“I don’t have to post about my outrage. Neither do you,” said the title of an opinion essay in The New York Times from October 2023. The essayist had a pretty straightforward argument. Posting your outrage is reductive, because it trivializes the uncertainty and heft of complicated moral issues. Taking a stand on social media reduces complex problems to facile binaries.

So, what is an appropriate social media reaction in this moment? Is satire acceptable? How can you weaponize online humor to expose the internal contradictions of Israel’s US-funded brutalities in Gaza?

I sat down yesterday with preeminent posters Dril and Derek to talk about what it means to post through a morally and politically charged moment. An excerpt of our conversation is included below, or you can listen to it in its entirety, unedited for your purest enjoyment.

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Earlier this week, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik released a statement slamming Harvard University as a “disgraced bastion of antisemitism.” In case you need a refresher, Stefanik is the politician who a month or so ago fiercely questioned the presidents of top American universities. During a hearing before the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Stefanik’s 15 minutes of fame came when she partook in a highly antagonistic exchange with each president, asking them whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s code of conduct.

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— Rain, Resident Evil (2002)

In modern popular culture, zombies are a beloved category of creatures. They are commonly represented as corpses reanimated by magic, witchcraft, scientific mischief, or technological malfeasance. Experientially and agentially hollowed out, they behave like us in many ways and might even look like us, but they have no interio…

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A friend once joked that I’m bad at deescalating things on Twitter because I engage with anything stupid. That’s certainly true. For the last day or so I’ve been locked into a mindless debate where all sorts of charges have been levied against me—that I’m a liberal, that I use my Iranianness as a cudgel, that I support Israel, that I’m an apologist for American imperialism, and that, once more, I’m a liberal for doing so. This all started because I said—in the characteristically somber way that I say things these days—that the US and Israel are seeking to provoke Iran into a region-wide conflict, which would invariably result in the death and displacement of untold numbers. I expressed despair and dismay over this prospect, especially since my mother lives in Iran, and having lost one parent to US sanctions, I’m not keen to lose another one to US wars.

However, the internet did its thing and within a night these sentiments were somehow twisted as opposition to liberatory resistance and support for the continued slaughter of Palestinians. Essentially, an anti-war sentiment was repackaged as support for American militarism. So, instead of wasting another day on Twitter, I think it’s fitting to address a simple question: Does being anti-war equate to opposing the liberation of the oppressed?

The answer is an emphatic no. I’m not a pacifist, but even pacifism does not entail passivism. Likewise, being anti-war does not commit you to the requirement that you sit back and let the powerful terrorize the oppressed. To the contrary, being anti-war commits you to the requirement that you work to create conditions that would allow the oppressed to defend themselves—conditions that would ultimately render unnecessary the need for violent self-defense in the first place.

Furthermore, it is possible to acknowledge the gore and horror of war, even within the framework of liberatory violence, while still asserting that violence can be a justified means to advance the ideal of a just world. This is the position that I maintain—that uncivil and violent resistance are, in some contexts, critical elements of resisting one’s oppressor. At the same time, much like Edward Said, I also do not believe in what he once called “the purifying power of violence,” or the notion that violence will cleanse the earth of all evil. Acts of violence are often ugly, and ugliness tends to reproduce ugliness. Nevertheless, when all nonviolent means have been exhausted, violence may become the only recourse for the oppressed.

The internet is an ecosystem that fosters pointless disagreement, especially amongst people that otherwise might agree on many fundamental issues. Nonetheless, I was surprised  by the reaction that my antiwar stance produced amongst certain segments of the so-called Online Left. Once more, being anti-war does not commit one to a blind opposition to all warfare, especially when force is employed in the service of breaking the oppressor’s rod. This is why I was taken aback by the excitement amongst certain Western observers who insist that war is a positive development—rather than a necessary one—in the pursuit of liberation. Violence of the oppressed is not an end in itself, but rather a utilitarian violence that seeks to lay bare the internal fragility of an order built upon the domination of one group by another. Its role has to be understood and appreciated within context, but it is not a spectator sport to be enjoyed; it is the type of violence that burdens the oppressed and materially and psychologically exacts a steep price. 

Those amongst us who have generationally endured the terrors of war are entirely justified in recoiling with horror at the prospect of more conflict, more death, more destruction. This does not negate, either practically or theoretically, the recognition that violence can serve a liberatory purpose. It also doesn’t undermine the understanding that such modes of violence arise in response to the violence inflicted by the powerful. Rather, this horror expresses something deeply human–the ability to appreciate the ugliness of war, grieve its victims, and bemoan a world that forces upon us a tradeoff between dramatic displays of violence and a flicker of hope for liberation.

“[T]he tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.”

- Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé (2015)

In 2010, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway published a book called Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. The book investigates the actions of a powerful and conservative group of scientists, identified by the authors as “merchants of doubt.” Typically, we associate scientists with their dedication to uncovering facts about the world. They formulate hypotheses, seek evidence, and, based on the solidity and consistency of collected evidence, proceed to confirm or refute their initial assumptions. This is the scientific process as we understand it at the most rudimentary level. The product of this process, we believe, is truth. However, the scientists who Oreskes and Conway scrutinized in their book were offering a different product.

Their commodity was doubt. Recruited by multi-billion dollar industries, these scientists were tasked with merchandising doubt in an effort to suppress scientific facts. For instance, the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking as early as 1953. By the 1960s, the scientific community had reached a consensus on the matter. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the tobacco industry began to lose cases in court, and not until 2009 that the U.S. Congress finally authorized the FDA to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug. Why did it take so long, one might wonder? Because, while doubt is crucial to the scientific process, it can also be taken out of context to “create the impression that everything is unresolved.” That is what these merchants were selling. They manufactured doubt in order to weaken the truth.

This article isn’t about the tobacco industry. Rather, I want to talk about the merchandising of another product that, much like doubt, can create the impression that everything is uncertain, complicated, and therefore unresolvable. This product is nuance. In the West, particularly in America, the merchants of nuance operate to obscure one particular issue–the issue of Palestine. Much in the ways that merchants of doubt produced studies casting doubt on the harms of tobacco or the risks of global warming, Western commentators have become merchants of nuance, insisting again and again that Palestine is an issue too complicated and multifaceted to either understand or to solve.

