March on Washington for Gaza
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
Israel: Hier Ist Kein Warum
An interesting item I haven’t seen anywhere in the news: Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces yesterday raided and vandalized the Freedom Theatre of Jenin, arresting its two codirectors without charge (or even accusation), holding them for the better part of a day, and then releasing them the next day. Read the article for the backstory, but what’s of interest to me are the particular details of the arrest. Mustafa Sheta, one of the co-directors of the theater (and a Facebook friend of mine),
told Al Jazeera how he was handcuffed and blindfolded before soldiers kicked him in the head and stomach. He was then taken to the Al-Jalama checkpoint, north of Jenin, where he was held in the cold, rain and mud for about 14 hours before being released.
“They did not tell me why they were there,” he said. “They did not tell me if I was wanted for any crime. No questions asked. They just took me.” Continue reading
“The Future Is Being Bulldozed”
An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.
This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report. Continue reading
JVP-NNJ Event: Chanukah Vigil for Gaza
Blathering at the Abyss: Bret Stephens on Ukraine
It’s said that you should never judge a book by its cover, but there’s a lot to be learned about a piece of writing from how it begins.* The opening to a piece of writing often marks out what the author takes to be uncontroversial, and in so doing, reveals the assumptions that structure his thought.
This column by Bret Stephens (back in September) is intended as a cautious defense of the presidency of Joe Biden. It opens with this apparently uncontroversial claim—or set of claims–about the war in Ukraine.
We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk.
A single sentence can assert several propositions at once. The preceding one asserts at least three: Continue reading
Nationalism and Liberalism: ‘Policy of Truth’ at the APA
Just a quick announcement that there will be something of a PoT presence at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting this January in New York (to be held at the opulent, hence utterly unaffordable Sheraton New York Times Square). Roderick Long has, through the Molinari Society, arranged a two-part session for Tuesday afternoon, January 16th: “Nation-States, Nationalism, and Oppression” in the 2-3:50 pm slot (Session G7C, listed at APA Draft Program, p. 33), and “Topics in Radical Liberalism” in the 4-5:50 pm slot (Session G8C, listed at APA Draft Program, p. 37). I’ll be presenting some version of my PoT blog post, “Teaching Machiavelli in Palestine” in the first of the two sessions. Continue reading
From Apartheid to Genocide: Israel in Gaza
Blood on all our hands
We cannot hope to wash them clean
History is mystery
Do you know what it means?
Motorhead, “Brotherhood of Man“
In an earlier post, I wrote:
Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next full year, from now until the beginning of November 2024.
That “extraordinary event” is here. Israel’s open, unapologetic attacks on the medical system of both Gaza and the West Bank are a conclusive indication that we’ve reached a macabre turning point in this “war.” Continue reading
Teaching Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the Americans”
I’m told that Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the Americans” is currently trending on TikTok, and that some people have encountered my short pedagogical paper about it from the Winter 2017 issue of Reason Papers.
The paper began life as a presentation to the 2011 conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, which explains the somewhat cryptic references in it to “dialectic” and “the Core” (“dialectic” was, if I remember, part of the official theme of the conference). The presentation later became a contribution to RP‘s “Afterwords” section, where it was called “You’ve Got Mail: Teaching Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the Americans,‘” Reason Papers 39:2 (9 page PDF). Continue reading
Bi’l Haq, B’Sabr
By the passage of time
Surely humanity is in grave loss
Except those who have faith, do good, urge each other to the truth (bi’l haq), and urge each other to perseverance (b’sabr).
–“Al Asr,” Qur’an 103:1-3
After some thought, I’ve decided to keep the implicit resolution I made in this post awhile back, and take a break from public commentary on Israel and Palestine, and for the most part from blogging and social media altogether. Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next full year, from now until the beginning of November 2024. Continue reading
Health Facilities and Human Shields
It’s frequently asserted as an unchallengeable axiom that Hamas uses health facilities as a base of military operations, so that Israel is forced–by Hamas’s callous, murderous use of human shields–to target these facilities. I’m very skeptical of this claim, but let me set that particular skepticism aside for now. Consider this item below, which comes from a neutral third party, the World Health Organization (WHO). What it reports is a series of Israeli attacks on Palestinian health facilities.
Let’s suppose that Hamas does indeed use health facilities as a base of operations, thereby treating the patients and staff as innocent human shields. Still, that claim leaves us with a quantitative problem. How often? Put another way, how do we determine, in particular cases, whether this accusation is true? (a) Do we simply treat it as an axiom that regulates any evidence we receive about Palestinian health facilities hit by Israeli fire? Or (b) do we treat each case on its own merits, granting as much credence to the “human shield” hypothesis as is warranted by the evidence in each case, and taking it from there? Continue reading
Policy of Truth 