What is terrorism? And who decides who is a terrorist and who isn’t? This vague, politically malleable concept has become the justification for a global American war against terrorism that spans 78 countries — more than a third of all nations. At home, it's handed local police departments $34 billion to buy military equipment, turning terrorism into a catch-all excuse for militarizing American communities.
In this episode of Always at War, we talk with national security law expert Elizabeth Beavers to unpack how terrorism designations work as political tools rather than security measures — keeping Nelson Mandela out of America until 2008, shutting down the biggest Muslim charity in the country, and now threatening Gaza protesters with prosecution.
We trace how terrorism laws originated in anti-Palestinian activism and evolved into a legal framework so broad that it criminalizes giving "expert advice" to designated groups. Through examples like the Holy Land Foundation — whose leaders went to prison for charity work the government admitted reached legitimate recipients — we show how these laws are designed not to stop violence, but to suppress political dissent and enforce American geopolitical interests.
The episode reveals how America’s Global War on Terror did little to eliminate “terrorism” – a potentially impossible goal – but to create an endless justification for global American dominance.
By declaring war on a concept rather than specific enemies, we've built a system where peace becomes impossible and every corner of the globe becomes a potential battlefield — all while the vague definition of "terrorism" expands to include anyone who challenges American interests.
C. Kaye Rawlings is the lead digital strategist at the Quincy Institute and the co-host of the Always at War podcast. She received her Ph.D. in Art History, with a specialization in the history of architecture, in 2023 from Emory University.
Top photo credit: Palestinians walk to collect aid supplies from the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/File Photo
Many human rights organizations say it should shut down. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have killed hundreds of Palestinians at or around its aid centers. And yet, the U.S. has committed no less than $30 million toward the controversial, Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Through almost-daily email campaigns and X posts, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation contends its work provides critical aid to Palestinians. But these assertions ring hollow when juxtaposed against the disastrous, widely condemned state of its Gaza operations, where IDF soldiers have reportedly been instructed to shoot Palestinians at or around their centers almost every day
GHF's peculiar media strategy
The GHF passes itself off as an independenthumanitarian group. In fact, it was conceived by Israeli officials at the beginning of the war, with buy-in from Israeli tech investors and venture capitalists, as well as stafffromIsrael’s state-aid coordinators, or COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories). Israeli opposition lawmakers allege that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has funded the GHF. Meanwhile, former CIA officer Paul Reilly was allegedly in on the ground floor of the scheme and founded Safe Reach Solutions, one of the two U.S.-based private contracting firms managing the aid hubs. A former U.S. Special Forces soldier heads the other.
For their part, Israeli officials say the GHF is the only safe way to get direct aid to the Palestinians inside. The World Food Programme has found it nearly impossible to operate in Gaza due to the security situation, often halting its operations, while Israelbanned the UN program UNRWA, which was the predominant source of aid for Palestinians there, in January.
Eager to depict itself as a force for good, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation inundates reporters with near-daily communications boasting of the number of meals provided to Gazans, and frequently featuring photos of smiling Palestinians, especially children, receiving aid. Its X account and new, flashy website employ similar messaging and photos.
The GHF has even recruited Shahar Segal, the prominent restaurateur and business partner of celebrity Israeli chef Eyal Shan, as its spokesperson. Segal arguably isn’t the GHF’s only flack: State Department spokespersons Tammy Bruce and Tommy Pigott have repeatedly gushed over GHF aid operations at recent press briefings.
GHF’s other communications efforts are markedly less glamorous. Its Facebook page, for example, often posts announcements in Arabic about upcoming aid distributions. Often, the GHF posts that it’s distributing aid in a given location, only to announce minutes later it’s already handed out all the supplies.
The GHF routinely denounces Hamas in its communications. Like the Israeli government, it says Hamas has fabricated the narrative of Palestinians being harmed or killed by the IDF at their aid sites, even though the killings have been widely reported by numerous mainstream outlets, including Haaretz, Reuters and Al Jazeera.
“There is a growing pattern of violent events being misreported as occurring near our sites, when they involve UN convoys or areas far outside our operations,” the GHF said in a June 17 email. “We’re also concerned by the role of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, certain UN officials, and Al Jazeera in promoting these false narratives.”
