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    • Category: Pick

    • The President of the German Association of University Presidents warns

      Nicola Kuhrt, Markus Weisskopf: Interview with Walter Rosenthal: “The science system is facing its greatest test since reunification,” Research.Table, February 4, 2026.

      Rosenthal’s interventions in this interview can be read as a warning based on institutional theory: In his role as president of the German Rectors’ Conference, he does not talk about science as a pure idea, but as infrastructure, as a structure of legal norms, financial flows, procedures, and self-governing bodies. His statement, “We must secure science in such a way that it can withstand illiberal times,” is programmatic and marks a shift: freedom does not appear here as a normative postulate, but as a construction task.

      When Rosenthal speaks of the “greatest stress test since reunification,” he is not referring to a singular conflict, but to the simultaneity of structural tensions: geopolitical shifts, growing authoritarian movements, and a growing discourse of mistrust toward expertise. In such a constellation, science is not only criticized but also politically instrumentalized. Its autonomy is not a matter of course but a contested status.

      Rosenthal’s reference to structural vulnerability is central. Academic freedom depends on concrete arrangements. Where funding is fragmented on a project basis, where planning horizons are shortened, where responsibilities remain diffuse, political dependence arises. Autonomy is then formally asserted, but materially relativized. In this sense, the demand for reliable basic funding is not a detailed budgetary issue, but a condition of epistemic sovereignty.

      At the same time, Rosenthal does not understand resilience as isolation. Science should not retreat into the role of a misunderstood collective of experts. It must explain itself, prove its ability to engage in discourse, and not allow itself to be reduced to populism. Trust is not created by gestures of authority, but by transparent procedures and comprehensible communication. This is precisely where the tension lies: science depends on the public, but must not become dependent on it.

      Essentially, Rosenthal advocates conscious institutional precaution. If illiberal dynamics operate not through abrupt breaks but through gradual shifts, then science does not need hectic alarmist rhetoric, but robust structures. In this context, safeguarding means a clear distribution of competences between the federal and state governments, strong self-administration, long-term financing, and international networking as a counterweight to national narrow-mindedness.

      Rosenthal’s position could therefore be read as a reaffirmation of democratic politics: Science does not stand outside society, but is part of the political order – and for this very reason it depends on specific protective mechanisms. In this understanding, freedom is not a state that is achieved once and then preserved. It is an ongoing institutional process. In a nutshell: science remains free only if its freedom is produced organizationally and desired politically – even and especially when political majorities change.

      ↗ https://table.media/research/analyse/walter-rosenthal-im-interview-wissenschaftssystem-steht-vor-groesster-belastungsprobe-seit-der-wende?utm_source=share&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_share

    • Dishonest honesty law in North Rhine-Westphalia

      North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament, 18th legislative period: Draft bill of the state government. Law on the Strengthening of the University Landscape (University Strengthening Act), Publication 18/16798, November 25, 2025, https://www.landtag.nrw.de/home/dokumente/dokumentensuche/gesetzgebungsportal/aktuelle-gesetzgebungsverfahr/hochschulstarkungsgesetz.html.

      The draft bill, which was initiated by the CDU-led Ministry of Science and referred to the Science Committee after its first reading on December 18, 2025, remains a threat to academic freedom and freedom of expression at universities in North Rhine-Westphalia, even after revision. On the surface it seems harmless: it aims to reduce shortage of skilled workers “through an attractiveness campaign for the higher education sector,” to reform lifelong learning at universities, to foster digitalization, to introduce quarter parity in senates as a standard model, – and to create “instruments to protect university members from assaults and hostility, discrimination, and the abuse of positions of power within the framework of university self-administration.”

      Indeed, there is a pressing need to curb the abuse of power at universities. But this legitimate demand is being exploited to make it easier for the government to expel unwelcome students and sanction university faculty, staff, and leadership under the guise of protecting diversity at universities.

