Reckoning with Racial Capitalism: Settler Colonialism, Anti-Blackness, and Left Critique Beyond Neoliberalism
by Siddhant Issar
Columbia University Press, 2026
In recent years, activists and scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of racial capitalism to examine a range of topics, from the role of slavery in the development of the modern economy to the uneven effects of capitalism on nonwhite populations. Yet the meaning, scope, and political implications of this concept are deeply contested. Why has this idea provoked fierce debate? What can critical theory learn from engaging with the framework of racial capitalism and its use by social movements? How might reworking this framework push left politics and thinking to better understand our historical moment?
by Siddhant Issar
Columbia University Press, 2026
[Publication date: October 6, 2026]
This book develops a critical theory of racial capitalism and argues that it is indispensable to understanding and contesting the neoliberal present. Challenging deracialized left critiques of neoliberalism, Siddhant Issar reconfigures the paradigm of racial capitalism to illuminate the relationships among anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and capital accumulation. He historicizes the neoliberal era, examining American capitalism’s changing yet durable long-term entanglements with gendered logics of racial and colonial domination. Bringing together political theory, Black studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and critical political economy with the knowledge production of social movements, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism calls for a reorientation of left politics beyond zero-sum framings of antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles.
REVIEWS:
"Racial capitalism is everywhere. It is the answer to everything, or a dead end; it has been lambasted, celebrated, contested, and mostly misunderstood. Reckoning with Racial Capitalism moves beyond the noise and critically situates its meaning, origins, and analytical purchase within its historical and contemporary context. The result is a revised, sharpened understanding of the term and concept indispensable for our current anticapitalist struggles." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
"Reckoning with Racial Capitalism is among the most important critical theory texts of the post-2008 interregnum in its convincing explication of the centrality of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism to capitalism and neoliberalism. Siddhant Issar offers a timely and unimpeachable rebuttal of both leftist screeds against "identity politics" and critiques of Western Marxism as irrelevant to, and detracting from, real class analysis." -- Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
"Reckoning with Racial Capitalism does what I wish all academic texts did: It recognizes Black and Indigenous social movements as theorists who can and should guide not only our collective knowledge about capitalism but also our collective struggle to free all life from the racial, colonial, and patriarchal violence that makes capitalism tick." -- Melanie K. Yazzie, coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation
"The framework of 'racial capitalism' was originally forged in the context of a mass struggle against a regime of racial domination, exploitation, and dispossession. In this book, Issar simultaneously returns us to these political roots while bringing it into the present conjuncture. He deftly reveals the imbrications of white supremacy, colonial dispossession, and neoliberal financialization, addressing Black and Indigenous social movements as fellow theorists and co-conspirators, all the while inciting us to solidaristic collective struggle to forge alternatives beyond the given world." -- Robert Nichols, author of Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory
"Siddhant Issar’s Reckoning with Racial Capitalism offers an account of U.S. racial capitalism that encompasses settler colonialism and uses it to theorize neoliberalism anew, accounting for the uneven work of capital’s violence within it. To understand this unevenness, Issar grounds neoliberalism in the history of racial, colonial, and patriarchal domination and explicates how they are articulated with the exploitation of the working class and emerging financialization and privatization. A great achievement!" -- Inés Valdez, author of Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Siddhant Issar is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville.
Harold Cruse: Critic, Writer, Teacher
by Vincent W. Lloyd
Yale University Press, 2026
[Publication date : October 6, 2026]
In the 1960s and 1970s, Harold Cruse (1916–2005) was one of the most prominent Black intellectuals in the world, mentioned in the same breath as James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X. Today, Cruse is nearly forgotten. In this biography, Vincent W. Lloyd reclaims the story of an influential contrarian, a man who was beloved, feared, hated, reviled, praised.
Cruse grew up poor in Virginia and Harlem, worked as a critic and organizer, and then spent years making his living through manual labor while writing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). The book electrified Black America, and the activist who never finished high school became a tenured college professor, a founder of the field of Black Studies, and a mentor to countless student activists. By the 1980s, however, Cruse’s distaste for integration, liberal pluralism, and multiculturalism meant that his influential work was fading from view.
Drawing on Cruse’s letters and unpublished writings, along with scores of interviews, Lloyd offers a fast-paced narrative of an extraordinary life―and a new perspective on Black justice struggles. Ultimately, this is the story of a singular man: passionate, brilliant, strange, and visionary.
REVIEWS:
“A delightfully intimate scholarly encounter with the life and legacy of Harold Cruse, one of the foremost contributors to the discipline of Black Studies.”―Lawrence Jackson, Johns Hopkins University
“A beautifully written and impressively sophisticated portrait of a true intellectual whose name and writings should be known by everyone who imagines they know 20th century African American history.”―David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross
“Lloyd’s sympathetic portrait of Cruse perfectly captures the colleague I once knew: brilliant, stubborn, warm, irascible, unfiltered, enigmatic, sad, and hilarious. As contemporary Black intellectuals face what feels like an existential crisis, Harold Cruse could not be timelier.”― Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vincent W. Lloyd is professor and former director of Africana Studies at Villanova University. His recent books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination and the coauthored Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons. His writing has appeared in Commonweal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Plough, and other publications.