Repeating a common Israeli claim that Hamas diverts humanitarian aid in Gaza to its own ends, Segal insisted that the GHF “is the only right and possible way to deliver food to Gazans without feeding Hamas' terror machine.” But Cindy McCain, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program, said in late May that there was no evidence Hamas was stealing aid.
Despite credible media reports, GHF insists that IDF soldiers have not killed or injured hundreds of Palestinians seeking aid at their sites. As of June 29, at least 583 Palestinians have been reported killed at or near GHF-run aid sites since May 27, when they started operations.
“It is not surprising that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation uses social media to portray itself as assisting Palestinians in Gaza,” Annelle Sheline, research fellow at the Quincy Institute’s Middle East program, told RS. “It has to try to overcome the overwhelming evidence that its aid distribution sites are in fact primarily responsible for killing Palestinians rather than saving them.”
Helping Israel dodge accountability
Concerned that GHF’s unconventional operations jeopardize Palestinian lives, many humanitarian organizations condemn its work.
In an open letter released June 23, a group of 15 international human rights organizations, including the International Commission of Journalists, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, slammed the GHF’s operations, including involving private mercenaries and the IDF.
The GHF’s “new model of privatized, militarized aid distribution constitutes a radical and dangerous shift away from established international humanitarian relief operations,” they wrote.
In another letter from July 1, over 170 humanitarian NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and Save the Children, said the GHF should cease operations. "Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families," they wrote.
Alexander Smith, a former USAID contractor who resigned after his work on Gaza was censored by the Biden administration, told RS that the GHF is not behaving like a genuine aid organization. For example, forcing Palestinians to travel to a select few aid centers violated established humanitarian norms. “You don't want sick and injured people having to move, and you don't want them moving across a war zone,” he said. “You get the aid to them.”
Observers contend GHF operations assist Israel’s political goals for the region. Environmental researcher Yaakov Garb found that GHF’s aid structures were designed and located in ways “predominantly responsive to Israeli military strategy and tactics rather than…a broad humanitarian relief intervention.” And the GHF only deploys aid sites in the center and south of Gaza, suggesting the operations aim to force Palestinians out of northern Gaza — where Israel has now banned aid altogether.
"The placement of those three aid distribution hubs in [Gaza’s] extreme south are obviously meant to draw people to the south, near the Egyptian border... to draw people away from the north,” Smith said. “Israeli officials, from Netanyahu to Smotrich, have been very frank about their intention to simply take and resettle that land.”
Sheline said that GHF’s operations and communications help Israel skirt accountability for the humanitarian crisis it has created in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 56,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023.
“The IDF only allowed the GHF to begin operating to dispel the impression that Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza to death by allowing in almost no food since March 2, and still preventing any medicine, fuel or water from entering the territory,” Sheline said. “The GHF is not intended to help Palestinians, it is intended to dispel negative media coverage.”
When RS asked the State Department about its decision to directly fund the GHF, it was referred to a June 26 press briefing in which Pigott announced the $30 million donation. When reporters at that briefing repeatedly asked about the IDF killing Palestinians at GHF aid centers, Pigott simply said Hamas was solely responsible for starting the war.
“I think everyone in the State Department…and probably within the Trump administration, understands that GHF is not an effective way to deliver aid,” Smith said of the State Department’s $30 million contribution toward GHF operations. “They're choosing to double down on GHF because it's more politically expedient.”
The GHF did not return a request for comment. The IDF says it is investigating the shootings at and around GHF aid hubs as possible war crimes, and plans to reorganize its presence around the aid hubs, adding fences, signs and checkpoints around them, and marked routes to them to minimize “friction with the population.”
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Heads of state of Mali, Assimi Goita, Niger, General Abdourahamane Tiani and Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traore, pose for photographs during the first ordinary summit of heads of state and governments of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in Niamey, Niger July 6, 2024. REUTERS/Mahamadou Hamidou//File Photo
In Mali, General Assimi Goïta, who took power in a 2020 coup, now plans to remain in power through at least the end of this decade, as do his counterparts in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. As long-ruling juntas consolidate power in national capitals, much of the Sahelian terrain remains out of government control.
