed as expendable.

We must challenge the framing of this conflict as merely a geopolitical struggle. It is a humanitarian crisis that demands our moral outrage and active resistance. The targeting of civilians and the destruction of essential infrastructure must be condemned unequivocally. How many more lives must be sacrificed before the world acknowledges this as a grotesque violation of human rights? How long will the world allow Netanyahu and his collaborators in the United States to make a mockery of the rule of law?

In the aftermath of the horrors witnessed at Al Aqsa Hospital, we must not forget the names and stories of those who perished. Each life lost is a reminder of the ongoing fight for justice and the right to exist. We cannot allow these narratives to be drowned out by political platitudes or media soundbites

Western media outlets are complicit in the erasure of these stories. And as the horror at the hospital unfolded, CNN, the BBC and their legacy counterparts were slow to report. And when they did, reduced the war crime to a passing blip on a grand narrative of biased reporting that rendered the same old message: Palestinian lives matter far less than Israeli lives, and at worst, don’t matter at all.

Western truths burn. But after a year of genocide, understanding their truth will help us find our own.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on Instagram and Twitter at @khaledbeydoun.

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Yesterday, by way of an Instagram post, I shared my position on the 2024 US Presidential Election.

Through three key points, I stated that: (1) I will not vote for Kamala Harris; (2) I will actively encourage voters, particularly in swing states like my home-state Michigan, to mobilize against Harris; and (3) that I will cast a vote for Jill Stein, not as an endorsement, but as a first step toward building a viable third party option for a non-genocidal future.

Below, I articulate these three points more closely.

#1 - Harris was Vice President throughout the duration of the genocide and now the siege in Lebanon. When given opportunity to distance herself from Joe Biden, she has done anything but. In fact, she has doubled down, prefacing virtually any and every question about Gaza or the region with "Israel has a right to defend itself" or leading with October 7th.  Concern for the genocide in Gaza has been frivolous, banal, and riddled with doublespeak aimed to vainly placate concerned voters.  

In short, I pray that Harris not only loses this coming election, but is one day prosecuted at The Hague for enabling Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and War Crimes.  Endorsing Harris, let alone voting for her, is either: 1) tactic endorsement for Biden/Harris policy in Gaza and Lebanon; 2) an admission that these matters are secondary to you as election issues; or 3) surrender to a "lesser of two evils" that capitulates to the binary status quo that gridlocks American electoral politics.  

Even the third, especially during a time of genocide, is just as unethical as it is politically flacid. 

#2 - A Vote for Harris perpetuates genocidal policy in Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader Arab World. If the last 12 months have conveyed anything, it is that this neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party is a collaborator in Netanyahu's vision of Greater Israel.  Not complicit, but collaborative. Biden and Harris have, at every step, funded, facilitated, and fueled the Genocide in Gaza and now the Seige in Lebanon.  These are only the first phases of a broader campaign that Harris/Biden are proven conspirators to, which will expand and spiral more violently if she is elected.

We must Punish Harris for Genocide, and encourage voters - especially in swing states - to Not Vote Harris. Especially in states including Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, home to sizable Arab and Muslim voters.  Gaza and Lebanon can determine this election, and demonstrate to the Democratic and Republican Parties that Genocide is Not Negotiable. 

Trump may be a "disaster president," but Harris will graduate from Genocidal Second Executive to Genocidal President in waiting if elected. While there are myriad domestic policy concerns and interests that are favorable with a Harris presidency, the mass killing of as many as 180,000 Palestinians and 3,000 Lebanese in 5 days creates an Urgency that real lives - Palestinian, Lebanese, Arab and Muslim Lives - cannot afford to sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of domestic policy.  

However, I encourage everybody to go out and vote.  I am against a protest vote, particularly given critical races and questions Down the Ballot.  

#3 - I will vote for Jill Stein in the spirit and strategy of gradually building a viable Third Party Option. This Genocide should serve as an alarm to invest in, expand, and build a bona fide third party option.  2024 will not deliver Stein to the White House, but Gaza, Lebanon, and the future of averting more genocide of Palestinian, Lebanese, Arab and Muslim peoples at a time when our Lives Matter None to the Democratic or Republican Parties demands us, right now, to work toward cultivating that option for the future.  

A future that, for 185,000 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, will not see because of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  I will not be voting for Kamala Harris.

Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor, who shares his insights daily on social media @khaledbeydoun

These beheaded babies needed no verification.

Their charred and headless bodies, dangling from the arms of a man shouting into the camera, affirmed what had unfolded only minutes before.

Before the viral video raced across digital platforms and claimed a permanent plot in our minds, Rafah became the site of one of this genocide’s most gruesome massacres.

A massacre not measured by scale of death or degree of destruction, but a metric far more sinister. Evidence that we saw in naked, living color, projected onto the screens of our mobile phones that double as mortuaries these days.

Our phones are murder sites, morbid black mirrors where headless Palestinian babies hang from the blooded hands of refugees, camped behind humanitarian centers reduced into death camps.

This past bloody Sunday was another turning point; a downward spiral into a nadir that supersedes the technical and existential depths of genocide. Particularly for those headless small bodies, and the fully grown ones tasked with hoisting them up for all to see.

Sunday May 26, 2024 will be forever be remembered as the “Rafah Tent Massacre,” at least from the subaltern lens and pens of voices foreclosed from the privileged process of writing history and producing journalism.

If that Massacre mandates any one thing, it is to barge into those enterprises and etch into words the gory images forever etched into our memories.

Images of beheaded babies that could be verified by age and name, face and parents. Dramatically unlike those forty beheaded Israeli babies that filled the mouths of politicians hellbent on genocide, and media headlines beating the drums of a siege that would decimate a people and their plot of land.

There was no video evidence. Just hearsay.

No names or ages of the alleged babies were produced. Merely rhetoric from American presidents and Israeli prime ministers primed for genocide.

Without verification, the myth of beheaded Israeli babies was echoed by Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the corporate media architecture conspiring with the plot to destroy Gaza. The degree of journalistic malfeasance cannot be understated, as leading newspapers printed and peddled the lie without checking sources, and imperial scholars scrambled to produce history from fiction.

As Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels stated, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  Particularly those already invested in the decimation of the Palestinian people, and others sitting on the imperial fence of knowledge monopolized by the acolytes of genocidal culprits.

The march of genocide rolled over the lie and those bent on exposing it, as Israel and the United States trampled the rule of law, journalistic and scholarly ethics, and a global community that incessantly called for ceasefire at the United Nations and the halt of genocidal acts at the highest courts.

There were no confirmation of beheaded Israeli babies. But it did not matter.

The myth had been weaponized and the story morphed into a genocidal vendetta that displaced millions and murdered thousands, conjured up in the halls of American and Israeli power to – once again – indiscriminately punish the “uncivilized” and repay the “savages.” Villains with no names or faces, indicted on account of nationality and ethnicity alone, locked away in an open-air prison camp of their making.  

231 days of genocide ensued, unabated by human rights law and the American will to flatten it. Flattened like that makeshift encampment behind the UNRWA office in Rafah, where bombs were dropped on Gazans with nowhere left to turn.

In between the lie and the last massacre, evidence of the beheaded babies was finally produced. It sprung from our screens, so violently vivid, that we could not turn away even if we tried.

Many of us, haunted by the ongoing scroll of genocidal murder from the past seven months, did try with all of our will. But the pull of horror was indelible.

A baby. Or what was once a baby.

His head severed from his little body by a two-thousand-pound bomb made in America, held by a mad man as evidence – (in)human evidence – for the entire world to see.

Verification. Finally.

Not of beheaded Israeli babies. But Palestinian babies.

Fact not fiction, burning in the minds and hearts of millions shook by an image that marked yet another turning point.

Another flour massacre.

Another Al Shifa siege.

Another uncovered mass grave.

Another Aaron Bushnell.

Another Hind Rajab.

Another smoking gun.

