Samuel Geddes

Opinions my own.
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[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

#BretStephens thought he was clever when he rhetorically asked why, if #Israel is committing #genocide, the official toll is “only” 60,000. Whenever investigators are allowed in, it will be clear that hundreds of thousands of #Gazans have been killed.
https://t.co/844PtZ8f9b

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@UrOrientalist I have no knowledge of this dispute, but resembling George Lucas (I don't believe this guy does) is nothing if not a blessing.

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@anasgameland Elon did something right for a change.

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@JewishGenomics Sure Jan.

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

When are such rumours NOT circulating?

[Mecha @MechaNews_]

Rumors of a possible nuclear attack are circulating.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

Why is he shocked? The prevention of genocide is one of the core rationales for the UN’s existence. Netanyahu is a Génocidaire.

The real shame is that Israel has not been expelled from the UN.

[Nazia Kazi @NaziaKaziTweets]

“Hollow anti imperialism”: fighting a literal war against the actual empire
“Legit anti imperialism”: being a famous intellectual in the USA

[asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل @asadabukhalil]

This is not new: Invoking moral equivalence between colonialism/imperialism and its victims can only serve colonialism/imperialism.

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@rabbigert Would you like to speak to the Manager?

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

The Guardian has published an open letter to Iran’s political prisoners, signed by Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, Walden Bello, among others.

These are not people to be dismissed lightly. Several have given their lives to the anti-imperialist and Black liberation movements, and one of them is writing from inside a US prison. I take no pleasure in disagreeing with them. But the letter is wrong, and plays an objectively harmful role.

Its central image is the “two blades of a scissors”: the Islamic Republic on one side, US and Israeli imperialism on the other, with the Iranian people crushed between them. It inserts a symmetry between the world’s major imperialist power and an anti-imperialist state that has never invaded another country, and which has stood consistently with the oppressed from Palestine to South Africa to Venezuela.

The load-bearing phrase is this: “we reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism.” Exactly how “hollow” is Tehran’s anti-imperialism? 😵‍💫

For four decades, while almost every Arab government made its accommodation with Washington and Tel Aviv, Iran armed, funded and sustained the Palestinian resistance. It refused normalisation when the Abraham Accords put enormous inducements on the table. It has absorbed forty years of sanctions, assassinations of scientists, sabotaged infrastructure, and now an open war of aggression, rather than abandon that position.

The states that normalised are not being bombed. Hollow anti-imperialism is a communiqué and a hashtag. Iran’s anti-imperialism has been measured in the blood of 168 Minab schoolgirls, in the bombing of its hospitals and oil depots.

One can vehemently disagree with aspects of Iran’s domestic politics, but the question at hand is: where do we stand in the global struggle against imperialism? What side of the barricade are we on? Do we support a criminal war of aggression waged by the US and Israel, or we we support the resistance to that war? Do we support genocide in Gaza, or do we support the country that has been the Palestinian resistance’s most consistent ally for decades?

This letter dissolves the distinction entirely. It asks us to refuse the choice. But in a war of aggression there is no third position available, because only one party benefits from your neutrality – and it’s not the party being bombed.

The letter appears in a British newspaper, six months into a US-Israeli war, at the precise moment when Washington cannot win militarily and needs the political terrain softened. It recycles a familiar vocabulary – sham trials, systematic torture, the targeting of minorities – without sourcing, in the genre that has preceded and accompanied every single regime-change war. Whatever the signatories intended, that is the function it will serve: making the moral case for war.

Angela Davis was imprisoned by a state that told the world she was a terrorist. Mumia Abu-Jamal is imprisoned by that state today. These are people who know exactly what happens when an empire manufactures the moral case for crushing its enemies. They would not have signed, half a century ago, a letter denouncing both blades of the scissors – COINTELPRO on one side and the Black Panther Party on the other.

Progressive and anti-war forces have a duty to support Iran against war, sanctions, regime change plots and destabilisation.

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@AnaKasparian Answer: Yes.

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@loongshih Regardless, the "Before" image is superior, IDC.

[Setareh Sadeqi 𓂆 ☫ @Leelako]

I talked to TRT about US war on Iran and recent remarks by Trump

https://t.co/s8KAx1YSpB

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@abierkhatib Bit late for that now.

[Heshmat Alavi's Trenchcoat @UrOrientalist]

They nuked my channel

[Elijah J. Magnier 🇪🇺 @ejmalrai]

Donald Trump is not endorsing benjamin netanyahu, an ICC fugitive for war crimes, elections.

Israel brought the US by the nose into a war with Iran with no exit, humiliated and forced Trump into a catering truck.

[Esmaeil Baqaei @IRIMFA_SPOX]

The US Secretary of the Treasury has boasted of “suffocating” Iran through economic sanctions.

Beyond its sheer pathos, the claim is a stark testament to America’s compulsive addiction to sanctions. Whenever Washington proves itself incapable of pursuing diplomacy, it retreats into sanctions; and whenever those sanctions fail to produce results, it simply increases the dose.

This is no longer 'policy'—it is 'habit'; and more dangerously still, it is an addiction that has displaced thought itself.

Iran has demonstrated over decades that it will not be strangled by these exhausted refrains. The real risk is that American politicians, clinging to this bad habit, will instead strangle their own remaining chances of a less humiliating exit from a crisis of their own making.

[Tikun Olam 🍉🇮🇷 @richards1052]

The photo gives it away. But check out those titles carefully

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@keithedwards What in the goddamn...

[Samuel Geddes @SamuelGeddes]

@CyrilH44 Please be serious.

[Tikun Olam 🍉🇮🇷 @richards1052]

Yes. If you muddy your identity and make Jewish & Zionist interchangeable, then you pay a price.