I didn’t know what to do, so I drew; I used red lead and two brown watercolor pencils to capture the powerful moment when Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila gestured to the Israeli court, as if to say, “I come in peace, you assholes.”

A few days ago, with the shameful complicity of the Greek police, Israel illegally raided, sabotaged, detained, abused, and stranded over twenty boats carrying roughly two hundred international humanitarians on the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was brimming with aid and bound for Gaza to break Israel’s siege (the siege being a war crime that has been an ongoing tool of the genocide designed to starve the people of Palestine).

Israel, I’ll state my words clearly here, because I recognize that you struggle to understand how property works: YOU DO NOT OWN THE OCEANS.

As was the case with Israel’s attack on the Flotilla last year, when Israelis assaulted renowned activists like Greta Thunberg, who put their bodies on the line to bring attention to Israel’s oppression of Palestine, this year too, the mainstream media in the West doesn’t seem to find these groundbreaking historical events worthy of note, as the most well-known outlets once again seem to have little to say about civilians and celebrities from around the world teaming up and risking their lives to personally fight back against an internationally sponsored genocide; nothing to see here, I guess.

And this time, in their violations of international law, Israeli terrorists targeted two beloved activists in particular: Thiago Ávila (drawn above) and Saif Abu Keshek (pictured below), who is Palestinian and has Spanish and Swedish citizenship. The honorable, steadfast duo was tortured and kidnapped right from European waters off the coast of Greece and illegally taken to the settler colony of Israel, where the apartheid courts have extended their detention until May 10 at the time I’m writing these words, on the basis of “secret evidence” that their lawyers aren’t allowed to access. The governments of the world, the international regulatory bodies, and the very idea of Western civilization, it turns out, have all been a sham. We could never clear the debt we owe to Palestine just for exposing that reality to us.

Saif’s wife Sally Issa has said that Saif wasn’t even planning to sail all the way to Gaza. Thiago’s wife Lara Souza is interviewed in the same clip, and both women demonstrate striking courage and selflessness befitting their mission. Since Saif is Palestinian, there is extra concern for his safety in the hands of Israeli authorities. Both activists also have children anxiously awaiting their safe return insha’Allah.

It’s also tragic to note that Thiago’s mother Teresa has passed away during the few days he’s been in detention. I hate to think that his sadistic Zionist captors could be the ones to inform him. Thiago has said that he won’t leave without Saif. Their governments are relatively supportive of the cause of Palestinian liberation, and Brazil and Spain both have been demanding their release.

During his stay at an Israeli dungeon, Thiago has written a letter to his two-year-old daughter, who shares his late mother’s name.

Meanwhile, Israel continues its daily genocide in Palestine and its new campaign of ethnic cleansing and land theft in Lebanon at alarming rates.

We pray to the All-Hearing and raise our voices for the liberation of Thiago, Saif, the over ten thousand Palestinian hostages illegally held in torture camps by Israel, the entire nation of Palestine, and the entire colonized world.

Additional Viewing

• Footage of Israel’s Illegal Interception of the Flotilla - AJ+

• An Interview with the President of Ireland’s Sister on the Flotilla - RTÉ News

• Extremely Powerful Words to Heed from a Turkish Flotilla Activist - Middle East Eye

you always warn about

that never comes to pass

you are catastrophe

fully realized

in the death tolls we amass

you are the claim

of equality

yet supremacy on that basis?

we are the proof

of your lies

your prize innately racist

you are the sick smile

when your men

pull the trigger

we are the sweet laugh

when we meet

the grave digger

you say liberty

you say liberalism

we cry liberation

you think freedom

is your name

but it’s our occupation

you fancy yourself the lion tamer

you are ever the victim blamer

when we dare to fight back

we dare to fight back

April 23, 2026: a little boy clings to hope in the rubble of Lebanon
as Israel claims more lives and land (Zohra Bensemra for Reuters)

The People of Palestine Kidnapped by Israeli Forces in the Occupied Gaza Strip
(Yossi Zeliger for Reuters, December 2023)

I have a problem. I’ve been sitting in a fire for a few years now, and I want desperately to tell you about it, to invite you into my world, but let’s just say that there’s a good chance you’ve been kept far enough away from the blazing inferno that I’m genuinely not sure how to approach you without coming in too hot. Essentially, what I’ve been asking myself is: how do I fire you up without burning you? And that’s the question we’ll be trying to answer together this morning. Full disclosure, the first five versions of this speech were too angry to be usable. And I’ve been wisely advised that it might be overwhelming for the audience to just listen to me list the latest war crimes our taxes have funded around the world, even though it’s really tempting for me to use this platform as a chance to undo the damage done by the mainstream media. I sincerely don’t want today to be about me, but if showing you the world through my eyes can blunt the shock or make the heavy feel accessible, then I’m very grateful for this opportunity to share with you a condensed anthology of my creative writing from over the course of the genocide.

At times, my words might feel like a lot, but I promise you, today I’m trying to be an ember instead of a fire. An ember is a coal that still smolders after the fire has flickered out. The fire I’ve been cooking in contains the warmth and light of truth, a message that needs to spread, and I can’t be casual about it, because it is a matter of life or death. But what good is it if the fire burns too intensely for anyone to draw near? We’ll just burn ourselves out. An ember, on the other hand, carries the flame, it’s still true to the heat, but we can invite people to actually hold it in their hands and confront it directly. At least, that’s my hope, God willing.

And if you do happen to be the type of person who is motivated by anger, if you’re like, “hit me with the fire,” or if you feel curious after hearing me share my heart with you this morning and you’d like to see one of the speeches I originally wrote for this event that would have been too much for nine am with coffee and donuts, it’s up on my liberation blog, which is linked on the handouts. More importantly, the handouts contain resources to learn more and ways to act now. And before I jump into my reading: this is crazy, I swear we didn’t plan this, but today of all days, April 17, is actually the international day of solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners. This day is a reminder that over ten thousand Palestinian hostages and counting are still illegally held in Israeli torture camps, including journalists, doctors, and children. In fact, a few weeks ago, Israel actually passed a death penalty law that only applies to Palestinians and not to the Jewish population (please raise your hands if you already knew about this new apartheid law, and no shame if you didn’t, I just want to see how much is reaching people). With the mainstream media in its pocket, Israel doesn’t have to conceal the racist policies on which it was founded, but we don’t have to let them get away with it, and I can’t think of a better way to spend this day of solidarity than to be here with you to honor the Palestinians who have been held for decades in the dungeons of their occupiers. Thank you so much, I don’t take for granted the chance to borrow your ears this morning, and I recognize the care you show by being here; I’m now going to share with you a sample of my poems and essays from roughly the past year of the genocide, and I’ll read them in the order I wrote them.

Poem from February 2025: Phosphorus Palms

if we are to die

then put us to death

don’t play with your prey

until the last breath

if we are to fight

then fight us like men

don’t shoot at our kids

and silence our pen

if you want our land

then stop dropping bombs

like you’d take craters

with phosphorus palms

if you want to lie

on why you must kill

then buy your own tale

or no one else will

and what if the way

you treated the poor

reaches your own kind

then what was it for?

and what if one day

you stir in your bed

and find you can’t get

us out of your head?

Essay from March 2025: Like Our Voices Could Free You

Anything I could say falls short and the last thing you need is our tears, yet I keep rewriting this line, like our voices could free you, if only our eloquence were profound enough to reach hearts or change minds or inform those who seriously still don’t know so the genocide might end one minute sooner. Can you feel the desperation in my words? If it’s not reaching, how do I make it reach? And if I’m too upfront or intense, will I turn people off? Will the algorithm turn me off? What’s the might of the pen without readers?

Words are all I have to offer. And for that, I’m so sorry. And my words are so burdened. They could never be heavy enough to match the weight of the moment, to do justice to the task they are called for, yet they are too heavy to be heard, a frequency tuned out by the unbothered masses. I resent them for diluting us. My supportive bosses ask how I’m doing and I dare to say good. I resent myself. I am a people pleaser who has been screaming at strangers on the street, their racism polite and my righteousness unhinged. I have gotten to know myself and I have learned that in a genocide, my rage far exceeds my sorrow.

And when they tell me to catch flies with honey, I tell them you’re talking to a bee. But all I see these days is my stinger, because all I hear these days are drones.

I’m so sorry. They’re on my screen and I’m not there. I’m so grateful. Yet what would I want of this world, if you’re not enjoying it with me? I feel useless. I feel like the world is useless, and shameful, and fake, like my disgust could encompass the atmosphere. I’m furious at everyone, all the time. And I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m so sorry.

Your bewilderment on our screens is so calm, Palestine. We deserve far harsher than your patient rebukes. Humanity has failed you. May God forgive us, except the silent, and guide us beyond the need to keep apologizing to the most betrayed people of all time, who have taught us everything and humbled and inspired us, and in return we keep watching their slaughter, I’m so sorry. May God bless everyone who has more than words to work with, and I’ll keep using my words, because if language alone can be used to manufacture consent for genocide, then speech can even more naturally expose the truth. Maybe we can channel the trauma before it drowns us and maybe if our message strikes the right chord, it can move something in someone who can do something more than say sorry.

Poem from August 2025 (About Iraq): Dust and Gasoline

you smell of dust and gasoline

just like that, I’m young, my heart stops

I’m playing palm tree shadow tag

I’m picking fruits from rooftops

we didn’t leave you burning, love

we left you right before

we sought cover from the sandstorm

but could not seek much more

if what we know now

were known back then

would we still have left?

drawn a deep enough breath?

to make the smells last

mixing future with past

what we know now

that we didn’t back then

about homeland is that

we never saw you again

Poem from November 2025 (About Sudan): Stolen Dessert

they act like your bodies

and souls are cheap

they sow as though

they will never reap

what should I do

if I can’t breathe?

I see your arms twisted

up in that tree

I see my own people

laugh as you bleed

the devil was so sure

that fire

is better than clay

so there

is where he

will end up one Day

they think their skin

is better than yours

he thought that too

and he was so sure

melanin and skeletons

are vessels for the colonized

but the vassal as the slave master

is in for a surprise

he too is skin and bones

and a soul to be apprized

oh people of Heaven

and people of Hell

your time is short

on this Earth where you dwell

oh people of hunger

when your turn comes to eat

the feast will not end

with the One you will meet

oh people of pockets

when your time comes to burn

all you will be told

is to taste what you earned

oh city of gold

and stolen dessert

your chocolate will melt

into mud and dirt

when your stocks plummet

you will feel the pain

but nothing like the Day

you will choke by your chains

Essay from December 2025: Get on Their Level

There are days when I sit instead of standing, like I’m waiting for the world to liberate itself.

I read your news like that’s enough.

The war crimes repeat themselves. So do my words. They start to fade out like your lives. Sometimes I save them up and squirrel them away for fear I won’t have them when I need them, should someone happen to be listening, but I don’t know who. Most days it’s God alone.

I pray for you like that’s enough.

I feel like I’ve done it all, tried everything, yet when I weigh my efforts, it’s almost like they don’t even register on the scale. But I don’t know how to measure these things. I feel like I’ve done little more than bear witness. You’ve changed my life, but I haven’t changed yours.

I learn from you like that’s enough.

It was too cold to protest again this week. I got to warm myself while your children froze to death. I think of new ideas for signs. I forget them before I find the paint.

I speak out for you like that’s enough.

It’s our words versus their lies, our words versus their money, our words versus their drones. Our most righteous words feel obscene. Will words feed you or free you or reclaim your stolen land? Do our strongly worded letters to war criminals feel like an insult to you at this point? The international community turned out to be a euphemism for the colonizer, and they have words too, they offer a thousand words to reframe the ugliest picture. Self-defense is called terrorism, and terrorism is called self-defense. All the soldiers of all the lands turned out to be decoration, flexing their muscles for the performance and only getting to use their strength when the state needs protection from the wrath of its own people.

I cry for you like that’s enough.

My rage doesn’t settle. If it does, it turns to sorrow. I’ll carry it with me like a burden in my heart all the way to Judgment Day, because God alone can settle a score this vast. I shudder to think of how the world could ever clear the debt we owe to Palestine. My bed is so soft. I think of your flooded tents. I think of the dogs they train to rape you.

That’s enough.

It feels wrong to keep reading about the ways Israelis torture you, and it feels wrong to stop reading. I think of Al Fashir and Kordofan and I can’t breathe. My mind can’t believe the numbers, each one a soul, cherished and haunting to its beloved ones. Sudan, how could we ever meet your eyes? I’ve had an eye on Venezuela too, because lately it looks like Iraq if you squint, and their boats “carry fentanyl” in the same way my homeland “harbored weapons of mass destruction.” Perpetrators convict their victims in the ultimate double-tap strike. A man in Kashmir burned himself alive the other day when the occupiers took his family away, and we’ve got ICE in our backyards leaving the same trail of misery. It’s tough to reconcile the chess game of global power struggles with their human impact. I read and write about the world, but I’m no political analyst. I just care about people.

What if that’s not enough?

Then again, who are we to despair when you do not despair, to the grave and far beyond? You don’t fight to taste freedom yourself, but to give your children a chance to taste it, and they’ll fight for the same reason if they have to. And when we fight for you from far away with our meager words, some will say we’re not doing anything, and others will say it’s about the ripple effect. But if I do affect someone, and the ripple of my impact doesn’t go beyond that one person, was that individual soul not valuable in its own right? What if our efforts are flawed yet continual, what if a tree didn’t grow yet, but we keep planting seeds instead of sitting on our hands?

