Some quick thoughts on today’s statement by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan:

Of the 12 ICC cases currently under investigation, 5 are in Africa. Of the 5 concluded investigations, 4 are in Africa. Every defendant convicted by the ICC thus far is African. As noted by international lawyers and political scientists over the past decade, the ICC is widely seen as biased at best. At worst, its critics charge the ICC is hardly fit for purpose in successfully prosecuting war criminals outside of the African continent, or even attempting to prosecute the crimes of neocolonial proxies such as Saudi Arabia (much less their benefactors in the US, the UK, and other NATO-aligned nations).

The warrant on Netanyahu and Gallant may be groundbreaking in terms of symbolism, but the warrant itself has no teeth without willingness on the part of the US (which is not an ICC signatory and has flatly refused to arrest either), or the UK (which is an ICC signatory, and will not clarify if they will comply). Neither is it especially meaningful if the states which directly supply Israel’s arms and financing face no criminal repercussions.

Not to understate the gravity of the warrant, of course. But without the stated willingness of ICC signatories to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant if they land on or fly over those countries, the warrant is a weightless statement. And given that none of Israel’s major financial and military partners appears to be willing to restrict the flow (much less stanch it altogether), the ICJ’s genocide investigation will conclude years after Israel either completes its objectives or withdraws on terms unimpeded by the ICJ’s ruling this past May.

In other words, without the power of enforcement, what good are human rights laws but a polite suggestion to Israel?

Yesterday, the US House of Representatives voted to pass House Resolution 1449, titled “Condemning the global rise of antisemitism and calling upon countries and international bodies to counter antisemitism.” However unobjectionable the language of the bill’s title might be, the contents of the bill are certainly alarming. Included in the preamble to the resolution were the following lines:

Whereas, in 2016, the 31 member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted a legally nonbinding “working definition” of antisemitism, an important internationally recognized tool to increase understanding of antisemitism;

Whereas, on May 25, 2023, the White House issued the United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, making clear that the fight against antisemitism is a national, bipartisan priority that must be successfully conducted through a whole-of-government-and-society approach;

The “working definition” of antisemitism, as drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, has for years functioned as a tool to polarize public opinion on Israel, to smear the Palestinian resistance as inherently antisemitic, and to broadly define any substantive criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Contained within the IHRA’s working definition are the following actions considered to be examples of antisemitism: 

• Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Moreover, the IHRA asserts Antisemitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law (for example, denial of the Holocaust or distribution of antisemitic materials in some countries). For countries such as Canada and the UK, which have laws against hate speech that can result in prison sentencing, folding the IHRA guidelines into criminal law can effectively mean that criticizing Israel for its genocidal campaign in Gaza must come with a great deal of prevarication and throat-clearing in order to avoid legal repercussions.

In the US, where hate speech that doesn’t accompany a criminal act is protected under the First Amendment, the IHRA working definition can still have a pronounced chilling effect. H.R.6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 (which passed the House in May of last year), also relies on the IHRA working definition. When applied to Title VI investigations of discrimination at colleges and universities, could result in higher learning institutions losing their federal funding if they aren’t sufficiently punitive of students and faculty who criticize Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities. 

And it isn’t as if the IHRA working definition is the sole definition that the global political community can draw from, in creating or revising legislation to protect Jewish people from antisemitic bigotry and violence. An alternative framework was created by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in 2021, to decouple Judaism and Jewishness from the state of Israel. It was brushed aside by Congress, and has gone almost unacknowledged in most Western countries. Per international politics writer Sana Saeed:

Despite opposition by the ACLU, free speech organizations such as PEN, and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, H.R.6090 passed the House, with only 70 Democrats and 21 Republicans voting against the measure. Its Senate counterpart S.4127, will very likely pass, and be signed by Joe Biden into law. 

The passage of H.R.1449 came at a rather inauspicious time for American opposition to the genocide in Gaza, as the very same day, Senator Bernie Sanders’ motions to curtail the flow of munitions to Israel were overwhelmingly defeated. The Senate’s rejection of an even slight restriction on US military support comes in the wake of President Biden’s failure to offer any punitive measures, recriminations, or even mild criticism for Israel having blown past its 30-day deadline to cease the blockading of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Which not only gave further lie to the myth that Biden and Kamala Harris are “working tirelessly” towards a ceasefire, but brought yet another weasel-faced statement from House representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

AOC, by the way, voted for H.R.1449.

