Dear Reader, 

The idea for this column was born out of a letter from the editor that I was asked to write in the spring, toward the beginning of the war. It is the idea that the rest of the editions of this column will be about current events or political occurrences of the vaguely recent sort. That being said, I will take this inaugural edition to reflect back. To create a shared reality of sorts, dear reader, which will help us understand each other with more accuracy. 

On April 9, 2026, Donald Trump tweeted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” I woke up. I went to class. My whole body shook, but I did not cry. There are days where you learn nothing and days in which the whole universe seems to be bearing down on a lesson. Now I know what I would do if I thought many people I loved would die in a few hours—I would go to class. It makes me sick. My writing has been stuck since. It does not come out of me. Nothing comes out of me except for shock and horror and more horror. Sometimes I feel as though I left something behind permanently on the side of the road, or that who I am now is permanently less than who I was, or who I could have been. 

I walked around as a ghost for a month. I walked observing the actions of the people around me but not understanding how they could possibly be doing them, not understanding how to get rid of the hatred that seemed to be stuck behind my teeth. I cannot transmit this feeling—it is something that you cannot understand until you wake up one dreaded day with fifteen notifications on your phone, all of which are condolence messages. There is probably an academic word—alienation, or something along those lines. When it happens to you, that word will not be enough to cover it. It is this feeling which, near the twenty-fifth anniversary of the War on Terror, I have been thinking so much about. 

The condition of the American Muslim has been, for upwards of twenty years, one of abject humiliation. The word Muslim became a stand-in for a great many people who may or may not actually be Muslim, creating the kind of resentment from within the community of those people on the “Ethnicities of Interest” list which seeks to constantly disassociate with those people who have made life so hard, only to end up beaten down right alongside them. Islamophobia, then, as we use it, is both the specific hatred of Muslims but also the hatred of that dark mass of people which stretches from Sudan towards Pakistan, alluding more to a general terror of the potentiality of terrorism than to a specific group. It is that word, terrorist, which seems to be the root of it. 

A Muslim, in America, is a terrorist until proven innocent. It is this accusation which plagues those advocating for the Palestinian cause. In Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Repressive Tolerance,” he says that one of the fundamental deceptions of the unequal free speech society is the equating of statements which hold entirely different weights. For example, the common equivalence of the two statements: “Unification of opposites: preparing for war is working for peace. Peace is redefined as necessarily, in the prevailing situation, including preparation for war.” The terrorist has almost usurped the accusation of communist as the archetypal American enemy. When Ted Cruz said in 2016 that he wanted all Muslim neighborhoods to be patrolled by police cars, he was echoing what McCarthy said in a political campaign address: “dislodge the traitors from every place where they’ve been sent to do their traitorous work.”

On September 24, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an address in front of the United Nations in New York City. He was not taken into custody, despite a warrant for his arrest from the International Criminal Court. He will be allowed to say whatever he wants to, even though he has instigated genocide against Palestinians. Under Princeton’s free speech policy, people like Naftali Bennett can come to this school and tell an entire hall that “Palestinians should stop whining,” and that protestors were lying about the number of children killed in Gaza. There is no discussion of how safe Arab students feel around a man who had previously said that he had “killed many Arabs in his life, and there was no problem with that.” 

In the US, too, statements like this are increasing. Florida Congressman Randy Fine recently said that “Fear of Islam is rational.” Trump has described Muslim candidates for Senate as “jihadists.” The Guardian reports that “The ISPU separately found that 63% of Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination in the past year, the highest share of any faith group it measures.”

When I was around eight years old, two FBI officers walked into my father’s office to question him about his internet search history. At the time, my father was a professor of Islam teaching a class on fundamentalism across religions. They didn’t like the sites he’d been looking at. When they left his office at the university at which he taught, my father was flagged in some sort of system. For the next five years, every time we crossed a border, my family would be interrogated for upwards of three hours. We were asked who we stayed with, their names and addresses, and all of our belongings were searched and opened. It is gall that they punish—the gall to speak or think about any topic related to terrorism. 

It is again Marcuse’s essay which perhaps best encapsulates my father’s condition, and the condition of many Muslims all over the world—“Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.” In other words, this extremely repressive attitude is allowed to flourish in discussions about American Muslims, despite the suggestion of violence. The opposite, however, is certainly not true. The suggestion of violence toward the Muslim, or the “terrorist,” is an ever-expanding domain of political thought. The label of “terrorist” is an ever-expanding one.