What if trying is enough?

Not because we might make a difference given enough people buying into our mission. Not because we might make a difference given enough time. We could keep seeing zero “results” till the day we return to our Lord. Maybe us standing out in the streets or on the screens for the cause is the result. Maybe trying is the point. How could our efforts be fruitless if the efforts are the fruits, the willingness to leave our homes and shatter our silence and attempt to reform something profoundly broken? Isn’t that a difference? Our souls are just as needy as those in Palestine, and just as capable of glorious resistance. Maybe we were never standing out there to save Palestine. We’re just trying to get on their level.

And maybe that’s enough.

Poem from March 2026: Antibody

we’re back here again

I remember this part

with smoke in my eyes

and sand in my heart

I would cough you from my lungs

but I can feel you in my nerves

if I cut through skin to dig you out

would we both get what we deserve?

I would spit you from my seas

but I can see you in my skies

and I would crush you on the ground

but I keep bruising my thighs

get off of me

get off of me

get off of me

at last I see

you kill thousands of my children

then complain about the price of gas

and they applaud your valor

as entire nations pass

you cut me up and graft yourself

yet you say I let you in

you poison me and tell the world I’m sick

and you call yourself my medicine

get out of here

get out of here

get out of here

at last it’s clear

with your missiles in my hair

and your bases on my head

I can tell this is cancer

and I know it has spread

one of us has numbered days

on this body that used to be mine

I’m bleeding, but awake at last

my antibody Palestine

And that brings us to today. We just journeyed across the Atlantic as I’ve shared with you how I’ve personally been processing the ongoing genocide, and as we come back into this room together, I want to say I’ve passed you the torch, but I know it’s more like I’ve put these embers right into your palms. I know they’re heavy; I warned you they’re hot. But I’m trusting you with them because I believe in your ability to carry them, a burden shared and a bond forged.

I’ve had a really hard time talking to the general public for the past few years. I’ve given plenty of speeches at rallies, but I lost my diplomacy for a while there, a diplomacy I have spent my life cultivating by the way, through every career choice I have made since growing up here as an Iraqi Muslim during the so-called “War on Terror.” Yet over the past few years, between the racist death threats we’d get on the streets and the snubs from city councilors and the ambushes from Zionists and the lies about us in the media and the cops in riot gear and the judges in courtrooms who were bafflingly indifferent as to why we were protesting on college campuses and in front of weapon factories in the first place, sometimes it felt like we weren’t part of society anymore. I want you to know what it means for me to be standing here with you now.

And I want you to feel like you can talk to me about it, like the lives we’ve been losing are your family too. Do you know how much hope the people of Palestine gain from watching American activism? Even if you feel really out of your depth and totally new to this topic, or if you used to think differently, no matter who you are and what you’ve been through, I’m inviting you today to hold this ember with me. So if you have any questions, I want to hear them.

LEARN MORE ABOUT PALESTINE AND JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST IMPERIALISM

Palestinian and Muslim Voices

• Bisan Owda of “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive” - youtube.com/@ajplus

• We Are Not Numbers - wearenotnumbers.org

• The Institute for Middle East Understanding - imeu.org

(Click “Resources” and then “The Nakba” to read about the ethnic cleansing catastrophe in 1947 that led to the violent creation of the apartheid settler colony that now occupies Palestine.)

• With Struggle Comes Liberation: y9ssra.substack.com

(You can access this handout and today’s anthology on my liberation blog through the post titled “Confronting the Heat,” and you can read the fiery speech that I originally wrote for this event through the post titled “Home to Roost: The Imperial Boomerang from Israel to ICE.”)

Jewish and Western Voices

• B’Tselem - btselem.org

(This Israeli human rights organization releases reports like “Our Genocide” and “Welcome to Hell” to document Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the experiences of over ten thousand Palestinian hostages who are still held without charge in Israeli torture camps.)

• The New York War Crimes - newyorkwarcrimes.com

(Learn about how the Zionist-owned “New York Times” has provided cover for US involvement in atrocities and manufactured consent for Israel’s genocide in Palestine, misleading the masses through their intentionally distorted and consistently racist reporting.)

• Jewish Voice for Peace - jewishvoiceforpeace.org

• Political Scientist Norman Finkelstein - normanfinkelstein.com/videos

Some News Sources Not Controlled by Billionaire War Criminals

• Middle East Eye - middleeasteye.net

• Mondoweiss - mondoweiss.net

• Democracy Now! - democracynow.org

• Drop Site News - dropsitenews.com

• Double Down News - doubledown.news

BOYCOTT - bdsmovement.net and disoccupied.com

DONATE - pcrf.net and hhrd.org

ABSTAIN - trackaipac.com

(Use this online tool to find out whether your representatives support genocide.)

The resources on this handout are only a small sample of what’s out there. Think of it as an invitation to further educate yourself and your loved ones about the plight of Palestine and our direct involvement in it as American taxpayers, from the history of the Nakba starting in 1947 to Israel’s daily violations of international law in Gaza and the West Bank since the “ceasefire” of October 2025, as the genocide continues to unfold even as Israel and the US kill thousands and displace millions in Iran and Lebanon in 2026. When talking about justice and human rights, please don’t forget Palestine. It has everything to do with us, every struggle is connected, and we have a role to play as people living in relative privilege to never stop fighting until all of the colonized peoples around the world are free of their occupiers!

THE UPCOMING EVENT - I’m grateful to announce that I’m the speaker of the month for the Portsmouth chapter of CreativeMornings. They have a different theme each month for speakers around the world to discuss, and I’m giving a talk around the theme of “Ember.” The event will start at 8:30 am at Kittery’s Dance Hall on Friday, the 17th of April, which just so happens to be the international day of solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners. I’ll be reading some of my creative writing on Palestine, new reflections as well as some of the poetry and reflections I’ve shared on this blog over the course of the genocide. My goal with this talk is to personalize the effects of colonization and help make heavy subjects like genocide more accessible to Americans so they can feel comfortable raising their voices against the atrocities the government funds with their money. You can learn more about the event and register to attend for free at the link below. Registration opens on April 13 at 9:00 am insha’Allah.

https://creativemornings.com/talks/ready-to-ignite-on-the-urgency-of-resistance

WHY I DIDN’T GIVE THIS SPEECH - Normally, my writing process is swift and intense when I have something to say. It doesn’t typically take me months or even days to write most posts on this blog, the words just burst out of me after I read the news and stew in my thoughts and feelings about it. But writing a speech for a general audience of American people who haven’t had much of a reaction to their government carrying out a livestreamed genocide felt abnormally difficult, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that “I have nothing to say to you.” Which isn’t true of course, and on the contrary, I obviously struggle with brevity, but in this case, it’s more like I have so much to say that I’ve buried so deeply beneath layers of disgust and grief that I didn’t know where to begin, and I didn’t know how to find the words that could serve two seemingly incompatible goals: being palatable and being true. I felt an immense sense of responsibility to use this opportunity to properly represent the voices the media normally silences, and what I ended up producing was a pill so dense with bitter truth that few would be able to swallow it, aside from those who have already grown accustomed to the taste and don’t need the pill in the first place. The CreativeMornings speaker coach made a great point that this version of my speech could make people feel sheepish for their inaction instead of actually inspiring them to start fighting injustice. I only know what I know because of my life experiences, and I don’t want to harshly shame others just because they have lived through different challenges than the ones I happened to witness, so after getting some misdirected anger and feelings of betrayal off my chest, I got to work on a more accessible speech with the goal of inviting people to genuinely want to learn more about Palestine and join the fight against imperialism.

THE SPEECH ITSELF - If I’ve piqued your curiosity, feel free to read or skim my fiery speech below. I still stand by every word of it. But I do think the material as I’ve presented it here is guilty of either preaching to the choir or shaming the rest, meaning it might have had the opposite of its intended effect on much of its intended audience. Even if no one hears it, writing this speech has been a meaningful struggle. In a few weeks insha’Allah, around the day of the event, I’ll share the speech I’m giving instead (the writing and the recording), along with the handout I made for the event, which is full of resources and calls to action that have reduced the burden from my new speech so it no longer needs to encompass all of the information to which I wish American audiences could be exposed. My new speech is much less of a callout of people living in the land of the colonizer and more an expression of the anguish and defiance of the colonized. Meanwhile, until I share my official talk, here’s my earlier effort, which I wrote a while ago now, so it’s not up to date on the latest Zionist war crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and beyond, but I do in this unspoken speech confront the overall system that so casually produces such evil acts, and I quote Malcolm X a lot.

Malcolm X, رَحِمَهُ الله (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz).

When asked whether he felt that the United States was making progress, Malcolm X replied, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”

Like many of his quotes, his words here offer a spot-on description of the world today. We often use the term “post-colonial” to distance ourselves from more messed up times and to establish a sense of linear progress, but for those of us who are from colonized lands, it’s clear that the oppression of the colonizer has only escalated since the time of Malcom X, and the world order that got us here has yet to fall. I’m going to zoom in on occupied Palestine as a central example, because everyone in this room actually has a very direct connection to the people of Palestine. Even if you’ve never met a Palestinian, as Americans, we pay taxes, and whether we like it or not, those taxes are actively fueling their slaughter.

Two years into Israel’s genocide, during October 2025, a so-called “ceasefire” was declared in Gaza, and there are four facts I’d like you to know about what has happened since then, all of which is in violation of both the treaty and international law, and none of which Israel has faced any consequences for.

1. THE KILLING NEVER STOPPED.

2. ISRAEL CONTINUES TO PREVENT HUMANITARIAN AID FROM ENTERING GAZA.

3. ISRAELI FORCES AND SETTLERS ARE STILL ACTIVELY STEALING MORE LAND FROM BOTH GAZA AND THE WEST BANK.

4. OVER 10,000 PALESTINIAN HOSTAGES REMAIN IN ISRAELI TORTURE PRISONS.

Journalists, doctors, and children are among those detained without charge, and one of the tactics Israel employs is the rape of Palestinian hostages using dogs. And let’s go back to the first point for a moment: the killing never stopped. There are new massacres daily, and Israeli forces have murdered hundreds of Palestinian civilians since the start of the ceasefire. According to Save the Children, on average, since the start of the genocide, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel in Gaza every single hour.

That’s not normal. You can’t chalk that up to “the tragedy of war.” Soldiers die in war. Children die in genocide. And it’s easy for those of us living in privilege to forget, but violence is not all one thing. It matters how we fight, and why we fight. Violence to steal land and violence to protect one’s land from getting stolen are at opposite ends of the moral spectrum.

Particularly in their Hebrew speeches, Israel’s leaders have been very explicit about their cause: completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine so European Jews can settle in what’s left of it. The Israeli military’s own data shows the vast majority of their kills being civilians, and Israeli researchers’ own polling shows that the majority of Israeli citizens support the genocide in Gaza. And what’s worse is that these atrocities are all happening on occupied land. Palestinians can’t come home from war. The battlefield is their home, unlivable, and unleavable.

And while the international community is full of empty condemnations for Israel, they have yet to enact any consequences whatsoever for these ongoing war crimes. Forget consequences, G7 countries haven’t stopped funneling money into Israel this entire time while lying on their behalf and burying human rights reports. This is not just Israel’s genocide. It’s the Western empire’s genocide.

There’s so much more to say, and not just about Palestine. We haven’t even gotten into the United States’ imperialist transgressions around the world that would not have been possible without Zionist money or power, such as the mass murder of civilians in Iran in pursuit of regime change, or the sanctions on Cuba to starve its population, or the violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and the theft of their resources, or US support for the Emirati-backed genocide in Sudan, but I’ll stop my overview here. Suffice it to say, the world is still very much colonized. But the job of mainstream media outlets in the West, liberal or conservative, isn’t to inform us, it’s to make sure we don’t hear much news of oppression committed by America or its allies, and that only distorted stories about America’s enemies reach us instead.

And if we’re being honest, don’t we sometimes glance at news of violence in foreign lands and assume that that kind of chaos is just what “less civilized places” are used to? That’s the kind of White supremacy instilled in our hearts that needs to be interrogated. Buildings in South America and Africa and Asia were not reduced to rubble until our leaders made them that way. The colonized peoples too have universities and community centers and cozy homes with beautiful architecture. The literacy rate in Gaza is 97%, significantly higher than it is in the United States, by the way. And obviously, people’s human rights should be protected regardless of their ability to read and write, but my point is that people our government has forced to live in tents didn’t always live in tents. Yet now, it’s no longer possible to deny that Israel has made Gaza into a concentration camp.

One of the reasons Palestine has become the moral compass of the world is because it’s very good at exposing people who claim to care about universal human rights, who claim to renounce White supremacist ideals, yet who define violence as acceptable or even heroic depending entirely on the identity of the aggressor. Among the people with money and power, oppression is not seen as “the bad kind of violence” so long as the Western world is the one committing it, and on the contrary, anyone who resists Zionist tyranny is automatically labeled a terrorist. Armed resistance against an occupying power is a clearly established fundamental right under international law, yet in the United States, people’s implicit biases might have allowed them for a time to accept without question that Palestinians fighting back against the kidnap, torture, and slaughter of their loved ones and the theft of their homes somehow makes them terrorists. But when ICE murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti and the federal government justified it by referring to them as terrorists, I hope the mask started to slip a little more for American people. I hope the next time we hear a Western government label any person or entity as terrorist, we question the label and the one giving it, not just the one it’s being bestowed upon. A terrorist is by definition someone our fascist government doesn’t want us to support. Is it more dangerous to ask why, or to never raise the question?

