🐞Urchins Are Chins 🐜🧸

AKA Fondants are Ants + Ladybirds Are Birds. Still terfy but not genocidal. #RepealTheGRA 'We're all blocked'

[Alonso Gurmendi @Alonso_GD]

The “uninvolved civilian” they shot at was a SEVEN MONTH OLD BABY.

His name was Sam Fahd Abou Haikal.

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

Republicans are standing next to signs saying Democrats were “trans-ing the mice” because they don’t want people to realize they’re talking about transgenic mice—genetically modified mice used in lifesaving medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and neurological disorders. People could die because Republicans saw that important medical research has the word “trans” in it.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump to farmers: You have a nice safe beautiful life. Your life is much better than my life. Your ear wasn’t pierced. You didn’t get pierced.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

@michaelgove You can read the full review here, where I contrast @michaelgove's extraordinary ignorance of the Middle East (hardly surprising as at the time he had hardly been there)
with the brilliant analysis of Lawrence Wright in his seminal The Looming Tower.
https://t.co/VCu5ABSrj6

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Here you go, @michaelgove:
Gove’s book is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject. Thus we are solemnly told, for example, that during the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, the Palestinian population from Jenin to Hebron was “herded into, and kept penned up inside, refugee camps”, an idea as novel as it is comically ridiculous and ahistorical. During this period, towns such as Ramallah became sleepy backwaters, quite free from the land seizures and apartheid policies of Arab-free Israeli settlements and Arab-free road networks that followed the Israeli occupation — realities entirely at odds with what Gove calls Israel’s “culture of equality”.

Gove also rewrites history when he alleges it was the “appeasement” of the Palestinians represented by the Oslo peace process that encouraged al-Qa'eda to launch the 9/11 attacks. In fact it was not any offer to make peace, so much as the violent repression that followed Israel’s unilateral ending of peace talks that actually formed the backdrop to the attacks. In his Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has written that it was the the repressive campaign waged against the second intifada by Sharon in the Autumn of 2000 that provided al-Qa’eda’s opportunity : as the corpses of dead children piled up, al-Zawahiri realized that here was the rallying cry that could unify the Muslim world. All that was needed was a massive strike, and the US system in the Middle East would begin to unravel. And so - thanks partly to Gove's friends in Washington- it has indeed proved, to the peril of us all.

Gove is also quite wrong that few Muslims or Islamists really mind what Israel does to the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and that “it is what Israel is, rather than what Israel does” that really provokes resistance. Instead Israeli violence is the principle cause of anti-American anger- Bin Laden himself has written that it was the sight of US support for the Israeli bombing Beirut in 1982 that initially radicalised him: “they started bombing… I still remember the blood-torn limbs, the women and children massacred. Houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing… As I looked on those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America…”

Throughout Gove's book, the old NeoCon myths are reheated and served up, despite being long discredited, most recently by the 2005 CIA report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Saddam, believes Gove, “invited Islamists into Iraq” (p130); he was “determined to pursue his WMD programme” and “dreamt of emulating” 9/11, strongly suggesting the central lie of Saddam's non-existent links with 9/11. Gove also repeats the tired old canard that the spread of democracy will exclude the Islamists from power in the Middle East, (p135) despite the evidence from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Algeria that given the option, the newly radicalized Muslim peoples of the region are much more likely to choose fundamentalist candidates over secularists.

At the heart of Celsius 7/7 lies the long-discredited idea that the Islamists are motivated by a deep hatred of freedom: as Bin Laden noted in his 2004 broadcast, if that was so “why we did not attack Sweden?” Instead, it is specifically to fight for freedom from US interference in the Islamic world that al-Qa'eda was formed: “We have been fighting you because we are free men,” said Bin Laden in the same speech. “Just as you violate our security, so we violate yours.”

All terrorist violence , Islamic or otherwise, is contemptible. But just because we condemn does not mean we should not strive to analyse accurately. It is exactly the sort of woolly elisions that Gove indulges in that has got us into the trouble we are now in.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Says possibly the only British politician to show less understanding of the Middle East than Tony Blair- @michaelgove

https://t.co/7pXoQoFG2p

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

"A prominent example of the sort of pundit who has spoon-fed neocon mythologies to the British public for the past few years is Michael Gove. Gove has never lived in the Middle East, indeed has barely set foot in a Muslim country. He has little knowledge of Islamic history, theology or culture — in Celsius 7/7, he just takes the line of Bernard Lewis on these matters; nor does he speak any Islamic language.... Gove’s book is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject..."

https://t.co/wgx7K6s7qh

[cheyenne @cheyeyeyeyey]

Please stop announcing the Northern Lights will be visible if they will not be visible to me.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump: Look at this guy over here. He is one hell of a specimen. This is one hell of a physical specimen. That’s what I like.

[En Aitch Ess @adje__]

In all seriousness, this is why you can’t have the death penalty.

[Zak @ZG1999_]

Have we all collectively gone fucking mental

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The richest 3 people have more money than the poorest 4 billion.

But the problem (according to those richest people) is the poor people.

[Praise @tufpraise]

this was literally the whole point of ai

[Wyatt Reed @wyattreed13]

Yesterday I wrote about Israel’s murder of 27 Lebanese Boy Scouts & Scout leaders.

Photos I posted of 4 smiling Scouts were immediately declared “graphic content.”

Now a screenshot showing they were falsely deemed “graphic content,” has also been deemed “graphic content.”

Inception-level censorship.

[Benjamin Halligan @BenHalligan]

@alexL_E_I

[Henry Ash @henryash2105]

@alexL_E_I

[alex lei @alexL_E_I]

checking in with the goat

[Hughes-on-the-Wold @NotThatHughes]

Whoever created this is as creepy as that fella who pretends to be Declan Rice.

[Zak @ZG1999_]

What the flying fuck has happened to this website