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solidarity
Eulogy for My Friend and Freedom Fighter, Yanar Mohammed
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently. She was one of them.
Mar 29, 2026
The first time someone threatened to kill Yanar was in 2003.
That was the year she returned to Baghdad, after having fled with her infant son during the first US war seven years earlier.
With Iraq now under US occupation, Yanar noticed something that the media did not: The US had unleashed and empowered Iraq’s most reactionary political forces, and like fundamentalists everywhere, their first priority was to subjugate Iraqi women and girls.
Yanar wasn’t having it.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed.
She saw what was happening and launched the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) to fight against the dismantlement of women’s rights and the terrible rise in violence against women. The organization’s first office was a bombed-out bank in central Baghdad.
From that moment, Yanar became a lightning rod for anti-feminist attacks, and very soon after, the threats began.
In 2004, I published an open letter to the chief of the US administration in Baghdad, reminding him that the United States was legally obligated to protect Yanar’s life and the lives of all Iraqi civilians under occupation. I didn’t know Yanar yet, but she wrote to thank me, and we arranged to meet in New York.
We sat on a lumpy couch in MADRE’s old office and talked about building a network of safe houses, where women fleeing violence could find safety and solidarity. Then we went to Macy’s, and Yanar tried on every single lipstick at the makeup counter.
Over the next 22 years, Yanar became one of MADRE’s closest partners, and to me, she became family.
MADRE accompanied Yanar as she brought her visions for revolutionary feminism to life again and again, founding a network of shelters for women and keeping them operational through attacks by clans, militias, and the State.
She launched a feminist newspaper and radio station and staffed them with women who rebuilt their shattered lives through the care, feminist education, and job training that OWFI provided.
She created safe spaces for young people to come together across sectarian lines to defy the logic of the US-caused civil war and create art, music, and poetry.
She co-founded the first organization of Afro-Iraqis, understanding that there is no feminism without racial justice.
She built an underground railroad to free women who were enslaved by ISIS.
She fought like hell to defend women’s legal rights, understanding that the more we lost, the more critical every victory became.
She led protests, campaigns, and coalitions that brought down a corrupt government and forced its successor to answer to demands for accountability from Iraq’s most marginalized people.
Yet, as extraordinary as Yanar’s legacy is, she was so much more than the sum of her accomplishments.
Yanar loved jazz, sushi, and beer. She also worried about her son and spent years hoping to find love. She loved her husband, who made her so happy these last few years.
Yanar was also despondent at times. More focused on all that was left to do than on what she had achieved. Her moments of exhaustion and frustration always reminded me that we don’t have to be infallible heroes in this work; we just have to keep doing our part and take care of each other along the way.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed. The Iranian-backed militias that had threatened Yanar for years have been galvanized like never before by this war.
In January, when Yanar and I spoke about the killing of Renee Goode in Minneapolis, we were both struck by the parallels between those militias in Iraq and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States.
“Now you have what the US brought to Iraq,” Yanar said, “A paramilitary force working for the worst reactionaries in government, terrorizing communities and committing extrajudicial executions.”
We talked about the beauty and the power of the organizing to protect immigrants, and the militant joy of people coming together to remake the world: in Minneapolis, in Baghdad, in Gaza, in Darfur, and in Haiti.
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently:
Heating soup and handing out blankets,
Offering sanctuary to those who are under attack,
Spinning the ideas that will move everything forward,
And putting their bodies on the line again and again.
Yanar did all of these things. And she did them with joy in her heart and fire in her belly. I loved her for that.
Two years ago, when I was in Jerusalem, where I lived as a child, Yanar wrote to me about her hopes for the future:
My plan for the coming decade is to have a small house with a big garden in a Baghdad suburb, where I will get a dog, and plant all the flowering trees and vegetables. And I hope the day will come when we can both visit each other in our home cities without any fear.
This is the legacy Yanar leaves us to enact—to fight for each other and spend time together in the flowering gardens we’ve planted.