Personally, I prefer to save the term “terrorist” for our oppressors, not for their enemies. And here’s the part where imperialist terror abroad comes back to bite the people living here in the belly of the beast in the form of state terror. The fires burning in colonized lands might look foreign to our privileged eyes, like such turbulence is reserved for so-called “third world” or “developing” countries and could never touch our American cities, but we’ve already got embers of discord starting to smoke here in the lands of the colonizer. The problem is that these embers can be hard to recognize, because they’re cloaked under the cover of democracy. If we consume enough propaganda from whichever party we hate less, it will barely even feel like tyrannical billionaires are pulling the strings, because to their credit, they really know how to put on a show here in the United States.

But while entrenched outlets like the “New York Times” might be desperate to downplay this influence and manufacture consent for the genocide, it’s impossible and irresponsible to ignore the connections to Israel and the ties to Zionism among the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet, especially since the release of the Epstein files exposed the networking between world leaders and the Jewish supremacist human trafficker himself. Last year, it might have sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to deny that the entire world is run by a small group of billionaire pedophiles. Yet all of these major revelations get sidelined or altogether smothered in the mainstream media, especially where Israel is involved. Politicians are deliberate about how they time their announcement of world events.

Now, you might ask, why all of these distractions and lies? Why can’t the corrupt just own their oppression? If they’re so powerful, then why do they have to sell what they’re doing and justify it to the public? The truth is, they rely on our complacency. The fact that powerful people care enough to lie to us means we are powerful, collectively. What we choose to believe or reject, and stand for or fight against, is powerful. This fact should inspire and terrify us.

It’s why the most powerful people in the world have been waging a war for your heart. Between government lobbyists and the mainstream media, you’d get chills if you saw the riches they have devoted to buying the rights to build your worldview. It’s not cheap, crafting a narrative that reshapes our perception of reality. That same amount of money could have instead established housing and health care for everyone, but to anyone who has not been blinded by privilege, the government has made it pretty clear by now that caring for people is not its real function. It exists to expand its own control, and under the guise of a democracy, that means it has to influence our hearts by tapping into our tribalism to get us to do the propaganda work on its behalf.

What better way to manufacture consent for a corrupt system than to offer the illusion of choice? Are you team blue or team red? Whichever one we choose becomes the embodiment of common sense in our mind, while the other comes to represent the root of all evil. Every once in a while, a new culture war distracts everyone so we don’t start noticing the uncanny similarities between the two teams, especially in terms of how US policy impacts people living outside of the States. It’s brilliant, really, because even when we do start noticing the injustices around us, rather than attributing this oppression to the government, they can get us to conclude that the problem is one party in particular, or one administration, or one figurehead who we love to hate.

And whoever that figurehead is for you, you might see them as such a cartoonishly evil clown that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that both teams sponsor and are sponsored by the same billionaire pedophiles and war criminals, criminals in uniform like the masked terrorist militias that roam the streets kidnapping minorities and shooting activists to death while the federal government provides cover for them, criminals in uniform like the genocidal foreign interest lobby known as AIPAC, which has made weapon companies rich beyond reason through the massacre of families abroad so Europeans can settle on stolen land.

For a lot of people, the world is split into the colonizer and the colonized, and I only know this because I come from a colonized country. Like many people around the world, my homeland was occupied by the Western empire, both before and during my lifetime, and during my lifetime, the US government murdered hundreds of thousands of my people. My homeland’s government refused to take orders from the colonizer, so the US took out my homeland’s government and installed their own, one that would answer to the whims of the West instead of representing their own people. I’m from Iraq, if you’re wondering.

I’ve met Americans who like to boast about their freedom of speech, not realizing that many countries without freedom of speech have been specifically deprived of that right and many other fundamental liberties as a direct result of Western intervention. People who brag about American freedom act like people outside of the US somehow rejected that freedom, but rather, it was stolen from them, and the thief was none other than the United States, in the form of coups and puppet governments. When you look at the leaders in the Arab world today, everywhere from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates, remember that tyranny is inherently a symptom of colonization. And colonized people are used to these stakes, not because it’s always been this way, but because occupation has been imposed on them. For someone living in parts of South America, Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia, it’s considered normal for one’s own government to represent a foreign entity rather than its own people, and it’s considered normal for one’s own government to shoot into the crowd of protestors, and to quell dissent by murdering any citizens who are critical of the state or wish to film its crimes.

That kind of tyranny used to be unthinkable in the US, but this year in particular, it might almost be starting to sound familiar to you, and if you’ve ever heard of the imperial boomerang, a term coined by anti-colonial scholar Aimé Césaire, then you know that everything the colonizer does to the rest of the world will always come back to be used against its own people. Horrifically, we are seeing that today with the unprecedented suppression of free speech against Israel’s war crimes in countries like Australia, Germany, the UK, and of course the United States. In all of these countries and across the Western empire, activists have been kidnapped and held hostage, accused of antisemitism and some of them even hit with terrorism charges, just for protesting genocide. On top of its human rights violations in the Arab world and far beyond, Israel has come to represent the loss of freedoms in the Western world.

As someone who comes from a colonized country, I don’t think people in the West fully appreciate how much they’re about to lose when they lose free speech. And in the US, we’ve become disturbingly accustomed to ICE terrorists kidnapping minorities from their own communities when they’ve committed no crimes. But now, ICE has taken to shooting American citizens in broad daylight on camera as the federal government makes up lazy lies to try to justify such street executions by blaming the victims of these atrocities. Your average American is now getting a taste of the fear that many people of color have long been living under.

And again, I have to warn you to think critically about how you’re processing these events, because when these horrors occur under Trump’s leadership, liberals capitalize on the opportunity to win you back onto team blue. They’ll point to the horrors that occurred since he’s been in office, and they won’t be wrong, but they also won’t mention the policies Democrats put in place that paved the way for ICE to grow into the threat to public safety that it has become. Democrats deport immigrants in cruel and unusual ways too, in some cases at greater rates than Republicans do. Even the most popular Democratic presidents like Obama designed the family detention policies that allowed children to be locked into cages at the southern border. But a lot of people don’t think about that legacy and the inconsistency of their leaders’ stances and the hypocrisy of their own policies when Democrats are at least more diplomatic about their atrocities than Republicans are. Conservative figureheads have a way of boasting as they pull the trigger, while liberals shed a performative tear as they stab you in the back. Fear is a great motivator, and politicians will cash in on yours to win your loyalty, getting you to choose evil for yourself by playing the “lesser evil” game, threatening you with the mentality that if you don’t choose this evil politician, then this other evil politician will strip away even more of your rights.

I’ve had several friends struggle to explain to me why sponsoring Israel’s genocide in Palestine is not a deal-breaker for their vote, why this one war criminal will somehow be worse for Palestine than this other war criminal. And to be fair, I recognize that most people are just thinking of their loved ones when they vote, like if you have a sick relative, then they’ll have an easier time affording the medication they need if this person becomes president instead of that one. But that’s just it, people vote for Democrats or Republicans because they care more about their own right to cheaper health care or more economic freedoms than they care about Palestinians’ right to exist. That’s why Palestine has become such an inconvenience for Americans, especially liberals who claim to care about human rights for all; no one can spin their vote as selfless while consciously supporting Zionists, the Nazis of our time, as both mainstream parties clearly do without exception and without limit. As we continually lower our standards straight down to hell, it’s always the marginalized people who pay for our concessions first, and most dearly.

But here’s the thing: this two-party system isn’t just bad for the colonized and occupied people beyond our borders. It’s also terrible for you. All your party has to do is be slightly less awful than the other one to get your vote. That’s why the standard of living in this country seems to have gotten consistently worse over time as the two demographics drag each other down ever lower and their respective representatives from both parties get together to laugh at us all while they get away with taking ever more and giving ever less. Meanwhile, we direct our anger at each other instead of toward these horrible leaders who have gotten us here in the first place.

And I get it, because I’ve also been having a hard time staying diplomatic when the vast majority of people, even within my own community, have gone on with their lives like the suffering their government funds has little to do with them. I’m sick of the silence. I’m sick of Democrats only looking up when Republicans are in office, and vice versa, only when they get personally affected by the policies both parties constantly inflict on minorities and the entire rest of the world. And if I can be uncomfortably honest with you, it hurts to see Americans only now performing fear and outrage and grief, because they’ve shown they were capable of caring all along, and funding a livestreamed genocide for years just wasn’t enough of a motivation for them to feel any sense of urgency. And I know that people aren’t all heartless, I know that Zionists own just about every politician, media company, and popular website, I know the news of the atrocities simply isn’t reaching people, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t happening, that they haven’t been happening every day. I’ve seen so many tiny body bags and children’s corpses this year. Maybe you haven’t seen enough.

Or maybe you have, and you’re sick of it too. Whether I’m preaching to the choir or whether I’m making you feel profoundly uncomfortable, I need you to hear this, because I’m not standing here for fun or for clout. Forget my name, but remember this: the world is still colonized, and on behalf of the people I stand for, if you have been silent, then please know that we don’t blame you, but we do need you. Please, you have to step up. I know that most people who live in the land of the colonizer aren’t the ones calling the shots, that you wouldn’t have stood for this if it were in fact your call.

Still, we tune into our algorithm, and every day for years now, it’s sports scores and Taylor Swift’s latest album and this or that viral new trend. I don’t know how else to put it: people are being killed, every single day, on our dime. We have to ask ourselves, if we haven’t spoken out, why not? You don’t have to dedicate your entire life to this cause of taking down the colonizer. I realize everyone has their own battles to fight based on their own experiences. But what I am asking is that if you haven’t already, then please, as someone who lives in the heart of the empire, just adopt this fight as one you can put on your radar, because if enough people considered supporting genocide a deal-breaker, then it would become financially too costly for politicians and companies and universities to keep working with Israel. I know within American culture, there are some people who only care about their own team, people who they share an identity with, and there are others, the really big-hearted folks, who care about all Americans, even if they’re a minority, or poor, or disabled.

That’s still not enough. It hasn’t been enough. And our selfishness has already come back to bite us. We need to start caring about more than just Americans. I say this as an American, and I do have a similar version of this speech for the many Muslims who have also been deafeningly indifferent. And again, I recognize with gratitude that I’m likely in large part preaching to the choir right now, but my plea is for us to expand our empathy beyond the boundaries of this nation, because our money expands far beyond its boundaries. The weaponry built on American soil and the influence of the leaders we vote for expands far beyond its boundaries.

As a really pathetic bare minimum starting point, politicians supporting genocide and accepting money from AIPAC should be a deal-breaker for our support. Unfortunately, that describes pretty much every Republican and every Democrat, since politicians across the nations know that political leverage under the current world order requires groveling to Israel. In the past, that wasn’t a problem, as all they had to do was sell their souls behind the scenes. But nowadays, people are waking up to the evil of the Zionist project, so American politicians have to make a choice, since promising their loyalty to Israel will win them influence in Washington, but it will also hurt their reputation among their constituents, maybe even enough for them to not get elected in the first place. Statistically, I’ve probably badmouthed your team during this talk. I’m not standing here to guilt you, but to suggest: hey, pick a new team. We can do better than this… we deserve better than this. I’d say the same to a friend in a toxic relationship.

We need to stop supporting politicians and watching personalities who sideline the suffering our taxes have been funding. If your identity still feels attached to a group of people who is committing genocide, then it might be time to revisit your identity. If your heroes have betrayed the very values they claim make them better than the other guy, then find new heroes who consistently do live by those values. We need to stop treating Palestine like a side issue. We need to stop treating Israel like it’s complicated. Suffering around the world is directly connected to the central injustice of Israel’s apartheid system and illegal occupation of Palestine, and the United States is at the heart of it all. This isn’t my conspiracy theory, it’s documented in the reports of virtually every human rights organization in the world, going back decades to the relatively recent creation of the state of Israel, when Britain “gave” the land of Palestine to European settlers through the initial ethnic cleansing of the first Nakba.

And the weapons and surveillance infrastructure tested out on Palestinians is already being brought home and implemented in other places around the world. American cops are sent to train in Israel. Where do we think they learned the “knee to the neck” move they like to use on Black men in American city streets? It’s Palestinian necks and Israeli boots, and we can’t keep acting like it has nothing to do with us. American tax dollars run dry for Israel, and American soldiers are told to die for Israel. Why? Are we all disposable background characters who only live to serve “the chosen people”?

Zionism is finally exposed for the apartheid settler colony project it is, and for the grip it has on the entire world. Still, since its exposure, I do believe the colonizer is living on numbered days, even when the situation might look hopeless. The Western empire has lost all pretense of civility, and their people are furious with their leaders. Many Jewish people too are turning against the Zionism they were raised on, recognizing it as the true threat to their safety, and amazing organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace have in large part led the Palestinian liberation movement in the United States. And it might sound weird, but I feel hopeful when I see even Americans get called terrorists after being targeted by state forces just for their peace activism, because maybe now more people in the mainstream will start paying attention and questioning everything and seeing their government for what it is. It’s harder to oppress an entire population than it is to oppress minority groups. The fact that the imperial boomerang has come back around to finally affect the people whose taxes have been fueling this genocide means change could follow, God willing, bringing a real awakening in the public consciousness and a real shift in the power balance.

