Nostr notes by Mouin Rabbani

"There are moments when institutions are judged not by what ...

2026-07-31T00:10:21Z

"There are moments when institutions are judged not by what they are prepared to accept, but by what they refuse to compromise. This is one of those moments."

The above words conclude the statement issued by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) on 30 July. It came

This joint statement has an unmistakably clear message: You will ...

2026-07-19T15:55:27Z

This joint statement has an unmistakably clear message: You will be confronted only with statements, and we fully expect you to ignore them. Enjoy your impunity as much as we do.

"Even the Nazis tried to tone things down a bit. Before the ...

2026-06-12T02:58:00Z

"Even the Nazis tried to tone things down a bit. Before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, acutely conscious of how it might be perceived by foreign visitors, the Third Reich tried to soften some of its harder, more intolerant edges. Antisemitic signs and images were removed from shops and other public places. Der Stürmer was removed from newspaper kiosks. Paragraph 175, the country’s strict anti‑homosexuality law, was temporarily suspended.

By contrast, the 2026 men’s World Cup is being co-hosted in a country utterly indifferent to what a foreign visitor might think of it. In this respect, the US of Donald Trump is tonally different to any host of a major sporting event that has preceded it: a country that actively wants you to see the darkness in its heart, the inhumanity at its core, that gets off on your revulsion."

Jonathan Liew, "Omar Artan Scandal Reveals Gianni Infantino for What He Is: One of Sport’s Greatest Cowards"
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/11/omar-artan-scandal-gianni-infantino-donald-trump-world-cup

"Will Israel listen?" Of course not. This is part of a ...

2026-06-10T14:58:20Z

"Will Israel listen?"
Of course not.
This is part of a well-rehearsed pantomime.
Western governments express "profound concern" and sometimes even "alarm".
On rare occasions they go so far as to "condemn".
But words are never - ever - followed with action.
More to the point, words are intended to replace action and are a substitute for consequences.
The pantomime has been repeated thousands of times over the decades.
Everyone understands it.
Israel understands it perfectly.
"Profound concern" means "Do as you please".
Business as usual
https://bird.makeup/users/nrc_egeland/statuses/2064679767337476242

quoting
note1sxz…n72g

Will Israel listen?
22 donor countries express their “profound concern regarding the catastrophic humanitarian situation that persists in Gaza. The aid entering Gaza has remained largely insufficient, both in quantity and in quality, while nearly the entire population depends on life-saving services.”

The Europeans plus Australia and Japan also find “deeply concerning” the extreme Israeli registration law that bans NRC and many of the world’s most important humanitarian NGOs from serving Palestinians from Israel.

Perceptive tweet from 2022. ...

2026-06-07T13:49:58Z

Perceptive tweet from 2022.
https://bird.makeup/users/son_of_laikipia/statuses/1604561785473974272

quoting
note1j3c…m4pn

Qatar has held a World Cup where everyone who could afford to attend attended, wait till it's the USA hosting and they will have visa restrictions even on the players themselves 😂.

Excerpt from The Protocols of The Elders of Mecca ...

2026-06-06T04:02:08Z

Excerpt from The Protocols of The Elders of Mecca
https://bird.makeup/users/danburmawy/statuses/2062760766034350433

quoting
note1x48…ajks

Muslims do not need to conquer the West by offensive jihad, which they cannot legally declare without a caliph. They need only grow numerous enough, and push hard enough, that the West is forced to resist them, and then call that resistance the aggression that activates defensive jihad, the personal duty of every believer, requiring no permission from anyone.

Defensive Jihad: Turning Expansion into Self-Defense

Link to the article in the comments.

I can provide firm assurances that the Grand Wizard was not - ...

2026-06-01T20:29:16Z

I can provide firm assurances that the Grand Wizard was not - repeat, not - invited to the Klan rally and that his presence took the KKK leadership entirely by surprise.
https://bird.makeup/users/elikowaz/statuses/2061461283036082517
nostr:note13mu96j7qeqxfux55ukcgzfq3wgl0fgcnw3m6x3hgrfwsdtyhhc2q3sc8qn

Something tells me this flunkie openly argues Palestine ...

2026-05-31T02:54:00Z

Something tells me this flunkie openly argues Palestine shouldn't exist.
https://bird.makeup/users/clearreason/statuses/2059788293634453739

quoting
note1e6m…euqs

The Jewish state is the only country people openly argue shouldn’t exist.

And we’re told that isn’t hatred.

If it is indeed true that these EU sanctions were announced in ...

2026-05-28T22:10:29Z

If it is indeed true that these EU sanctions were announced in response to illegal settlement activities as such and not specifically in response to the additional crime of settler violence, that would be an excellent development.

Revealed: Mandelson vetting warned of ties to senior figures in ...

2026-05-27T14:58:20Z

Revealed: Mandelson vetting warned of ties to senior figures in China, Russia and Israel
Bombshell. But for Mandelson, just another day at the office
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/27/mandelson-vetting-warned-ties-senior-figures-china-russia-israel

h/t [@einat_temkin](https://bird.makeup/users/einat_temkin ) ...

2026-05-23T15:58:41Z

h/t [@einat_temkin](https://bird.makeup/users/einat_temkin )

Adversaries are not simply to be deterred, defeated, or bargained ...

2026-05-22T03:42:32Z

Adversaries are not simply to be deterred, defeated, or bargained with; they are to be degraded so deeply, and their environments so reshaped, that reconstitution becomes difficult or impossible.

Such conclusions are not efforts to guess Israeli intent, they reflect what is

It's always the same pantomine: solemn statements of ...

2026-05-20T19:06:16Z

It's always the same pantomine: solemn statements of condemnation, ambassadors summoned, no consequences. Rinse and repeat.

The thing to understand about Ben-Gvir's abduction victory ...

2026-05-20T14:43:16Z

The thing to understand about Ben-Gvir's abduction victory video is that it is part of his election campaign.
It is equally important to understand that it will work. Because Israel.

Regarding Inea Bushnaq: During the Ottoman Empire’s final ...

2026-05-19T05:25:36Z

Regarding Inea Bushnaq:

During the Ottoman Empire’s final century, the Sublime Porte lost vast territories in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and North Africa as a result of wars with the Russian Empire, various local rebellions and wars of independence, and the imperial expansion of European powers.

In some instances the new rulers ethnically cleansed their territories of Muslim subjects. This was most prominently the case in the North Caucasus. In arguably the largest genocide of the nineteenth century, more than ninety per cent of Circassians were killed or forcibly expelled by the victorious Russians. 21 May, the Circassian Day of Mourning, continues to be observed in remembrance of the genocide and exile.

Hundreds of thousands of surviving Circassians found refuge in Ottoman territory at a time when Istanbul was engaged in a campaign to centralize and consolidate its rule in its remaining possessions. In addition to Anatolia, Circassian communities were settled in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine, where they remain to this day.

The Jordanian capital Amman, known as Philadelphia in Roman times, re-emerged as a city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely on the strength of Circassian settlement. This was in turn related to Ottoman efforts to secure key transportation routes from Damascus to the Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

In other cases, the Muslim population was not actively expelled or persecuted by the new rulers, and either remained, fled, or pursued a combination of the two.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 1878 Congress of Berlin ended several centuries of Ottoman rule and replaced it with that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whether out of fear of oppression by their new Christian rulers, opposition to conscription by the Habsburg army, or a preference to remain under Ottoman rule, a minority of Bosnian Muslims emigrated from their homeland.

Among those who left were the grandparents of Inea Bushnaq, the Palestinian-American translator and oral historian who has among other works compiled a highly-regarded volume of Arabic folk tales.

The Bushnaq family settled in the Palestinian town of Tulkarm and then Jerusalem, where Inea was born in 1938. Like every other Palestinian family in what became West Jerusalem, bar none, the Bushnaqs were expelled during the Nakba in 1948, when Inea was nine years old. She would later complete her education in Britain and after the 1967 June War settled in New York, where she remains to this day.

A sprightly woman in her mid-eighties, Inea Bushnaq is currently the object of the latest meltdown by Israel flunkies. With the hysterical frenzy produced by nickkristof (npub1m6c…ftzy) 's The New York Times (npub1an9…krup) report on Israel’s rape regime yet to subside, a new and equally dire threat to Israeli national security has erupted.

This time it comes in the form of Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (npub14u4…9697) Zohran Mamdani’s 15 May commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba, which his official social media account highlighted with a four-minute profile of New Yorker Inea Bushnaq, described as a “Nakba survivor”. “For Palestinians," it concludes, "their displacement and the Nakba continues to this day."

The responses were fast and furious, essentially a replay of the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra’s Greatest Hits: There was no Nakba, so Bushnaq couldn’t have survived anything; there was no Nakba but they deserved it; neither the Bushnaqs nor any other Palestinians were forcibly displaced; the Nakba was an attempted genocide of the Jews; Palestinians didn’t and don’t exist; what about the Holocaust, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and the millipede in Vanuatu with a broken leg; Islam, Muslims, Islam, Muslims; FAFO; etc. etc. etc.

The talking point that most amused me is that Inea Bushnaq (and by extension Mamdani) is an imposter because Bushnaq is actually a “Bosnian” and “European settler” with “zero connection to the land” and therefore cannot be Palestinian. Her surname apparently definitively settles the matter.

I have no idea whether and, if so, to what extent the Bushnaqs inter-married with the local Arab population. Let’s assume for the sake of argument they never did and kept strictly to themselves. What we do know is that they became part of the local society and made it their own. Theirs is the story of virtually every immigrant known to history, and it is how the societies that exist today were formed.

But to Israel flunkies, one cannot be a Palestinian of Bosnian descent, because such individuals are really Europeans, Bosnians. If there is even the slightest connection to any foreign territory, no matter how distant in time, it means one is from there, and has no connection to and certainly no rights in Palestine.

This principle of course applies only to Palestinians. On the other side of the ledger we have “Your home has been mine for 3,000 years and it’s blood libel if you ask me to prove I was ever here”. This particular gander is allergic to what is good for the goose.

Are all these Israel flunkies, and the Americans first and foremost among them, really making the argument that a family that arrived in a particular country during the late nineteenth century cannot legitimately claim to belong to that country? Really?

Would this not also have to mean that Inea Bushnaq, who arrived in the US as an adult in the late 1960s, similarly cannot legitimately claim to be American? And would it not also mean that any of her US critics whose ancestors can identifiably be traced to Europe, or Asia, or Africa, or indeed anywhere abroad also cannot claim to belong to or in North America?

Most importantly, if Bushnaq is an imposter who has no place in Palestine because, although born there, her family emigrated from Europe to the Middle East during the nineteenth century, what are we to make of the hundreds of thousands who arrived from Europe during the twentieth century, most of whom were born abroad?

Is it really that difficult to confirm that people have equal rights irrespective of their identity or background?

Zionism is identity politics on steroids.

This anonymous imbecile is now arguing that Israel and its ...

2026-05-17T21:10:00Z

This anonymous imbecile is now arguing that Israel and its flunkies have never made the claim that Palestinians were ordered to evacuate their homes and homeland in a series of Arab radio broadcasts in 1948.

As anyone even tangentially familiar with the issue would know, the claim regarding Arab radio broadcasts has been a mainstay of Israeli propaganda since the late 1940s, and continues to be repeated to this very day.