After a full day of the US political machinery strangling opposition to the genocide in Gaza, both on Capitol Hill and within the UN assembly, and for all of the lofty words and ink spilled within the borders of Israel’s largest benefactor on the matter of human rights, the genocide continues unabated nonetheless.

At this morning’s UN Security council meeting, members voted on a draft resolution moved by its 10 elected members (E10). The resolution called for an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire by all parties, and in the subsequent paragraph, called for the Hamas-led coalition to immediately and unconditionally release of all hostages captured during the October 7th raid. It also called for the provisions contained in UNSC Resolution 2735 to be implemented, including the withdrawal of Israeli troops, unhindered distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza, and the beginning of a multi-year reconstruction plan.

The draft resolution had the support of 14 UN Security Council members, which might as well have been none, because it was, of course, vetoed by the United States. 

“We made clear throughout negotiations we could not support an unconditional ceasefire that failed to release the hostages,” wrote Robert A. Wood, alternative US representative to the UN, in a letter to UN Security Council President (and primary US ambassador to the UN) Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “Because, as this Council has previously called for, a durable end to the war must come with the release of the hostages. These two urgent goals are inextricably linked.” 

The gap in linkage being that, according to the view of the Biden administration, the Gaza coalition’s release of the remaining Israeli hostages must come as a precondition to the end of Israel’s genocidal campaign. And because the remainder of the Security Council would not give Israel the maneuvering room, in the even that all hostages and remains couldn’t be accounted for, to continue that campaign unabated, the US effectively voted for the slaughter to continue.

This isn’t, however, the major topic under discussion in US media.

This was, of course, bound to happen, once incoming Delaware Representative Sarah McBride’s positive news cycle was masticated into the endless right-wing culture war against all things “woke.” This years-long campaign is, of course, the latest mutation in an unbroken narrative of mythologized decadence and degeneracy preached by American conservatives since the revivalist movement of the 1970s. But the rapid-cycle positive feedback loop between social media and legacy media has produced a distortion effect rather akin to a fishbowl lens, warping the image of politics to push cultural flashpoints to the foreground, and relegating everything else to the back. Whatever issue gains the fastest traction on social media therefore gains the fastest traction in the news cycle, regardless of its truthfulness, longevity, and overall impact on the day-to-day lives of people unlucky enough to fall off the media radar (if they were ever on it, in the first place).

One can see the pernicious effect of this culture war feedback loop reflected in the way western politics are conducted: UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy (a man more than happy to co-opt the anger and frustration of protesting Black Brits when Labor was the opposition party, and then playing sheepdog once they’re returned to power) recently invoking his enslaved ancestors to call Vladimir Putin a modern-day plantation owner, and then seeming to forget those ancestors exist less than a month later, when admonishing the use of the term “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza. Elon Musk claiming, for whatever bizarre reason, that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies were somehow responsible for the numerous mechanical problems plaguing Boeing 737 passenger planes, and then cheering Trump’s incoming cabinet of unqualified buffoons, cronies, accused pedophiles and rapists, and Deep State accomplices.

The ability of politicians and media to use the Culture War as a smokescreen for the continuance of plunder and exploitation at home, and imperialism and genocide abroad is nothing short of staggering. By pinning a target on the back of Sarah McBride, Nancy Mace (who once described herself as a supporter of LGBT equality) not only managed to push Gaza off the front pages, but accelerated the shift of politics from concrete reality to abstractions of identity and ideology. Today, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that single-sex facilities in the Capital and House Office Buildings (i.e. bathrooms, locker rooms) are “reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” Democratic leadership, of course, offered little pushback, and even McBride herself capitulated in a boilerplate statement on Twitter. 

And then, once social media furor on either side of the transgenders-in-bathrooms argument has died down, McBride will, as per her staunchly pro-Israel statements to Jewish Insider in 2023, vote for US funding and arms to continue to flow to Israel, which will be used to continue the campaign of genocide, torture, and rape against Palestinian people. Because, of course, Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of the US Congress, was funded to the tune of over $38,000 according to AIPAC Tracker. Which further demonstrates the only true viable multipartisan consensus in the Western world is that Israel — and all other western proxies in the MENA region — have an unfettered right to inflict whatever atrocities they want. 