I’ll end as I began, with a Malcolm X quote. In his 1964 essay titled “Zionist Logic,” a year before he was assassinated, he wrote, “The Israeli Zionists are convinced they have successfully camouflaged their new kind of colonialism… The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians… The Zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history… not even in their own religion.” It might scare us to hear words of warning from people who had a better understanding of our world today despite the fact that they never lived to see it, but his insight comes from experience, which is why I urge us to listen less to mainstream media owned by billionaires, and to instead seek out and act on creative wisdom from the resistance. Colonized people who were raised in a world on fire are always the first to recognize the embers in the land of the colonizer. We’ve been walking on coals that are ready to ignite, as Malcolm X said, when we inevitably see the chickens coming home to roost.

I remember this part

with smoke in my eyes

and sand in my heart

I would cough you from my lungs

but I can feel you in my nerves

if I cut through skin to dig you out

would we both get what we deserve?

I would spit you from my seas

but I can see you in my skies

and I would crush you on the ground

but I keep bruising my thighs

get off of me

get off of me

get off of me

at last I see

you kill thousands of my children

then complain about the price of gas

and they applaud your valor

as entire nations pass

you cut me up and graft yourself

yet you say I let you in

you poison me and tell the world I’m sick

and you call yourself my medicine

get out of here

get out of here

get out of here

at last it’s clear

with your missiles in my hair

and your bases on my head

I can tell this is cancer

and I know it has spread

one of us has numbered days

on this body that used to be mine

I’m bleeding, but awake at last

my antibody Palestine

Masjid al Aqsa in Jerusalem, Palestine (AFP)

Hi commenter, thanks for reaching out, and good question! I actually wrote an essay last year titled “Why Everything Has to Be About Palestine,” but I’ll also give you a direct answer below.

US Military Presence in the Middle East Mapped by Al Jazeera

The entire current world order that got set up after WWII hinges on the creation of Israel. It is the flagship of the Western empire, their foothold in dominating much of Asia and Africa, and in successfully colonizing all Muslim countries. The US and Israel’s current war against Iran, in which they have already in less than a week horrifically massacred over one thousand civilians, is an effort to finally wipe out one of the remaining major powers in the Middle East that isn’t aligned with and controlled by the West. Sadly, most Muslim countries today are indeed colonized, with their leaders blatantly serving not their own people, but rather the very Western nations that destroyed them.

Just to give you a small example, the US murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq when I was growing up. How crazy is it then that the US got to handpick Iraq’s new government at the time? Yet I don’t write about Iraq nearly as much as I write about Palestine, even though I’m from Iraq. Why? Because the suffering of Iraq, the suffering of Sudan, the suffering of virtually every Muslim country, is very directly tied back to the existence of the Israeli apartheid settler colony. Our oppressors, no matter the country, are directly supported by Israel and the Zionist empire at large. Our martyred leaders, no matter the country, were taken out because they supported Palestine.

In fact, America’s reason for invading Iraq in 2003 never made sense to me until 2023, after the start of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, when the bigger picture finally became clearer to a lot of people. When we focus on Palestine, it isn’t just about Palestine. It’s all connected, and it’s about our ability, our right, to rule over our own people and to be free from imperial tyranny. And don’t get me wrong, Iran is also an oppressor in the region; I’ll spare you the graphic details of the ways Iranian-backed forces used to torture political prisoners in Iraq. But had the Arab states not been under Western control, then maybe they would have had a chance to unite against Iranian occupation, or maybe they wouldn’t have been susceptible to it in the first place.

It’s funny, in the US where I live, all of our mainstream politicians are owned by AIPAC, an Israeli foreign interest lobby, and while we are allowed to criticize American politicians all day and we could talk about Iraq all we want, the moment we criticize Israel or mention Palestine, we receive threats and we see how delicate our right to free speech really is in the Western world (hence the interesting phenomenon of Americans being “progressive except on Palestine”). We don’t focus on Palestine more because it gets more media coverage; rather, it gets more media coverage (heavily distorted at that) because it is at the center of the battle against the colonizer, the land where Israeli forces test all of the Western world’s weapons on millions of Palestinian concentration camp victims before those weapons are then used to kill and surveil the rest of the occupied world, from Africa to South and Central America to immigrants, minorities, and lower class workers right here in the United States.

Meanwhile, through it all, the people of Palestine have experienced a level of evil we’ve never seen before, yet they’ve displayed a level of resilience we’ve only ever heard stories about from studying the Sahaba. To shed further light on your question, you might also want to check out an interesting essay from Malcolm X titled “Zionist Logic,” which was published in 1964, the year before he got assassinated.

Another Map of the Middle East from Al Jazeera Sheds Light on Imperial Power Struggles
(Note Iraq, Where Both the West and Iran Attacked Each Other)

Rescue workers surround a corpse amidst the rubble in Iran at a site strewn with bodies, each one belonging to someone’s daughter who was alive in the morning before Israel and the United States decided to bomb a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing over one hundred and fifty little girls on February 28, 2026 (Abbas Zakeri for Mehr News Agency via the AP).

Foreword

I’m sorry for the graphic image, but I wonder about the ethics of shielding our eyes from atrocities sponsored by our own taxes. We’re also often wisely advised to stay out of comment sections, but I like being able to access people’s honest reactions to world news in ways they might not share anywhere outside of a screen. I’ve been reading lots of comments from Muslims lately on current events, so this essay will primarily address Muslims, but even if you’re not Muslim, a peek into our distinct yet overlapping Sunni and Shia perspectives might be helpful to understand, and I hope the core message can encompass any human who cares about justice and peace. To anyone who strives against oppression, I consider you my family. Thank you for your fight.

Two Troubling Takes

I’ve been seeing more unity among Muslims this week than I have in a long time, but also some disturbing division, a consequence of the colonizer retraining our very psyche. As Allah continues to expose the oppressors and reveal more of His plan with each passing day of Ramadan, today I wanted to shed light on two drastically clashing perspectives I’ve noticed in the Ummah, because it’s been catching my attention how differently we perceive the same events based on our experiences and allegiances. There are many other viewpoints out there, but for our purposes, I’ll briefly cover two troubling stances I’ve noticed from Muslims in response to recent news. The wider context to this conversation includes America and Israel’s attacks against Iran, and Iran’s counterattacks against Israel as well as US military bases across the Middle East, especially in the Gulf countries. In the interest of fairness, I’m about to call out both Sunni and Shia Muslims, but I do so with love.

1. Among Shia Muslims, there are those who perceive Shia leaders like the Iranian government to be sacrificial heroes, the only ones willing to take on the Western Zionist colonizer in a world where Sunni leaders are themselves colonized…

• However, I’m not sure how they reconcile this belief with the fact that the Palestinian resistance is Sunni, not to mention the fact that Iran has consistently behaved out of self-interest, meaning they only fight Israel when Israel attacks them, while Israel has been overwhelmingly left unimpeded by the entire international community in its genocidal campaign against Palestine.

2. Among Sunni Muslims, there are those in places like Syria and Iraq who have been oppressed by Iran’s current regime, so they perceive Iran as another occupier they have to deal with on top of the Western empire…

• However, some of them allow their frustration with one aggressor to make them actively root for the other in an appalling display of the “lesser evil” fallacy, a reactionary mentality that someone perceived to be merely less evil than someone else is therefore morally acceptable to support… and in what universe could Israel be considered a lesser evil compared to any other entity?

The Scope of the Moment

I’m a Sunni Muslim from Iraq myself, so I’m not going to sanitize Iran’s record against their neighbors, but we have to distinguish between people and their leaders, between regional disputes and external domination, and between one’s complaints against his brother’s abuses and the mutual threat they both face from the serial killer who stole the house down the street. When I said that humanity has failed Palestine, I meant it. With the notable exception of Yemen, no force on Earth, not even Iran, has tried to stop Israel and the Western world from carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to completion. And now that failure is boiling over, with hundreds of our precious Iranian siblings slaughtered by the US and Israel in the space of days. Even the wealthiest Gulf countries are finally feeling the burn and tasting the consequences of their support for the Zionists who have been massacring our brothers and sisters in Palestine and Yemen and Sudan and far beyond this entire time.

The news these days might have people finally asking some very important questions. Questions like: wait, why are there so many US bases in the Middle East? And questions like: how can Zionist Persians and Zionist Arabs celebrate as the West massacres their own people? Or questions like: why is the Zionists’ so-called “Board of Peace” made up of leaders of Muslim nations from every corner of the Earth under the guidance of the very war criminals who have carried out genocide in Gaza?

I love it when people start asking questions. I love hearing that Americans are starting to wonder why exactly they should be expected to kill and die for Israel. I love seeing Muslims turning against their colonized leaders and toward each other, rejecting the tribalistic nationalism of tyrannical puppets and seeing with new eyes what we once were and insha’Allah can again become: a global community of Muslims united, an Ummah uncolonized. While many of us have been blessed to live in peace as we focus on growing closer to the Most Merciful and making our way through the Qur’an during this precious month, how many Muslims have been murdered this Ramadan?

In the past several days alone, we have escalation of genocide in Sudan through the support of the United Arab Emirates, we have Pakistan striking Afghanistan, we have Pakistanis getting murdered while protesting America and Israel’s killing of Shia spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, we have debris from Iran’s rockets falling on Bengali workers in the Middle East, we have American bases making targets out of every Arab land, we have Israel bombing Iran and Lebanon and forcing the populations of countless cities to scatter, and through it all, we still have Palestinian children dying of starvation, even today.

I want you to pause this reading and open up a tab with a world map; take a second to look at the size of Israel’s stolen land, and compare it to the scope of destruction across Asia and Africa that the Western world and its vassals have carried out on Israel’s behalf.

What have we been doing? Ya mu’mineen, this current moment we are witnessing is a special chance that Allah has opened for us. Let’s stop taking the colonizer’s bait. Let’s stop seeing the world through the eyes of our nationality or race or sect alone. Of course our identity will inform our worldview, but our experiences should only enrich our empathy and our solidarity. If your people have lived through oppression, then you should be all the more able to recognize it in others. Let your concern for others envelop the Ummah and beyond, because in our limited time through this life, we owe it to everyone, Muslim and otherwise, to stand with them against injustice.

That’s why we’re here, remember?

Further Listening

• A Ramadan Reflection from Dr. Omar Suleiman for Muslims Who Feel Conflicted About Current Events

• An Iranian American Woman with Code Pink Connects the Dots

• Coverage of the Unfolding War by Propaganda & Co.

One of our protests for Palestinian liberation outside of the New Hampshire State House in 2024.

What follows is the written testimony I just submitted to the government in opposition to a hilarious yet disturbing New Hampshire bill (linked below) “declaring that Sharia law and political Islam represent an existential threat to the state,” a bill that is to be discussed by our House of Representatives today insha’Allah; I don’t feel particularly represented, so I had a few words to say.

https://legiscan.com/NH/text/HR34/id/3287005

This bill is evidently discriminatory against a minority group that the federal government is already persecuting domestically in the form of state repression and abroad in the form of colonization and genocide. It is Western imperialism that is the true existential threat, and it’s not merely an empty ideological threat to public peace, but rather one with a very real death toll attached of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and counting whose blood is on the hands of AIPAC-funded American politicians. This bill is a prime example of “punching down,” of ratifying oppression into law, of attempting to retroactively justify the extreme violence of the Western world by casting its victims as villains, and the effort is tragically transparent. The text of the bill is full of fallacious errors and fundamental misunderstandings of Islam that any of the billions of Muslims on the planet would find embarrassing.

Moreover, there is a great irony to the bill, which incorrectly states that Sharia law “includes a moral imperative to extend the Islamic state across the entire world.” There is no basis for this claim aside from a willful misunderstanding of Islamic jurisprudence, and it is tremendously ironic for the colonizers of Muslim lands to claim that it is Muslims who wish to colonize the West. There is also an irony to the bill’s preposterous bad faith mention of sex slavery and rape gangs, which are obviously forbidden and punishable in Islam according to Sharia law. So actually, it’s understandable that some American politicians would take issue with Sharia law, given that convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and many Zionist politicians working with him in the US and around the world displayed a propensity for engaging in sex slavery and human trafficking themselves. This bill’s clear hypocrisy and blatant contempt for marginalized peoples is in line with what Epstein’s exposure has made the American public come to expect of American politicians. The authors and supporters of this bill also demonstrate contempt for the ideal of freedom of religion. This sad attempt at a distraction has failed, as it is too late to try to reclaim the narrative or turn back the clock on the decline of the public’s trust in the American government, and not even trying to blame your problems on immigrants and refugees can save you this time.

As a Muslim living in New Hampshire, I have to wonder how often any New Hampshire politician actually encounters Sharia law in their daily work. What requests have Muslim citizens asked of you, aside from the right to live and worship as they choose to? When has a Muslim personally or administratively tried to impose their ways on you? This bill seems to ignore the fact that New Hampshire’s Muslim population is not only peaceful, but such a small fraction of the overall population, while the bill is phrased as though Muslims are somehow in power here and hungry for more. While Sharia law wouldn’t be the threat the bill makes it out to be, the matter is also not an issue in the first place, because no one in the Muslim community in New Hampshire is even asking for Islamic laws to be implemented. In fact, the imposition of Sharia law on people who are not Muslim is itself not in compliance with Sharia law. What we do ask of our less tolerant New Hampshire politicians is for them to stop worrying about delusional threats, to engage in less self-victimization and more self-reflection, and to start paying more attention to true local threats, like state terror from ICE agents, or the way foreign agents representing Israeli interests divert New Hampshire taxpayers’ money away from serving the struggling people of New Hampshire, who have a big place in this Muslim woman’s heart.