It is precisely why Erskine Childers, and more recently Benny Morris, among others, examined the relevant documentary record.

They found nothing. Well, not nothing. As Childers wrote in 1961, there were relevant Arab radio broadcasts: "There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put ... Even Jewish broadcasts (in Hebrew) mentioned such Arab appeals to stay put. Zionist news-papers in Palestine reported the same : none so much as hinted at any Arab evacuation orders."

Hasbara fallback option: when caught fabricating, simply respond that the false claim was never made, and it is a fabrication to state otherwise.

"Never happened, doesn't exist" is all hasbara has left in 2026.
https://bird.makeup/users/noteamsindy/statuses/2056093969746899327

Claims that the Palestinians were in 1948 ordered to evacuate ...

2026-05-17T03:04:08Z

Claims that the Palestinians were in 1948 ordered to evacuate their homes and homeland by Arab leaders in a series of radio broadcasts has been a perennial Hasbara Symphony Orchestra favourite since the Nakba, and continues to be widely promoted to this day.

The BBC journalist and United Nations official Erskine Barton Childers (not to be confused with his father, Ireland's fourth president, Erskine Hamilton Childers) thoroughly debunked this claim more than half a century ago in his article, "The Other Exodus" published in The Spectator on 12 May 1961.

Childers reviewed the comprehensive archives of Arab radio broadcasts compiled during that period by both the BBC monitoring station in Cyprus and its US counterpart, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) run by the CIA, and found nothing.

I have posted a link to Childers's article in the comments, which is worth reading because it includes details of additional fabrications concocted by Israeli officials to further this foundational hasbara myth.

Abba Eban, then Israel's permanent representative to the UN and later foreign minister, and easily its most celebrated diplomat, for example claimed that the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Haifa, George Hakim, "fully confirmed" that Palestinians were encouraged to flee by their leaders.

Yet, according to Childers: "I wrote to His Grace [Hakim], asking for his evidence of such orders. I hold signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he has categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years; and that the Arabs fled through panic and forcible eviction by Jewish troops."

This is the same Abba Eban who on 6 June 1967 falsely informed the UN Security Council that Israel had launched the June War the previous day in response to a series of non-existent attacks on Israel on the morning of 5 June by the Egyptian air force and artillery units.

I was previously unaware that the Israeli archives also include records of these radio broadcasts. As the British-Israeli historian Benny Morris reports below, he went through these records and also found that such broadcasts, whether by local Palestinian or Arab leaders, simply do not exist.

While the research conducted by Childers and more recently Morris is of course useful in providing official confirmation that such broadcasts are a figment of the Zionist imagination, logic alone should suffice to debunk this myth.

In May 1948, the Arab states intervened in Palestine to put an end to the mass expulsions of Palestinians, which since November 1947 already numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and to defeat the Israeli forces responsible for this monumental crime.

Does it make any sense that prior to their intervention they would have ordered hundreds of thousands of civilians to clog every road they hoped to use to enter Palestine, for miles and days on end? Of course not.

As for the silly claim that the objective of the Arab intervention was genocide, there is no evidence for it, and the conduct of the Arab militaries during the Palestine War supports this conclusion.

Nor was it the case that the Arab intervention was a coordinated military campaign to eradicate the nascent Israeli state. Some of the participating Arab states, Syria and Iraq, did have this as an objective.

Transjordan clearly did not. Its leadership had already cut a deal with the Zionist leadership to partition Palestine between them and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Armed conflict between Israel and Transjordan in fact ensued only after Israeli forces reneged on their agreement and initiated seizures of territory beyond the partition boundary.

Egypt's position was more ambiguous. It seemed to be primarily motivated by rivalry with Jordan, and ensuring Jordan did not become the main Arab power in Palestine. In short, no Arab state wanted to see the emergence of the Israeli state, but in most cases Arab leaders had more pressing priorities. Coordination between them was primarily notable for its absence.

Arab public opinion, by contrast, considered the failure of their leaders to successfully confront the Zionist project nothing short of treason, and it served as a catalyst for more than a decade of revolutions, coups, and uprisings throughout the region.
https://bird.makeup/users/3lfares/statuses/2055760189161095185

quoting
note130z…up2u

Even Benny Morris has debunked this Israeli propaganda talking point
https://bird.makeup/users/diplomatofnight/statuses/2055746729559904465

It seems increasingly likely that the US and Israel will renew ...

2026-05-11T00:46:28Z

It seems increasingly likely that the US and Israel will renew their full-scale war on Iran. There is little indication they have the resources to achieve more than they already have, or even to undo the strategic damage they have inflicted on themselves since 28 February.

It seems likely that the biggest casualties of a renewed war will be neither Iran nor Israel, but rather the Arab states on the Persian Gulf.

Israel is likely to view such destruction as a net benefit. But if the Arab states lose their value to Washington, and if the US is additionally forced into strategic retreat, that also means Israel's value as a US proxy is sharply diminished.
https://bird.makeup/users/hamidrezaaz/statuses/2053629015605281235

"Calling for Rhodesia to be dissolved was a call for ...

2026-04-30T04:48:00Z

"Calling for Rhodesia to be dissolved was a call for genocide".

States have been regularly dissolved throughout human history, sometimes peacefully but often violently.

The German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana, and Islamic State are just a few examples, all since 1990.

Only an imbecile equates the dissolution of a state with the extermination of its residents.
https://bird.makeup/users/strxwmxn/statuses/2049607528627966222

quoting
note1jtq…yyjy

Calling for Israel to be dissolved is calling for genocide.

This year has seen a new pattern in Israel's hasbara. Rather ...

2026-04-25T17:42:48Z

This year has seen a new pattern in Israel's hasbara.

Rather than denying that Israel has committed a particular crime, Israel flunkies are resorting to claims that the crime itself does not exist because it is impossible to perpetrate.

It is apparently easier to convince people a crime cannot be committed than to persuade them Israel has not committed it.

We are seeing this, for example, with respect to Israel's use of dogs to rape Palestinian political prisoners.

A concerted hasbara campaign has been launched to claim that these reports cannot be true because dogs cannot be trained to sexually penetrate human beings. Those promoting this perspective are not above claiming specialised expertise in canine anatomy and behaviour.

In other words, you are free to believe Israel is capable of such crimes, but unless you also believes pigs can fly, Israel is innocent.

As for the mantra that "dogs can't be trained to rape", it has been extensively reported that Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo officer known as the Butcher of Lyon, resorted to this practice during the German occupation of France. See, for example, Beverly Chalmers, "Jewish Women's Sexual Behaviour and Sexualized Abuse During the Nazi Era", in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 24:2 (July 2015).

More recently, Bestia, a Chilean stop-motion film directed by Hugo Covarrubias, was in 2022 nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 94th Academy Awards. Bestia tells the story of Ingrid Olderöck, who served in Augusto Pinochet's notorious National Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA). Olderöck was better known as "The Dog Lady" for using her German Shepherd, Volodia, to rape political prisoners.

Bestia is based upon a book, La Mujer de los Perros (The Dog Lady), by the Chilean journalist Nancy Guzman, who as part of her research interviewed Olderöck before the latter's death.

If dogs can't be trained to rape and reports that Israel somehow managed to do so with its Dutch-supplied canines are an anti-Semitic blood libel etc. etc. etc., then what are we to make of reports that the Nazis and Pinochet's torture regime did engage in this practice? Also irrational bigotry?

Reports are emerging that Israeli soldiers are once again ...

2026-04-23T21:07:40Z

Reports are emerging that Israeli soldiers are once again engaging in systematic looting and vandalism, this time in southern Lebanon.

Given their record over the course of nearly a century, it would be news if Israelis did not engage in systematic looting in vandalism.

Reporting about the Palestine War of the late 1940s and the Nakba understandably focuses on the role of the nascent Israeli state in robbing an entire country and dispossessing its entire population.

Yet individual Israelis, soldiers and civilians alike, also engaged in massive, prolonged looting at their own initiative. They committed these acts in broad daylight, their thieving is well-documented in both print and photography, and the Israeli state did nothing - absolutely nothing - to stop them. The new state effectively gave its entire population a license to steal whatever it wanted from the population it had dispossessed and displaced.

Similarly, in 1967 there was once again massive looting by Israelis, particularly by civilians and especially in East Jerusalem. Similarly well-documented.

Looting and robbery by Israelis typically reaches a crescendo during times of crisis. Thus it was a constant feature during the 1987-1993 uprising, and has of course been systematic during the Gaza Genocide.

Only the ignorant or uninitiated will be surprised to learn that Israelis are engaging in systematic looting in southern Lebanon.

It is nothing new. Israelis have not only stolen an entire country (and parts of several others), they have been robbing homes and individuals in the Middle East with total impunity since the 1940s.

In the real world a statement cannot be libellous if it is true ...

2026-04-20T02:12:00Z

In the real world a statement cannot be libellous if it is true and factually correct.
Factual accuracy is precisely why a particular statement, even if it is intended to bring its target into disrepute, would not be considered libellous.
Yet in the alternate universe of Ziobabble, a statement is libellous not only if it is true and factually correct, but precisely because it is properly substantiated.
The factual accuracy of a statement Israel flunkies don't like makes it all the more libellous.
Welcome to Alice in Zioland.
https://bird.makeup/users/history__speaks/statuses/2046025306377736283

quoting
note15k3…lgu2

The most extreme of these idiots is - as usual - [@adam_louis52328](https://bird.makeup/users/adam_louis52328 ), who claims that it's a libel even if it's real.
https://bird.makeup/users/ryangrim/statuses/2046024317020848238
note1wrp…2ckg

The Ziobabble libel: “It’s libel even if it is true”. ...

2026-04-20T00:26:09Z

The Ziobabble libel: “It’s libel even if it is true”.
https://bird.makeup/users/adam_louis52328/statuses/2045935806909493500

quoting
note1gtd…ywds

Im not “defending” anything. It’s libel even if it ends up being true bc of how it is circulated. Look:

The Ziobabble libel: “It’s libel even if it is true”. ...

2026-04-20T00:26:09Z

The Ziobabble libel: “It’s libel even if it is true”.
https://bird.makeup/users/adam_louis52328/statuses/2045935806909493500

"A new analysis published by UN Women shows that more than ...

2026-04-17T18:07:26Z

"A new analysis published by UN Women shows that more than 38,000 women and girls—including over 22,000 women and 16,000 girls—were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and December 2025, representing an average of at least 47 women and girls killed per day."
https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2026/04/more-than-38000-women-and-girls-were-killed-in-gaza-between-october-2023-and-december-2025-un-women

Harvard University President Alan Garber said that “a great ...

2026-04-15T22:31:57Z

Harvard University President Alan Garber said that “a great deal” of what had initially been labeled antisemitism was ultimately anti-Israeli bias, which he called “insidious and maybe more corrosive of University life.”
Translation: Harvard does not have an anti-Semitism problem, but its president considers opposition to Israel more serious than Jew hatred.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/15/garber-talk-israel-palestine/

There are credible reports that Washington has instructed Israel ...

2026-04-15T20:42:52Z

There are credible reports that Washington has instructed Israel to suspend military operations in Lebanon to enable a new round of US-Iran negotiations in the coming days.

If this development indeed comes to pass, a major new Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip is highly likely.

Perpetual war has become Israel's state of existence.

After weeks of consultations, intensive study of the relevant ...