      The addition of a “security right” and “integrity right” or “honesty right” (Redlichkeitsrecht) to disciplinary law in academia opens the door to exploitation for political purposes. Political exploitation is very likely if the new regulations and contact persons are designed and operate in such a way that academic freedom and freedom of expression are not prioritized. Science Minister Ina Brandes (CDU) openly stated in the state parliament’s science committee on January 21 that she was “extremely frustrated” that her hands had been tied in dealing with uncooperative university administrations such as that of the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Her hands might not be tied anymore with the amendment. It is imperative to recognize that the regulation excess of the new law, in those passages that do not concern abuse of power, is an attempt to interfere with university autonomy and academic freedom. Protection against abuse of power must be clearly separated from interference with fundamental freedoms.

      ↗ https://www.landtag.nrw.de/home/dokumente/dokumentensuche/gesetzgebungsportal/aktuelle-gesetzgebungsverfahr/hochschulstarkungsgesetz.html

    • Iran: Between Regime Massacres and US-Israeli Instrumentalization

      Tom Delgado, What is Happening in Iran w/ Historian Arang Keshavarzian, February 5, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBpyHx–Cs.

      In this interview by the Comedian and Tour Guide Tom Delgado, historian Arang Keshavarzian, a specialist on modern Iran and the Persian Gulf, sheds light on Iran’s current crisis. Although the protests from late December 2025 to mid-January 2026 fit within Iran’s long tradition of protest, the nature and dynamics of these protests, as well as the scale of violence used by the Iranian regime, are unprecedented.

      Keshavarzian highlights factors shaping Iran’s domestic and foreign predicament that are often overlooked in media coverage and Campist debates while avoiding definitive predictions on outcomes. These factors include:

      1. Iran’s 20+ year history of regional and nationwide protests feature diverse groups with varied demands. Key examples include the 2009 Green Movement over election fraud; 2017–2018 and 2019 uprisings against economic crisis, unemployment, high fuel prices, and Khamenei’s rule; and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests following the state murder of Kurdish Jina Mahsa Amini, demanding broader political change and an end to the regime beyond mandatory hijab.

      2. The ongoing impact of foreign interventions, from the US- and U.K.-backed 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought oil nationalization, through Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s repressive rule, and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, to today’s protests blending legitimate grievances and demands, likely CIA and Mossad involvements, and the regime‘s brutal crackdown. One example Keshavarzian cites to illustrate foreign powers’ co-creation of a regime-change narrative is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s New Year’s 2026 X post: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

      3. The Iranian regime’s eroding social base amid corruption, repression, sanctions, the June 2025 12-day war with Israel, and economic mismanagement.

      4. The information war, including diaspora media outlets like Iran International and Manoto, which foster US/Israeli intervention and promote Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah, as Iran’s sole political alternative to the Mullahs. While some Iranians chant for Pahlavi and a nostalgic return to monarchy, others inside Iran and in the diaspora, who were persecuted under his father’s rule and are aware of its repressive nature, oppose him. Reza Pahlavi is also highly exclusive and hostile toward Iran’s ethnic and political diversity, prioritizing US/Israeli ties.

      5. Prospects for the Iranian people, trapped between regime massacres and foreign powers like the US and Israel, that are exploiting the protests for their own political agendas.

      Keshavarzian notes that most key leaders and groups capable of forming a political opposition or alternative in Iran have been brutally crushed, imprisoned, or executed by the regime. Some opposition groups, he says, want new negotiations to address not just foreign policy but also domestic issues: ending repression and the highly securitized atmosphere, enabling press freedom and internationally supervised elections, and creating conditions for unions, feminists, workers, environmentalists, and academics to regroup and strengthen again.

      Keshavarzian adeptly analyzes this pivotal juncture by integrating political, economic, social, and geopolitical factors, amid current US-Israel-Iran tensions oscillating between negotiation and war rhetoric. Notably neglected in the interview, perhaps due to Keshavarzian’s academic framing, as he is pointing out himself, are the roles of workers’ unions, strikes, and struggles by ethnically marginalized groups in Iran (e.g., those of the Kurds and Baloch). Yet these efforts diversify Iranian perspectives on future governance.

