Nils De Groef

🏯 Même si la peur m'assaille,
Je partirai comme un samuraï 👺

[Maryam De Groef @MaryamDeGroef]

This week marks 2 years since Zeynah left returned to her creator. In her honour, pls help us reach 10k for the Pediatric Critical Care unit that went above and beyond for her https://t.co/IAtL7IAsYT
@SultanAChoudhr1 @caffiienated @CorporateAndy @KashifMD @CHFHope

[Maryam De Groef @MaryamDeGroef]

A big Thank You to everyone who contributed & shared our @HumanityFirstUK #waterwell project in honour of our beloved Zz. @SultanAChoudhr1 @KashifMD @tariqmah @ismat @Hallie_Sawyer @TammaraSoma @thecndnmuslim @AmirMAhmad1

[Maryam De Groef @MaryamDeGroef]

Last week I spoke at @LHSCCanada to over 150 healthcare professionals about the impact of #organdonation for #organdonationawarenessmonth in the same place Zeynah died a year ago. What an experience!! @NilsDeGroef @TrilliumGift @CorporateAndy
https://t.co/UV2iEMxc8Z

[Maryam De Groef @MaryamDeGroef]

In honour of Z giving the #giftoflife 1 year ago, we've set up a campaign 2 get 366 ppl to register to #beadonor @TrilliumGift
@corporateandy @LajnaCanada @LajnaPVLCanada
https://t.co/RyPMLgCpG1

[Maryam De Groef @MaryamDeGroef]

What a year - 366 days since your anaphylaxis. You've transcended the physical realm and your energy & love fills all the lives you've touched in one way or another. Islam promises us life after death & you transcended that too by giving life.
https://t.co/yT2ujuK4TD

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Pentagon spokesperson acts shocked and aghast that anyone would suggest repeatedly bombing a foreign country could mean you are at war with them.

[Nils De Groef @NilsDeGroef]

@Yvonne_Lavinia I finally paid off mine earlier this year too! 🥳🥳🥳

[Richard Medhurst @richimedhurst]

UN Security Council resolutions are legally binding.

Israel has never implemented a single one. It continues to violate UNSC 242 and others by illegally occupying and annexing the Syrian Golan Heights, the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Even if the United States hadn't vetoed the ceasefire, Israel would just ignore it and violate it anyway.

Israel would also continue to murder UN staff—more UN staff have been killed in this war than any war in the United Nations history.

And yet Israel loves pointing to its membership at the United Nations, to claim legitimacy as a "state".

Israel cherry picks what it likes and burns the rest. Hypocrisy at its finest.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

If I Were Going To Commit A Genocide

If I were going to commit a genocide, I’d make sure to kill as many women and children as possible to eliminate the future generations of the people I was trying to wipe out. Come to think of it, I guess I’d do what Israel is doing in Gaza.

If I were going to commit a genocide, I’d deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure to make it harder and harder for the undesirable population to survive. Actually, one good example of this would be what Israel is reportedly doing in Gaza today.

If I were going to commit a genocide, I’d make sure to target cultural centers to destroy the history and culture of the population I wished to remove, taking out their museums and ancient religious buildings. You know what? I suppose I’d do pretty much exactly what Israel is currently doing in Gaza.

Another thing I’d do if I were going to commit a genocide is make sure to kill all the best and brightest members of the population I was trying to exterminate — their doctors, lawyers, academics, journalists and thought leaders — in order to prevent any reconstruction of the civilization I was trying to stomp out. In other words I’d do what Israel is presently doing in Gaza.

If I were going to commit a genocide, obviously I’d have to make sure all my main underlings were on board for the operation, so you’d probably see them spouting genocidal rhetoric all the time in support of those plans. Kind of like the way Israeli officials have been talking for the last two months when discussing their operations in Gaza.

If I were going to commit a genocide, I’d also want to have a plan to drive the undesirables who couldn’t be eliminated by mass murder off the land I wanted them removed from. You’d see people in my government frequently discussing plans for ethnic cleansing, in very much the same way you’re seeing such discussions over and over again among Israeli officials and thought leaders.

If I were going to commit a genocide, I’d keep attacking the undesirable population with extreme aggression while pushing them further and further toward a foreign border, eventually forcing other nations to either take them in or keep allowing them to be slaughtered as I rain military explosives upon their continually shrinking living space.

Either way I get rid of the population I was trying to get rid of, and I can repopulate the land I seized with a more desirable sort of people. In other words I’d do exactly what Israel is clearly doing, in plain view of the entire world.

[Lowkey @Lowkey0nline]

Israeli occupation forces shot this unarmed man in the head while he was standing with his small child in Qalqilya today in the West Bank.

This is fascism.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Motaz Azaiza is Our 2023 'Man Of The Year' - GQ Middle East https://t.co/U9IPVSoVRN

[jeremy scahill @jeremyscahill]

The list of Palestinians to be potentially released by Israel has 300 names:
—270 children
—30 women
—233 have not been convicted of anything
—21 are accused of throwing stones

[Richard Medhurst @richimedhurst]

Israeli officials going on TV, saying that Palestinians should be distributed around the world like objects.