2026-04-15T17:16:29Z

After weeks of consultations, intensive study of the relevant issues, and numerous drafts I have finally formulated a diplomatic initiative that I am confident will produce a durable resolution to the Iran crisis:

1. Iran pledges to renounce the internationally-recognized

Whatever one thinks of Zionism during its formative years, it is ...

2026-04-11T19:25:13Z

Whatever one thinks of Zionism during its formative years, it is today indisputably a totalitarian movement.

Anyone, of any background, who steps out of line, anywhere on the planet, is immediately defamed, delegitimized, and demonized.

In unison, an army of flunkies will go after you, your work, your family, even your citizenship. Campaigns are launched to get you silenced, fired, imprisoned, and deported.

Whether you are an individual, an institution, or even a country, everyone is expected to boycott and sanction you if you express even the slightest criticism or dissent.

But if you call for Israel to be boycotted and held accountable for its actions, these suddenly become the most illegitimate tactics ever conceived.

And the global repercussions begin... ...

2026-04-08T02:24:00Z

And the global repercussions begin...
https://bird.makeup/users/sariarhohavren/statuses/2041486614552043821

quoting
note1w4f…mv04

U.S.-South Korea Relations Are at Breaking Point:

“What good is the U.S. security guarantee against China when the United States cannot even handle a middle power such as Iran? What was the point of suffering through China’s economic retaliation to deploy THAAD in the name of upholding the U.S.-South Korea alliance when the United States makes a mockery of that suffering by unilaterally pulling THAAD to a different corner of the world? What good is a guarantor that asks you to spend your resources to cover the liability it created?”

1/2

If Turkey were to invade Greece tomorrow, expel all its citizens ...

2026-04-05T01:43:48Z

If Turkey were to invade Greece tomorrow, expel all its citizens to Bulgaria and annex the country, the West – however one cares to define it, and Western civilization – however one cares to define it, would survive. Sad but true.

The same would hold if Morocco were to take over Spain and Portugal, or (nuclear Armageddon notwithstanding) Russia were to seize Poland and Finland, and even if the US invades and annexes Canada and Greenland.

Since 1900 alone, “the West” has survived the two most devastating wars in history, several genocides, the Cold War, the disintegration of multiple European states, and much else. It has even survived two episodes each of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

Yet Israel flunkies want us to believe that if Israel fails in its perpetual wars of domination, or is defeated in the attempt, the West and its civilization will instantaneously collapse into the dustbin of history.

Is that really the best they can come up with? Is that all they have left in defense of the indefensible?

Of the thousands of bombs that have fallen – and fall still – ...

2025-11-04T02:52:28Z

Of the thousands of bombs that have fallen – and fall still – on Gaza, there is one to which Navi Pillay returns: a lone shell, fired by the Israel Defense Forces at the Al-Basma fertility clinic in December 2023. A single strike that wiped out 4,000 embryos in a moment.

The strike was “intended to prevent births” among Palestinians in Gaza, says Pillay, the former chair of the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Territory of Palestine and Israel.

“That clinic stands alone in the grounds, separate from the rest of the hospital buildings. They didn’t fire on the hospital – if the excuse is that Hamas is hiding in the hospitals, they didn’t touch the hospital. They came straight to this building and targeted and hit the nitrogen tanks that kept the embryos alive.”

Pillay cites the attack not as a totality, but signal example, one among “a great number” of incidents, that led to Pillay’s commission finding Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

“Children who were meant to be born from these … reproductive specimens will never exist,” an expert medical witness told the commission’s investigation. “Families will be forever changed and bloodlines may end.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/04/world-must-fight-israel-genocide-gaza-like-aparthied-navi-pillay

The Balfour Declaration was issued on 2 November 1917. In the ...

2025-11-02T21:04:35Z

The Balfour Declaration was issued on 2 November 1917. In the memorable words of Arthur Koestler, Balfour’s declaration was “one the most improbable political documents of all time,” in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

As is well known, the Balfour Declaration was categorically rejected by the Palestinians. That they would not look kindly upon their intended dispossession by the Zionist movement was considered so self-evident that General Edmund Allenby, who that same day had finally seized Gaza from the Ottomans on the third attempt, and was preparing to make his way to Jerusalem, issued a decree prohibiting its publication in Palestine.

Less well known is that the Balfour Declaration hardly met with widespread euphoria among its intended beneficiaries, the Jews of Europe.

Below is an excerpt from a memo presented to the British cabinet by Edwin Samuel Montagu in August 1917, as the Balfour Declaration was being drafted.

Montagu’s memorandum, entitled “On the Anti-Semitism of the Present [British] Government”, is significant because Montagu was at the time the only Jewish member of the British cabinet, and in that capacity also the Balfour Declaration’s fiercest opponent. In his words:

Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on The Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the “national home of the Jewish people”. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.

I lay down with emphasis four principles:

1. I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries - through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race. The Prime Minister and M. Briand are, I suppose, related through the ages, one as a Welshman and the other as a Breton, but they certainly do not belong to the same nation.

2. When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter. I have always understood that this was the consequence of the building of the Tower of Babel, if ever it was built, and I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have always understood, by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove to be the Messiah.

I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest. But I would ask of a British Government sufficient tolerance to refuse a conclusion which makes aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at once by law, of all their Jewish fellow-citizens.

3. I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. The Ten Commandments were delivered to the Jews on Sinai. It is quite true that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mahommendan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be the only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled.

If my memory serves me right, there are three times as many Jews in the world as could possible get into Palestine if you drove out all the population that remains there now. So that only one-third will get back at the most, and what will happen to the remainder?

4. I can easily understand the editors of the Morning Post and of the New Witness being Zionists, and I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome this policy. I have always recognised the unpopularity, much greater than some people think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share of this country’s goods and opportunities than we are numerically entitled to. We reach on the whole maturity earlier, and therefore with people of our own age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships and intolerant in our attitude, and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew in England wants to get rid of us. But just as there is no community of thought and mode of life among Christian Englishmen, so there is not among Jewish Englishmen. More and more we are educated in public schools and at the Universities, and take our part in the politics, in the Army, in the Civil Service, of our country. And I am glad to think that the prejudices against inter-marriage are breaking down. But when the Jew has a national home, surely it follows that the impetus to deprive us of the rights of British citizenship must be enormously increased. Palestine will become the world’s Ghetto. Why should the Russian give the Jew equal rights? His national home is Palestine. Why does Lord Rothschild attach so much importance to the difference between British and foreign Jews? All Jews will be foreign Jews, inhabitants of the great country of Palestine.

I do not know how the fortunate third will be chosen, but the Jew will have the choice, whatever country he belongs to, whatever country he loves, whatever country he regards himself as an integral part of, between going to live with people who are foreigners to him, but to whom his Christian fellow-countrymen have told him he shall belong, and of remaining as an unwelcome guest in the country that he thought he belonged to
...
I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government will be prepared to do everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs. I would ask that the Government should go no further.

E.S.M.
23 August 1917

"Lawlessness Without Limits: Israel’s Parallel World ...

2025-10-30T18:13:06Z

"Lawlessness Without Limits: Israel’s Parallel World Order"
The latest episode of Middle East Monitor's Palestine This Week with Mouin Rabbani (npub19fe…j4nv) and Nasim (npub1e98…6gfr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmBSci5mHkU

If you would never attack a Jewish candidate in the manner ...

2025-10-27T23:42:39Z

If you would never attack a Jewish candidate in the manner employed against Zohran Mamdani, you are an Islamophobe.
If you would, you are both an Islamophobe and an anti-Semite.

One of the central tenets of Christian Zionism is that ...

2025-10-26T22:22:01Z

One of the central tenets of Christian Zionism is that Palestinian Christians, the heirs and descendants of the first Christians, have no rights in or to their homes and homeland.

In the Christian Zionist worldview, the dispossession of Palestine's Christians is, at worst, necessary collateral damage in what they insist is the divinely-ordained project of transforming Palestine into an exclusivist Jewish state.

In practice this means that Zionism, and Israel’s agenda and policies with respect to Palestinian Christians, is to be supported, encouraged, and praised as the work of God irrespective of the costs or consequences to its victims.

The forcible expulsion of most Palestinian Christians from Palestine and the systematic theft of their properties during the 1948 Nakba? Praise the Lord!

The systematic destruction of Palestinian Christian villages in Israel after the end of the Palestine War? Hallelujah!

The decline of the Christian population of Jerusalem, illegally annexed by Israel in 1948 (west) and 1967 (east), from approximately twenty per cent of the city's population in 1947 to barely one per cent in 2025? Glory to the Almighty!

Israeli terrorist attack blows a leg off the Palestinian Christian mayor of Ramallah and he is subsequently deposed from office by Israel’s military government? Why didn’t Israel do God’s work and kill him!

Military-supervised settler pogroms against Palestinian Christian villages in the West Bank? It’s Judea and Samaria! It is the Christian villages that are illegal, and their residents are squatters who should be evicted!

Israel bombs the Church of St Porphyrios in Gaza City, the third oldest church in the world, killing over a dozen? Burn that abomination to the ground and leave no one inside alive!

Israel repeatedly bombs Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City during the Gaza Genocide? Better late than never!

Israel seizes Armenian property in Jerusalem for exclusive Jewish settlement? Jews from Brooklyn and Moscow are from Judea, Armenians belong in Armenia!

Christian clergy are routinely spat upon in the streets of Jerusalem? They’re the lucky ones! Settler sputum is sweeter than rosewater!

And on it goes.

Christian Zionists claim to stand for Christian values and the survival of embattled Christian communities. You’ll hear them scream “genocide” whenever and wherever a Christian is murdered or killed. Particularly so if the offense takes place in Muslim-majority societies, and especially Arab ones.

But in Palestine? Not even embarrassed silence but full-throated support for systematic attacks on the world’s first and oldest Christian community. Because they are Zionists before they are Christians.

Their Holy Trinity is Zionism, the state of Israel, and Binyamin Netanyahu.

Their communion consists of the bread used by GHF to bait desperate Palestinians and the blood of those murdered by its death squads.

And their Bible is Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.

To cover their tracks, they like to pretend Palestinian Christians simply don’t exist, that Arab Christians are like them all devoted Zionists, and that all Palestinians are Muslims.

In the alternative reality constructed by Christian Zionism, there is no such thing as a Palestinian struggle for national self-determination, let alone one in which Christians have always played a prominent part, decades before Hamas existed and years before its parent organization the Muslim Brotherhood was established.

Because in their view that struggle was never about retrieving Palestinian rights violently usurped by Israel, but rather part of a global Jewish – sorry, Islamic – conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Anyone who opposes Israel or its genocidal apartheid regime and policies is conveniently dismissed as Hamas, a jihadist, a passenger, as per Dan Burmawi clown show below, in the “Trojan horse that carries the virus of Islamification”.

This also helps explain the central role Christian Zionists have played in whipping up not just fear and hostility to Islam, but hatred of Muslims and what can only be described as hysteria – with few parallels since the 1930s – about the New York City mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani.

Needless to say, Christian Zionists despise not only Palestinian Christians for getting in their way, but also have rather nefarious plans for the Jews, who most view as the “Trojan horse” that will hasten the Second Coming, and then the rapture that many believe will see millions of Jews literally immolated.

