amir latif

‘Para Todos Todo, Para Nosotros Nada’ (‘Everything for Everyone, Nothing For Us’)

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

“As a Palestinian, I am the direct subject of Zionism. I’m an expert on it, in fact, because it is practised on my body”

Mohammed El-Kurd defines Zionism in under 5 minutes. He says everything that needs to be said👇

[Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd]

Your definition of Zionism does not matter. Nor does mine. Zionism is defined by its material manifestations. The purpose of a system is what it does. And the Zionist system does racism and genocide. Simple. Please spare me the arrogant insufferable graaating Oxbridge debates. Your opinions are irrelevant. People are dying.

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

I explain here why I voted for the “Zionism is racism” motion at the Green Party conference. I now find myself, despite being Jewish, labelled “antisemitic” and “extremist” or sometimes worse. Obviously, I do not accept these labels

Here is my thinking

1. The dominant Israeli and Western narrative is that Zionism means (a) the right for Jews to have a homeland in their biblical land and (b) the right to have a place of safety after persecution culminating in the horror of the Holocaust
2. ⁠This, on its face, is very reasonable, right & proper. This is the core of the UK political & media response to the Greens motion
3. ⁠Sadly, the early Zionist slogan that Palestine would be “a land without people, for a people without a land” was not true - the land DID have people, Palestinians
4. ⁠The great Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said, wrote a 1979 essay called “Zionism from the viewpoint of its victims”
5. ⁠That viewpoint is conspicuously absent from much discussion in the West
6. ⁠Zionism has meant decades of ethnic cleansing, oppression, apartheid & killing of millions of Palestinians BECAUSE they are Palestinians
7. ⁠This is why Zionism is racism
8. ⁠One of my (many) Jewish heroes is Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. He did not go to live in Israel. He was an anti-Zionist. He said, “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors”

[Ajamu Baraka @ajamubaraka]

this is going down as one of the most horrific events in human history. And just think, the people who opposed this are seen as the criminals. Pure madness.

[Monisha Rajesh @monisha_rajesh]

I will never forget the people who bragged about, mocked it with memes and championed the cleverness of Israelis when this was nothing more than a terrorist attack that maimed and injured children.

[محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf @mb_ghalibaf]

Straits Taylor Rule:

i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*) + α(SOH−SOH*) + β(BEM−BEM*), α,β > 0

Let’s see if a hike could open SOH or produce a single barrel :)

You can’t 25bp a chokepoint and r* isn’t neutral. It’s SOH risk premium, and We set it.

Stay unanchored !

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Jeremy Corbyn told me how MI5 and MI6 worked to undermine him when he was Labour leader

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also came to London in 2019 and was recorded saying Washington was doing its “level best” to stop Corbyn becoming PM

Think you live in a “democracy”?

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

Notice how Miliband - in addition to not once even bothering with acknowledging Palestinian humanity, loss and fears and making it instead all about Jewish loss & fears - easily used the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ for just the West Bank and delegates the responsibility not to the Israeli government but to settlers.

The Israelis occupy the West Bank, the Israeli kidnap and detain Palestinians, including children, in prisons indefinitely. They execute & sexually assault Palestinians.

Settlers aren’t an aberration, they function as part of Israeli expansionism and are protected and empowered by the state & military. They also function as a scapegoat that allows the Israelis full impunity overall.

The UK has been directly complicit in genocide in Gaza, where Palestinian parents are still picking up pieces of their slaughtered children. They cannot be allowed to wash their hands clean of it.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Ha'aretz reports that Hamas, through Qatar, conveyed immediately on Oct. 7 that they were willing to return all the civilian hostages for nothing -- their only ask was for a mediator to arrange the exchange and establish a connection to then negotiate the further release of the soldiers. Israel refused to talk or hear about it.

So Qatar reached out to Antony Blinken to let him know that Hamas was willing to release all the civilian hostages.

Blinken told Qatar he didn't want to hear it because "Israel is still under attack, and there's no one to talk to."

Blinken had the opportunity to free every single civilian hostage and de-escalate the situation. Instead he wanted war.

[Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty]

So to recap:
- Israel knew about Oct 7
- Israel lets it happen
- Israel Apache helicopters maximize destruction & death
- Israel lies about war crimes and mass rape to manufacture consent for a genocide
- Israel buries all evidence
- Israel launches an ethnic cleansing war
- Israel cuts off water, food and supplies
- Israel blocks all foreign media & international oversight
- Israel targets media and medical staff and infrastructure
- Israel launches worldwide silencing propaganda campaign
- Israel expands land grab and illegal invasion into West Bank and Lebanon
- Israel pulls U.S. into illegal invasion of Iran
- Israel confirms plans for Gaza final solution

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Tens of thousands tortured.
Dozens of thousands killed.
Hundreds of thousands wounded,
Many left limbless.
Countless orphans.
Nearly 2M left homeless..

