Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure
Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure
...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
You're viewing a single thread.
Do we have a "What is Zionism?" one-page document I can throw at someone? They're "very offended" that I said Hamas changed it's charter to distinguish between fighting Zionism and fighting all Jewish people because they ahve "family ties in Israel" and I just don't want to write a whole fucking thing right now, especially because I'm half-convinced anything I say will blow up the discord. Dude's already pulled out the "Your opinion is invalid because I have family on the ground" thing. : p
I mean, you probably should just give up on trying to convince them tbh
They're far too emotionally invested. It's not worth your time
Convince somebody else that's easier to reach
I dunno how about this:
Zionism is a settler-colonial project to establish a "Jewish" ethnostate in Palestine that slowly gained momentum in the mid-19th century and was accelerated by European antisemitism. Its chief architect was a guy in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 1800s.
Settler-colonial means it's premised on stealing land and property from the people that already live(d) there, and to do so uses extreme violence and ethnic cleansing. A fundamentally genocidal project, it has a lot in common with the genocide of indigenous Americans, including the racist excuse-making for why their genocide was/is good for the people they're genociding, ever-shrinking ghettos, regular racist massacres, dehumanization of their target, and a rationalization that they're destined to own and control the land. The Zionist state gained its initial footholds through British colonialism in the 1920s-1940s, which initiated the apartheid regime and prompted the anti-colonial backlashes that gave the British and other Zionists the excuse to annex more land via genocide. This oppression-uprising-annexation pattern has repeated itself a few times, now settling on a (usually) slow genocide and expropriation of Palestinians under an apartheid regime. This pattern has always required the explicit material support of the predominant Western superpower (British and then American), as the indigenous inhabitants and their neighbors oppose the Zionist project.
The modern Western impression of Palestine is based on ignorance and lies, the most fundamental of which is to frame it as an age-old religious conflict rather than a recent colonial and anti-colonial struggle. Zionists conflate their genocidal racism with Judaism, which has led to much of this confusion. However, to repeat the claim that Zionism is about being Jewish is itself an antisemitic to say, as it suggests that to be Jewish is to drive a people from their homes, to steal their orchards and villages, to discriminate against them, to bomb their children.
Modern Zionism requires the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Anyone with a heart that knows the humanity of that people rejects Zionists as fascistic, genocidal settlers that should be opposed in every way possible.
based and eloquently written pilled
Death to America
The history of antisemitism in Britain pre and immediately after ww2 may be worth noting. The brits didn't want Jewish people coming to Britain but they were happy enough to direct them to an imperial beachhead.
Herr Schmidt from Chile assures me that my opinion on the Third Reich is invalid because his family ties on the ground contradict me.
Just watched a jimmy dore video that explained it pretty well.
Yes
Jimmy dore. But it's some fill in host
Reading that grifter ass name
Permanently Deleted
“My family is doing a genocide, don’t you say different!”