{ "article": { "title" : "Suhail Nassar’s Moments in Gaza", "author" : "Suhail Nassar", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/suhail-nassar", "date" : "2025-11-21 09:00:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/suhail-IMG_9108.jpg", "excerpt" : "Suhail Nassar is a Palestinian photographer based in Gaza. His photo series captures daily life under two years of ongoing genocide. Amidst the harrowing videos, testimonies, and images reaching the world, Suhail’s work offers a deeper intimacy—portraits of quiet resistance and contemplative movements toward liberation.", "content" : "Suhail Nassar is a Palestinian photographer based in Gaza. His photo series captures daily life under two years of ongoing genocide. Amidst the harrowing videos, testimonies, and images reaching the world, Suhail’s work offers a deeper intimacy—portraits of quiet resistance and contemplative movements toward liberation." } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Malcolm X and Islam: U.S. Islamophobia Didn’t Start with 9/11", "author" : "Collis Browne", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/malcolm-x-and-islam", "date" : "2025-11-27 14:58:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/life-malcolm-3.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "Anti-Muslim hate has been deeply engrained and intertwined with anti-Black racism in the United States for well over 60 years, far longer than most of us are taught or are aware.As the EIP team dug into design research for the new magazine format of our first anniversary issue, we revisited 1960s issues of LIFE magazine—and landed on the March 1965 edition, published just after the assassination of Malcolm X.The reporting is staggering in its openness: blatantly anti-Black and anti-Muslim in a way that normalizes white supremacy at its most fundamental level. The anti-Blackness, while horrifying, is not surprising. This was a moment when, despite the formal dismantling of Jim Crow, more than 10,000 “sundown towns” still existed across the country, segregation remained the norm, and racial terror structured daily life.What shocked our team was the nakedness of the anti-Muslim propaganda.This was not yet framed as anti-Arab in the way Western Islamophobia is often framed today. Arab and Middle Eastern people were not present in the narrative at all. Instead, what was being targeted was organized resistance to white supremacy—specifically, the adoption of Islam by Black communities as a source of political power, dignity, and self-determination. From this moment, we can trace a clear ideological line from anti-Muslim sentiment rooted in anti-Black racism in the 1960s to the anti-Arab, anti-MENA, and anti-SWANA racism that saturates Western culture today.The reporting leaned heavily on familiar colonial tropes: the implication of “inter-tribal” violence, the suggestion that resistance to white supremacy is itself a form of reverse racism or inherent aggression, and the detached, almost smug tone surrounding the violent death of a cultural leader.Of course, the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad represent only expressions within an immense and diverse global Muslim world—spanning Morocco, Sudan, the Gulf, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and far beyond. Yet U.S. cultural and military power has long blurred these distinctions, collapsing complexity into a singular enemy image.It is worth naming this history clearly and connecting the dots: U.S. Islamophobia did not begin with 9/11. It is rooted in a much older racial project—one that has always braided anti-Blackness and anti-Muslim sentiment together in service of white supremacy, at home and abroad." } , { "title" : "The Billionaire Who Bought the Met Gala: What the Bezoses’ Check Means for Fashion’s Future", "author" : "Louis Pisano", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/the-billionaire-who-bought-the-met-gala", "date" : "2025-11-27 10:41:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_TBesos_MET_Galajpg.jpg", "excerpt" : "On the morning of November 17, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos would serve as the sole lead sponsors of the 2026 Met Gala and its accompanying Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art”. Saint Laurent and Condé Nast were listed as supporting partners. To be clear, this is not a co-sponsorship. It is not “in association with.” It is the first time in the modern history of the gala that the headline slot, previously occupied by Louis Vuitton, TikTok, or a discreet old-money surname, has been handed to a tech billionaire and his wife. The donation amount remains undisclosed, but sources familiar with the negotiations place it comfortably north of seven figures, in line with the checks that helped the event raise $22 million last year.", "content" : "On the morning of November 17, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos would serve as the sole lead sponsors of the 2026 Met Gala and its accompanying Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art”. Saint Laurent and Condé Nast were listed as supporting partners. To be clear, this is not a co-sponsorship. It is not “in association with.” It is the first time in the modern history of the gala that the headline slot, previously occupied by Louis Vuitton, TikTok, or a discreet