Recent attacks on government security forces in Djibo (Burkina Faso), Timbuktu (Mali), and Eknewane (Niger) have all underscored the depth of the insecurity. The Sahelian governments face a powerful threat from jihadist forces in two organizations, Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, JNIM, which is part of al-Qaida) and the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP). The Sahelian governments also face conventional rebel challengers and interact, sometimes in cooperation and sometimes in tension, with various vigilantes and community-based armed groups.
The roots of instability in the Sahel extend both to specific crises in the 2010s (especially a rebellion in northern Mali in 2012) and to broader, systemic issues having to do with land use, resource competition, poverty, official corruption, the spread of jihadist mobilization through a chain of socially combustible zones, and citizens’ loss of faith in institutions. Government responses largely fueled insurgencies, as security forces committed abuses and collective punishment, and as civilian leaders pursued inconsistent and often tone-deaf policies.
Foreign intervention also inflamed the situation. France, the European Union, and the United States pursued a narrowly security-focused policy matrix that failed to reverse the escalation in violence in the 2010s and that crumbled upon contact with the coups of the early 2020s. Russia, the new partner of choice for the central Sahelian regimes, supplied an even more brutal dose of violence, but one that produced no concrete gains for national governments other than the Malian authorities’ triumphant but ultimately isolated victory in Kidal, a northern rebel stronghold. The jihadists, who delight in having a foreign adversary, have replaced the French with the Russians in much of their propaganda and targeting.
As the juntas have struggled on the battlefield, they have hollowed out their countries’ politics, subverting decades of fragile but meaningful democratic experiences. Political parties have been banned, journalists arrested, critics conscripted, and associations dissolved. There are a few niches of resistance remaining, particularly labor unions, but those have largely challenged the juntas on a sector-by-sector basis over issues connected to pay and conditions; unlike in 1991 in Mali or 2014 in Burkina Faso, broader revolutions involving multi-sector coalitions have not coalesced. In fact, although it is difficult to measure given the lack of regular and reliable polling as well as the near absence now of investigative journalism, the juntas appear to enjoy substantial popularity. Military men have made invigorating promises about restoring security, championing national sovereignty, revitalizing economies, and bringing people dignity. Even as those promises remain unfulfilled, the message is clearly thrilling to a wide domestic audience.
Western governments are still adrift on Sahel policy. In Europe, expectations for how much influence governments can wield over the Sahel, bilaterally and collectively, have been tempered by the rebukes the Sahelian juntas have issued over the past five years. Ambitions to rebuild influence persist, and the most thoughtful suggestions involve pursuing “a pragmatic course that reconciles [Europe’s] interests and diplomatic priorities with political realities on the ground.” Yet there are few genuinely new ideas in the mix in Europe, as concerns about migration control and insecurity lead policymakers and analysts back to a familiar menu of security assistance and development partnerships.
In the United States, intermittent concern about the Sahel under the Biden administration has given way to relative indifference under the Trump administration. Both under Biden and Trump, meanwhile, there was greater concern about the potential for (and to some extent, reality of) spillover from the Sahel into coastal West Africa than there was concern about the Sahel itself. Tellingly, U.S. Africa Command hosted the April/May 2025 edition of its annual Flintlock training exercise in Cote d’Ivoire, and periodic reports suggest that AFRICOM is scouting the possibility of basing drones there (after the government of Niger expelled U.S. personnel in 2024). AFRICOM, however, could ultimately be cut amid the Trump administration’s ongoing restructurings.
To some extent, Western policy to the Sahel is inadvertently replicating some long-discarded ideas about Somalia policy. In a refreshing set of analyses around 2009-2010, Bronwyn Bruton advocated what she called “constructive disengagement” from Somalia — a pause in perennial American and Western efforts to shape the politics and security landscape of that long-troubled country. Most of Bruton’s suggestions were specific to Somalia and its Islamist Shabaab insurgency to that moment, but some of them offer intriguing glimpses of what an alternative approach to the Sahel could look like.