Yours truly.

increase us in urgency

or decrease in our hearts

the feeling of emergency?

they are so tired

their fight unlike our fight

we carry their cause

but it is still their plight

we bear it on our shoulders

and they bear it on their heads

our necks are free, and theirs are pressed

they rest in tents, while we have beds

we are not weary

we don’t know what that means

we can’t claim that word

when we live it through screens

our throats are tired too

I’ve been losing my voice

but I have water

and they don’t have a choice

little toes on little corpses

have become a normal sight

we need to learn for the weary

to fight like they fight

A Gazan boy mourns his loved one after Israel murdered Palestinians collecting firewood during the “ceasefire” in January, 2026 (Omar al-Qattaa for AFP).

Professor Butch Ware on “The Thinking Muslim” with Muhammad Jalal in January, 2026.

The Typical Liberal Charmer

I have yet to write about New York City’s hottest new Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

I’m not a fan.

Bear with me on this one. I’ve held back on sharing my opinion until now to keep observing him from the sidelines before rushing to judgment. I know many of the other mayoral candidates were so much worse, and I know how much hope he has given to the people struggling and caring in NYC. I know he means a lot to many activists fighting for a free Palestine, including people I really respect. I know his wife makes illustrations calling out Israel’s war crimes and his father is a respected anti-colonial academic. I know how cool it is for the Big Apple, which has long been run by Zionists, to have a Muslim mayor who is critical of Israel, especially given how much discrimination we’ve faced as Muslims in the US after 9/11. I also recognize that the man is absurdly charismatic and eloquent… like Obama.

I live by Islam and I spend a lot of my time fighting for Palestinian liberation, so I’ve encountered people who assume I’m happy about Mamdani’s victory. Well, I’m happy Zionists are troubled. But I don’t trust him, I don’t think they’re troubled enough, and my frustration finally outweighs my hesitation, so I’m going to be the jerk who writes an essay criticizing one of the only politicians in the US who has a significant track record of advocating for Palestinian liberation and against Israeli impunity. One could take my critique as a compliment to Mamdani, since the corruption of the vast majority of US politicians is so plain to see that no scrutiny is required. Of course, I could always be wrong, and in this case I’d love to be wrong, so if I’ve misread Mamdani so far or I later turn out to be way off, then I owe him a public apology (not that the public should care about my opinion, but just for the sake of my own integrity). And maybe he will prove me wrong, maybe he can change, maybe his conscience has been eating him alive and one day he’ll come out and explain everything. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m speaking too soon.

Even now, I’m expressing more charitable hesitation to call out Mamdani than he afforded the Palestinian resistance, who he was so ready to throw under the bus when prompted by the American political elite, condemning genocide survivors for resisting decades of illegal Israeli occupation sustained by US taxes.

I have to be honest: it only took me a few minutes to clock Mamdani as a sweet-talking opportunist who is willing to compromise on what matters most in order to build power. A true politician. He’s very good at what he does. Tragically, what he does, it turns out, is play diplomat with Zionists. I was disappointed, but I wasn’t shocked, when I heard of his many immediate betrayals of Palestine after running as the “pro-Palestine” candidate (visit the links at the end of this essay for detailed descriptions and evidence of these betrayals). If we’re being honest with ourselves, how could we be that surprised, when he was willing to run as a Democrat in the first place, aligning himself with a party synonymous with genocide? If your instinct is to defend him by saying he’s hoping to change the party from within, then please keep reading to the end.

I don’t know if this essay would upset people, fans of his. That’s not my intention, especially since I’m likely to agree with his supporters on many issues. I know people form emotional attachments to politicians. It’s only human, and the system counts on it. I know people can point to the good Mamdani has done and will do for Palestine and in general, which they might argue goes far beyond the scope of what any of his critics could ever achieve, given Mamdani’s influence, and I get it, I want to like him so badly too, this should have been our moment, and how dare I rain on it?

But let me take you back a second. I remember the moment I first became aware of Mamdani’s existence. I stumbled across a video of his on YouTube, and I watched a minute of a speech from his campaign to become the mayor of New York, in which his energy was undeniable and his ideas simultaneously felt fresh and long overdue. Impressed and excited, I subscribed to his channel, looked up his name, watched him in an interview with Stephen Colbert, and rushed back to his channel to unsubscribe in a whirlwind, trying to shake what I had just witnessed out of my head. It’s amazing how rapidly my first impression of Mamdani shifted from inspiring to unsettling. I was hoping for Mamdani to put the Zionist New York Times in an incredibly awkward position through his rise in popularity, but I quickly realized he wasn’t going to be the one to hold their feet to the fire. On the contrary, he could inadvertently become the answer to their problems, a way for unethical journalists to win back the conscientious public and make normalizing with Israel socially acceptable again simply by appearing to care about Palestine, while still answering to and reinforcing the Zionist world order.

By working with Zionists, Mamdani unwittingly saves their reputations from the brink of oblivion in the eyes of onlookers, doing more to sanitize their image as an anti-Zionist politician than a liberal Zionist ever could.

My excitement deflated as suddenly as it had overtaken me, because when Colbert asked Mamdani a remarkably racist and Islamophobic question about how he’d make Jews in New York feel safe despite his “controversial” comments against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, rather than pointing out the offensive nature of the question, rather than turning it back on Colbert and asking him why he didn’t make Zionist candidates prove themselves to the Palestinian diaspora in New York during an active Zionist genocide against the people of Palestine, the quick-witted Mamdani did not waste the opportunity to pander to Zionists, going on a tangent about October Seven to repeat debunked propaganda from the occupier’s narrative, instead of standing his ground on his right and our collective imperative to condemn close to eight decades of Israeli terrorism from the apartheid settler colony, instead of pointing out that Jewish supremacists feeling safe should not take priority over Palestinians actually being safe.

It might seem harsh, but that single moment of pandering was enough for me to lose interest in what Mamdani has to offer the liberation struggle. Many others within the movement have yet to run out of chances to give him, which is understandable considering his history, but his credibility is precisely why I feel all the more driven to call him out. It’s too easy to reason that maybe he’s playing the long game somehow, that he’s under unique pressures and he has to build political power before he can use it, that he needs to form strategic alliances and lull his enemies before he can act, that this is a rare opportunity for our sidelined cause to gain mainstream popularity. You get it, we’ve heard it all before, and it’s everything I hate about politics, which can have us justifying the most reprehensible transgressions against our own standards in the pursuit of morsels of recognition. But if you’re an activist for Palestine and you’ve ever felt skeptical or suspicious of Mamdani as he’s continued to work with, endorse, and even appoint self-identified Zionists, and if by any chance you’ve been scared to say anything because you’re not Muslim, then I’ll do you a favor, speaking as a Muslim: when I looked into Mamdani, what I saw was a fake.

Of course, I can’t speak to Mamdani’s true intentions. Allah alone knows the inside of his heart. Mamdani probably believes he’s doing the right thing and helping the cause by working with Zionists. But so does Netanyahu, you know? I’m not comparing the two of course, I’m just saying every politician has their rationalizations. I’ve been burned by politicians too many times before, and especially disillusioned by the unforgivable Zionism of figures I once admired like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, so I’ve been thoroughly reminded since Israel’s genocide in Palestine to be wary of US politicians, who are essentially professional liars on behalf of the colonizer, selling the suffering public on the promise of better days to stave off revolution. Ordinarily, I’d write off politicians altogether, so I don’t say what I’m about to say lightly, and again, if I turn out to be wrong for endorsing who I’m about to endorse, then I’ll make an effort to correct the record on my liberation blog.

The Real Deal (Insha’Allah)

In my opinion, the real Muslim politician who Americans should look to for inspiration is Butch Ware, who ran as the vice presidential nominee for the Green Party with Dr. Jill Stein. He’s also currently running to serve as the governor of California, where he actually has a fighting chance. For him, Islam is not a convenient identity label to campaign on, but rather an ideology that drives him, in tandem with Black liberation texts, as he came to Islam as a teenager immediately after reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” In his recent interview on “The Thinking Muslim,” Butch Ware talks to the host Muhammad Jalal about his background and personal journey to Islam, he calls out both mainstream political parties in the US for supporting genocide and imperialism, he considers liberal hypocrisy and addresses Mamdani’s shift, he explores Black liberation and White supremacy, and he suggests a path for Muslims and all Americans to rise above culture wars and unite over human rights at home and abroad.

Ware’s assessment of Mamdani was gracious and especially insightful in my opinion. In his conversation with Jalal, Ware said, “My analysis as a historian… is that there’s only three outcomes: [Mamdani] breaks the party, the party breaks him, or he leaves the party.” While many people hoped and argued for the first option, the second option unsurprisingly seems to be the direction Mamdani’s mayoral tenure is leaning (which, again, is to be expected, since he started from a place of working within the Democratic party). Was Mamdani changed by the very party he sought to reform, or was he playing politics all along? In contrast, it seems Ware is uncompromising in his message, because he understands that winning by diluting the people you strive to represent isn’t a victory for them at all, and it also bears noting that Ware is a professor of Islamic and African history, and he’s a Hip Hop artist. His lyrical style reminds me of British Iraqi rap legend and liberation journalist Lowkey. Here’s a recent album from Ware’s Black Muslim rap duo Slum Prophecy.

It’s hard not to compare Ware’s moral courage with Mamdani’s ambitious compromise. Some people might criticize me for pitting Muslim politicians against each other when there are so few of them in the US, or for being hard on Mamdani when he’s already taking heat from Zionists on the other side. But Ware’s mainstream political success to me is proof that Mamdani’s willingness to appease genocidal Jewish supremacists is unnecessary, not to mention harmful to the cause of Palestinian liberation. At the end of this essay, I’ll link to an article on Zionists co-opting anti-Zionists in politics, in which the author George of Patmos presents evidence of the many unacceptable compromises Mamdani has already made.

The Principle of the Matter

It’s the age-old political tale of working with the corrupt and powerful in the hopes of gaining power for one’s cause, only to gain corruption in the process. I explored this phenomenon in my essay from 2024 that I wrote after some fellow Palestine activists gutted me by collaborating with a local Zionist politician just to get a dehumanizingly watered-down version of our ceasefire resolution passed. I also explored the process of political corruption in my essay from 2020 in which I pushed back against the insulting argument to vote for the lesser evil. I’ll link both essays at the end of this one.

Fighting oppression without compromise is a core teaching of Islam. Islam emphasizes deeds over identities, and hypocrites who claim to be Muslim yet fail to act accordingly are frequently called out in the Qur’an. So I don’t care who claims to be Muslim. I stand with those who stand against oppression. Below I’ll share my newest sign.

I’ve been in mourning this week over Venezuela. I’m so tired of American audacity. Iraq never got justice for US war crimes, my heart has wounds that haven’t healed, that I don’t think can heal till the Day of Judgment, and seeing the impact of US bombs on Venezuelan homes instantly reduced me to tears. It’s hard to explain the unique feeling of violation mixed with helplessness when a foreign entity kidnaps your sovereign ruler, but Venezuela, as an Iraqi American, I see you right now, and I know a lot of other Americans do too.

America, we need better leaders. We need better parties. The Western empire can’t keep getting away with their atrocities and their attempts to colonize or otherwise profit off of Venezuela, Palestine, Sudan, or any other land. Which means we can’t keep falling for the likes of Democrats or Republicans, or identity politics or culture wars, if we are remotely interested in liberation for the oppressed and human rights for all.

Relevant Links I Recommend

Key Political Sources

• George of Patmos Argues Zionists Use Mamdani

• The Thinking Muslim Interviews Professor Butch Ware

• Photos of Devastation in Venezuela After Illegal US Strikes

Seriously Excellent Music

• “Blood of the Martyrs” by Slum Prophecy

• Resistance Hip Hop Anthem “Vietnam” by Lowkey (with Mai Khalil)

• Lowkey’s New Track and Video for the UK Political Prisoners Starving for Palestine

Previous Essays Referenced

• My Essay Against Zionist Collaboration

• My Essay Against Voting for the Lesser Evil

should kidnap our leader and steal our land?

would we feel better if we were told

it’s for our sake and not our gold?

wouldn’t we in the face of their hubris recoil

if they claimed for their safety they needed our oil?

we’ve been here before a thousand times

the same old criminals, the same old crimes

instead of sentences, they were given awards

wearing smiles and ties while severing cords

bossing around other states, picking a fight

what in the hell could give them the right?

I don’t know what to say, but words can’t wait

may you Venezuela be spared Iraq’s fate

the US still thinks it can do what it wants

and nothing will happen to the power it flaunts

I wish I was there to watch Rome as it fell

what finally did it, that their home is now Hell?

Your regular reminder that democracy is an illusion: months of imperial harassment boiled over as the United States bombed Caracas today, kidnapping the Venezuelan president along with his wife, and Trump explicitly declared that the US would run Venezuela in his stead and assume control over the nation’s oil industry “to make Venezuela great again.”

