It is possible to mourn human loss without embracing everything those humans did.
It is possible to mourn human loss while being openly disturbed that certain deaths are never mourned, and the reasons for that.
It should be possible to discuss the political consequences of an act without having to dissociate that discussion from the politics of the act itself.
It is possible to speculate as to motivation, causality, experience, relations and histories without condoning, or being accused of condoning, an act.
It is possible to defend a right and also to enact it in criticizing the way in which that right is enacted, and reductively understood.
It is possible to oppose an assault on free speech, while also insisting on the hypocrisies, inequalities and elisions that undermine the idea that free speech is a cornerstone of ‘the West’.
It is possible to value politically the freedoms you have without understanding them as deriving from exclusively Western ideals, or as evidence of civilizational superiority.
It is possible to understand the political value of ‘the right to offend’, while opposing the political deadness of the contemporary duty to offend.
It is possible to defend a universal right to free expression, while noting the strange contemporary relativism that has little interest in the content, context and consequences of what is expressed.
It is possible to recognize the intentionality of an expression without accepting that this defines its meaning or significance.
It is possible to insist on the importance of context without assuming that there is but one context.
It should be possible to recognize the importance of context without writing dissenting voices and evident antagonisms out of that context.
It is possible to oppose oppressive institutional and political uses of religion while not contributing to the ways in which presumptive religious identities are racialized.
It is possible to be critical of positions derived from faith while not succumbing to the kind of identity politics that depends on treating faith as a failure of the mind.
It is possible to grasp that the lack of secularism, in one context, underpins oppression, and that a surplus of secularism, in another, extends it.
It is possible to approach racism as a political effect and not as an individual moral failing.
It is possible to critique racism without the reductive certainty of categorising racists and antiracists.
It is possible to understand that political actors can act against particular forms of racism while simultaneously extending others.
It is possible to affirm that ‘Islam is not a race’, while still contributing to anti-Muslim racism.
It is possible to hold onto the diversity of Muslim populations while recognizing the ways they are collectively racialized as Muslims.
It is possible to grasp that effects matter more than intentions, and thus that what is presented as antiracist may be received as having racializing consequences.
It is possible to wear your values on your sleeve, if you wish, and still reject monocausal explanations.
It is possible to advance a grinding form of communitarianism while criticizing the appeal to community.
It is possible to insist on the living legacies of colonialism and the hierarchies of the racist state, while recognizing that this does not determine the political agency of ‘extremists’.
It is possible to oppose both antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism, and not to present them relationally as a zero-sum game.