      ↗ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBpyHx–Cs

    • India’s undeclared state of emergency

      Arvind Narrain: India’s Undeclared Emergency : Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance, Chennai (Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited) 2021.

      “The Dual State” is being rediscovered. Ernst Fraenkel’s study of the Nazi state, written in Germany in 1938 and adapted while in exile in the US, offers an analytical tool for understanding current processes by distinguishing between the normative state and the action state. In Die Zeit, Heinrich Wefing refers to an essay by Aziz Huq, which applies Fraenkel’s concepts to the US under Trump. A Polish constitutional lawyer had already drawn Wefing’s attention to the “dual state” in order to understand the restructuring of the Polish state.

      In fact, the US under Trump is not the first in the shift that some describe as authoritarian and others as fascist. It does have a special charisma and therefore serves as a model for the new order elsewhere. But the US example also distracts attention from the more quotidian and familiar processes near us. In many ways, the measures taken by other governments, less spectacular and theatrical, can draw our attention to how the transformation into a dual state is taking place.

      Arvind Narrain, an Indian lawyer, employed the concept of the dual state in his book “India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance” to describe developments in contemporary India. India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi could be considered the most successful and internationally least problematized example of the establishment of a dual state.

      Narrain argues that India’s constitution has always combined both tendencies of the dual state, but that under the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which has been in power since 2014, the prerogative state has increasingly overshadowed the normative state – made possible by laws such as the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), which expand executive powers, and executive measures that are increasingly exempt from judicial review.

      Narrain defines the concept of the prerogative state, following Fraenkel, as field within the state in which the executive acts without restrictions and outside or above legal constraints and constitutional processes. He sees the Indian prerogative state particularly in the use of (legal) preventive detention, in national security laws, and in extraordinary executive orders. The latter increasingly override judicial reviews of executive actions, but also fundamental safeguards in criminal law. The police carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions without any significant judicial control. The executive branch issues ordinances and administrative orders that circumvent legal safeguards. The reluctance of the judiciary to control such abuses leads to a situation in which institutions and individuals are subject to arbitrary state oppression. This establishes the prerogative state in Fraenkel’s sense.

      Narrain advocates a strategy of “constitutional resistance.” In 2021, he was still confident that citizens, civil society, lawyers, and democratic institutions could and would defend the normative state.

      Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dual state promises not only the dismantling of judicial review of executive powers, but also impunity for offenses and crimes committed by civil society actors, always and everywhere. In India, these include lynchings of Muslims and pogroms against them. The dual state is always a state of complicity. And it can certainly be democratic. The Indian example also points to this. There is no need for the Modi regime to abolish democracy, because the Indian dual state enjoys broad support among large sections of the population, which is also reflected in the elections. The authoritarian or fascist turn does not require a dictatorial form of government. This is precisely what makes Fraenkel’s concepts so relevant and important for the German and European present.

    • Colonial versus anti-colonial transgressions of the civilian–combatant divide

      Nicola Perugini, “Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, November 2025, 1–14, doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214.

      Perugini highlights a major blind spot in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as to how it has recognised anti-colonial wars. Perugini points out that IHL’s limited recognition of anti-colonial violence – enshrined in the 1977 Additional Protocols which institutionalised the right to fight against colonial occupation through armed struggle – rests on a static state-centric framework where the civilian is imagined only as a passive, nonpartisan victim in need of protection, while it is the combatant who engages in violently dismantling colonial occupation and domination through anti-colonial resistance. However, historically we know that anti-colonial movements have challenged this IHL principle of distinction between civilians and combatants by blurring the line between the two in a collective struggle. Adopting the perspective of the colonized, Perugini thus calls for “decolonizing the civilian” in international law. To Perugini, this perspective “forces us to rethink the civilian as a figure of resistance rather than passivity” (p.2).