And after the anti-wokes and culture warriors have had their turn at the trough, whether one more term under Trump, or two consecutive terms under JD Vance, the technocrats and institutionalists within the Democratic party will, of course, come roaring back to power with promises to enact sweeping change and restore the rights and dignity of marginalized people ground beneath the heel of America’s collective MAGA fever dream. Bombs will continue to rain down on the anti-Israel resistance and civilians alike, America’s working poor will continue to slide into wretched penury, and marginalized minorities will continue to be offered token representation in media, business, and government as a empty and anemic mea culpa for their suffering.

When a state has the money, the surplus arms, and the ability to nullify any multinational steps towards peaceful resolution that it wants, still manage to fail at fulfilling the needs of its own people, and still manage to slide into global irrelevance, what else can it do besides periodically slap down marginalized people and call that a culture?

Credit: Bloomberg TV

An interesting opening gambit, to say the least. Lai, a longtime critic of the Chinese government (and whose supporters during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests loudly advocated for a return to British rule) faces charges alleging a conspiracy to collude with foreign powers, and to publish seditious material. His trial, along with the “Hong Kong 47” resumes this week. At the time of the group’s arrest, China faced a two-pronged PR attack with the protests on one end, and inflated accusations of genocide against Xinjiang region’s Uyghur population on the other.

But it’s rather interesting that freedom of the press and individual speech was the UK’s angle of criticism for China, given its recent crackdown on anti-Zionist speech. Only two weeks ago, Haim Bresheeth, founder of Jewish voices for Palestine, a retired film studies professor, and born Israeli, was arrested by London Metro police during a protest in front of the residence of Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Bresheeth’s crime, according to the police, was support of a proscribed organization. In his own words:

“They cannot win against Hamas, they cannot win against Hezbollah, they cannot win against the Houthis. They cannot win against the united resistance to the genocide they have started.”

It doesn’t end there. In October, UK counterterrorism police raided the home of Asa Winstanley, an internationally-known journalist who writes for Electronic Intifada. Winstanley was not charged, but his electronic devices were confiscated. And over the summer, Richard Medhurst, a longtime critic of western imperialism, was arrested for voicing similar sentiments regarding Israel’s genocidal campaign, especially with regards to the lack of long-term viability behind the strategy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and aggression against Yemen, Iran, and Lebanon.

Normally, reporters present for the G20 summit are not able to stay for the duration of the meetings between leaders, and Chinese security was well within its power to usher press members out of the room. But Starmer obviously knew what he was doing with those opening remarks — raising the spectre of Chinese repression against its citizens and the press, and anticipating that reporters would catch at least part of his remarks while being escorted out.

On the other hand, the G20 is not a UN meeting, and Starmer certainly has no room to posture. With the possibility of a new US-led tariff regime looming over the events, and China’s increased influence in Latin America and the Asian Pacific, it was a rather bizarre choice for Starmer to pander to western press with those opening comments. Especially given the UK is not only providing military assistance to Israel in order to prosecute a genocide, but stretching the definitions of its counter-terrorism legislation at home to stifle activists and journalists who speak out against that genocide.

As with the United States’ anemic attempts to assert itself as a viable and ongoing partner to Asian Pacific countries during the APEC Summit in Peru, the UK government must, by now, be well aware that its diminished empire no longer provides the weight of military and economic hegemony behind its Prime Minister’s words.

Welcome to a new age, lads. The world is moving on with or without you.

This, of course, brought a flood of negative responses on Twitter. 

The announcement was indeed an embarrassment, but for a completely different reason than the brain-scrambled right wing of Twitter seems to think. Blinken was not announcing US investment or aid for Peru, but instead putting a charitable spin on the fact that Caltrain (the San Francisco to San José rail service, which recently upgraded to an all-electrical fleet) found a purchaser to take its disused Diesel engine and railcar fleet off its hands.

In exchange for 19 locomotives and 90 passenger cars, the city of Lima paid $6.32 million. In other words, Blinken’s announcement didn’t represent a cost to US taxpayers; it represented a quick and profitable means for Caltrain to get the obsolete hulks out of storage.