old-money surname, has been handed to a tech billionaire and his wife. The donation amount remains undisclosed, but sources familiar with the negotiations place it comfortably north of seven figures, in line with the checks that helped the event raise $22 million last year.Within hours of the announcement, the Met’s Instagram post was overrun with comments proclaiming the gala “dead.” On TikTok and X, users paired declarations of late-stage capitalism with memes of the museum staircase wrapped in Amazon boxes. Not that this was unexpected. Anyone paying attention could see it coming for over a decade.When billionaires like Bezos, whose Amazon warehouses reported injury rates nearly double the industry average in 2024 and whose fashion supply chain has been linked to forced labor and poverty wages globally, acquire influence over prestigious institutions like the Met Museum through sponsorships, it risks commodifying fashion as a tool for not only personal but corporate image-laundering. To put it simply: who’s going to bite the hand that feeds them? Designers, editors, and curators will have little choice but to turn a blind eye to keep the money flowing and the lights on.Back in 2012, Amazon co-chaired the “Schiaparelli and Prada” gala, and honorary chair Jeff Bezos showed up in a perfectly respectable tux with then-wife MacKenzie Scott by his side and an Anna Wintour-advised pocket square. After his divorce from Scott in 2019, Bezos made a solo appearance at the Met Gala, signaling that he was becoming a familiar presence in fashion circles on his own. Of course, by that point, he already had Lauren Sánchez. Fast forward to 2020: print advertising was crumbling, and Anna Wintour co-signed The Drop, a set of limited CFDA collections sold exclusively on Amazon, giving the company a veneer of fashion credibility. By 2024, Sánchez made her Met debut in a mirrored Oscar de la Renta gown personally approved by Wintour, signaling that the Bezos orbit was now squarely inside the fashion world.Then, the political world started to catch up, as it always does. In January 2025, Sánchez and Bezos sat three rows behind President-elect Donald Trump at the inauguration. Amazon wrote a one-million-dollar check to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Bezos, once mocked by Trump as “Jeff Bozo,” publicly congratulated Trump on an “extraordinary political comeback.” By June 2025, Bezos and Sánchez became cultural and political mainstays: Sánchez married Bezos in Venice, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana gown Wintour had helped select. This landed Sánchez the digital cover of American Vogue almost immediately afterward. Wintour quietly handed day-to-day control of the magazine to Chloe Malle but kept the Met Gala, the global title, and her Condé Nast equity stake, cementing a new era of fashion power where money, influence, and optics are inseparable.Underneath all of it, the quiet hum of Amazon’s fashion machine continued to whirr. By 2024, the company already controlled 16.2 percent of every dollar Americans spent on clothing, footwear, and accessories—more than Walmart, Target, Macy’s, and Nordstrom combined. That same year, it generated $34.7 billion in U.S. apparel and footwear revenue that year, with the women’s category alone on pace to top $40 billion. No legacy house has ever had that volume of real-time data on what people actually try on, keep, or return in shame. Amazon can react in weeks rather than seasons, reordering winning pieces, tweaking existing ones, and killing unpopular options before they’re even produced at scale.Wintour did more than simply observe this shift; she engineered a soft landing by bringing Amazon in when it was still somewhat uncool and seen mostly as a discount retailer, lending it credibility when it needed legitimacy, and spending the last two years turning Sánchez from tabloid footnote to Vogue cover star. The Condé Nast sale rumors that began circulating in July 2025, complete with talk of Wintour cashing out her equity and Sánchez taking a creative role, have been denied by every official mouthpiece. But they have also refused to die, because the timeline is simply too tidy.The clearest preview of what billionaire ownership can do to a cultural institution remains Bezos’ other pet project, The Washington Post. Bezos bought it for $250 million in 2013, saved it from bankruptcy, and built it into a profitable digital operation with 2.5 million subscribers. Then, in October 2024, he personally blocked a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris. More than 250,000 subscribers canceled in the following days. By February 2025, the opinion section was restructured around “personal liberties and free markets,” triggering another exodus and the resignation of editorial page editor David Shipley. Former executive editor Marty Baron called it “craven.” The timing, just months after Bezos began warming to the incoming Trump administration, was not lost on anyone. The story didn’t stop there: in the last few days, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance revealed he had texted Bezos suggesting the hiring of a right-leaning Breitbart journalist, Matthew Boyle, to run the Post’s political coverage. This is a clear signal of how staffing decisions at a storied paper now sit within the same power matrix that funds