The Unchilding of a Voice: The Mother’s Day Magazine, the Children You Are Not Allowed to Name, and the Economy of Erasure
By Uldduz Sohrabi
This piece reflects the author’s experience with Auralis Magazine’s editorial leadership only. The contributors featured in this edition, and persons who appear alongside them in this family-focused edition, bear no responsibility for the decisions described here.
In April 2026, I was interviewed by Auralis Magazine for their Mother’s Day Edition. They censored it, citing that the naming of children is ‘political’. What I found when I started asking why is what this piece is about.
My work in humanitarian disarmament has taken me into the rooms where decisions about weapons and their impacts on civilian lives are made. I know what erasure looks like when it is institutionalised. I did not expect to find it in a Mother’s Day magazine. I was wrong.
My piece named children including: the children of Palestine, subjected to incarceration and genocide by Israel[1][2][3]; the schoolgirls of Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab, Iran, over 120 of them, killed in their classrooms on 28 February 2026 when US Tomahawk missiles struck their school[4]; the children of the DRC, exploited to mine cobalt by global extraction industries[5]; the children trafficked by the Epstein network, shielded for decades by the very institutions meant to protect them, and children whose names I cannot exhaust. I began to name them because to leave them unnamed is itself a form of unchilding, the process coined by Palestinian decolonial scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian by which children are stripped of their humanity and converted into political capital.
Nic BeeGee, co-founder and Editor in Chief of Auralis Magazine, called the list of children “specific political topics” and that it would “not publish specific political views or issues”. They declined to publish my interview if I insisted on naming the children in the feature. I declined to publish with them, if the children were not named.
What I Found: The Financial Chain to the IDF and the Killing of Palestinian Children
Auralis benefits from its brand partner, which has profited from investment by a private equity firm that also funded a company founded by veterans of IDF Unit 8200 — the unit responsible for the automated systems used to target and kill Palestinians, including children.
At a glance, Auralis looks harmless to children, after all, it celebrates motherhood. A small, privately held aesthetic magazine with beautiful layouts. The kind of publication that sits on a coffee table and makes you feel like success is a mood board away.
Summer Fridays, one of Auralis’s featured brand partners, received a majority investment in July 2024 from TSG Consumer Partners, a San Francisco-based private equity firm.[6] TSG Consumer Partners participated in two funding rounds for Noname Security, an Israeli cybersecurity company founded by veterans of IDF Unit 8200: a $60 million Series B in June 2021 and a $135 million Series C in December 2021, totalling almost $200 million. Its CEO, Oz Golan, served in Unit 8200 before becoming Director of R&D at NSO Group, the maker of Pegasus spyware, documented as being used to surveil Palestinian journalists, activists, and human rights defenders. He founded Noname Security directly after leaving NSO.[7][8]
Unit 8200 is Israel’s signals intelligence corps, which is the architect of the digital infrastructure of killing in Gaza. It developed Lavender, an AI system that assigned kill scores to 2.3 million Gazans and listed up to 37,000 Palestinians as targets, with an average human review time of twenty seconds before authorising a strike.[9] It developed The Gospel, which automatically identified 12,000 bombing targets in weeks. It built Where’s Daddy?, a system purposely designed to track targets in real time and identify the moment they entered their family home, so that strikes could be carried out while they were with their children and their children’s mothers. As one intelligence officer told +972: “The system is built to look for them in these situations” — situations meaning when targets were at home with their families. Strikes were carried out there, in the words of the same officer, “without hesitation, as a first option.”
Unit 8200 also ran facial recognition on Palestinians across Gaza. It stored recordings of millions of Palestinian phone calls on a segregated Microsoft Azure cloud environment.[10][11]
In June 2024, Noname Security was acquired by Akamai Technologies for $450 million,[12] delivering returns to its investors including TSG Consumer Partners. Three months later, TSG made a significant investment in Summer Fridays. The chain is documented, timestamped, and traceable.