      In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the stakes around the distinction between civilians and combatants decide over life and death for most Gazans, and certainly for all males and even male children. As Perugini points out, Israel uses precisely this distinction to kill with impunity all those who dare to blur the line between civilians and combatants. The recent example of a local ZDF contractor also illustrates, how targetting of journalists is justified by Israel and German media by questioning the civilian status of journalists.

      More specifically, by drawing on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Perugini highlights two dialectically entwined forms of transgression that are at odds with IHL. On the one hand, anticolonial forces merge the civilian and the combatant in their anticolonial struggle through, for instance, the network and infrastructure of tunnels which have a commercial and a military purpose. Through tunnelling, Palestinian resistance groups have undermined the distinction to be able to “challenge the asymmetry of the battlefield” through “subterranean warfare” (p.7). On the other hand, the state of Israel uses this very indistinction in order “to destroy the colonised people as people”. To Perugini, both transgressions of international law allow us to better grasp the limits of international law, as well as the relationship between colonial genocide and anticolonial resistance in settler-colonial contexts.

      Perugini’s call to decolonize the civilian in IHL thus allows us to better understand why anticolonial resistance necessitates the indistinction, and how IHL allows Israel to justify self-defence as a coloniser by denying the colonised their own right to self-defence. “This inversion of aggression and defence is central to the colonial logic of genocide.” (p. 10).

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214

    • Federal Ministry of Education and Research ignores expert opinions when awarding funding

      Stella Hesch: “Despite criticism: Ministry of Research funds controversial project against anti-Semitism”, Correctiv, October 30, 2025.

      Stella Hesch’s investigation at Correctiv reads like a political tragedy: The Federal Ministry of Research has awarded nearly nine million euros in funding to a project run by Ahmad Mansour’s company MIND, based on political considerations and without adhering to scientific standards and award criteria. This decision reveals a highly problematic understanding of academic research among the leadership of the responsible ministry and across all parties involved in the Bundestag committee’s decision. The fact that the funding decision was supported despite negative expert opinions from three science ministers from different parties—Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP), Cem Özdemir (Greens), and Dorothee Bär (CSU)—speaks to a broad cross-party consensus on circumventing quality standards in the allocation of funding.

      Mansour’s company was awarded extensive funding from the ministry, although the unanimous conclusion of the experts commissioned by the ministry was that Mansour’s project was “not eligible for funding”. This was explicitly communicated to the ministry in several negative expert reports, and both the experts and the ministry’s technical staff had expressed considerable doubts about the scientific quality and ethical implications of the project.

      The political awarding practices documented in the investigation are unworthy of a federal ministry. They ignore the peer review process necessary for quality assurance and violate the scientific standards inherent in the awarding of funding. This undermines confidence in good and ethical scientific practice and awarding procedures.

      Moreover, this approach is reminiscent of the funding scandal in the summer of 2024, when the then minister, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, had it examined whether funding could be withdrawn from undesirable scientists. Here, too, political positioning seemed to be more important to the ministry than scientific standards.

      ↗ https://correctiv.org/aktuelles/integration-gesellschaft/2025/10/30/antisemitismus-mansour-foerderprojekt/

    • Disgust and eroticism of the new fascist body

      Dagmar Herzog: Der neue faschistische Körper (The New Fascist Body), with an afterword by Alberto Toscano, (Wirklichkeit Books) 2025.

      “In a context in which propaganda is often no longer easily distinguishable from enlightenment, documentation, and serious research,” the debate about the authenticity of images showing hunger and starvation in Gaza reached its low point in the summer of 2025: Not only did journalist Tobias Huch deny that the images circulating at the time documenting the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli military, he used the case of the emaciated boy Mohammed Zakarias al-Mutawaq as an opportunity to accuse Palestinians of provoking genetic diseases and having low IQs due to their sexual behavior. Unimpressed by medical assessments that clearly identify signs of starvation despite the boy’s pre-existing condition, and indifferent to countless other images showing underweight children, Huch’s X-Post aimed to degrade the Palestinian population by establishing a link between disability and sexual morality.