Translation: the martyrs of Nahariya passed through here
(comic by martyred Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali).

There are days when I sit instead of standing, like I’m waiting for the world to liberate itself.

I read your news like that’s enough.

The war crimes repeat themselves. So do my words. They start to fade out like your lives. Sometimes I save them up and squirrel them away for fear I won’t have them when I need them, should someone happen to be listening, but I don’t know who. Most days it’s God alone.

I pray for you like that’s enough.

I feel like I’ve done it all, tried everything, yet when I weigh my efforts, it’s almost like they don’t even register on the scale. But I don’t know how to measure these things. I feel like I’ve done little more than bear witness. You’ve changed my life, but I haven’t changed yours.

I learn from you like that’s enough.

It was too cold to protest again this week. I got to warm myself while your children froze to death. I think of new ideas for signs. I forget them before I find the paint.

I speak out for you like that’s enough.

It’s our words versus their lies, our words versus their money, our words versus their drones. Our most righteous words feel obscene. Will words feed you or free you or reclaim your stolen land? Do our strongly worded letters to war criminals feel like an insult to you at this point? The international community turned out to be a euphemism for the colonizer, and they have words too, they offer a thousand words to reframe the ugliest picture. Self-defense is called terrorism, and terrorism is called self-defense. All the soldiers of all the lands turned out to be decoration, flexing their muscles for the performance and only getting to use their strength when the state needs protection from the wrath of its own people.

I cry for you like that’s enough.

My rage doesn’t settle. If it does, it turns to sorrow. I’ll carry it with me like a burden in my heart all the way to Judgment Day, because God alone can settle a score this vast. I shudder to think of how the world could ever clear the debt we owe to Palestine. My bed is so soft. I think of your flooded tents. I think of the dogs they train to rape you.

That’s enough.

It feels wrong to keep reading about the ways Israelis torture you, and it feels wrong to stop reading. I think of Al Fashir and Kordofan and I can’t breathe. My mind can’t believe the numbers, each one a soul, cherished and haunting to its beloved ones. Sudan, how could we ever meet your eyes? I’ve had an eye on Venezuela too, because lately it looks like Iraq if you squint, and their boats “carry fentanyl” in the same way my homeland “harbored weapons of mass destruction.” Perpetrators convict their victims in the ultimate double-tap strike. A man in Kashmir burned himself alive the other day when the occupiers took his family away, and we’ve got ICE in our backyards leaving the same trail of misery. It’s tough to reconcile the chess game of global power struggles with their human impact. I read and write about the world, but I’m no political analyst. I just care about people.

What if that’s not enough?

Then again, who are we to despair when you do not despair, to the grave and far beyond? You don’t fight to taste freedom yourself, but to give your children a chance to taste it, and they’ll fight for the same reason if they have to. And when we fight for you from far away with our meager words, some will say we’re not doing anything, and others will say it’s about the ripple effect. But if I do affect someone, and the ripple of my impact doesn’t go beyond that one person, was that individual soul not valuable in its own right? What if our efforts are flawed yet continual, what if a tree didn’t grow yet, but we keep planting seeds instead of sitting on our hands?

What if trying is enough?

Not because we might make a difference given enough people buying into our mission. Not because we might make a difference given enough time. We could keep seeing zero “results” till the day we return to our Lord. Maybe us standing out in the streets or on the screens for the cause is the result. Maybe trying is the point. How could our efforts be fruitless if the efforts are the fruits, the willingness to leave our homes and shatter our silence and attempt to reform something profoundly broken? Isn’t that a difference? Our souls are just as needy as those in Palestine, and just as capable of glorious resistance. Maybe we were never standing out there to save Palestine. We’re just trying to get on their level.

And maybe that’s enough.

Further Reading

• Israelis Train Dogs to Rape Palestinian Hostages

• The Scale of Emirati-Funded Atrocities in Al Fashir

• The RSF Bomb a Kindergarten in Kordofan

• American War Crimes Against Venezuela

• A Desperate Man in Kashmir Self-Immolates

• ICE Hostages Face Inhumane Conditions in California

and souls are cheap

they sow as though

they will never reap

what should I do

if I can’t breathe?

I see your arms twisted

up in that tree

I see my own people

laugh as you bleed

the devil was so sure

that fire

is better than clay

so there

is where he

will end up one Day

they think their skin

is better than yours

he thought that too

and he was so sure

melanin and skeletons

are vessels for the colonized

but the vassal as the slave master

is in for a surprise

he too is skin and bones

and a soul to be apprized

oh people of Heaven

and people of Hell

your time is short

on this Earth where you dwell

oh people of hunger

when your turn comes to eat

the feast will not end

with the One you will meet

oh people of pockets

when your time comes to burn

all you will be told

is to taste what you earned

oh city of gold

and stolen dessert

your chocolate will melt

into mud and dirt

when your stocks plummet

you will feel the pain

but nothing like the Day

you will choke by your chains

“One Day their gold and silver will be heated in the fire of Hell, and it will brand their foreheads, sides, and backs. This is the treasure you hoarded for yourselves, so taste what you used to hoard!” (Qur’an 9:35)

Dubai Gold Souk in the United Arab Emirates (the world hates you like Israel)

“And what is with you? You do not fight in the cause of Allah and the weak among the men, women, and children, those who say, ‘Our Lord, deliver us from this town of oppressors, and designate for us from Yourself a Protector, and designate for us from Yourself a Savior!’” (Qur’an 4:75)

Survivors from Al Fashir in Sudan (the world loves you like Palestine)

This is not justice. But it is much-needed relief.

This is not peace. Who could call it that, with their boot pressed against your neck?

Your killers still roam your lands. Your heroes remain locked in dark rooms.

Your children are buried in the rubble. And so are the dormant grenades.

There is no victory without liberation. But alhamdulillah for your joy today.

No one deserves it more. May nothing you gain ever be lost.

We are with you. We will never abandon the cause, and resistance takes many forms.

”They Should Stop Fighting” Is the New “Let Them Eat Cake”

“The war is finally over!” say the people outside of Palestine who have barely been paying attention. They dare speak of injustice in the past tense. Their selfish relief is repulsive. They can’t wait to stop hearing about Palestinian suffering. In case the obvious needs to be stated outright: Palestine is still not free. A single moment free from active bombardment is not “the end of the war” (even now, the war crimes haven’t even stopped, and you could even argue they’ve escalated). The ignorance of the international community is part of what has prolonged the genocide, allowing such injustice to endure at such an intensity for two years and eight decades, and I won’t let anyone off the hook by calling their ignorance naive, because passivity is a choice.

I’ve heard people from the US to the Arab world say the resistance should stop fighting “because the people of Palestine are tired.” As though if the resistance stopped resisting oppression, the oppression itself would somehow magically cease. Liberation is not the vanity project of the resistance. Exactly what do people think Palestinians have been fighting for? How removed from reality can these careless commenters be?

When people blame the resistance for fighting back, they forgive the oppressor for giving them a reason. “They should stop fighting” is the new “let them eat cake,” a frivolous refusal to acknowledge the true source of a problem, coming from a perspective that is privileged to the point of delusion. When those who say the fighting back must stop because the people of Palestine are tired, what they really mean is that they are tired of hearing about Palestine and feeling guilty. Well, we are tired of the world betraying the oppressed with their silence, which they only break to lazily pass judgment on how the oppressed should handle the injustices that the world’s silence has brought them.

Wrath of the Defeated Killers

While the fight has obviously not ended, these are still blessed days. Although our emotions in this moment must be a diluted version of your own, precious Palestine, you still elicit in us a more intense response than anything else in our life. The only delight that could compare to witnessing your happiness is witnessing your oppressor’s humiliation. Israel still seems to not understand just how much its supporters have lost, and how much more they are about to lose. But they know enough to feel wrath at your joy and vicious envy at the world’s love for you.

In true sadistic Israeli fashion, just as they did during the previous ceasefire, after agreeing to release a fraction of the thousands of Palestinian hostages, the IOF just raided the homes of their families and made threats against them, warning them against publicly celebrating the return of their kidnapped and tortured loved ones. Last time, the Zionist forces intensified the abuse of their captives in their daily beatings before letting them go and shaved the Star of David into the head of one Palestinian hostage. Reading the news in this era feels like hearing updates from an abusive husband who is desperate to retain control over his wife through intimidation, but somehow applied to the scale of entire populations. In fact, caring about Palestine feels like knowing your neighbor’s child is being abused, yet Child Protective Services and the cops are somehow in on it, and every time you check in, the abuse has gotten worse, and all you can do is scream to tell the other folks in town and to let the child know that you care, but you can’t stop it.

Alhamdulillah, from the freedom flotillas trying to break Israel’s siege on Gaza to the marching of millions across Europe for Palestine, our screams have been getting louder. As the tides keep turning, it will become increasingly important to sharpen our skill of distinguishing opportunistic hypocrites from the people who stood by justice even when the oppressed didn’t have popular support. Killer Kamala recently dared to make a statement on the genocide, may she face the Hague. Omar El Akkad’s cleverly phrased and often quoted book title continues to gain relevance with every passing day: “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” So we’ll have to find a balance between healthy skepticism and a welcoming attitude toward sincere newcomers to the cause who are simply still learning. When evaluating a newcomer, consider their previous stance on Palestine, and if it doesn’t look good, then consider whether they seem openly remorseful versus dismissive regarding their past complicity. In some cases, the only road to repentance is retribution; the political structures that enabled the genocide (most political structures around the world) cannot be the ones to prevent future atrocities, and everyone who profited from such evil can only redeem themself by facing the profound punishment that’s due, not by “joining the new leadership to help reconstruct Gaza” after having themselves destroyed it.

The Jewish Identity Crisis

In light of the current exchange of captives, this next part addresses specifically the subset of Jewish people who have been grappling with their lingering attachment to Israel now that their holocaust in Palestine has become more obvious to the vast majority of the world. I walked past my local Temple Israel with my family the other day, and we saw photos of Zionist prisoners of war, members of Israel’s genocidal army, adhered to trees in their courtyard. As they call them, the hostages. I immediately thought of the eleven thousand plus Palestinian hostages who the mainstream Western media never mentions, the reason for the fight in the first place, hundreds of whom are children and all of whom are held in torture prisons by illegal Israeli occupation forces with the support of the United States. These neighbors of ours would sooner publicly grieve war criminals who share their identity than spare a thought for the masses they victimized in their name. If our mosque were to display those eleven thousand faces, how big would our courtyard need to be? We just kept walking.

Genocide is only “complicated” when you identify with the oppressor. I can see how personal ties to the transgressing party would make standing with the oppressed less convenient, but inconvenience does not dissolve personal responsibility. To anyone who was raised Zionist and is currently struggling with the most epic case of cognitive dissonance of all time, I have a request: please mull over your moral dilemmas in private. Grieve your childhood attachment to the idea of Israel with people going through the same identity crisis, and rage against the ones who manufactured and weaponized your emotions to justify a new holocaust. This is all productive work.

But don’t make it Palestine’s problem.

The Western empire’s illegal occupation of Palestine isn’t complicated, it’s only complicated for YOU. That’s fine, please do process those emotions. But be very conscious about which parts of that journey you make public when your privileged tears have the power to fund bombs and silence the people who are suffering for your sense of self. You should use your position to turn fellow Jewish people into allies for liberation, willing to take back what was taken by Zionists, and willing to give back what was taken from Palestine.

And if you ever look up and realize that even your conversations about Palestine spotlight only the Jewish experience, when the narrative becomes about your ego, your resentment, your atonement, here’s a good exercise: just imagine how you might feel if the Holocaust were only publicly discussed by Germans, if those conversations centered their internal struggle and regret and excluded the souls who actually suffered the internment camps. Your identity crisis in this historical moment is interesting and important, but outside the walls of your homes and synagogues, it’s not the central story, so don’t let it be. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak out; on the contrary, your voices are sorely needed, but that’s precisely because Western society puts more weight on your experience, all while continuing to conflate Judaism with Zionism. So God bless you for speaking, but when you do, please remember: although the genocidal mainstream media won’t feature the people of Palestine, until they are liberated, it’s their stories that matter most.

Recently an Israeli man approached my mom during her standout for Palestine. Compared to her typical interactions with Israelis, this man was relatively “nice,” yet his immediate question for her was not about the genocide. It had nothing to do with Palestine. No, what he wanted to know was whether she believes Israel should not exist. That was his primary and sole concern. As if Israelis were the ones facing ethnic cleansing. This exchange reminds me of the way hypothetical psychological harm befalling Jews is given more media attention than active physical harm being inflicted upon Palestinians.

It reminds me of the “we love our Jewish brothers and sisters” disclaimer people feel compelled to include in any statement about how genocide is wrong. Again, to hear how ridiculous this sentiment sounds, apply it to the Holocaust: “we love our German brothers and sisters, but we have to put our foot down and say that the Holocaust is wrong.” Would Jews feel supported or baffled by such a message? And these are the kinds of sentiments coming from the very few public figures who do spare a thought for Palestine. And rather than pointing out their odd framing, audiences applaud their courage for using the word genocide.

The bar could not be lower. People who were brought up Zionist, whether explicitly or simply by virtue of living in the West, will have their work cut out for them in terms of undoing the training they’ve received that continually centers their ego and tells them they’re special and superior, ever-persecuted victims who have been chosen by God Himself. Even as the hateful Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism dies in the hearts of the people before our eyes, its impact continues to infect the echo chambers of the powerful, from the double-standard terminology used in reporting to the unchallenged assumptions and disproven lies that are still thrown around. The best cure for the world’s Zionist hangover isn’t to purify Israel’s image by distancing the apartheid settler colony from Netanyahu’s administration; it’s to center Palestine.