The Nuance Industry

The merchants of nuance often disagree on important topics. Some of them believe that a woman’s right to choose is sacrosanct, while others vociferously maintain that abortion is an eternal sin. Some believe gun laws are too permissive in the US, while others maintain that the right to possess firearms is a constitutionally enshrined one. Some believe that climate change is an existential threat to the future of our planet, while others maintain it is an exaggerated issue. In short, merchants of nuance often disagree on important and hefty questions. In spite of such profound disagreements, they are unified in one unshakable and core commitment. They all subscribe to the belief that the ongoing moral and political catastrophe in Palestine is really, really nuanced and complicated.

They are encouraged to do so in part because the nuance industry is a highly lucrative field of employment. The professional class in the nuance industry comprises a splendid array of esteemed practitioners from various personal and professional backgrounds. Some accomplished journalists belong to this class, as well as popular politicians. Barack Obama is part of this industry, as are many of his colleagues in the Democratic Caucus, including the progressive Bernie Sanders. The likes of David Brooks, the famous political commentator and sandwich connoisseur, are also employed within the nuance industry. 

According to the merchants of nuance, it is the mark of a good thinker to be able to see subtle differences and complexities where others see stark juxtapositions of right and wrong, good and bad, truth and falsity. The nuanced thinker, on the other hand, can recognize the fine-grained shades of difference between one situation and the next, details that ordinary people are bound to miss with the naked eye. 

The merchants of nuance, as the sociologist Kieran Healy observes, do this by insisting that they are making our understanding of social reality richer and more sophisticated by adding layers of complexity. The world is a complex and rich place, therefore all angles must be considered, all perspectives included, all eventualities gamed out before we can settle on a plan of action. The complexity of the world demands nuance, these people suggest.

According to Healy, however, the insistence on nuance is often just an intellectual cop out, a kind of holding maneuver:

It is what one does when faced with a question for which one does not yet have a compelling or interesting answer. Thinking up compelling or interesting ideas is difficult, so it is often easier to embrace complexity than to cut through it.

Healy’s analysis primarily focuses on exploring the role of nuance in constructing good theories, especially in the social sciences. But I think his arguments—ultimately yielding the provocative conclusion “fuck nuance”—are salient to understanding how simple observations in many scenarios can be rejected under the guise of demanding nuanced explanations.

Merchants of nuance, according to Healy, can inhibit theoretical clarity in three ways. These are the tricks and traps that they employ to obstruct access to the truth. First, there is the nuance of the fine-grain, where simplicity is rejected in favor of increased detail and accuracy. Second, there is the nuance of the conceptual framework, where theory is continually expanded to the point where it becomes impervious to empirical challenges. Lastly, there is the nuance of the connoisseur, where nuance is celebrated as a unique sensitivity to the richness and texture of social reality; a skill reserved for the select few and deemed inaccessible to the everyday person. Examples of these nuance traps can be identified in much of the contemporary mainstream discourse about Palestine, particularly in discussions about the ongoing violence against Gaza.

Complicating A Simple Story

First, there is the nuance of the fine-grain. This is where simplicity is continually rejected in favor of heightened accuracy and increased detail. This tactic is frequently employed in the mainstream discourse about Palestine. Pundits and politicians in the West insist that this is a very complicated situation, a delicate matter that is too nuanced for the average person to understand. “If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity,” former President Obama recently said in an interview. But what exactly is so complex about the slaughter of 25,000 people? It seems clear as day to many observers, including scholars of the Holocaust, that what we are witnessing is a genocide in process. Complexity is not always the enemy of clarity, but invocations to “an admission of complexity” are too often employed these days to defend the indefensible. Ultimately, these are moral holding maneuvers, allowing the powerful to shield themselves from public accountability. 

Second, there is the nuance of the conceptual framework, where you complicate a theory so much that it is divorced from reality and thereby becomes unresponsive to real-world challenges. In regards to the Palestine question, this effort has been ongoing for decades. Writing in 1984, Edward Said warned about a “disciplinary communications apparatus” that both naturalizes Israel’s day-to-day conduct and punishes those who seek to report on the facts. Such frameworks have grown so expansively and intricately in recent years that any criticism of the Israeli state is instantly muted through mechanisms that depress the voices of dissent–including firings of pro-Palestine activists, anti-BDS legislation, or European laws that criminalize criticisms of Israel as attacks on the memory of the Holocaust.

As regards the latter, consider the ways that Israel’s actions are so often placed under what Masha Gessen calls “the shadow of the Holocaust.” “Israel has waged an incredibly successful campaign in setting the Holocaust outside of history by weaponizing the politics of memory,” Gessen said in a recent interview. Actions whose justifications fall outside of history, however, cannot be understood through historical analysis, or any kind of analysis that requires engaging with reality. As such, Israel can do as it pleases in the eyes of the West because its actions are always situated within complicated historical narratives that cannot be challenged through present-day, real-life grievances.

Lastly, there is the trap of the connoisseur, where experts insist that the average person cannot comprehend the nuances of some situation because they do not possess the same specialized intellectual sensitivity to nuance and complexity. “The intellectual poverty that would reduce human history to a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors is also just plain lazy. This part of the world is complicated,” Alexis Grenell wrote in The Nation. This is paradigmatic of the attitude that Western commentators often adopt toward the plight of Palestinians. “It’s too complicated, you wouldn’t get it!” Amongst Western observers, this has become the de facto justification for normalizing Israeli aggression. They routinely exclaim that the situation in Palestine is too complicated for the average person to understand. There’s a deliberate logic to this exercise. Invoking complexity positions you as an expert on some issue, but also intimidates the non-experts who do not possess the same sensitivity to the textured and multilayered complexities of the issue in question.

