Ben Ashraf

The Islamophobic biker gang running Gaza aid sites is just the U.S. empire in a leather jacket Infidels MC, an “anti-Islamic” biker gang turned militia, now mans Gaza’s aid checkpoints. From Blackwater to the Pentagon, Islamophobia is no aberration, but the blueprint.

GHF aid in Gaza, where bread is rationed in blood, is manned by US contractors wearing leather jackets, crusader crosses, and Infidel tattoos.

US empire doesn’t hide — it franchises out. Infidels MC is just Blackwater 2.0 in Gaza.

First op-ed in @mondoweiss.net

mondoweiss.net/2025/09/the-...

The Islamophobic biker gang running Gaza aid sites is just the U.S. empire in a leather jacket Infidels MC, an “anti-Islamic” biker gang turned militia, now mans Gaza’s aid checkpoints. From Blackwater to the Pentagon, Islamophobia is no aberration, but the blueprint.

Infidels MC, an "anti-Islamic" biker gang turned militia, now mans Gaza’s aid checkpoints. From Blackwater to the Pentagon, Islamophobia is no aberration, but the blueprint.

mondoweiss.net/2025/09/the-...

#Palestine #Israel

Hasbara with glitter: Israel’s politics of pleasure Leisure has long been a colonial cover for brutality; Israel refines it with festivals, pride and travel culture.

Israel sells bikinis and trance while Gaza starves. In my first Op-ed for @aljazeera.com I write on how Israel weaponises pleasure — its all-inclusive apartheid sells forgetting Palestinians as ‘fun’.

www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Soundtrack to genocide: Inside Israel’s military-pop complex Emboldened by far-right rhetoric, a new music genre has emerged in Israel, one that celebrates the death of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza.

BBC clutched pearls over Bob Vylan saying “death to the IDF”.

Israeli artists have been singing about killing Palestinians for 50+ years, without a whisper of backlash.

Read Shahla Omar and my 2023 feature on Israel's military-pop complex. @thenewarab.bsky.social

www.newarab.com/features/sou...

India, Pakistan, Kashmir: How religious nihilism can go nuclear India and Pakistan are heading toward war in Kashmir, driven by manufactured hatred, collective trauma, and an appetite for bloodlust, says Benjamin Ashraf.

India and Pakistan are heading toward war in Kashmir, driven by manufactured hatred, collective trauma, and an appetite for bloodlust, @ashrafzeneca.bsky.social writes ⬇

Really excited to chair such an important discussion. Catch Ilan, Katy, Nadine and I at Reference Point on April 4.

Ivy League’s tenured complicity in deportation of Mahmoud Khalil Failed by Columbia’s faculty, the responsibility of upholding Edward Said’s legacy now falls to students like Mahmoud Khalil, says Rebecca Ruth Gould.

For The New Arab @thenewarab.bsky.social l wrote about Mahmoud Khalil and our collective complicity in genocide
www.newarab.com/opinion/ivy-...

Thanks to @ashrafzeneca.bsky.social for wonderful editing.

Book Launch: Palestine in a World on Fire

Join Ilan Pappé & Katherine Natanel for the launch of their powerful new book w @ashrafzeneca.bsky.social

📅 Fri, April 4
🕢 7:30pm
📍 Reference Point (London, UK)

A @haymarketbooks.org & The New Arab event

Reservations: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/palestine-...

Emily in Karachi: Why 'American woman in Pakistan' won my heart Onijah Robinson flipped the script on decades of anti-Pakistan sentiment in Western media in this captivating yet chaotic TikTok saga, says Benjamin Ashraf.

"Here was an African American woman treated with compassion, receiving free housing & healthcare in a country Joe Biden once deemed 'one of the most dangerous in the world'."

@ashrafzeneca.bsky.social on how Onijah Robinson's TikTok saga flipped the script on decades of anti-Pakistan sentiment 👇

the headline lmao

WSJ sub: “Indian Partition went smoothly enough, right? Will try to remember to check this before publishing.”

Is Trump's Gaza 'takeover' actually Jared Kushner's last hurrah? Trump isn’t the first to propose the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Even if his plan fails, it still reinforces Israel's genocidal designs, writes Mouin Rabbani.

Mouin Rabbani in The New Arab: "The challenge now is to impress upon Washington that its interests are better served by compelling Israel to fulfil its commitments under the ceasefire agreements it was forced to accept, rather than indulge its genocidal fantasies"

www.newarab.com/opinion/trum...

Neither Secularism Nor Islamism… I’m really happy to have published this with New Lines Magazine, an excellent initiative in long-form journalism organized by some of the very best people in the field. al-Sharaa enters the U…

If you haven't already, please read my opinion on the secular/Islamist binary (with regard to Syria in particular) and what should replace it.

