Having an institutional blessing to be called a ‘writer’, ‘journalist’ or an ‘academic’ does not really make one so. In fact, anyone with institutional support and titles is a suspect more than anything else.

Indeed, the Internet is being run by few moguls that monopolize the online world which is, like the physical world, becoming owned by few actors. In brief, the virtual world is owned by the same few actors who are trying to control and suffocate the physical one, which means that its usefulness as a tool should not be exaggerated or evaluated without taking this factor into serious consideration.

It should not be a secret to any independent and conscientious thinker, writer, or journalist that what has been happening in Syria since 2011 is nothing but complex and dirty attempts by multiple regional and global powers to 'Iraqize' Syria by other means.

I thought about how in every ‘Third World’ country that gets ‘liberated’ from its dictators, the first things that go up are luxury hotels and residential areas for Western expats and gated communities from which to administer the newly formed governments in places like Baghdad’s Green Zone.

This is exactly what it means to be caught in the colonial matrix of power. It is to be constantly suffering from lack of options, and constantly finding oneself in such a position that all the choices available have already been chosen for you. As a result, you are constantly trapped and unable to think or do otherwise. You are consistently deprived of the possibility of working with other possibilities.

The role of the academy as a colonial and imperial space par excellence, which in the age globalization and corporatization of practically everything, has become the biggest enemy of knowledge and the decolonial option. In fact, the academy has become a space that instead of creating options, is doing everything in its power to deny most people options and keep itself as the only game in town.

While the imperial university continues to pay lip service to letting the subaltern speak, make no mistake: the subalterns have never been silent. They have always been thinking, writing, doing, and sensing. The problem has always been with the shortsightedness and racism of the colonizers and the imperial spaces where certain knowledge gets produced and promoted, while other knowledge gets silenced, mutilated, and buried under the rubble of indifference and arrogance.

We have very few writers and journalists not on the payroll of the empire or the oppressive powers in today’s world. With few exceptions, most accounts and narratives I hear from and read by the so-called ‘journalists’ and ‘experts’ about Middle East affairs remind me of Upton Sinclair’s immortal words … where he writes 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.

In many ways, the language, the sect, and the ethnicity are the IDs in post-U.S. occupation Iraq—the 'new Iraq'.