Against Nuance

Imagine you’re born into a city where the borders are completely sealed. Your access to the outside world is severely limited; you may die never having the opportunity to leave. Jobs are scarce in your city, and a blockade on trade and importation of key technologies has hollowed your city’s economy. These restrictions on movement also impede your access to healthcare and life-saving medicine. Effectively, you live in what is commonly described as an open-air prison. On top of it all, every now and then, an advanced militarized force enforcing this siege bombs your city into oblivion. They do this with total impunity. In fact, other countries give your captors funding and weapons to conduct military campaigns against you and the two other million people trapped in your city. Over the years, despite sporadic humanitarian resolutions, the international community has done little to alleviate your suffering. Astonishingly, when you try to shed light on your circumstances, international observers dismiss your pleas - after all, the situation is far too complex to be dealt with. 

Of course, what I’m asking you to picture here is the city of Gaza and the plight of its inhabitants. Likewise, the phenomenon that I have described—in which onlookers dismiss the gravity of an injustice by insisting that it is too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to simple moral claims—is the nuance-mongering and nuance-trapping that I described above. It is the unscientific insistence of Western commentators that Palestine is a complicated and multifaceted issue where demands for moral clarity, as one writer recently put it, undermine complexity. 

In a recent interview, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates noted that the situation in Palestine is often portrayed in the Western press as a complicated issue that requires years of advanced studies to fully understand. Direct experience, however, can very easily dislodge this elaborately constructed narrative. Having spent 10 days in the Occupied Territories, Coates was struck by a deep tension between representation and reality:

The most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand.

The tension that Coates is trying to articulate here–between what is real and what is represented–is not an accidental feature of how the West portrays Palestine. 

The insistence on complexity and nuance has been carefully crafted as a political ploy over the years. It is employed with the aim of punishing and intimidating challenges to the official narrative, which deflects criticism of Israel and its allies by appeals to nuance and complexity. It is questionable whether this narrative, which has lodged itself deeply into the psyche of many Westerners, can be dislodged anytime soon. At a minimum, however, we must reject the appeals to complexity and insist that the tale of Palestine is a straightforward story of dispossession, oppression, and genocidal violence.

2023 wasn’t a very good year for Joe Biden politically. After coming in at the start of the year with some real momentum from the 2022 midterms, he ended it in arguably the worst position of his tenure. His approval rating has reached all-time lows. At the time of this writing, his disapproval rating has never been higher. He regularly trails Trump in the polls, both nationally and in crucial swing states. For many on the left, this is clearly the result of one thing: his continued support for Israel’s war on Gaza. This is not true. Biden had been struggling for sometime before the events of October 7th and their aftermath. In fact, the primary reasons why he has been and remains so unpopular have nothing to do with his support for Israel or U.S. foreign policy at all. 

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In the hours immediately following the news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’ death, American liberals made a lot of threats about what they would do to prevent a third Trump appointee to the Supreme Court. The most threatening of such threats came from Reza Aslan, the Iranian American academic and former CNN host. “If they even try to replace RBG we burn the ent…

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I was very young when I lost my paternal grandfather. I have vague memories of perching on his lap when I was 3 or 4 years old, enchanted by the array of tricks and toys that he used to amuse me. He died shortly thereafter, though his presence cast a signifiant influence in my life as I grew up.

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***

“When Trump wins again and starts with another Muslim ban, you guys should be the first to be shipped out. Think that’s fair.”

“Don’t bitch if Biden loses and they start deporting Muslims.”

“Don’t ask for help when Trump deports you to the West Bank.”

“You can always self deport before Trump does it for you in January 2025.”

A few weeks ago, President Biden told reporters that there was no chance of a ceasefire in Gaza, even as the number of civilian deaths continued to steadily increase and as millions took to the streets to demand an end to the war. “None, no possibility!” he said. Angry, disheartened, disgusted, I did what I often do and took to social media, declaring my intent to persuade voters to withhold their support for Biden in the upcoming election. Within minutes, my mentions were flooded with some of the most virulent and racist comments I've encountered in over a decade on the platform, the examples above representing just a snapshot of the reactions to my post. All of them originated from users advocating for the reelection of Joe Biden, all of them, I would guess, people believing themselves to represent the antithesis of the brutish Islamophobia and xenophobia that marked the era of Donald Trump.

For over a month, Muslim Americans and their allies have beseeched the president to pursue a permanent ceasefire in Israel's ongoing war on Gaza. More than 15,000 Gazans have been killed as of this moment, with nearly 70% of the reported casualties women and children. Thousands more remain trapped under rubble. Access to water and electricity is highly restricted. Nearly 77% of Gazans have been displaced from their homes. Third party international observers have repeatedly referred to the situation as catastrophic, including the director of the World Health Organization (WHO). Even Israeli scholars of the Holocaust have described the war on Gaza as genocidal. Despite mounting evidence of Israel’s unprecedented targeting of civilians, the Biden administration has not only dismissed the calls for a lasting ceasefire, but has also cast doubts on the number of the dead in Gaza. While a fragile temporary truce has been brokered by the Qatari government with the backing of American officials, the situation remains extremely explosive and Israel has already violated numerous terms of the ceasefire.

I was not surprised by the replies to my tweet. In the last several years, the liberal electoral mantra has been a simple one: vote for us or else. Or else you will have to deal with our opponent, an unpredictable leader hell-bent on the destruction of your communities, of human rights, of the very foundation of democracy itself. They present this ultimatum to their critics as though the threat is new information, as if we do not know the stakes better than they do, as if we have not felt the same threats from both sides for years and years on end. 

Today that threat rings hollow for the Muslim-American community. For one, liberals have become increasingly reluctant to explain how exactly they differ from their opponents, especially on questions of foreign policy. Moreover, they often are insulted and incensed when confronted with justified criticisms of their party’s policies.

There is a growing tide of frustration against this attitude in the Muslim- and Arab-American community. In a video released in early November, Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian American representative in the United States Congress, accused Biden of supporting the genocide of Palestinians, cautioning the president that “the American people are not with you on this one. We will remember in 2024.”

The National Muslim Democratic Council, comprised of influential leaders from pivotal swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, called upon President Biden to exert his influence on Israel and facilitate a ceasefire. In their open letter titled "Ceasefire Ultimatum," party leaders and activists urged the White House to advocate for an immediate and meaningful end to hostilities. Otherwise, they would pledge to “mobilize Muslim, Arab, and allied voters to withhold endorsement, support, or votes for any candidate who did not advocate for a ceasefire and endorse the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian people.” 