However useful the trains may be for Lima’s commuters though, the announcement paled in comparison to events a day earlier and 35 miles north in the city of Chancay, where Chinese president Xi Jinping attended the opening ceremony for the city’s newly-completed mega port:

The massive deepwater port, the largest of its kind in the South American west coast, has the capacity to dock 18,000 ultra-large container vessels, will reduce shipping times between Shanghai and Peru from 35 days to 23 days (as ULCVs will no longer need to use Mexico’s ports as a transfer point), reduce shipping costs by 20%, generate $4.5 billion annually, and bring approximately 8000 jobs to the region. 

Having invested $1.3 billion USD into the project, and with state-owned firm COSCO’s exclusive operation of the port, Puerto Chancay represents the largest accomplishment for China’s Belt and Road Initiative thus far. With the Peruvian government’s $10 billion investment into planned railway lines from Barranca to Ica, scheduled improvements to the Pan-American highway, and real estate investments in the region already picking up, Puerto Chancay represents a potential 2-3% boost in growth for the Peruvian economy.

As rapidly as Peru has been modernizing its infrastructure and technology, and as liberalized it has been with its willingness to engage in foreign investment and free trade, the country struggled since the early 2010s to find an investment partner for the construction of its deepwater port. With a water depth of 18 metres, and Chancay’s convenient proximity to the Pan-American Highway, US investment in the project could have created even larger access to Latin America and the Asian Pacific for American firms, as well as helped rebuild trust in a region that has mostly been ravaged by extractionist US foreign policy. 

But it took until 2019 for Peru to find an investment partner for the project. Having adopted a policy of economic, infrastructure, and technological improvement for its lesser-developed trade partners, China (through the COSCO shipping conglomerate) partnered with Peruvian mining firm Volcan to redesign and redevelop the project in order to increase its ambitious scope. Five years later, China now has an export doorway to move finished goods to and through South America, and South America has an export doorway to move agricultural and natural resource goods to China. 

While the bow-cutting ceremony on this multibillion dollar project was happening, Anthony Blinken was rehearsing a speech to announce the arrival of old, obsolete diesel trains in Peru’s capital. Unsurprisingly, US media did not take the inauguration of Puerto Chancay well, calling the megaport’s opening a sign that South America is “disrespecting the US,” and that the Chinese had gained “a foothold in America’s Backyard.” To US observers, in keeping with the long-dead Monroe Doctrine, any business conducted by China or Russia — regardless whether profitable opportunities had long since been passed over by America — necessarily represents a threat to US interests. Global south nations aren’t of course, populated by human beings, but abstracted away by numbers on spreadsheets to justify a two century-long policy of plunder and wanton slaughter.

With the Trump administration incoming, and a tariff increase (of some size, if not the self-immolating figure of 60%) on Chinese-produced goods almost certain to arrive with it, the global south appears to be finally coming out from underneath the shadow of economic and military force inflicted by the US and its western allies. With a senior partner in China (which of course makes these investments for long-term profit far more than any pious sense of altruism), countries like Peru as well as Trinidad & Tobago, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile have completed the sort of projects (highways, hydroelectric dams, fiber optic networks) that they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish on their own. Without firing a shot, China has not only effectively displaced the US as the world’s leading hegemonic power, it’s done so to the measurable, material benefit of its partners in the developing world.

There are, of course, major exceptions to this trend. In the past, Congolese mines have been massively undervalued by Chinese firms, and the paltry infrastructure investments promised in return have not been fully honoured. Mismanagement and even physical abuse by Chinese management staff in Zambia’s copper mines soured the nation’s mood enough to elect a president who campaigned on a platform promising economic sovereignty. In the interim, President Hichilema lobbied western interests to help Zambia restructure its debt, and re-opened Zambia to the IMF (which, through its disastrous structural adjustment programs in the 1970s, gutted Zambia and reduced it from one of Africa’s richest nations to one of its poorest).

But these exceptions pale in comparison to the policies of military entrenchment, forced austerity, and political capture that tend to mark any partnership that global south countries engage with the US. 

Though Puerto Chancay might be the last megaproject of its kind in China’s Belt and Road strategy, when compared with Blinken’s train announcement, it is certainly emblematic of an emerging truth. The age of American global dominance is coming to a close, and along with a Chinese century comes the hope that the west’s former imperial subjects can finally become a new First World in their own right.

The 2026 APEC Summit, by the way, will be held in China.

