No one

“Yes, it - used to be - a new account”

[No one @Signed_out_]

الأمل مقاومة
Hope is resistance

[No one @Signed_out_]

It’s just spoken form the heart, an expression of sadness due to an act by someone I had a lot of respect for @susanabulhawa
Someone who will tweet about the cruelty towards animal but is unable to support other humans

[No one @Signed_out_]

It’s just spoken form the heart, an expression of sadness due to an act by someone I had a lot of respect for @susanabulhawa
Someone who will tweet about the cruelty towards animal but is unable to support other humans

[Fatemeh Shams @ShazzShams]

Reading this post reminded me of an exchange with @susanabulhawa in 2023. When I invited her to a conference to mark the first anniversary of Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, she declined, objecting to “too many Western feminists” and expressing reluctance to criticize the Islamic Republic in the U.S., in a "location" where “the audience… already holds Islam and Muslims in grave contempt.”

This was less than a year after the Islamic Republic’s brutal crackdown, killings, torture, sexual assault, mass imprisonment, against Iranians protesting gender apartheid. A UN mission found these amounted to crimes against humanity.

I wrote back to her saying that the conference aimed to broaden conversations about oppression and resistance, fostering transnational feminist solidarity beyond geopolitical camps. The program addressed Assad’s prisons, Taliban rule, Israeli and Egyptian repression, and Iran’s violence against protesters. She did not care about that and the argument came down to the fact that in her view criticizing the violence imposed by a regime that abuses Islam to incite violence was not a priority in her life.

What troubled me then, and what this post also confirms, is a form of selective, dihonest solidarity that only recognizes Iranian victims when it doesn’t disrupt a preferred geopolitical narrative.

Let’s be clear: The US destruction of Iran Air 655 was an atrocity. So is the bombardment of Iran. The US-Israeli military advantage is immense. And while Palestinian administrative detention, US migrant incarceration, and Iranian political imprisonment differ historically and legally, this doesn’t justify Abulhawa’s conclusion.

A state can be both an imperial victim abroad and a repressive force at home. These facts don’t cancel each other. The power imbalance between Washington and Tehran doesn’t erase the deeper asymmetry between the Iranian state and its prisoners. Context helps us understand and criticize the violence with honesty, not excuse it in the name of "anti-Imperialism" and "resistance".

Abulhawa writes, “[Iranian prisoners] deserve fairness, but to center them… feels misguided.” That “but” is quite telling: Iranian prisoners’ rights must yield to the state’s “existential” struggle. For political prisoners, “wait” means “wait forever.”

No government deserves a human rights moratorium because it’s under threat. No prisoner is less deserving of solidarity because her jailer faces a stronger foe. Those threatened with execution are not obstacles to sovereignty, but part of the nation itself.

Abulhawa claims Iranian prisoners are prosecuted under "their state’s laws", “regardless of whether one thinks the laws are unfair.” But whether those laws are just is central. Criminalizing dissent on charges of "waging war against god" and denying due process isn’t redeemed by legal codes. Repression is often legalized before it’s enforced. Citizenship imposes duties on the state; sovereignty isn’t a license to repress.

She’s right: Iranian, Israeli, and US detentions are different. But comparison doesn’t require identity. We can discuss shared tactics and denials of liberty without claiming sameness. She treats comparison as equivalence which is false. A taxonomy of legal status isn’t a defense for incarceration.

Abulhawa’s statistical claim that projects a US wrongful conviction rate onto Iranian political prisoners is baseless as well. Multiplying unrelated numbers yields a figure; but is is definitely not an insight. More deeply, “innocent under the state’s laws” doesn’t mean “justly imprisoned.” Violating unjust laws still makes one a victim of persecution. Her calculation obscures reality under a false empirical gloss.

Her reliance on confessions is equally flawed. Admissions made in custody don’t equal proof. Only credible evidence, presented fairly, can establish guilt. Isolated criminal cases don’t justify smearing all political prisoners.

Abulhawa chooses to remember the victims of Flight 655 while choosing to forget the victims of the Flight PS752 that was shot down by the IRGC with two missiles killing 176 passengers on board, including 15 children and an unborn child. One state’s crime can’t be used to silence another’s. The dead of Flight 655 don’t absolve the Islamic Republic; the dead of PS752 don’t reduce American culpability. Ethics doesn’t force us to choose.