      This very connection is at the heart of the new book by Holocaust researcher and gender studies scholar Dagmar Herzog. “Der neue faschistische Körper” (The New Fascist Body, 2025, Wirklichkeit Books) adds an important piece to the puzzle of current theories of fascism. The focus of what she calls postmodern fascism is on the “confusing connections between sexual and disability politics” (35), with the intersectional categories of gender, race, and class being supplemented by the important category of disability.

      Taking the success of the AfD as a starting point, Herzog discusses in the first chapter the extent to which anti-migrant racism is made “sexy” (9) by stirring up disgust for disabled bodies. Herzog traces the “fear-driven (…) devaluation of any vulnerability” (9), which is conveyed through the eroticization of (physical) superiority, for example in AfD election campaigns, using five scenes that, not coincidentally, also play on the keyboard of the German Staatsräson (raison d’état). Among other things, Herzog shows how the devaluation of the Arab-Palestinian body and intelligence goes hand in hand with German envy of alleged Jewish intelligence, infused with anti-Semitic motives. Based on a careful reading of statements by journalists such as Ulf Poschardt and Mathias Döpfner, she elaborates on how this affective coupling of disgust and envy is used, on the one hand, to court Jewish intellect for (reputational) economic gains and, on the other hand, to affectively forestall the potential immigration of Palestinians who have lost everything through genocide.

      In this sense, one could say that we are in a phase of preconditioning, which Herzog explains in the third chapter, drawing on George Mosse. Mosse had argued that the racist sensitization of Germans, who felt themselves to be a chosen people at the latest with the rise of the National Socialists, had already begun in the 1890s—along the “affective seam” (48) between the exterminatory hatred of disability and the sexual charge of “racial hygienic” procreation. Disgust and eroticism are the binding forces that work toward an ideal future, which is why Herzog speaks of “frontlash” (24) rather than backlash in relation to postmodern fascism: The attack anticipates and responds to a development such as the migration of Palestinians, which has neither begun nor is likely under the current political conditions of pacification of the “Middle East conflict.”

      Emotions are excellent tools for such a preemptive attack, which is why Herzog considers their activation to be the strongest link between postmodern fascism and National Socialism. Their stimulation, and the open rejection of their repression, directly indicates that we are in a phase of fascistization and can no longer speak only of authoritarianism. For the emotional attachment to National Socialism also presupposed having penetrated the intimate sphere and revealed “the innermost secrets of desire” (41), writes Herzog in the second chapter. Even today, by focusing on the pre-political sphere, on feelings and desires, fascism is being prepared in the subjects and our “mental attitude” (47) is affectively preconditioned.

      It is an important insight of Herzog’s that even historical fascism could not be reduced to a “biology-obsessed regime” (42), but was based on social constructivist theories of the mutability and malleability of desire. We have never been modern, not even in historical fascism; this is how Bruno Latour’s words could be interpreted in Herzog’s view. Even in National Socialism, there are signs of a concept of socially conditioned constructions of desire, as examined in postmodern theory. Postmodern fascism is therefore not a description of the present, but rather a kind of backward shock. Aimé Césaire coined the image of the shock triggered by the application of colonialist methods in Europe against white Europeans during National Socialism. Although transferring this image to the subject at hand is not without risks, it seems to me that the application of postmodern methods from the Nazi era is the shock of our present: The neo-fascist co-opting of the contestability of immutable truths (6), which is central to postmodern theory formation, represents a shock to postmodern theory formation as an echo of the past of National Socialism. Postmodern theory must recognize how its insights can be turned against itself.

       The good news about recognizing the changeability of our desires and the contestability of truth is that, as Alberto Toscano puts it in his afterword to Herzog’s book, following Walter Benjamin, we can make ourselves completely useless to fascism by orienting our desires toward accepting vulnerability and not repressing it through fitness-asketic self-optimization.

    • Antisemitism training at US universities

      Hannah Feuer: “Hundreds of Northwestern students can’t register for class because they won’t watch an antisemitism training video. Here’s what’s in it”, Forward, September 29, 2025.