This is no trivial warning, considering Michigan's slim 2.6 percent margin of victory in the 2020 election. The margins in other crucial states like Pennsylvania and Arizona were even narrower. With Biden securing the latter state by a mere 10,000 votes over Trump, these differences could easily reverse if Muslim voters choose to withhold their support. The letter's conclusion left no room for confusion. "It has become evident that our voices are being ignored, but our votes will not be. Simply put, as Gaza turns red, so could crucial battleground states.”

As I have watched the knee-jerk responses roll in from liberals, eager to blame the Muslim community for potential 2024 losses, I wanted to examine the ethics and the strategy of withholding the vote. For instance, are there good political reasons for Muslims Americans mobilizing to withhold the vote in next year’s presidential election? Could doing so potentially jeopardize the fate of American democracy? Is abandoning support for Biden a tactically rash and counterproductive response to the situation in Gaza? Would this make Muslim Americans worse off in the long run?

Liberals have long taken the support of Muslim and Arab Americans for granted, only engaging with our concerns when it serves their electoral interests. That’s why in 2024 I will be withholding my vote. While I live in a reliably blue state, I am mindful that minority coalitions constitute the voting blocs pivotal to the Democratic Party's success in swing states. In the upcoming election, my aim is to use my influence to mobilize Muslim and Arab voters to withhold their support for Biden's reelection. While this decision might be viewed as counterproductive, considering the risks of another Trump presidency, I believe it is both politically and morally justifiable.

The Political Argument

In many regards, a vote is an expressive gesture, a formal indication of choice with communicative and pragmatic intent. When we vote, we attempt to convey a message through choosing; either one of approval and affirmation, or conversely, of disapprobation and frustration with the status quo. In fact, such modes of expression are foundational to the well-being of a democracy, and an important reason why we participate in the electoral process to begin with—to remind the powerful that we exist and that our votes afford us an opportunity to demand accountability. In this sense, voting is one of the few ways through which ordinary people exercise political influence. It is our leverage, our insurance against political alienation and disenfranchisement, our way of signaling to the ruling classes that they have to heed our voices.

But a vote is not necessarily guaranteed - such is the nature of the democratic process. In a well-ordered democracy, voters have to be reasoned with and persuaded, and political debate is organized around competing preferences and ideals. A candidate might gain your confidence if they campaign on a set of convictions that are important to you. If they deliver on their campaign promises, and perform the duties of their office satisfactorily, they can subsequently petition for your vote once more. Otherwise, you have the right to redirect your vote toward other candidates, or withhold your vote altogether if none of your options are sufficiently compelling. In short, how we vote should not be constrained by the authority of prior norms or requirements. Rather, how and what we vote for is up for debate and contention. In normally functioning deliberative democracies, according to German philosopher Jürgen Harbermas, “no force except that of the better argument is exercised.” Likewise, in the American context, voters have to be persuaded to vote in a certain way, rather than being coerced or demanded to do so.

For this important reason, we should never uncritically and blindly pledge electoral allegiance to a single politician or political group. Doing so deprives us of our political bargaining rights, the collective power that the electoral process affords us to influence policymakers and their behaviors. In fact, demanding that a group votes in one way or another, regardless of their preferences, would be antithetical to the very ideals that liberals claim are going be compromised under a Trump presidency: the ability to choose freely and rationally from among a range of options without the threat of intimidation and force.

If we accept these democratic and deliberative principles, then the question is: has the Democratic Party presented compelling arguments to persuade Muslim Americans to once more vote for Joe Biden? Not really. In fact, the only argument I have seen thus far is as follows. While it might be true that Biden could do more to curtail Israel’s military aggression in Gaza, Muslim Americans are much better off under another Biden presidency than the reign of terror that Trump will invariably unleash on our communities. If we really value the safety of ourselves and our loved ones, party loyalists opine, then we should do our darnedest to thwart another Trump presidency. Are we so woefully amnesiac that we have forgotten the ordeal of the Muslim Ban? Do we really want to see what new cruelties Trump might unleash on us? Or are we so eager to get deported back to wherever it is we’ve all come from—probably some wasteland resembling Arrakis in the liberal imagination—that we are willing to bargain with the Devil that is Republicanism? 

So the critical consideration for Muslim Americans is whether it is prudent to withhold or redirect our votes, given the potential indirect consequences that could lead to even more hostile conditions for our existence. The liberal argument emphasizes that such a decision would be counterproductive to our political aims, as a Trump presidency is anticipated to be significantly more adversarial towards Muslim communities. Furthermore, the refusal to vote for Biden is an indirect vote for Trump, given the expected narrow margins, whose policies would also adversely affected other marginalized communities. Accordingly, not only is abandoning Biden counterproductive to the aims of Muslim voters, but doing so also exposes other vulnerable groups to risks of severe harm. This utilitarian sentiment was expressed angrily by one Twitter user in my replies:

“You don't want to vote thus resulting in Trump being re-elected, but I'm supposed be to sympathetic to your cause. Fuck that. If you don't understand voting for harm reduction, and that sometimes you have to vote to keep evil from taken [sic] hold, then I don't know to tell you”

The harm reduction claim has never seemed compelling to me, principally because such proclamations rarely make clear how harms are tallied and calculated. If the Muslim Ban is the primary harm that Muslim Americans must plug into their reduction calculus, then should they also account for the fact that the foundation for this policy was laid during the Obama presidency, when the Visa Waiver Improvement Program and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act was signed into law? What about immigration policy, where in the last few months the Biden administration has reactivated the mass deportations of asylum seekers? What about drone warfare, which in the last two decades has exacted an appalling toll on Muslim communities across the world? What about increased funding in military aid to Israel, which has emboldened the extremist factions in Israel to expand settlements and terrorize innocent Palestinians?