Another body of evidence that signals that this genocide has descended into something far more sinister; spiraled into a depth far more hell than earth.

The truth is right there. Hanging headless before our eyes.

The verification is available for The New York Times and Washington Post, the BBC and CNN, without having to hunt it down.

Yet, their headlines redacted word of these Palestinian babies like American bombs removed their heads.

On a landscape ravaged by unhinged Israeli militarism and unchecked American might, the lie of headless Israeli children means everything; while the truth of beheaded Palestinian children means nothing.  

We must face this imperial word, head on.

Then confront it, by memorializing the events of genocide then beheading it with the swing of our pens that bleed dignity into the headless bodies of babies.

The truth of witnessing their headless bodies, years from now, will mean nothing it we do not unwrite the lies of their killers.

Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor. His daily insights can be viewed on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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The viral image of a protestor using a military policeman’s glass shield as a mirror was not tied to Gaza.

Many were quick to point that out online, shortly after posting the picture on my Instagram page. The image pulled me in seconds after seeing it for the first time, summoning feelings that spanned between awe and indignation.

It was, at once, emotionally seductive and urgent. Speaking powerfully to the season of protest blooming across college campuses and sonic youth of courage that spoke over the cowardice of civil rights elders.

Initially, I knew little about its origins, but the native feelings it spurred within me stormed over these particulars. The courage and defiance of the young woman, no matter what cause pushed her onto the streets in Tbilisi, was about Gaza.

The genocide swallowed up everything in life, good and bad. And for many of us, monopolized our imaginations and the existential passages in between and beyond it.

Right now, anything and everything are about Gaza. For me, and many millions more.

The young Georgian woman staring fearlessly into her reflection, unbothered by the lifeless riot police in front of her. She was brimming with life, juxtaposed with the lifeless statue in front of her. The image spoke loudly beyond the geographic or political context of that scene. The feeling was more transcendent than the facts, and the mis-en-scene pouring over the political matter standing in between her and the policeman.

In between her and us; the audience the image commanded against only yesterday.

Especially now.

Especially 211 days into genocide.

This picture, powerful beyond its place, harkened memory of another image. One of an indigenous girl in Chile, no more than ten years old at the time, standing and staring past another glass shield.

Her eyes, filled with disdain and devoid of the innocence her age deserves, just as timeless. Just as transcendent.

I saw this image, at least six years ago, for the first time. But I saw it again yesterday, for the first time, within the context of Gaza. Through the gripping prism of genocide that claimed the lives of 15,000 indigenous children, and stole the innocence from the yes of many more who endure it.

A young woman and child. Two archetypes of resistance and protest that, without their doing or knowing, became pro-Palestinian icons.

Metaphors that rang into the minds of those, like myself, who live and breathe Gaza every single morning, night, and expanse in between for the better of six months.

The images emanate with fearlessness. They speak with the spirit of resistance that rise from their native soils and pour onto college and universities campuses across the world. Their radiate with the strength that resonates with every individual who dares to speak up, who risks their practical interest for higher principle.

Both images, metaphorically, are about Palestine. Despite their origins in Georgia and Chile, and roots to rage politically untethered to Gaza, the feelings they spawn says otherwise.

The Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish wrote that the metaphor of Palestine is more powerful than the land or the language, the political causes or national quest:

“The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality. Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.”

These two pictures are poems of defiance. Sublime snapshots of resistance that have claimed the hearts of Palestinians in Gaza, and those protesting on streets near and far in solidarity with it.

Beyond just imagery, emotion, and metaphor, these pictures build on the very ideas Darwish penned decades ago. About “coexistence,” the images articulate without speaking a single phrase: before walls can be broken down, you must confront them. Defiantly.

Before peace can be had between two warring parties, that justice must be accorded. Definitively.

Pictures are more mobile than words. They are globetrotters, flippant to the walls of culture and the divides of language. Unlike the spoken word, pictures are universally understood without uttering a single word.

Particularly when their meaning aligns with the urgency of a particular moment. During these special intersections, pictures move fluidly beyond walls of language and culture, political causes and ideological positions.

They “break walls down,” in the words of Darwish, and “coexist” beyond the space and time of their native contexts and renewed relevance. In Georgia and Chile then; and Georgia, Chile, and Gaza now.

These two pictures are about Gaza. Not just by metaphor, but even more importantly, by moral. Their stunning emotion and defiant protagonists affirm in us, amid this prolonged season of genocide, a truth that no military can deny; that no genocide can abort.

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”

— Pablo Neruda

Until this spring and the bloom of ceasefire finally comes, everything will be about Gaza.

Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor. He publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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Young Saja, only four years old, survived an attack that killed hundreds in Gaza.

But her face did not.

The burns of the chemicals used in the bombs and bullets burned her face away. It would never the same.

The agent would distort and disfigure her face. Eating away her innocence and replacing it with a bloodied and burned visage.

This is Saja’s new face.

American-made weaponry did this.

Joe Biden’s desire to carry forward this genocide unmade Saja’s face, and the entire face of a land that will, also, never be the same.

165 days of uninterrupted genocide.

The days roll forward, as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza mounts, and mounts.

The unofficial number has surged past 40,000. While the number of starving and displaced bodies encompasses anybody still living on the Strip.

All of this could have ended months ago.

Much of the morbid images and massacred ongoing could have been prevented long ago.

However, the real time sieges on Al Shifa Hospital and ungodly attacks on Rafah continue.

Why?

One reason, and one individual alone.

Joe Biden.

President of the United States, and second commander-in-chief of a “war” that not only counts his nation as an aider or abetter. But a conspirator, a collaborator, and co-genocidal regime plotting and predating alongside Israel.

The labels matter.

Language is key for reasons tied to optics, but also tied to law. Namely, holding Biden and his Administration culpable of the genocidal acts that South Africa and other nations pin on Israel is why we must use these labels. Why these indictments must supplants terms that render Biden, and the United States , as secondary actors instead of leads. As Robins instead of Batman.

“Language is never neutral,” wrote Brazilian giant Paolo Freire. The words we choose are always political, and always intentional. Especially when it comes to genocide.

This pedagogy of the oppressor mandates us choose the right labels. To call it like it is.

Joe Biden wants a genocide in Gaza. That is his intent and aim. And as a result, Joe Biden is a principal culprit of this genocidal campaign that is approaching the half-year mark.

Israel, for purposes of the genocide in Gaza, cannot move ahead without America.

In civil (legal) terms, this genocide would be over but for Joe Biden. But for this American administration that, at every stop, chose to carry forward the mass extermination of Palestinians, their history, culture, and way of life.

To put it a different way, Biden could end this genocide, today, if he chose to. He is, next to Netanyahu, the only man in the world who can put an immediate stop to it all. Abruptly, instantly, and finally.

But he has actively chosen to do the very opposite.

UN ceasefire vote after ceasefire vetoed.

An ongoing financing, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, of the Netanyahu genocide machine.

The continuous distribution of military weaponry, military strategy, and military men, to Netanayu.

The brazen rhetoric dismissing the scale of murder and the severity of ethnic cleansing, where Biden himself flippantly rejected the number of innocents killed and the applicability of the term genocide to the events unfolding in Gaza.

Perpetuating a famine, fully by design, intending to starve nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza into submission. During the Holy Month of Ramadan no less, where this year’s “fasting” is famine.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, a final acknowledgement of the humanity of the Palestinian people only in relation to Biden’s presidential election interests, and as the American populace flocks toward and flanks alongside the people of Gaza, votes.

For Biden Palestinians never mattered. They only matter, if that word is to be used, in the form of votes.

But still, even in the face of his presidential fate tied to Gaza, Biden has not demanded a ceasefire or taken any active steps toward one. Rather, he has offered humanitarian crumbs of aid eclipsed by the limitless fueling and financing of the Israeli genocidal regime.

If Palestinians only matter in the form of votes and lost votes for Joe Biden, then it is an ethical imperative reduce him to a non-vote.

