Ghayth

[Macklemore @macklemore]

What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage. When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.

So we're going on tour. All proceeds will benefit organizations supporting the Palestinian people and movement.

Sign up at https://t.co/2na35y8pQ5

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[Richard Sanders @PulaRJS]

Our Double Down Newswatch interview with @SangitaMyska has now gone through 1 million views.

Keep sharing. /1

[Ghayth @J_ghayth]

@Tokyo_pi1 @grok what's cricuit training?

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

Rome built stadiums to stop its own people from rising up. Two thousand years later, we're still walking into the same trap — only we pay for it now.

Al Jazeera's Basel Ghazoghli breaks it down.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

This non-cyclist friend of mine asked me to ask cyclist and non-cyclist experts in the subject to fact-check the list below.

[Ben Swann @BenSwann_]

October 7’s Sanitized Story Just Cracked Open, And the Footage Is Damning

For years, Americans were fed a heavily sanitized version of what really happened on October 7. One of the most advanced military and intelligence apparatuses on Earth stood down for seven hours while its own citizens were slaughtered and taken hostage by Hamas.

The Hannibal Directive, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory, is now being confirmed as fact. The burned cars, flattened homes, and devastating human toll that were used to justify Israel’s military response, to justify mass devastation in Gaza, are now being confirmed as engineered by the Israeli government itself.

A new documentary is now surfacing footage of senior Israeli officials appearing to coordinate a mass Hannibal event in real time. In the opening hours of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, while speaking with Israel’s Police Chief Kobi Shabtai, a senior officer is heard calling to implement the Hannibal Directive, ordering Gaza destroyed along with the Israeli captives still inside. Minister Itamar Ben Gvir then walks in and orders the camera turned off.

Charlie Kirk, shortly before his assassination, questioned: “Was there a stand-down order given by Israel on Oct. 7th? Six hours to respond? I don’t believe it. They’re going to ethnically cleanse Gaza.”

The new footage now proves these questions weren't out of bounds.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

listen, this little video might actually be the single best thing I've ever been involved in producing in my whole career - take 128 seconds to watch it and pass it on

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

Throughout the west, criticizing the Netanyahu government is now a crime punishable by imprisonment. Glenn Greenwald on the end of free speech.

(0:00) The Current State of Free Speech
(12:52) Are Jewish Students Underrepresented at Ivy League Schools?
(16:10) Israel's Influence in America
(23:54) Why Are Republicans Attacking Free Speech?
(28:51) Where Are All the Protests?
(34:34) Why Is War the Only Thing Both Parties Agree On?
(36:36) Ron DeSantis's Strange Trip to Israel
(40:44) Is Ethnic Conflict Being Intentionally Promoted?
(50:04) The Future of American Politics and the Israel Lobby
(52:43) Charlie Kirk
(57:57) What Will America Look Like After This War?
(1:02:10) Will Americans Be Arrested for Their Opinions?
(1:09:07) Will We See Violent Attacks in the US?

[Dr. Omar Suleiman @omarsuleiman]

You’ve been lied to. The Muslims don’t hate you, they hate injustice.

[TCN @TCNetwork]

Could this be a religious war designed to rebuild the Third Temple on the ashes of Al Aqsa? Hope not.

[maxim khalil @MaximKhalil]

خذوا من التاريخ العبر ..
بالوقت الذي تغرق فيه المخيمات بأهلها
يتم تجديد ديكورات الكثير من مكاتب و بيوت الكثير من المسؤولين الجدد ..علماً انهم دخلو إلى مكاتب وبيوت مسؤولين سوريين سابقين !! و نعلم جيداً ان هذه الاماكن لا تحتاج إلى اعادة تأهيل فهي فارهة بما يكفي ..بل مانحتاج إلى اعادة تأهيله هي عقلية من يدخل هذه الاماكن ..
بعد مرور سنة وشهرين مازال سوريون على ارض سوريا يسكنون الخيام .. لماذا ؟؟
بعد عشرات حملات التبرع في كل المحافظات ومبالغ طائلة وظيتة وظنبليطة ..هناك أطفال ونساء في مخيمات لجوء !! لماذا؟؟
ألم تستطع الدولة ان تجد آلية تسكين مؤقت !! كم هي التكلفة ؟؟
ادخلو الآن إلى ملفات تكاليف المؤتمرات و الافتتاحات والاتفاقيات ..الخ …
ستكتشفون كم كان بامكانكم ان تغيروا بواقع هذا الملف ..
إذا لم تستطع العمل على كل الملفات بشكل متساوي ومتوازي فالأولية هنا للسوريين الذين يعيشون واقع يحتاج إلى تغيير فعلي ..الاولوية للملف الاغاثي ثم التنموي ..بالنسبة لي تغيير و تحسين واقع معيشة المواطن اهم من كل الاستعراضات و الحفلات و الترندات لأن كل الأموال المهدورة على تجميل الواجهة لن تجدي نفعاً.. فامام لحظة حقيقة واحدة وواقع أليم واحد تسقط كل الترندات لانها حالة مؤقتة لا تغطي الجوهر إلى الابد ..
والجوهر في سوريا هو "الانسان السوري"
الاخطاء بالجملة ..قبل ان تبرروا الآن ..اعملوا
#المخيمات_سورية

[Ghayth @J_ghayth]

@martyrmade @VigilantFox I love you Darryl, I'm Syrian living in Damascus. I've been following you for a long time, and my only wish is that you research Syria more. You view Assad as the good guy and that is just wrong. Christians are living better now than under Assad.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Please watch this. If you're American or British, you're paying for the mass famine Israel has been imposing and continues to impose on Gaza.

Alex de Waal is a leading famine scholar who has worked on most recent famines. Listen to what he says here about starvation in Gaza:

[Middle East Observer @ME_Observer_]

⚡️ ⭕️ Boycott campaign shared on resistance social media:

"Boycott Israeli products....
Don't be a pig"

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

“إن تفتيت الدول العربية إلى دويلات طائفية وعرقية يخدم الأمن القومي الإسرائيلي لعقود قادمة."

من وثيقة “كيفونيم” الإسرائيلية (1982)

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Just to be sure, on this day more than ever: I stand firmly and convincingly on the side of justice, as I have always done. I come from a country with a tradition of illustrious legal scholars, talented lawyers and corageous judges who have defended justice at great cost and often with their own life. I intend to honor that tradition.
Also: it is called the Rome Statute for a reason, and I am proud of it.

[WikiLeaks @wikileaks]

Hollywood has been planting the mental seeds for the war in Iran and the massacre of Palestinians for years

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

Top: An Israeli soldier with American citizenship, less than 24 hours after being released by the Palestinian resistance—healthy and calm.

Bottom: Palestinian civilians, less than 24 hours after being released from Israeli camps—exhausted bodies marked by severe torture.