      It was always to be expected that mandatory anti-discrimination training in schools and universities could also be used to spread propaganda and suppress unpopular positions. Universities in the US are now using this tool to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” of January 29, 2025. At the prestigious Northwestern University in Chicago, around 300 students have now been excluded from course registration because they refused to watch a mandatory “anti-bias” video that—in a slanderous and false manner—defines anti-Zionism as a denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. The video describes—again falsely—a Greater Israel as the only historical homeland of the Jewish people and equates—methodologically untenable—arbitrary and unverifiable “quotes” from “anti-Israel activists” with quotes from Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

      ↗ https://forward.com/news/772504/northwestern-antisemitism-training-jewish-united-fund

    • International Law in times of increasing authoritarianism

      Professor Schabas: “US, Germany, and Others Could Be Held Liable as Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza”, interviewed by Selcuk Gultasli, European Center for Populism Studies, August 30, 2025.

      With regard to Israel’s military actions and settlement violence in the occupied Palestinian territories, the norms of international law and international criminal law speak in clear terms, as hardly ever in law. However, inhumane policies not only in Israel but also in Germany are silencing these norms in a way that makes it increasingly difficult to debate on the basis of better arguments and, let’s be honest, even to name the overwhelming facts.

      In an in-depth interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor William Schabas—one of the world’s leading experts on international criminal law and genocide studies and a professor at Middlesex University—gives a detailed assessment of the escalating crisis in Gaza from the perspective of international law, populism research, and global governance. As a descendant of a family of Holocaust survivors, Professor Schabas warns that Gaza is a “litmus test” for the credibility of international justice and the authority of global legal institutions.

      Interviews in which those who have dedicated their entire lives to interpreting and clarifying the law have their say are more important than ever in times like these. They can make the pertinent norms of international law, their negotiation before various courts, and their relevance to the policies of states comprehensible to untrained readers, without losing much of the complexity. Schabas offers readers solid expertise and presents legally sound chains of argumentation.

      With regard to the allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, Schabas makes it clear that court and investigation proceedings such as those currently pending before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have and must have very concrete implications for the decisions of individual national authorities and politicians. Genocide is not an isolated event; it always consists of a series of actions and decisions by many actors, and preventing it is the responsibility of all states that have committed themselves to “never again” with the 1948 Genocide Convention. At the same time, as Schabas also notes, genocide existed long before this international agreement, particularly as part of colonial expansion and racist logic. These events defy the simplistic historical classification of a before and after of a supposedly peaceful and human rights-based liberal post-war order and continue to shape the current world situation.

      The case of South Africa v. Israel before the ICJ is “probably the most serious case of genocide ever brought before the Court.” Schabas argues that the intent to commit genocide can be inferred both from Israel’s military actions and from statements made by high-ranking Israeli officials, such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s remarks about cutting off food, water, and electricity supplies to Gaza. “We have more than just a pattern of behavior—we also have statements and clear indications of a policy.” Referring to the ICJ’s established case law, these are all factors that must be taken into account in the final assessment.

      According to Schabas, third countries – the US, Germany, Canada, and others – may also be liable under Article III of the Genocide Convention for supporting Israel with military and political aid. He warns: “To the extent that they provide material assistance of significant importance, they may be held accountable as accomplices to genocide.”

      Now is a crucial moment for the entire future of international justice, such as the ICJ and the ICC. Failure to apply uniform standards in the case of the destruction of Gaza carries the risk of entrenching a “two-tier system of international law” and undermining human rights worldwide: “These institutions are absolutely vulnerable, and they are aware of this. Gaza is a test of their credibility and authority.”

      On all these points, Schabas not only takes the time to explain the legal issues in an understandable way, but also places them in the context of larger global political and legal disputes between individual states and their worldviews and value systems. The ICJ in particular, so Schabas, has recently, after periods of fundamental consensus, increasingly become the scene of such disputes, which increasingly reveal the contradictions and fragility not only of international courts, but of the entire normative and institutional basis of the United Nations—with a Security Council that could not be further removed from the ideal of representation of the entire international community based on equality.

