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By Malik Mukhtar (Full-Length Version with Mbembe Quotations) There are historical moments when the ordinary vocabulary of violence collapses . When “ conflict ,” “ occupation ,” and “ security ” no longer carry the weight required to explain what is unfolding before our eyes. Gaza is one such moment — a rupture in the moral architecture of the present. It is not simply a battlefield. It is an experiment in state-administered dying , in what Achille Mbembe named necropolitic s — the transformation of political power into the authority to dictate who may live and who must die. In Necropolitics (2003), Mbembe writes: “ The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides… in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics For Gaza, this is not theory. This is the daily grammar of existence. My book, Calculus of Survival: Necropolitics, Siege, and the Deionization of Life in Gaza , is situated squarely within this reality —...

(A response to Bret Stephens’ sermon on antisemitism, Nov. 11, 2025) Ah, Bret Stephens has spoken again — that weary high priest of moral panic and selective outrage. Once more, he descends from the pages of The New York Times , clutching the sacred scroll of victimhood in one hand and a mirror he refuses to look into with the other. This time, his sermon bears a familiar title — “Meet the New Antisemites, Same as the Old Antisemites.” Catchy. Biblical, even. Only problem? The real “old antisemites” are now wearing army uniforms with Hebrew lettering and dropping U.S.-financed bombs on Gaza — and Bret calls that “self-defense.” The Gospel According to Bret Bret laments Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes — the “Hitler fanboy,” as he calls him — as proof that antisemitism is seeping back through the cracks of American conservatism. And he’s right — it is . Only, one wonders why Bret’s moral radar detects every droplet of hate in American discourse but goes blind to th...

  n R It was not the torture that shocked Israel. It was the fact that someone leaked it. Welcome to Sde Teiman — the desert detention camp that became a mirror to Israel’s moral decay, and to the world’s selective blindness. The Scene of the Crime The story begins, like most horror stories do these days, with a camera. On July 5, 2024, security footage inside the Sde Teiman military base caught what it was never meant to record: a Palestinian prisoner, blindfolded, bound, and dragged across the floor by Israeli soldiers. Moments later, the soldiers raised shields to block the camera — and behind that human wall, the real Israel revealed itself. When the shields dropped , the man lay broken: seven fractured ribs, a punctured lung, and a torn rectum so severe it required surgery and a colostomy. The anatomy of cruelty was complete. The Scandal That Wasn’t You would think such a crime would set off national outrage. But in Israel’s political universe , torture is an...

  Washington, D.C. — What a proud moment for Indian capitalism! The jewel of Indian industry — Tata — has finally earned its place in the pantheon of global enablers of apartheid. From salt to steel, and now from philanthropy to phosphorus bombs , Tata has proven that conscience is just bad for business. A new report by the U.S.-based South Asian collective Salam , titled “Architects of Occupation: The Tata Group, Indian Capital, and the India-Israel Alliance,” lays it out without the usual PR perfume: Tata is “fundamentally embedded in the architecture of occupation, surveillance, and dispossession.” That’s right — the “salt of the nation” is now the circuitry of apartheid. 🪖 The Hardware of Genocide — Now Made in India According to the report, Tata Advanced Systems Ltd (TASL) doesn’t just make airplanes — it manufactures the wings of death . The company provides parts for every new F-16 fighter jet and fuselages for all AH-64 Apache helicopters — the same machines th...

  When Zohran Mamdani stood before a roaring crowd on election night and declared, “ New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he wasn’t speaking in metaphor. He was naming a truth — one you can measure in numbers, taste in food, hear in accents, and see in every subway car at dawn. A City of Immigrants — Literally According to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, nearly 3.1 million New Yorkers — about 38% of the city’s total population — were born outside the United States. That means every third person you pass on a crowded sidewalk once began life across an ocean. The phrase is no hyperbole: this is simply who we are . The City Runs Because They Do Immigrants don’t merely live in New York — they keep it running : They make up a large share of the city’s healthcare, food-service, transportation and building-services workforce, keeping hospitals, resta...

  When Zohran Mamdani stood before a roaring crowd and declared, “ No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election,” he wasn’t just celebrating victory — he was delivering a eulogy for a long, poisonous political playbook. Because let’s face it — Islamophobia has never just been about prejudice. It’s been a strategy — polished, funded, and weaponized into one of the most successful vote-getting formulas in modern politics. The Machinery of Fear The arithmetic is simple — and sinister . Take a minority that makes up barely 2% of the U.S. population . Turn them into the symbolic threat for the other 98%. Feed that fear with millions of dollars , wrap it in the flag , and sell it as “security. ” According to a 2021 CAIR report , more than $105 million was funneled to just 26 anti-Muslim organizations between 2017 and 2019 — money laundered through “ mainstream charitable ” institutions. That’s not democracy in action. That’...

  Thirty years ago, Yitzhak Rabin stood before a crowd in Tel Aviv and spoke of peace — weary, pragmatic, unsentimental peace. Minutes later, the man who saw peace as security, not surrender , was shot by one who saw God as a weapon . That was the night the State of Israel shot itself in the heart and called it “defense.” Rabin’s Israel was a nation wrestling with its conscience. He believed in strength, but not sanctified violence ; in separation, not supremacy . His realism was unsparing — he trusted no one, least of Al Arafat — yet he understood that endless occupation would rot Israel from within . “Security,” for Rabin, meant protecting Israel’s soul as much as its borders . Then came Netanyahu — the anti-Rabin in every sense . Where Rabin saw security as a path to coexistence , Netanyahu redefined it as perpetual siege. Where Rabin’s integrity made him resign over a forgotten bank account , Netanyahu’s corruption became a leadership credential . Rabin stood on a pla...

  By Malik Mukhtar There are reports that reveal. And then there are reports that confess. In 2012, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) released — under court order — a document so meticulous, so mathematically obscene, that it deserves to be archived not in a defense ministry, but in a museum of moral collapse. It was called the “Red Lines” report — a bureaucratic manual for managing the metabolism of an entire population. The premise was simple: if you can’t exterminate, calibrate. Control not the mind or the heart — but the stomach. The report calculated the exact number of calories a human in Gaza could consume without dying — but not enough to live with dignity. 2,279 calories per person per day, multiplied by population, divided by blockade, adjusted for punishment. Not a humanitarian plan, but a dietary occupation. “We are not starving them,” officials claimed, “We are putting them on a diet.” History will remember this ...

  “ The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” — Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” There are philosophies that dissect history, and there are philosophies that bleed through it. Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics belongs to the latter — it is not an academic exercise, but a diagnosis of the world’s moral decay. In his words, modern sovereignty is no longer about governing life — it is about managing death . It decides who is allowed to breathe, who must suffocate, and who will exist in the space between. Nowhere is this calculus of death more visible, more technologically refined, and more ethically bankrupt than in Palestine . The siege of Gaza has transformed necropolitics from theory into geography — a place where the architecture of control and the arithmetic of survival intersect. The Right to Kill, the Duty to Let Die In Necropolitics , Mbembe extends Foucault’s biopower — the power to “...