And the "first and foremost" issue is the damage done to an apartheid state
by its genocidaire-in-chief?

#ArithmeticOfImpunity

[Richard Sanders @PulaRJS]

Astonishing fact: the BBC has not broadcast an iv with Francesca Albanese since Dec '23.

Almost 3 yrs of genocide & they've not once felt the need to talk to the UN's Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. /1

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Another one went from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk to Israel on August 11

Burnham had been PM for 3 weeks

This was a C-17 operated by the US Air Force

The C-17 can carry payload of 170,900 lbs or 102 fully-equipped paratroopers

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

In August 1960, US President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to murder Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected leader of the Congo

Five months later, Lumumba was dead

When former MI6 officer Daphne Park was asked if Britain had a role, she said: "We did. I organised it."

[The Resonance @Partisan_12]

This video from the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

US soldiers taped a ready-to-eat meal to their humvee and dragged it behind them as hungry Iraqi children chased them.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Norm Finkelstein: “International law died…when the UN gave the deed of Gaza to Donald Trump…At this point Iran has no obligations whatsoever to abide by international law. It can target who it wants and what it wants for the sake of its survival. You don’t like that? Then look in the mirror. YOU created that situation.”

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

They lost me at "The Guardian"

[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.

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

Disappointed the BBC cancelled my interview on Israel's killing of Hind Rajab

2 producers eagerly reached out. They confirmed the time & one called to prepare a brief for the anchor

She asked me whether Israel's announcement is positive, I explained in detail it was a cover up.

The IDF is blaming the killing of Hind, her uncle, aunt & 4 cousins on the family itself for trying to flee by car & on the ambulance sent to rescue her for "failures in the co-ordination of the movement."

None of this is remotely true! The Red Cross immediately informed the IDF about 5-year-old Hind who was hiding in that motionless car, & they requested permission from Israel to allow an ambulance to rescue them.

After multiple long hours, Israel granted greenlight to the ambulance & provided them with a designated route on a GPS to drive on.

As soon as the ambulance reached Hind's car, the IDF ambushed & bombed them immediately with an American made anti-tank missile then opened fire on Hind's car. The car was hit with 355 bullets.

Israel then kept that area under lockdown for 12 days, & prevented anyone from approaching.

Hind's mom went daily to the Ahli baptist hospital hoping to find her daughter, until her lifeless body was brought in along with the charred remains of the ambulance men.

Israel then claimed after an "initial investigation" that its troops were NEVER in that area to begin with. They maintained that claim for 2 years despite ample recordings & satellite images debunking this lie.

The only reason Israel is now making this new announcement of a deeper investigation is to shield its soldiers & generals from the International Criminal Court by invoking the principle of "complementarity;" that the ICC cannot investigate a state that is already investigating itself in good faith.

I told the BBC producer Israel today also quietly shut down the investigation into the triple tap killing of American, Canadian, British, Australian & Polish citizens in the WCK massacre. Israel blamed the massacre on the aid workers themselves for "deviating from the predesignated route" & for hiring an armed security guard "without informing the IDF" (both claims where debunked by WCK themselves, who had coordinates their every step with the IDF).

I told the producer the Israeli commander responsible for this massacre, Nochi Mendel, is a fanatical settler who had signed a petition calling for starving Gaza & that he was celebrated by settler leaders & supported by Israeli government leaders after what he did.

Mendel even received a box of chocolate from the settler council's leader & a letter of support for what he did.

Mendel was initially dismissed by the IDF & blamed for the massacre, but was quickly & quietly reinstated & promoted in the Defence Ministry as the head of the settlements and national infrastructure unit.

It's abundantly clear Israel is NOT serious about prosecuting any of the atrocities committed in Gaza. Since the genocide began, only two soldiers were punished by the IDF; one for microwaving a living frog & another for cooking sausages in the army kitchen on Shabbat.

The producer asked me: What about the 150 cases the IDF said are pending review?

I answered: it's just a number designed to give the appearance of seriousness, but it's essentially meaningless.

If it took the IDF two whole years to admit the simplest of facts that the entire world had already known, which is that their troops were the ones who fired on Hind Rajab's car, how do you expect them to do with the remaining cases that are not as high profile?

Five minutes after the call, the producer wrote me that they decided to cancel the interview & will not even host anyone else to comment on the issue, & instead they'll play archival footage!

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

Gaza one hour ago after the Trump regime convoy gave them the green light to continue massacring people and kids