The Whole Story

During her downtown standout for Palestine yesterday, amidst overwhelming support from the public, my mom says someone yelled at her: “The war is over! Go home!”

Another man asked her with irritation how long she plans to stand there. She told him, “Until Palestine is free.”

He told her, “I know that. When will that be?”

Her reply was patient. “When there is justice.”

Which he didn’t like. Then he said, “Do you want to know the whole story?”

And she said, “I know the whole story.” And he started babbling about the land belonging to Israel, so she told him to leave.

When she got home, I was crying too hard to get the name out: “You know S… Saleh?” I was gasping and she couldn’t hear me. She took me by the hand and led me upstairs, where I started fully sobbing. They killed Saleh al-Jafarawi, but apparently the war is over.

I’ll see you on the streets.

and you don’t fight fair

you’ve got the nukes

but we don’t care

so put up your dukes

you only debate us

with our mouths taped shut

and you shadow ban

what doesn’t make the cut

you kill our reporters

to sell your own spin

before long your viewers

learn to worship your sin

when you lose on the field

you want to talk peace

so you bring us to the table

then you bomb our seats

but your AI drones

can’t beat our stones

because we live for this

and we’re not alone

so you censor our heroes

and the billions behind them

then you pay for your fans

by the millions to blind them

you’re not only vile

you’re lame as hell

you buy your love

and it’s just as well

your days are numbered

your power is fake

a loan that expires

with your mistake

we’re tired of your games

you can’t make us despair

or admit you were wrong

yes you don’t fight fair

but you won’t fight long

(From B’Tselem: A Zionist Occupier
Kidnaps a Palestinian Child in 2021
in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank)

everything is breaking down

the cracks are where I live now

I fell and to hell with renown

only from here in the ground

do I notice what I always knew

even over burning trees

the sky is steadfast blue

who am I to touch it though?

or dare claim I could ever know

the warrior’s stance, the martyr’s glow?

when the best I do is watch their show

part the seas with Your flotilla please

I know we don’t throw when we throw

it’s Your plan and You who steadies our aim

and You know what we do not know

I saw a dog eating her corpse in the dust

and I dared to move on with my day

is that patience or betrayal?

Lord use us and show us the way

I pray they pass and drown the rest

I want to say I tried my best

spread the faith of the oppressed

this is a test, this is a test

(The Family Boat Heading the Sumud Flotilla to Break Israel’s Famine in Gaza)

Immigrant families fenced in like cattle at a Texas Border Patrol facility near the Mexico border in 2019 during Trump’s first term (photo from the US Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General).

What’s the first coherent thought you have when you wake up? In my case, it’s always the same, because I’ve trained my brain on it ever since I heard the saying at the end of this essay. As my consciousness returns to my body and my body becomes aware of my bed and my surroundings, I recognize three features that are true of my reality today: I have peace, I have freedom, and I have abundance. Existence for a lot of people doesn't include these three blessings. And such people often don’t have what they don’t have through no fault of their own, but rather because of injustice. Meanwhile, I have what I have through no merit of my own, but rather by the grace of God alone. Seen another way, what I really have is three liabilities, trusts I have been loaned, I am being tested with, and I will be held accountable for.

I live five minutes from a military airport. There was recently an airshow, and the other day, I kept having to pause my work as jet engines soared over the roof of my home, interrupting my clients. If this were Palestine, that same sound would not make me feel irritated, but terrified. Here it’s entertainment, as tasteless during a genocide as fireworks. But that’s not the worst part. That same airport, I found out, is considered a deportation hub for not just our state, but our entire region. Apparently, in the previous month alone, ICE shuttled thousands of people out of my backyard airport, terrorizing families with raids and violently uprooting their productive, meaningful lives for no other reason than paperwork and skin color while claiming to serve justice.

The ongoing ICE kidnappings and mass deportations of families occur in the United States regardless of whether a Republican or a Democrat is in office, and one of the more callous takes I’ve heard is this idea that people who break the law, no matter how arbitrary, deserve the consequences, no matter how harsh. And I can’t stop thinking about how their brains work, onlookers who would say such a thing and cheer on the theft of freedom from another human being. In my mind, this sentiment would be perfectly rivaled in cruelty if one were to yell at an unknown passerby, “I hope you get cancer.” But while such an occurrence would be considered bizarre and disgusting, you see the former example demonstrated all the time, as comment sections are riddled with wishes for people’s loved ones to rot in prison for daring to come here.

And therein lies the alleged crime: being here.

It’s strange, isn’t it? And they’re so confident in their logic; if one is truly so firm in his view, then he shouldn’t feel threatened to listen to the accounts of people victimized by ICE. Take the time to research the atrocities to which barely trained immigration enforcement authorities subject their plentiful victims, and then try to imagine what crime could be so heinous as to justify such treatment. I would go as far as to say that there is literally no crime evil enough to warrant such dehumanization and torture, but the horrific reality is that for many Americans, the crime of being here is enough. Being here, the same thing Americans are doing, also on a land that isn’t theirs (unless they’re Indigenous), yet somehow when Americans do it, when Americans dare to exist where they are, it’s their right, and when racial minorities do it, they forfeit their right to be treated like people.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that the descendants of colonizers are guilty of the sins of their forefathers. Rather, I’m arguing that since the US is largely a society of people who are not from here and who are only here now because of the genocide that their ancestors committed against the people indigenous to Turtle Island, as they call North America, you would think Americans might have a more humble and open-minded attitude about who has the right to be here. What makes a land mine or yours, when neither of us have roots here? Why is the presence of European "settlers" pillaging this land centuries ago celebrated in elementary school plays today, while immigrants traveling here to actively escape serious danger (danger that is often created by Western regimes) is worthy of scorn?

Mind you, this mentality of entitlement can plague anyone, regardless of race. I’ve even seen some immigrants who have made it through the system and received their citizenship acting this way, saying with no irony nor self-awareness that “their” country should stop letting in immigrants, conveniently starting now; rather than paying it forward, such people are essentially turning around and kicking anyone who tries to get onto their level right down the flight of stairs. People who oppose the freedom of movement claim that by being here, immigrants are taking something away from Americans, some imagined finite resource to which American citizens must have a more legitimate claim for some reason, but that’s not even true. The ugly truth is that labor laws don’t apply to “illegals,” so immigrants keep the country running by working the jobs even the poorest citizens wouldn’t agree to take. The work of immigrants in this country often looks like children working twelve-hour shifts in physically intolerable conditions, and if their boss happens to be abusive (which is likely given his willingness to subject human beings to such working conditions), then there is nothing they can do about it.

People also often suggest immigrants bring crime, yet immigrants are statistically more likely to be on their best behavior for fear of getting kicked out. And undocumented immigrants are also especially vulnerable to becoming victims of crime, since they can’t report perpetrators for fear of getting deported. But apparently such immigrants are criminals anyway for enduring this living, because again, how dare they be here? This is what’s so infuriating about conversations around how to deal with immigration; the real problem with immigrants is not what to do about their existence, but rather the oppression they face as our neighbors in need.

If you’ve been blessed with citizenship, chances are you’ve responded to your privilege in one of two ways, depending on your worldview: with gratitude, or with entitlement. Your attitude might be one of feeling humbled by how much you have been given despite not being better than anyone else, which can instill in you a sense of obligation to help those around you who are in need of what you have. Alternatively, you could have the attitude of someone who hoards his plenty, obsessed with the thought of losing it, and viewing the world through a delusional lens of “us versus them.” But for people with a capacity for empathy, these delusions are easy enough to shatter through personal encounters that humanize the “them.”

And as the hard of heart become increasingly uncomfortable thinking too deeply about this topic, they seem to concede on a point: the treatment of undocumented immigrants might be harsh… but hey, it’s avoidable! The harshness is the point, they argue, in order to discourage criminal misbehavior before it occurs. (Again, the criminal misbehavior in question is the crime of being here.) But on the contrary, the fact that people are still risking everything to come to the US, that the harshness of the repression has not been sufficient to ward them off, that they would choose life in an ICE detention center over life in their homeland, should be indicative of the desperation of their circumstances.

One of the justifications the inhumane try to use is the fact that victims of ICE “knew this would happen.” But that’s kind of like when people defend Israel and America’s genocide in Palestine by praising Jewish supremacists for raining down flyers before raining down missiles to let Gazans know they’re about to be bombed, as if that gives Zionists the clearance to go ahead and massacre civilians. Warning someone that you’re about to do something evil doesn’t make it less evil. Yet even if your opponent believes you that ICE victims are suffering, their next recourse is always to ask, “So why would they come here?” As far as victim-blaming goes, this question is akin to asking, “What was she wearing when she was raped?” but fine, I’ll bite.

We’re here because your leaders destroyed our home, and we have nowhere else to go. You think we want to be here? You think it’s fun being a minority living in the land of our oppressor, forced to justify our existence to racists? Every time I’m told to “go home,” part of me thinks, despite all my privilege, “I wish I could.” And I’m not from Latin America, but I’ve heard countless stories of the oppression that people from South and Central America face due to the deeds of the Western empire; leaving one’s home is one of the most tragic actions one can take, so obviously, they are immigrating north for a reason.

For my own story, I can only speak personally as to the impact of Western imperialism on Arabs. One of the ugliest ripple effects of colonization is the way the colonized commonly move to the very society that colonized them. And these are the lucky ones. The colonizer makes your home unlivable and then complains when you leave it and seek refuge wherever the colonizer hasn’t yet destroyed (in other words, among the society of the colonizer). If people who hate immigrants want them to return from whence they came, then perhaps they should ask their government to stop devastating foreign lands. Iraq remains a shell of its former self, and the colonizer gets to claim many of its most highly trained workers. What a vile design; as if wrecking countries isn’t enough, they have to leech off of their remains.

In my case, the reason I’m a US citizen is remarkably arbitrary: my parents both grew up in Iraq, but my dad happened to be born in Utah when his dad was studying abroad. On that technicality, I get to be here, but others don’t? I reject that. If prison is good enough for ICE victims, then what line of moral reasoning spared me that fate? For that matter, what spares White Americans?

Prison is a place where you lose the most sacred of your fundamental liberties: your freedom. And prison steals the most precious of your resources: your time. What kinds of acts could cause a human soul to deserve such a punishment, according to the United States? Murder. Rape. Grand theft. Oh yeah, and committing the ultimate crime of being inherently illegal… one of the things on this list is not like the others.

And many, myself included, would argue that long-term imprisonment behind bars as a concept is inhumane even for the guilty, that it's one of the most evil things humans still do to each other and it needs to end like slavery, it needs to end like yesterday, because it's too easy to forget about the fate of the imprisoned as we go about our days using our free time with our free will, while they endure minute to minute away from their loved ones under monitored restriction. It’s a system ripe for abuses of power, and it’s in some ways worse to imprison someone than to kill them, because you aren’t just violating their rights the moment you detain them; you are violating their rights for every single moment that you don’t let them go. As the hours turn into months for your victims, every tick of the clock whispers, “How dare you?” Even for “detainees” (victims of state-sanctioned kidnapping) who actually did something to earn a punishment, there are so many other methods of rehabilitation that are both more humane and more effective than prison.

Yes, jail is bad enough for criminals, but for people who are considered inherently illegal, meaning their only crime is existing here while not being from here, the treatment gets even worse, as even the most basic rights afforded to murderers and pedophiles who are citizens are denied to immigrants who have committed the crime of existing. They don't get due process. They don't get mattresses or privacy when they use the toilet. They don't get to see their families. The level of cruelty is off the charts, and it is ongoing, the daily reality for so many people while you and I get to enjoy our lives. To begin with, imprisonment could only be justified if one assumes the state to be a moral entity, which is a very big assumption. This is a country where innocent people are dehumanized, and this dehumanization is normalized depending on their race or their national origin, based on the concept that “here” somehow only belongs to a certain privileged group of people.

Instead of letting our wealth make us stingy, we should all share what we have more often, because we did nothing to earn it. It’s not like we exist because we cleverly managed to convince God to create us. Being here is a gift. No one can claim it over anyone else.

No matter who you are, if you ever think you’re not doing enough with your freedom to help the oppressed, you’ll always be right. And if you ever think you’re not focusing enough of your time on Earth on the Hereafter, you’ll always be right. We can only ever fall short, because what we’ve been given is so much greater than what we can give back, which should only make us more grateful for ar Rahman’s mercy and inspire us to try. It’s easier to be generous when you understand that everything you have is a gift, a trust, and not something that’s inherently owed to you. Here isn’t yours.

“Whoever wakes up among you

secure in his home,

healthy in his body,

having his food for the day,

then it is as if the world has been gathered for him.”

Prophet Muhammad, Peace and Blessings Upon Him

(Hasan Hadith from Sunan al Tirmidhi 2346)

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who has lost two hundred relatives over the course of Israel’s genocide, remains in ICE custody at the time I write this essay in September; she has been in prison since March, and she was first kidnapped by the US government during the vengeful, fearmongering wave of immigration detentions that, by the Trump administration’s own admission, targeted Palestine activists (photo from Middle East Eye).