The World Of Cecil Taylor: Essays, Poetry, Photographs, and Interviews
Edited by Peter Valente
SUNY Press, 2026
[Publication date: November 1, 2026]
Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) was one of the most influential pianists and composers in contemporary jazz. A pioneer as a leader/composer in the free jazz movement of the late '50s and early '60s, Taylor developed into a major voice in expanding jazz's harmonic and rhythmic languages. Through his career, he mentored and worked alongside other leading jazz stylists, including Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger, Jimmy Lyons, and Sunny Murray, as well as composed music for ballet and dance He also was a well-known poet whose work has been compared to Amiri Baraka's, among others. The World of Cecil Taylor contains essays from musicians who played with Cecil, jazz fans, academics, and critics, as well as in-depth essays on Taylor's poetry, photos, and interviews. Like one of Cecil's solos, the book is multivocal, with many nuances and changes in the rhythm. The World of Cecil will be a valuable resource for readers and scholars as an introduction and exploration of one of America's most original musical voices.
REVIEWS:
"Far more than a mere introduction to Taylor's revolutionary work." ― Kirkus Reviews
"This international, cross-disciplinary compendium of approaches to the maximalist art―music, poetry, dance―of challenging, profoundly rewarding Cecil Taylor is most welcome. There's no better way, other than listening to his recordings, to explore the complexly beautiful work of this unique genius." ― Howard Mandel, author of Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz
"What a marvelous book! Cecil Taylor was a great American artist―a one-of-a-kind pianist, composer, and poet who profoundly enriched those of us who were privileged to live in his time and to count him as a friend. Assembling a broad spectrum of interviews, memoirs, and analyses of Taylor's accomplishments by a bevy of musicians, writers, and poets whose lives were indelibly impacted by him, this anthology is worthy of its subject. It’s at once a terrific read and a textured, multi-angled mine of information about the life and work of a genuinely singular figure." ― Robert Levin, author of Going Outside: Fiction, Commentary, Jazz
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twenty-two full length books, including a translation of Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, which received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. His most recent books are The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical and Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes and his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan. He lives in Castle Hayne, North Carolina.
When Ignorance Governs:
Trump’s Return and Democracy Under Siege
by Stephen M. Fry, Ph.D.
SBDI Publications 2026
[Publication date: September 1, 2026]
What happens when weaponized ignorance returns to power?
In Weaponization of Ignorance, Stephen M. Fry examined how lies, misinformation, grievance, tribal loyalty, and media distortion helped divide America and make Donald Trump’s political return possible. But the deeper warning was never only about Trump’s dishonesty. It was about the ecosystem that protected the lies: the politicians who refused to correct them, the media figures who amplified them, the donors who tolerated them, and the voters taught to distrust every institution that might challenge the story they had been given.
When Ignorance Governs begins where that warning left off.
Trump’s return to the presidency has moved the crisis from rhetoric to reality. Claims that once circulated through rallies, cable-news segments, podcasts, social media, fundraising emails, and political memes have become justifications for executive orders, pardons, loyalty tests, investigations, funding threats, attacks on journalists, pressure on universities, assaults on civil servants, and open hostility toward democratic guardrails.
This book argues that weaponized ignorance becomes far more dangerous when it gains administrative power. In political campaigns, falsehood can distort public opinion. In government, it can reshape institutions. It can determine who is trusted, who is punished, who is protected, who is investigated, which experts are ignored, which judges are attacked, and which version of reality public power is used to enforce.
With chapters on loyalty, grievance, right-wing media, the Justice Department, the courts, Congress, immigration enforcement, civil service, election rules, and the 2026 midterm test, When Ignorance Governs is not simply a chronicle of Trump’s second term. It is a warning about democratic erosion while choices still-
The central question is no longer whether the warning signs were real. They are now visible in the machinery of government. The question is whether enough citizens will recognize them before they become normal.
The 2026 midterm elections will not decide the fate of American democracy once and for all. But they will teach political actors whether falsehood, revenge, intimidation, corruption, and attacks on democratic institutions carry a price—or whether they can be absorbed as ordinary politics.
A timely and urgent follow-up to Weaponization of Ignorance, this book is for readers who want to understand not only how democracy is weakened, but how citizens can still recognize, resist, and refuse to normalize its decline.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
"Far more than a mere introduction to Taylor's revolutionary work." ― Kirkus Reviews
"This international, cross-disciplinary compendium of approaches to the maximalist art―music, poetry, dance―of challenging, profoundly rewarding Cecil Taylor is most welcome. There's no better way, other than listening to his recordings, to explore the complexly beautiful work of this unique genius." ― Howard Mandel, author of Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz
"What a marvelous book! Cecil Taylor was a great American artist―a one-of-a-kind pianist, composer, and poet who profoundly enriched those of us who were privileged to live in his time and to count him as a friend. Assembling a broad spectrum of interviews, memoirs, and analyses of Taylor's accomplishments by a bevy of musicians, writers, and poets whose lives were indelibly impacted by him, this anthology is worthy of its subject. It’s at once a terrific read and a textured, multi-angled mine of information about the life and work of a genuinely singular figure." ― Robert Levin, author of Going Outside: Fiction, Commentary, Jazz
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of twenty-two full length books, including a translation of Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, which received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. His most recent books are The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical and Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes and his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan. He lives in Castle Hayne, North Carolina.