In one report, Bruton wrote, “The United States and its partners can encourage the pragmatic, nationalist, and opportunistic elements of the Shabaab to break with their radical partners by adopting a position of neutrality toward all local political groupings and by signaling a willingness to coexist with any Islamist authority that emerges, as long as it refrains from acts of regional aggression, rejects global jihadi ambitions, and tolerates the activities of Western humanitarian relief agencies in Somalia.”
This approach still sounds radical today, but it is effectively what has happened in Syria since late 2024. The U.S. should in no way cheer on a JNIM victory, but the U.S. should consider a range of options in case such a scenario transpires.
Bruton also recommended, meanwhile, that “new development initiatives…should be pursued in a decentralized fashion that involves collaboration with the informal and traditional authorities that are already in place on the ground – without attempting to formalize or empower them.”
Here she was referring largely to the regional governments and would-be governments that existed (and still exist) in a fractured Somalia, a very different landscape than the Sahel’s current political map. But the underlying principle has appeal for the Sahel: the U.S. and Europe would do better to pursue development for development’s sake in the Sahel, rather than trying to tie development to quixotic projects of reshaping society or steering national governments. Bruton’s (unheeded) mix of recommendations for Somalia is not a blueprint for the Sahel some 15 years later, but her ideas point to ways that the menu of options could be expanded beyond what sometimes appears to be Western governments’ search for a return to a modified status quo ante.
The Sahel appears poised to remain both politically frozen and deeply volatile through 2030, and if disruptions to that trajectory arrive, the easiest disruptions to imagine are ones for the worse, including further coups, the fall of major cities to jihadists, and/or mass famines. To the extent that Western governments seek to re-engage, it should be with a realization that the 2010s are not coming back, that the juntas have a do-or-die mentality, and that some fresh thinking is required.
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Top image credit: An Iranian man (not pictured) carries a portrait of the former commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, and participates in a funeral for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, Iranian nuclear scientists, and civilians who are killed in Israeli attacks, in Tehran, Iran, on June 28, 2025, during the Iran-Israel ceasefire. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto VIA REUTERS)
Washington’s foreign policy establishment has a dangerous tendency to dismantle nations it deems adversarial. Now, neoconservative think tanks like the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and their fellow travelers in the European Parliament are openly promoting the balkanization of Iran — a reckless strategy that would further destabilize the Middle East, trigger catastrophic humanitarian crises, and provoke fierce resistance from both Iranians and U.S. partners.
As Israel and Iran exchanged blows in mid-June, FDD’s Brenda Shaffer argued that Iran’s multi-ethnic makeup was a vulnerability to be exploited. Shaffer has been a vocal advocate for Azerbaijan in mainstream U.S. media, even as she has consistently failed to disclose her ties to Azerbaijan’s state oil company, SOCAR. For years, she has pushed for Iran’s fragmentation along ethnic lines, akin to the former Yugoslavia’s collapse. She has focused much of that effort on promoting the secession of Iranian Azerbaijan, where Azeris form Iran’s largest non-Persian group.
Shaffer’s views align with a recent Jerusalem Post editorial which, amid the euphoria of Israel’s initial strikes in this month’s war against Iran, called on President Trump to openly embrace Iran’s dismemberment. Specifically, it urged a “Middle East coalition for Iran’s partition” and “security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish and Balochi minority regions willing to break away.” The same outlet is on the record calling for Israel and the U.S. to support the secession from Iran of what it calls “‘South Azerbaijan,” (meaning the Azeri-majority regions in northwestern Iran).
Meanwhile, the foreign affairs spokeswoman for a centrist liberal group in the European Parliament convened a meeting on the “future of Iran,” ostensibly to discuss the prospects for a “successful” revolt against the Islamic Republic. The fact that the only two Iranian speakers were ethnic separatists from Iran’s Azerbaijan and Ahwaz regions made clear her agenda. Since the European Parliament unilaterally cut all relations with Iran’s official bodies in 2022, it has become a playground for assorted radical exiled opposition groups, such as monarchists, the cultish MEK (Mojaheddeen-e Khalk), and ethnic separatists.