While pragmatists insist that voting should always promote the common good, they rarely specify whose common good they expect us to prioritize. If their claim is that it is more profitable to vote for Biden, then the burden is on them to present convincing arguments to that effect. Arguments that are grounded in realities of the present moment, that acknowledge the legitimate grievances that Muslim Americans have put forth in recent weeks, instead of trivializing such concerns by emphasizing some greater future evil. 

Electoral deliberation is a process in which good reasons must be offered in support of collective choices, but our choices do not have to have a desirable fit with the preferences of a particular group or politicians. In a well-ordered democracy, multiple conceptions of the good can contend for collective approval, and political negotiation is conducted through reasoned dialogue, instead of rhetoric that is intended to intimidate and silence justified demands for justice.

The Moral Argument  

History tends to judge favorably individuals who refuse to relinquish principle and integrity in the face of politically adverse conditions. But we also have certain duties toward society, arising from the recognition that our interconnectedness necessitates a commitment to collective wellbeing. So, while we might have good political reasons to resist the pressure to vote pragmatically, is doing so a morally sound choice? Or do we have an ethical duty to vote for the lesser evil when our choices are equally unappealing?

For those embracing a pragmatic perspective, the answer to this question is straightforward. Pragmatists contend that we do not inhabit a morally perfect world; rather, our moral choices are perpetually qualified and conditional, responsive to the situational demands that the world imposes on us. While there might be occasions when one can align their actions with their moral ideals, more often than not, our decisions involve navigating among undesirable options, discerning between lesser and greater evils. Furthermore, pragmatists argue that acting on feelings of anger towards a particular politician, while understandable, could taint the capacity for moral reasoning, leading to outcomes that might seriously harm the common good. Therefore, the pragmatic stance advocates voting for Biden in the upcoming election, as abstaining could, according to pragmatists, result in far greater harms—specifically, the reelection of Donald Trump.

While this line of reasoning might seem appealing, it would come across to most reasonable people as a non sequitur, since it shifts the focus from intrinsic to instrumental reasons for being angry at Biden. To clarify what I mean here, I want to draw on the work of the philosopher Amia Srinivisan, and her account of the aptness of anger as a response to instances of injustice. According to Srinivisan, the issue of whether an oppressed person’s anger is an apt response to injustice does not turn on consequences, good or bad. Anger can make the oppressed person worse off, but that is no reason for the angry person to suppress her anger and not act on it. Here’s an example that might make this distinction clearer. Suppose you discover your lover has been unfaithful to you. You confront the bastard, but in response to your anger, which is a wholly justified response to a moral violation, he says to you: ‘You shouldn’t get angry because this could make me cheat more, which is worse than what I am currently doing.’ Alternatively, he might tell you that breaking up with him could yield some very unpleasant outcomes, because you could potentially end up with an even more unfaithful lover. But now you have two reasons to be angry, according to Srinivasan, because two wrongs have been committed: first the betrayal of your trust, and second, the subsequent refusal to treat your anger as intrinsically legitimate. Your anger has been dismissed because it has been instrumentalized, reduced to the question of whether or not it’s a productive response to moral wrongdoing.

The pragmatists who urge us to vote for Biden, because our anger could make things worse, are akin to the unfaithful lover. Initially, they position themselves as well-meaning allies. They are concerned, they tell us, with our well-being and the interests of those who have been treated unjustly. They recognize the moral violation and injustice that we are trying to draw attention to—namely the genocide of Palestinians. But instead of demanding that the powerful shift courses in response to such injustices, the pragmatists tell us that acting on anger will ultimately worsen things. Clearly, there is something deeply morally insensitive in a response like this. On Srinivisan’s account, this way of reacting to injustice, which the anger of the oppressed seeks to draw attention toward, constitutes an additional wrong for two reasons. First, it shifts the burden of responsibility for fixing the problem from the politician to the voter. Second, it treats the injustice as a fixed fact, rather than a largely contingent feature of political decision-making.

Thus, the liberal exhortation to vote for Biden is social control masquerading as social concern. The demand that you should vote to improve your condition is not an expression of solidarity or moral concern. Rather, it is a masked attempt at stifling and repurposing your anger. You’re angry? Don’t boo; instead, vote. And vote for the politician that we are demanding you vote for. Otherwise you are an agent of your own misery, a catalyst for the fire that will burn down your own community. But once you’ve voted, do not expect immediate results. You have to bear in mind the practicalities of change-making, and ultimately learn to accept that things do not change as swiftly you might like. Wars happens and people die, and “that’s what war is,” as Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, said a couple of weeks back. As Srinivasan notes, this kind insistence on pragmatism is often defended by people like Kirby as simply stating the facts. But such responses fail to understand how the insistence on pragmatism itself can be oppressive, insofar as they obfuscate the fact that such injustices are entirely preventable.

The Limits of Pragmatism

Pragmatism is the liberal's default rationale for consistently opting for the lesser evil among equally unappealing choices. However, in the realm of electoral and political alliances, pragmatism is a double-edged sword. Over the last two decades, the Democratic Party has continuously assumed the support of Muslims and Arabs, treating our presence as purely instrumental. Repeatedly neglecting our concerns, the party has overlooked the nuances of our experiences and the urgency of our grievances. Yet, every few years, we are demanded to mobilize in support of lackluster politicians, with the admonition that refusing to uncritically fall in line could lead to seriously self-harming consequences.

Since the outset of the war on Gaza, the Biden administration has worked diligently to deliver billions in armaments to Israel. They have deployed warships to the eastern Mediterranean to bolster the Israeli military and intimidate Palestinians. Biden himself has said, in front of news cameras and the whole word, that he has “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” while the images that trickle out of Gaza paint a picture of untold suffering. His ambassador to the United Nations rejected calls for a ceasefire weeks ago and vetoed such resolutions. His State Department has repeatedly refused to describe the assault on Gaza as genocidal, claiming that any comparisons between Gaza and Ukraine are inappropriate.

While Democratic loyalists can continue to harangue Muslim activists about the perils of another Trump presidency, we have to enforce a limit to our willingness to ally ourselves with politicians who support genocide. We can no longer afford to suppress our anger. This is the moment where a line must be drawn in the sand, or else we risk losing both the integrity of our persons and the power of our votes. 15000 dead Palestinians, over 70000 of them children, should serve as a stark reminder that pragmatism has its limits, and that we have reached ours. 