Not an “uncommitted” stance that may waiver in the face of Trump’s reemergence, or a protest vote against the red-hatted marauder.

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But a No Vote that aims to punish a genocidal president, to punish Joe Biden, for assuming the role as a principal conductor of the utter destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.

Some things are bigger than presidential elections.

With regard to Gaza and genocide, I can think of at least 40,000.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his social media platforms at @khaledbeydoun.

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While 1.8 billion Muslims around the world will be fasting, 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza will be starving.

Or, at minimum, 65% of that population standing at the intersection of ethnic cleansing, famine, and Ramadan will face hunger as a matter of genocidal design, not religious conviction.  

For the vast majority of Muslims outside of Gaza, fasting for Ramadan is a choice. For those trapped within its bloody walls, fasting is a deadly imposition.

100% of Palestinians in Gaza face a heightened degree of food insecurity, with 60% gripped by full-fledged famine. Famine is worst in the north of Gaza, as articulated by Zeena Aqel, where 300,000 people are barely clenching onto life amid grey rubble and rumbling stomachs.

This is Ramadan in Gaza.

A season of starvation crossed with genocide, colored by the apocalyptic strokes of shattered mosques and the ongoing strikes of Israeli jets.

While Muslims globally will begin the traditional annual fast on Sunday, March 10^th, a mounting number of Palestinians in Khan Younis, Rafah, and emaciated Gazan villages beyond and in between began fasting well before that date.  These fasts were not Islamic, but wholly sacrilege, inflicted by an Israeli war machine that plotted a famine as part of its broader ethnic cleansing project.

It did so in a series of sinister steps, or unholy pillars of “starve and slay” that began on October 8^th and continue into the Holy Month of Ramadan.

The first was to destroy bakeries and centers of food production. By strategically destroying these spaces, Israel aborted Gaza’s capacity to create its own food supply from within.  This made Gaza, and its millions of besieged residents, entirely reliant on external aid.

Next, Israel wields total control over Gaza’s water supply. Starvation is exacerbated by denying access to clean water, which Israel turned up by turning off two and up to three of the water pipelines that pump drinking water into the Strip. With no clean water coming in, desperate Gazans turned to contaminated sources to drink, cook, and clean themselves during the thick of the genocide. This not only fed and fueled the deliberate famine campaign, but also killed children and adults denied the very lifeline of life. 

Third, and perhaps most nefarious, Israel conspired with the United States to stigmatize the United Nations and Reliefs Works Association (UNRWA) – the primary organization tasked with providing emergency aid to Gaza. It did so, strategically, after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered its “historic decision” on January 26^th, as an attempt to distract global attention form the ruling.  By tying UNRWA to October 7^th, and charges of terrorism, the principal pipeline for food provision was not only cut off, but legally criminalized.  This was unprecedented, given UNRWA’s attachment to the UN and western roots. Yet, it marked a central and sinister plot to push foreign governments to divest billions of emergency aid funding to Gaza, and in turn, devolve starvation into a proliferating famine across a strip of land that became a food desert. Even more, tying UNRWA to terrorism enabled Israel to bomb their buildings and food stockpiles within the Strip, resulting in 155 installations destroyed by airstrikes and ground attack.

The criminalization of UNRWA enabled the next and fourth step of its genocidal famine campaign: Israel’s complete border closure to foreign aid. By conflating UNRWA with Hamas, and thus, terrorism, Netanyahu ratcheted up the starvation project by restricting the entry of all foreign aid into Israel. Whether from charitable sources, churches or mosques, governments, or humanitarian groups, foreign food aid was denied entry by sea, land, or air. As a result, stockpiles of food spoiled as it awaited beyond the borders of Gaza, while within it, legions of starving people were being weakened as bombs fall from the sky and famine rose from the ground.

Fifth, and circling back to Ramadan, the Netanyahu regime is conscious that its famine campaign will bleed into the Holy Month. In fact, Israel bombs Gaza virtually every year as if it were some diabolical tradition, desecrating Ramadan for Palestinians but also Muslims globally. This year is far more pernicious, with at least 144 mosques flattened and razed inside of Gaza. By destroying almost every center of Islamic life in Gaza, the Israeli regime sought to emaciate the spiritual lives of Palestinian Muslims in Gaza as it starved their bodies from good.

This was their plan. But as the cliché goes – man plans, and Allah laughs.

This opposite took place. In a sublime stroke of faith, Palestinians prayed alongside and inside destroyed mosques, convening in unprecedented numbers – while starving – to pray on Friday services across the Strip. 

The images were as stunning as they were inspiring, foreshadowing that the genocidal conspiracy to starve Gaza physically would not eat into them spiritually.

This brings us to Ramadan, when the genocide will intrude upon the Holy Month, and remind us that our fasts are not like the fasts of the people in Gaza.

Our fasts will end with bountiful tables of food, water, and more importantly, safety.

Gaza’s fasts began with no food, will end with scarce crumbs, and remain encircled by genocide.

“We fast because we have no food,” shared Mohammed, a friend on Instagram, “and will fast on Ramadan because we will have no food still.”

During the holy tenure of Ramadan, let us be perpetually conscious of the unholy days of rolling genocide in Gaza, and push our bodies and minds to do everything we can to alleviate the starvation and struggle in Gaza.

Breaking one’s fast should not include bodies broken by famine. That is the aim of this ungodly genocide, which intersects with the beauty Holy Month.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on social media at @khaledbeydoun.

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This article is dedicated to Aaron Bushnell, his family, and everybody struggling with the guilt and despair that helped stage Bushnell’s final act of protest.

I’m still shaken.

24 hours after watching the video, the young man’s sullen face as he paced stay with me. The words he uttered while he stepped toward the site of his final protest echo loudly in my head.

“I am an active duty member of the United Sates Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in this genocide.”

He spoke, looking away and toward the camera, as he took steps closer and closer.

The pain on his face signaled more than fear. Aaron, after all, was only 25. The reality of what he was about to do was sinking in, deeper and deeper, while the weight of genocide compounded by the creep of suicide fell hard on his shoulders.

You can see it on his face. You could, despite the vain certitude that shelled it, hear it seep from his voice.

“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme it all.”

He marched forward, like a soldier. That was, after all, who he was. Who he signed up to be.

Forward, on the margins of the Israeli Embassy on International Drive in Northwest Washington, DC - at the intersection of the two principal culprits of this genocide.

Israel and America. The flags of the two nations waved behind him as he placed his military cap on his head.

Bushnell was not merely an American. But an American soldier. He wore that badge of shame on his chest. The stain of guilt from “complicity in genocide” inflected his voice and infected his camouflaged uniform.

Unlike most Americans, Bushnell understood his nation’s central role in Gaza’s rolling demise. The reality of 40,000 slain Palestinians burned him with guilt, and buoyed him to undo his military service in radical fashion.

There would be no honorable nor dishonorable discharge for Bushnell. He would take the matter into his own two hands. One carrying a camera, and the other a canister of gas.

The episodes of pain and uncertainty, fear and commitment that reeled forward as Bushnell stepped toward his final stage were just as painful to watch as his last act.

For me, they were even more painful.

I’m still shaken. I can still hear those words and see his face.

The video, from beginning to end, is something I will never unsee.

A young man struggling with guilt and grief, desperation and rage, driven to do the unthinkable until it was unthinkable no more.

Only 25 years old. The planned event felt like a bleak, existential play for a new genocidal chapter in human history. The nihilism spawned by the moment birthed a radical form of protest for Bushnell, much like the extreme powerlessness that moved Mohammed Bouazizi to do the same more than a decade ago in Tunisia.

To quote Sartre, there was no exit for Bushnell but one. And he was committed to take it.

Before he doused himself with gas and let his body aflame, a voice inside my own head spoke to me.

It uttered, “I wish I could have reached Aaron. He looks like one of your students, who could have engaged in protest in ways that did not involve harming himself. That did not require him to take his own life.” Maybe he followed me on social media, I reflected, maybe I could have persuaded him to not do what he did. What the whole word would see.