With all the fanaticism that is often the hallmark of converts to a new religion, Burmawi postures as the authentic voice of all Christianity, cavalierly ignoring the beliefs and aspirations of those in the region who have been Christian for very much longer than himself, and of Palestinian Christians in particular.

Since he was previously a fanatic Muslim, he also considers it his mission to persuade us that any Muslim who does not spend every waking moment plotting the next 9/11 is an apostate, betraying the very essence of the faith.

Christian Zionism has all the moral force of “Christians for ISIS”, but unfortunately its vast political power is only beginning to be challenged and confronted.
https://bird.makeup/users/danburmawy/statuses/1982464904620638218

quoting
note1q6r…kfre

Support Israel and do whatever it takes to guarantee its security. Make sure your streets aren’t occupied by Israel haters, and by doing that, you will crush the Trojan horse which carries the virus of Islamification.

When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024 ...

2025-10-23T00:16:54Z

When the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024 ruled that South Africa's claims that Israel is violating the 1948 Genocide Convention were sufficiently plausible to justify a full hearing of the case, Israel and its apologists responded as they always do when criticism is levelled at the genocidal apartheid state: condemn the accuser, scream blood libel, work themselves into a frenzy about anti-Semitism, and play the aggrieved victim.

Once the initial hysteria passed, anyone concluding that Israel is perpetrating genocide in the Gaza Strip was roundly denounced on the grounds that no such determination can be made unless and until the ICJ rules that Israel is indeed guilty of genocide.

This was, of course, nothing but a disingenuous delaying tactic. If anyone seriously believes Israel and its flunkies will accept a ruling by the ICJ that does not absolve it of the genocide charge, the response was provided today.

In a devastating ruling for Israel, the ICJ today issued an Advisory Opinion on Israel’s obligations as an occupying in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, international organisations, and foreign states in the territories it occupies.

Since my purpose is not to analyse the ICJ verdict itself, for those interested a link to the full document is provided below, followed by a summary produced by the Court and a newspaper article on the matter.

Suffice it to say that the Court rejected every single claim by Israel, and specifically refuted Israel’s unsubstantiated claims about UNRWA. It also made short shrift of Israel’s GHF project.

It was also for all intents and purposes a unanimous ruling. The sole dissenter, Julia Sebutinde, will never let international law get between her and support for Israel.

And how have those who claim we must wait for an ICJ ruling on the genocide case before drawing any conclusions responded?
Entirely predictably: The ICJ got it all wrong, the judges don’t understand international law and have no clue what they’re talking about, the Court ignored the evidence that really matters, and so on.

Israel, of course “categorically rejects” the ruling and announced it won’t implement a single one of its obligations as specified by the Court. True to form, Washington chimed in with similar language, denouncing not only the ruling but also the Court itself.

For good measure Israel’s parliament the same day pushed forward legislation to formally annex the illegally-occupied West Bank.

If the ICJ in several years defies expectations and finds that Israel is not guilty of genocide, Israel will trumpet the ruling as the definitive, unassailable conclusion of the matter.

But if, as widely anticipated, the ICJ finds either that Israel’s entire campaign, or specific policies and atrocities conducted during this campaign constitute genocide, expect Israel and its flunkies to condemn the accuser, scream blood libel, work themselves into a frenzy about anti-Semitism, and play the aggrieved victim. Because Israel is always right, and it is always the victim, particularly when engaging in genocide.

https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/196/196-20251022-adv-01-00-en.pdf

https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/196/196-20251022-sum-01-00-en.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/icj-orders-israel-to-allow-aid-into-gaza-and-says-blockade-had-been-a-breach

"The Ceasefire Illusion: Deaths, Denials and Diplomatic ...

2025-10-22T22:39:35Z

"The Ceasefire Illusion: Deaths, Denials and Diplomatic Spin".
The latest episode of Middle East Monitor (npub1xgy…umem) Palestine This Week with Mouin Rabbani (npub19fe…j4nv) and Nasim (npub1e98…6gfr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM_q3uG_quQ

Credit to the Trump White House. This would have never happened ...

2025-10-19T20:15:17Z

Credit to the Trump White House. This would have never happened under Biden.
https://bird.makeup/users/ryangrim/statuses/1979973964719124613

quoting
note19tj…7t94

Soon after the explosion in Rafah, I’m told by a source familiar, the White House and Pentagon knew that the incident was caused by an Israeli settler bulldozer running over unexploded ordnance — contradicting Netanyahu’s claim that Hamas had popped up from tunnels.

After Netanyahu said he was blocking all aid from entering Gaza in response, and unleashed a bombing campaign, the administration conveyed to Israel that they know what happened. Netanyahu then announced he would re-open the crossings in a few hours.
https://bird.makeup/users/mustafabarghou1/statuses/1979947595511234788
note1eck…fnm5

During the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and for the ...

2025-10-18T04:13:42Z

During the 2008 US presidential election campaign, and for the eight years of the Obama administration, President Barack Obama was constantly criticized for his attitude towards Israel.

Obama did at least as much for Israel as any of his predecessors, and handed the genocidal apartheid regime USD 38 billion of taxpayer-funded weaponry in one of his final acts in office.

As many Israeli analysts noted at the time, the amount would have been substantially higher if Binyamin Netanyahu had not gone behind Obama’s back and addressed the US Congress in a transparently direct attempt to undermine him.

Because of Netanyahu’s insubordination, Israel walked away with a mere USD 38 billion courtesy of the US taxpayer.

The criticism of Obama wasn’t really about what he did or did not do for Israel. The constant refrain was that “he doesn’t love Israel”. US politicians, in other words, were expected to have an emotional if not erotic attachment to a foreign state. I know of no other instance in which a national leader is considered unsuitable for office because he lacks a passionate devotion to a country other than his or her own.

That was then, this is now.

There are multiple reasons Kamala Harris lost the 2024 US presidential election to Donald Trump. But it is also increasingly clear that her campaign’s decision to engage in public and visible displays of contempt towards the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities, specifically on the issue of Palestine and Israel, cost her dearly in key states.

More importantly, her exorbitantly-paid campaign managers and consultants convinced themselves this would play well with the rest of the electorate because other constituencies were either indifferent to Palestinian rights or supported Israel.

It is today clear she could not have won without singing a very different tune on the Gaza Genocide, and that her refusal to do so probably cost her the election. In other words, what was presumed to be an “ethnic” issue turned out to be a national one, cutting across multiple constituencies and particularly the youth vote.

More recently, in the Democratic Party primary for the New York mayoral race, Andrew Cuomo’s campaign did everything within their power to transform it into the Likud Party primary.

They succeeded, and in significant part because of this Zohran Mamdani wiped the floor with Cuomo and forced him to run as an independent.

I anticipated that Cuomo and his billionaire backers would draw the appropriate conclusions and change their line of attack against Mamdani, claiming that he is a communist determined to impose Khmer Rouge rule in New York City.

I was only partially correct. While indeed denouncing Mamdani as a commie pinko and all the rest of it, Thursday’s debate confirmed they are still doing everything within their power to portray the 4 November election as a contest for the mayor of Tel Aviv. All indications suggest their herculean efforts will produce the same result.

Never underestimate the self-confident hubris of nepo-babies or billionaires.

We live in a different world.

The public repudiation of AIPAC by a growing number of candidates for office, a development inconceivable even a year ago, demonstrates that Israel is no longer the electoral asset or requirement for success it has been for so long. The “love for Israel” demanded of Obama is today increasingly the preserve of freaks.

By contrast, support for Palestinian rights, previously a political death sentence if not one-way journey to obscurity, is rapidly being normalized.

According to this 2017 article in The Independent, allied ...

2025-10-16T06:17:37Z

According to this 2017 article in The Independent, allied governments were already receiving information about the unprecedented scope of the Holocaust in late 1941.

By late 1942 they were fully aware that several million Jews had already been killed, that millions more were at risk, and that Germany, in the words of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that December, was waging a war of extermination against Europe's Jews.

There has been ongoing debate about why nothing was done in direct response to this information.

Explanations range from anti-Semitism, to an allied assessment that bombing the railroad tracks leading to the extermination camps (or the camps themselves) would have an only temporary and limited impact, to the conviction among relevant governments that they should focus their resources on defeating Germany's Nazi government, because their priority was military victory and this would also be the most effective way to end the atrocities.

What is not debatable is that these governments could have spared large numbers of Jewish lives by offering them refuge but made a deliberate choice not to. It was the previous incarnation of "there's a reason nobody wants them", so popular among Israel flunkies these days when discussing Palestinians.

In contrast to today's Middle East, during the 1940s there were no fears expressed that refugees would be prevented from returning to their homes after war's end.

The article also reveals that allied governments, acting on the information at their disposal about Germany's slaughter of the Jews, which was far from complete, began drafting war crimes indictments against German leaders in 1942. This was several years before Soviet soldiers entered Majdanek, the first camp to be liberated in mid-1944.

There was opposition to such legal prosecutions, but then as now this was for political rather than legal reasons.

In those days, no one in their right mind claimed we should ignore the overwhelming evidence at our disposal, and first obtain a legal ruling definitively establishing that crimes were committed, before indicting those responsible.

By contrast, in 2025 any talk of the Gaza Genocide is denounced as "blood libel" because the International Court of Justice has not issued a final ruling on the matter. And if, as widely expected, it finds that Israel has indeed committed genocide in Gaza, that too will be denounced as a "blood libel", only more loudly.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/holocaust-allied-forces-knew-before-concentration-camp-discovery-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html

For immediate release: A Statement from Professors at McGill who ...

2025-10-15T20:36:36Z

For immediate release:

A Statement from Professors at McGill who Support the Boycott and Proposed a Resolution to their Faculty Association, MAUT

On Friday, October 10, 2025, McGill professors and librarians voted in favour of a historic resolution to endorse the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel at a Special General Meeting of the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT).

An overwhelming majority of the professors and librarians who are members of MAUT expressed that they fully endorse the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. As a quorum was met, this resolution is now binding.

In joining the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, MAUT joins at least twenty other academic associations in Canadathat have passed similar resolutions, as well as countless others around the world.

We are now participating in the long history of boycott and divestment at McGill, which among other examples, was the first university in Canada to fully divest from apartheid South Africa–a fact stated proudly on our university website.

With this vote, the professors and librarians of McGill have taken a strong stand against the genocide in Gaza.

By pledging our support for the boycott of Israeli institutions, MAUT members stand in solidarity with Palestinian colleagues who have called for this boycott for more than twenty years. In doing so, we also honour those colleagues and others murdered during this genocide.

The adoption of the resolution to boycott Israeli institutions complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people shows that McGill professors and librarians will not stand by idly as Israel murders and abducts our colleagues in healthcare, libraries, and universities.

MAUT members condemn the destruction of the health system, the total obliteration of academic institutions, the theft and destruction of cultural heritage, and the systematic scholasticide, one element of the genocide that the State of Israel is waging against the Palestinian people.

Our resolution states that we: “call upon McGill’s administration to take all necessary steps to implement the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, while ensuring that the boycott applies to institutional partnerships and agreements, not individual Israeli academics.”

The support of this resolution by professors and librarians at McGill represents the will of a large and growing number of people who are standing up for an end to the genocide in Palestine, an end to the occupation, along with an end to McGill University’s complicity.

McGill professors and librarians vow to keep working within all of our professional associations and unions to hold our complicit academic and cultural institutions accountable.

Israel insists one of the corpses it received from the Gaza Strip ...

