rothkochapel

[Esha K @eshaLegal]

The term Judeo-Nazi was created by Israeli professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz when the Israeli Supreme court legalized most forms of torture in the 1980s.

[rothkochapel @aporia_apoha]

@joequant @Brad_sester @Brad_Setser @Brad_Setser is an intellectually dishonest hack

[rothkochapel @aporia_apoha]

@greg_ip @Brad_Setser is an intellectually dishonest morally sickening physically hideous piece of hack

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

AI will do to minds what the decline in manual labor did to bodies.

The privileged few will keep exercising their minds with literature, art and science, just like they kept exercising their bodies despite escalators, elevators and desk work.

The many will suffer something akin to the obesity crisis but for the mind.

[rothkochapel @aporia_apoha]

@angeloinchina he’s French

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

Western NGOs didn’t just block Nepal’s dams. They built the political class that still can’t protect the country—and the last “revolution” was their handiwork.

Today’s flash flood catastrophe on the Nepal-China border—dozens dead, hundreds missing, villages and infrastructure erased—exposes the same pattern.
For decades Western NGOs and their funders (USAID, NED and the usual network of “civil society” outfits) systematically blocked major barrages and storage projects. Environmental purity tests and “indigenous rights” campaigns killed Arun III, stalled West Seti and others. Nepal was left with run-of-river schemes that generate power when the weather cooperates but offer almost no flood regulation when an upstream avalanche or glacial surge hits. Sovereignty over infrastructure was surrendered to foreign vetoes.

See the record:
• International Rivers and allied groups helped force the World Bank withdrawal from Arun III and later targeted West Seti: https://t.co/cV1t799H12
• Civil society coalitions including International Rivers urged the World Bank to abandon Upper Arun and other mega-dams: https://t.co/Q2Jebd8HiJ
• US lobbying, driven by NGO pressure and legislation, instructed international lenders to avoid large reservoir projects in Nepal: https://t.co/ffjWqO4bu8

That same foreign NGO ecosystem runs the political system. USAID and related Western money poured hundreds of millions into “governance,” “civil society,” media, youth empowerment and “democracy promotion.” Local NGOs became parallel power structures, more responsive to Washington and European donors than to Nepali voters. Ministers, activists, media figures and “independent” experts rotate through these funded networks. The result is a political class trained in the language of Western grants rather than in building real national capacity.
Foreign NGOs effectively set the limits of what Nepal is allowed to do.
Look at the last so-called revolution. The September 2025 “Gen Z” uprising that toppled KP Sharma Oli was sold as a spontaneous youth revolt against corruption and a social media ban. In reality it followed the classic color-revolution script: digital coordination through Discord channels linked to NGOs like Hami Nepal, rapid escalation, selective violence, and an interim government staffed with figures drawn from USAID- and NED-linked organizations.
An online “vote” produced Sushila Karki as interim prime minister.
Half the early interim cabinet had direct ties to Western-funded fronts. The process cleared the old parties and installed a new configuration more amenable to the same external networks. Elections in March 2026 then delivered Balen Shah and the Rastriya Swatantra Party—another product of the post-uprising landscape shaped by those same influences.
This is not organic national renewal.
It is managed regime change that keeps Nepal dependent, unable to pursue large-scale infrastructure without Western approval, and geopolitically pliable between India and China.

The empire’s NGOs first prevented the dams that could have mitigated today’s disaster. Then they engineered the political upheaval that installed leadership still operating inside the same donor-dependent framework.
Nepal’s rivers remain unmanaged for extreme events because the people who decide policy were selected and funded by the same external actors who oppose real sovereign development.
Sovereignty is not a slogan for Discord polls or grant applications.
It means the right to build the infrastructure that keeps your people alive—and the right to reject foreign NGOs that treat your country as a laboratory for their ideology and strategic games. Until Nepal breaks that dependency, catastrophes like the one unfolding today will keep repeating.

[تاج بخش @khoosh_]

But that’s the point. This is another facet of the decades long war effort against Iran. The intent of those like Shams is to silence a specific type of Iranian as much as they can: the ones who do not run around speaking of Iran through the same exceptionalised vilification lens & are capable of poking substantive holes in their narratives the way Ameli did re: the fictitious transgender section.

The two most effective ways to bring about silencing are either through leading the mob to ruin the target's reputation or creating enough attention around them that they are...found dead.

[rothkochapel @aporia_apoha]

@pmddomingos sit your ass down son and speak when you are spoken to

[Israel Exposed @xIsraelExposedx]

If you speak one of these 19 languages, we could use your help spreading the word in those countries.

[rothkochapel @aporia_apoha]

@LauraLoomer because there’s no epstein-zionist class in China

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

Jewish surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who stars in the new documentary American Doctor, calls Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer “prostitutes for the Israeli lobby.”

He says srael’s influence over Washington is so extensive that “the United States Congress building is the most occupied territory by Israel.”

“It’s not the West Bank. It’s not Gaza. It’s the U.S. Congress.”

[Bikrum Gill @bikrumsinghgill]

Thread on our collective responsibilities in the face of the Iran letter
1/

First, please slow down and step outside of the performative ecosystem of hot takes and ego driven gotchas regarding the critiques of the Iran letter.