But, perhaps, that was his intent. His final act of protest would also be his final day in this world, on this earth.

I am sorry that the world, that Gaza, that genocide, that your nation and my nation drove this young man to kill himself in one of the most horrific ways that somebody can kill themselves.

But it was not suicide in its traditional form. An act commit in the shadows of silence, darkness, and isolation, conducted in service of ones self.

Bushnell’s act was the opposite, intended for the world to see. His suicide was intimately wed to genocide, performed before the world’s collective eyes for the sake of others, for the sake of Palestinians in Gaza, desperately moving to shake everybody toward action - toward action that could not match the courage of his radical act.

Bushnell then lit his body ablaze, and the flames spread across his arms and legs, torso and head, eating the skin from the face we just saw minutes ago. A face that will forever be part of this moment in world history, salient to this genocide while never stepping foot in Gaza.

The flames, slowly, ravaged his young body and burned the very life from inside of it.

He would never be the same.

We will never be the same.

We were undone, forever. From what we saw on February 25th in front of the Israeli Embassy ; and from we and he saw from October 8th, 2023 through this very day. Until his final day.

The lines between sanity and insanity blur dangerously for all of us. The lines between reality and absurdity have never been so tenuous. Both dissolved and dissolving by the constant reel of death that invades our timelines and infects our brains, which are designed to absorb the uncut evil of unrestrained genocide.

Bushnell was no cautionary tale, and his final act was not deviant or aberrant in substance. He represented something within all of us gripped by the weight of this genocide, confined by the banality of its charge. He represented the struggle with a scale of visual slaughter that has changed us forever, and a severity of a truth that no degree of Palestinian death will stop the marching orders of evil.

I will remember Bushnell as an everyman not an exception. A real human being instead of an inhuman spectacle, who shouted the very two words that we all utter on our chosen stages of protest.

“Free Palestine!”

Bushnell’s stage was different, and that familiar phrase his final words. The rage and pain that burns within all of us burned outside of him, eating him alive until he was no more.

Until he was no longer a man, but a symbol.

A symbol that will stand vividly in our minds and loudly in our hearts.

This article is dedicated to Aaron Bushnell, his family, and soldiers struggling with the guilt and despair that helped stage Bushnell’s final act.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

A humanitarian crisis of colossal proportions preceded the current passage unfolding in the Red Sea and Yemen. For nine years, civil strife in the nation spiraled into a full-fledged regional war, where Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen with impunity and left its population scattered, starved, and slaughtered.

Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis were killed, but western media coverage did not care. 4.5 million people were displaced, yet the world remained uninterested in their plight. Nearly 400,000 people died (85,000 of them children) from bombs, famine and disease - spurring little to no alarm on legacy or social media.

Yemen and the human crises that befell it, during those nine years, did not matter to the west. Apart from its impact on the proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Arab nation and its people were indecipherable from the myriad of “Arab problems” in the region.

This all changed on October 7th.

Yemen began to matter in ways that it did not before as the world’s attention gravitated onto Gaza. It rose to the fore of media and popular consciousness when its presiding government, the Houthis, and population of 33 million, set aside civil fractures to stand up for Gaza. And more powerfully, leverage their geographic advantage to stifle the unfolding genocide by stopping Israeli-linked ships from traveling through the Red Sea.

Yemen, finally, mattered.

It mattered to the west because of commerce, and specifically, the maritime strategy that sunk Israeli revenue by 85% in the Port of Eliat - the only Israeli port on the Red Sea. Yemen, the poorest nation in the region, was able to bring the economic interests of the most powerful nation in the world, and its regional appendage, to its knees. In just two months’ time.

Money, not Palestinian lives in Gaza, moved the United States and its allies into swift action to stop the Yemeni intervention against the genocide in Gaza.

Starting on January 11th, the US along with its imperial predecessor the UK bombed over seventy sites in Yemen, beginning a several day campaign to put a stop to the blockade on the Red Sea.

Yemen was receiving the attention it deserved. Many states, and the public finally cognizant of Yemen because of its vocal and visible solidarity with the people of Gaza, spoke out against the American-led bombings.

Bombings that were by no means novel or aberrant. But when viewed within the broader context of American-led aggression against Yemen, in the form of proxy support of Saudi militarism or incessant drone strikes by four consecutive presidents, were actually an extension of a two decades’ long pummeling of a nation on the margins of the Arabian peninsula and the global imagination.

In order to truly understand the current American bombings driven by commerce, we have to understand how the preceding nine years of war enabled today’s unfolding events.

And the numbers speak volumes. Roughly 400,000 Yemenis have lost their lives due to the direct and indirect consequences of the conflict, a staggering toll. The indiscriminate nature of the violence has spared no one, leaving communities fractured and families torn apart. Masses of children died, while orphans across Yemen tally 2.6 million.

Beyond the immediate casualties, the war has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine. A report by the United Nations estimates that a staggering 16 million Yemenis are food insecure, with millions teetering on the edge of starvation.

The blockade imposed by the coalition has crippled the country's ability to import essential goods, exacerbating the already dire humanitarian situation.

To make matters worst, the United Nations World Food Program cut food aid on December 5th to segments of the nation controlled by the Houthis.

The UN claims that shortages led to this decision. However, a critical lens reveals that this decision is political, intended to collectively punish an entire population on account of the west’s aversion to the presiding government.

This sounds eerily similar to the categorical indictment in Gaza, whereby the entire population is conflated with Hamas and, as a result, subjected to the unhinged and indiscriinate rage of the Netanyahu regime.

Before the US bombed Yemen directly, the armaments Made in the USA were dropped by Saudi Arabia. The web of complicity that ties the United States to the Saudi-led coalition's military campaign is intricate. The American government's military and logistical support has played a pivotal role in fueling the war. From arms’ sales to intelligence sharing, the U.S. has been a key enabler of the Saudi war machine.

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The statistics are stark. The U.S. has approved arms sales to Saudi Arabia amounting to billions of dollars, providing the kingdom with the tools of war that have devastated Yemen. Precision-guided munitions, often used in coalition airstrikes, have raised concerns about the legality and morality of U.S. involvement in a conflict that has resulted in countless civilian casualties.

Moreover, the United States has provided crucial logistical support, including mid-air refueling for coalition aircraft. This support extends beyond mere military cooperation; it is a tangible manifestation of American involvement in a conflict that has perpetuated human suffering on an unprecedented scale.

The human cost of war that has disproportionately affected the most vulnerable. Children, in particular, have borne the brunt of the conflict. The UN reports that over 12 million children in Yemen are in need of humanitarian assistance, facing the specter of malnutrition, disease, and trauma. Private efforts, including my own fundraiser, have sought to provide food to orphans, assistance to mothers, and emergency food aid.

The targeting of civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, has further exacerbated the crisis. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), over 19,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed in direct attacks, with the majority attributed to coalition airstrikes. The very places meant to offer refuge and healing have become sites of tragedy, a juxtaposition that we see lucidly the schools and hospitals in Gaza.

This is not coincidence. Perhaps the staunch support Yemen marshaled for Gaza was, in part, driven by empathy. An empathy coupled with bloodstains from American bombs that fell atop the heads of Yemenis before they did Palestinians, for nine years and the mounting days following the Res Sea blockade.

The international community must reckon with the toll of the Yemen war and the role of the United States in sustaining it. Beyond the statistics, there lies a moral imperative to address the root causes of the conflict and hold those responsible accountable for the devastation wrought upon Yemen and its people.

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Behind every statistic is a human story—a life shattered, a family torn apart, and a nation marred by tragedy long before the most recent bombs dropped days ago. The Yemen crisis not only demands our attention now, because of the spotlight Gaza and the Red Sea have placed on the nation, but did before it.