When Ignorance Governs:
Trump’s Return and Democracy Under Siege
by Stephen M. Fry, Ph.D.
SBDI Publications 2026
[Publication date: September 1, 2026]
In Weaponization of Ignorance, Stephen M. Fry examined how lies, misinformation, grievance, tribal loyalty, and media distortion helped divide America and make Donald Trump’s political return possible. But the deeper warning was never only about Trump’s dishonesty. It was about the ecosystem that protected the lies: the politicians who refused to correct them, the media figures who amplified them, the donors who tolerated them, and the voters taught to distrust every institution that might challenge the story they had been given.
When Ignorance Governs begins where that warning left off.
Trump’s return to the presidency has moved the crisis from rhetoric to reality. Claims that once circulated through rallies, cable-news segments, podcasts, social media, fundraising emails, and political memes have become justifications for executive orders, pardons, loyalty tests, investigations, funding threats, attacks on journalists, pressure on universities, assaults on civil servants, and open hostility toward democratic guardrails.
This book argues that weaponized ignorance becomes far more dangerous when it gains administrative power. In political campaigns, falsehood can distort public opinion. In government, it can reshape institutions. It can determine who is trusted, who is punished, who is protected, who is investigated, which experts are ignored, which judges are attacked, and which version of reality public power is used to enforce.
With chapters on loyalty, grievance, right-wing media, the Justice Department, the courts, Congress, immigration enforcement, civil service, election rules, and the 2026 midterm test, When Ignorance Governs is not simply a chronicle of Trump’s second term. It is a warning about democratic erosion while choices still-
The central question is no longer whether the warning signs were real. They are now visible in the machinery of government. The question is whether enough citizens will recognize them before they become normal.
The 2026 midterm elections will not decide the fate of American democracy once and for all. But they will teach political actors whether falsehood, revenge, intimidation, corruption, and attacks on democratic institutions carry a price—or whether they can be absorbed as ordinary politics.
A timely and urgent follow-up to Weaponization of Ignorance, this book is for readers who want to understand not only how democracy is weakened, but how citizens can still recognize, resist, and refuse to normalize its decline.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stephen M. Fry Ph.D.
Stephen M. Fry, Ph.D. has had a varied career spanning physics, engineering, consulting, corporate management, and venture capital—as well as writing. He earned a Ph.D. in Quantum Electronics from UCLA, along with an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, and B.S. in Physics (also from UCLA), and an M.B.A. in Financial Analysis from National University. He has published extensively, including dozens of technical papers and presentations, and is the author or co-author of nine books on medical technology. Weaponization of Ignorance reflects his more recent focus—a decade of reading, research, and reflection on how media, psychology, and culture shape political belief. He lives in northern California with his wife, and their border collie.
Don't Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide
by Assal Rad
Vintage, 2026
[Publication date: September 8, 2026]
A searing indictment of Western media that lays bare how the "free press," long tasked with speaking truth to power, instead became a vital part of the machinery that enabled the genocide in Palestine
"In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth." —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country
If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.“Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice, and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity—not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage—are unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak.” —Omar El Akkad, National Book Award–winning author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“Eighty years ago, George Orwell wrote that ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.’ Assal Rad shows, in painful detail, that in the case of Israel-Palestine, this remains true.” —Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
“Throughout the course of the Gaza Genocide, historian Assal Rad has been a beacon of clarity in a media landscape clouded by lies. In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth.” —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country
“Assal Rad brilliantly exposes how, for the past years, reality itself had been distorted to fit a political ecosystem. Western media does not simply omit or distort reality, but actively launders it. Language reframes and ultimately erases both violence and responsibility. ‘Self-defense’ replaces the naming of genocide. These linguistic choices reveal intentionality in complicity: not neutral but political, shaping whose lives are grievable and whose deaths are rendered acceptable. In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad demonstrates how media narratives create permissive conditions for genocide through strategic omission, selective visibility, euphemism, and the erasing of Palestinian voices. When those same institutions dictate what can and cannot be said, this is not press freedom but censorship. And when they uncritically repeat the claims of a state responsible for unprecedented violence, in ways that obscure or diminish its gravity, this is not reporting—it is complicity.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of When the World Sleeps
“Remember ‘reading comprehension’ in high school? And then, in college, if you were pretentious, ‘critical theory’ or ‘media studies’? It was all about learning how to read—harder than it sounds. It was a lesson that was valuable then and is even more valuable now. Nobody has been as relentless a promotor of reading comprehension as Assal Rad. By showing us the gulf between what is said and what is meant—and what actually should be said—she has offered a vital lesson in reading comprehension—showing us how words can kill actual people in this actual world.” —Benjamin Moser, author of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
“If you’ve ever wondered how the media manipulated perception through subtle use of language, this is the book for you to read. Assal Rad in her superb book shows how no other institution is as instrumental in shaping perception like the media, which is not a record of truth-telling but a carefully curated narrative and elaborate system of erasure, euphemism, and deference to power.” —Raja Shehadeh, National Book Award finalist and author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
“A poignant reminder of the power of words to normalise, or legitimise, genocide.” —Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism
“When so many chose indifference and obfuscation, Assal insists on clarity, honesty, and integrity. She documents how complicity for a livestreamed genocide was perpetrated. It is a chronicle of depravity and the depraved, and of the operation of cynicism on a grand dehumanizing scale.” —Ussama Makdisi, author of Anti-Palestinianism
“Assal Rad offers a profound meditation on the role of the media in a democratic society, which ideally serves as a check against the interests of the powerful and lifts up the voices of those on the receiving end of brutal governmental policies. Yet, when it comes to mainstream media coverage of Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Rad expertly demonstrates how the media not only failed to uphold the ethical standards of its profession but, even worse, was and remains actively complicit in amplifying and reifying US and Israeli governmental talking points denying, excusing, and justifying Israel's crimes against humanity. This book is a shocking exposé illuminating the ways in which the media molds public opinion to help perpetuate and build consent for atrocities. A must read.” —Dr. Josh Ruebner, professor at Georgetown University and author of The United States and the Palestinian Nakba
“This is a searing indictment and a fierce demand for press accountability.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rad is a firebrand with receipts, and this blazing but clear-eyed work of media criticism should be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got to this terrible place.” —Literary Hub, “34 Books You Need to Read This Fall”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Assal Rad is a historian of Middle East history and a Nonresident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and DAWN. Assal completed a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine. She works on research and writing related to U.S. foreign policy issues, the Middle East, contemporary Iran, and Israel/Palestine.
