Dost Khan

“Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself.” Rousseau.

[Dost Khan @TheRealDostKhan]

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.” Gamal Abdel Nasser.

[Joseph Lumbard, شاكر عبد الحق @JosephLumbard]

The case for knowing the Bible rests not on faith alone. Be one a thoroughgoing skeptic, an adherent of another faith, or wholly indifferent to religion, the Bible remains foundational for any in the Anglophone world who wish to know the world in which they live.

To speak English is already to speak the Bible. To call someone the salt of the earth, defer to the powers that be, complain of a thorn in the flesh, see the writing on the wall, or warn against the root of all evil, is to reference a translation finished in 1611. Failure to recognize these inherited idioms is to leave one’s own speech but half-comprehended.

One could cite the biblical references in the great works of literature ad nauseam—“Call me Ishmael.” But we should also note that the default idiom of moral argument in the Anglophone world is scriptural; it draws overwhelmingly upon the prophetic demand that right be done. Lincoln at his second inaugural took the civil war beyond partisan triumph to a problem of divine justice. The abolitionists cast slavery as Egypt and themselves as exiles by the rivers of Babylon. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the nation and let Isaiah and Amos do the arguing—every valley shall be exalted, let justice roll down like waters. Obama, eulogizing the murdered congregants of Charleston, took up Cain’s evasion—"am I my brother’s keeper?"—turning it into a claim of mutual obligation. To be deaf to this register is to be unable to hear how the culture makes its moral claims, whether one agrees with them or not.

A civilization’s foundational book is not merely a source of quotations but a grammar of its imagination. Exodus and deliverance, exile and return, wilderness and promised land, fall and redemption, the prophet against the king are not just biblical episodes but abiding archetypes from which culture derives its self-understanding and reproduces itself —"All we are is dust in the wind." Even rebellion against the tradition is structured by it. Thomas Paine turned biblical literacy against the Bible, and later voices repudiated the "slavemaster’s religion." They nonetheless worked within the idiom they rejected. One cannot dissent intelligibly from what one does not know.

To read Anglophone civilization’s literature, follow its arguments, and grasp the freight of everyday speech, one must hold the keys that open it. Cultural literacy is not a refinement added after understanding; it is a condition of understanding. To live amid a world built on a book one has never read is to live as a stranger, even at times to one’s own imagination. Such estrangement, however borne, is a kind of poverty.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This is the brigade and battalion notorious for having killed Hind Rajab, her family, and the medics sent to rescue her.

[Enkidu Reborn @enkidureborn]

کیا فوج بلوچستان میں شفاف الیکشنز کے لیے تیار ہے؟ کیا فوج نے مریدکے ، ڈی چوک ، راولا کوٹ میں انسانیت کا مظاہرہ کیا؟ آپ فوج کی بربریت کی مذمت ویسے کیوں نہیں کرتے جیسے بی ایل اے کی کرتے ہیں؟

کسی بھی انسان کا قتل بھیانک جرم ہے ، دہشتگردی ہے چاہے وہ ظل شاہ ہو ، ارشد شریف ہو ، انیس ستی ہو ، ڈرون حملوں میں مرنے والے معصوم بچے ہوں یا بی ایل اے کے ہاتھوں مرنے والے والے نہتے شہری۔ اصول ہر جگہ یکساں رکھیں۔

[Omar Hamad | عُـمَـرْ 𓂆 @OmarHamadD]

I tell myself every day: Don’t die. Don’t get tired.
Check on the children. Look for water. Check if there are any holes in the tent so the water doesn’t leak in. Then stand up—don’t die.

Don’t you dare die from some silly illness. Resist. Save your tears for a more painful day. Don’t you dare say, “I’m tired.”

Look for food. Don’t be afraid of the bombing. Gather your things and flee. Set up a tent. Flee again—don’t get tired.
Write, and then write, and then write. Write your own death with your own hands—don’t let anyone write about you.

Live, and don’t die.

