📘 I’ve signed with Routledge for my new book, Hormuz and the Geopolitics of Eurasian Energy Infrastructure, planned for spring 2027. From chokepoints to power grids, it explores how energy networks shape geopolitical risk. #EnergySecurity #Geopolitics stay tuned!

One of the main reasons why people want to be so cruel to @KatieZacharia is because she is pretty and White. White envy and pretty envy are real. She was obviously nervous during her first press briefing and it didn’t go well, but some of you were kinder to Lindsey Clancy. Let that sink in.

Breaking News: Anthropic said it halted potential plots by scientists who used its A.I. models to do research that could have helped develop biological weapons. nyti.ms/3V3epAE

I have to say, of all the signatures on that letter, Mumia's was the most puzzling to me. It is so contrary to his politics. Others on that list have wavered in the past—Davis endorsing Harris, for example; or Khalidi on multiple occasions—but I don't know an instance when Mumia did.

In the scandal of the Open Letter, the @guardian should do an investigation - given the following facts that have now emerged. 1. Mumia Abu-Jamal did not give consent for his signature on this letter. 2. Several initial signatories, such as Robin DG Kelley, have now retracted their signatures saying that the letter that was published was not what was shown to them. a. Why did the Guardian's editorial team not check to make sure that the signatures were accurate? They could have asked to see emails or - in the case of Mumia - letters to verify the signatures on such a consequential statement. b. Why did the Guardian not verify with the signatories that what they were publishing was indeed what the signatories had read? The @guardian is responsible for ensuring accuracy. It turns out that they let slip a poorly executed intelligence operation.

بچه‌ها من چکار کنم واسه یه کار پاره‌وقت؟ دارم دیوونه میشم از بی‌کاری و بی‌پولی... (به هشت ساعت کار روزانه نمیگن پاره وقت)

The longest apology for one of the most repressive governments in the world that I have ever read. My position is the letter's refusal, not every line of it, against this war and against the empire waging it, and equally against the repression and tyranny of the Islamic Republic, because neither commitment has ever bought silence about the other. I have my own disagreements with how the letter frames things, but they are disagreements within that refusal rather than objections to it. I hold it from somewhere, having lived under a gender apartheid state and remained subject to its reach for decades from exile, which is what transnational repression means in practice rather than in theory. That does not entitle me to speak for Iranians, who disagree with one another about nearly everything, but it does mean I recognize the shape of an argument that requires us to be one thing. @susanabulhawa cites confessions from detainees who admitted to working with #Mossad. I am not naive about #Israel's role in agitating, in January 2026 or before it, and I do not doubt that there are spies. But espionage is the default charge for anyone the state wants gone, and a televised confession from a system with nearly fifty years of extracting them tells us nothing about which of the two is standing in front of the camera. She then applies the American wrongful conviction rate to fifteen thousand political prisoners, arrives at six to nine hundred who deserve fairness, and leaves the remainder, presumably, to have earned what was done to them.She calls #Khamenei "the country's spiritual leader", where in fact he was the commander in chief who held the armed forces, appointed the judiciary and the #IRGC command, and authorized every crackdown since 1989. Calling that authority spiritual removes the chain of command from the sentence, and hands to one man a country's inner life that was never his to hold, since Iranians are Sunni, Kurdish and Baloch and Turkmen among them, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Baha'i and persecuted for it as a matter of policy, and in enormous and growing numbers not religious at all. She closes by writing that Iran could have bowed to empire as some of its neighbours did, and chose self-possession instead, but the "they" doing that choosing is the state, and the Iranians held in Evin are also "they," except that they did not choose it, they are held by it. The letter she is answering names the targeting of Kurds, Arabs, and Baloch alongside the scapegoating of Afghan migrants, and she passes over every word of it, because her argument only works if Iranians are a monolith, and we are not. She writes on colonialism, anti-imperialism, and racism while reproducing the epistemic ignorance of the Western intellectual left in a different voice, which is the orientalist lens still operating, since it has never required a white author, only the assumption that non-white populations arrive as blocs rather than as societies.

