Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Defining “Wokeness”: Strike 1 for Robert George et al

Posted on by under cancel culture

See update at the end of the post, July 12. Second update, July 25.

One of the many problems with the “culture wars” in the United States is that almost all of the contested terms used in the debate have gone undefined. It’s common for people to speak loosely about “wokeness,” “cancellation,” “cancel culture,” “the Left,” and “Cultural Marxism,” as though these terms had some obvious meaning known by all. They don’t. In fact, in the absence of explicit definitions, all of these terms are mysterious to the point of meaninglessness. So despite contrary appearances, no one really knows what they mean. The absence of definitions of contentious terms tends to benefit people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but would like to conceal that fact from others. That might explain why so much talk on this subject has such a nonsensical quality about it, at once insular, enigmatic, and histrionic. Continue reading →

Innocents Abroad

Posted on by under Palestine

From a story in NorthJersey.Com, a local New Jersey paper (subscription required to read the whole article, and see the photo of burning village):

Afif Alasmar traveled to his vacation home in the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, a popular destination for Palestinian Americans, as he does every summer. He was eager to relax, visit family, check on his land and attend three nephews’ weddings.

“The town grew in the last 10 to 15 years with new, beautiful homes and beautiful farms,” said Alasmar, a Clifton business owner. “It’s known for its olive oil and has about 10,000 acres of farmland. Even though they live in the United States, people are very attached to the town.”

Lately, though, Alasmar and other families have become uneasy about their summer haven amid a spike in West Bank violence, including a June 21 rampage by hundreds of settlers who set fire to dozens of homes and cars in Turmus Ayya. One person, 27-year-old Omar Qattin, was shot and killed in the attack while trying to help his injured cousin (Hannan Adely, “NJ residents say US turned its back on them when they were attacked on vacation,” NorthJersey.com, July 6, 2023).

It’s an interesting but largely unasked question whether Americans are attacking one another in the armed clashes taking place in the West Bank, but it’s entirely possible, and well worth considering. Continue reading →

“Death, Desolation, and Tyranny”: Israel in Jenin

Posted on by under Palestine

If the people of Jenin were Americans facing the British in 1776, we would be celebrating the revolutionary war they began. If they were Ukrainians facing the Russians, or Afghans facing the Soviets, we’d be sending them heavy arms to fight a proxy war against our common enemy. But because they’re Palestinians facing our ally, Israel, we arm the power that occupies them, anathematize their resistance, and watch with cold indifference or grim satisfaction as the refugees of yesteryear are made refugees once again, driven out of the refugee camp that until recently was their home.freedom theatreThe Freedom Theatre of Jenin Refugee Camp in happier times, August 2019. 

Continue reading →

Democratic Vistas

Posted on by under Art/Literature

It’s customary to celebrate Independence Day in the United States by recalling the glories of the American Revolution, and hauling out the idols of our “civic religion” for worship–primarily the Declaration of Independence treated as Scripture, and tales of the Revolutionary War treated as hagiography. I don’t find the American Revolution a particularly glorious event, and find most celebratory discussions of our “civic religion” tiresome. So this Independence Day, I’d like to change the subject. There are other things about America worth celebrating and discussing: not its politics or military valor, but its art. It’s always been a question whether American art has ever managed to declare independence from its European forbears, and always been a fear that it hasn’t. Those questions generally go unasked on Independence Day, but maybe they shouldn’t. Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (7): Vindication

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

Justice is done, for now. Personally, as I see it, this is just the first of many vindications to come. In the end, blood can only be cleansed by truth–and there’s plenty of cleaning up left to be done. But a sigh of relief for now. My congratulations to Scot, to his attorney Mark Eiglarsh, and to the entire team that supported him, including Kevin Bolling and Lydia Rodriguez, whom I know from afar, and so many people that I don’t.  The verdict is what we all hoped for, an 11-0 win. It’s good to have some good news in a world where good news seems so rare. 

The Parkland Trial (6): Awaiting a Verdict

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

Over a decade ago, I was given a ticket for a moving violation. I thought I was innocent, so I demanded a trial. I showed up in court on the relevant day, and went out of my way to construct what I regarded as a cogent defense based on the law. Most of it was disallowed as “irrelevant” by a judge who insisted that I was guilty because most people accused of my infraction were: why think I was any different? Having made my presentation, the judge asked whether I had any more to say. No, I replied, but I had some visuals–some photographs–to support my case. The introduction of the photos was disallowed on the grounds that I had failed to “introduce them into evidence” at the outset. And that was that. Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (5): An Orwellian Prosecution

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

In 1984, George Orwell described Newspeak, the language of the totalitarian regime depicted in the book, in this way:

Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English speaker of our own day (George Orwell, 1984, Signet Classics, p. 300).

It sounds like an exaggeration, but this is an exact description of the language spoken by the prosecution in the Scot Peterson case. Consider a few examples from a CNN story on closing arguments in the case. Ask yourself what language the prosecution and its witnesses are speaking. Whatever it is, it’s not intelligible as English or any other natural language.  Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (4): If the Evidence Is Shit, You Must Acquit

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

The Scot Peterson trial has ended very quickly–far quicker than anyone thought it would, and too quickly, I think, to do justice to the real complexity of the issues involved. That said, the narrow issues raised by the criminal charges against Peterson are so obvious that there’s a sense in which the trial could reasonably have been shorter–by not happening at all. So from that perspective, a short trial may well be appropriate.

The case for acquittal is, in a certain sense, so simple and obvious that it can be stated fairly briefly. For Peterson to be found guilty of the main charges against him, it had to be proven that he was a “caretaker” in the legally relevant sense, that he knew where the shooter was, and that knowing where the shooter was, he failed to engage the shooter as he was (supposedly) required to do. To acquit, all that the jury needs is reasonable grounds to doubt any one of these claims. Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (3): The Hayden Report

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

In two previous posts (here and here), I’ve made reference to the report by police tactical expert Philip Hayden as the best written account of the events relevant to Scot Peterson’s actions at the Parkland Shooting. In the just previous-post, I raised some provisos and reservations about Hayden’s report, but (apart from Appendix A) those are all matters of omission and incompleteness, not of disagreement with anything Hayden says in the report. In fact, I fully agree with the contents of the report. I received the report in the form of two PDFs. Here is the first one, which I’ve called “Hayden 1,” about 53 pages long, and here is the second, which I’ve called “Hayden 2,” about 17 pages long.*

I highly suggest that anyone interested in this topic read the whole report in its entirety, from beginning to end. It’s somewhat long, about 41 single-spaced pages of text, and another five pages of appendices. But every sentence is worth reading. Continue reading →