When the news broke the other day that Tal Mitnick, an Israeli teenager from Tel Aviv, was refusing to enlist in there IDF and subsequently sentenced to 30 days in prison, the internet rushed to celebrate him as a saint. “He is hero,” wrote Ben Burgis in Jacobin. “In the long arc of history it’s peace activists like Tal Mitnick who’ll be remembered as the real heroes of this war,” said another commentator on Twitter.

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When former President Bill Clinton took the stage at the Democratic Convention in summer 2016, he had an important message for Muslim Americans. For months, Trump had been demonizing the Muslim community and vowing to impose severe restrictions on their rights to travel upon assuming office. The Democratic Party, therefore, had worked hard to present itself as inclusive and Islam-friendly alternative. It was now time to reaffirm this message of inclusivity at the Convention by parading a rainbow alliance of activists and lawmakers. But then came Bill Clinton on the second night. “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together.” 

Muslims across America cringed. Whether or not he had intended to, Bill Clinton had lapsed into a similar style of Trumpism that had horrified Muslims for nearly a year. The implication in Clinton’s statement was that Muslims are a class apart, which is exactly what the other guys were claiming. For Bill Clinton, it seemed like Muslim Americans’ right to be in America was predicated on an allegiance to counter-terrorism and national security; they must prove that they are good Muslims, in other words. The warm welcome the Clintons were offering into the mainstream of the Democratic coalition was, it turned out, conditional. 

Muslims did not have a chance to make a future with the Clintons, but within hours of Trump’s election, liberals took their side against Trump. They marched in the streets to protest the Islamophobes in the new administration and made their way to airports across the country to protest the infamous “Muslim ban.” This became one of Trump’s most egregious transgressions, one that liberals seized upon as a rallying cry, along with the atrocities committed against families on the border, or the gross mismanagement of the hurricane in Puerto Rico. For a brief moment, the liberals were the resistors, ready to challenge the new status quo. But it was not meant to last. 

***

A few years back an ex invited me to come home with her for the holidays and stay with her family—a white, wealthy family living in the suburbs of Seattle. The family was very pleasant to me, even welcoming on occasion, but things soured on the second night of our stay, when I inadvertently made my ex’s mother cry by floating the idea of visiting Iran with her daughter. “I just want my daughter to be safe,” she mumbled through the torrent of tears.  

Liberals are fascinating creatures. Through their actions and interactions, they promote themselves as allies, as friends of the oppressed, as staunch proponents of inclusion and diversity. If they are white, they recognize that whiteness is problematic, emblematic of privileges that they do not deserve, but have inherited through flukes of good fortune. They are willing to recognize their historical role as oppressors, as wrongfully privileged, yet they don’t do much to disavow the trappings of their privilege beyond performative gestures of allyship, for which they love to be praised. 

I have been thinking about that interaction recently, as I watch the way public opinion in liberal circles has started to shift with the advent of the genocidal assault on Gaza. Long gone is the protective, inclusive language of the Obama- and Trump-era liberals. Instead, the mask has fallen, the “in-this-house-we-love-refugees” signs are being taken down, the lines are being drawn. Behind the veil of inclusivity and civility lies an ever-present fear. 

***

On November 21st, a series of videos began circulating on Twitter featuring a gray-haired man in his mid-60s harassing a halal cart vendor in New York City. In the videos, recorded by the vendors over a two-week period, the man repeatedly asks questions like “Do you rape your daughter, like Mohammed did?” and “People who use the Qur’an as a toilet. Does it bother you?” The vendors urge the man to leave them alone, to which he responds, “But you’re a terrorist. You support terrorism.” 

That the man was Stuart Seldowitz, a former diplomat in the US government and an ex-advisor to former President Obama, was no surprise to many of us who are acquainted with the limits of Democratic liberalism. Here was a man in power who had been awarded a Superior Honor Award from the State Department multiple times, and who felt perfectly comfortable harassing Muslims in his neighborhood, until, of course, he was caught doing so on camera.  

When later interviewed about his comments, Seldowitz claimed that the vendors had refused to condemn the October 7th attacks on Israel and expressed support for Hamas, thereby “making [him] rather upset” and prompting his unhinged behavior. While Seldowitz incurred professional and legal consequences for his conduct—though it remains to be seen how severely he will be charged in court—his behavior was by no means an aberration from the norm.

Eve Gerber, the wife of an economics professor at Harvard and economic advisor to the Obama administration, was caught on video on October 14th berating a Harvard graduate student for wearing a keffiyeh. In the video, Gerber follows the person on a neighborhood sidewalk, before the camera captures her saying, “thank you for walking through the neighborhood and making families feel unsafe with your terrorist scarf.” When the video surfaced on Twitter a month later, Gerber posted an apology online.

On 10/14, after I overheard chants I found disturbing at a rally near my home, I spoke with a person on my block who I thought had come from that event. When the political argument escalated, I used indefensible words.

Note Gerber’s reliance here on the same emotional apologia that Seldowitz had used in his defense—she had been disturbed by some unseen and undocumented provocation and was therefore compelled to react so unpalatably. 

People like Robin DiAngelo, the famed white guru of antiracism, might claim that Seldowitz and Gerber are experiencing white fragility, a kind of defensive response to racial stress that can manifest in feelings of guilt and shame. But I don’t believe that is the case. To my mind, the kind of demonization of Muslims that both Gerber and Seldowitz brazenly displayed was not a bug, but rather a feature of their political worldview. As liberals have been confronted with actions that diverge from their prescribed norms of acceptable dissent, the conditional nature of their solidarity has become glaringly obvious. Out of the crooked timber of liberals’ humanity no straight thing has ever been made. Or, maybe more succinctly, scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. 