I'm struggling with this open letter, signed by people I admire deeply—individuals who've dedicated their lives to Black liberation and anti-colonial struggles. But I just can't reconcile my instinctive reaction to the letter with the respect I hold for the signatories. Prominent intellectuals in the imperial core are using their voice at this hour primarily to criticize a government under active bombardment. While I believe that no government is beyond reproach or criticism, I have a lot of questions and cautions about this open letter. The overall framing of is of two equally opposing sides—two blades of the same scissors. This is a wholly unfair representation of what is in reality a profound asymmetry of power. On one hand, a country that has been subjected to crippling, decades-long economic sanctions, now fighting kinetically an existential anti-imperial struggle; on the other hand is nuclear, AI-powered empire, with its inexhaustible money, munitions, supply lines, coalitions, surveillance, and near total grip on international political, legal, information, and economic infrastructure. The severity of the imperial onslaught seems to be minimized in the letter. This is perhaps for the sake of brevity, but it should not stand without critique. What the letter describes as "current, indiscriminate waves of US-Israeli military assaults" undersells what's actually happening in the "six months into a war". Unprovoked Tomahawk missiles and B-2 bombers that targeting a an elementary school that killed 180 children and teachers, the country's spiritual leader and his family, more than a third of the country's political, military, and scientific leadership, civilian infrastructure, including water, farmlands, electric grids and power plants, an unarmed navy ship at sea full of young cadets returning from a peacetime maritime exercise in international waters. This after decades of attacks that went unanswered by Iran, including Israel's repeated assassinations of Iranian scientists, assassination of Qasem Soleimani, strikes on Iranians generals in Syria, strike on Iranian consulate in Damascus, assassination of Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil; the US shot down civilian aircraft of Iran Air flight 655, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. There were endless cyber attacks, covert and overt naval sabotage and so much more—all of it without response from Tehran. The letter does not identify who the prisoners are or why they were arrested. In neglecting to do so, there is no engagement with the very real security threats, proven foreign interference, terrorism, and espionage, which Iranian authorities cite as reasons for some arrests and prosecutions. I have no doubt there are some who've been wrongly imprisoned, but we also know that many of those who were rounded up confessed to working with the Mossad, and recently a group who gruesomely disembowled a young reciter of the Quran are among those who are imprisoned. There are currently 2 million incarcerated people in the United States, the largest prison population anywhere on earth. It is estimated that 4-6% of them are innocent—that's 80,000-120,000, about two NFL stadiums full of innocent lives behind bars. Setting that percentage against Iran's estimated 15,000 political prisoners, that's roughly 600-900 individuals. They deserve fairness, but to center them in what is perhaps the most existential anti-colonial struggle of our lives feels misguided. I would also argue that comparing Iran's prisons with Israel's decades-long, systematic, colonial detention of indigenous Palestinians is another form of false equivalence. So is the comparison with America's ICE detentions, separation of families and loss of children in the process (who are most likely trafficked). It is not remotely fair to put a revolutionary government, barely a few decades out from under colonial boots and still under sanctions, in the same "carceral" category as two settler colonial states. One cannot ignore the enormous disparity of political, military, and historical circumstances. The people held in Iranian jails are overwhelmingly Iranian citizens, prosecuted under the state's own criminal and national security laws, regardless of whether one thinks the laws are unfair. Palestinians held in Israeli administrative detention are non-citizen subjects of a military occupation, detained and re-detained indefinitely under military decrees without charge or trial. People in US detentions are another category—non citizens held under civil immigration laws pending removal proceedings with access to immigration courts, however corrupt they may be. These are three distinct legal relationships—1) a state and it's own citizens; 2) a state and migrants crossing its borders, and; 3) an occupying power and a stateless occupied indigenous population. The letter collapses them all into a single architecture of "carceral states everywhere," creating an analysis that is not supported by the underlying facts. It creates rhetorical equivalence that treats "administrative detention," "political imprisonment," and "immigration detention" as though the political stakes of each were the same, when the questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and self-determination underneath them are not. The phrase that knocked me off balance was this: "...we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism." I note that @agent_of_change addressed this in a recent post, which he identified as the "load-bearing phrase" of the letter. Indeed, it does so much heavy lifting and I'm at a loss why the word "hollow" would have been inserted. It's so clearly deliberate, but why? How can Iran's insistence on sovereignty and dignity be called "hollow," despite the grave and terrible cost to themselves? They could have taken the easy path a long time ago and bowed to empire, like some of their Arab neighbors have done. They've chosen self-possession and loyalty to their ancestors and children instead. That can be called many things, but hollow is not it. theguardian.com/commentisfre…