Before, from 2014 onward and until the siege in Gaza, when one Yemeni child died every fifteen minutes cholera or covid, bombs or preventible diseases. For nine years, when the Saudi strategy of starvation-by-design was sponsored by Washington, DC bills and bombs. For twenty-two years of the “War on Terror,” when American drones dropped death onto Yemeni schools and mosques, villages and towns.

Yemen mattered as much then as it does now. Perhaps even more so, given the scale of human catastrophe that few knew about, and less even cared to stop.

The present bombings are not new or novel. But tied to this modern history of American violence, which redeployed itself all over again on December 11th.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his socials @khaledbeydoun.

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This Article was originally published by Khaled Beydoun in the Harvard Law Review. The preface is featured below. Click here to read the full Article.

“My only consolation is that periods of colonization pass, that nations sleep only for a time, and that peoples remain.”

— Aimé Césaire

Journalist: The law’s often inconvenient, Colonel.

Colonel Mathieu: And those who explode bombs in public places, do they respect the law perhaps?

— The Battle of Algiers

Nearly 8 months of genocide in Gaza has marked a sinister new stage of history. Which, with no end in sight, obliges us to look back at revolutionary history.

The landmark film, The Battle of Algiers, brought the stunning drama of the Algerian Revolution to screens everywhere. From the winding walkways of the Casbah to the legions of foreign soldiers whirling through them, the film captured the color of imperial horror marked by 132 years of French occupation.

On the silver screen, the world finally saw and understood the Algerians for who they were: a people fighting for their independence with everything they had. Through the director’s subaltern lens, the film exposed the unhinged “barbarism” that loomed underneath the pristine uniform of “civilization” adorned and advanced by the colonial French. The roles of the “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” were cinematically retold, reversing the weight of law and its imprint on colonial history. As the director Gillo Pontecorvo showed and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “When despair drove [the Algerians] to revolt, these subhumans either had to perish or assert their humanity against us: they rejected all our values, our culture, our supposed superiority.”

The film, nearly six decades beyond its making, remains revolutionary theatre. It masterfully recreates the asymmetrical battle between the indigenous Algerians, most powerfully the women, who rooted anything and everything from the loins of the land they loved so much to survive the French. Only that brand of love, indigenous love, could scale odds stacked so heavily against them. They faced the limitless legions of colonial soldiers brandishing the most modern weaponry, and the blow of imperial laws crafted to steal rightful claim of soil that sheltered their ancestors and nourished their fight.

As The Battle of Algiers made naked, the law is often the colonizer’s first front. Through word, law strips the natural claim of self-governance deriving from indigeneity, then swiftly unravels the humanity of those resisting with their bodies and being. Law enables the colonial power and his foot soldiers to carry the fight within the most intimate quarters of the natives’ homes. And then, law labels the righteous resistance against it as “terrorism.” The charge of terrorism, per its modern “War on Terror” deployment and earlier use, is crafted powerfully along racial lines, as illustrated by the kindred realities unfolding in the Casbah then, and in accosted squares of Kyiv today.

Law converts that very absurdity — that a foreign force holds possessory rights over a native’s home — into the manmade fiat of manifest destiny. Brutal soldiers invoked this legal authority crafted by foreign men in distant capitals and cruelly imposed it on natives as their new fate. This is the law’s cardinal function in settler colonial states like America and imperial experiments such as Algeria — to delegitimize self-determination and dehumanize those who resist.

“The rule of law?” Aimé Césaire asks rhetorically: “I look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict . . . .” Law, in this sense, is an imperial instrument, molded and maneuvered to advance the interests of those that hold power over it and power over the machinery that translates authoritative law into ominous violence. Law is most lethal when it envisions its targets as objects of conquest rather than subjects of patronage.

The discourse between the journalist in The Battle of Algiers and Lieutenant Colonel Philippe Mathieu brings this imperial expedience of law, or convenience, to vivid display. Mathieu is the cinematic embodiment of the steely French entitlement driving its colonial obsession of Algeria. With regard to Ukraine, the French stand as a telling archetype for the arrogant authoritarianism of President Vladimir Putin, whose obsession with power is wed to a kindred nostalgia of Soviet regional and global hegemony. This discourse about law and power, imperialism and indigeneity is built upon an undergirding epistemic about freedom fighters and terrorists — a timeless dialectic that screams from the screens as if from The Battle of Algiers.

Political reality, after all, inspires the best cinema. In a world marred by two decades of a global War on Terror, racial reckoning, and cold wars of the past thawing to restore bygone geopolitical rivalries, modern reality is as gripping as fiction. Terrorism has taken on a pointed racial and religious form. Muslims, transnationally, have been “raced” as terrorists as a consequence of this American-led crusade. Their faith is conflated with extremism and their portrayal in American media is constructed based on that conflation.

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More than legitimizing this indictment, global War on Terror law and propaganda have spearheaded its construction. In turn, they unravel the humanity of Muslims in favor of a political visage that enables policing and prosecution in America and military persecution and mass punishment abroad. This occurs even in lands where Muslims — like the Algerian women and men in Gilo Pontecorvo’s classic film — are striving for self-determination against modern imperial actors. Seeing them as terrorists facilitates the unseeing of them for what they rightfully are: freedom fighters struggling for the very dignity that Ukrainians, taking arms in the midst of impending conquest, clench onto in the face of imposing Russian aggression.

The force of the imperial law, that simultaneously strips the land from its rightful holders and constructs them as inferior or inhuman, is most potent when driven by a “racialized” frame. Postcolonial thinkers of eras past, most trenchantly Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said, revealed how the accompanying hand of racism expedited the plunder of nonwhite peoples.

Today, critical race theorists emphatically and incessantly affirm racism’s centrality to law, against the political and legal tidal wave that seeks to disfigure and discredit it. There is perhaps no theatre of law where the centrality of race is on fuller display than the War on Terror, where the unabashed demonization of Muslims remains politically palatable and culturally pervasive. Islamophobia stands, almost singularly, as a final bastion of acceptable bigotry. This is especially apparent in the United States, and a globalized world remade through a War on Terror lens over the last twenty-one years.

The color of freedom and terror is intimately tethered to the world order remade by the War on Terror. Muslims are “presumptive terrorists,” a charge levied on account of race, religion, and realpolitik, even when acting as freedom fighters. A distant, yet kindred campaign for self-determination reinforced the power of this indictment, with a racial design as its marrow. It took form in Europe, beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russian missiles “rained down on the Ukraine,” foreshadowing the thunderous military storm seeking to restore reign over the former Soviet colony.

The formidable Russian army rushing in from the east was rightfully and universally branded “imperialist,” while Ukrainians, from the highest rungs of political office to the deepest roots of lay society, were globally celebrated as “freedom fighters.” Ukrainians embodied the indigenous fight of Algerians then, or Yemenis and Kashmiris today, against a global military power intent on crushing their hearts, homes, and everything they love beyond and in between.

Unlike the accusations leveled at Ukrainians’ Muslim counterparts striving for self-determination, the Russian indictments of “terror” lacked the dehumanizing hand of race and racism. Rather, the indictments were countered and quelled by their targets’ lurid whiteness, and Ukrainians were celebrated as freedom fighters on the basis of their whiteness coupled with Western opposition to the Russian invasion. It took little for Ukrainians, whose faces monopolized the news headlines and timeline feeds, to become universal darlings and irrefutable victims.

The Western world flanked alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians’ archetypal whiteness twice mooted Putin’s levied charges of terrorism from Moscow. Ukraine is ninety-nine percent white, and politicians and media outlets all over the world hailed its people fighting for resistance and pushed from Ukraine as refugees. As Césaire wrote during the thick of the postcolonial era of the 1950s: “Europe has this capacity for raising up heroic saviors at the most critical moments.” This heroism is monopolized by whiteness, embodied decades later by blonde-haired and blue-eyed Ukrainians at the “critical moment” of NATO expansionism clashing with Russian imperialism.