The Cobalt Supply Chain and the Exploitation of the Children of the DRC
TSG’s portfolio also extends to Canyon Bicycles, a manufacturer whose e-bike batteries depend on cobalt supply chains that Amnesty International has documented as involving child labour in the DRC.[13][14] Harvard researcher Siddharth Kara has documented children as young as five and six years old mining cobalt in militia-controlled areas in the DRC.[15]Auralis told me that naming these children was political. They did not tell me that profiting from the economy that exploits them was.
Financial networks of this kind create indirect influence without issuing instructions. Investors’ interests shape the conditions in which editorial decisions are made, including what gets commissioned, what gets suppressed, and what is deemed too ‘political’. In the media, opaque investment chains enable what researchers describe as ‘dark money flows’, flows that buy narratives without direct control, eroding public trust from the inside.[16] This is the financial architecture within which the editorial decision of Auralis was made.
Auralis did not specify which children were too political to name. The children of Palestine? Iran? The DRC? The Epstein survivors? Each answer tells us exactly whose pain a publication has decided is acceptable to witness. And whose is not. This is heartbreakingly not the exhausted list.
On Mother’s Day
This is what the economy of erasure looks like in practice. It protects and exercises a financial architecture that creates the conditions in which certain children can be named and certain children cannot.
A publication that invites mothers to speak and then removes the children from their testimony is not neutral. It is one node in a financial chain that, as of July 2024, connects a women’s empowerment Mother’s Day magazine’s brand partner to a private equity firm that invested in a company founded by veterans of the unit that built an automated Palestinian kill list.[17]
Auralis Magazine’s decision to erase the naming of Palestinian children from a Mother’s Day edition in particular, is not an isolated editorial choice. It is part of a documented pattern. The National Writers Union tracked 44 cases of retaliation against over 100 US media workers perceived as supportive of the Palestinian cause.[18] A Prism investigation published in September 2025 documented systematic newsroom suppression of Palestinian coverage across US outlets.[19] What this piece adds to that record is the financial architecture beneath the editorial decision. This is not editorial cowardice alone. It is structural complicity. The connections described here are drawn from publicly available records. They raise a question every media outlet with advertiser relationships and investment-backed brand partners should now be asking: what editorial decisions are being made inside your financial ecosystem, and who is paying for them?
Sources
[1] International Court of Justice, South Africa v. Israel, Provisional Measures Order, 26 January 2024: icj-cij.org
[2] International Criminal Court, Warrants of Arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, 21 November 2024: icc-cpi.int
[3] Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, March 2024: ohchr.org
[4] TIME Magazine, ‘Iran School Strike, Minab, Tomahawk’, March 2026: time.com
[5] Amnesty International, ‘This is What We Die For’, January 2016: amnesty.org
[6] TSG Consumer Partners / Summer Fridays investment, July 2024: tsgconsumer.com
[7] TechCrunch, Noname Security Series B, June 2021: techcrunch.com
[8] CTech/Calcalist, Noname Security Series C, December 2021: calcalistech.com
[9] +972 Magazine, ‘Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza’, April 2024: 972mag.com
[10] +972 Magazine / Local Call, Microsoft and Unit 8200 surveillance infrastructure: 972mag.com
[11] Forty-three Veterans and Reservists of Unit 8200, Open Letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, 12 September 2014, published in Yedioth Ahronoth and The Guardian: palestine-studies.org
[12] Akamai Technologies, acquisition of Noname Security completed, June 2024: akamai.com
[13] TSG Consumer Partners, Canyon Bicycles investment, 2016: tsgconsumer.com
[14] SGB Media, Canyon Bicycles acquisition, 2020: sgbonline.com
[15] Siddharth Kara, Yale Environment 360 interview on DRC cobalt supply chain and child labour, March 2023: e360.yale.edu
[16] RUSI, ‘Tracking Money and Influence in the UK and Europe’, March 2026; see also RUSI, ‘Active Financial Measures: The Unseen Threat to Democracy’: rusi.org
[17] Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory (Verso Books, 2023); see also +972 Magazine Lavender investigation [9]
[18] National Writers Union, Red Lines: Journalism and Palestine: redlines.nwu.org
[19] Prism Reports, ‘Journalists, News Media Bias, Palestine’, September 2025: prismreports.org
The author has retained all correspondence referenced in this piece.