3/16/2026 Update: Alhamdulillah, after a year in detention and after a judge ordered her release for the third time, right before the end of Ramadan, Leqaa Kordia has been freed! Her liberation came shortly after American Muslims for Palestine posted a clip of many famous activists for Palestinian liberation reading her powerful words alongside her own voice from prison. This post came shortly after fellow Palestinian activist and Columbia University student who was previously detained for protesting the genocide of his people, Mahmoud Khalil, wrote her an open letter. Upon her liberation, Leqaa addressed the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, as Dr. Omar Suleiman never stopped fighting for her. Ya Rabbee, al Fattah, help us to keep fighting insha’Allah for the innocent immigrants kidnapped from their families by ICE terrorists in the United States, the over ten thousand Palestinian hostages currently held without charge in Israeli torture camps, and prisoners all over the world, until prison as a practice is abolished.

Myself, my big brother Ebrahim, and my baby brother Yusuf in 1998.

Looking through old family photos, I’ve noticed that even lighthearted moments take on a deeper significance; time is heavy.

I used to believe the Iraq War was the greatest evil I would ever know, yet the violence of the colonizer that so profoundly defined my childhood and identity has been continually recontextualized by its apparent climax now as the Western empire seeks to overpower the unassimilated once and for all, destroying every Arab land one by one and all at once, with the center of both oppression and resistance in the SWANA region focused around Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine.

The Latest Atrocities

I can’t breathe as I force myself to watch Israel destroy dozens of residential towers in Gaza City, rendering thousands more people homeless overnight and ordering a million civilians to evacuate their shelters while simultaneously not allowing them to leave the concentration camp of the Gaza Strip, where nowhere is safe and everyone is starving. Bewilderingly, Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are not even the only Zionist war crimes in the Arab world, as the government of Sudan has left its villagers to amazingly defend themselves against the Rapid Support Forces, the pillaging, raping, genocidal tornado of horrors backed by the Zionist United Arab Emirates, while the UAE enjoys its sparkling tourist attractions, unbothered by the world’s scrutiny. At the same time in the United States, the NYPD has sent cops to train in Israel, and ICE continues to terrorize minorities and destroy their families, deporting people by the thousands and shuttling them through the military airport five minutes from my house. Meanwhile in the West Bank, Israel recently raided and detained a thousand Palestinian men in a single night of terror and humiliation, and in steadfast Yemen, Israel murdered some thirty journalists at once when they bombed their media office. People have started keeping a tally of how many countries Israel bombs at a time, from international peace activists carrying humanitarian aid on the Sumud flotilla to Israel’s own ceasefire negotiation mediator Qatar. The message is clear: Israel believes it owns the world, and it can do whatever it wants.

The world has yet to prove it wrong.

I Remember It Differently

When I want to float away, I anchor myself to the past. Yesterday, Baba and Mama told me that the first time we went to Iraq, right after we boarded the plane, the Clinton administration bombed Iraq with hundreds of missiles. Subhanallah, I had no idea, and I can’t believe I keep learning my own history decades later. I was four, and it was one of my earliest memories, but I remember that journey in 1998 very differently, as the first time I would get to see my “real” home. I remember doing somersaults on the coach with excitement, and I remember the absurd amounts of luggage waiting by the door, not realizing at the time that our bags were stuffed to the zipper by my heartbroken parents to relieve our relatives from the effects of the sanctions. I also remember the endless freezing journey through the desert at night, not realizing there was a reason we had to cross the Iraqi border by land, that the United Nations had forbidden Iraq from commercial flight.

Mama had traveled to sign paperwork for my grandpa, but we got stuck in Jordan for a while and scammed by our driver, only for Mama to return to an Iraq she didn’t recognize. She described the country as beige and the people as desperate. She said she’d thought her family was all gathered under one roof because of her visit, but it was actually because of the bombing, and back in the US, Baba waited anxiously for weeks, not even bothering to turn on the lights till al Muhaymin brought us home, home being a loaded term. Mama said she couldn’t stop crying; the Iraq she had left behind didn’t exist anymore. In contrast, what I remember is the pure glee of seeing my homeland for the first time, meeting my cousins, and realizing I’m from somewhere, that there’s a place where I belonged. My best days growing up were often my parents’ worst.

Making Sense of the History We Live Through

Many of my relatives were threatened, attacked, or killed in the years that followed, and I knew it even then, but I didn’t understand its scope, and lately my childhood memories keep getting recontextualized by Palestine, painting the picture of an epic fight across time and space, a fight between the oppressor and the resistance, between the states and the people, between the colonizer and the Ummah, and when I try to bear witness to this encompassing war between empires that spans countries and centuries, as I scroll from articles analyzing geopolitics to videos interviewing refugees on the ground, I’m having an overwhelming time attempting to reconcile the magnitude of this fight with its human impact on each person’s daily life once I zoom in on the maps marked by people who strategize.

Is war a story of empires, or families, and how can we simultaneously see the overall fabric and every thread within?

Iraq remains occupied to this day, in more ways than one, but my eyes are on Palestine, letting go of my thread to take in the tapestry.

I don’t want to carry this weight, but I don’t want to not carry this weight.

Am I a fighter, strategizing to protect the vulnerable by thwarting the enemy through my defiant words, minuscule though my efforts might be in the grand scheme, or am I one of the vulnerable people carried by the waves of history and injustice, feeling helpless as I watch our taxes yet again fund the destruction of our people from afar?

I am both, I am a vulnerable fighter, and as human as my enemy, but unlike my enemy, I welcome the inevitable judgment of our Maker, who brings together the big picture and the minute details, al Lateef al Khabeer, from whom tyrants fruitlessly flee, and upon whom the oppressed endlessly rely.

Our childhood passport photos inside our mom’s Iraqi passport in 1998.

Decimation by Israeli Explosive Robots at Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip (Mohammed al-Hajjar for Middle East Eye)

Newly exposed classified data from the Israeli military itself reveals that over eighty percent of the Palestinians they have killed are civilians, and seventy-five percent of the Palestinians they have detained in Israeli military prisons that are infamous for torture are also civilians. Putting aside that death tolls are widely understood to be severe underestimates, and that Israel posthumously declares its civilian victims to be terrorists without evidence, let’s take this data at face value for a moment, though the truth is likely to be even worse. People have taken notice that this statistic of over eighty percent is more damning than the civilian death toll ratio of the Nazi-aligned Axis powers during World War II. It’s become increasingly clear to even the willfully ignorant by now that if Israel isn’t actively trying to wipe out every Palestinian off the face of the Earth, then at best, their existence is inconvenient, their lives are disposable, and their suffering is ignored if not actively enjoyed by Zionists.

Israeli journalist and liberation ally Gideon Levy points out in a recent article that even at Israeli protests for a ceasefire, the focus is not on the genocide or the famine, the absolute holocaust being orchestrated in Israelis’ names against the indigenous people their government occupies; rather, the focus of the Israeli protesters seeking ceasefire is overwhelmingly on “the hostages.” This term of course is in reference to the dozens of remaining prisoners of war in Gaza, members of Israel’s genocidal occupation army who are unfortunately regarded by the Knesset as living liabilities that Israel has yet to kill, not for a lack of trying. And note that when the Israeli people protest for the release of the hostages, they are not referring to the over ten thousand Palestinian hostages held illegally by the Israeli government, some of whom have been in prison without charge for decades, with more civilians being dragged away in IOF raids in the West Bank daily. These are Israel’s protests for peace, mind you; with very few exceptions I do deeply admire, even in their protests for peace, Israeli peace activists neglect to mention the active genocide they fund on the land they stole. I don’t have another word for it; it’s just embarrassing, and damn, those chosen people sure do deserve each other.

Israel’s own genocidal army admits to its genocidal statistics, and polls continue to show the majority of Israeli society mirroring this genocidal mindset, yet they call it war. If it’s a war, then Israel, as a terrorist pawn of the Western empire, as an apartheid settler colony, and as a psychopathic society of Jewish supremacists, is apparently comfortable with the vast majority of human beings they murder being collateral damage, something other than their claimed intended targets. Truly, they have less regard for human lives than healthy people have for animals, for trees, for blades of grass that folks would naturally feel bad about needlessly harming. It’s not collateral damage, though, because it’s not war. Obviously, the civilian death toll is their goal, their intended target all along.

But I’d also like to talk about that overlooked under twenty percent, the claimed intended targets, the combatants, the so-called terrorists, the ends that Israel believes justify all means, even if Israel’s means include the daily massacres, dismemberment, and starvation of children. Of course, anyone with a functioning conscience would say there is no end great enough to justify such war crimes, that atrocities carried out en masse against children could never and should never be justified in the first place. But Israelis, unironically believing their people to be “chosen,” find their mission so noble and their opponents so evil that anything can be justified in service of their cause, even if Palestinians have to be put in real danger to protect Israelis from hypothetical danger. For that reason, the successful murders of Palestinian combatants, the deaths that make up under twenty percent of Israel’s genocide victims, justify in Israel’s perception the ongoing “accidental” daily mass murders of Palestinian civilians.

Yet if by Israel’s own logic, one can murder their enemy’s children to keep their own people safe on stolen land, then wouldn’t it be even easier to conclude and far less of a moral stretch to say that Palestinians have not only a right, but a duty, to defend against genocidal Israeli soldiers who are actively murdering their children in their own homes? Wouldn’t self-defense in the context of genocide not only absolve an occupied people of guilt, but make them heroes for their fight? Wouldn’t that expression of defensive force, in the context of protection against imminent threats from an illegal occupier during a genocide, be the most morally acceptable instance of force, especially according to international law? If violence in that extreme situation is not justified, then no violence can ever be justified, and no army should ever exist. In other words, even that under twenty percent Israel murdered, they are absolutely not within their rights to have killed, neither legally nor morally. Israel is not eighty percent off target, it is one hundred percent in the wrong.

What does it mean to be a combatant during a genocide? Clearly a lot is riding on that term for Israel. Even going back before October Seven, what does it mean to be a combatant during an occupation? Crucially, is it even possible for an indigenous warrior facing off against a racist settler colony to be unjust toward that colony? I’m serious, think about it: what does any colonized person, civilian or combatant, owe to their oppressor? Famously, Palestinians treat their Israeli oppressors far better than Israelis treat their Palestinian hostages, as the Israelis the Knesset has abandoned in Gaza are fed by Palestinians even through the famine Israel has designed, and these Israelis are sheltered by Palestinians from Israeli bombs even through the genocide Israel is waging.

Meanwhile, how does Israel treat its indigenous Palestinian civilian captives? It starves, tortures, and rapes them. It beats them and denies them medical care. It deprives them of sunlight and loved ones. And these captives aren’t members of an occupying genocidal army, no, they’re doctors. They’re journalists. Too often, they are children.

Israel treats the best of Palestine worse than Palestine would ever treat the worst of Israel. So when I ask what Palestine owes to its oppressor, it’s clear that they have fulfilled their end of the human contract above and beyond all reasonable expectations, in accordance with Islamic laws about upholding the rights of one’s enemy, laws I used to consider purely hypothetical before my soul lived to witness this era.

More importantly, what do the people of Palestine owe to each other? They sacrifice their lives to protect their loved ones, and we are expected by the Western world to look down on these souls’ willingness to defend their people, to condemn their resistance and use their courage as a reason to deny them mercy.

Most importantly, what do we owe to the people of Palestine? Given the way they have exposed the truth about the entire world to itself, given the burdens they alone have been enduring to free us, the complacent masses, I’d have to say we owe them everything, and we have failed them eight billion times over.

Now that Israel’s holocaust in Palestine has become so obvious to the world as a genocide, now that the manmade famine and the daily massacres targeting children, journalists, and medical workers are making even the chosen people uncomfortable, I just have to ask why, why are we still taking Israel’s word, on anything? Anything they have ever said or will ever say? Would people capable of genocide not be capable of lying? Should their speech not immediately be regarded as likely to be the opposite of the truth? The Zionist narrative on October Seven, the Zionist narrative on their enemies, the Zionist narrative on their stated mission, all of that should come into question now. If war criminals hate someone, then shouldn’t that someone be assumed innocent (if not heroic) until proven guilty? And shouldn’t that proof come from any source other than the mouths of war criminals and industries that are serving and covering and justifying the ethnic cleansing right now?

As people focus on Israel’s death toll ratio of civilians versus combatants, will they not stop to ask if Israel even has the right to fight indigenous combatants on stolen land? According to international law, they do not. While Israel talks about their nonsensical right to self-defense, where is the threat to their people? Beneath the debunked lies around a single day that woke up a sleeping world, what remains? A bunch of privileged land thieves talking about antisemitism? Aren’t they embarrassed?

Chosen people, doesn’t it feel shameful to talk about words offending you, to talk about “feeling unsafe,” when the people being killed in your name are actually unsafe, being massacred by the dozens on the daily, their buildings leveled to the ground? What do you still feel entitled to from the people you are committing a genocide against? Should the starving, disfigured Palestinian who has lost hundreds of members of her family and has been displaced a dozen times while outrunning your bombs be more diplomatic in her wording, lest her harsh reality that you created inconvenience your reputation or self-image? Would that your victims could even once enjoy the luxury of feeling offended. Alas, they are too busy searching for their loved ones in the rubble (even if you didn’t click on any of the previous links in this essay, you might want to click on this one). Palestine doesn’t owe us a damn thing, and we will never be able to pay off our debt to them.