Her first book, The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy, and other publications, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.
Follow her on X/Twitter: @AssalRad and IG: @AssalRad_
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
When Dehumanization Becomes Standard
I. Rationalizing Atrocities
As a society, we often reflect on historic human brutalities with dismay. Questions like “how could they let that happen?” or “how were people okay with it?” are raised in a manner that implies such cruelties would not be permissible today. Yet the world watched in horror as Israel’s most devastating assault on the besieged Gaza Strip to date unfolded with nightmarish scenes of entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, children pulled lifeless from the debris, and parents cradling shrouded bodies too small for graves.
By January 2026, the official death toll had surpassed 71,000, the majority of whom were civilians. According to researchers, these figures significantly undercount the actual death toll in Gaza. The evidence of atrocity was not only overwhelming, it was broadcast in real time by Palestinian journalists who remained on the ground, often until they themselves were killed by Israeli forces. And yet much of the Western media refused to name what was unfolding: a genocide.
Instead, we were told this was a “war” against Hamas, a “response” to the attacks of October 7, a part of the “conflict” between Israel and Palestinians—whose land Israel has illegally occupied for decades. The headlines echoed official Israeli and U.S. talking points nearly word for word. When entire families were wiped out, the language softened the crime: Israel said it was targeting Hamas. When children starved due to deliberate aid blockages, the narrative focused on logistics, not policy. Hospitals were not obliterated; they were caught in cross fire. All the while, Palestinian lives were rendered abstract, conditional, and unworthy of the same humanity as Israeli lives.
But this is not a book seeking to prove what is known to be true and what most of the world knows to be true. This is a book about how it was allowed to happen. This book is a study in how narrative shapes reality. It is not simply about media bias. It is about the weaponization of language to justify the most heinous of crimes. It is about how a self-styled free press became complicit in silencing the truth and shielding power. It is about how the media, rather than holding those in power accountable, became a vital part of the machinery that enabled genocide. It is about how Western media manufactured consent for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
To understand how this happened, we must first recognize the long history of how Palestine has been framed in Western thinking—not as a nation seeking liberation and self-determination, but as a problem to be managed. For decades, Western media have largely repeated the framing of Israel as a liberal democracy defending itself, and Palestinians as either obstacles to peace or threats to be neutralized. Long before the events of October 2023, this framing laid the groundwork for what would come. Israel’s actions were always couched in the language of self-defense, no matter the scale of violence; Palestinian resistance, even nonviolent protest, was criminalized or erased. Palestinians were described not as people with rights under international law but as figures in a security narrative dictated by Israeli and American priorities.
This is not new. Of course, there is the centuries-old history of Western colonialism in the Middle East and the language of Orientalism that was used to reinforce and justify the existing power imbalances, rooted in the exploitation of regional peoples. However, recent history may provide a more familiar case to illustrate this larger pattern. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers a useful precedent. Then, too, we were told stories about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that did not exist, and about liberating people who would suffer far more after U.S. intervention. The media, instead of interrogating the narrative, laundered it. The result was a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized an entire region. Then as now, consent was manufactured—not by flagrant censorship, but by selective storytelling, by privileging the voices of the powerful, by embedding with soldiers, which shaped the coverage, and by suppressing inconvenient truths.
In the case of the Gaza Genocide, the foundation had already been laid for its rationalization through years of political rhetoric that was unequivocally pro-Israel and media coverage that followed suit. The media were able to manufacture consent in real time and understate Israel’s atrocities by tapping into existing narratives and relying on the public to accept them without question. The only kink in their plan was the courageous work of Palestinian journalists and social media platforms, which showed the world the reality of Israel’s unprecedented slaughter in Gaza.