Almost 15 years ago now, Michael Walzer, a notable scholar in the field of Just War Theory, wrote an article in the New York Review of Books alongside Avishai Margalit titled “Israel: Civilians and Combatants.” That article, published in 2009, is centrally focused on the 2005 article “Assassination and Preventative Killing” published by Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin of the IOF. It is notable that Walzer of all people was the one who felt so strongly about the article the two men had written—in his most famous book, Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer employs just war theory to thoroughly defend, among other things, the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. What disturbed Walzer and Margalit so deeply was a concept which later came to be central to the IOF’s “Code of Ethics,” and which has unfolded across the Middle East at scale for years now. The concept is that of the civilian soldier, or the idea that the state has a deeper commitment to the protection of their own soldiers than the civilians of any other country by rewriting what has essentially for centuries been the doctrine of war. It has been true for years that because of their distinction from civilians, soldiers had to take upon themselves the responsibility of minimizing civilian casualties whether or not that risked their own lives. While this has never been carried out perfectly, it has certainly been expected in one way or another during the history of modern warfare as human rights frameworks build out the definition of a civilian. However, in Kasher and Yadlin’s own words, “Consequently, the duty to minimize casualties among combatants during combat is last on the list of priorities or next to last, if terrorists are excluded from the category of noncombatants. We reject such conceptions, because we consider them to be immoral. A combatant is a citizen in uniform.”

Consequently, if the soldier is merely a citizen in uniform rather than a separate category, and if the state has a responsibility to its citizens over all else, then the carefully constructed descent into hell begins with a single stroke. Walzer and Margalit write in their rebuttal that “Kasher and Yadlin are simply assuming that the war against the enemy is a just war. Their claim, crudely put, is that in such a war the safety of “our” soldiers takes precedence over the safety of “their” civilians.” But to equate a state’s soldier with a civilian is not enough to fully strip the civilians of the opposite side of rights; a more complicated maneuver must be undertaken. In a subsequent article entitled “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” Kasher and Yadlin expound on this concept with the addition of an amended view on “enemy combatants” or “terrorists” as they are more conveniently called in their writing. One of Walzer’s particular concerns with the articles is the idea that the category of ‘civilian’ is a malleable category based on a moral or otherwise physical proximity to those deemed enemy combatants.  

Part of the list goes as follows: 

“(b.10) Developing and operating funding channels that are not crucial to acts or activities of terror; (b.11) Preaching in a mosque in general praise of past suicide bombers;(b.12) Making payments to families of past suicide-bombers, when and wheresuch payments are not crucial for acts or activities of terror;(b.13) Issuing posters in praise of past suicide-bombers;”

This model is scalable. Under this kind of logic, the label of the ‘terrorist’ becomes an associational game. It is the stickiness of this language that allows the FBI to send undercover agents to mosques to pretend to be recruiters for terrorist groups, or torture civilians in Abu Ghraib who had the same first or last names as suspected terrorists. Recently, a judge found 2007 confession statements about the planning of 9/11 invalid because of the overwhelming evidence of torture used to acquire the statement. He had been waterboarded more than 138 times in various CIA black sites prior to the ‘confession,’ More than 300,000 civilians were killed in the direct violence after 9/11. In 2002, thousands of young men from majority-Muslim countries were forced to register themselves with the Department of Homeland Security, leading to thousands of deportations. All Iranian citizens have been sanctioned from taking the LSAT, and no new student visas will be issued for Iranian students. In December of 2025, Trump extended the ban to 39 more majority-Muslim and African countries. At his speech at the UN, Netanyahu held up two pictures—one labeled “The Curse” and “The Blessing.” The countries labeled as “blessings” were the ones who had collaborated with Israel. In this way, the label is already becoming modular. It is already spreading. When you are a “curse,” you are not a person. You are a terrorist until proven innocent. 

This April, on the way back to Tabriz, the highway my grandfather was on was bombed. He saved a piece of the shrapnel and sent us a picture. He is a terrorist until proven innocent. I was very young when I realized that the people I love are seldom considered human.