Image is from the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Over 50 heads of state and 600 CEOs attended.
holding flashlight under face
Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's first update is here.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
The UK government and media rhetoric around anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian is getting more and more dangerous.
At first the protests were 'upsetting' and 'insensitive'. But they continued to grow.
Then they escalated to being inherently anti-semetic, with anything as mild as displaying a Palestinian flag being called anti-semitism, as well as hyperfixating on the phrase "from the river to the sea". Police have begun harassing people flying Palestinian flags in public, in their own homes, and 'detaining' people with clothing featuring it at public events.
The Home Secretary wrote to police forces saying "I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world. Behaviours that are legitimate in some circumstances, for example the waving of a Palestinian flag, may not be legitimate such as when intended to glorify acts of terrorism.”
The needle on the 76% of people who support an immediate ceasefire didn't move, so the state and media escalated again.
Then the allegations became that they were inherently pro-Hamas, with numerous journalists and political guests stating without a shred of evidence that Hamas was present in the protests and were "handing out Hamas leaflets". This tactic isn't just a smear for publicity, because Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK it's an attempt to create a framework to apply terror charges to peaceful protesters. Numerous labour politicians have openly called for all Palestinian solidarity protests to be banned outright.
Still, it hasn't swayed opinion and the protests have continued and are growing.
So now the new framing is that the protests and protesters are being controlled by Iran. Half a million people at the London protest alone, apparently being directed by Iran. This isn't just cranks on the extreme right channels like GBNews, this has been the framing from Sky News and the BBC this morning. This has been coming from people affiliated with the government, who are today holding an emergency COBRA meeting to discuss 'the rising threat of terrorism' associated with the reaction to the state's support of genocide.
The head of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley went on television and said “When you’ve got state threats from Iran, you’ve got terrorism being accelerated by the events and hate crime in communities. For Jewish communities, it’s now about a 14-fold increase in antisemitism in London, and for Muslim communities it’s nearly threefold. So this is really precarious. In the middle of it, we’ve got these big protests.” Both the BBC and Sky News matched government and police accusations of Iranian control and terror concerns with images of the peaceful marches.
The police have announced that 5 people have been charged with offences during this weekend's marches. 5 out of what some are saying was 500,000 in London. And they haven't released what those offences were apart from "assaulting a police officer" which is the go to bullshit charge for anyone suffering police aggression and "carrying an illegal placard" which is worth remembering that police also arrested people for holding up blank placards to protest the King's coronation.
Obviously this is incredibly dangerous, but it's also disgustingly Islamophobic, just as it would be to state that all British Jews are secretly controlled by Israel, while completely erasing the numerous Jewish peace activists and groups at the centre of these protests. And of course, it's going completely unchallenged.
The good news is that it doesn't seem to be working. The bad news is that they're getting ever more desperate and so a much worse crackdown seems inevitable.
I mean, it is literally a call to end the existence of Israel. I can see how hearing people say it can be concerning to people who conflate Israel with Jewishness. It's the main thing we say that can be (mis)interpreted as "genocidal".
Is just kinda true. Maybe not necessarily violent, but realistically that's the only way it's going to happen.
Not that the overall point of your post is wrong.
I broadly agree with you there, but (whether the sentiment is realistic or not) many of the uses have also been explicit in their anti-violent sentiment. Left Labour politician and anti-war activist Andy McDonald gave a speech which ended on a poem, whose final lines were "Until all people, Israelis & Palestinians, between the river & the sea, can live in peaceful liberty" Nonetheless this was siezed upon as apparently genocidal rhetoric by various Labour ghouls and edited to be reported as such by the media who ran with it.
From the Hebrides to the channel, Scotland people will dismantle
...England.
There aren't really different meanings of "Israel". There's the legendary ancient Kingdom of Israel and there's the modern Israeli state. Ancient Israel is irrelevant and the modern state needs to be ended. There's nothing hyperbolic about it.
It's quite clear that freedom for the Palestinian people is only accomplishable through violence. Insert JFK quote here.
Because Scotland is only part of Great Britain and there'd still be a United Kingdom (of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland) left. Palestine is everything Israel claims as theirs minus Golan Heights (which is Syria). The Scottish and British/English states can continue to exist next to each other, the Israeli and Palestinian states can't.
Wait 'til they find out about anarchists, who want to end the existence of ALL nation-states.
That means killing everyone, right?
When Palestinians made their Great March of Return they were chanting "From the river to the sea." It wasn't a call to arms then and it isn't now.
It’s a call to abolish the state of Israel and set up a Palestinian state.
That’s only possible through violence. So it may not directly be a call to arms, but for it to mean anything it must effectively be so.
No it isn't. Its a call to end apartheid and set up a 2 state solution so that Palestinians are free.
Again no. The zionist state could choose to end the occupation at any time. The international community could choose to sanction israel to capitulation. USA could cut off their support and israel would have no choice but to give in before the Arab nations wiped israel off the map. There are plenty of ways that Palestine could be free that don't involve violence or the absolute destruction of israel. They haven't been working but violence hasn't worked either.
"From the river to the sea" a statement of desire. Just because some the people who say it are violent does not mean it is a call to violence. "Stop killing babies" isn't a call to violence just because the some pro lifers have bombed abortion clinics.
wtf it's explicitly not that. "From the river to the sea" means the entirety of Palestine. That's the whole point of the phrase. Does this look like a two state solution?
These are never going to happen.
I’m sure it’s happening but what is the metric they use for “anti semetic incident” like is this reported over the phone to the police or what? If someone is out on a walk and they see a Palestinian flag and report it is that making its way into the statistics?
:free-palestine:
It's classic boy-who-cried-wolf at this point. Now when I hear a news story about an antisemitic incident, I mentally file it under "pro-Palestinian unless I personally see footage". I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Sadly yeah, I was discussing this with a secular Jewish friend when these narratives about Palestinian flags started. I'll happily stand against actual antisemitism, but the Israel lobby and the political class in this country has so thoroughly poisoned the well that I need evidence and receipts before I give the benefit of the doubt. Which is a pretty sad state of affairs, but that's where we are I think.
They've been suspiciously careful not to say. They also haven't released any actual numbers so "fourteenfold" could be 14 reported case in three weeks as compared to the usual one.
I think it's pretty likely that there will have been an increase in genuinely anti-semitic and islamopohobic comments for example, because there are always bad actors, people trying to inflame tensions, emboldened Nazi types etc, but it also seems suspicious that I haven't seem any reporting of any that isn't some Israel die-hard on Twitter saying "Trust me bro" and you'd think the media and political class would be all over any high profile, rock solid ones.
Perhaps the completely meritless smear of Corbyn being an anti-Semite has a blowback effect of people tuning out whenever British MSM calls someone or something they don't like anti-Semite.
Perhaps. Im not so optimistic. I think it's more that the horror of the images coming from Gaza just can't be ignored by all but the most dedicated racists and ghouls. If there's a lesson I think might be learned from this by more people it's how completely and utterly out of touch politicians and media are from public opinion and how they have absolutely no interest in moving towards the public, instead just admonishing them.