2025-10-15T15:28:20Z

Israel insists one of the corpses it received from the Gaza Strip yesterday is not one of its own. Its DNA matches neither a soldier brutally kidnapped from a tank nor any other captive known to Israel.
Hamas insists the body was seized, in military uniform, in Jabaliya in May 2024.
Some have speculated it could be the body of a foreign mercenary or collaborator.
My guess is that it is the corpse of a Palestinian.
Not of a collaborator but one of the numerous human shields forcibly conscripted by the Israeli military.

Excellent article by Patrick Cockburn: For two years, Gaza became ...

2025-10-15T06:07:01Z

Excellent article by Patrick Cockburn:

For two years, Gaza became a theatre of cruelty in which the horrified audience was the rest of the world. As Israeli airstrikes pounded the homes, hospitals and schools of Gaza into rubble, they also pounded sympathy and support for Israel. Today, polls show that more Americans support the Palestinian people than they do the Israeli government. This week some 38 percent of Britons told YouGov they feel more sympathy for the Palestinians, whereas 12 per cent have more for Israel.

Yet Israeli failure goes far beyond international obloquy and isolation. As in past wars with the Palestinians, Israel showed great tactical military expertise combined with self-defeating political blindness, deluding itself that long term success can be won by force alone: Israelis must have 100 per cent security, even if this means 100 percent insecurity for Palestinians.

The only possible relationship it would consider between the seven million Palestinians and seven million Israeli Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is what Human Rights Watch calls apartheid, or expulsion. The very great superiority of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) became a liability because it tempted Israelis into convincing themselves that all problems with others can be solved by military means – though this approach has a track record of bloody failure stretching back three quarters of a century.

Israel put great resources into propaganda at home and abroad, but then made the huge mistake of believing too much of it itself. All opponents are demonised as deadly enemies to be physically eliminated. Once this demon was the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) while today it is Hamas, yet if the latter vanished tomorrow it would inevitably be replaced by some other Palestinian movement.

In conscious or unconscious recognition of this fact, Israel’s attack on Gaza was from the beginning a merciless assault on all its 2.4 million Palestinians inhabitants. In the six months since Netanyahu broke the ceasefire on 18 March, a detailed report by the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) reveals that nearly 15 out of every 16 Palestinians killed in Gaza was a civilian.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/trump-only-winner-israel-gaza-war-3972645

After slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, including ...

2025-10-15T05:33:53Z

After slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, including approximately 20,000 children, and celebrating every one of those deaths as if they won the lottery, Israel groupies continue to insist that what separates the genocidal apartheid regime from those it slaughtered with such glee is that "we value life".

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of ...

2025-10-11T01:55:06Z

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have formally rejected Project Blair.
Other Palestinian factions can be presumed to share this position.
The Palestinian Authority, which has formally accepted the Trump proposal without reservations, doesn't support Blair's installation as colonial viceroy, seeking his role for itself. Additionally, those of its leaders who have dealt with Blair previously thoroughly detest him on a personal level.
This means Project Blair can only be imposed by armed force.
The only military with the resources in place to do so is Israel.
Yet Israel is not particularly committed to its great British champion's pet project, and is unlikely to seek or obtain US permission for a full-scale occupation of the Gaza Strip to enable it.
Or succeed if it does.
It looks like the Blair Witch Project is dead in the water.

It has been suggested that Hamas almost immediately offered to ...

2025-10-11T01:35:03Z

It has been suggested that Hamas almost immediately offered to release all the captives it seized on 7 October 2023, and that if Israel had accepted this initiative the Gaza Genocide could have been prevented.

This is incorrect in several respects.

1. Hamas on 8 October offered to release all the civilian hostages then being held in the Gaza Strip, in exchange for an Israeli commitment not to invade the territory. It did not offer to also release the military and security captives it held, because like every other armed force throughout history it intended to release these in exchange for the release of its own captives held by Israel.

The constant references to “hostages” has created the mistaken impression that all Israelis being held in the Gaza Strip were civilians. In fact, all remaining civilian hostages, as well as the remaining female military and security personnel taken captive on 7 October, were released early this year as part of the January 2025 ceasefire agreement. The remaining captives, scheduled for release in the coming days as part of a final exchange with Israel, are all military or security personnel.

Israel of course rejected the offer, and also did not make any counteroffer, such as the inclusion of military captives in exchange for a commitment to not invade the Gaza Strip.

2. Even if Israel had accepted the offer, it would not have prevented the Gaza Genocide. Israel initiated the most intensive aerial and artillery bombardment of the twenty-first century on 7 October. This would not have been covered by any commitment to not invade the Gaza Strip, and would therefore have continued and probably intensified.

The Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip did not commence until 27 October. Yet, October was one of the very bloodiest months of the Gaza Genocide. The toll, overwhelmingly consisting of civilian casualties, had very little to do with the ground invasion during the last several days of that month.

This also explains Israel’s motivations for rejecting any proposal that would have prevented the ground invasion. Because it was never about the hostages and captives being held in the Gaza Strip.

Israel was determined not only to perpetrate the Gaza Genocide, but also to raze the Gaza Strip to the ground so as to make it functionally uninhabitable. This required a ground invasion.

I very much enjoyed participating in this discussion hosted by ...

2025-10-11T00:00:54Z

I very much enjoyed participating in this discussion hosted by Ireti Bakare- Yusuf / Host, Borderlines on 99.3FM (npub1q4g…n8f3) of Nigeria Info FM 99.3 (npub1rsk…hh0w) together with [@academic_la](https://bird.makeup/users/academic_la ) , Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu (npub1d0l…6hys) and [@ori_goldberg](https://bird.makeup/users/ori_goldberg ) .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxj6mF0sgUI

Much of the information in this article has been circulating for ...

2025-10-10T21:32:22Z

Much of the information in this article has been circulating for years, particularly how Washington a decade ago bullied the United Nations into removing Israel from its blacklist of baby killers.
It is nevertheless useful to have this all confirmed with documentation and collected in one article.
The article below demonstrates how Israel has not one but at least two delegations at the United Nations, one of which is a permanent member of the Security Council.
Yet Israel constantly whines about being singled out at the world body, even though - in contrast to numerous other states, including several in the Middle East - the UN has imposed precisely zero consequences upon Israel, even as it commits genocide.
The article below also conclusively demonstrates, once again, that Samantha Power is what can only be described as a problem from hell. An opportunist of the worst sort, who poses as a champion of the victims of unrestrained power, yet weaponizes her reputation and the power placed at her disposal to promote the very worst and most depraved human rights violations, helped set the stage for the Gaza Genocide, and whose greatest achievement in life is ensuring total impunity for the most vile crimes perpetrated on her watch.
She remains exceptionally proud of her record, and doubtlessly sleeps better at night than those whose lives have been permanently destroyed on account of her activism on behalf of unrestrained violence and power.
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/10/09/sam-power-colluded-israel-committees/

My article in ...

2025-10-10T16:15:05Z

My article in [@the_newarab](https://bird.makeup/users/the_newarab ) examining the Israeli-Palestinian agreement recently concluded in Egypt.
https://www.newarab.com/opinion/good-news-or-bad-gaza-peace-those-least-fit-keep-it

In other words, rather than Israel forming a bulwark against ...

2025-10-06T20:26:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…vlf5
_________________________

In other words, rather than Israel forming a bulwark against terrorism as it likes to claim, the Zionist project has in fact been a pioneer of this method of warfare. Without this resort to terrorism, over many decades, Israel would not have come into being and could not have sustained itself.

Hoffman’s concluding paragraph is particularly telling: “When ...

2025-10-06T20:25:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…vg83
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Hoffman’s concluding paragraph is particularly telling: “When U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they found a copy of Begin’s seminal work, The Revolt, along with other books about the Jewish struggle and the Irgun’s transformation from terrorist group pariah to a respectable political party, in the well-stocked library that al-Qaeda maintained at one of its training facilities in that country.”

Additionally, “the Brazilian revolutionary theorist Carlos ...

2025-10-06T20:25:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…vhl7
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Additionally, “the Brazilian revolutionary theorist Carlos Marighela’s famous Handbook of Urban Guerrilla War, which was essential reading for the variety of left-wing terrorist organizations that arose both in Latin American and Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, embodies Begin’s strategy of provoking the security forces in hopes of alienating the population from the authorities.”

6. Hoffman concludes: “The internationalization of Palestinian ...

2025-10-06T20:25:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…s8kh
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6. Hoffman concludes: “The internationalization of Palestinian Arab terrorism that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s would also appear to owe something to the quest for international attention and recognition that the Irgun’s own terrorist campaign pioneered a quarter of a century earlier.”

5. In contrast to the 2020s, during the 1940s Zionist groupies ...

2025-10-06T20:24:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…z8z2
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5. In contrast to the 2020s, during the 1940s Zionist groupies didn’t ceaselessly whine about the lack of attention for other conflicts, like the civil war in Greece raging at the time. In fact, Begin was openly bragging that actions such as the terror bombing of the King David Hotel had made Palestine the “centre of world interest”. Again, how times have changed.

Given the Irgun’s contemporary heirs’ vociferous and ...

2025-10-06T20:24:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…weyy
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Given the Irgun’s contemporary heirs’ vociferous and insufferably sanctimonious denunciations of precisely such a strategy in recent weeks, one would almost conclude their greatest fear is that the Palestinians have taken a page out of their book and will achieve similar success.

“An integral and innovative part of the Irgun’s strategy was ...

2025-10-06T20:24:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…naus
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“An integral and innovative part of the Irgun’s strategy was Begin’s use of daring and dramatic acts of violence - such as the King David Hotel bombing - to attract international attention to Palestine and thereby publicize simultaneously the Zionists’ grievances against Britain and their claims for statehood … [T]he Irgun deliberately attempted to appeal to a worldwide audience far beyond the immediate confines of the local struggle, beyond even the ruling regime’s own homeland. In particular, the Irgun … sought to generate sympathy and marshal support among powerful allies … as well as among the delegates to the fledgling United Nations Organization, to bring pressure to bear on Britain to grant Jewish statehood.”

4. Hoffman notes that the purpose of the terrorist attack was not ...

2025-10-06T20:23:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…6q8c
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4. Hoffman notes that the purpose of the terrorist attack was not only to undermine British rule in Palestine, but also to “draw worldwide attention to the group’s struggle”. He continues:

3. In the aftermath of the terror attack, only one year after the ...

2025-10-06T20:23:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…2s9j
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3. In the aftermath of the terror attack, only one year after the conclusion of the Second World War, it was considered perfectly appropriate to compare the Irgun to the recently-defeated Nazis, including in the House of Commons. How times have changed.

This turned out to be Irgun disinformation to divert British ...

2025-10-06T20:23:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…pszn
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This turned out to be Irgun disinformation to divert British intelligence resources away from Palestine, and in the process may well have deprived the British in Palestine of the ability to judge the severity of the terrorist threats to the King David Hotel as the bombing became imminent.

Hoffman also reveals that the two most senior British ...

2025-10-06T20:23:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…fu4n
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Hoffman also reveals that the two most senior British intelligence officials in Palestine were shortly before the terror attack dispatched to Beirut because Kim Philby, still active for MI6 and yet to be unmasked as a Soviet agent, had received word of a Zionist terror plot against British facilities in Lebanon.

According to Hoffman this was in fact a blessing in disguise. ...

