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When I use the term “Afro-Arab,” it is just my American lingua, not an actual term that Arab thinkers are trying to adopt or even consider. It is the kind of term you find in US academia but not in Arabic letters or political discussions. Even on the e-margins, young East and North Africans have been embracing their Africanness in opposition to Arabness, often citing Arab racism and exclusionary politics as reasons to depart from that historical bond.

I noticed how often Arab writers, including those North and East African, seem at ease when othering Africa—the bordered continent is harder for them to grasp than an imaginary “Arab World” made up by the French, and later appropriated by Arab nationalism. Moreover, the wildly inaccurate treatment of black experiences and cultures as one sum; from Zanzibar and Lagos to Havana and Detroit.

the Arab-Afro encounter seems more connected to the Americas and France, than to Africa itself

translations, references, and intertextual conversations, even by black Arabs, look toward Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, as well as African-American literature, and the civil rights era.

From one panel title “Black writer, White reader,” in a nod to Fanon, it was clear how the Arab fixation on black skin functions as an erasure of race, therefore assuming Arab is White

Arab writers, in the aftermath of the Iraq war and its apolitical introduction of identity politics into the region, have found an opportunity in writing about these groups which could get them translated and serve as primary literature for western academics and NGOs alike. Their white translators whisper to me “oh my god, this shit is racist” sometimes mediating in the process to clean up the language

While Amnesty could not definitively state that the Moroccan authorities were behind the attack, the group was able to use forensic evidence to conclude this was very likely the case.

The spyware they found — commonly known as “Pegasus” — can be traced back to the Israeli cyber surveillance company, NSO Group.

Radi is an investigative journalist who co-founded the local news site Le Desk, a partner with the Star in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He specializes in the connections between politicians and business people as well as social movements and human rights. In other words, he’s a thorn in the government’s side and a prime target for surveillance, hacking and harassment.

NSO Group, which was valued at $1 billion USD last year, sells surveillance software to governments and law enforcement agencies intended to combat terrorism. Over the last several years, however, reports from around the world have implicated NSO Group’s spyware in the targeting of journalists and human rights activists.

A recent report by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School identified 13 journalists, including a reporter for the New York Times, targeted by Pegasus software employed by the Mexican and Saudi Arabian governments.

what makes Radi’s case unique is that he was infected last September, only three days after the Israeli company issued a policy that vowed the company would cut off clients if they were found to misuse the surveillance technology to target journalists and human rights activists

Amnesty’s new report notes that the NSO server used to hack Monjib and El Bouchattaoui was shut down shortly after the previous report was made public. Shortly afterward, a new server that operated in the same manner was set up and used to hack Radi’s phone, the report said.

This month, an article on the Moroccan news website Chouftv reported that Radi was part of a group of journalists organizing a support campaign for an imprisoned colleague. Radi says the article contained details taken from conversations he had on the encrypted apps Signal and WhatsApp, and he suspects government intelligence officers leaked the information gleaned from his phone.“It’s a way of saying: ‘You are being watched,’ ” he said.Radi’s sources have grown more reluctant to talk as it has become evident that journalists’ phones are being tapped.

Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.

“If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”

Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.

Culture is in the air like cigarette smoke in pubs before the ban, but it’s also pinned down in editorial rules and style guides. It’s there in tropes and cliches, precedent and the dread line “just how we’ve always done it”.

if Laura Kuenssberg had needed to be “told what to say — or what not to say” she would never have been appointed Political Editor

NOTMWTS is a shield intended to bat away further questions, to avoid closer scrutiny of how stories are chosen, framed, and reported. “All you’re doing is trying to find the truth,” is a line that comes from the same place as claims of journalistic impartiality and objectivity

purporting to offer true objectivity is like saying you can draw a perfect circle freehand

the notion that there are no clues to Kuenssberg’s politics or worldview in the thousands of hours of broadcasting she undertook in that role is downright insulting to viewers and listeners

Kuenssberg is far from alone in having provided a megaphone for anonymous sources, “not told what to say” but happily parroting lines to a huge audience; it’s an epidemic in British political journalism, where WhatsApp messages whip onto Twitter with undue weight and ceremony.

Their beloved Orwell — writer of two of the handful of books that every columnist leans on at some point (1984 and Animal Farm) — wrote in an unused preface5 to the latter that: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

The unfashionable opinions have changed and shifted over time but the silence around them prevails

Growing threats to press freedom in America have metastasized in the weeks since Oct. 7, with pressure not to make any controversial comments about Israel or Palestine causing some editors and reporters to get fired or resign, which has a chilling effect on others. And my bigger fear is that this growing climate of fear is bleeding into coverage of the 2024 election and the threat to democracy.

The world is staring into an abyss, much as it did in the 1930s. Now, as then, the global rise of right-wing authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is linked to aggressive militarism that targets civilians and risks a world war. Here at home, the growing sense of chaos abroad and a broken government on Capitol Hill, with Republican Johnson poised to make matters worse, has imperiled the flawed small-d democratic government of President Joe Biden and has primed too many voters to fall into the waiting arms of a wannabe dictator.

the institutional caution that frames their work has been getting a lot worse. Some of it is probably business-driven — to avoid offending readers who might cancel a subscription. A lot of it seems to be a desire in newsrooms, after Trump’s whirlwind, lie-filled first term, to return to normalcy and the kind of balance that treats the two parties equally, which means ignoring that one has become an authoritarian cult.

things will get worse in less than two years if journalists — as individuals, as newsrooms, and as a profession — can’t stop cowering and won’t adopt a much more aggressive posture in defending democracy, the only political system that makes a functioning news media possible. Some of it is basic stuff — more boldness in calling out a blatant lie, like Johnson’s IRS claim, or making it clear when someone is to blame, like Israel’s killing of journalists.

I’m terrified that many angry, apathetic, or ill-informed voters will wake up on Jan. 21, 2025, in a country they no longer recognize ... and didn’t see coming.