This is perhaps a jarring realization to grapple with. Many of us came of age politically during the ascendancy of the Obamas and the era of “Hope” and “Yes we can,” clinging tightly to the hope that liberalism could offer us a reprieve from the right-wing extremism of the Republican Party. But this is the real Democratic Party. The one whose leaders donned kente cloths and performatively kneeled in tribute to the victims of police killings to showcase their anti-Trumpism, while concurrently belittling the calls to defund the police. The one that passed the Crime Bill of 1994 and normalized the War on Terror. The one that expanded drone warfare and authorized extrajudicial killings of Muslim-American teens. The one whose leaders today question the cruelties and proportions of a genocidal war on Gaza, while demonizing anti-war activists as antisemites. This is the real Decmoratic Party, and the likes of Seldowtiz and Gerber merely represent the status quo within this institution. 

***

Since at least the 1979 Iranian revolution, the US foreign policy establishment has always regarded the Middle East as a troublesome territory. This is partially due to the history of regional resistance to the American empire and their key ally, Israel. As Arun Kundani notes, “a belief in an ‘Islamic threat’ has become a kind of collective unconscious of the US ruling elite.” In the final years of the Cold War, the Americans needed a new ideological bogeyman to maintain the ecosystem of fear that had prevailed upon the country during the postwar years. The Muslims and Arabs seemed like highly suitable candidates.1 

With the launch of the War on Terror, Islam was redefined as a specter haunting the world, an inherently fanatical ideology that sought to uproot and eradicate Western civilization. We were suddenly seen as uniquely prone to violence, and the vocabulary of ‘terrorism’ was selectively deployed to associate all representations of Islam and Muslim identities with violence.

Despite isolated instances of resistance, for the most part liberals have worked overtime to sanitize the drive to imperial expansion and violence in the name of defending liberal values. Take the buildup to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where liberal feminists played a central role in manufacturing cultural and political support. In fact, in the years since, some cultural commentators have dubbed the war in Afghanistan America’s first “feminist war,” wherein military conflict was constructed and promoted as women’s rights campaigns that would allow virtuous Westerners to save victimized Middle Eastern women from authoritarian structures. But liberal complicity in the institutional demonization of Muslims goes beyond redefining militarized violence as feminism. 

Like most political ideologies, liberalism is in part a cultural project that aims to uphold a certain way of life. In spite of its nominal commitments to inclusivity and cosmopolitanism, the liberal project, in its modern iteration, demands that all members of society integrate into Western values. This is what Bill Clinton was talking about at the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. What Clinton articulated on that night was a certain widespread liberal anxiety about the emergence of a politically engaged faction within the Democratic Party that is opposed to US hegemony and imperialism. This is why the likes of Rashida Tlaib are so estranged in the mainstream of their own parties. In the perception of average liberals, people like Tlaib are racialized subjects that can articulate a knowledge of how the empire destroys Brown and Black lives. This, however, eschews the liberal expectation of cultural and political subservience and homogeneity. 

It is my contention that today’s most zealous Islamphobes are not right-wing extremists. Rather, they are the liberals who spent the last few years performatively condemning Muslim-bashing. This is not, to my mind, a glitch in the liberal operational system. To the contrary, this is what so many Muslims and other racialized communities in the United States (and also in Europe) have long understood be the operating logic of liberal societies. That is why we often feel culturally, politically, and spiritually homeless in the Democratic Party. For decades, this institution has regarded us as interlopers, and has violently insisted that we reformulate our identities to conform to their expectations of the Good Muslim. The latest outbreaks of anti-Muslim vitriol are thereby not aberrations, but reactions to perceived challenges to the status quo. 

Audre Lorde famously told us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Likewise, we cannot hope to dismantle the empire by playing nice with its architects and operators and hoping to ideologically sway them with through civil words and acts. American liberals despise us, the Muslims and our communities, and it is time that we honestly admit as much.   

Most people are familiar with the George W. Bush shoeing incident. In December 2008, the outgoing U.S. president was in Baghdad on a surprise visit. In the middle of a news conference with the Iraqi Prime Minister, an angry journalist stood up. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” the man shouted in Arabic, before hurling his shoes at the American president. Bush successfully ducked both throws and tried to laugh the whole thing off in his characteristically buffoonish way. Nonetheless, the incident became a hugely publicized scandal, and came to symbolize not just the shortcomings of America's military efforts in the Middle East, but also the justified resentment harbored by many Iraqis toward the American government.

We are often told that rudeness and incivility have no place in political discourse, especially as tools of radical resistance. If you want to engage the powerful, you should do so politely and tactfully or risk being perceived as rude, which would undermine the willingness of your audience to work with you. After all, no one likes to be attacked and yelled at. When your opponents feel attacked, especially if these attacks are carried out in public, they will dig in their heels to defend themselves instead of seeking common ground. Rudeness is simply counterproductive, the politically privileged claim. As President Obama, the poster boy for political civility, once put the point in a commencement speech:

You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it.  You can question somebody’s views and their judgment without questioning their motives or their patriotism. Throwing around phrases like “socialists” and “Soviet-style takeover” and “fascist” and “right-wing nut” that may grab headlines, but it also has the effect of comparing our government, our political opponents, to authoritarian, even murderous regimes…The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise.

Being polite, according to Obama, is an essential lubricant for resolving political disagreements. If you can’t reach common ground on intransigent issues, then you just have to politely agree to disagree. But you don’t rock the boat when you disagree with someone. Doing so will capsize your argument.

Personally, I think this is all a crock of shit.

Political discourse is embedded in relations of power, and who can say what is a function of these processes. If you are powerful, you can say many things and get away with it. Conversely, if you are powerless, your words and actions are always subject to heightened scrutiny. Thus, you are perpetually urged to comport yourselves in manners that conform to mainstream expectations of propriety. Don’t be rancorous and bitter. Don’t be loud. Don’t boo and disrupt. Don’t rely on profanity to express yourself. And certainly don’t throw shoes at anyone, even if such actions are morally warranted. Always remember the Michelle Obama maxim: When they go low, you should go high.

But herein precisely lies the problem. Invocations to civility are a highly effective way of neutralizing and recasting legitimate grievances. When you say “be civil” to someone expressing legitimate grievances, you transform the conversation. You shift the burden of moral accountability from yourself onto the angry person. The uncivil now have to abide by your conversational norms or be chastised.