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer,

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

By the time Wilfred Owen reached 18 years of age, he had already charted out his life’s path. An ardent reader and devotee of John Keats, two of his poems written in the prior year (Written in a Wood, September 1910, and Sonnet: Written at Teignmouth, on a Pilgrimage to Keats’s House) were written in Keats’ honour. As the imperial expansion of European powers augered towards all-out war, Owen worked patiently and inexorably towards his calling in poetry.

Hailing from a lower middle-class family (who, if he were to be believed in his youth, had descended from aristocracy and fallen into pastoralism), Owen was hungry for beauty in all its forms. During his stay in Wimbledon in the fall of 1911, he was a frequent visitor of galleries and museums in London. Of his time at the British Museum, he wrote of spending “hours in subdued ecstasy,” devouring Keats’ manuscripts, studying their handwriting, and making note of the corrections. 

When Germany declared war on France in August of 1914, Owen was working as a tutor in France. By dint of his family’s class position, which denied him the prerequisite knowledge of the Greek language, his near-lifelong dream of attending Oxford had nearly evaporated. To gain a new perspective (and perhaps enough worldliness to edge his way into the university’s vaunted halls), he took up a position as an English teacher at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux. 

He learned the French fluently enough to develop a Bordeaux accent, and a love for the café culture (though, in his letters to his mother, he assured her that he hadn’t fallen into the habit of indulging wine). Over the summer, he accepted an offer as a private tutor for in the Pyrenees for the Léger family. The family’s matriarch, a Parisian businesswoman, required English before her return to the city in the fall. By the time news of the war reached the Léger summer home, Owen was rather enjoying his full-time duties between improving the Madame’s English, and entertaining the Légers’ daughter Nénette with duets on the piano, and games of hide-and-seek.

Throughout the time he spent in France, Owen sought to improve his chances of study at Oxford by ingratiating himself with influential people. In fear of letting his talents stagnate, continued to work on his poetry. However, by 1915, the war had cast a pall over Bordeaux. It was also becoming increasingly likely that Britain would conscript its soldiers, and with the army opening its officer ranks to the lower middle class, Owen chose to enlist rather than be drafted. 

Though Owen spent the vast majority of the war at home in Britain, due to suffering a concussion from falling into the crater of an exploded mortar, his naive, romantic view of war had given way to exhausted cynicism. 

From Exposure (1917):

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, 

Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles. 

Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles, 

Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war. 

       What are we doing here?

During his convalescent stay in Edinburgh, Owen met fellow writer and poet Sigfried Sassoon. The two struck a deep, profound relationship which, some historians suggest, may have been a romantic one. Himself once a dreamer of patriotism and empire, Sassoon had quickly been plunged into the horrors of trench warfare. Soon afterwards, his poetry began to reflect the depression and trauma of an emerging modernism, fueled by the bodies of young men ground and mingled into lifeless meat for the territorial aspirations of idle aristocrats.

From The Counter-Attack (1918):

An officer came blundering down the trench:

“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...

Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”

Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

And stumbling figures looming out in front.

“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...

And started blazing wildly ... then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

The following year, wracked with what appeared to be survivor’s guilt, Sassoon returned to active combat in the Western Front. Less than two months later, he was shot in the head — a friendly fire incident. He returned to England, this time for good. Owen would follow in his footsteps, departing for France as the Alliance was making its final push towards a decisive victory against Germany. 

He returned to England as a corpse. 

Wilfred Owen was killed while attempting to take the western side of the Oise-Sambre Canal. Shouting for the men under his command to fashion a makeshift bridge from wooden planks, he was hit by German machine-gun fire. Over a thousand men were killed in the attempt to cross the canal and breach German lines, which ultimately failed.

The survivors of the attempt would ultimately cross the canal via an existing road bridge, just a few kilometres south.

Over a hundred years later, and millions upon millions more dead in service to — and as a result of — the boundless greed and ambition of the ruling class, the poetry and symbolism of the anti-war movement that emerged in the wake of The Great War has amounted to less than nothing. 

The poppy, once a symbol of the blood of young men who died for no purpose relevant to their own lives or that of their communities, now serves the opposite purpose: a gauche signifier of support for more war, more territorial aggression, more ethnic cleansing. The gallantry and virtue of the military officer is not only taken for granted, but social compliance with “honoring the troops” is strictly enforced, no matter how vile and inhumane the accounts of their killing, torture, rape, and bodily desecration of civilians and enemy combatants alike. 