II. Selective Justice: The West’s Misleading Narrative of Palestine
Even before the Gaza Genocide, the Western narrative of Palestine—led by the United States, which is both the most powerful state in the world and Israel’s largest funder and supporter—had largely focused on Israel’s exclusive rights while relegating Palestinian rights to an afterthought. We are all familiar with the now ubiquitous language of “Israel has a right to exist” and “Israel has the right to defend itself,” which Western officials use to deflect questions about Israel’s actions or the plight of Palestinian people. Yet Western officials never acknowledge that Palestine has a right to exist and that Palestine has a right to defend itself, denying Palestinians the same protections enshrined in international law. In fact, when reporters pushed the Biden administration on the Palestinian right to self-defense, the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller refused to acknowledge that Palestinians have such a right.
They often get away with this by using legal language to create a paradox for Palestinians, wherein Palestinian statehood is denied and, because no official Palestinian state exists, they are deprived of the same rights afforded to other nations. Miller demonstrated this absurdity during a press briefing in November 2024, when reporters questioned the Biden administration’s selective support for the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, versus warrants for Israeli officials, which had been issued on November 21, 2024, “for crimes against humanity and war crimes.” Miller’s response boiled down to the fact that Ukraine is a sovereign state, but “there is no sovereign state of Palestine.”
Israel has intentionally thwarted Palestinian statehood—with help from the United States, which refuses to recognize a Palestinian state despite overwhelming international support—to create such a paradox, while feigning interest in the “peace process.” All the while, Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements continues unabated, Palestinians are subjected to apartheid and other mistreatment under Israel’s decades-long military occupation, and Palestinians are given no legal recourse to address this injustice.
Zealous support of Israel in the West, especially in the United States, goes unquestioned, whereas being critical of Israel can be seen as a political liability. The language of “unconditional support” that is commonly used to describe the U.S. relationship with Israel is plainly an extremist position, effectively saying the United States will support Israel no matter what it does, even if it is committing a genocide. Such a statement also defies international and U.S. domestic law, which prohibits aid and weapons being supplied to a state committing gross human rights abuses.
At the same time, anti-genocide advocates and pro-Palestine voices are forcibly silenced, raising questions about the values of liberty and freedom Western states claim to espouse. In the United States, campus protests were brutally repressed in the spring of 2024, under the Democratic Joe Biden administration. This chilling effect on basic constitutional rights like speech and protest continued under the Republican administration of President Trump. In Europe—especially in the U.K. and Germany, which vociferously support Israel’s actions despite the flagrant violations of international norms—human rights groups and experts have raised concerns over the suppression of pro-Palestine advocacy, targeting of free speech, and arresting of protesters.
For their part, legacy media have played the role of stenographers through all of this. Rather than challenging such repression of freedoms, questioning the legality of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel, or presenting the Palestinian perspective with any sense of balance, the mainstream media have acted as the propaganda wing of Western and Israeli governments. Moreover, the media’s tendency to compartmentalize the Palestinian cause into separate issues based on their geography influences public perception and understanding. Though treated as distinct concerns, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are all Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation. They are inextricably tied together through the struggle for Palestinian statehood.
The right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled in the Nakba of 1948 and the 1967 war, as well as their descendants, is also part of the broader story of Palestinian identity and liberation. There can be no “peace in the Middle East,” as Western states led by the United States profess to care for, without Palestinian liberation. There can be no Palestinian liberation without Palestinian people and their homeland. Yet Western narratives rarely question the injustice of denying Palestinians the right of return to a homeland they were forcibly expelled from over the course of the last century, as Jewish people across the world are granted the right to immigrate to Israel (historic Palestine) or illegal settlements in the occupied territories, simply because they are Jewish.
In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are expelled from their homes so that Jewish New Yorkers can take their place—and their actual homes. In the West Bank, Israel is enforcing a system of apartheid, expanding its illegal settlements, facilitating settler violence and pogroms against Palestinians, and moving closer to annexation of the occupied territory. These stories receive little coverage in the media, and when they do, the language often normalizes Israel’s actions. For instance, in early July 2025, the story of Israeli ministers pushing for annexation of the West Bank by the end of the month was only covered by one major Western media outlet. The Reuters headline read, “Israeli Likud Party Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex West Bank,” which failed to mention the brazenly illegal nature of this action or the fact that the West Bank is occupied and belongs to Palestinians.
In Gaza—prior to the genocide—Israel had imposed a blockade for more than a decade that significantly deepened existing restrictions and solidified Israel’s control over Gaza by land, air, and sea. Though Israel argues that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed in July 2024 what UN agencies and human rights groups had long asserted: Israel’s effective control over the Gaza Strip constituted an illegal occupation. Despite the dire reality of Israel’s occupation of Gaza before the Hamas attacks of October 7, this context was largely absent from the political talking points and media coverage that ensued. Yet articles covering Israel’s assault on Gaza in the wake of October 7 repeatedly contextualized the atrocities against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks, illustrating the selective nature of what qualifies as important background information.
For years, mainstream media have parroted the language of their own governments, and that of Israel, with little critical coverage of or challenge to the dominant political narrative in the West. Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized, along with the broader Arab and Muslim world, to serve the foreign policy objectives of governments without questioning the moral and legal implications. The horrors that have been normalized in Gaza are the culmination of this long history of racism and injustice. But it is not the first time in recent memory that the media have played a central role in legitimizing war crimes.
