I was at a migrant defense demonstration Thursday evening in Elizabeth, a small city in northern New Jersey. The man pictured below spoke to the crowd; unfortunately I didn’t catch his name.* He told the story of how he was detained by ICE for four years, shuttled around detention facilities and jails in Essex and Bergen Counties. His “crime”? Being undocumented. No country recognizes his existence or identity, and none will take him in. Continue reading
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
Hegseth and the Houthis
As usual in American politics, everyone’s talking the Hegseth and the Houthis story to death, but almost no one’s focused on the right part of it. The story, of course, is that Hegseth and Co had planned to bomb Yemen, and did. They discussed their war plans on the Signal app, but accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, on the chat. That was a gigantic breach of protocol, but Hegseth et al didn’t notice Goldberg’s presence. A big national controversy has now arisen about what to do. Investigate Hegseth? Force him to resign? Prosecute him? Continue reading
Gaza: Tod Macht Frei
Some friends of mine associated with Jewish Voice for Peace of North Jersey (along with Peace Action and Pax Christi) have taken out a paid ad in the Star-Ledger this morning (Newark, New Jersey), condemning Israel’s violation of the ceasefire agreement signed January 17th (see below, under the fold). You might not, by reading legacy (“mainstream”) media, have grasped the blatantly obvious fact that Israel had violated the ceasefire, but if you hadn’t, here’s a primer by Jonah Valdez at The Intercept. Continue reading
In Your Darkness, We Shall See the Darkness
Columbia’s Capitulation
In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen
–“In Your Light, We Shall See the Light,” Columbia University’s motto
Of all the pathetic abdications of moral responsibility and expressions of cowardice I managed to see during the quarter century I spent in academia, few approximate Columbia University’s abject surrender to the Trump Administration the other day. I won’t bother belaboring the details, which you can read almost anywhere. As former Columbia law professor Katherine Franke aptly put it, this is a case in which the victim of a ransom note has not just capitulated to the demands of the ransomers but given them what they hadn’t asked for, in return for less than nothing. But if you stand back from the welter of detail, there are a few lessons here worth learning, and worth articulating. Continue reading
In Defense of Mahmoud Khalil
Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana March 18, 2025
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. Continue reading
Death Camps and Torture Chambers
An Addendum on Institutional Neutrality
I wanted to add a sort of postscript to my March 17 post on institutional neutrality, meant to clarify an inference that is slightly (but only slightly) more complicated than I made it in the original post. The post was already somewhat long, and I didn’t want to burden it with over-complications by addressing every possible objection, or chasing down every twist and turn in the argument. But I also don’t want to burden it with misunderstandings.
Stirring the POT (2)
March 2025: Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of “Institutional Neutrality”
Last month, I started a series here called “Stirring the POT,” designed to announce forthcoming events and summarize notable recent happenings. In my last installment, I mentioned that I was giving a paper on–a critique of–“institutional neutrality” at the 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) in Norfolk, Virginia. That was fun, so I figured I’d report on what happened. Continue reading
You Can’t Burn Down Neapolis
Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon.
“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did. Continue reading
I Think They Call This Fascism
They say, you know when you know
So let’s face it, you had me at hello
Hesitation never helps
How could this be anything, anything else?
–Elvis, in a slightly different context
Are we living under fascism? Are we on our way to it? It’s natural to ask these questions, but hard to answer them, mostly because it’s hard to know what they’re asking. To know whether we’re living under or en route to fascism, we need a workable definition of “fascism,” but strangely enough, decades after the defeat of the worst of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century, that’s what we seem to lack. We know that fascism was defeated, but still don’t know what it was. In what follows, I simply want to canvass some of the problems involved in answering my opening question, not so much to provide a conclusive answer to it, as to figure out why it’s so hard to come up with one. Continue reading
The Sea of Trees
(This post gives away the whole plot of the movie “The Sea of Trees.”)
My wife Alison took her life four years ago today in Toronto–March 4, 2021. She was discovered, still alive, during a pre-scheduled building inspection of her townhouse. She was rushed to the hospital but died there. She’d been hospitalized for an earlier attempt on her life in February of that year, and had made at least one yet earlier attempt several years before we’d been married. Suicide was a preoccupation of hers for the duration of our admittedly brief marriage. She brought it up repeatedly in conversation in ways that are easy enough to remember, but also in ways I ended up suppressing. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 