Most people are never allowed to truly understand and respect the value of what they have to offer. Denying people self-value has for the longest time been an effective and vicious colonial wound that only produces submissive and self-sabotaging individuals.

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.

The hierarchy of most workplaces in America looks very much like climbing high mountains—the higher you get, the whiter the scenery becomes.

[W]e need to acknowledge that violence begets violence. There are no violent people who were not first violated.

Language is a double-edged sword that can imprison or set us free.

The world is expected to take it for granted than an American expat who studied at any 'reputable' American academic institution is smart, well trained, and competent to do a job anywhere around the globe, but the opposite is never true for newcomers in the U.S.

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.

Once upon a time, displaced people had a time and a place. They had a place in which they made plans about what to do with their future and their lives. Their time and place were prematurely destroyed and stolen from them. These people were then forced to exist in times and places that are not theirs. They were forced to learn the art of living and flourishing in the same empire that stole and destroyed their time and place back home.