Lemonpie

[Esmaeil Baqaei @IRIMFA_SPOX]

Scott Bessent: “The final stage begins today.”

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

@ajamubaraka It’s the latter. I don’t understand how people could have been tricked into this… like it’s a problem if you wanted to sign any version of this message.

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

Mumia Abu-Jamal sent a message about his actual feelings about the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. He wrote it on two paper plates. It is more eloquent than the Guardian letter, whose right to put his name down needs to be questioned. Who signed for Mumia?

A transcription of the text on the plates:

‘My young friends,

Iran is showing the world (especially the 3rd world) how to fight against the Empire. Their drones are rewriting the rules of war. And countries across the Global South are studying this phase of the war for that use!

They remind me of Vietnam poor country that whipped the most powerful army on earth... That's where we are today.

Love...
Mumia’

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

@AliAbunimah Okay but this is maybe slightly better than the nonsense he signed onto. Maybe don’t film yourself on a yacht next time and bemoan interruption to brunch.

[The Sameer Project @sameerproject]

More than half of our content is related to the need for water in Gaza. And that is because water is life!

Give water to Gaza: https://t.co/6l9JFjWInX

The most important initiative for The Sameer Project is water. Palestinians I. Gaza are getting around 5 liters of water per day when the minimum amount of water in conflict stated by the UN is 15 liters.

So in Gaza, people get 30% of the minimum amount of water needed. That is truly insane and unacceptable. The Sameer Project was doing half a million of liters per day and we had to recuse that due to lack of funds. We need at least $5,000 daily to go back to that number.

We can help quench thirst by providing consistent support. Sign up to our monthly donations through the Food & Water Campaign today: https://t.co/6l9JFjWInX

Other ways to donate include:
https://t.co/OmIU4SifDD (Paypal option, please make sure to add a message saying "WATER")
https://t.co/WNZu0ERJci (Venmo option, please make sure to add a message saying "WATER")

[Helyeh Doutaghi | حليا دوطاقي @Helyeh_Doutaghi]

Moving beyond the critique of the letter itself which has been already addressed by colleagues/friends, what has become visible over the past few days goes beyond the failure of one letter or the outrage surrounding it. It reveals something deeper about the political and intellectual order that produced it.

I. The decay of western left intellectual authority

For decades, prominent Western left intellectuals have spoken with an authority that assumed their analyses could shape movements and political/public consciousness. The extensive scrutiny and rejection this letter has received shows how such authority is eroding.

The Guardian and the wider mainstream media, even when furnished with left cover, increasingly struggle to manufacture the moral consensus they once could. Humanitarian language, progressive/abolitionist credentials, calibrated condemnations and declarations of solidarity remain available, but their power to confuse or persuade the masses is diminishing.

The empire is experiencing a crisis of hegemony (owed to historic defeat of US by Iran and Resistance by anti-colonial forces in West Asia) and its intellectual institutions are decaying with it.

II. Condemnation is not politics

There is also a question for those, including comrades, who have rightly condemned the letter: what does condemnation actually accomplish?

It can provide the feeling of opposition without confronting the structures producing the violence. It allows people to distinguish themselves from the most vulgar representatives of imperial power while remaining embedded in the society that sustains and benefits from it.

Thinking, analyzing and denouncing matter. But they cannot become substitutes for political transformation.

The harder question is therefore: what kind of movement continues to reproduce intellectual authorities so detached from the material anti-colonial struggles of the people they claim to stand beside?

And how have Western left intellectuals who took disastrous positions on Syria retained legitimacy and institutional authority with so little accountability for the violence to which they contributed?

III. The letter’s irrelevance to Iranian political life

Perhaps the most revealing fact is what has *not* happened.

I have been closely following Iranian spaces from inside Iran; universities, classrooms, women’s collectives, labour spaces and political discussions. I have seen no meaningful engagement with this letter.

Its circulation has been overwhelmingly concentrated in English-language media and Western political spaces. A letter that appears enormously important in the West has little discernible significance among the people whose lives it claims to address.

That gap exposes the distance between the political imagination of the imperial centre and the material reality of those living under its consequences.

Western subjects may be surprised to discover how irrelevant they have become to the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles unfolding beyond the imperial centre.

Finally

After everything i have lived through over the past two years, and specially after talking to Minab families, I refuse to extend the language of “good intentions” to those who signed this letter. They had decades of history, scholarship, testimony, war, sanctions, intervention and resistance from which to learn.

The future is being made by those who have proved capable of changing the balance of power in fav of the masses of the periphery. History is being made by the Resistance forces across West Asia led by the Islamic Republic of Iran, not through the increasingly irrelevant/saviour takes of the imperial intellectual class.

//
Let Iran’s beauty bless your day

[Dr.mostafa project🇵🇸𓂆 @MostafaBNaim1]

This was the last photo, taken just half an hour before the siege and destruction of the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza.

Here I was with my colleagues in the photo. The occupation killed most of them and detained the rest, while I was seriously injured that day.

At the time, we thought that the enemy still possessed at least a tiny shred of humanity. Just one shred. But sadly, the whole world now knows and fully understands that this occupation is a brutal, filthy criminal force that has destroyed stones and trees and slaughtered human beings.

