In this issue of What We’re Reading, we explore the impunity of the global rich, from Manchester City to the myth of Gulf sovereignty; an investigation into the Minab girls' school massacre in Iran, carried out by the US; and the excuse of good intentions.
We also cover Egypt's closed information space, and the quackery it breeds; technology under neoliberalism, Egypt's rental market, and architecture as an object of power and desire.
World
Yes, The U.S. Is The World’s Biggest Terrorist — Kyle Kulinski, Current Affairs
Last month, a political streamer and commentator told Axios that the United States has inflicted more terror than al-Qaeda, only for the interviewer, Alex Thompson, to ask whether some Americans are terrorists. Throughout the interview, the commentator already explained that he means the people committing acts of terror. Yet somehow the conversation kept returning to the offensiveness of the accusation, even as countless innocent civilians killed were described.
Kyle Kulinski has very little patience for this, and rightly so. He reads the interview as an attempt to manufacture a scandal around the commentator and pressure centrist Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who was born to Egyptian parents, to disown him, and the political test becomes whether a candidate will condemn the person naming American violence, while condemning the violence itself appears to be optional.
Kulinski answers with a furious inventory: the bombing of an Iranian school and a wedding, sanctions strangling Cuba’s access to fuel and medical supplies, napalming little girls in Vietnam, helping Saudi Arabia commit war crimes in Yemen, aiding the Indonesian government in its massacre of communists, arming contras in Nicaragua, selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, American weapons sustaining Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and military attacks in the Caribbean.
These are the people whose suffering disappears when the discussion becomes a referendum on an American commentator’s patriotism.
The Cuba section is especially sharp because it follows coercion beyond the explosion. Shipping companies withdraw, medical supplies stop arriving, electricity fails, and households absorb the consequences. The instrument travels through contracts, transport, and banking rather than arriving as a missile, but the pressure still works through civilian deprivation. Kulinski also connects that deprivation to the prospect of opening Cuba’s assets to politically connected investors.
That is where the essay starts moving from an indictment of cruelty toward displaying modern imperialism at work. Violence helps determine who can govern, on whose terms, and what property becomes available for acquisition, and the deprivation is just one part of the bargaining power.
His historical sweep also refuses the comforting American liberal idea that this somehow began with Trump or is exclusive to the Republican Party. Kennedy’s campaign against Cuba, Johnson’s war in Vietnam, Obama’s drone warfare, and Biden’s unconditional backing and arming of Israel sit alongside Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Styll, Kulinski saves some particularly deserved contempt for Bush’s forthcoming paintings of political prisoners, quipping “I’m guessing it probably won’t include all the people he tortured for years in Guantanamo.”
The essay’s ending, however, retreats from the implications of its own history.
After establishing that American violence survives changes of president and party, Kulinski advises El-Sayed to answer the controversy by declaring: “Donald Trump is absolutely the biggest terrorist in the world.”
As an electoral maneuver, the appeal is obvious, but as the conclusion to this particular argument, it is a narrowing of the target.
Trump becomes the answer to a problem Kulinski has just demonstrated cannot be explained by Trump. The Democratic candidate gets a line without having to confront the continuity of the state’s military commitments, sanctions, and alliances under his own party.
Still, it’s worth reading for its refusal to apologize for naming American terror, and its strongest evidence also points beyond the campaign strategy it ends up recommending.
Benign Intentions Are Worthless — Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Nathan J. Robinson begins with an endangered bat and a generous accommodation for the company cutting down its tree. Under a new Trump administration interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, he explains, the animal’s death would violate the law only if killing or capturing it were the purpose of felling the tree.
The company wants timber, and the bat’s continued existence is an inconvenient detail.
This is an excellent starting point because the exemption fits the ordinary workings of commercial destruction. A logging business need not harbor a particular hatred of bats to eliminate their habitat; it just needs trees, buyers, and permission to proceed. Restrict protection to animals whose deaths are the primary objective, and much of the activity threatening them escapes the restriction by definition. Profit supplies its own respectable explanation.
Robinson then takes this reasoning into the defense of American military operations. Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid concedes that the United States has killed more civilians than al-Qaeda, but rests the moral distinction on American policymakers not deliberately seeking those deaths.
Robinson asks what this assurance establishes when state officials choose actions whose lethal consequences they should already understand.
His examples steadily close off the exits. Someone who fires into a classroom cannot shed responsibility by insisting that the windows were the intended target, and destroying an aircraft for its cargo still requires accounting for its passengers. The chosen objective cannot encompass everything the perpetrator values while excluding everything the action destroys.