2025-10-06T20:22:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…jr9a
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According to Hoffman this was in fact a blessing in disguise. Given the explosive force of the terrorist bombs, an evacuation of the building, resulting in people milling around the street, would likely have resulted in even higher casualties.

As such, the “senior British official” had no inkling of the ...

2025-10-06T20:22:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…dhcp
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As such, the “senior British official” had no inkling of the telephone warning, could not have made the statement Begin attributes to him, and most certainly did not prevent anyone from leaving the building.

Additionally, Zionist terrorists had been regularly calling in ...

2025-10-06T20:22:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…9nuw
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Additionally, Zionist terrorists had been regularly calling in bomb threats for some time. As a result the hotel’s assistant manager didn’t communicate the warning in question to the British authorities, hoping to avoid the significant disruption and embarrassment which ensued when he had previously taken such threats seriously and nothing happened.

Hoffman concludes that telephone warnings were indeed provided, ...

2025-10-06T20:22:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…ld6a
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Hoffman concludes that telephone warnings were indeed provided, but contrary to Begin’s claims these were communicated only ten minutes prior to the terror bombs’ detonation. This was hardly sufficient to evacuate the building.

Begin, for those unfamiliar with him, was an extraordinary ...

2025-10-06T20:22:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…qruj
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Begin, for those unfamiliar with him, was an extraordinary charlatan and demagogue. Think Eyal Yakoby, and similarly steeped in self-righteous victimhood.

2. The Irgun, and specifically its leader Menahem Begin, have ...

2025-10-06T20:21:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…2m7k
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2. The Irgun, and specifically its leader Menahem Begin, have always insisted that they provided several warnings of the impending terror attack, and did so sufficiently in advance to avoid casualties. According to Begin these warnings were ignored by the British, with a senior British official responding, “I’m not here to take orders from Jews, but to give them”. Begin also insisted the British actively prevented people from evacuating the hotel.

Hoffman does not address an important, related issue in his ...

2025-10-06T20:21:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…mhlr
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Hoffman does not address an important, related issue in his paper, which is that in view of the above it is inconceivable this terrorist attack could have been carried out without the personal authorization of Jewish Agency Chairman – and Israel’s first prime minister – David

Hoffman recounts its motives thus: “The previous month, in a ...

2025-10-06T20:21:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…rxxt
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Hoffman recounts its motives thus: “The previous month, in a major British military operation against the Jewish leadership in Palestine, the authorities had seized highly sensitive documents directly implicating the Haganah and its political masters in the Jewish Agency with the resistance movement. The Haganah believed that these papers were stored in the British intelligence offices located in the King David [Hotel] and hence hoped that the Irgun’s bombs would destroy the incriminating material.”

1. Although the terrorist bombing was carried out by the Irgun, ...

2025-10-06T20:21:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…989x
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1. Although the terrorist bombing was carried out by the Irgun, it was conducted on the orders of the Haganah, the largest Zionist militia in Palestine which served as the armed wing of the Jewish Agency and worked in partnership with the British.

Hoffman, who is clearly sympathetic to Israel and arguably ...

2025-10-06T20:21:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…qd4z
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Hoffman, who is clearly sympathetic to Israel and arguably indulgent of the Irgun as well, adds a number of details about this unprecedented act of Zionist terror I was previously unaware of:

More accurately, the King David Hotel bombing qualifies as the ...

2025-10-06T20:21:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…cr4j
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More accurately, the King David Hotel bombing qualifies as the most lethal terrorist attack on record until the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie which killed 259. If the data set is limited to buildings on the ground this would be the 1995 Oklahoma City truck bomb

This latter part of the statement isn’t quite accurate. A ...

2025-10-06T20:20:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…trsm
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This latter part of the statement isn’t quite accurate. A marine barracks is by definition a military objective, and whatever one may think of that attack it cannot qualify as terrorism.

The terror attack killed 42 Arabs, 28 Brits, 17 Jews, 2 ...

2025-10-06T20:20:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…3z2p
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The terror attack killed 42 Arabs, 28 Brits, 17 Jews, 2 Armenians, and a Greek. According to Hoffman, the bombing “for decades to come would hold the infamous distinction as the most lethal terrorist attack in history: surpassed only in 1983 with the suicide bomb attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut.”

THREAD: In an article brought to my attention by Frances Coppola ...

2025-10-06T20:20:29Z

THREAD: In an article brought to my attention by Frances Coppola [@frances_coppola](https://bird.makeup/users/frances_coppola ) , Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University examines the Irgun’s 22 July 1946 terrorist bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which at the time served as the headquarters of the British administration in Palestine.

I grew up in The Netherlands. During my youth it was easily the ...

2025-10-05T21:46:21Z

I grew up in The Netherlands. During my youth it was easily the most pro-Israeli country in Europe. So pro-Israeli that visiting Palestinians would say it was easier to reason with Israelis than the Dutch about the Middle East.
Although the Dutch are like others a fundamentally decent people, even a decade ago a demonstration one-tenth this size would have been inconceivable in The Netherlands. It would also have been largely populated by Arab and Muslim immigrants.
Yet on Sunday, as confirmed by the police, a quarter of a million Dutch citizens, of all backgrounds, of all stripes and colours, turned out to draw a “Red Line” against the Gaza Genocide.
I never anticipated I would witness such scenes during my lifetime, and am genuinely humbled.
Israel has irreversibly lost the Dutch public, and future Dutch governments will find it increasingly difficult to hold the line on behalf of the genocidal apartheid regime.
We are living in a different world, and it will become a better one.

Israel's military has fought so valiantly in the Gaza Strip ...

2025-10-02T04:28:15Z

Israel's military has fought so valiantly in the Gaza Strip that two years on it had to beg its sponsor in Washington to demand that Hamas surrender.
https://bird.makeup/users/asadabukhalil/statuses/1973588060379222124

quoting
note1g45…fk6g

“But the deal that the US president struck with Netanyahu –…– is less a ceasefire proposal than an ultimatum for Hamas to surrender.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/01/netanyahu-trump-israel-gaza-peace-plan?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

In fact Gandhi understood the point @npub1n3g…0syt makes below. ...

2025-10-02T02:02:46Z

In fact Gandhi understood the point Bruno Maçães (npub1n3g…0syt) makes below.
This is what Gandhi wrote in 1938, during the Arab Revolt in Palestine:
"There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they [Zionists] will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.
I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment on their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds".
When even Mahatma Gandhi accepts your right to take up arms, it says something about the justice of the cause.
https://bird.makeup/users/macaesbruno/statuses/1973550606091690210

quoting
note1pt9…tg44

Useful to remind those like Prince Turki who argue that Palestinians should adopt Gandhian nonviolent resistance that, were Gandhi Palestinian, he would have been shot by Israel one day after returning to Palestine

Israel's piracy on the high seas against the Sumud Flotilla ...

2025-10-02T01:31:55Z

Israel's piracy on the high seas against the Sumud Flotilla is predictably being met with ecstatic celebration and euphoric mockery by Israel flunkies.
It may not be another dozen Palestinian infants shredded to bits by a 2,000 pound bomb, but has sufficient entertainment value nonetheless.
To cover their tracks Israel groupies once again trot out one of their favourite tropes: Gaza Genocide aficionados act exclusively out of high-minded principle, while those willing to risk their lives to challenge the genocidal apartheid regime are spoiled, narcissistic opportunists.

Deradicalization is the word of the day. Not of Israel, its ...

2025-10-01T04:47:57Z

Deradicalization is the word of the day. Not of Israel, its genocidal apartheid regime, and the fanatic society that sustains it and drives it to ever greater extremes. But of the Palestinians it has dispossessed, of those who have lived under its jackboot for almost eight decades, and particularly of Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip that has experienced two years of genocide.

It is the main item of the first article of the Trump-Netanyahu twenty-point initiative. Needless to say it has been enthusiastically embraced by the editors of the New York Times. One can similarly imagine the NYT reporting from Poland in 1943 and publishing an editorial that sanctimoniously proclaims that the main impediment to peace in Europe is the Bolshevik virus that has infected the continent’s Jews.

The concept of deradicalization has a long pedigree. At heart, it is based on the premise that colonial subjects have no grievances towards their foreign rulers. They are empty vessels, with not a thought in their heads, happily farming fruit and vegetables in their sunny fields, grateful for the many improvements their overlords have generously bestowed upon them.

More to the point, they are so backwards and ignorant they are completely unaware that they can or should have grievances. Until, that is, nefarious outsiders appear on the scene and plant diabolical ideas about freedom, equality, and liberation in their simple minds, and terrorize them into participating in revolts and rebellions.

The natives, duly infected with ideas like independence, social justice, and the redistribution of wealth, need to be deradicalized so that the natural order of things can be restored. The outside agitators need to be cleansed from the body politic, and the natives re-educated to once again thoughtlessly till the fields, concerned only about the harvest and making sure the chickens have enough to eat.

The Palestinian case is no different. They hate Zionism and Israel only because they have been taught and terrorized into doing so by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Hamas, and of course UNRWA. If we can only reform the Palestinian school curriculum yet again, Palestinians will learn to peacefully co-exist with dispossession, apartheid, and genocide.

Imagine, for a moment, that Palestinian schoolchildren were to start the day singing Hatikva, are taught that the Holy Trinity in fact consists of Yitzhak Shamir, David Ben-Gurion, and Theodor Herzl, spend an hour a week studying Binyamin Netanyahu’s addresses to Congress, dutifully rising from their seats every time the seals that swim in the Capitol give him yet another standing ovation, and are made to chant “Death to the Arabs” a dozen times before going to sleep under a Maccabi Tel Aviv poster.

Does anyone in their right mind genuinely believe Palestinians can be taught to peacefully co-exist with dispossession and oppression?

If Palestinians are indeed radicalized, the agents of their radicalization are Israel and its policies, not least its compulsive murder of their children. The only available formula for deradicalization is Palestinian rights, first and foremost their inalienable right to self-determination.

The beauty of Trump’s initiative is that “deradicalization” is not defined, and with ever-shifting goalposts moved at Israel's discretion can therefore never be achieved. And until it is, Israel will be free to continue radicalizing Palestinians with its bombs, bullets, and bulldozers with total impunity.

Fact-free far-right bigot once again claims unparalleled ...

2025-09-30T01:57:12Z

Fact-free far-right bigot once again claims unparalleled expertise in Islamic jurisprudence because he lived in Lebanon until age 10.

In this case, he repeats the demonstrable falsehood that "dogs are haram in Islam".

Dogs are mentioned several times in the Quran.

One passage relates a parable in which a dog serves as the faithful guardian of a group of believers who hid in a cave to escape persecution.

The other specifies that it is permissible to eat animals that have been hunted by dogs and falcons (and thus retrieved in their mouths).

There is no Quranic passage that describes dogs as "haram" or forbids keeping them.

Islamic clerics have issued multiple views on dogs.

Based on the above Quranic references, they are agreed that it is permissible to keep dogs that serve a purpose – such as hunting, herding, and guarding.

There is also consensus that dog saliva is impure (“najis”), requiring the special cleaning of utensils that come into contact with it.

The clerics are however divided on whether it is also permissible to keep dogs within the confines of the home. Three of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence consider dogs impure (najis), a concept that is quite different than haram, which entails categorical prohibition. None consider dogs haram.

