Jadaliyya Readers,
As we announced previously, the article titled “Impossible Solidarity” was taken down when it was discovered that proper in-house editorial procedure had not been followed prior to publication. After a full review that included relevant Page Editors as well as Jadaliyya Co-Editors, the article was removed permanently, and the author was notified. The editors fundamentally disagreed with the article’s placing of settler colonial genocide and authoritarian state repression on equal footing, regardless of what the author’s intentions may have been. The article also included several questionable and/or patently incorrect statements. The consequence of the publication of this piece has been temporarily costly to our mission, regardless of whether readers understand the decentralized and volunteer-based nature of how Jadaliyya operates.
The initial reviewers understood that the author’s intentions were to ventriloquize, in order to better refute, Zionist arguments circulating in much of the Iranian public sphere. The procedural mistakes prevented the appropriate editors from ensuring the piece was properly edited, or potentially rejected. Swift action was taken to pull the article and conduct a full review which resulted in taking down the article permanently.
We take full responsibility for this error, which inadvertently perpetuated views on resistance, authoritarianism, and imperialism that are opposed to more than a decade of what this publication’s content conveys. Finally, we deeply appreciate the unbending trust of nearly all readers who were, like most of us, disappointed to see this content on Jadaliyya’s pages, even if briefly, and were puzzled by its publication knowing full well it did not belong. Even the legacy “critics” were surprised and angry, which confirms the foregoing. As to the occasional travelers who doubted our funding and ownership, and traced our origins to 2010, try going back two more decades, and hone your research.
In solidarity,
Jadaliyya Co-Editors