The most interesting passage returns to Noam Chomsky’s exchange with Sam Harris. Chomsky challenges the assumption that indifference deserves moral credit over deliberate killing: treating people as ants crushed underfoot may disclose how little their survival counts in the first place. The author uses this to shift the discussion from the killer’s preferred description of himself toward the value assigned to the lives at risk.
His case is more precise than his title. Accident, recklessness, and deliberate murder are meaningful differences, and a serious account of responsibility needs them. But a professed intention to accomplish something else does not establish that the resulting deaths were unforeseeable or that reasonable precautions were taken. Declaring a benign purpose answers neither question, and that is the defense Robinson successfully dismantles.
The bat also brings the argument back to a concrete political decision—the administration is choosing which harms businesses must prevent and which they can leave outside their calculation, and that choice determines whether protecting a species imposes an obligation on production or remains a pleasant aspiration subordinate to it.
The promise of protection can survive in the statute while officials narrow the offense until ordinary commercial activity falls outside it. Companies gain room to operate through a change in what the government recognizes as prohibited harm. The protection is hollowed out through its enforcement.
The dead animal, meanwhile, receives the difference between an intended result and an accepted cost, while the company receives its tree.
The Manchester City case shows us how the global mega-rich now expect to operate with impunity — Jonathan Liew, The Guardian
Thirty million British pounds, 50 lawyers, and a decade of litigation. In the correspondence leaked in 2018 that Jonathan Liew revisits, that was preferable to Manchester City’s chairman accepting a fine from European football’s governing body. A club lawyer threatened the destruction of UEFA’s rules and organization, and a football disciplinary dispute had acquired the vocabulary of a siege.
Liew’s column followed the finding that City had manipulated their finances over the nine seasons from 2009 to 2018. The Premier League’s account explains the mechanism: sponsorship agreements disguised money supplied by the owner, while other arrangements concealed expenditure. Together, the schemes inflated revenue and reduced recorded costs by more than 900 million pounds, allowing City to appear compliant with spending limits.
Expectedly, the club denied wrongdoing and has appealed.
The football matters, of course, but Liew is interested in the entitlement surrounding it. City’s majority owner, Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the UAE’s deputy prime minister and the president’s brother. Challenging the club’s accounts consequently brings a regulator up against a network with access to governments, sovereign investment funds, and diplomatic channels. Money buys players; the ownership behind it supplies additional ways of making a sanction expensive.
Events after the column gave the author’s argument a particularly blunt illustration. Liew had already cited an August warning about Emirati investment, but in early October, it was reported that UAE officials had warned the British government that City’s punishment could affect future investment commitments, putting billions in prospective private funding for the Oxford–Cambridge technology corridor as being at risk.
The proposed technology hub had somehow become part of Manchester City’s defense.
The connections are quite concrete, as the club’s chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak met Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds in Downing Street before the verdict, in his capacity as chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund Mubadala. This overlap of positions is consequential enough: the man representing the club also represents capital the government wants for its economic plans.
Britain’s own political response helps explain why the warning carries weight. After the ruling, Former Manchester mayor and now-prime minister Andy Burnham said he would be “concerned” to lose City’s owners, praising their contribution to Manchester’s development while saying he should not intervene in the proceedings.
Club ownership embeds an investor in a city’s pride, commercial life, and political relationships. Supporters defend their team; politicians defend promised development; the owner gains allies whose concerns extend well beyond a tribunal. A government that relies on attracting this money creates reasons of its own to accommodate the people supplying it.
Liew also acknowledges that financial restrictions can shelter established clubs from new challengers. Unlimited spending would deepen the advantage of owners able to spend the most. His inclusion of private equity and American fortunes alongside Gulf royals keeps the argument focused on an ownership system that has made supporters dependent on whichever wealthy patron buys their club.
In a follow-up, Liew proposes temporary public ownership followed by transferring City to its supporters. The investment threat gives that question real urgency: how much control over a shared cultural institution should its purchaser acquire over everyone else’s future?
Region
The Myth of Gulf Sovereignty — Beirut Dispatches
The is a useful corrective to the Gulf-as-model fantasy common in Lebanese and wider Levantine discourse. It’s also quick and decent reading material for anyone setting out to try and understand the Gulf.
The issue is the analysis.
The author says outright that the analysis is “from a purely realist perspective.” The question driving the piece is how much autonomy these states have, rather than whose interests the states serve.
And, again, the amount of sovereignty the Gulf monarchies have is not the angle here, it’s that they are ruling classes, even if they had “more sovereignty” it would serve the same people.
Therefore, it flattens the Gulf into a US client. Nowhere does the author mentions the Gulf’s own imperial ambitions. Yemen is mentioned almost passingly; Bahrain’s uprising in 2011 and its subsequent crushing by the monarchies is entirely absent; and it skips entirely that the Gulf finances (present tense) counter-revolution in the region.