III. Iraq as a Precedent: The Death of Accountability
It is often said that hindsight is twenty-twenty—a phrase that suggests we are better equipped to judge past events once their consequences have come to light. This could not be truer than in the case of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. More than two decades after the incursion that claimed so many Iraqi lives, wrought havoc on the region, and sowed the seeds of ongoing conflict, there is now a clear consensus among analysts and the American public that the war was a catastrophic foreign policy mistake. Launched under the guise of national security, framed as a righteous mission to rid the region of WMDs and to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein—whom the United States had supported as early as the 1950s and in the 1980s during his war of aggression against Iran—the invasion stands today as a textbook case of how deceit, racism, and empire were packaged for popular consumption, with the U.S. media serving as willing accomplices.
Activist and Middle East historian Assal Rad is known as the “headline fixer” for her powerful posts that illustrate how mainstream Western media’s coverage of the Gaza Genocide is filled with double standards. Israelis are described as "children" and "civilians," while Palestinians are "people under 18" and "collateral damage"; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the so-called ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine: For example, the Associated Press reported that "Gaza's living conditions worsen as strong winds and hypothermia kill 5." No, Rad corrects: Gaza's living conditions worsen as Israel blocks aid.
In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones. This groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action, mapping with devastating clarity the media’s complicity in whitewashing a human rights crisis.
"In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth." —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country
If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.“Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice, and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity—not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage—are unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak.” —Omar El Akkad, National Book Award–winning author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“Eighty years ago, George Orwell wrote that ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.’ Assal Rad shows, in painful detail, that in the case of Israel-Palestine, this remains true.” —Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
“Throughout the course of the Gaza Genocide, historian Assal Rad has been a beacon of clarity in a media landscape clouded by lies. In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth.” —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country
“Assal Rad brilliantly exposes how, for the past years, reality itself had been distorted to fit a political ecosystem. Western media does not simply omit or distort reality, but actively launders it. Language reframes and ultimately erases both violence and responsibility. ‘Self-defense’ replaces the naming of genocide. These linguistic choices reveal intentionality in complicity: not neutral but political, shaping whose lives are grievable and whose deaths are rendered acceptable. In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad demonstrates how media narratives create permissive conditions for genocide through strategic omission, selective visibility, euphemism, and the erasing of Palestinian voices. When those same institutions dictate what can and cannot be said, this is not press freedom but censorship. And when they uncritically repeat the claims of a state responsible for unprecedented violence, in ways that obscure or diminish its gravity, this is not reporting—it is complicity.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of When the World Sleeps
“Remember ‘reading comprehension’ in high school? And then, in college, if you were pretentious, ‘critical theory’ or ‘media studies’? It was all about learning how to read—harder than it sounds. It was a lesson that was valuable then and is even more valuable now. Nobody has been as relentless a promotor of reading comprehension as Assal Rad. By showing us the gulf between what is said and what is meant—and what actually should be said—she has offered a vital lesson in reading comprehension—showing us how words can kill actual people in this actual world.” —Benjamin Moser, author of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
“If you’ve ever wondered how the media manipulated perception through subtle use of language, this is the book for you to read. Assal Rad in her superb book shows how no other institution is as instrumental in shaping perception like the media, which is not a record of truth-telling but a carefully curated narrative and elaborate system of erasure, euphemism, and deference to power.” —Raja Shehadeh, National Book Award finalist and author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
“A poignant reminder of the power of words to normalise, or legitimise, genocide.” —Yanis Varoufakis, author of Technofeudalism
“When so many chose indifference and obfuscation, Assal insists on clarity, honesty, and integrity. She documents how complicity for a livestreamed genocide was perpetrated. It is a chronicle of depravity and the depraved, and of the operation of cynicism on a grand dehumanizing scale.” —Ussama Makdisi, author of Anti-Palestinianism
“Assal Rad offers a profound meditation on the role of the media in a democratic society, which ideally serves as a check against the interests of the powerful and lifts up the voices of those on the receiving end of brutal governmental policies. Yet, when it comes to mainstream media coverage of Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Rad expertly demonstrates how the media not only failed to uphold the ethical standards of its profession but, even worse, was and remains actively complicit in amplifying and reifying US and Israeli governmental talking points denying, excusing, and justifying Israel's crimes against humanity. This book is a shocking exposé illuminating the ways in which the media molds public opinion to help perpetuate and build consent for atrocities. A must read.” —Dr. Josh Ruebner, professor at Georgetown University and author of The United States and the Palestinian Nakba
“This is a searing indictment and a fierce demand for press accountability.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rad is a firebrand with receipts, and this blazing but clear-eyed work of media criticism should be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got to this terrible place.” —Literary Hub, “34 Books You Need to Read This Fall”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Assal Rad is a historian of Middle East history and a Nonresident Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and DAWN. Assal completed a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine. She works on research and writing related to U.S. foreign policy issues, the Middle East, contemporary Iran, and Israel/Palestine.
Her first book, The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy, and other publications, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.
Follow her on X/Twitter: @AssalRad and IG: @AssalRad_
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
When Dehumanization Becomes Standard
I. Rationalizing Atrocities
As a society, we often reflect on historic human brutalities with dismay. Questions like “how could they let that happen?” or “how were people okay with it?” are raised in a manner that implies such cruelties would not be permissible today. Yet the world watched in horror as Israel’s most devastating assault on the besieged Gaza Strip to date unfolded with nightmarish scenes of entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, children pulled lifeless from the debris, and parents cradling shrouded bodies too small for graves.