I'm barely alive. Let 2025 not be a third year of Gaza genocide Gaza has lived and died through a year of Israeli genocide. With 2025 nearing, there isn't much left other than the faint hope of peace, says Abubaker Abed.

The New Arab’s 2024 retrospectives begin, as they should, with my dear friend Abubaker Abed’s reflections of one year of genocide in Gaza.

An intensely emotive piece, let this be another reminder of our apocalyptic failings.

www.newarab.com/opinion/im-b...

The red ropes seen in the video were used for daily executions in Sednaya Prison. They should stand as one of the symbols of the dark era Syria endured under the rule of the Assad family and their prisons.

Dawn in Damascus In the end, Bashar al-Assad had nothing to say to the country he bludgeoned and bled, but what matters now is that his ‘forever’ rule is over

"My eyes are on you, O Damascus, for it is from you that the morning flows"

A brilliant piece of writing from @kshaheen.bsky.social — Stand tall!

newlinesmag.com/spotlight/da...

Liberation The Syrian Revolution: the most thoroughgoing, diverse, persistent and resilient revolution in all human history. The revolutionary Syrian people: a people that risked everything, lost everything, …

I wrote this quickly on Syria's national liberation from fascism and imperialism.

These four men were going to be executed today by the Assad regime. “Our executions were going to be half an hour ago.”

‘He has come out an old man’: joy and grief as loved ones released from Assad prisons Family members describe renewed hopes after decades-long searches for political detainees in ‘Kingdom of Silence’

Moammar has been searching for his brother for 39 years, arrested by Syrian soldiers in Lebanon when he was 18. He hadn’t heard anything from him since.

Until Thursday, when his brother emerged from Hama prison as an old man, 39 years later.

www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d...

Israel and the ICC: A Catch-22 for the West's rules-based order By refusing to enforce ICC warrants, the West has hardened its support for Israel's genocide, relying on absurd justifications to do so, says Mouin Rabbani.

Mouin Rabbani makes his debut for The New Arab!

By refusing to enforce ICC warrants, the West has hardened its support for Israel's genocide, relying on absurd justifications to do so, he writes.

Israel and the ICC: A Catch-22 for the West's rules-based order.

www.newarab.com/opinion/isra...

Facsinating detail from Adam Hanieh’s new banger of a book on Lenin’s use of oil concessions as a ‘weapon’

To survive after ceasefire, rebuild Lebanon for all its citizens Lebanon is bruised but not broken. Reconstruction efforts must focus on the public good and not fall prey to private interests once more, argues Mona Fawaz.

Published two great pieces in @thenewarab.bsky.social today.

1) Mona Fawaz: "To survive after ceasefire, rebuild Lebanon for all its citizens"

www.newarab.com/opinion/surv...

2) Leila al-Shami: "Our dream of an Assad-free Syria has returned with rebel advance"

www.newarab.com/opinion/our-...

History Made on the Ground You know the multiverse theory, that there are many parallel universes, and that they may contain alternate versions of ourselves and our conditions in this universe…. Well, the last couple of days…

I've written a summary/ initial analysis of what's happening in Syria. qunfuz.com/2024/12/01/h...

Bluesky feels like a throwback to the Twitter days of 2013, and now a Syrian rebel offensive — somehow it feels all too familiar.

Great list, Ayman. Thank you for this!

Revolution in Every Country Comic Series: Episode 1 - Syria: Erasing an Inconvenient Revolution - UNICORN RIOT Episode 1 takes a look at aspects of the Syrian Revolution that have been erased, from Omar Aziz and local councils to the Douma 4 and more.

So a lot is happening right now in Syria, but this didn't start yesterday. Here's a thread of resources to understand the Syrian context that centres Syrian revolutionary and liberatory voices. First up, humbly, I made a comic a couple years ago on this very thing!
unicornriot.ninja/2022/revolut...

My cardinal directions as a marxist:

1) make Palestine central
2) brinng sartre back
3) value oriented stuff and ideology critique aren’t as opposed as many present them
4) residual antipathy to the fragment on the machine

His sweater reads “turn up the love” around the graphic of a green heart.

Read the words on the sweater of this Palestinian child standing in flood water outside his meager tent shelter in Gaza. Read the words and ask yourself why the US is allowed to do this to him.

Abu Ghraib case casts spotlight on Iraq's private security firms In-depth: A recent ruling awarding millions to Abu Ghraib torture victims has rekindled interest in the role that private security companies play in Iraq.

Impunity for crimes and a lack of avenues for recourse remain issues that many in Iraq feel should be addressed with urgency.

A recent ruling awarding millions to Abu Ghraib torture victims has rekindled interest in the role that private security play in Iraq.

www.newarab.com/analysis/abu...