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

PUTIN🇷🇺: THE US🇺🇸 MUST UNDERSTAND WE HAVE NOWHERE LEFT TO RETREAT TO

‘Under what pretext did they destroy Yugoslavia? Where's Yugoslavia and where is the US? Who gave them the right to strike a European capital?

What was the pretext for the invasion of Iraq? The development of weapons of mass destruction?

How did they invade Syria?
Did the UN Security Council authorise any of this? Whatever they want, they do.

But what they are doing now in Ukraine is not thousands of miles away from our national borders; it is on our doorstep. And they must realize that we simply have nowhere else to retreat to.’

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

This is yet more proof that Western institutions should not be granted the legitimacy they enjoy. It’s time to create real legitimate international institutions that represent all Journalist, all writers, all Artists, all academics, and so on. The West simply cannot be trusted and they do not deserve the legitimacy they have been given

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Ernest Shackleton watched the ice slowly crush his ship past saving. He turned to his stranded crew and told them: ship and stores have gone, so now we'll go home.

It was 1915. He had sailed to Antarctica to cross the whole continent on foot, and his ship, the Endurance, got stuck in thick sea ice before he ever reached land. The ice held the ship for ten months, then crushed it until it broke apart. They left the ship that October and watched it sink that November, with no other people for hundreds of miles, no radio, and no one coming to look for them.

What the crew saw was a man who never lost his nerve. What they could not see was his diary. The night the ship was crushed, he wrote one line about it: it is hard to write what I feel. A crewmate later said it plainly. If Shackleton ever wanted to give up, he kept it to himself.

The calm was something he did on purpose. He held everyone to a strict daily routine so no one had time to lose hope. When the men threw out every heavy thing that might slow them down, he ordered them to keep the banjo, because music at night kept the men from falling apart. When his photographer lost his gloves, Shackleton gave away his own and let his fingers freeze.

They lived on the drifting ice for five months, eating seals and penguins. When the ice broke up, they rowed three small lifeboats about 180 miles to Elephant Island, a bare rock where no one lived and no ship would ever pass. Food ran so low that one of the men wrote they might have to eat whoever died first.

So Shackleton bet everything on a single boat. He and five others climbed into a 22-foot lifeboat and sailed 800 miles across the roughest ocean on Earth, through 16 days of freezing storms, aiming for a tiny island called South Georgia. They reached it. Then he crossed its mountains on foot for 36 hours straight, over ground no one had ever crossed, to reach a whaling station and get help.

Twenty-two men were still waiting back on Elephant Island. They waited 105 days. Three times a rescue ship was turned back by the ice before a small Chilean tug finally broke through, on August 30, 1916.

Shackleton stood on the bow as it neared the shore and called across the water, asking if they were all well. The answer came back: all safe, all well.

All 28 of them came home. He never let his men watch him break, and that was the whole point.

[Enkidu Reborn @enkidureborn]

تحریک انصاف پر ابتلاء کا وقت ہے ، گزر جائے گا۔ لیکن زرداری و شریف خاندان ، صحافیوں اور بڑے بڑے نظریاتیوں کو فوج کی تشریف چاٹتے دیکھنے کا اپنا مزہ ہے۔

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

New from @EmpirePodUK
THE ORIGINS OF GOD
Where did the idea of one God come from? Not the God of any particular faith — but the very concept that there is only one, that all others are false, that monotheism itself is possible? This week on Empire, we go looking for the answer. It leads somewhere extraordinary.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Zack Polanski, "When I studied history at school. Tudors, Romans, a bit of WWII. I don't remember talking about empire or colonisation"

Historian William Dalrymple, "It is possible to do at A'Levels modules on the British empire, but very few people do them"

"Which means most British people are entirely ignorant for what is for better or worse the most important thing Britain ever did"

"Britain drew it's empire, completely changed the face of the world over the course of 300-400 years"

"Not only did they change it within a local European context, but they completely upended flows of global trade and eco-systems which had existed for millinia"

"For most of history, India and China dominated the world economy, and Europe was an add-on"

"They were producing about 70% of the world's GDP, that's still the case in the 18th century"

"When we're looking at the world today, China already the world's number two economy, and India about to be number three overtaking Japan and Germany"