Race, far from a fringe actor, is central to the dramatic play unfolding within Ukraine and beyond it. By interrogating the centrality of race in the dialectic of freedom and terrorists, this Essay examines how the realpolitik driving imperial law and its accompanying discourses is powerfully abetted by racial difference, and the indelible resonance of whiteness when it occupies the role of freedom fighter.

The War in Ukraine, distinctly unfolding alongside similar campaigns in the “Middle East” and Muslim-majority contexts, is a powerful theatre illustrating this dissonance; such dissonance colors the framing of “nonwhite” Muslims vying for self-determination as terrorists and white Ukrainians, engaged in the very acts of resistance, as freedom fighters.

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This racial interplay saturates media discourses, scholarly literatures, and as new wars converge with preexisting crusades, across screens drilled to walls and smaller ones held in our palms.

Through its examination of new war, this Essay builds on foundational literatures interrogating the construction of racialized threat and colonial victimhood. In doing so, it interrogates how the War on Terror creations of terror threaten to extend beyond American borders geographic and political, converging with a globalized formation of whiteness that extends presumptions of innocence and valor to those who hold it.

Echoing the formative critical race baseline that racial construction is not separate from political interest, this Essay stands as the first to examine this very discourse within one of the most consequential wars of this era — centered as such because the white identities of its lead actors align with the geopolitical stakes of the conflict.

Click here to read the full article.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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This Article was originally published on June 20, 2003 in the Los Angeles Times, three months after the War on Iraq commenced and three months before Edward Said passed away.

Said, a Palestinian scholar and intellectual, examines historic and modern colonialism in the Arab world, with Palestine at the center.

The Article, two decades later, speaks to the imperial color of the siege on Gaza. Further, it crystallized how the rhetoric of “civilization” serves as the justifying tool of criminal land grabs, unjust wars, and inhuman onslaughts on defenseless people. It is a must read, providing context to a crisis ongoing today, rooted in colonialism, the War on Terror, and the woes beyond and in between the two.

The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa.

The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one’s gaze, constructing its history from one’s own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing.

For a while this worked, as many local leaders believed -- mistakenly -- that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification through unpopular local rulers has so far worked.

At least since World War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors.

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire, but that hasn’t prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy apparatus from imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate.

Several generations of Americans have come to see the Arab world mainly as a dangerous place, where terrorism and religious fanaticism are spawned and where a gratuitous anti-Americanism is inculcated in the young by evil clerics who are anti-democratic and virulently anti-Semitic.

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In the U.S., “Arabists” are under attack. Simply to speak Arabic or to have some sympathetic acquaintance with the vast Arab cultural tradition has been made to seem a threat to Israel.

The media runs the vilest racist stereotypes about Arabs -- see, for example, a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the Wall Street Journal in which she speaks of Palestinians as having “reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors” and of Palestinian culture as “the life force traduced, cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism.”

Americans are sufficiently blind that when a Middle Eastern leader emerges whom our leaders like -- the shah of Iran or Anwar Sadat -- it is assumed that he is a visionary who does things our way not because he understands the game of imperial power (which is to survive by humoring the regnant authority) but because he is moved by principles that we share.

Almost a quarter of a century after his assassination, Sadat is a forgotten and unpopular man in his own country because most Egyptians regard him as having served the U.S. first, not Egypt. The same is true of the shah in Iran. That Sadat and the shah were followed in power by rulers who are less palatable to the U.S. indicates not that Arabs are fanatics, but that the distortions of imperialism produce further distortions, inducing extreme forms of resistance and political self-assertion.

The Palestinians are considered to have reformed themselves by allowing Mahmoud Abbas, rather than the terrible Yasser Arafat, to be their leader. But “reform” is a matter of imperial interpretation. Israel and the U.S. regard Arafat as an obstacle to the settlement they wish to impose on the Palestinians, a settlement that would obliterate Palestinian demands and allow Israel to claim, falsely, that it has atoned for its “original sin.”

Never mind that Arafat -- whom I have criticized for years in the Arabic and Western media -- is still universally regarded as the legitimate Palestinian leader. He was legally elected and has a level of popular support that no other Palestinian approaches, least of all Abbas, a bureaucrat and longtime Arafat subordinate. And never mind that there is now a coherent Palestinian opposition, the Independent National Initiative; it gets no attention because the U.S. and the Israeli establishment wish for a compliant interlocutor who is in no position to make trouble. As to whether the Abbas arrangement can work, that is put off to another day. This is shortsightedness indeed -- the blind arrogance of the imperial gaze. The same pattern is repeated in the official U.S. view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the other Arab states.

Underlying this perspective is a long-standing view -- the Orientalist view -- that denies Arabs their right to national self-determination because they are considered incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth and fundamentally murderous.

Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery -- and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because “that’s the way the Arabs are.”

That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.

We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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“This is worse than after the Muslim Ban, than after 9/11,” uttered Abed Ayoub, a lawyer and childhood friend, four blocks away from the White House and two decades apart from the day that changed everything.

In between the prevailing custom of doom-scrolling and delivering bad news, Abed looked up with a stare that said everything. I knew that look well.

Like him, I’m an Arab, Muslim and American — an amalgam of identities that conjures up “pariah” in the world we live in. But now, it means something different. At this moment, when the horror of mass death unfolds in Gaza and on screens we hold in our palms, our identity spells absurdity.

This was on 7th day of the genocide that descended into Gaza. We are now at Day 92. Nearly three months and 30,000 deaths later.

We see ourselves in the people of Gaza. The accosted people there share our names, our faith, our culture and our customs. We have friends in that 140-square-mile open-air prison turned into hell on earth, including journalists who were sheltering at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital at the time of the deadly blast on Wednesday.

But what we continue to see on our screens is still half a world away. On the other side of our terrestrial reality and this virtual insanity.

But after several days into the genocide and fateful passages after and in between, this no long was the case.

“A Palestinian boy was killed in Illinois,” shared Abed. This sequence of foreign-to-domestic murder was a familiar one. Being American, like 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was, does not protect us from the stigma of being Palestinian or Arab, Muslim and from the “Middle East.” Rather, these latter identities keep the security blanket of Americanness away from us, rendering us foreign and, during times of crisis, “terrorists.”

Wadea was stabbed 26 times last Saturday with a military-style knife by his family’s landlord, a 71-year-old man who’s been charged with murder and hate crimes, among other crimes. The attacker also stabbed Wadea’s mother more than a dozen times. She lived. But what does that word even mean anymore?

What does it mean for a mother who escaped war for the safety of an American suburb? What does it mean for Abed and I: an executive director of a civil rights organization and a law professor, standing at the crosshairs of American power and an Arab identity conflated with terrorism? What does “living” mean for millions of Arabs and Muslims who call the United States home, burdened with the impossible task of proving their allegiance, over and over again, in response to bellowing demands that bury our humanity?

It feels like we are living on borrowed time, like we were extended a contingent citizenship that can be stripped at any time, on account of events that unfold in America or on the other side of the world.

Weeks later, three Palestinian college students were shot for wearing the keffiyeh. This garment, worn as a symbol of resistance, is widely stereotyped as a market of terrorism in the minds of bigots - including the man who shot the three young men.

The students lived. However, one was left permanently paralyzed, his life forever turned around and changed by a hate crime spurred on by a vile blur of anti-Palestinian hate and Islamophobia.

Calling it “Islamophobia” would be a severe understatement. This existential ballad of being Arab or Muslim in America is far more onerous, far more absurd. It feels like an existence that has no exit. A play where our daily routine is waking up to the news of war, the stark images and videos of slain children, rolling timelines of shattered villages and the roaring demands “to condemn Hamas.” While this plot sounds a lot like novels from Jean Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, this is not fiction.

This is our absurd reality.

An absurd reality where we, in America, can only post on virtual timelines where the footsteps of suspicion stomp out our voices and censor our speech.