Additionally, migrant labor is discussed in terms of “demographic stability” and institutional continuity, meaning how it affects the rulers’ viability. There is nothing on kafala, wage theft, deaths on worksites, bans on unions and strikes, or deportation as a tool of control. Gulf migrant workers have also struck and organized despite all of this. The war section treats workers “leaving in droves” as a labor-supply headache for the economy.
The problem is also that prediction of uprising is framed in sectarian geography, completely at odds with the workers’ strike tadition everywhere, including the Gulf.
Not to mention that the overall analysis of the Gulf economies is practically two-dimensional. The Gulf economies are not just consumption economies.
That is all to say that it is a campist reading.
The closing is an admiring tally of Iranian capacity and a shrug about the Gulf being “subjugated to Iranian security priorities.” Iran is a capitalist regional power with its own sub-imperial projects in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and it represses its own workers, women, and minorities.
We oppose the US and Israeli war on Iran, yes, but we do not give political support to the Iranian regime. We give it to the Iranian people.
Actually, the piece also never addresses Hezbollah as part of Lebanon’s sectarian-capitalist order.
There is no class and capital analysis at all, but it is still useful reading.
Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave — Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain & Reza Sayah , Drop Site News
This is one of the most heartbreaking pieces I have ever read. I don’t have the words to explain what reading it feels like.
Drop Site spoke to the families, teachers, and rescue workers who lived through the US bombing of a school in Minab, Iran, where 120 children were killed.
One mother had packed her child a sandwich and kissed her goodbye that morning. She was given back the backpack, with the sandwich still inside.
One child, who survived, drew her classmate’s severed hand.
Please read it.
Egypt
Citizen, soldier & a quack: An absurd play in two scenes — Sabry Zaki, Assafir Arabi
After the 2013 coup, Egypt’s military once promised to turn viruses into kofta. It remains a demanding act to follow.
Sabry Zaki opens with the 2014 unveiling of a device supposedly capable of curing hepatitis C and HIV. Major General Ibrahim Abdel Aty explained that viruses would be broken down and fed back to the patient. The announcement acquired the prestige of a national scientific breakthrough, complete with stories about foreign powers conspiring to keep Egypt from its discovery.
What has now become normal in Sisi’s Egypt is that clinical evidence could wait. National pride had a press conference.
Zaki places the spectacle in the months between the 2013 coup and Sisi’s presidential bid. The new authorities needed achievements; families living with hepatitis C needed relief, and the promised bogus cure allowed the military to present itself as the answer to both. Scientific objections became an affront to the nation, and the people qualified to assess the invention found themselves cast as spoilsports.
The second act follows Diaa al-Awady, a doctor who built a cult-like following around his “Tayyibat,” or “good things,” dietary system, which is a regimen that prohibited eggs and milk while permitting Nutella and encouraging smoking. Al-Awady urged patients to abandon essential medication, invoking pharmaceutical conspiracies and giving his dietary rules religious authority. This time the medical qualifications were real, and they lent credibility to claims that are not in any way connected to reality.
The comparison works because the two performances recruited people’s hopes differently. The military offered a spectacle of national deliverance. Al-Awady offered recovery, certainty, and a community of believers.
In each case, questioning the promised cure could be treated as evidence that the questioner belonged to the enemy.
Zaki’s most compelling argument concerns the conditions in which such promises find an audience. He connects media concentration, censorship, and the suppression of independent journalism to the destruction of public trust. A government can make broadcasters repeat its account of reality, as patients still encounter the distance between that account and their experience.
When they turn elsewhere, the journalists and institutions that could help them assess competing claims have fewer opportunities to do so.
His descriptions of followers surrendering their minds are less illuminating than this account of how trust breaks down. Someone struggling with illness may have ample reason to resent the cost of treatment or doubt an official assurance. A charismatic doctor can turn that disappointment into loyalty by presenting every challenge as further proof of persecution. Explaining the appeal requires taking the disappointment seriously.
The fraudster’s great advantage—whether it was the Egyptian military or al-Awady—is the conviction, and the ability to persuade the masses, that everyone else is lying.
Desiring Architecture: Towards a Theory of Architectural Pornography — Abdallah El-Biary, Khatt30
Al-Bayari argues that since 2013 Arab cities have become objects of conflict, not just its backdrop. Function can no longer explain why buildings are raised or razed, he says. Drawing on Badiou and Nadir Lahiji, he proposes “architectural pornography”: an economy in which buildings are exposed, objectified, possessed, penetrated and finally erased, with construction and destruction as two faces of one desire.