Najis primarily means that if one comes into contact with a dog, ritual purification is required prior to the performance of religious duties such as prayer. Ablutions, for example, are considered invalidated by physical contact with a dog. But the physical contact itself is not forbidden.

Basing themselves on different sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as other forms of reasoning, Islamic clerics have generally forbidden keeping dogs as companions, and offered various reasons for doing so. Others only discourage it, and others still permit it. In other words, there is no doctrinal position on the issue across the faith, as there is for example with respect to the consumption of pork or carrion.

To claim that "dogs are haram in Islam", or that "Islam hates dogs", is at best a profession of ignorance, and in this case also clearly an exercise in fact-free bigotry for the sole purpose of promoting bigotry.

In the example below, fact-free far-right bigot Gad Saad believes he has definitively demonstrated that "dogs are haram in Islam" by reposting a fellow fact-free far-right bigot's account of a single incident.

Rather than presenting a legal opinion by a Muslim cleric or conclusions of a study by scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, the incident concerns a statement by a grocery shopper in France.

As with so much posted by this pair, it is unclear if the incident is genuine or distorted to amplify the bigotry. If it is real, it changes nothing about Islamic jurisprudence with respect to dogs, no more than it would if a Muslim kept a dozen dogs as indoor pets after receiving a fatwa expressly prohibiting it.

Saad’s post is however not without value. It provides - yet again - a valuable insight into his fact-free approach to substantiating his bigotry, as well as into his standards of – for lack of a better term – scholarship.

Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been so ...

2025-09-29T21:35:00Z

Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip has been so overwhelmingly successful over the course of two entire years that it requires 20,000 Indonesian troops to disarm Hamas.
As I've been saying for years: The Israeli military is a highly effective and efficient killing machine, especially against unarmed civilians, but it is also a mediocre fighting force, and particularly so in urban combat.

They didn't walk out when Ukraine's Zelensky, a Jewish ...

2025-09-28T17:38:52Z

They didn't walk out when Ukraine's Zelensky, a Jewish president, spoke.
They wouldn't have walked out if Claudia Sheinbaum, the Jewish president of Mexico, had spoken instead of sending her foreign minister.
They wouldn't have walked out if Keir Stammer, who recently claimed Jewish ancestry, had spoken instead of sending his deputy.
Etc.
But nice try making this about anti-Jewish prejudice, as if global aversion to Israel's genocide, apartheid, and impunity for war crimes have nothing to do with the walkout.
https://bird.makeup/users/hananyanaftali/statuses/1971983245685178842

quoting
note1rpt…2x88

They didn’t walk out when Iran’s president stood up to speak.
They didn’t walk out when Syria’s ruler spoke.

But when Netanyahu,
A Jewish Prime Minister, Took the podium to tell the world what happened on October 7th.
That’s when they walked out.

Let that sink in.

"The Meaning of Western Recognition of Palestine". I was ...

2025-09-24T17:42:03Z

"The Meaning of Western Recognition of Palestine".
I was asked by Jacobin (npub1p87…kec6) to contribute my thoughts on the recent spate of recognitions of Palestinian statehood.
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/recognition-palestine-israel-genocide-zionism

Israel and its flunkies have settled on the great replacement ...

2025-09-23T02:41:37Z

Israel and its flunkies have settled on the great replacement theory aka The Protocols of the Elders of Mecca, as their favoured explanation for the recent spate of recognitions of Palestinian statehood. Key tenets:
1. All Muslims support Palestine
2. Only Muslims support

Today marks the annual commemoration of the 16-18 September 1982 ...

2025-09-17T17:26:48Z

Today marks the annual commemoration of the 16-18 September 1982 Sabra-Shatila Massacre in Beirut. It formed the culmination of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that year.

The Sabra-Shatila Massacre was an Israeli operation from start to finish. The Phalangist and South Lebanon Army terrorists, the Israeli proxies who conducted most of the killing, were instruments of Israel's design pure and simple.

Ever the victim of those it massacres, Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin, a wanted terrorist during the British Mandate for the murder of hundreds of Arab, Jewish, and British civilian non-combatants, predictably whined, ''Goyim kill goyim, and they come to hang the Jews''.

Even acts of genocide are spun as blood libel. The repulsive sanctimony of the genocidal apartheid regime knows neither shame nor limits.

Below two links: The first, "Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations", is an article by the Middle East scholar Seth Anziska (@SethAnziska ), published in the 17 September 2018 issue of the New York Review of Books. It sheds further light on the extent of Israeli responsibility and US complicity in the massacre.

The second, "Four Hours in Shatila" by the late author and activist Jean Genet, speaks for itself.

It seems the emergency Arab League-OIC summit took the ...

2025-09-15T16:54:42Z

It seems the emergency Arab League-OIC summit took the unprecedented step of expressing dissatisfaction with the recent Israeli bombing of Doha.

The twin Israeli myths of "the most moral army in the ...

2025-09-06T21:05:54Z

The twin Israeli myths of "the most moral army in the world" and "purity of arms" emerged during the Nakba, primarily to fend off scrutiny of Israel's widespread atrocities - what can legitimately be called the Israeli military's culture of atrocity - during the Palestine War.

The Israeli military's conduct during the Palestine War was so morally depraved - massacres, gratuitous killings of unarmed civilians, rapes, looting, and of course expulsions were very regular features - that a report about its conduct produced for Israel's government remains classified to this day, and the existence of the commission of inquiry that examined these matters was never revealed to the public.

The Israeli film maker Neta Shoshani several years ago produced a documentary, "1948 - Remember, Remember Not" that touches on some of this history, and among other topics examines the Israeli military's culture of atrocity.

For this reason the broadcaster that commissioned the documentary refused to air it.

Now that bloodlust has become all the rage in Israeli society, and rather than denying the Nakba, "Second Nakba!" has become a popular rallying cry, the documentary is finally being shown.

The documentary was reviewed and Shoshani interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on 6 September 2025.

Among other atrocities the article relates the following incidents in Duwayma, a town southwest of Hebron and site of a major massacre on 29 October 1948:

[Begin Quote] "Another commander ordered a sapper to take two old Arab women into a house and to blow it up with them inside," the reporter continued. "Another soldier boasted that he had raped an Arab woman and then shot her. An Arab woman with a newborn baby was employed in cleaning up the area where the soldiers eat. She performed that service for a day or two, in the end they shot her and her baby ... The fewer Arabs that will remain, the more praiseworthy it is.[END Quote]

The Duwayma Massacre is infamous because in this case an Israeli soldier documented how a number of the town's children were killed: "The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks." The article is unclear if this report is incorporated in the documentary.

The most moral genocide in the world. Purity of depravity.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-09-06/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/if-1948-was-a-war-of-independence-the-current-war-could-be-the-one-that-ends-israel/00000199-15e0-d7a2-a9bf-15f9867b0000

Israel and its flunkies consistently complain that Israel is held ...

2025-09-06T06:31:48Z

Israel and its flunkies consistently complain that Israel is held to a different standard than other states.

The assertion is factually correct, though not in the manner assumed.

No state since the Second World War, and this includes the United States, Soviet Union, Russia, and China, has enjoyed both the impunity and freedom from criticism enjoyed by Israel.

It was never taboo to condemn the US wars against Vietnam or Iraq, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Russia’s wars in Chechnya or Ukraine, or China’s domestic policies. By contrast, the prominent politicians who dared to explicitly condemn Israel for its murderous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, for example, can be counted on the fingers of an amputated hand.

Israel likes to complain that the United Nations, which in 1947 adopted the critical decision to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, is an anti-Israeli organization and even one whose primary purpose is to promote an anti-Israel agenda.

Yet, with the exception of the veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, no state in the world body’s history with a record even remotely similar to Israel’s has systematically escaped sanction and condemnation. The former Rhodesia, South Africa’s former white-minority regime, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, and Myanmar, to name but a few, would like nothing better than to be in Israel’s exalted international position. Zero economic sanctions, zero arms embargoes, zero
UN-mandated criminal tribunals, zero anything with practical consequences.

The same could be said for Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Iran has been subjected to decades of Western and UN sanctions on the pretext that these are required to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. Earlier this year Washington supported and participated in an Israeli war against Iran, the claimed purpose of which was to destroy its capacity to weaponize its nuclear program. UN sanctions on Iran lifted a decade ago are at European urging almost certain to be re-imposed later this year.

Unlike Iran, Israel has refused to ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has possessed a nuclear arsenal since the 1960s. Western governments systematically refuse to even acknowledge that this arsenal exists, let alone attach even a single consequence to Israel’s possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems. Most recently, Germany knowingly provided Israel with nuclear-weapons-capable submarines and subsidized much of their cost. Ensuring a permanent Israeli nuclear monopoly in the Middle East while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge its existence is the West’s undeclared policy.

Russia and China have voted in favor of Chapter VII Security Council resolutions against not only Iran but North Korea. By contrast Israel’s nuclear arsenal, now more than half a century old, has never even been discussed as a Council item.

At the International Criminal Court (ICC), the 2023 indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and warrant for his arrest did not produce an international crisis. The Russian leader threw a fit, took it in his stride, has avoided visiting certain countries, and that was the end of it.

The Court’s 2024 indictment of two Israeli leaders has by contrast produced an ongoing, concerted campaign to dismantle the court wholesale. Hungary has withdrawn from the ICC. Greece, Italy, and France have effectively repudiated the Rome Statute and renounced their treaty obligations by repeatedly permitting international fugitive Binyamin Netanyahu to traverse their airspace. Most recently, Little Marco for a Big Israel sanctioned the three leading Palestinian human rights organizations on the grounds that they were cooperating with the Court.

Any organization with the temerity to hold Israel to the same standards applied to others must be destroyed, by any means necessary.

I recently had dinner with an individual who has for many years been teaching at a British university. Almost immediately after the 7 October 2023 attacks, the university administration sent a communication to all staff warning them to be careful about how they expressed themselves about this issue. No similar communication had ever been received about any other issue, whether foreign or domestic. Not Iraq, not the climate protests, not government austerity policies, not even the major terrorist attacks Britain has experienced in recent years

It seemed to me clear the warning was meant to instill fear and stifle discussion about causes and consequences, just as the campaign against freedom of expression in US universities has far exceeded anything witnessed during the Vietnam or Iraq wars, wars in which the US was directly involved and lost thousands of lives.

What has changed during the Gaza Genocide is that the taboo on criticism and condemnation of Israel – the taboo on open discussion of the nature of the Israeli state and its policies – has been irrevocably shattered.

Individuals, public figures, and increasingly politicians as well, are no longer mortified by the spurious accusations that are inevitably flung their way if they dare to hold Israel to the same standards they have for their entire lives instinctively applied to other and similar regimes. Even the Washington branch office of the Israeli parliament, the US Senate, recently debated a partial arms embargo on Israel, a development inconceivable even three years ago.

Jewish critics of Israel have played a pivotal role in these developments. Their words and actions have made a mockery of the tropes that criticism of Israel is for all intents and purposes criticism directed at Jews for being Jewish, and invalidated the Defamation League’s constant refrain that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. In so doing they have given many others, often previously unfamiliar with the Middle East, and instinctively and rightfully opposed to being associated with hatred and discrimination, the confidence to judge Israel as a political entity like any other.

