B. Altukmaci

Will write, maybe tomorrow. currently traversing the world of anti-imperialist literary theory. #freepalestine

[B. Altukmaci @altukmachii]

We cannot absorb all the grief of war and violence, so we write, remember and document.

Huge thanks to @CaireneGirl and the team of the Connect and Sustain issue at @RowayatEgypt for welcoming my short story into this collection.

Read here: https://t.co/fMI78iUiaX

[Ghassan Abu Sitta, Chair of Conflict Medicine AUB @GhassanAbuSitt1]

They kill and then they cry so that they become the victims, then they vintriloquize their victims so they become the moral beings in the story.
All of this is only possible because of the diseased European liberal mind that is so formatively racist that it automatically unsees people of colour in every story.
https://t.co/Hwi3NOB8jB

[Ghassan Abu Sitta, Chair of Conflict Medicine AUB @GhassanAbuSitt1]

Yesterday Israel killed 6 children in South Lebanon

[मालिनी @maliniranga]

We got an article on Palestine through peer review at a leading academic journal. How many ways have Israelis killed Palestinians solely through food—its denial, its destruction, its weaponization? We write on the geopolitics of the ongoing Gaza famine— https://t.co/5jTZrRoDnn

[tara al-alami @taraalami]

the entire world halts and bends over backwards to accommodate the epstein axis. if it weren’t so absurdly disturbing it would be funny

[Sinan Antoon سنان أنطون @sinanantoon]

Last week, I signed my name to a letter aimed at expressing solidarity with political prisoners in Iran. The plight of political prisoners across the region has always been a concern for me and is reflected in my earliest writings. I always oppose imperial wars and sanctions, as I have in the cases of Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. I do not believe this opposition requires I stay silent about other injustices, especially carceral ones. This solidarity was the spirit of the letter and my signing it. Still, I recognize the asymmetries of power that the letter’s critics have pointed out, especially relevant in this moment of continued imperial aggression, and thus requested my name be removed.

[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.

[Gary Younge @garyyounge]

"When people talk about the need for Black Excellence I counter with an insistence on Black mediocrity: the right for black people to be as average, flawed, compromised & mistaken as any other group of people. The right, ultimately, to be human." R.I.P. Jason Arday

[Writers Against the War on Gaza @wawog_now]

We are humbled to present the largest oral archive of testimony from Gaza produced since the genocide began, a collective memorial to the journalists who gave their lives to tell their people’s stories. LISTEN: https://t.co/qTS04mJsON

[Zara Zhar @Boudicca61AD]

“The greatest fear of imperialism is that the anti-imperialist struggle ceases to be an abstract slogan and becomes a concrete, legitimate reality embraced by the masses.”
— Georges Abdallah

[hashed @hashedelesood]

2005, Karbala, Iraq, during Muharram procession against innocent Shia civilians 2 Saudi terrorists blow themselves up killing several 100s and injuring 100s more

Saudis are no strangers to bombing places of worship in Karbala.

[Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini @DrKarimWafa]

They say books won’t change the world. Tell that to every colonizer who burned them. To every enslaved person who was punished for reading. Literacy is resistance. Literacy is liberation. The library is a battlefield.

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

They all condemn "settler violence" until a Palestinian fights back. Then the Palestinian becomes the terrorist and the settler becomes the victim.

Liberal Zionism for you

[Amr Waked @amrwaked]

إيران حضارة عريقة وبلد جار قريب لك طول عمره، يشاركونك الثقافة والحضارة ولهم صلة رحم معك، لذلك لا أفهم استعداء الأنظمة العربية لهم، خاصة ان هذا الاستعداء سببه الوحيد هو لإرضاء دولة أخرى في آخر الدنيا لا هي جارك ولا تشاركك أي شيء في ثمن الخسارة يا أهطل.
عالم كله بلاهة وغباء.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Un soldado estadounidense ofrece una granada de mano a un niño iraquí después de que el niño le hubiera dado un chicle como regalo, durante la invasión a Irak, en 2003.

Pero luego te hacen una película mostrándote lo mal que lo pasaron psicológicamente matando niños iraquíes.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Dear writers, we need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound. https://t.co/FEmCrdQ392

[Maya Mikdashi @mayamikdashi]

The Shia community in Lebanon is living through a Nakba. This is a war against Lebanon, but a primary target is that specific community. Any politician or pundit that does not acknowledge that fact is not being honest, and their dishonesty is as dangerous as it is myopic

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

I often wondered early on in the war on Lebanon how the shrieking anti-resistance crowd would react if Iran came out with enough leverage to impose a ceasefire on Lebanon.

As we get closer to that potential outcome, I’m watching with great curiosity and amusement how they will spin this.

[Āçina @LittleZab]

Muharram is upon us

[kev joon @never_oppressed]

Iranian monarchists will have to carry the moral shame of dancing and twerking for Trump, most publicly hours after 168 schoolchildren were murdered, to their graves.