"What we're seeing is a reversal of the trading system to a pr colonial period - it's taken 80 years since the British left India"

"We're seeing the world recover form this brief blip where Europe smashed its way around the globe moving populations and natural resources around, looting some places, bringing wealth to Europe"

"If you look at the big National Trust country houses, if it's a big palladian house, the sort you'd see in a Jane Austin Sunday night drama"

"If it's on the east coast of the country, quite probably it was built by the East India company money, in other words the looting of India"

"If it's on the west coast, near Liverpool or Bristol, it's more likely to be slave money, from the Caribbean"

"These two sources of wealth brought capital into Britain, and cotton into Britain, which was then milled in the industrial revolution, which gave the seed capital for Britain to accelerate massively through the industrial revolution"

"Which catapulted England from an upper middle position in Europe"

"It transforms Britain and the world"

"But what gives us great prosperity often detracted from the prosperity of the looted countries, or countries that have been plundered for enslaved people"

"And it remains a strange quirk of our history system that we learn more about the wives of Henry VIII, than we do about the entirely looting of India, or the Caribbean slave trade"

"Two crucial moments in Britain's and the world's history"

"The reason we don't learn it, is because when the British empire ended, it became something people stopped talking about"

"By the time you get to Monty Python in the 1970s or late 60s, the Empire is a joke"

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

There are many shocking provisions in the scandalous “agreement” signed by Lebanon and the Israeli regime, but none more shocking than point 13 whereby Lebanon purports to give up its international legal claims against the Israeli occupation. But a news flash for the US-Israel Axis: Article 47 of the 4th Geneva Convention explicitly states that protected persons in occupied territories cannot be deprived of the benefits of the Convention“by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power." The rights and protections guaranteed under IHL
cannot legally be signed away or contractually waived, not by Lebanese officials, not by the occupying Israeli regime, and not by its complicit US ally. Point 13 is null and void as a matter of law, and the other provisions of this absurd surrender deal will eventually follow it into the trash bin of history.

[Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd]

NEW: The Board of Directors at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) will formally change its definition of who qualifies as a journalist, to broadly exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese journalists who worked for government-funded media outlets. Israeli, American, and Ukrainian journalists who work for state-funded outlets or are embedded with the military will remain recognized as journalists, of course.

The move was catalyzed to appease the right-wing Zionist rag The Free Beacon, which has repeatedly accused Palestinian and Lebanese journalists of being undercover militants or used their political opinions or affiliations as justification for their killing by the IOF.

This is a racist scandal of massive proportions for everyone involved, and it makes a mockery of the purported mission of the organization. It is absolutely abhorrent that the organization’s resources are wasted on this cowardly witch-hunt, at a moment in history that is the deadliest for journalists, especially in Palestine and Lebanon.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Israelis are now making films about themselves to document how they are the real victims of the last 3 years.

They're still incinerating Palestinian families in tents and bombing apartment buildings in Lebanon, but watch this film on the criticisms they endure when cheering it:

[Ana Kasparian @AnaKasparian]

Hezbollah are only considered "terrorists" to the invaders and occupiers currently attempting to annex land in their country.

Since Emily is part of that blood thirsty group, which is loathed across the globe, we should all expect a braindead post like this.

[Aleema khan @ikhan_17]

🚨 اہم ترین پیغام: تمام ممبرانِ اسمبلی اور انصاف سنز متوجہ ہوں! 🚨
​کل کا دن حقیقی آزادی کی تحریک اور ہمارے قائدین کے لیے انتہائی اہمیت کا حامل ہے۔ عدالتی محاذ پر کل دو اہم ترین سماعتیں شیڈول ہیں، جہاں ہماری بھرپور حاضری اور یکجہتی وقت کی سب سے بڑی ضرورت ہے۔