Instead, it is imperative to collectively use this moment towards a broader self-critique of our failures. There are two tasks in particular which stand in front of us:

i) Critically turn around and look at the limitations of the theoretical and epistemological frameworks through which race, colonialism, and imperialism have been approached in the West. These frameworks logically lead to this letter, however much it has been mocked here, its intellectual foundations remain the basis of even critical approaches in Western universities. And

ii) we must open ourselves up to substantively engaging, and learning from, the theoretical and epistemological frameworks that underpin the actual forces of resistance in the region who are alone today in materially fighting genocidal imperialism even at great cost. In other words, move beyond just watching the resistance, and allow yourself to enter, with humility, the worlds that birthed the resistance, to learn from them so that you might be able to apply these lessons to revolutionizing our own genocidal Western societies so that they stop raining terror down on the majority world.

I break down these two points in more detail in the rest of the thread:

[Calla @CallaWalsh]

Georges Abdallah speaking in Beirut during the launch of a national call for comprehensive resistance: “The fundamental matter is if Iran were to lose today, history will sweep us all away.”

Full transcript:

Our region is suffering from a comprehensive imperialist zionist attack. All of our nation's entities are exposed to destruction. What happened in Syria and what will happen elsewhere lies in wait for us all.

Either we submit to the process of Somalization and accept its priorities or we confront it. Lebanon possesses all the qualities of steadfastness. Its fedayeen possess all the solid will and the necessary concepts for the success of the resistance process.

It is now time for our parties to rise to this level. This attack, which has failed miserably as is clearly evident before us. If we were to choose, we would have chosen no other than this resistance.

Let it be clear to everyone that the fundamental matter is if Iran were to lose today, history will sweep us all away. Either we stand on our feet and look to the future, and look toward Egypt restoring its position, and Turkey restoring its position, and Pakistan restoring its position side by side with Iran, and a comprehensive defeat for all imperialist allies mandates in our world, and consequently, we will create the new world.

[Abbas @Abbas_Muntaqim]

According to the Western elitist secular left, the Islamic Republic of Iran has “hollow anti-imperialism” because it is fighting an anti-imperialist war against the U.S./Zionist/Arab Gulf axis while simultaneously supporting Palestinian liberation.

To the secular left, apparently anti-imperialism includes $50k speaking engagements, six-figure jobs at elite educational institutions, six-figure book deals from Western presses, and large mansions.

These academics don’t represent any liberation movement. They represent a bourgeois class position that supports Western finance capital. They are quite frankly divorcing themselves from the Black Radical Tradition and instead represent the neoliberal imperialist academic wing.

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🚨 BREAKING:

American journalist Abby Martin:

"We won't forget Palestinians carrying their children in plastic bags.

I will never forget a drone using a baby's cry to lure children from their homes.

You cannot cover this up with propaganda lies."

[Adnan A. Husain @adnanahusain]

“the imperialist forces that (Islamic) republic claims to stand against”

Yeah, the US-Israeli illegal war on Iran is just a false flag to deceive you. Iran is just colluding with the empire it is defeating militarily and economically. We should instead have more open letters published condemning Iran (and maybe the US some also) because that will be much more effective in opposing imperialism.

Good timing. Just when US fails militarily and turns more obviously to economic warfare and political subversion strategy against the Islamic Republic, the Western left in the US rushes in to condemn Iran publicly rather than organizing a campaign against the war their taxes fund or to oppose the criminal sanctions imposed on 90million people by their own government.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

The Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi David Yosef said today that the Palestinian people do not exist, do not have rights, that it is good that Gaza was destroyed and that with the help of God, all of Gaza and the West Bank will be Jewish soon. The Jewish religion is being used as a tool of genocide. This is not a fringe rabbi. This is the most important rabbi in Israel.

[rothkochapel @aporia_apoha]

@USAmbToBelgium fuck you

[Abbas @Abbas_Muntaqim]

Elitist Western academic secular “leftists” are so irrelevant that they have to prove their irrelevancy by publishing open letters whose thesis is “No war on Iran, but an end to the Islamic Republic.” But here’s the thing: this secular liberalism produces an imperialist logic that is very much a part of the media warfare waged on the Islamic Republic — the same imperialist warfare that is responsible for murdering Iranians. And of course Western media like the Guardian will uplift the narrative, showing how the West aligns with such talking points.

It’s also quite laughable and intellectually dishonest that they try to claim the Islamic Republic has the same type of “carceral” state as the U.S. The amerikan prison plantation system is a settler colonial machine that extracts labor to build empire. Saying they’re the same just reveals their neoliberal imperialist ambitions. To further prove this, they even said Iran and Israel are two sides of the same coin. How are we supposed to take such positions seriously? Does their hate for an Islamic form of governance just turn them into vulgar materialists?

Furthermore, they use a universalist grammar of “political prisoners” as if Black revolutionaries incarcerated by amerika are the same as prisoners in Iran. They use Black revolutionaries as pawns for their Western chauvinism. In doing this, they support an interventionist foreign policy position through the weaponization of the Black liberation struggle these same academics don’t even participate in at home.

These leftists claim to be historical materialists, yet their secular humanism and moralism have them rejecting material reality in favor of their godless dogma. In their pseudo-Marxist utopia, they fail to even understand the concept of hegemony, and in their rejection of the Islamic Republic they co-sign American imperialism. The secular left in America is cooked. It doesn’t exist. But that’s another story.

I’d urge Black academics and the likes of even our great revolutionary Mumia Abu Jamal to not be used by the liberal Iranian secularists for their neo liberal ambitions.

[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.