the Met Gala and shapes culture, media, and politics alike. It’s a tangled, strategic web—all of Bezos’ making.It’s curious that, in the same 30-day window that the Trump DOJ expanded its antitrust inquiry into Amazon, specifically how its algorithms favor its own products over third-party sellers, including many fashion brands, the MET, a city-owned museum, handed the keys of its marquee event to the man whose company now wields outsized influence over designers’ fortunes and faces regulatory scrutiny from the administration he helped reinstall. This is not sponsorship; it’s leverage. Wintour once froze Melania Trump out of Vogue because she could afford to.But she cannot freeze out Sánchez or Bezos. Nor does she want to.So on the first Monday in May, the museum doors will open as they always do for the Met Gala. The carpet will still be red (or whatever color the theme demands). The photographs of celebrities posing in their interpretations of “Costume Art” will still break the internet. Andrew Bolton’s exhibition, roughly 200 objects tracing the dressed body across five millennia, displayed in the newly renamed Condé Nast Galleries, will still be brilliant. But the biggest check will come from the couple who already control 16 percent of America’s clothing spend, who own The Washington Post, and who sat three rows behind Trump at the inauguration. Everything else, guest list tweaks, livestream deals, shoppable moments, will flow from that single source of money and power. That is who now has the final word on the most influential night in American fashion." } , { "title" : "Communicating Palestine: A Guide for Liberation and Narrative Power", "author" : "Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/communicating-palestine", "date" : "2025-11-25 14:04:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_Template-MIT_Engineering_Genocide.jpg", "excerpt" : "Communication as a Tool of Erasure", "content" : "Communication as a Tool of ErasureAs new “peace plans” for Palestine are drafted far from Palestinian life, Palestinians find themselves once again spoken for - another reminder of how communication is weaponized to sustain Zionist colonialism. Colonialism doesn’t just seize land; it seizes the story and its agents. From early myths like “a land without a people for a people without a land” to today’s narrative spin that frames Palestinians as “rejecting peace,” the Zionist project  has aimed to erase not only a people but also their agency, voice, and narratives.Today, as Israel continues its genocide on the ground, its propaganda apparatus, known as Hasbara (“explanation” in Hebrew), wages a parallel war over narrative in the media, in diplomatic halls, and online. From smear campaigns, to lobbying governments and media outlets, to pressuring digital platforms like Meta, the machinery of erasure is well-funded and relentless.As Edward Said wrote in Blaming the Victim, Zionist success was not just military - it was narrative. They won the global narrative battle long before 1948. Narrative control is not symbolic - it justifies policy, enables displacement, and legitimizes genocide.Our ResponseFor Palestinians, the narrative struggle has never been separate from the struggle for liberation. We recognized that incredible work is already being done to amplify Palestinian narratives and counter disinformation—through platforms like MAKAN, Decolonize Palestine, Let’s Talk Palestine, Newscord, and others. But what was missing was a one-stop toolkit that brings together the best practices and resources across all areas of communication, for everyone who communicates Palestine: media, policymakers, artists, content creators, advocates, and more. A space rooted not in defensiveness, but in reclaiming our agency and our narratives.So we built one.Communicating Palestine is more than a guide; it’s a manifesto for liberatory and decolonised communication. It is the outcome of a Palestinian-led process, woven from the wisdom of focus groups in Ramallah, Battir village, and Dheisheh Refugee Camp as well as journalists, activists and analysts. It centers Palestinian narratives on their own terms, refusing to be defined in reaction to the propaganda that seeks to erase them.What does the guide look like in practice? It’s a one-stop platform for anyone communicating about Palestine—journalists, activists, artists, policymakers. It’s organized into four core sections: Narratives and framings – analysis and recommendations to counter harmful tropes and disinformation. Visual representations – guidance for photographers, artists and video journalists on ethical imagery. **Communication and engagement practices **– tips and tools for ethical reporting and centering Palestinians with dignity, Tools – user-friendly resources that can be day-to-day support in your work. Practical checklists on key take-aways from across the guide Terminology guide for accurate wording and reporting. Photography and video guidelines to avoid harmful visuals. Resources countering disinformation, bias and fallacies. **This is a call to action. **It’s an invitation to unlearn the narratives we’ve been fed, to relearn how to engage with dignity and integrity, and to finally practice a form of communication that doesn’t just talk about justice, but actively builds it—one word, one image, one story at a time." } ] }