Rude radicals, on the other hand, don’t really give a shit about these norms. This category of speakers refuse to be constrained by expectations of custom and civility, because they understand that power is encoded in manners and conventional rituals of sociability. They are defiant in their attitudes and actions, insurgent in their critique of existing power relations. They are interested in unseating established norms, and recognize that civil discourse and both-sideism are tools that the powerful employ to preserve the status quo. Rude radicals understand that taking a principled stance is more important than maintaining pointless relationships with unprincipled oppressors. They don’t care about being polite, because politeness doesn’t have any strategic utility if your opponents are rigidly committed to the goal of destroying you.

The likes of Refaat Alareer—the Palestinian writer and professor who was last week assassinated in an Israeli airstrike—belong to this group. First and foremost, Refaat was an educator and a scholar; a man whose legacy will live forever through his writings and pedagogy. But many of us also knew Refaat through his online presence and his irreverent style of posting, wherein he combined wit and conviction to expose the brutalities of the Israeli occupation. Refaat held no punches, took no prisoners. From Wahajat Ali to Naomi Klein, he said what many of us would never have the courage and effrontery to say. He challenged the hypocrisy of the international community in its dogged refusal to extend to Palestinians the compassion they bountifully offer Israelis. He was no armed fighter, as one writer recently put it, but he was no spectator either. Instead, he fought against the monstrosities of the Israeli apartheid, and their western apologists, with his words and his pen. In part, this is because Refaat believed that “Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry,” thus making words an important resource in the toolkit of resisting the occupation.

This conviction was expressed powerfully in one of his final interviews, where he vowed that he would defend his people with nothing but a pen:

I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.

Refaat did throw the pen, boldly and defiantly, and is now among the more than 17,000 civilians killed by Israel in Gaza. While we will never hear Refaat speak again, an intellectual void that will forever remain unfilled, his voice will reverberate through the work of students and writers whom he trained and inspired.

Refaat was a model of struggle and resistance, the type of staunch and rude fighter that Israel dreads the most. A narrator whose pen is far mightier than his opponents’ swords. A radical whose bitter and irreverent irony exposes the absurd logic of settler-colonial violence. A solider whose spirit is unconquerable, because he knows history will judge him as the moral victor.

“Do not die before you become a worthy adversary,” the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani once said. Refaat was a worthy adversary, beyond any doubt, and his martyrdom is a testament to the spirit of his resistance, one that will live on to be told as a tale.

What do Susan Sarandon, Tom Cruise’s agent, and I all have in common? At first glance, very little. I was a researcher for a creative consulting firm, while Susan Sarandon is an Academy Award winning actress and Tom Cruise’s agent, Maha Dakhil, is Tom Cruise’s agent. But all three of us have incurred professional losses for one simple act: speaking up against Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, which, as of this moment, has ended over 20,000 Palestinian lives and displaced over 80% of Gaza’s population.

For nearly 14 years, I have been involved in pro-Palestine activism. Throughout these years, I have been vocal in my criticism of Israel’s institutionalized regime of apartheid, and the campaigns of unlawful military destruction that are the modus operandi of this oppressive institution. During this time, I’ve participated in public protests and teach-ins and put together fundraisers to support the work of organizations delivering aid to Palestinians. I am extremely proud of this work, especially as the chorus of support for Palestinian rights has grown multifold in the last decade. Like many others in the Palestine solidarity movement, I am also fully acquainted with the fact that activism around the issue of Palestine, especially in the United States and Europe, entails severe risks of professional and personal retribution. Over the years, I have gladly accepted such risks, because I believe they are negligible compared to the incalculable pain and suffering that Palestinians have generationally endured.

That said, we have entered an era of suppression and censorship that is far more organized and ruthless in its blacklisting, doxxing, and harassment of dissent than I have ever encountered before. I also believe that these campaigns of silencing are highly tactical and deliberate in their intent, insofar as they both rob Palestinians of the opportunity to narrate their experiences, but also stunt our collective capacity for understanding and appreciating their stories.

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February 2023 marked the 44^th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. As a kid growing up in Iran, my father often told me that he voted “No” in the 1979 referendum to create the Islamic Republic. Part of a small electorate who rejected the idea of a theocracy, he lamented the fervor with which many of his compatriots participated in the formation of …

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Hi all, this is Keyvan. You may know me as a Persian breakfast enthusiast from Twitter. Or you might not—even better. In a previous life I was an academic and primarily wrote about identity, personhood, and the nature of social practice. I left academia after my PhD to pursue a more financially practicable career, but have since continued to write about Iran, identity, and culture. Long story short, this is my Substack. I want to take a moment to briefly introduce the board themes of what I will be doing on this platform.

Most of my previous writing has revolved around Iran and American foreign policy toward Iran. I was born and grew up in Iran, and am always traversing the weird cultural and political dualism of living in the US whilst my family still lives in Iran. Naturally, this Substack will serve as a forum to continue writing on Iran-related themes, but it will also be a place for me to explore themes outside the politics of Iran and the Middle East. As I currently envision its structure and perimeters, my writings on this platform will be categorized into a couple of distinct (but at times overlapping) categories.

First, I will continue to write about Iran, but this will not be limited to present-day Iranian politics. I intend to use this venue to write about my own identity as an Iranian and a Muslim, and the experiences of Muslim Americans more broadly. Some of this will be political, insofar as Muslim identities are inherently politicized and political, but not necessarily so.

Second, I want to utilize this space to return to writing about social and political theory,—topics that animated so much of my academic research for the last decade. This is partially an attempt to post less on Twitter and write more in long-form, in addition to an experiment in making myself venture outside the borders of writing exclusively about American foreign policy.      

Unfortunately all of this will cost money. I intend to publish some things for free, but I want to offer the best representation of my work, which does require material incentive and support. You can encourage this endeavour for the small price of $5 per month, but if you can’t or are reluctant to, that’s fine too. You could probably get a pretty decent cup of coffee for $5, and I certainly won’t begrudge you for doing so. You can also support this endeavor more generously through gift subscriptions.

In any case, I hope you support this work and stick around. Hit the subscribe button below.

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