@25YearsAgoLive lol he thought the hijackers were poor ignorant sandn!Ggers thank fuck Hilary was his secretary of defense bc motherfucker would never have nailed osama without her
It’s actually amazing how dog shit Obama’s reflections on 9/11 were in 2001. His writing is amazing because it actually perfectly illustrates how the left never understood 9/11 ever.
Obama said that the fundamental problem was that the hijackers lacked empathy and that their lack of empathy grew out of “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Basically a version of “hurt people hurt people.”
But Bin Laden came from a billionaire family and the pilots and planners were all university-educated, middle-class men.
Marc Sageman analysed hundreds of terrorist biographies and found that three quarters of his al-Qaeda sample came from the upper or middle class, 90 percent from intact families, and 63 percent had attended college against a developing world norm of 5–6 percent.
They were essentially a kind of jihadist version of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard organisation with a much higher concentrated pool of human capital than the masses they claimed to speak for. Qutb's Milestones actually explicitly calls for a vanguard to lead the Muslim masses, and Qutb is the intellectual lineage Zawahiri came out of.
And rather than lacking empathy for their victims, they knew full well that they were inflicting massive suffering on the world - they simply believed that Americans deserved this suffering.
Think about it for a second. How do we define the concept of empathy? It’s the ability to understand and access the feelings of others. This necessarily rests upon an understanding that the other party is in fact human and can feel.
The 9/11 hijackers and the men who plotted it knew full well that their victims were human. They fully understood that they were slaughtering thousands of American civilians in some of the most brutal ways imaginable. It’s not that they dehumanised Americans - they knew they were human and wanted them to suffer.
Cruelty requires cognitive empathy - you can't design maximal suffering without modelling the victim's mind. To terrorise, humiliate or maximise suffering you have to model what the target dreads, what will break them, what they will see coming.
Bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America" argues that American civilians are not innocent because they elect their government and fund it through taxes. That is the collective-guilt argument in the perpetrators' own words - it presupposes Americans are moral agents, not sub-human.
So Obama diagnosed a deficit - an "inability to imagine" - when the 9/11 hijackers and plotters in fact imagined the suffering perfectly well. They wanted to inflict suffering on Americans because they believed their actions were morally right.
Al-Qaeda operated according to a highly developed and ideological Schmittian friend-enemy distinction framework, yet Obama naively imagined they were a bunch of poor suffering Third Worlders who could have been diverted from attacking America through development aid, economic opportunity and education.
Doesn’t work like that when your enemy marks you as an eternal enemy against which anything is justified.
What is micropenis?
It is a real medical condition. And for the people living with it, the suffering can go far beyond physical size.
Imagine growing up afraid of being mocked. Avoiding locker rooms. Being terrified of intimacy. Constantly comparing yourself to others. Feeling like one part of your body defines your masculinity or your worth.
Many men with micropenis can have normal erections, orgasms and sexual function. But the psychological pressure, embarrassment and social stigma can be incredibly difficult.
We talk a lot about body positivity, but men’s body insecurities are often still treated as a joke.
Maybe this is something we should have a little more empathy about.
Ah yes. The usual lie that “Israel is only unpopular because of certain leaders”.
Bro, Arabs were killing Jews BEFORE Israel was even established. Israel was hated BEFORE Ben Gvir & Smotrich were born. Nations have stood against Israel throughout its history.
The only difference now is that you have a global system of billions of Muslims, with countries like Qatar pumping money into education in the Western world. Like, what do you expect?
The UN places countries like Iran (the regime) in charge of women’s equality, and gives the worst authoritarian, autocratic Islamist regimes (that hate the Jews) the power to vote in UN resolutions.
Israel was the one attacked on October 7th and it’s them who are demonised for their response.
No one—Right or Left—in Israel would not have viciously attacked Hamas. No one.
Honestly Piers, I know saying this gets you likes. But it makes you come across like someone with stunted reasoning capabilities. Like, try thinking a little deeper every now and then.
You keep saying the same garbage—never addressing the fact that Israel would have been hated regardless.
Like damn, give it a rest my guy.
