We’ve been truely thick… unable to understand the obvious. but it’s dawning on me. so let me explain:
They dont have to be careful what they do, who they kill or what they destroy,
but we have to be very very careful what we say about it.
we live in societies that care more about scrutinising what we say than scrutinising what they do.
They can act monstrously
but we have to be very very careful how to spell monstruously. (Have i made a spelling mistake here? oh my god maybe. what a horror. enough to make any decent person forget that we are talking

re: #KhaledSabsabi, but also every Arab being currently the target of discrimination and marginalisation.
Let's face it: As historically colonised people, an important part of the Arab's sense of dignity (in its Kantian meaning) is structured around the opposition to zionist colonialism. Now that this zionist colonialism has succeeded in becoming an orthodoxy (in Bourdieu's sense) in the West, it means very simply that Arab dignity in the colonial West is illegal. full stop. That has always been there but it is becoming way more explicit now.

This week i presented the keynote for the Australian Anthropological Society - AAS annual conference. My paper dealt with a question I have been slowly developing for some time now: what is the nature of Israel's relation to the west within the western colonial project? To do so, I argue that we need to explore the many strands of scholarship that help us understand the place of violence, and the modes of

Surprised, Outraged and Can’t Understand What is Going On
I used to have a ritualistic argument with my partner concerning her affective politics. Whether she is talking about coal mining, abortion, Zionist colonialism or opposition to bike lanes in the city, she always expresses her principled positions against right wing politics doused with a strong sense of outrage. ‘I can’t believe they still believe x or y!’, ‘how outrageous is it that they have voted for z!’, ‘how can they act against their own interest like this?!’ I, on the other hand, having

Thinking with Marx about fractions of capital, with Bourdieu about the field of power, and with George Steinmetz about the different forms of cultural capital that shape the field of colonial power, I've been asking the question: who has unleashed - please note I am not asking who has created, which requires a different answer - I am specifically interested in who has unleashed the colonial beast?
So far, I'm finding myself increasingly focusing on an assemblage of:
- economic forces with military and fossil fuel capital as their backbone

The civilised peaceful Westerner and the unhinged violent Zionist

Growing up in Beirut in a Christian and culturally conservative environment, I often heard racist and derogatory remarks made about Muslims.
At the same time, like many Christian families, my family and that of my friends had to deal, by necessity, with Muslim people.
One day, when I was six or seven, I was playing with my neighbour at their house when a long term acquaintance of his family, a Muslim merchant, visited on some business. When the merchant picked up my friend and started

I was struggling with whether it was legal for me to publish these paragraphs from the text that the Max Planck Society has put before the court to justify my sacking, but then my lawyers noted that they were in fact cut and pasted from a text already published on the Max Planck's website. Still, in case you don't know, please be informed:
"The Max Planck Society attaches great importance to close cooperation with partners in Israel, the world's leading science and research nation. Its institutes maintain more than 90 collaborations with six

From presentation at the University of Bologna yesterday
“The equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism has become an increasingly central, if not the most central, ideological feature of Western/Zionist colonialism today. This equation is so obviously superficial, incoherent and untenable intellectually that it knows it has to protect itself against any thought that thrives on empirical proof, coherence, and rigour. As such it develops a particular enmity towards critical social and historical knowledge which it aims to devalorise. It also

In 2006-2010 I initiated a series of talks and pieces of writing about 'exterminability': the way societies prepare themselves to accept the extermination of others. I took as my starting point Etienne Balibar's comment that:
What is strikingly similar in Arendt and Foucault …, is the fact that neither of them believes that processes of mass extermination, or more generally elimination, ever were possible in history, especially in Modern history … without their victims being so to speak prepared for elimination, i.e. progressively and institutionally

Germany seems to be hit by a plague of ‘antisemitism’ virus. But it’s a totally new variant of the virus, discovered recently by Zionist scientists. Let’s call it antisemitism-z. It works very differently from the earlier and still present variant. Unlike the latter which affected mainly Jewish people and led to them being violently attacked, discriminated against, thrown out of their jobs, having their shops destroyed and their lives taken away, the new ‘antisemitism-z’ works differently.
First, it doesn’t affect all Jews, but only zionists.

I really dislike ethno-nationalist states, and particularly colonially implanted ethno-nationalist states. They are the ones who have a long history of racial hatred, of censoring and burning books, of discriminating and burning stores, and putting peoples in concentration camps. Murderous, land stealing, colonially implanted ethno-nationalist states are seriously unlikeable. I really hate them.
But, I have never called for even disliking, let alone hating, Jews. Like Muslims, Christians, Greek, Lebanese or Chinese, in this regard there are some

And now Genocide is not Genocide
brutal inhumanity is not brutal inhumanity
and moral bankruptcy is not moral bankruptcy

Continuing a story I began telling in 2010: Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine;
I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians;
They also explained to me that ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing.

Rushdie and I
Phase 1 - I loved Midnight Children and thought it was the best thing that ever happened to English literature
Phase 2 - I loved the Satanic Verses even more than I loved Midnight Children, not because I thought it was 'objectively' a better novel, but because it was closer to my diasporic postcolonial preoccupations. It was and still is truely amazing in terms of thinking the post colonial encounter between the west and its immigrants.
Phase 3 - Facing Khomeini's fatwa part one: outrage. the idea that a writer can be silenced with a

A young reporter asked me what I thought of the racialised way in which so many reporters are speaking about the Ukraine war and the Ukrainian refugees:

‘When western reporters in Ukraine say ‘this shouldn’t be happening here, this is a western civilised culture’ they know what they are talking about. Among many things, western colonialism involved relegating war, violence, and greedy and aggressive exploitation of people and nature to the Third World so as to enjoy more civilised conditions in the metropolis. Every peaceful civilised cup of tea in