What Shakes Me Most
Some good-faith thoughts about the discourse around the Guardian letter
by Abdelrahman ElGendy
24 August 2026 (originally posted on Instagram)
What shakes me most about the discourse around the Guardian letter is realizing how many people I consider “comrades,” if tomorrow Egypt’s Sisi decided to rebrand himself as anti-imperialist, would start laundering his image the same way they do with every butcher they’ve deemed politically useful to the grand anti-imperial project—a project I firmly believe in, by the way, but do not exceptionalize.
I have no qualms about critiquing the language of the letter in good faith and from a position of respect for political prisoners in Iran, but it’s sad and angering to realize how many people I trust and brush shoulders with in struggle see me and fellow political prisoners as nothing more than pawns, and glorify our jailers.
I will always be wary of Western and diasporic comrades who dehumanize anyone whose suffering complicates the neatness of their ideological project. Yes, there’s no “equivalence” between a murderous empire assaulting a sovereign nation, and we could argue endlessly about metaphors, scissors, and the Guardian platform. I unequivocally stand against foreign intervention and the egregious horrors the US empire wreaks on us all, and I would say the same if it happened to Egypt even if I were still in my prison cell.
But there’s a world of difference between rejecting “both-sidesing” and equivalence, and going all the way to glorifying local butchers who, day after day, execute thousands and crush their own populations merely because their strategic brand is anti-imperial and serves a project you’ve decided every other struggle must be subservient to. That discourse of glorification and erasure is what nauseates me, and it’s loudly dominating the conversation.
At the time of the Global March to Gaza through Rafah, many of us were enraged and insulted by the same condescending chastisement of Egyptians to revolt, which ironically, suddenly became invested in advocating for Egyptian political prisoners and overthrowing Egypt’s dictatorship, only to stop caring once it passed. Because both invoking Egyptian political prisoners and invisibilizing and smearing Iranian political prisoners is precisely the same expression of this arrogant attitude: our bodies only become relevant, whether in saving or erasure, when it serves that grander project, toward which all means are justified and all bodies are collateral.
Many I consider dear friends are so blinded by this euphoric feeling of purity that they don’t realize how closely their language resembles state propaganda. Instead of calling political prisoners terrorists, they call them Mossad agents. They see no structural catastrophe, only “disagreement with some actions.” Everyone who attempts conversation in good faith becomes a lib, a Zio sleeper cell, or whatever new slur they invent that week. It is indistinguishable from how the Sisi or Trump regimes would call us terrorists, traitors, or whatever enemy a self-righteous authoritarian project needs to justify itself.
As a firm believer in prefigurative politics, where we must embody in our coalitions and work here and now the world we imagine, I cannot align with discourse that leads to a world still governed by people who see most of us as acceptable collateral damage in service of their superior project.
One should have humility when addressing the struggles of others from afar—and no, not because of identity politics. Not because I am Egyptian, or because they are Iranian. There is a wide array of abhorrent native voices I would never ask anyone to listen to. We’re not a monolith. But listen to those oriented toward the same horizon of liberation who have paid dearly for it, because people like us have real bodies to bury. Real prisoners to free. Real families to protect. Real displacement to survive. Real torture marks to tend to, etched permanently into our bodies by years of batons, whips, and damp prison floors. Real psychic ruin left by massacred loved ones, forcibly disappeared friends, shattered families, and ghosts that do not leave us. We have real flesh that we sacrificed again and again for what we fought for, including the same anti-imperial struggles you imagine yourselves the sole proprietors of.
The people who truly know liberation struggles know how difficult it is to remain human within them, human enough to be worthy of the world you struggle so militantly toward. They know the terror of one day looking in the mirror and realizing your face has become indistinguishable from that of your torturer.
Fuck US imperialism
Free Iranian political prisoners
Free Egyptian political prisoners
Free Mumia Abu Jamal and all American political prisoners
May all prisons fall.
Republished with the kind permission of the author.
Featured image: painting by Cairo-based artist and former political prisoner Yassin Mohamed entitled “The Majority of the Time” (2020), honoring Abdelrahman ElGendy. Source: Inkstick, “Prison Everywhere Is the Same: An Interview with Artist Yassin Mohamed.”