How many writers would have emerged from Iraq, if not for the 2005 invasion? How many poets in Gaza have been obliterated by glide bombs while at morning prayer? The answer to that question, as with the millions of war dead from 1914-1918, lies in the decaying flesh, blood, and bone spread across poisoned soil by the bombs we continue to manufacture and deploy relentlessly. 

A pitiful and damning irony, then, that our day of remembrance has so wholly and efficiently been warped into an annual celebration of war propaganda, and collective amnesia.

Lest we forget.

For months, U.S. Democrats (as well as their sycophantic enablers in the entertainment and political media industries) have taken to every available platform with ominous warnings of a Republican plan to reshape democracy in Mussolini’s image. Project 2025, according to the Skye Perryman-founded project Democracy Foward, represents “a ruthless plan to undermine the quality of life of millions of Americans…and prioritize special interests and ideological extremism over people.” And the Project 2025 policy agenda certainly includes proposals that would alarm anyone who’s been in a deep coma since before the Bush 2 Administration and just woke up.

However, it is doubtful that anything in this 900-page document will leap out to the average voter as some harbinger of an immediate fascist takeover of America. That hasn’t stopped Democrats from using it as paranoiac leverage to whip up their base, though – a base that’s becoming increasingly sheepish, if recent polling is any indication – in the face of a sinking reality that President Biden’s cognitive state is, much like the “world’s oldest democracy” he leads, sliding into terminal senescence.

Which presumably is how Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo (whose spirited enunciation of the c-word on-camera recently earned him an Oscar nomination) recently found himself boosting the message on Twitter with a dire pronouncement that “Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism.” His message would have landed quite neatly if he had ended it there.

But, given the liberal tendency for rhetorical self-immolation, of course he didn’t end it there.

“It is the Sharia Law of the ‘Christian’ crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life through their narrow and exclusionary interpretation of Christ’s egalitarian, inclusive, and kindly teachings,” Ruffalo continued. “Don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s extremist and perverse ideology. Trump is bringing it to all our lives: abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of education, and equality between the races and genders—GONE. Forced birth and forced religion. Trump’s American Taliban.”

Using Islam as a shorthand to invoke fear of a reactionary social agenda is so commonplace by now, and it has been for so long, that it would probably go unnoticed were it not for the rather un-subtle shift in its intended target: American conservatism. It’s the sort of role reversal that liberals seem a bit too enamored with these days—we’re the ones who are really tough on our enemies, and those Republicans just resemble them more and more all the time, don’t they? 

Under this rhetorical construction, all stops must be pulled out to stop this descent into extremism, yet, rather conveniently for Democrats, stops being pulled out begin and end at the ballot box.

I’m a relatively new convert to Islam, and I’ve certainly had my struggles with everything from regular prayer, to my sexual identity, and beyond. While it hasn’t been easy to reconcile my attitudes, habits, desires, and such with my Muslim faith, I can’t attribute that to any intolerance I’ve experienced within the ummah. In fact, my Muslim brothers and sisters have been extremely welcoming, and they check in with me regularly about my general well-being and that of my family, without judgment (except, perhaps, whether I’m eating enough, due to my polite but frequent declining of offers to buy me snacks after prayer service). So remarks like Ruffalo’s are bound to stand out to someone like me—possibly more acutely than they might to someone who has endured Islamophobia all their lives, and therefore, become painfully inured to it.

But even prior to my conversion* in 2022, and well before the immediate post-9/11 period began roughly a quarter-century ago, I knew about the concept of Sharia, and I also knew about the diversity of its adherents around the world, just by growing up in neighbourhoods as diverse as Malton and Rexdale, Ontario. Deploying the spectre of “Sharia Law” as a scare tactic, among both conservatives and liberals, has always struck me as one of the most vulgar forms of racism and ignorance. One aimed at an entire quarter of the human population who find the Qibla before they kneel in prayer, and for whom Sharia is not just “law”, but a living set of practices.

Ever since the Taliban and al-Qaeda replaced the USSR as the Civilized West’s existential enemy in 2001, the beliefs of Muslim extremists have served as a proxy for Islam itself. Samuel P. Huntington’s so-called “Clash of Civilizations” has gripped pundits and intellectuals, and anyone who was at least old enough at the time to watch primetime TV with their parents saw Alexander Siddig’s star rise, as both the overt jihadist fanatic and the sleeper agent tropes crowded out the available villain slots, in fiction as in reality.

