Dan Smith

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

They have never actually given a shit about Henry Nowak or his family. He’s nothing but a pawn for them.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Sad but true.

The US World Cup is even worse than the Qatar one and that could be predicted 4 years ago.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

There is a surprising level of surprise in the West that Iran was serious about its demand for a region-wide ceasefire and that it would act against Israel if it continued attacking Lebanon.

I explain here: https://t.co/1tpxvwHAC2

...why Tehran was dead serious about forcing Israel to stop its attacks on Lebanon and how it might respond.

Part of the reason Iran's insistence on defending Lebanon has surprised Western observers may lie in their erroneous belief that Hezbollah is nothing but an Iranian proxy.

Indeed, Hezbollah is consistently described in the Western discourse as an Iranian proxy. And it appears that this statement was genuinely believed by Western observers.

So if the belief is that Hezbollah is no more than a proxy, it also becomes more difficult to take Iranian threats that it will defend Lebanon seriously. A proxy, after all, is a piece on the chessboard whose fate almost invariably is to be sacrificed or consumed.

Iran would surely risk regional war to defend its queen on the chessboard, but would it do the same for a pawn, Western observers ask themselves?

But if from the outset the nuanced relationship between Hezbollah and Iran was more properly understood - a mutually beneficial alliance in which Tehran clearly is the bigger party but not one that can simply issue dictats for Hezbollah to follow - Iran's warnings against continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon would likely have been taken more seriously.

Yet another example of how the simplistic and unnuanced understanding of Iran's geopolitical calculations and perspectives perpetuated in the Washington discourse ultimately undermines US interests and America's ability to calibrate optimal moves in the region.

[Dan Smith @Dan1763]

@ianbremmer Trump told them not to bomb Beirut, BiBi bombed anyway.

Will Trump hold back US logistic support like Tankers ?

[Reza Nasri @RezaNasri1]

The American people should know that, in recent months alone, Israel has killed more Lebanese civilians than the number of Americans who lost their lives on 9/11. The scale of this human tragedy constitutes a humanitarian crisis that demands urgent international intervention.

[Dante Raimundo 🇻🇪 @RaimundoDante]

Vcs já pararam pra pensar que o atleta negro americano Jesse Owens entrou mais fácil na Alemanha Nazista para disputar as Olimpíadas de 1936 do que o atacante iraquiano Aymen Hussein para disputar a Copa de 2026 nos EUA?

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Leyla Hamed @leylahamed]

Today’s good news: Palestine women’s national team player Rand Al-Halawani, who was arrested by Israel, has been released.

What’s telling is that she was arrested and released before Western media (or FIFA) even found the time to say a word about it.

[Politics For You @PoliticoForYou]

BREAKING 🚨🚨🚨

World Cup fever kicks off as America welcomes the world with a traditional display of their culture and traditions.

[Isi Breen @isaiah_bb]

Israel has killed more Palestinian children in the last 3 years than Palestinians have killed Israelis of any kind over the last 80 years.

And it’s the Palestinians who are bloodthirsty and violent. Sure.

[Dan Smith @Dan1763]

@latininxtc @datchuguyy 4000 guarantee purchase, no one is getting free tickets, through national Football associations there is usually a discount for fans that have bought tickets for all the qualifying rounds

[Dan Smith @Dan1763]

@BladeoftheS With a little notice put all games in Mexico,

Or only other bid to host 2026 was Morocco who are hosting 2030.

[John Smith @UrbanExplorer00]

If Americans think it's all Europeans complaining about this World Cup they really need to read Middle Eastern, African and South American Twitter. Arabs in particular are fuming over the treatment them and their teams have received. Latinos furious over being denied entry.

[Man at C&A @BeardedBrownMa1]

Dear White people, As British Sikhs we are now in our 4th generation as British born. Born here, our parents born here, our grandparents born here. Can you please clarify when we will stop being "foreign" so I can pencil the date in on my new calendar 👍#sikh #sikhs #kirpan

[Ryan Rozbiani @RyanRozbiani]

🇮🇷 Iran to Honor Makan Nasiri at the Iran vs. New Zealand match

He was killed at the Minab School, his body has still not been found.

The Iranian Embassy in the UK released this emotional video:
"In memory of Makan Nasiri, the football-loving boy from Minab whose only trace left after the US bombing was a single shoe."

[DataFut @DataFutebol]

A diferença do tratamento no recebimento das seleções no México em relação aos Estados Unidos diz muita coisa.

[Vivre l'Histoire @Vivrelhistoire]

⚔️🪖🇫🇷 Ce jour-là | Le 7 juin 1940, le capitaine Charles N'Tchoréré est exécuté d'une balle dans la nuque par les Allemands.

Quelques instants plus tôt, cet officier français, encerclé et à court de munitions après de violents combats à Airaines, s'était rendu avec ses hommes. Lorsque les Allemands décident de séparer les prisonniers noirs des blancs, il refuse catégoriquement d'être traité autrement qu'en officier français et s'insurge contre cette discrimination. Il est alors emmené à l'écart et abattu. Ses assassins ne provenaient de la 7e division blindée allemande, sous les ordres d'Erwin Rommel. Son corps aurait ensuite été broyé sous les chenilles d’un char.

Né à Libreville en 1896, engagé volontaire durant la Première Guerre mondiale, Charles N'Tchoréré gravit les échelons jusqu'au grade de capitaine. Lorsque la Seconde Guerre mondiale éclate, il demande à rejoindre le front et se distingue par sa bravoure, repoussant quatre assauts allemands successifs à Airaines et permettant à son bataillon de se replier.

Son fils Jean-Baptiste, caporal au 2e Régiment d'infanterie coloniale, est tué au combat à Remiencourt.
Père et fils tombent ensemble pour la France le 7 juin 1940, il y a 86 ans aujourd'hui.

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

Critical thinking? Let's do some, shall we?

Daniel Shaver, 2016. White, 26, father of two. Shot dead with an AR-15 while sobbing "please don't shoot me" on a hotel floor, trying to comply with contradictory instructions. Officer acquitted December 2017, Trump's first term.

Andrew Finch, 2017. White, 28. Opened his own front door in sweatpants. Police swarmed his house over a hoax 911 call from a video game dispute. He had nothing to do with it. Shot dead within 10 seconds. Officer never charged. Later promoted.

Justine Damond, 2017. White, 40. Called 911 to report a possible rape behind her home. Walked to the patrol car in her pyjamas. Officer shot her through the car window. She died trying to help someone.

Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle, 2019. White couple. Killed in a no-knock raid on their home. Officers fabricated the warrant. The officer responsible was convicted and sentenced to 60 years.

Ryan Whitaker, 2020. White, 40. Answered his door after a noise complaint holding a legal firearm at his side. Saw it was police, immediately dropped the gun and raised his hands. Officer shot him twice in the back as he surrendered. Five seconds start to finish.

Five cases. All white. All completely innocent. All dead. Most of them under Trump . US police fatally shoot roughly 450 white Americans every year for the past 10 years.

Your country shoots 450 white people dead every year. You are in no place to lecture anyone about systemic Police brutality.

https://t.co/oiGrS4atAO

Seat this one out, clown.

[Frances 'Cassandra' Coppola @Frances_Coppola]

West Bank Palestinians have endured repeated progroms since 2022. The pogrom in Huwara in February 2023 was so bad that Israeli press (yes, ISRAELI), compared it to Kristallnacht.

[Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

Wonder who wrote Hegseth’s terrible speech, which goes down in history as the most ignorant, classless, and disrespectful ever.