Their numbers are also perceptibly increasing. In decades past a Jewish anti-Zionist or public critic of Israel was often considered something of an anomaly, and their affiliation would be repeatedly noted as if they were a member of an endangered species miraculously sighted in Borneo. That is for the most part no longer the case. The schism between Israel and diaspora Jewish communities, or at least with significant sectors of the latter, is as real as it is visible. The same can be said for the growing rift between Jewish communities and the organizations that claim to represent them but are in practice surrogates for the Israeli government.

From Israel’s perspective, being judged by the same standards applied to others after a lifetime of impunity may well feel like being singled out for special treatment. But the reality is of course precisely the opposite. The goose is finally being treated like the gander and is no longer the unacknowledged elephant in the room. Hence the ongoing meltdown, and the systematic resort to formal measures to shut down not only protest but also debate, and punish those who insist on speaking their minds.

Important contribution by Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) in Substack: ...

2025-09-06T04:03:53Z

Important contribution by Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) in Substack:
"Around the world there are eleven places where more people are at serious risk of hunger than in Gaza, but what this wider view of global famine reveals is not that Gaza is “normal”, but precisely the opposite. Being the result of deliberate policy by a powerful state, commonly regarded as belonging to the exclusive club of “advanced economies”, the mass starvation in Gaza in the summer of 2025 is quite unlike that anywhere else in the world ...
Across the hunger hot spots of the world in 2025, what is the percentage of the population that is at risk?
In Nigeria - mainly in the North - it is one sixth of the population. In Myanmar and the DRC it is roughly a quarter of the population. In Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan and Haiti - the places most commonly cited in arguments about the application of “special standards” to Israel - the share of the population at risk is between 49 and 57 percent. In Gaza, the share is 100 percent. The risk of famine is total."
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-400-not-crisis-but-murder?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FAdam%2520Tooze&utm_medium=reader2

THREAD: I’ve watched the Adam Friedland (@AdamFriedland) ...

2025-08-30T01:58:17Z

THREAD: I’ve watched the Adam Friedland (@AdamFriedland) interview with Israel groupie Ritchie Torres twice. It made for utterly compelling viewing.

The Whole World is Against Us! That includes Britain which ...

2025-08-27T16:53:31Z

The Whole World is Against Us! That includes Britain which sponsored Zionism, France that provided Israel with its nuclear weapons program and advanced arms to launch the 1967 June War, Germany, and (arguably) the United States. Poor little Israel. Always the victim, even when committing genocide.
https://bird.makeup/users/akoz33/statuses/1960446743910473886

quoting
note1r7q…k92e

People who write that “Israel is losing allies” obviously don’t know what the word ally means. Israel has not had an ally other than (arguably) the United States since 1956. Perhaps by “ally” they mean something like sympathizer, someone who will express regret when you die and

The conspiracy theories being spouted by the Hasbara Symphony ...

2025-08-26T15:42:55Z

The conspiracy theories being spouted by the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra are getting more unhinged by the day.

Take, for example, the case of Alonso Gurmendi (@Alonso_GD), the respected Peruvian historian of international law currently at the London School of Economics (LSE) whose work and analysis has been a key resource in understanding the multiple dimensions of the Gaza Genocide.

Gurmendi’s great-grandfather emigrated from Germany to Peru in 1903. His grandfather was born in Peru, and like most Peruvians lived his entire life in that country.

Alonso’s full name is in fact Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg. He consistently provides his full name in professional profiles, such as on the websites of LSE, King’s College London, University of Oxford, and LinkedIn. He also routinely uses his full name in his impressive record of publications.

This easily verifiable documentary evidence notwithstanding, the Orchestra’s groupies have recently decided that Alonso in fact deliberately conceals the Dunkelberg part of his surname.

Building on this fantasy, Israel flunkies, acting in concert, constructed a conspiracy theory that Alonso conceals his full name because his grandfather was actually born in Germany, was a devoted Nazi, and only arrived in Peru after Germany’s defeat in 1945, narrowly escaping justice thanks to the so-called ratline that helped prominent Nazis escape to South America. Naturally, this is also presented as definitive proof that Alonso is himself a Nazi. Why else would he conceal his real name that is all over the internet?

Needless to say, since unlike Israeli Jews Alonso can’t produce a family tree demonstrating that his ancestors have been the sole inhabitants of Peru for the past 3,000 years, or furnish a deity that promised Peru to the Dunkelbergs and them alone, he’s also not a real Peruvian, but German.

This is the level of crazy we’ve reached. Deranged hysteria has become the default mode.

The good news is that these half-baked conspiracy theories are a sign of the Orchestra’s utter desperation. Its musicians understand that, apart from reliable season ticket holders like the New York Times and the Bibi Si!, the world has long since lost its appetite for their cacophonous concertos, and even keeping the band together is becoming a growing challenge.

Think of it as a cult whose leader has to make ever-more outlandish prophecies to maintain a following, but in doing so also increases doubts about his sanity.

I recently encountered a similar incident myself. In response to a post during Israel’s war against Iran in which I noted that “I have yet to see anyone in mainstream media make the obvious point that Israel has a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and has gone to war in order to preserve it”, a Death Squad State groupie responded, “You were eating caviar at the Iranian embassy in Damascus while they genocided the Syrian people.”

I’ve never been invited to an Iranian embassy, whether in Damascus or anywhere else, let alone to be offered caviar. But that’s precisely the point of the attempted deflection. If it isn’t a fabrication concocted out of thin air, it will no longer be considered for inclusion in the Orchestra’s hysterical repertoire.

The disconnect with reality has become not only complete, but is today a requirement for maintaining membership in the utterly toxic cult devoted to the genocidal apartheid regime.

The problem for Israel flunkies is that so many of them genuinely ...

2025-08-23T22:38:46Z

The problem for Israel flunkies is that so many of them genuinely enjoy being thoroughly vile and showcasing their despicable views.
They spend more time competing with each other to see who can reach the furthest beyond any semblance of humanity, as opposed to persuading those not already fully committed to their genocidal echo chamber.
In decades past Israel's leadership would have at least attempted to provide some adult guidance - "Not now boys, people are watching and what they think matters". Not anymore. These days it mainly encourages its groupies to crank up the vicious racism and genocidal venom.

As the genocidal apartheid regime's military is confronted by ...

2025-08-18T23:22:55Z

As the genocidal apartheid regime's military is confronted by the twin challenges of exhaustion and manpower shortages after nearly two years of unremitting slaughter, it is high time for a campaign directed at governments around the world to make it illegal - a criminal, punishable offence - for their citizens to serve in the armed forces of the death squad state or to materially contribute to these forces in any way.
Such measures have precedents, and these could serve as a guide and template.
Additionally, countries that permit their citizens to serve in the death squad state's military also often have laws that prohibit foreign armed forces - even Israel's - from actively recruiting their citizens within their sovereign territory.
The activities of organisations and individuals in various countries that recruit foreign citizens on the genocidal apartheid regime's behalf would be a good place to start.
Governments know exactly who these are, and had they been conducting such activities for any other foreign military they would have been prosecuted decades ago.

German policy during the Gaza Genocide - both foreign and ...

2025-08-18T22:04:03Z

German policy during the Gaza Genocide - both foreign and domestic - appears impervious to comprehension by rational minds. This article by Adam Shatz in London Review of Books (npub15yd…ydja) is probably as close as we're going to get to an explanation.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n14/adam-shatz/berlin-diary

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof ...

2025-08-17T04:15:23Z

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes: "When Hind Rajab, a 5- or 6-year-old Gazan girl, was killed, I held off writing about the case because Israel denied responsibility, and I wasn’t sure what to believe. Additional information later emerged, strengthening the case that Israeli troops killed Hind, six members of her family and the paramedics trying to rescue her."
It's perfectly legitimate to criticize this statement for its feigned naivite, and to point out that if this had happened anywhere else in the world, including anywhere in the United States, Kristof would have immediately identified the perpetrator and condemned them in the harshest available terms.
Even now, Kristof still cannot quite bring himself to unambiguously state the obvious - that Israel wilfully committed this atrocity, and that it is just one of many such massacres that have become a daily occurrence. That is exactly what he would have done had he been writing about any other country, including his own. Yet in this case there is merely "additional information ... strengthening the case" for the only available conclusion.
While Kristof's column confirms once again the sacred status of Israel in the West and the West's compulsive indulgence of its atrocities, it also confirms an essential and vital point about how Israeli hasbara works:
When putting out its fabrications, which often decompose at the first contact with reality, Israel seeks not to convince its audience, but merely to sow confusion and a certain level of doubt. If the propaganda put forward by the death squad state makes people refrain from comment, if only out of fear of the consequences of publicly contradicting the "most moral army" in the midst of a genocide, the hasbara has already achieved its purpose.

If a judge claims to get DMs from God requiring that justice be ...

2025-08-14T20:37:19Z

If a judge claims to get DMs from God requiring that justice be done that's crazy enough. But for a judge to enter the courtroom determined to defend the accused, irrespective of the evidence, because of instructions from on high cries out for immediate removal from the bench, a straightjacket, and urgent psychiatric evaluation.
https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/news/national/my-country-disowned-me-after-israel-gaza-ruling-sebutinde-5153060

Moving testimony from @npub1lju…w3kz about her family history. ...

2025-08-14T20:23:07Z

Moving testimony from Ana Kasparian (npub1lju…w3kz) about her family history.
There was a key difference between the Armenian and Jewish communities that arrived in Palestine during the twentieth century:
The Armenians arrived in Palestine seeking refuge, were welcomed as refugees, integrated into the host society and contributed to it. The current Palestinian Foreign Minister, Varsen Aghabekian, for example, is a Palestinian Armenian.
The Armenians were without exception Christian, the Palestinians largely Muslim, and religion was an entirely irrelevant factor.
The Jewish immigrants by contrast arrived not only as refugees but with an ideology, Zionism, to seize control of the country, dispossess its Muslim and Christian (including Armenian) inhabitants, and transform the Palestinians into stateless refugees.
They were consequently resisted with every means available.
Religious affiliation was of paramount importance to the Zionists, but irrelevant to Palestine's Muslims and Christians.
The Zionist project would have been just as strenuously resisted if it called for transforming Palestine into an exclusively Sikh, Anglican, or Zaidi state.
https://bird.makeup/users/royalintel_/statuses/1955658086628421664

quoting
note165w…3jqj

🇦🇲🇵🇸@AnaKasparian speaks on her Armenian grandmother who was born in Haifa, Palestine

I stand by my position that Karim Khan has been an obstacle to ...

2025-08-01T15:07:44Z

I stand by my position that Karim Khan has been an obstacle to both accountability for Israeli criminals and justice for their Palestinians victims. Khan was forced to act only because he backed himself into a corner with his actions on other cases and because Israel's conduct forced his hand and left him with no other choice.
It is in my view also a positive development that Khan is no longer involved with the ICC Palestine file.
The above notwithstanding, this detailed article in Middle East Eye (npub1sl7…zn99) is worth reading for the level of detail it provides about Israeli and US efforts, both covert and overt, to destroy the Court in order to derail its work on the Palestine.
It reflects the organising principle of the so-called rules-based international order: if an official, a rule, an institution, or indeed the order itself is unable to sustain Western and Israeli impunity, these are no longer fit for purpose and will be dismantled and destroyed without a second thought.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/exclusive-karim-khan-israel-war-crimes-probe-derailed-threats-leaks-sex-claims