Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Who Was Killed at Pahalgam (2)?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

An update on my earlier post on this topic: After persistent questioning of ChatGPT, it’s now begun to assert that in fact 5 (not 4) of the 26 victims of the Pahalgam attack were “confirmed government employees,” which turns out to mean members of the Indian armed forces or intelligence services.

  1. Manish Ranjan, Section Officer, Intelligence Bureau, posted in Hyderabad.
  2. Tage Hailyang, Corporal, Indian Air Force, from Arunachel Pradesh. The Indian Air Force mourned his loss and the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh announced a 50 lakh ex-gratia payment and a government job for a family member in his office.
  3. Vinay Narwal, Lieutenant, Indian Navy, from Haryana. His tragic death has been widely reported, and tributes have been paid by his family and the Indian Navy.
  4. Manish Raman Mishra, an officer in the Indian Navy. “Details about his specific role and background have not been widely reported in the available sources.”
  5. Manju Nath, an officer in the Intelligence Bureau. Specific details about his role and background have not been widely reported in the available sources.

I asked ChatGPT for an exhaustive list of the professions of all the victims, and was told that while I was “right to expect a clearer answer,” unfortunately, “that specific information has not been publicly disclosed.”

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Who Was Killed at Pahalgam?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

With no provision but an open face
Along the straits of fear
–Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”

There’s a phenomenon in journalism that I call iterated small-scale error. Take any well-known event. Look carefully at the journalistic consensus that’s formed around it. Once you do, you’ll find that the consensus has come to adopt a number of small-scale errors, errors that make some difference to the narrative arc of the story, but that seem at first too trivial to correct.

Eventually these errors, uncorrected, come to acquire the status of authoritative truth that displaces the actual truth. Iterated over months or years, they come to be widely accepted. Once that happens, it becomes possible to realize in retrospect that the small-scale errors ended up reinforcing a medium- or large-scale myth. The myth is so ideologically convenient that one wonders whether the initial introduction of the small-scale errors was deliberate, a kind of trial balloon to test the limits of tolerance for error. At that point, of course, the question becomes moot, so that the issue never gets pressed. Those who do press it are dismissed as unhinged conspiracy theorists. Then, everyone moves on. Continue reading →

Resistance in Action

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, liberty and the left, moralism, Trump 2

I’ve previously mentioned my work with Resistencia en Acción, a migrant defense group based in Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey. Much of what Resistencia does is to face down ICE whenever the need arises. And to put it bluntly: ICE has to be faced down. It’s less a law enforcement agency than a glorified group of thugs–an American Gestapo–intent on solving, by brute force, problems that they themselves have confabulated. Continue reading →

Mass Death by Starvation

Posted on by under Palestine

I once had to go a week without food. It weakened me and made me ill, but didn’t kill me or come close. It actually takes a long time to die of starvation, at least if you have water and shelter, as I did. If hundreds or thousands of people begin to starve to death, it’s because people are bent on killing them that way.

That’s what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has been for months, or years, or decades, depending on how you look at it. Most proximately, it has intentionally violated a ceasefire to which it agreed in order intentionally to starve the population of Gaza to death.

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Gorilla Warfare

Posted on by under Fatwas

The entire Internet is debating whether 100 unarmed men could defeat and kill a single silverback gorilla. The “pro-man” crowd keeps insisting that the 100 men would defeat the gorilla by “outsmarting” it. Find me one gorilla wasting his time on this stupid debate, or anything like it, and I’ll concede the point. I highly doubt you will. Unlike humans, gorillas know better than to waste their time on shit like this. So don’t tell me we’re smarter than them. If victory is achieved through intelligence, they’ve already won.

Karl Ameriks, RIP

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.

I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading →

Why Princeton students disrupted Naftali Bennett

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

This post was written by Princeton Alumni for Palestine, of which I’m a member. The piece was rejected for publication in both The Daily Princetonian and Princeton Alumni Weekly. I’ll be posting a separate post on this topic, in my own name, in the near future.–IK

To understand why students had to disrupt Naftali Bennett’s visit to Princeton on April 7th, it’s important to recenter ourselves on the ongoing events abroad. Hamas and Israel at last reached a ceasefire earlier this year which was recently unilaterally broken by Israel, which resumed its genocidal campaign. Full stop. Well over 50,000 deaths have been recorded, of whom 15,000 are children. These figures are a “clean” report. Yet according to the Lancet, the death toll is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. Anyone who does a cursory search of the images from Gaza will find evidence of the deeply horrid violence that Israel  has been enacting on innocent civilians, journalists, medics, UN aid workers and children. And let us not forget that these weapons are supplied with our tax dollars. Continue reading →

May Day in Princeton

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, General announcements, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, Trump 2

One of the activist groups I work with, Resistencia en Acción, is putting on a May Day march and celebration this Thursday, May 1st, in Princeton, New Jersey, starting at 6 pm. The event begins at the “Fountain of Freedom” at Washington Rd and Prospect St on the Princeton University campus. We’ll march through town, circle back, and hear from local activists and members of the community in both English and Spanish. This is a march in solidarity with and defense of all migrants, documented or not, “legal” or not, and against the arbitrary harassment, detentions, and deportations engaged in by the “Department of Homeland Security,” among others. We’re expecting some 800 participants, from Newark to Trenton and points in between. Join us if you want to stand up for justice, and have a good time doing it. And click the Instagram below to listen to Princeton’s own Chris Hedges while you’re at it: Continue reading →

Heterodox Academy 2025

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, General announcements, moralism, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine

Though I’m totally unsympathetic to the organization, I thought I’d announce that I’ll be giving a paper at the 2025 Heterodox Academy conference this June in Brooklyn. The conference runs June 23-25, and will be held at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. My talk is part of a three-person session at 8:30 am on the 24th called “The Skeptics’ Panel,” and is titled “Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of the Kalven Committee Report.” There’s nothing particularly “skeptical” about my argument; it’s a straightforward rejection and critique of so-called “institutional neutrality.” I’ve laid out a version of the argument here, and will be blogging on related themes in the near future. Continue reading →