Ps, Ben Gvir definitely doesn’t help the situation at all sometimes. MANY Israelis wish he would hold his tongue. But unlike most of the Islamic states, he lives in a democracy and can say what he wants.
The fact that people zoom in on him makes my point. He’s just an easy target. If Ben Gvir wasn’t there, the world would find another reason to paint Israel in a negative light.
“Looking back, the adoption of the “Zionism is racism” resolution is arguably one of the Soviet Union’s most successful active-measures operations.
A component of Soviet psychological warfare, active measures were aimed, in the words of KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, at “altering perceptions”: planting doubts about the host country’s democratic and capitalist system and undermining ideals, values, founding narratives, social norms, and national identity—and doing so through legitimate means, by exploiting its own institutions, press, and political and legal systems.
The United Nations offered an unparalleled arena for it. Its scale, prestige, and moral authority guaranteed global resonance for any campaign carried out under its auspices.”
My latest for @tabletmag
Because foreign powers want to weaken the West and reshape the global order in order to expand their own influence and power, and they have realized that there is alkost no issue that divides Western countries, especially the United States, as much as Jews and Israel.
Not transgender issues. Not even immigration.
People lose their minds and become politically divided, first and foremost, over Jews and Israel, a subject that some people in these countries already have an obsessive preoccupation with.
And that’s how a conflict that, in terms of the number of victims, doesn’t even come close to the ten bloodiest conflicts in the world over the past five years ends up dominating a huge share of the headlines.
That’s how artists who aren’t particularly successful can get enormous amounts of free publicity, politicians can get more airtime, and individuals can rally around an issue that allows them to signal virtue without having to understand much about it.
🚨 Apparently, exposing and humiliating DHS is the only tactic we have left, so here we go:
As you watch the video of this howling banshee, keep in mind, this is someone who has overstayed her student visa by 4 years.
She is an illegal alien.
Leqaa Kordia is a fake “student” from the West Bank who arrived on a student visa in 2016.
She was supposed to return in 2022, but never did.
Kordia is a Palestinian terror-supporter who refers to herself as a “political prisoner in America.”
She’s been here on our dime for 10 years.
Our taxes paid for her housing, her food, and her fake school attendance.
There is no evidence she ever attended college, other than a few weeks in a language course.
She became an unhinged protestor during the riots at Columbia University, despite not being a student.
Kordia was seen screaming her brains out for the destruction of America and Israel, while waving the Palestinian flag like a lunatic.
ICE arrested her one year ago. One of Biden’s commie judges released her.
Upon her release, she began screeching, “FREE PALESTINE” and led a chant in Arabic for Allah.
She now gives interviews as an activist against ICE.
Naturally, in every interview, she trashes America and Israel.
The Republican party is stumbling around wondering why 77 million voters are pissed off at them?
THIS. THIS IS A HUGE WHY.
Our window to remove criminal foreigners who promote terrorism will not remain open indefinitely.
@FBI@DHSgov@POTUS
100%.
It's less that they started caring about Gaza and more that they found a permission slip to stop caring about everything else.
And their one thing is too faraway for them to have any actual expectations of responsibility for their "caring" to amount to anything.
They're giving up on Gaza real quick too: 6 months ago "Free Palestine" switched to "fuck AIPAC", now I've seen these types just say "the Jewish lobby", and they're honing in on making lists of specific Jewish celebrities and their allies to cyberbully with specific imagery evoking themes of blood libel and visuals of old antisemitic propaganda.
Human minds don't like big abstract things. Or hard things. It was always going to collapse into bullying Jewish people. 4channers even supply them with all the words, talking points, and memes to spread.
They can keep all the moralizing leftist clout but this time they don't even have to pretend to unlearn the internalized bigotry of their evangelical suburban conservative upbringings. It's comforting, familiar, and now they get to feel good about it. It confirms those biases.
And as angry white men, without all those pesky social issues, now *they* get to be the victims and heroes and the only thing that *actually* matters.
You can really start to see how boomers went from Woodstock hippies to the maga base.