Yet Iran is not some fragile patchwork state on the verge of collapse. It is a 90-million-strong nation with a deep sense of historical and cultural identity. While proponents of balkanization love to fixate on Iran’s ethnic diversity — Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs — they consistently underestimate the unifying force of Iranian nationalism. As the scholar Shervin Malekzadeh noted recently in the Los Angeles Times, “There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history, a nation that ‘looms out of an immemorial past.’ Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority, whether monarchist, Islamist or leftist.”
Decades of foreign pressure, from sanctions to covert operations to war, have only reinforced this cohesion. The idea that stirring separatist sentiment will fracture Iran is a dangerous fantasy — one that deliberately overlooks how schemes hatched, in major part, by pro-Israel neoconservatives, have backfired in Iraq and Syria leaving chaos in their wake.
This approach is not only morally grotesque; it is based on a profound misunderstanding of Iran’s internal dynamics. Shaffer and her ilk expect that external pressure on Tehran would lead to an Azeri (and other minorities’) uprising against Tehran. Instead, like the rest of Iran, Israel’s recent attack triggered a rally-around-the-flag effect, because Iranian Azerbaijanis are deeply integrated into the national fabric: both the highest officials in the country — the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Massoud Pezeshkian — are of Azeri ethnicity.
A month ago, I walked the streets of Tabriz, a city steeped in Iranian history and identity. Far from being a hotbed of secessionism, Tabriz is living testament to Iran’s enduring unity. The Azerbaijan Museum proudly displays artifacts from millennia of Iranian civilization, while the Constitution House commemorates Tabriz’s pivotal role in Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolution — a movement that shaped modern Iranian nationalism and continues to inspire democratic forces and civil society across the country.
The idea that Tabriz — or any major Azeri-majority city in Iran — would rise up in revolt at the behest of Washington or Jerusalem is a pipe dream. Iranian Azerbaijanis are not some oppressed minority waiting for liberation; they have thrived in Iran. Most critical Azeri activists in Iran frame their demands in terms of cultural rights, not independence.
Admittedly, local grievances may be more pronounced in the Kurdish and Baloch regions, particularly in the latter – remote, poor and Sunni. But even here, there is no evidence of strong popular support for secession. Besides, trying to capitalize on whatever disaffection may exist would put the U.S. on a collision course with its allies and partners in the region.
Turkey, a key NATO ally, will never tolerate U.S. support for Kurdish separatism in Iran, given its own decades-long struggle with the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK’s Iran affiliate – PJAK (the Party of the Free Life of Kurdistan) has welcomed Israel’s attacks on Iran.
Similarly, Pakistan, already facing its own Baloch insurgency, will see Western meddling in Iranian Balochistan as a direct threat to its territorial integrity. Alienating these allies in pursuit of an unworkable regime-change gambit would constitute foreign policy malpractice.
Russia and China have long argued that Washington seeks to dismember its adversaries — from Yugoslavia to Iraq. Any push to balkanize Iran will validate their darkest suspicions, hardening their own domestic crackdowns against minorities, and accelerating their efforts to build an anti-Western coalition.
India, a country avidly courted as an ally by Washington, would similarly reject such policies as they would undermine New Delhi’s strategic trade and logistics projects, such as the development of the Chabahar port in Iran, India’s entry point to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan.
If Washington and its European enablers push for Iran’s disintegration, the consequences will also be felt acutely in Europe. A destabilized Iran would unleash a migration crisis dwarfing the 2015 Syrian refugee wave. It could also create fertile ground for terrorist groups — including the Islamic State. One of its franchises. ISIS-Khorasan, has already been active in Iran, including suicide bombings last year in Kerman. Add to that the inevitable energy shocks if Iran moves to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, and Europe will face a self-inflicted disaster.
The architects of this approach — hawks at FDD and their European and Israeli fellow travelers — are playing with fire. Attempts to fracture Iran will backfire spectacularly, unleashing chaos that will spill far beyond its borders.
Instead of indulging in fragmentation fantasies, the West should pursue pragmatic engagement. The alternative is likely another forever war — one that neither America nor Europe can afford.
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