Our names and nationalities, faces and faith brand us with the stain of collective guilt for crimes that we did not commit. Moments like this — like the aftermath of 9/11 or the reckoning after former President Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban in 2017 — moved many to conceal their ethnicity or cover their faith, particularly women who removed their hijabs or young children who hid behind aliases.

Hate crimes statistics skyrocketed after 9/11, and reached near proportions in the wake of the Muslim Ban. Wadea’s death foreshadows that these figures may spike again, and descend on the heads of Arab and Muslim Americans shadowed by suspicion.

But we cannot shed our bodies. These are the corporal vehicles that connect us to the victims cast as villains in Gaza. And the symbols that tie us to distant places where “wars on terror” were wrought yesterday and are certain to wreck more lives tomorrow.

Even acts of protest have been punished. Off and online, whereby students have been doxxed, doctors have lost their jobs, and everyday Muslims laid off or terminated for innocuous social media posts calling for a ceasefire or opposing a genocide.

American citizenship, and the theoretical rights that emanate from it, have not protected Muslims exercising their right to free speech and assembly. And when they do, the more that they do, the bigger the target grows on their back and head.

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“Muslims are only newsworthy when villains, never victims.” I wrote those words, for the first time, as a law student weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks. I was much younger then, unprepared for what the world would come to be.

But I knew then that it would never be the same.

I typed those very eight words 20 years later in my book, “The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims.” In between the wide-eyed optimism of a young law student and the sobered worldview of an aging law professor, 9/11 and today’s war serve as bookends for morbid middle passages for Muslims in America and around the globe – as evidenced by the genocidal campaigns in China, persecution in India, hijab and abaya bans in France, and far more. The law and language of Islamophobia have been exported transnationally by an American “war on terror” that was first enforced on the home front, upon the heads of Arabs and Muslims like me whose citizenship was cast aside.

Being American was no protection. Not then and definitely not now.

The barrage of cold stares and commands to condemn terrorism, assignment of collective guilt and characterization of our dead children as “collateral damage,” not only strips us from the substance of citizenship, it renders us inhuman. “People don’t have ideas,” wrote Carl Jung, “Ideas have people.”

And the idea that conflates our skin with terrorism not only grips the imagination of people, but sinks into the very marrow of American gates of power. We must exist, whatever that even means anymore, within the very lines that divide our identities and sever us from normalcy.

While I am in Phoenix and not Chicago, I can feel every one of those 26 stabs that plunged into little Wadea’s body. While across American cities large and small, we see ourselves in the grieving parents forced to bury their dead children in Gaza.

This is what it means to be us.

Perhaps it is time that this country begins to see us.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights online at @khaledbeydoun. This article was originally published in CNN.

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Joe Biden was asleep for much of the term of his presidency. But on October 7th and the horrific days after, Biden finally woke up.

While the moniker given by his orange-skinned predecessor was a silly one, it was given renewed substance by a presidency that was rather dull and nondescript.

Biden was just there. Little news surrounded his administration aside from a slip or gaff, and the ongoing discussions about his age that orbited them.

Everything changed on that fateful day near the Gaza border, when Biden rushed to aid an Israeli “war on terror” that became the very thing it demonized, and Sleepy Joe turned into Genocide Joe.

The Biden Administration, which wore the brand of multiculturalism and its woke ornaments of the day as an antithesis to Trumpism, shed that thin cap and showed its true self. A neoliberal war-machine, particularly in Arab lands, which would arm a far-right government in Israel with whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted it, to carry forward a genocide.

Biden was a genocidal facilitator and financier. His Administration poured billions into a “war” that was anything but, as the death toll among civilians and children in Gaza mounted.

Then billions more were given. “The total aid the U.S. will be giving to Israel in 2023 and early 2024 will be about $18 billion… That’s the $3.8 billion in normal annual aid, plus $14.5 billion in supplemental aid.”

But as bombed rained onto refugee camps and hospitals, Biden continued to make it rain on Netanyahu. At the close of the year, Biden evaded Congress to expedite “a second emergency determination covering a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed to make the 155 mm shells that Israel has already purchased function.”

As dead bodies mounted and moved beyond the 20,000 mark, money kept coming in.

As the death toll of children ballooned past 8,000, formal calls for a cease fire were shot down by the United States at the United Nations.

Not once, but again and again, in front of a world aghast by the images of slain babies and vivid reels of slaughter on their timelines.

Genocide Joe, however, was unmoved. And rather, sunk his feet deeper into an intractable position of not only endorsing genocide, but collaborating in one.

These were all tactic endorsements of the genocide; explicit expressions of being on board, fully, with an ethnic cleansing project hellbent on mass slaughter and mass expulsion.

Biden’s imprint was prominent on nearly every dimension of Netanyahu’s war. From the rubber-stamped funds earmarked to him to eliminate “Amalek,” a biblical call for genocide, to the direct U.S. military guidance given to Israeli ground invasion teams that penetrated deep into Gaza.

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This was not the typical brand of American support of Israeli aggression on the Palestinian people. But one that was quintessentially Biden’s own, marked by dismissal of any and all calls for cease fires and open disavowal of the official death toll of Palestinians.

This was a “liberal” president (whatever that means in the popular discourse anymore), mind you, who shaped a campaign on “resisting” the violence of Trump, no less.

Biden’s violent streak, as illustrated by this genocide, was far greater. And, many believe that Trump would not have allowed this genocide to continue on for as long as it has, destroying as much as it has.

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I, despite my extensive record of reviling Trump’s championing of Islamophobia, also believe he would have stopped this genocide far earlier. Perhaps out of derision for Netanyahu, a considerable segment of his base lacking the appetite for foreign war and the finances it demands, and most probably, ego.

Whatever the catalyst, the genocide would have been cut short earlier under Trump. And thousands of lives, many of them babies and children, would not have been murdered.

In a world of American hegemony, perhaps fading past its prime like its president well beyond it, genocides don’t just happen. Particularly in the Middle East, where the ghosts of empire’s past and the neocolonial boot-print of American dominance is at play.

Even Netanyahu and Israel need a dance partner. A co-conspirator to push a genocide near the three month, 30,000 murdered, and 153-10 vote at the UN General Assembly mark.

“Imperial arrogance,” in the words of Edward Said, buoyed by the bloodthirst of two white men wed to killing Palestinians already entrapped in a living hell.

War criminals. Defying every law and custom of war.

Genocide brothers. Bound to the systematic killing of a people even when the rest of the world, resoundingly and repeatedly, tell them to stop.

Genocide Joe. A new image untethered to Barrack Obama and the alias assigned to you by Trump.

It’s 2024, Joe Biden.

You finally made your own name and cemented your final legacy.

Khaled A. Beydoun is an author and law professor who publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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These are the words of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet and literary icon. I share them as homage, and to highlight the timelessness of words he originally penned in Arabic in 1973 - 50 years ago.

Gaza is far from its relatives and close to its enemies, because whenever Gaza explodes, it becomes an island and it never stops exploding. It scratched the enemy’s face, broke his dreams and stopped his satisfaction with time.

Because in Gaza time is something different.

Because in Gaza time is not a neutral element.

It does not compel people to cool contemplation, but rather to explosion and a collision with reality.

Time there does not take children from childhood to old age, but rather makes them men in their first confrontation with the enemy.

Time in Gaza is not relaxation, but storming the burning noon. Because in Gaza values are different, different, different.

The only value for the occupied is the extent of his resistance to occupation. That is the only competition there. Gaza has been addicted to knowing this cruel, noble value. It did not learn it from books, hasty school seminars, loud propaganda megaphones, or songs. It learned it through experience alone and through work that is not done for advertisement and image.

Gaza has no throat. Its pores are the ones that speak in sweat, blood, and fires. Hence the enemy hates it to death and fears it to criminality, and tries to sink it into the sea, the desert, or blood. And hence its relatives and friends love it with a coyness that amounts to jealousy and fear at times, because Gaza is the brutal lesson and the shining example for enemies and friends alike.