Opposing foreign interventionalism is the easiest cause in the world as long as you don't get a job in the government. I don't think you can beat the good clout to low effort ratio in any other policy area.
Path of least resistance. Lowest common denominator. You can't debate a bigot into realizing they're a bigot like that'll solve anything.
We need to celebrate other causes, politicians, and activism. We need to make other things, doing anything, just as easy to get involved with and as socially rewarding to do.
Rich white kids are seeking moral validation by bullying Ed Sheeran, to be "less bad" than him, when they should be flowing into actual causes, groups, and being part of solutions.
2010s slactivism used to at least be positive and try to center vulnerable groups that could try to harness that energy better with smarter calls to action. Now it just attacks targets. Gross.
Here are just three specific examples that undermine Weasel Mehdi’s false “consensus” narrative:
- Amnesty Israel, which publicly rejected Amnesty International’s genocide report.
- Former ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan who - in an interview with Weasel Mehdi himself! - said he had not found evidence supporting a genocide allegation.
- Former UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who repeatedly refused to apply the genocide label to the Gaza war despite an outright bullying campaign from within the UN.
I look at those two "filmmakers" and their film, NAZA. Absolute lies from beginning to end.
My country was the one torn apart on October 7. But it did not begin there. For decades, we Israelis have been targets of Islamist terrorists and extremists in Gaza and around the world.
Let me ask you something. Have you ever imagined seeing your friend beheaded? Your children bleeding to death? Your grandmother burning to death? What other extremist ideology has produced this much terror, this much evil?
For three years, I have lived with the atrocities of October 7. I put my life aside to create a record that could never be erased or forgotten. I went to sleep with these images every night, crying out to the world: Do not forget.
I have seen things I cannot even write about. I have watched atrocities that words cannot describe. Here in Israel, we have respect for the dead. We have never wanted to publish images of the bodies of those who were murdered. Their families do not deserve to live with those images forever.
If the full footage were released, many people would be psychologically harmed by images the human mind cannot process.
We never wanted war with Gaza. Lebanon did not interest us either. For years, we begged our government to end the constant attacks - decades of rockets and incendiary kites while we remained trapped in a disastrous policy of restraint that helped bring October 7 to our doorstep.
What would you do if a terrorist wearing a green headband broke into your home, abducted your wife and children, dragged them into a dark tunnel, starved them, and murdered them with his own hands? What if your neighbors were murdered in their beds? If your daughters were raped? What would you do?
Again and again, we watched a world driven by antisemitism blame us and turn the predator into the victim. We watched you threaten us, isolate us, condemn us.
We buried our dead and stood up again. Together. United. We fought back. We rose from the ashes and took back our skies. We lost soldiers. We lost our sons. In a war we never asked for.
We watched people celebrate the massacre against us and hit "like" on photos of our kidnapped children. And now we have watched people from within our own society sell their souls for money and sell us out for applause - the same kind of applause heard in Khan Younis when a crowd cheered as members of the Bibas family were returned in coffins.
We survived that cursed day. We stood up again. We fought on every front. Thousands of terrorists were eliminated. The IDF paid a devastating price while taking measures intended to avoid harming civilians. Had we not been stopped again and again, we would have continued to act against the Islamic regime - the head of the octopus behind so much of our suffering.
Many of us also fight on the information front, as platforms blur our evidence and silence us while Iranian agents and bots distort the truth.
Many of you know me through my documentation of October 7. The stories and testimonies will continue to be told. We will not surrender to pressure or vested interests. Deep down, you know the truth.
September 11, October 7, January 8, and the atrocities in Sweida - we have seen the bodies, the blood, and the horror. We know what murderous Islamist jihadists are capable of. And still, they receive applause from comfortable seats in Venice and elsewhere around the world. You have always looked away from our losses, just as the world now looks away while innocent Iranians are executed day after day.
Make no mistake. We are the ones condemning you. And in the name of every victim whose suffering you chose to ignore, we will never forgive you.
There is only one truth. You will never erase it. We never asked for war. But when war comes knocking at our door, we will be the ones who win.
This is me in 2023, looking at what they had done to us, realizing my life had changed forever.