February | 2025 | Pandaemonium
4 posts published by Kenan Malik during February 2025| Pandaemonium
This essay, on viewpoint diversity, academic objectivity and free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 20 April 2025, under the headline “Trump’s political bullying of Harvard will do nothing to foster diversity of thought”. Few people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on British Muslims, identity politics, sectarianism and bigotry, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 13 April 2025, under the headline “The identity politics of many Muslims, and critics of Islam, are deeply corrosive”. A poll suggests that most British Muslims identify more with their faith than with their nation. The head of the Saudi-backed Muslim World League counsels British Muslims to talk less about Gaza and more about domestic issues. Labour MP Tah...| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the realities of the white working class, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 6 April 2025, under the headline “The white working class is nothing like what politicians think – or claim – it is”. “Many of those who act as the champions of the white person against immigrants”, Labour MP David Winnick told the House of Commons in 1968, “have not in the past gone out of their way to defend the interests of the white […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on fear as a means of enforcing social order, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 30 March 2025, under the headline “Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets”. “Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the debate over decolonising Shakespeare, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 March 2025, under the headline “Why decolonise Shakespeare when all the world’s a stage for his ideas on injustice?” “My quarrel with the English language,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare, had been “that the language reflected none of my experience.” And so “I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression...| Pandaemonium
This essay, on how class is a missing category in discussions of the justice system, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 March 2025, under the headline “Amid all the noise about the UK’s ‘two-tier’ justice system, there is silence on class”. As so often in such debates, the controversy over new guidelines for courts from the Sentencing Council for England and Wales has obscured as much as it has illuminated. Critics have condemned them as presaging a “two-...| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the significance of the Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 March 2025, under the headline “Ignore the row: Oscar-winning No Other Land offers a vision of a shared Palestine forged in solidarity”. In 2009, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. He had come to see a school that had gained attention for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear […]| Pandaemonium
This essay, on the lessons of Milton for the politics of today, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 March 2025, under the headline “For a stagnating left mired in pessimism, Milton’s radical vision is poetry in motion”. “Is this pessimism?”, TJ Clark asks in his 2012 essay For a Left with No Future. “Well, yes.” How else, he wonders, “are we meant to understand the arrival of real ruin in the order of global finance… and the almost complete […]| Pandaemonium
Photograph via the Times This essay, on Englishness, race and ethnicity, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 February 2025, under the headline “Can a brown Hindu be Engli…| Pandaemonium
In the wake of the Douglas Murray defamation case against the Observer this week, which focused on a column I had written last August, there have been a large number of claims that I lied or sought…| Pandaemonium
Oresteia at the Park Avenue Armory, New York. Photo: Joan Marcus This essay, on what Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy can tell us about the Gaza conflict, was my Observer column this week. It was …| Pandaemonium
Photo: Tom Trevatt This is a transcript of the talk I gave about my book Not So Black and White at New York University on 16 October 2023. I have not had time to put the links in, but I will do so.…| Pandaemonium