Gaza is not the most beautiful city.

Its shore is not bluer than the shores of Arab cities.

Its oranges are not the most beautiful in the Mediterranean basin.

Gaza is not the richest city.

It is not the most elegant or the biggest, but it equals the history of an entire homeland, because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies. Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort. Because it is his nightmare. Because it is mined oranges, children without a childhood, old men without old age and women without desires. Because of all this it is the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us and the one most worthy of love.

We do injustice to Gaza when we look for its poems, so let us not disfigure Gaza’s beauty. What is most beautiful in it is that it is devoid of poetry at a time when we tried to triumph over the enemy with poems, so we believed ourselves and were overjoyed to see the enemy letting us sing. We let him triumph, then when we dried our lips of poems we saw that the enemy had finished building cities, forts and streets. We do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth, because we will hate it when we discover that it is no more than a small poor city that resists.

We do injustice when we wonder: What made it into a myth? If we had dignity, we would break all our mirrors and cry or curse it if we refuse to revolt against ourselves. We do injustice to Gaza if we glorify it, because being enchanted by it will take us to the edge of waiting and Gaza doesn’t come to us. Gaza does not liberate us. Gaza has no horses, airplanes, magic wands, or offices in capital cities. Gaza liberates itself from our attributes and liberates our language from its Gazas at the same time. When we meet it - in a dream - perhaps it won’t recognize us, because Gaza was born out of fire, while we were born out of waiting and crying over abandoned homes.

It is true that Gaza has its special circumstances and its own revolutionary traditions. But its secret is not a mystery: Its resistance is popular and firmly joined together and knows what it wants (it wants to expel the enemy out of its clothes). The relationship of resistance to the people is that of skin to bones and not a teacher to students. Resistance in Gaza did not turn into a profession or an institution.

It did not accept anyone’s tutelage and did not leave its fate hinging on anyone’s signature or stamp.

It does not care that much if we know its name, picture, or eloquence. It did not believe that it was material for media. It did not prepare for cameras and did not put smiling paste on its face.

Neither does it want that, nor we.

Hence, Gaza is bad business for merchants and hence it is an incomparable moral treasure for Arabs.

What is beautiful about Gaza is that our voices do not reach it. Nothing distracts it; nothing takes its fist away from the enemy’s face. Not the forms of the Palestinian state we will establish whether on the eastern side of the moon, or the western side of Mars when it is explored. Gaza is devoted to rejection. . . hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection.

Enemies might triumph over Gaza (the storming sea might triumph over an island. . . they might chop down all its trees).

They might break its bones.

They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women. They might throw it into the sea, sand, or blood.

But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.

It will continue to explode.

It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.

It will continue to explode.

It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his insights daily on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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“There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”

- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

The genocide in Gaza is approaching the three month mark. During this protracted stretch of unhinged inhumanity, the work of two postcolonial intellectual giants, Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, have renewed relevance.

In fact, reading them is as urgent as ever.

Putting two of their landmark works into conversation with one another, namely Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, interrogates the ugly shortcomings of activists galvanizing against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Particularly, those who fall into the trap of undermining individuals committed to their same cause, playing cog in the colonial machine of “divide and conquer” that bludgeons every struggle for freedom.

There are too many case studies illustrating this. One recent example is Meta’s suspension of Shaun King, the social media activist who dedicated his entire account to Gaza for 82 days. In the aftermath of Instagram’s suspension of King, the scorn and condemnation rushed in. Not from pro-Israel voices, but from those on his side, the pro-Palestinian wing of the struggle.

Digital divide and conquer was at work. And continues onward. And the fools rushed in to accelerate this colonial objective on digital platforms.

In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon observes how the colonizer,

“Fabricate(s) a fake bourgeousie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.”

Today, we see this unfold online, on platforms like X and Instagram. Namely, where self-righteous activists adorning themselves with robes of ideological purity occupy the role of the bourgeoisie, casting indictments and scorn on others that don’t rise to their impossible standard.

To them, they can do no wrong. Only others can and do.

They, unwittingly or knowingly, caste themselves as part of a political avant garde. A cast “exploited” to pass judgements and issue indictments from ideological perches built upon arrogance, impracticality, or even more vile incentives.

Many of these are bad-faith actors, paid to taint and derail the work of highly visible activists. But the majority are bad-intentioned elements advocating on behalf of Palestine, that focus more on short-term distractions than long-term aims. They then fall for the divide and conquer plot devised by pro-Israeli colonists.

Fanon knew this well. And anybody who has read Fanon that scans digital timelines today, can see it unfold in living color.

Sudanese artist Khalid Albaih noted on Instagram:

“The dismantling of the online support for Gaza started with shadowanning, taking out Shaun King and now they are working on Khaled Beydoun. It always comes from within that’s what they did historically with the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Occupy Wall Street. Divide and conquer.”

While crafted in response to colonization in Africa, Fanon’s template on divide and conquer is powerfully relevant to the online fissures and fractures widening among pro-Palestine activists online. Illustrating, unfortunately, that there will always be a supply of idiots ready to carry forward the colonizer’s work.

Idiots that must be ignored or set aside, for the sake of carrying the work toward justice forward.

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This brings us to Césaire.

In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire turns the table on the colonizer. Instead of examining how colonization functions as a political and psychological project to dehumanize the natives, the poet and politician from Martinique centers the colonizer. He writes,

“In the process of dehumanizing the colonized subject, the colonizer himself is the one that is truly dehumanized. If you are looking for the true source of barbarism, brutality and incivility it lies with the colonizer and his actions against the people he has dehumanized.”

The epistemological campaign to caricature the colonized natives as subhuman, violent, and intractably inferior has been brilliantly articulated by a range of modern scholars, most notably Edward Said, Malcolm X, and Fanon. However, Césaire shifts the lens onto the colonizer, and powerfully argues how colonization has brought about their dehumanization.

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How the discursive, political, and militaristic fronts against native peoples makes him everything he said the colonized are. We see this, poignantly and vividly, in Gaza right now, with the limitless savagery of Israeli soldiers posing in front of shattered classrooms, parading around nude Palestinian men as if cattle, and justifying the mass killing of unarmed civilians through a vapid conflation of everyday people with Hamas.

But Césaire’s analysis goes beyond this. In fact, the most powerful takeaway from Discourse on Colonialism is prescriptive. Namely, for the colonized to not capitulate to the colonial project of dehumanization, and thus, not make monsters of everybody on the other side. To flatten and caricature the colonized is to fall for their dictate, and to turn away from the very humanity that should drive any and every movement for liberation.

I am guided intellectually, and even spiritually, by Césaire’s dictate against dehumanizing the colonizer. I myself was attacked for maintaining my position of not caricaturing all racists or Zionists as “bad people,” rejecting the colonial project of capitulating to the dialectic of sub-humanities. Doing so is part of the colonial project, aimed to perpetuate a never-ending war that only brings about more death, more land grabs, and more neo-imperialism guised as “wars on terror” or “struggles against terrorism.”

Falling for this trap, combined with the divide and conquer strategy Fanon warned against, is pervasive across the movement to end the genocide in Gaza. Off, and especially online.

They are, in short, doing the colonizer’s work. Unthinking cogs in a colonial machine that turns them against pro-Palestinian voices already under tremendous attack and scrutiny, social media censorship and digital erasure.

Their is little strategy, just scorn. No prudence, just directionless rage and insolent malice.

Their mob mentality feeds on hate, attacking individuals they have never spoken to or met in person. It is hate, naked and unfiltered, harkening the insights of James Baldwin who observed, “hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated, and this is an immutable law.”

But few of them have cared to read Baldwin, Fanon, Césaire, or the postcolonial thinkers that warned against this divide, conquer, and inward-gazing idiocy. If so, they would have acted otherwise.

It’s never too late to pick up a book. And especially, the books from these two intellectual north stars that warned against vile elements that sink liberation movements southward.

Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.

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