Skip to main content

Posts

Follow Me !

When Fighting Antisemitism Risks Silencing Debate: Britain's IHRA Controversy and the Freedom to Question Power

  By Malik Mukhtar | Ainnbeen Can a definition designed to identify hatred become an instrument for policing political opinion? Britain's latest controversy over antisemitism in schools raises a question that reaches far beyond the classroom. There are few responsibilities more fundamental to an educational institution than protecting students from hatred, discrimination and intimidation. Antisemitism, like every other form of racism, deserves unequivocal condemnation. Jewish children and teachers must be able to study, work and participate in public life without fear of hostility because of their identity or religion. But an equally fundamental responsibility of education is to protect the freedom to question, examine, debate and challenge political power. What happens when these two responsibilities appear to collide? A growing controversy in England, following Sir David Bell's independent review into antisemitism in schools and colleges, has brought this question into ...
Recent posts

Strength in Diversity: The Contributions of American Muslims—and the Test of American Democracy

  A growing community is not a national threat. A citizen exercising democratic rights is not undermining democracy. As videos warning Americans about the growth of the Muslim population and its political influence circulate online, the debate deserves something more substantial than alarm, insinuation, or demographic fear: evidence, historical perspective, and a principled defence of American democracy. The United States has never been defined by a single ancestry, ethnicity, or religious tradition. Its enduring promise rests on the idea that people of different backgrounds can share a country, exercise equal rights, and contribute to a common future without surrendering their identities. American Muslims are part of that story. 1. A Growing Community, Not a Monolithic Bloc According to a September 2026 analysis by the Pew Research Center, approximately 5.5 million Muslims of all ages live in the United States , compared with an estimated 2.4 million in 2007. These figures d...

When Diplomacy Becomes a Filter: The Truth Washington May Never Have Heard About Gaza

  By Malik Mukhtar | A Voice for Gaza When reports of human suffering are altered, delayed, or buried, the damage extends beyond diplomatic procedure. It reaches the people whose lives depend on decisions made in distant capitals. The most dangerous silence is the one manufactured inside the corridors of power On October 8, 2026, an investigation published by The New York Times raised a disturbing question about the integrity of American diplomacy : What happens when the officials entrusted with reporting the facts begin filtering those facts through a political preference? The investigation alleged that David Milstein , a senior adviser to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, repeatedly suppressed, delayed, or substantially altered internal embassy reporting in ways that portrayed Benjamin Netanyahu’s government more favorably to Washington. The report drew on interviews with 15 current U.S. officials and nine former diplomats, alongside internal communications reviewed...

The Media Sold the War. We Watched It Happen.

What Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide reveals—and what the question of digital witnessing forces us to confront There is a disturbing question at the heart of the Gaza catastrophe that cannot be answered simply by asking what governments did, what armies did, or even what the media reported. There is another question: What did the world do while watching? Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, published by Pluto Press, approaches Gaza through the machinery of mainstream American media. His investigation examines how some of the most influential institutions in the Western information system—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC—framed the destruction of Gaza. It is an important question because wars are not fought only with weapons. They are also fought through language. Before bombs become statistics, they become headlines. Before civilian deaths become numbers, they become narratives. Before dest...

When a City Is Destroyed, What Exactly Is Being Killed?

Gaza is not only a story of buildings reduced to rubble. It is a story about what happens when the physical conditions of urban life—homes, hospitals, universities, roads, water systems, memory and community—are progressively dismantled. There is a word for the destruction of a city that captures something the language of “damage” cannot fully express: urbicide . The term is at the center of Mourad Benguita’s important 2025 research article, “Urbicide in Israel’s War on Gaza: Architecture of Erasure and the Unmaking of Urban Life (2023–2025),” published in Filistin Araştırmaları Dergisi / Bulletin of Palestine Studies . The article examines Gaza not simply as a battlefield but as an urban environment whose physical and social foundations have been subjected to extraordinary destruction. And this distinction matters. Because when a house collapses, we see a destroyed building. When an entire neighborhood disappears, we begin to see something else. When hospitals, schools, unive...

When the Soup Kitchens Begin to Die

There is a special kind of cruelty in watching not only a society collapse, but also the last institutions keeping it alive. For nearly three years, Gaza's humanitarian lifeline has increasingly been reduced to a queue for a single meal. Parents no longer ask their children what they would like to eat. They ask whether there will be anything to eat at all. Childhood has become measured not in birthdays, classrooms, or family gatherings, but in ration lines, empty cooking pots, and the uncertain arrival of humanitarian assistance. Now even those fragile lifelines are disappearing. The gradual closure and scaling back of World Central Kitchen (WCK) operations reflects a convergence of financial pressures, operational insecurity, and restrictions affecting humanitarian access. According to World Central Kitchen and the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, kitchens that once produced approximately one million meals each day have been progressively reduced, leaving only a han...