They killed my colleagues before my eyes. Among them was the brave martyr, my colleague who is embracing me in this photo, Dr. Mohammed Qashqash, whom the occupation assassinated along with his family. His “crime” was that he was providing healthcare to the wounded of northern Gaza, at a time when the occupation wanted us to abandon our patients and leave them to die a thousand deaths, without treatment and without medical teams.

To my left is my brave martyred colleague, Wael Abu Sharia, and the detained Ahmed Shaheen. May God free him, along with the hundreds of my colleagues who remain detained.

Hasbunallahu wa ni'mal wakeel.

#I_Remained_Here_As_A_Witness_To_A_Brutal_Bloody_Holocaust
#A_World_That_Watches_And_Silently_Looks_Away
#The_Law_Of_The_Jungle_And_A_Weak_Lying_Cowardly_World

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran Resists An Illegal War of Aggression. My response to the letter in the Guardian, published at the International Peoples Assembly (@peoplesassembl_) website,

https://t.co/PaBI29ts25

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

So shameful

[Dr Vira Ameli | ویرا عاملی @viraameli]

Much has already been written about the hypocrisy of this letter. But one claim deserves particular attention. The authors repeat the story that Israel struck the ‘transgender section’ of Evin prison, purportedly housing 100 transgender prisoners. This false story circulated internationally after it was reported by the New York Times, before later investigations found no evidence to support it and the key source denied ever making the claim attributed to him.

Having spent my PhD years researching HIV in Iran, a subject that necessarily involved studying the legal, social and healthcare realities facing transgender people, I know full well that transgender people are not imprisoned in Iran for being transgender. Iran legally recognises transgender people and permits gender reassignment surgery. Furthermore, there are no dedicated prison wings housing 100 transgender prisoners.

Yet people who were willing to uncritically repeat such an implausible story are now writing open letters to Iranian prisoners, as though they possess a deep understanding of the people they claim to write to. It is another reminder of how often narratives about Iran are constructed from assumptions and second-hand mythologies, rather than from serious engagement with realities on the ground.

https://t.co/Sav02QXd2I

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

@PalmTreesnGz Yep.

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

Thank you for calling out everything that needs to be called out

[Sunny Singh @ProfSunnySingh]

A reminder to be wary of those who speak of justice and liberation from the imperial core. Empire’s lure of power adjacency, influence, comfort and legacy are VERY hard to refuse (and yet refuse we must)

[Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah]

There is only one imperialism on Earth. There may be others in the galaxy but not in this solar system. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

@NinaFarnia The left in the West is dead, this letter its funeral. The guardian was a big tell. It’s not just anti-Iran; they are 💩ing on anyone who dares to support 🇵🇸 in a material way. These academics have blood on their hands, using their positions to spew+amplify this trash

[Ajamu Baraka @ajamubaraka]

Western petit-bourgeois nonsense. In a period when the state is explicitly constructing "the far left" as a national-security enemy, why are these folks reproducing political divisions that make anti-imperialist dissenters easier to isolate & marginalize? https://t.co/s9nHudM17k

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

I just talked to Jewish-American and Muslim-American doctors who were in Gaza and featured in the movie American Doctor. They explained how many kids were shot in the head and chest by Israeli snipers. They're murdering the kids on purpose.

83% of American doctors who went to Gaza reported a child assassinated by a sniper with either a head or chest shot - every single day they were there. They're murdering the children on purpose.

One of the doctors explained that when Israel surrounds a hospital, bombs it, raids it and shuts it down, they purposely destroy all the life saving equipment. In the hospital he was in, they destroyed the incubators, and eight babies died without them.

We are being forced to finance a fascist country committing a genocide, while the monsters in our government and media pretend it isn't happening.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

Palestinian figure Fathi Khazem, 60 years old, father of Ra’ad and Abdulrahman Khazem, was killed by Israeli forces during a raid on his home near the main roundabout in central Jenin, after refusing to be humiliated in front of his family. Israeli forces then withheld his body.

In footage from inside the house, traces of his blood remained on the floor, bearing witness to his final moments.

Fathi Khazem, a father who carried the immense grief of losing two of his sons and lived his final years burdened by that loss, joins them today as a martyr.

[TIMES OF GAZA @Timesofgaza]

Traces of the blood of martyr Fathi Khazem, known as “Abu Raad,” at the scene after he was killed by Israeli army gunfire during a raid on his home in Jenin, with his body being withheld.

[Nina Farnia @NinaFarnia]

My latest. "A Tale of 2 Strikes (and Dreams of More)"
https://t.co/0U3LSzraLn

"The general strike can produce a revolution, consolidate
a social democracy & even accelerate national liberation. Its an undeniable
& under-studied motor of human liberation"

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

This

[Nick Cruse 🥋 @SocialistMMA]

Synagogues all over the United States and UK are facilitating the theft of Palestinian lands, selling them to Jews for ultra cheap in order to accelerate the colonization of the West Bank

As this is happening the number one priority of Zohran Mamdani and progressives is to talk about the rise of antisemitism! Smearing the working class a bigoted for wanting to hold these genocidal monsters accountable

[Lemonpie @Lemonpie749221]

@CyrusParsa1 @Gompers_Stomper ‼️‼️‼️