These stereotypes, of course, served the vital function of legitimating the U.S. war machine and its horrific misdeeds. Rather than Nazis sending minorities to concentration camps and crematoriums, and Soviets sending political dissidents to freeze to death in northern gulags, the death-loving Wahabbist beheading young men and sending off young women to join the concubinage of some crazed mullah loomed large in the collective Western imagination. Bombs and black sites soon followed.

But even as political viewpoints began to shift in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial disaster and fatigue with endless war grew, and the West began looking inward to find its true villains, vestiges of that Bush-era Islamophobia remain etched indelibly in the Western mind. Ruffalo himself is borrowing from an old script. Long after red states and municipalities exhausted their political capital (and voters’ patience) with empty ballot measures and legislation to “ban Sharia Law,” Democratic politicians still managed to eke out some mileage with the charade. For example, former Democratic Congressional representative Alan Grayson attacked his Republican opponent Daniel Webster in a 2010 campaign ad with the label “Taliban Daniel Webster,” likening Webster’s proposals to ban divorce and abortion to religious fanaticism in countries like Iran.

This, despite the fact that divorce and abortion in Iran, while certainly facing many more restrictions than within the US, are not strictly illegal.

And herein lies the larger problem: when people refer to “Sharia Law” in Western politics, not only is it a sign of abject desperation, a last-ditch bid to avoid a catastrophic electoral loss we all know is coming, it’s also a tell that the doomsayer invoking it doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

To begin with, “Sharia Law,” or simply Sharia (شَرِيعَة) is itself a body of rules and jurisprudence which governs broad and, in fact, mostly mundane aspects of life. The strictest and most well-defined of those rules generally govern worship, sacred times and places, and purifying oneself, while other, more loosely defined rules concern social relations. Sharia covers everything from which hand washes which first, to which foods are permitted to be eaten, to the number of daily prayers, to permitted sexual practices, some much more strictly interpreted than others within the four madhhab, or schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

All of this might sound overbearing and constricting to those of us in the West who value individual freedom over and above every other ideal or principle. But our understanding of freedom may not be the only understanding of that ideal, nor must it always and exclusively be thought of as the highest good for all people everywhere, at all times. This line of thinking betrays the historical tendency to believe in the white man’s burden to tame and civilize the more savage races and nations. 

Yes, there are rules under Sharia which many in the secular West consider oppressive, such as those governing the modesty of dress, and the fact that same-sex marriage is not recognized. But this paradigm isn’t at all unfamiliar to even the most strict secularists in the West. In fact, most people living in the Western world carry out their social and personal affairs under laws and customs whose origins are mostly ecclesiastical.

I don’t say this to make Sharia sound innocuous, or more palatable to those who take exception to the rules they can’t reconcile with their personal beliefs. But consider that, in states like California, committing adultery within a marriage can affect spousal support payments, the division of assets, and even child custody. Adultery even remains a felony in several states. So it’s worth asking what it is that makes adultery more worthy of social opprobrium and juridical punishment than other leading causes of divorce, such as financial irresponsibility, or saddling one’s spouse with an unfair burden of chores.

We’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t admit that many of our social, legal, and political norms — despite efforts since the Enlightenment period to splice together a Christianized West with the traditions of Classical Antiquity, along with influence from Indigenous cultures — stem from laws and traditions developed on the understanding that nations, institutions, and people are ultimately answerable to, and governed under the watchful eye of, an all-powerful God. Adultery within marriage doesn’t simply imply a breach of trust between partners, but carries the epigenetic stain of a breach of the sacred covenant which we’ve traditionally understood as having been sworn between a man, his wife, and the Almighty. 

In fact, the American trend towards secularism over the past half-century hasn’t necessarily resulted in less religiosity among the public, per se, but rather a stratification and individualization of religious practice. Many sociologists, including Georgetown professor José Casanova, cheekily refer to this trend as “supply-side” secularism. 

Knowing this, and knowing the extent to which Christian extremism in the West has contributed to repression of the LGBT community at home as well as abroad, why then does the phrase “Sharia Law” continue to function as a shorthand for religious absolutism  encroaching on the public sphere?

Well, it’s because the people who push those tropes are racist.

