Gerd Nonneman

Prof. International Relations & Gulf Studies / former Dean, Georgetown University Qatar. Tweets do not represent views of employers.

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.

This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

People will look back with nostalgia to the Qatar World Cup — at least those who actually attended (including the teams!)

[Professor Simon Chadwick @Prof_Chadwick]

The World Cup is an event fraught with risks

Public health concerns, extreme heat and terrorist threat are all challenging organisers
https://t.co/iYaVFwqRC5
@Fire_and_Skill #Geosport

[B'Tselem בצלם بتسيلم @btselem]

"Nations committing genocide don't recognize it in real time:" Yuli Novak, Executive Director of B'Tselem, joins this week's edition of the @haaretzcom Podcast to discuss Israel's moral crisis, the government's "propaganda machine," and the hotly debated New York Times article about sexual abuse of Palestinians.

Link to the full episode >> https://t.co/1IGAoJC5fl

Edited by Matan Oz.
Credits: Ofer Vaknin; Mahmoud Illean/AP; Video footage used in accordance with Section 27A of Israel's Copyright Law.

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

It's not just the exploitation of a tragedy.

JD Vance's picture of Britain - where migrants have led to a crime surge - is the opposite of the truth.

https://t.co/y5El5FUj7v

[Dilly Hussain @DillyHussain88]

“I took my rocket launcher and ordered the soldiers to bombard a building in Gaza where a Palestinian family lived…It was very fun to hear them scream while they burned alive.”

— IDF soldier Yarden Megira.

This is Zionism, and it’s mainstream in Israel.

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

This is absolutely brilliant — and so refreshing.

[Nader Itayim | ‌‌نادر ایتیّم @ncitayim]

🇸🇦 Saudi energy minister: If you don't know what is to come, it's absolutely fine to admit that.

"In the midst of definitely the biggest energy security crisis that the world has ever seen, I haven’t uttered a single word. And I intend to maintain that record, because I believe being silent is a type of talking.

"For me, to be silent is an admission, a humble admission of the fact that I don’t know what will happen. Not tomorrow, or even in half an hour’s time. So if you don’t know what will happen, you might as well be humble enough to say I don’t know it, and I’d rather preserve my self-respect, and the respect that people may have for me.

"And this is the very core of the situation today. There are so many moving parts. There are so many unknowns… If you don't know it, be silent. Being silent is a form of talking."

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Say it like it is 👏

[neyi kaybettiğini hatırla @neyikaybettik]

🔴İspanyol Dışişleri Bakanı:

▪️İtalya ve Almanya, Avrupa Birliği ile İsrail arasındaki Ortaklık Anlaşması'nın askıya alınmasını engelliyor.

▪️Ukrayna söz konusu olduğunda Almanya ahlaki bir bekçi gibi davranıyor, ancak Filistin söz konusu olduğunda üç maymunu oynuyor. Almanya ikiyüzlü ve acınası bir devlettir.

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Completely normal….

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

At the request of the illegal “Havat Maon” settlers, Israeli forces detained five Palestinian children, aged 8–12, for gathering wild vegetables and flowers near the settlement.

[Jadaliyya @jadaliyya]

“Jews were not singled out as the exceptional minority in the 19th century Middle East. It’s simply not the case. There’s nothing analogous to the antisemitism of Europe. Don’t allow people to take talking points to distract from the suffering of the Palestinians or even worse, to pit Arab Jews against Arab Palestinians."

What Have We Learned?
Israel’s Genocide — One Year On w/ @UssamaMakdisi and @4Bassam (Sep 2024)

https://t.co/2H2Lx64Mkv

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

This is the Israeli military justification for attacking a Lebanese army patrol inside Leb territory - ‘the area is an active combat zone, and movement in the area requires coordination with the IDF’ The Israeli military is demanding Leb troops asks its permission to move around its own country 🧵

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Brilliant.

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Rather nicely summarized.

[John Simpson @JohnSimpsonNews]

The only Gulf state which has come well out of the current crisis is Oman. Moderate, relaxed, and with a healthy sense of its own culture, it hopes to take the place of the UAE in trade terms. And it’s managed to keep its links with Iran.

[Itay Epshtain @EpshtainItay]

On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a war of aggression against Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and came to occupy the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, territory intended to form part of a future Palestinian State.

Within weeks, a young legal adviser at Israel's Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, set out the legal consequences with remarkable clarity. In a memorandum I recovered during archival research in 2019, he affirmed the applicability of the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention to the newly occupied territories, and recalled the prohibition on annexation.

Two months later, writing to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Meron advised that the establishment of civilian settlements in the occupied territories would be, in his words, in "contravention of explicit provisions" of international humanitarian law.

History has a habit of leaving breadcrumbs. Meron would later become President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and decades later advised the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on atrocity crimes committed by Netanyahu and others in Gaza. The legal position he articulated in 1967 has not changed. What has changed is that nearly six decades later, the warnings were ignored, the occupation entrenched and metastasized into unlawful presence, and the consequences are before us all.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

For the first time in British history, protestors are being sentenced as terrorists. Their crime? Breaking into an Elbit Systems factory - Israel's largest weapons producer - and destroying drones used to kill civilians in Gaza.

The judge secretly granted himself the power to sentence them as terrorists - and banned the British press from reporting it.

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Excellent piece from @AndrewMLeber outlining current trends in UAE (or rather Abu Dhabi) foreign policy, and its limitations:
Can the UAE Go It Alone? https://t.co/b1G26L3a4q via @ForeignAffairs

[Kristian Ulrichsen @Dr_Ulrichsen]

'Abu Dhabi prefers collective security and the containment of Iran by force, whereas Riyadh prefers collective diplomacy in pursuit of a negotiated settlement with Iran'

Good analysis from @AndrewMLeber on the UAE & regional/foreign policy options/choices
https://t.co/o93aaMfbak

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Apartheid South Africans used to say all the time that South Africa was "the only democracy in Africa."

They would herald South Africa's High Court decisions such as those nullifying racist state laws, as evidence of their democracy!

Sound familiar? https://t.co/EwaG70D8IY

[J Street @jstreetdotorg]

This is abhorrent.

Our Jewish values demand that we speak up and speak out against this kind of dehumanization of Palestinians and annexation of their land.

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Looks like most people (including large numbers of Jewish people) don’t approve of apartheid, genocide, or violent settler-colonialism after all. Who’d have thought?

[Gregg Carlstrom @glcarlstrom]

Support for Israel is increasingly a minority position in America. From the latest @pewresearch poll:

"60% of Americans said they hold unfavorable views of Israel, compared to 37% who view it favorably." (last year those figures were 53%/45%)

"74% of Americans ages 18-34 hold unfavorable views of Israel, compared to 65% of those aged 35-49 and 49% of those 50 and older." https://t.co/xOGyemJZ1j

[Gerd Nonneman @GerdDoha]

Reuters has standards after all.

[Reuters @Reuters]

CORRECTION: Israel plans major settlement push across occupied West Bank https://t.co/1MGC3gNXdo

We will delete a post that referenced Israel’s latest settlement push as being seen by many as illegal; Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank are deemed illegal under international law