The Disaster That Continues
September 25, 2025
Today marks a somber anniversary. On this day, September 25, 2003, the prominent Palestinian-American writer and intellectual Edward Said died in New York. He was 67. Said, one of the founders of post-colonial theory, dedicated his life to dissecting the power structures that shape our world, writing extensively on West Asia and Palestine. His voice was a beacon, challenging the very foundations of imperial narratives.
His most famous work, Orientalism, remains a devastatingly relevant critique. In it, Said argued that empires always present themselves as exceptional, their violence a reluctant necessity for a higher, civilizing purpose. He wrote: “All empires, in their official discourse, declare that they are not like the others, that their circumstances are special, that their mission is to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that they use force only as a last resort.”
More tragically, Said pointed out, there is always “a chorus of willing intellectuals” ready to provide reassuring words about benign or altruistic empires. They ask us to ignore the evidence of our own eyes, to distrust the visceral truth of destruction and suffering in favor of a comfortable, state-sanctioned fiction. They are the scribes of the disaster, sanitizing its horrors as it unfolds.
We see this chorus in full voice today, as the disaster continues its relentless march. Just as Said described, the language of a "special circumstance" and a "last resort" is used to justify a reality of overwhelming violence. The narrative of a civilized mission is deployed to mask a brutal, collective punishment.
This mission’s brutality is not new; it has been a constant for those under its boot. Recall the heroes of the Freedom Flotilla, attacked by Israeli drones as they sailed to break the siege on Gaza. Their boats were damaged, their protocols of danger activated, all for the crime of carrying humanitarian aid. They were a direct challenge to the siege, an act of solidarity that had to be crushed.
These individuals left their lives and families behind, risking everything to break the siege,or, at the very least, to shine a spotlight on Gaza’s suffering. Many were not of the land or the people; their only motive was a shared, radical humanity. They acted when the world’s governments stood by.
Now, their message is more urgent than ever. The disaster has escalated into a cataclysm. Israeli tanks push deeper and deeper into Gaza City, a place that still shelters hundreds of thousands of souls, amid heavy bombardment and the systematic destruction of entire residential neighborhoods. The landscape is being erased, street by street, home by home.
From within this hellscape, constant appeals for help emerge from a great number of families trapped by the advancing tanks. Their voices, transmitted through dying phone batteries and faltering signals, are desperate. And now, the contact with some of them has been lost. Their silence is the most terrifying sound of all.
The intellectuals of empire would have you look away from this. They would have you believe this is a complex, necessary war, not the simple, brutal eradication of a people. They ask you to distrust your eyes when you see the rubble, the children pulled from beneath it, the hospitals without power.
The disaster that Edward Said described did not end with his death. It continues. The heroes of the Flotilla, and the countless voices now being silenced in Gaza, need you to carry their message forward. In a world of centralized, controlled narratives, your role,your act of witness, your refusal to be reassured,is a radical act. Make their voices heard. Do not let the chorus of empire drown out the truth. The disaster continues only as long as we allow its architects to write its history.
X-RAT PALESTINE experiment in the lab with hopes of peace