I hate to be simplistic, but there’s no way to make it complicated without waffling. The idea that certain elements of Project 2025 can be simply attributed to Christian extremism, and the further idea that such extremism can only be understood by audiences through an image of, say, ISIS militiamen throwing gay men from rooftops, comes from a well-studied impulse in the white Western imagination. It’s the same impulse which attributes violent, lustful, and “toxic” behaviour among males to the Black man, and avaricious, double-dealing greed in commerce to the Jew. It’s the impulse to believe that a certain set of standards governs the way white men fight, or that unchecked “authoritarianism” and the never-ending growth of the surveillance state is an unsavoury adoption of Chinese practices.

In short, it’s the belief that America (and the West, broadly) is fundamentally good. That any deviance from the core of its virtues and ideals is due to pollution by foreign and essentially malignant cultures, beliefs, and practices which are not only incompatible with American culture in the long-term, but must be excised totally before America is transformed into something unrecognizable. It’s ethnocentrism at its worst.

This, from people born in a country that had to fight a bloody war over the question of whether one man has the right to enslave another, a country that infiltrates, imprisons, and assassinates Black freedom fighters, that sends money and missiles to Israel for the purpose of conducting a genocide, and that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to demonstrate its military strength to the Soviets, is entirely too much to stomach.

Mark Ruffalo has, for several months, spoken out forcefully against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. To his credit, he is one of the first Hollywood celebrities to cut against the (near total) censorious and Islamophobic consensus within the entertainment industry. To see this kind of message coming from him in particular is all the more depressing. But Ruffalo is, like the rest of us, steeped within a chauvinist and Orientalist mindset which affords itself endless grace, but has none left over for the vaguely illusive, abstracted cultures of the people for whom he advocates.

Sharia doesn’t even prohibit abortion. Depending on which state, school, or scholar one subscribes to, it’s permissible for as few as 40 days after conception, or as many as 120 days. Homosexuality isn’t considered a “sin of the mind” in Islam, as it is with Christianity, even though the view (and potential punishment) of homosexual acts differs from school to school, and from place to place. And all that is moot for everyone else, as it’s generally accepted among the ummah that Sharia doesn’t apply to non-Muslims. It’s no secret that Muslim caliphates throughout history have mostly allowed religious minorities to conduct their religious and social affairs according to their own frameworks.

Ruffalo likely doesn’t know any of this, because he’s never had to learn. The glib cultural shorthand of “Sharia Law” is all that’s required to condense Muslim culture, customs, and ways of understanding the world into a discursive bogeyman. Anyone familiar with the chauvinism of white abolitionists in the 19th century, and white anti-apartheid advocates in the 1980s, wouldn’t be surprised by this tendency at all.

It’s unfortunate, but in the end, a mere fact of life. It isn’t as if these people can even talk about each other’s differing political stances without lapsing into fearmongering, so why would we expect they wouldn’t fall into old habits when talking about the rest of us? Why even spend all of this time and energy on so many words that have little chance of being read or understood?

Well, because the expectation of disappointment from liberal “allies” simply isn’t good enough. Christian extremism belongs to Christendom and the occidental culture within which it resides. Liberal “allies” to Palestinians—the latter of whom are much more occupied with resisting their own genocide than giving any thought to electoral politics or cultural freedoms in the United States—can’t continue to project their own cultures of violence and structural dominance onto others who have nothing to do with those things. “Sharia Law” is a bogeyman that entails whatever the speaker wants or believes. But Muslims don’t practice “Sharia Law,” which, once transliterated from Arabic, would read “Sharia Law Law.”

We subscribe to Sharia.

Sharia doesn’t call for legislating a permanent end to divorce, a ban on abortion even in the case of rape and incest, subsumption of the bureaucracy under the auspices of the Oval Office, or further dismantling of the Voting Rights Act. These are aspects of a broad policy agenda pushed by Christian reactionaries, and their goals far exceed those of America’s rhetorical antipodes like Iran and China (within which America has also backed religious and fascistic elements in order to further its own goals) .

On the off chance you are reading this, Mark Ruffalo, Project 2025 belongs to you and yours. It is entirely your mess. Stick to invoking your own culture and history, replete with more than enough bloody, repressive moments to draw from, as you try to rally your dispirited voters in a last-ditch effort to clean it up.

*My deepest apologies to those who insist on the word “revert,” but the term raises far more questions than answers among non-Muslims, so I’ll stick with “convert.”