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What I Saw in Cuba? Resilience
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
Mar 28, 2026
I traveled to Cuba this month. As a Cuban American, that sentence carries the weight of longing born of an estrangement from my roots. For much of my life, Cuba existed as a distant story, a place I knew only through descriptions from my father.
I was there as part of an international solidarity convoy; over 500 representatives from more than 30 countries, united by a simple conviction: No country has the right to strangle another simply because it chose a different path. I cannot stand by while the island of my family’s heritage is suffocated.
What I witnessed over those days was not the Cuba of Western propaganda. It was a country enduring a 66-year siege, and a people who, against all odds, continue to build, create, and care for one another.
A Public Health System Under Siege
One of the most profound visits was to a neighborhood polyclinic in Havana. These clinics are the backbone of Cuba’s public health system. Doctors live on the second floor, above where they work. They know every patient in their community by name. They treat physical and psychological health alike, and they embody a model of care that prioritizes people over profit.
I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
But the doctors I met face heartbreaking constraints. They are highly trained professionals who know exactly what their patients need, and they know those treatments exist. Due to the US embargo, they cannot access them. Imagine living every day with the skill to heal and being blocked by a political and economic siege.
We brought what we could: 6,300 pounds of medical supplies delivered by our delegation, including neonatal equipment, analgesics, catheters, and other critical materials, valued at $433,000 and more still in unquantifiable amounts stuffed into carry-on and personal bags, sacrificing space for our own clothing and toiletries. Cuban doctors told us about nights when the power goes out, and medical students rush to respirators, manually pumping air for hours until electricity is restored. They save lives with their bare hands.
Community and Creativity in the Face of Scarcity
Everywhere we went, I saw people organizing to survive. In a central Havana neighborhood, we helped refurbish a crumbling playground. We brought paint and new swings. A local man who maintains the park offered to take the swings down each night so they wouldn’t be taken, then put them back up each morning for the children. That kind of mutual care was everywhere.
We met an artist named Lázaro, who collects garbage and old newspapers to create recycled art. He teaches neighborhood kids to do the same. His studio walls are covered in vibrant works that double as expressions of resistance and creativity.
On another day, we set up a table outside Lázaro’s studio with construction paper, markers, and glue. Children from the neighborhood gathered to write letters to pen pals in Singapore. I translated letters from English to Spanish, helping each child respond in Spanish and illustrate their replies. Parents played drums and danced while the kids painted and wrote. It was a profound moment of cross-border connection—kids building relationships through art and translation, across continents, across the blockade.
For Cuban Americans, there is something like a spiritual cost that is paid for quietly going along with the status quo in the face of the many injustices we have grown up with for decades, which seem to us to have intensified in these recent years. But the children I saw in Havana had their spirit intact.
The Human Cost of the Embargo
The blockade is not an abstraction. Poverty is real. I gave what I could, but as individuals, we cannot meet that scale of need brought upon by a systemic crisis created by US policy.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work.
Rolling blackouts on the island are the result of a strategy of siege warfare intensified in January. Cuba has gone months without fuel imports due to sanctions and naval pressure aimed at stopping oil shipments to the island. Power plants cannot run consistently. Hospitals cannot perform necessary surgeries. Water pumping infrastructure fails. This is not a natural disaster. It is man-made violence; it is a silent war.
And yet, the Cuban people do not wait for rescue. They organize. They adapt. They invent.
Solidarity and a Call to Action
As a Cuban American, I have heard all my life that Cuba is a country ruled by capricious autocrats. That the Cuban people are waiting to be liberated. That their strangulation is meant to help them. But standing on that island, talking to doctors and artists and children and families, I saw something else entirely. I saw a people who are already free—free to define their own destiny, even under the weight of a siege designed to break them.
Cuba is open to dialogue and investment with respect for its sovereignty. But the US continues to enforce a policy that even much of the world condemns. Year after year, the United Nations General Assembly votes overwhelmingly to end the embargo. Year after year, the US ignores it.
I came back with a deeper sense of what solidarity looks like: showing up, listening, sharing what we can, and staying connected to the work. But solidarity cannot end after a single delegation. We need to break the siege. We need to end this decades-long economic warfare.