Why? So someone from Brooklyn or Ukraine can live on their land.

Ethnic cleansing & genocide are crimes against humanity, but zero pushback from these "reporters". Vile.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Israel getting mad at Hamas for killing Israelis is like a man getting mad at his shadow for darkening his floor. It's maddening to see grown adults acting like Hamas are these foreign invaders who attacked Israelis out of the blue out of a hatred for Jewish people, like they're internet-radicalized neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or something.

Hamas attacked Israel because Israel is a murderous and tyrannical apartheid regime who butchers children and makes lives miserable for the Palestinian people. The violence on October 7 was the echo of the violence Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians for generations. Only a fool gets angry at his echo for talking back to him.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Someone uploaded one of those viral “help identify this racist jerk” clips featuring a man accosting a street vendor with awful Islamophobic vitriol, and it turned out he was the former US State Department Deputy Director in the Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs.

It sounds made up, but that’s exactly what just happened; Vice has a whole article out about it. The video was uploaded today, and within hours the man was identified as Stuart Seldowitz, who helped direct US diplomacy on Israel-Palestine from 1999 to 2003 and then served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council.

Seldowitz’s identity was confirmed by his former employer Gotham Government Relations, who released a statement denouncing him and saying they’ve ended all affiliation with him.

Seldowitz is seen hounding the New York City vendors in multiple different videos wearing multiple different outfits, showing a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse. He told them while fully aware he was being filmed that Israel killing thousands of Palestinian kids “wasn’t enough”, insulted their religion, threatened them, mocked their intelligence and their English, called them terrorists, and asked “Did you rape your daughter like Mohammed did?” From the videos he appears to be harassing them for no reason other than because they are Muslims selling halal food.

That such a horrible person could climb his way to the highest echelons of the world’s most powerful government — working on Palestinian affairs no less — illustrates an important point about the US empire and what it is. There are no barriers stopping such creatures from rising to the top of that power structure, just the opposite in fact — they get an express lane to the top. That’s why bloodthirsty swamp monsters like John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and Elliott Abrams find themselves so intimately involved with US policymaking.

That’s the true face of the US empire, right there. That’s the empire at its most honest. Not dressed up in affable charm and slick PR work, but sneering and hurling racist invective at immigrants who are just trying to do their jobs in peace. Not performing carefully rehearsed faces of compassion for the Palestinians who are being tragically unintentionally killed as collateral damage in Israel’s war of defense against Hamas, but staring right into the camera and saying “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough.”

Too many people look at Israel as something separate from the US empire, seeing it as a small nation run by a historically mistreated ethnic group that everyone singles out and picks on unfairly. If you look at Israel separately from the US-centralized global power structure, it feels off to have any forceful animosity toward Israel and its government, because it feels like you’re picking on the little guy.

It’s only when you see clearly that Israel is just an arm of the same empire that’s been murdering people by the millions around the world with nonstop invasions, bombing campaigns, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and CIA coups that you understand that, yes, Israel really is exactly as evil as it appears to be, and its behavior in Gaza is exactly what it looks like.

The US empire backs Israel for the same reason it backs most of the world’s dictatorships: because a globe-spanning empire can only be held together by nonstop violence and tyranny. Israel and other US-aligned states in the middle east are like the chair and the whip of a lion tamer — weapons used to violently abuse the populations of a crucial geostrategic region into compliance. It suits the empire perfectly to have a nuclear-armed government which exists in a constant state of war in the middle east governed by officials who speak English with American accents and interests which are reliably in alignment with those of the United States.

Stuart Seldowitz is not an aberration but a perfect manifestation of all this. This is the sort of mind which keeps the empire marching along from administration to administration no matter who Americans elect. This is the sort of mind which keeps the weapons flowing, the blood pouring, the fossil fuels burning, and the terrified screams which power the imperial machine continually erupting into the night sky.

[Ritika Goel @RitikaGoelTO]

As long as I have known @yipengGe, he has been committed to equity, anti-racism and justice. He has been unjustly suspended from residency, without due process, for supporting Palestinian human rights. Please tell @OttawaU this is not OK. https://t.co/9ohHTVxOss

[Maryam De Groef @MaryamDeGroef]

On World Children's Day...I pray for the safety, security & freedom of all children. May they live to see happier/better days #voicesforpeace #CeasefireNOW

[Amer Zahr @AmerZahr]

The same people think "Black Lives Matter" & "From the river to the sea" are hateful. You know why?

Because they think when we demand our own rights, that we are denying others'... because that's what they did.

I'm not a psychologist, but I think that's called "projection."

[Joseph Hill @nebedaay]

Many Zionist tweeters claim pro-Palestine protests are barbaric and genocidal (not true from what I've seen), while the pro-Israel protests are calm and civilized. This guy: "We'll remove Gaza from the earth! You're animals! Animals! The end of Gaza! The end of your people!"

[Davide Mastracci @DavideMastracci]

After spreading two blatant falsehoods in a day, CIJA has deleted both from their Twitter. No acknowledgement of doing so that I can see, and no apology for spreading them.

If you aren’t already, be skeptical of *everything* this sort of groups says. Journalists especially.