      In a broader context of debates on populism, authoritarianism, and international accountability, the interview makes an urgent call for a rethinking of the legal, institutional, and political frameworks for preventing mass atrocities. Double standards, as currently applied more than ever in law and politics, are not just an unfair application of the law and an unequal distribution of legal responsibility and effective prosecution. Double standards promote and create the illegitimate power of the few over the many and are the cornerstone of any authoritarianism that ultimately subjects all people to its dehumanizing logic.

      Schabas argues that this must be prevented while it is still possible.

      ↗ https://www.populismstudies.org/professor-schabas-us-germany-and-others-could-be-held-liable-as-accomplices-to-genocide-in-gaza/

    • “Don’t Woman Life Freedom Us, You Murderers!”

      “Women, Life, Freedom” against the War. A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic, 23. Juni 2025, https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

      It has already been six weeks: In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched an attack on Tehran in violation of international law. Iran struck back within hours, firing missiles at dozens of military installations in Israel. The Israeli government justified the war by claiming that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear bomb – an unsubstantiated claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating since 1992. Nine days later, the US officially entered the war on Israel’s side. According to the US-based human rights organization Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), nearly 1,000 people were killed and over 3,500 injured in the Israeli attacks. In Iran’s attacks on Israel, 29 Israelis were killed and 172 injured. After twelve days, the war was temporarily ended with a ceasefire initiated by the US.

      We share here a statement by the collective Roja, which was originally published in Farsi on June 16 and translated into English a week later by the decentralized network CrimethInc. It is now available in many other languages, too. Roja is an independent internationalist collective of Kurdish, Afghan (Hazara), and Iranian feminists, based in Paris, that was founded in 2022 in response to the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran.

      The statement embeds the events of the war in the context of recent Iranian history, critically assesses the military interventions in the “War on Terror,” such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and insists that there is no such thing as a “just” war or justified bombing. With analytical clarity, Roja takes a stand against attempts at discursive appropriation from all sides. In the discussion about the so-called Twelve-Day War, supporters of the alleged “preemptive strike” who push the narrative of Israel’s self-defense and “regime change” in Iran are pitted against those who stylize the Islamic regime as an anti-imperialist resistance force to protect the Muslim peoples from Western superpowers. While monarchist groups justify civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage in the fight against the Islamic regime, the regime deliberately exploits the situation to repress political opponents and marginalized groups.

      Roja condemns Israel’s war and the US intervention just as strongly as it condemns the patriarchal-repressive regime of the Islamic Republic: “Genocidal imperialist projects will never liberate us, nor will patriarchal nationalist regimes protect us.” It recognizes that Israel’s war, which was supposedly directed only against Iranian nuclear facilities and regime officials, attacks the entire population of Iran and also and foremost the principles and actors of the women, life, freedom protests. In addition, it criticizes those who cannot differentiate between grassroots resistance movements and the actions of a state power, thereby rendering invisible decades of self-organization of the working class, to give one example.

      The collective does not relativize, but rather offers differentiated criticism of the governments of both countries: the Israeli government, which, according to renowned experts and human rights organizations, is currently committing genocide in Gaza and has been denying Palestinians self-determination for decades; and the Iranian government, which has been oppressing, persecuting, and executing opposition members, ethnic minorities, women, and many others for decades. Iran, Roja demands, must not be turned into a second Libya through external intervention, nor must it become the scene of renewed mass executions by the Islamic regime, as in the summer of 1988.

      By showing solidarity with grassroots resistance movements “from Kabul to Tehran, from Kurdistan to Palestine, from Ahvaz to Tabriz, from Balochistan to Syria and Lebanon,” the collective rejects all attempts to legitimize state warfare and external regime change efforts. Only resistance movements from below can achieve long-term change through political means.

      ↗ „https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.