Cubans have a right to self-governance. They have a right to medicine, to electricity, to water, to dignity. My father chose to leave Cuba in the face of poverty brought on by a cruel sanctions regime. I chose to return for the same reason.
Let Cuba live.
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Jewish and Arab-American Solidarity Is More Important Than Ever
At a time when authoritarianism thrives on division, the solidarity between Arab and Jewish communities rooted in justice and human dignity is a powerful response to fear and hate.
Mar 24, 2026
Our country is at war. The American-Israeli attack on Iran has plunged the Middle East and the Arab world into chaos, displacing millions and causing thousands of casualties.
Here at home, this war has consequences for the safety of Jewish and Arab American communities. Last week, a man drove a car containing explosives into a synagogue just outside of Metro Detroit. Reports indicate he held Jews responsible for the death of several members of his family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. At the same time, multiple congressional Republicans have decided anti-Muslim bigotry will be a key part of their strategy for the midterms. This, after their language dehumanizing Palestinians and Arabs, went generally unchallenged.
This moment requires solidarity.
As we hold our breath with every new development abroad and at home, our hearts break. Our hearts break for the loss of life. Our hearts break for the fear felt by Jewish and Arab-American communities. And our hearts break again when we consider how this may fuel more of both antisemitism and anti-Arab racism.
The same politics that justify illegal wars abroad target communities at home.
Meanwhile, many American communities are also the target of the same state violence that launches unlawful wars. The National Guard has been deployed to cities across the country, and agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are targeting Black and brown people in mass raids that have led to tens of thousands of abductions, detentions, and deportations, tearing families apart. Racial profiling has Latinos, Somalis, Asians, and other immigrant communities in fear of leaving their homes. Immigration agents have killed Americans on the streets, and a record number of people have died in ICE custody over the past year. 2026 is on track to surpass those devastating numbers.
Right now, the Trump administration is using antisemitism as a smokescreen to target protesters, particularly immigrants who are people of color, and most particularly those who are Palestinian or Arab. We reject the assertion that this is how we fight antisemitism. We reject the assertion that one of our communities must be harmed to ensure the safety of another. Not only does doing so bring no lasting safety to Jews and Arabs, it invites more danger by weakening all our rights in a democracy under attack—the opposite of how we attain safety for everyone.
The administration’s willful disregard for the rule of law extends far beyond executive powers. Students are being arrested and detained for First Amendment-protected speech advocating for Palestinian human rights, teachers are worried about lesson plans that include the history of slavery, and libraries are being forced to remove LGBTQ+ books while transgender Americans in entire states are being stripped of their documentation.
Our nation’s essential nonprofits are under threat from our own government, and political dissent and protest is labeled “domestic terrorism.” And one of our most important tools to fight back, our vote, is under assault. The Voting Rights Act itself is in jeopardy, with the potential of taking us back six decades. These realities are deeply interconnected.
The same politics that justify illegal wars abroad target communities at home. State repression is creating fear and the erosion of our basic civil rights and liberties, as well as the abandonment of democratic norms.
In the case of Arab Americans and Jewish Americans, many choose to paint our communities as adversaries or, if we’re lucky, as unlikely allies. Neither is true, and our work together is not novel. At a time when authoritarianism thrives on division, the solidarity between Arab and Jewish communities rooted in justice and human dignity is a powerful response to fear and hate. It is also how we fight back.
This is a time of convergence for many important holidays. Arab American Muslims are preparing for the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Jewish Americans will soon celebrate Passover. The Passover Seder has us place ourselves in the story of those fleeing oppression. The Ramadan fast has us place ourselves in physical hunger and thirst, feeling what it is like to be without.
Those for whom that oppression or hunger is enduring, who await a relief that may not be forthcoming, are the reason we do the work we do. The reason we do the work we do together. Our solidarity is with each other and with them—the marginalized, the least protected, the hungry. We pledge to keep working hard together—and with all who believe in the promise of a better America where everyone is safe and thriving—until our collective liberation is achieved.
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