By January 2026, the official death toll had surpassed 71,000, the majority of whom were civilians. According to researchers, these figures significantly undercount the actual death toll in Gaza. The evidence of atrocity was not only overwhelming, it was broadcast in real time by Palestinian journalists who remained on the ground, often until they themselves were killed by Israeli forces. And yet much of the Western media refused to name what was unfolding: a genocide.
Instead, we were told this was a “war” against Hamas, a “response” to the attacks of October 7, a part of the “conflict” between Israel and Palestinians—whose land Israel has illegally occupied for decades. The headlines echoed official Israeli and U.S. talking points nearly word for word. When entire families were wiped out, the language softened the crime: Israel said it was targeting Hamas. When children starved due to deliberate aid blockages, the narrative focused on logistics, not policy. Hospitals were not obliterated; they were caught in cross fire. All the while, Palestinian lives were rendered abstract, conditional, and unworthy of the same humanity as Israeli lives.
But this is not a book seeking to prove what is known to be true and what most of the world knows to be true. This is a book about how it was allowed to happen. This book is a study in how narrative shapes reality. It is not simply about media bias. It is about the weaponization of language to justify the most heinous of crimes. It is about how a self-styled free press became complicit in silencing the truth and shielding power. It is about how the media, rather than holding those in power accountable, became a vital part of the machinery that enabled genocide. It is about how Western media manufactured consent for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
To understand how this happened, we must first recognize the long history of how Palestine has been framed in Western thinking—not as a nation seeking liberation and self-determination, but as a problem to be managed. For decades, Western media have largely repeated the framing of Israel as a liberal democracy defending itself, and Palestinians as either obstacles to peace or threats to be neutralized. Long before the events of October 2023, this framing laid the groundwork for what would come. Israel’s actions were always couched in the language of self-defense, no matter the scale of violence; Palestinian resistance, even nonviolent protest, was criminalized or erased. Palestinians were described not as people with rights under international law but as figures in a security narrative dictated by Israeli and American priorities.
This is not new. Of course, there is the centuries-old history of Western colonialism in the Middle East and the language of Orientalism that was used to reinforce and justify the existing power imbalances, rooted in the exploitation of regional peoples. However, recent history may provide a more familiar case to illustrate this larger pattern. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers a useful precedent. Then, too, we were told stories about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that did not exist, and about liberating people who would suffer far more after U.S. intervention. The media, instead of interrogating the narrative, laundered it. The result was a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized an entire region. Then as now, consent was manufactured—not by flagrant censorship, but by selective storytelling, by privileging the voices of the powerful, by embedding with soldiers, which shaped the coverage, and by suppressing inconvenient truths.
In the case of the Gaza Genocide, the foundation had already been laid for its rationalization through years of political rhetoric that was unequivocally pro-Israel and media coverage that followed suit. The media were able to manufacture consent in real time and understate Israel’s atrocities by tapping into existing narratives and relying on the public to accept them without question. The only kink in their plan was the courageous work of Palestinian journalists and social media platforms, which showed the world the reality of Israel’s unprecedented slaughter in Gaza.
II. Selective Justice: The West’s Misleading Narrative of Palestine
Even before the Gaza Genocide, the Western narrative of Palestine—led by the United States, which is both the most powerful state in the world and Israel’s largest funder and supporter—had largely focused on Israel’s exclusive rights while relegating Palestinian rights to an afterthought. We are all familiar with the now ubiquitous language of “Israel has a right to exist” and “Israel has the right to defend itself,” which Western officials use to deflect questions about Israel’s actions or the plight of Palestinian people. Yet Western officials never acknowledge that Palestine has a right to exist and that Palestine has a right to defend itself, denying Palestinians the same protections enshrined in international law. In fact, when reporters pushed the Biden administration on the Palestinian right to self-defense, the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller refused to acknowledge that Palestinians have such a right.
They often get away with this by using legal language to create a paradox for Palestinians, wherein Palestinian statehood is denied and, because no official Palestinian state exists, they are deprived of the same rights afforded to other nations. Miller demonstrated this absurdity during a press briefing in November 2024, when reporters questioned the Biden administration’s selective support for the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, versus warrants for Israeli officials, which had been issued on November 21, 2024, “for crimes against humanity and war crimes.” Miller’s response boiled down to the fact that Ukraine is a sovereign state, but “there is no sovereign state of Palestine.”
Israel has intentionally thwarted Palestinian statehood—with help from the United States, which refuses to recognize a Palestinian state despite overwhelming international support—to create such a paradox, while feigning interest in the “peace process.” All the while, Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements continues unabated, Palestinians are subjected to apartheid and other mistreatment under Israel’s decades-long military occupation, and Palestinians are given no legal recourse to address this injustice.
Zealous support of Israel in the West, especially in the United States, goes unquestioned, whereas being critical of Israel can be seen as a political liability. The language of “unconditional support” that is commonly used to describe the U.S. relationship with Israel is plainly an extremist position, effectively saying the United States will support Israel no matter what it does, even if it is committing a genocide. Such a statement also defies international and U.S. domestic law, which prohibits aid and weapons being supplied to a state committing gross human rights abuses.