The essay is strongest on the ground. His account of Warraq Island, Maspero, the New Administrative Capital and Syria’s Law 10 shows how “development” decides which bodies may stay in the city. The Dar al-Salam residents who put their furniture back on the rubble in 2021, and were arrested for it, say more than the theory does. His warning that reconstruction cut off from return, restitution, and residents’ control can complete erasure is the piece’s most useful idea.
The framework makes no sense.
Libido stands where capital should; the army’s construction empire, Gulf land purchases, contractors and debt are barely named; and Harvey and Lefebvre sit in footnotes while Debord, Han, and Lacan lead. Worse, collapsing the New Capital, NEOM, and Gaza into “one logic” blurs real-estate dispossession, imperialist-backed settler destruction, and Gulf image-making when each of these require very different politics. Attributing “pleasure” to armies and planners psychologizes what racism and the logic of occupation already explain.
Workers are also missing, again. The people who build these cities, and the residents who fight eviction, appear only as bodies acted upon. There is no agency to be found here. No understanding of the fact that the working class people are active historical agents.
Worth reading for its Egyptian cases and its critique of reconstruction if you’re not at all familiar with the situation in Egypt—and if you can stomach the framing.
If you want to read a more interesting analysis on architecture in Egypt, I’d suggest reading “The New Capital: An Urbanism Born of Fear of Revolution,” by Salama Mansour and Shoukry Samir, published on The Socialist last July, and available in Arabic and English.
Coding Humans — Tamer Wagih, Sifr
Wagih argues that technology is neither autonomous nor neutral. Its direction is set by relations of production, and under neoliberalism digitization, platforms and algorithms have been steered toward fragmenting and casualizing labor, shifting costs onto workers, intensifying surveillance and cutting labor’s share.
Algorithms mimic the market by reducing use-value to quantity.
He rejects Varoufakis’s “technofeudalism,” Fuchs’s claim that platform users produce value, and fears of AI-driven mass obsolescence, and concludes that technology must be freed from capital.
It is a lucid materialist primer. The opening on tools as the means by which humans remake nature, the link between rising organic composition and the profit squeeze behind neoliberalism, and the productive/unproductive labor distinction are all well used.
His point that Amazon’s take is capitalist rent, and that ad platforms circulate surplus rather than create it, is a strong answer to the technofeudalism thesis. Insisting that tech workers belong to the working class whether or not they produce value keeps the politics straight.
I’m not too sure about the conclusion that technology is “instrumental,” a weapon for either side. The absence of class struggle is also strange.
The postwar welfare settlement is explained by accumulation logic alone, and neoliberalism appears as a response to a profit crisis, with no account of the working-class defeats that enabled it.
The ending provides little in the way of strategy, which is almost as disappointing as the framing of workers (riders, data workers, etc) as mere victims.
But, overall, an interesting read.
New-Law Rentals in Egypt: Temporary housing until the landlord gives notice — Ahmed Allam, Sifr
Allam argues that Egypt’s 1996 law moved new leases to “the contract is the law of the parties” without building any rules to replace the old protections. Tenants now renegotiate price and tenure at every renewal.
Four tenants’ stories anchor the piece, and it follows the instability through the costs of moving, informal contracts, and the 2025 laws on eviction and old rents. It closes by noting that Germany, Spain, and France regulate rents without abandoning the market.
The reporting is the strength. The point that a court can enforce a lease without guaranteeing a home is sharp, and the link between the 2025 old-rent law and the new-rent market is the piece’s most important insight.
The framework, once again, is the weakness (an unfortunate and frustrating pattern to this week’s offerings).
The diagnosis is a gap in “intermediate rules,” and the remedy is a European-style package of minimum terms and rent brakes. That is a policy brief, not an analysis of a class relation.
We never learn who owns the housing, why units sit empty, or why housing works as a hedge against inflation and devaluation. The IMF, devaluation, and the state’s retreat from public housing are all absent. The JLL price data concerns elite satellite cities, not Abbasiya or Muqattam.
The tenants are also passive. No organizing appears, whether old-rent households facing the end of their contracts or tenants’ groups. Nor does the piece make a demand beyond regulation, such as public and social housing, or taking vacant stock into use. The European models are offered as moderate reform, though the German rent brake’s record is contested.
Actually, Spain’s current fight is a stress test of Allam’s proposed remedy. Parliament voted down two decrees this month, one making leases renew automatically and the other restricting evictions, after an investment fund’s rent hike on an 87-year-old tenant sparked mass protests.
The renewal decree is close to the “intermediate rules” Allam wants, and it lost because property-owning parties had the votes, so rules are an outcome of class power, not a missing piece of legislation.