As the signatories of the letter rightly note, “hollow anti-imperialism” doesn’t deny imperialism or Iran’s right to sovereignty. It describes a posture emptied out by selective empathy. Anti-imperialism is hollow when it recognizes state sovereignty but not the people’s sovereignty over their own bodies; when domination is excused because the oppressor uses anti-Western rhetoric; when victims are erased to let the state pose as resistance. That is CAMPISM.

Abulhawa romanticizes the Islamic Republic’s “self-possession" and taking the "state" as the "nation". Political prisoners, women, dissidents, are part of "Iran", too. A government can’t claim dignity while denying it to its people.

Islamophobia is real, and criticism can be weaponized. But fear of instrumentalization doesn’t make truth unspeakable. The answer is precision and consistency, not abandoning Iranian victims. Western biases can’t dictate which Middle Eastern women deserve defense. Silencing women resisting gender apartheid enables their erasure.

We don’t have to choose between the victims of Flight 655 and PS752, between Gaza and Woman, Life, Freedom, or between opposing US-Israeli aggression and Iranian repression. Principled condemnation doesn’t require claiming equivalence. Equal principle doesn’t mean equal measure. The real test of solidarity is whether we defend victims when the perpetrator is from our own camp. On that test, Abulhawa’s argument fails - and badly so. It constructs a dangerous hierarchy: Iranian lives matter when harmed by the US or Israel, but become negotiable when harmed by their own government. That’s why “hollow anti-imperialism” is not an insult. It’s an accurate description of such posturing when it comes to Iranians.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is a type of Western feminist who has strong opinions about the hijab and has never once organized against an arms sale.

Who discusses Muslim women's autonomy at length and has never read a word about what structural adjustment programs imposed by Western-led financial institutions did to female employment, female education, and female healthcare access across the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia in the 1980s and 1990s.

Who can describe in detail the ways Islamic jurisprudence has historically constrained women's rights and cannot name a single woman killed by a drone strike.

This feminist is not unintelligent.

She has simply inherited a feminism that was constructed within empire, that took imperial priorities as its frame, that universalized a very specific, very Western, very culturally located set of concerns about women's freedom while remaining systematically incurious about the relationship between that freedom and the violence done abroad in its name.

Her feminism includes her.

It reaches toward Muslim women instrumentally, when their suffering can be used to argue for Western superiority.

It does not reach toward the women under the bombs.

It does not reach toward the women whose healthcare infrastructure was defunded because the IMF required it.

It does not reach toward the women picking through rubble.

It was never meant to.

[Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar]

Why was Jason Arday's plagiarism a front-page story, and not Johann Hari's? Or Dr William O'Reilly's?

Because when white people do wrong, they're seen as individuals, and not stand-ins for their entire race.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This paragraph by Haruki Murakami hits hard:

“Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

— Leo Tolstoy

[Talal Al-Rashoud طلال الرشود @tsalrashoud]

Regimes don’t drink water, people do. Destroying the only water source of an entire population is a genocidal act, yet this man readily justifies it.

[No one @Signed_out_]

AI loves to foster.

[Ghias El Yafi @YafiGhias]

هذا هو الرقي الذي يريد #ترامب وكل من وقف معه محوه عن الوجود.

[No one @Signed_out_]

"Democracy is Coming"
Huda Lutfi, 2008

[No one @Signed_out_]

I want to go home, but home is a moment in time and not a place.
To be a stranger in this timeline.

[No one @Signed_out_]

Listening to @jonstewart on @Trevornoah podcast, saying the most sensible things ever. Most touching for me personally were conversations around home, diaspora, and ancestral homes...and I couldn't agree more. Worth a listen.

[No one @Signed_out_]

"Can the sun lie? [...] though the sun does not lie, the liar may use the sun as a tool [...] let us then be aware of the liar who lies in the name of the sun"
https://t.co/ICsS6udsQZ

[No one @Signed_out_]

Immanuel Wallerstein on the structural crisis of world systems.

https://t.co/iVpB5sQIFf

[No one @Signed_out_]

"...Many people’s incapacity to desire beyond the options provided by extractivist capitalism is due to the fact that we have come to valorize individuality [...] leaving us disconnected from each other and from reality. "

https://t.co/eGVW8J60Lw

[No one @Signed_out_]

"I have seen this film before, and I didn't like the ending"

[No one @Signed_out_]

https://t.co/uJyLSzpLB9

[No one @Signed_out_]

لسنا أكثر إنسانية من الغرب، إنسانيتنا - كإنسانيتهم - مؤدلجة
ومثلهم أحيانا نقف مع الحق، أحيانا نحيد عنه، وأحيانا...بل كثيرا نقف مع الباطل