​⚖️ کل کا عدالتی شیڈول:
​صبح 09:00 بجے: قائدِ تحریک عمران خان اور بشریٰ بی بی کو قیدِ تنہائی میں رکھنے کے خلاف اہم ترین سماعت۔
​دن 11:30 بجے: القادر ٹرسٹ کیس کی سماعت۔
​تمام اراکینِ قومی و صوبائی اسمبلی اور سینیٹرز کو ہدایت کی جاتی ہے کہ وہ بھرپور تعداد میں بروقت پہنچیں۔ یہ صرف ایک حاضری نہیں، بلکہ ہمارے کپتان اور بھابھی کے ساتھ چٹان کی طرح کھڑے ہونے کا عملی ثبوت ہے۔
​"ظلم کے خلاف خاموشی، ظالم کا ساتھ دینے کے مترادف ہے۔ کل ہم نے ثابت کرنا ہے کہ کپتان اکیلا نہیں، پوری قوم اور اس کے نمائندے اس کے ساتھ ہیں۔"

[Richard @ricwe123]

"Anyone who has served in the Israeli Forces in Gaza since October 2023 should be considered a suspect in relation to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide"

-Chris Sidoti, UN Commission of Inquiry on Palestine

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇦🇫 NEW: Pakistani airstrikes have killed hundreds of Afghan civilians this year while Islamabad simultaneously presents itself as a peacemaker between Iran and the U.S., according to a new Drop Site News investigation.

🔸 On June 10, Pakistani drones and fighter jets struck villages in Afghanistan’s Khost and Paktika provinces, killing at least 14 civilians, including women and children, and wounding at least 10 others, according to local residents and medical staff interviewed by Drop Site.

🔸 Nine members of one family were killed when two neighboring homes were destroyed in Khost. In nearby Paktika, three children were killed while sleeping outside their home.

🔸 By April 1, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan had verified at least 372 civilian deaths from Pakistani military operations this year. Drop Site reports the true toll is likely higher due to limited access for independent monitors.

🔸 Pakistan says the strikes were “precise and calibrated” operations against Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) fighters. Residents interviewed by Drop Site denied the victims had any links to armed groups.

🔸 Pakistan’s campaign has expanded beyond airstrikes to include attacks on hospitals, schools, markets and roads, contributing to the displacement of border communities.

🔗 Story by @Emran_Feroz

https://t.co/zzHi2pUQnt

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Think about what it means to order the killing of your own soldiers in order to prevent them from becoming part of a prisoner exchange.

It means that Israeli officials consider it a higher priority to keep detaining Palestinian men, women, and children without charge than to release some in exchange for those soldiers.

That logic is so obviously inhumane that Israel officially ended the Hannibal Directive policy on paper, yet obviously kept it in practice, because we now have many different reports of it being implemented on October 7. And we also know that the bombing campaign was organized through 2023 and 2024 in a way that many Israeli officials understood to be highly likely to kill captives Israelis in Gaza, as +972 has exposed.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

If there ever was any smoking gun evidence that the Israeli-Lebanese agreement is nothing but a cover for Israel to sabotage the US-Iran MOU and subjugate Lebanon under Israeli dominion, it is von der Leyen's endorsement of the agreement.

[Aleema khan @ikhan_17]

آج دنیا دیکھ رہی ہے کہ بانی پی ٹی آئی عمران خان کو جھکانے کے لیے ہر حربہ استعمال کیا گیا، بڑی سے بڑی آفرز دی گئیں، لیکن کپتان کا جواب ہمیشہ پاکستان کے مفاد میں تھا۔ انہوں نے ذاتی فائدے کے بجائے 3 بنیادی مطالبات سامنے رکھے:
​پہلا مطالبہ: قید میں موجود تمام سیاسی رہنماؤں اور بے گناہ کارکنوں کو فوری رہا کیا جائے۔
​دوسرا مطالبہ: ملک کے مستقبل کا فیصلہ عوام کو کرنے دیا جائے اور فوری شفاف الیکشن ہوں گے۔
​تیسرا اصول: ہم اقتدار میں آ کر کسی سے بدلہ نہیں لیں گے، بلکہ ملک کو آگے لے کر جائیں گے۔
​یہ ایک حقیقی مدبر (Statesman) کی نشانی ہے جو ذاتی عناد سے اوپر اٹھ کر ملک کا سوچتا ہے۔