At the same time, anti-genocide advocates and pro-Palestine voices are forcibly silenced, raising questions about the values of liberty and freedom Western states claim to espouse. In the United States, campus protests were brutally repressed in the spring of 2024, under the Democratic Joe Biden administration. This chilling effect on basic constitutional rights like speech and protest continued under the Republican administration of President Trump. In Europe—especially in the U.K. and Germany, which vociferously support Israel’s actions despite the flagrant violations of international norms—human rights groups and experts have raised concerns over the suppression of pro-Palestine advocacy, targeting of free speech, and arresting of protesters.
For their part, legacy media have played the role of stenographers through all of this. Rather than challenging such repression of freedoms, questioning the legality of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel, or presenting the Palestinian perspective with any sense of balance, the mainstream media have acted as the propaganda wing of Western and Israeli governments. Moreover, the media’s tendency to compartmentalize the Palestinian cause into separate issues based on their geography influences public perception and understanding. Though treated as distinct concerns, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are all Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation. They are inextricably tied together through the struggle for Palestinian statehood.
The right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled in the Nakba of 1948 and the 1967 war, as well as their descendants, is also part of the broader story of Palestinian identity and liberation. There can be no “peace in the Middle East,” as Western states led by the United States profess to care for, without Palestinian liberation. There can be no Palestinian liberation without Palestinian people and their homeland. Yet Western narratives rarely question the injustice of denying Palestinians the right of return to a homeland they were forcibly expelled from over the course of the last century, as Jewish people across the world are granted the right to immigrate to Israel (historic Palestine) or illegal settlements in the occupied territories, simply because they are Jewish.
In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are expelled from their homes so that Jewish New Yorkers can take their place—and their actual homes. In the West Bank, Israel is enforcing a system of apartheid, expanding its illegal settlements, facilitating settler violence and pogroms against Palestinians, and moving closer to annexation of the occupied territory. These stories receive little coverage in the media, and when they do, the language often normalizes Israel’s actions. For instance, in early July 2025, the story of Israeli ministers pushing for annexation of the West Bank by the end of the month was only covered by one major Western media outlet. The Reuters headline read, “Israeli Likud Party Ministers Urge Netanyahu to Annex West Bank,” which failed to mention the brazenly illegal nature of this action or the fact that the West Bank is occupied and belongs to Palestinians.
In Gaza—prior to the genocide—Israel had imposed a blockade for more than a decade that significantly deepened existing restrictions and solidified Israel’s control over Gaza by land, air, and sea. Though Israel argues that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed in July 2024 what UN agencies and human rights groups had long asserted: Israel’s effective control over the Gaza Strip constituted an illegal occupation. Despite the dire reality of Israel’s occupation of Gaza before the Hamas attacks of October 7, this context was largely absent from the political talking points and media coverage that ensued. Yet articles covering Israel’s assault on Gaza in the wake of October 7 repeatedly contextualized the atrocities against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks, illustrating the selective nature of what qualifies as important background information.
For years, mainstream media have parroted the language of their own governments, and that of Israel, with little critical coverage of or challenge to the dominant political narrative in the West. Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized, along with the broader Arab and Muslim world, to serve the foreign policy objectives of governments without questioning the moral and legal implications. The horrors that have been normalized in Gaza are the culmination of this long history of racism and injustice. But it is not the first time in recent memory that the media have played a central role in legitimizing war crimes.
III. Iraq as a Precedent: The Death of Accountability
It is often said that hindsight is twenty-twenty—a phrase that suggests we are better equipped to judge past events once their consequences have come to light. This could not be truer than in the case of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. More than two decades after the incursion that claimed so many Iraqi lives, wrought havoc on the region, and sowed the seeds of ongoing conflict, there is now a clear consensus among analysts and the American public that the war was a catastrophic foreign policy mistake. Launched under the guise of national security, framed as a righteous mission to rid the region of WMDs and to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein—whom the United States had supported as early as the 1950s and in the 1980s during his war of aggression against Iran—the invasion stands today as a textbook case of how deceit, racism, and empire were packaged for popular consumption, with the U.S. media serving as willing accomplices.
Activist and Middle East historian Assal Rad is known as the “headline fixer” for her powerful posts that illustrate how mainstream Western media’s coverage of the Gaza Genocide is filled with double standards. Israelis are described as "children" and "civilians," while Palestinians are "people under 18" and "collateral damage"; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the so-called ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine: For example, the Associated Press reported that "Gaza's living conditions worsen as strong winds and hypothermia kill 5." No, Rad corrects: Gaza's living conditions worsen as Israel blocks aid.
In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones. This groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action, mapping with devastating clarity the media’s complicity in whitewashing a human rights crisis.
The 2026 midterm elections will not decide the fate of American democracy once and for all. But they will teach political actors whether falsehood, revenge, intimidation, corruption, and attacks on democratic institutions carry a price—or whether they can be absorbed as ordinary politics.
A timely and urgent follow-up to Weaponization of Ignorance, this book is for readers who want to understand not only how democracy is weakened, but how citizens can still recognize, resist, and refuse to normalize its decline.
