Matt

why am I on here again

[Abier @abierkhatib]

They have turned the world into a filthy goddamn horror show.

45 miles away

[B.M. @ireallyhateyou]

The great white hope of Israel's "liberals", war criminal Gadi Eisenkot (Yashar), makes it clear that he has the same view regarding a Palestinian state as Netanyahu.

Whatever the results of the upcoming elections are, the genocide will continue. It can only be stopped by force.

[Matt @msega085]

@Hezbolsonaro Maybe its just my peers, but the Quebecois I know are definitely far less entrenched in global culture. Engage with way more Canadian/Quebec media than Anglos, tend to travel differently, etc.
Not so for multilinguals, but true Francophones? Kinda got their own stuff goin on

[Matt @msega085]

@zeldalevine2022 @dsherwoodx2 @RS613506 Sutcliffe raises the Israeli flag at city hall, speaks in support of the state at least annually, and meets with pro-Israel groups constantly. I suspect you are on board with that, though.

[Matt @msega085]

@dsherwoodx2 @RS613506 The current mayor raised the Israeli flag and has given multiple statements in support of Israel. He frequently meets with genocide supporters, takes notes from them, and allows them to co-write his statements. Our tax dollars go to the state.

Perhaps you just support genocide?

[Matt @msega085]

@simonrowland @RS613506 Durrrrrrrrrrduuuuuuuuuhadoyyyy

pbbbbbbbthhhhh

i am very smart and totally not talking out my ass, either

[Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi]

This letter shows us one thing with brutal clarity: if you are anything in the West - if you have any position in any establishment, you are morally and intellectually as good as dead. This civilization and all its institutions are rotten to the core, and highly contagious

[Matt @msega085]

@MysticScholar @brianstelter @MarkRuffalo Get over yourself.
No one is obsessed with Jews.
We are talking about a major media company being purchased by an open genocide-supporter and proud propagandist.
That’s the issue.

[Matt @msega085]

@FoulballPro @ryangrim Cool! I havent seen a pull-string toy in ages.

Oh, wait, this ones broken.

[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.

[Matt @msega085]

@heart_ISR Hague Honeymoon

[Matt @msega085]

@AnitaAnandMP By ‘unacceptable’, do you mean that you will accept it in every meaningful way? Yes?

[Davide Mastracci @DavideMastracci]

This is a well-intentioned piece, but it has some issues.

It states, “Anti-Zionism is a 100-year-old, well-documented current of Jewish thought.”

Jews don’t have a monopoly on anti-Zionism, and the most effective opposition to Zionism today doesn’t come from Jews. The article completely erases the non-Jewish history and present reality of anti-Zionism, both in thought and in action.

“Ask a dozen Jewish thinkers whether Judaism is best understood as a religion, a culture, or a nationality, and you will get a dozen conflicting answers. This report settles the question by decree, and throws out half of them in the process.”

This obscures the fact that an overwhelming percentage of Jews in Canada and abroad are Zionists, and that mainstream Jewish organizations and institutions are almost unanimously Zionist.

Overall, the article’s authors fall into the same trap that so many other critics of Israel do: they position anti-Zionism as legitimate because some Jews are anti-Zionists.

As I’ve written before, “100% of Jewish people could be Zionists and being an anti-Zionist would still be justified. Mass support for Zionism among Jews isn’t an argument against anti-Zionism, just like mass support for the Nazis among Germans wouldn’t be an argument against anti-fascism.”

Framed another way, the legitimacy of opposition to Nazism didn’t come from the fact that some Germans were anti-fascists

[Julian Sayarer @JulianSayarer]

This exemplifies the behaviour of the organised jewish community, where you use the US to have a man incarcerated for spending his family wealth to feed people surviving your genocide, then publicly gloat about it.

[Rohan Talbot @rohantalbot]

Literally how Israel was founded bud.

[Matt @msega085]

@davidmdraiman Death, death to the IDF

[B.M. @ireallyhateyou]

You know what's far more dangerous to Jews than people calling out the racism within Judaism? Jews' total refusal to call out or even acknowledge that racism.

Naked, blatant supremacism, and yet almost no Jews whatsoever criticize it openly, especially not in front of the goyim.

[Martin Shaw @martinshawx]

Genocide is shockingly common. What is distinctive about Gaza is that it is perpetrated by a Western state with the direct involvement of others, and normalised by Western media—as well as by bad-faith actors who pretend to be concerned with definitions but really aim to block recognition of the atrocities that Israel is committing.

[Shane Martínez @martinezdefence]

We cannot wait on the Canadian state to do the right thing. Arms Embargo Now has an active campaign to pressure Canadian companies to stop doing business with Elbit Systems. Please learn more and support this valuable initiative.
https://t.co/D1RLyUdKE5

[Shane Martínez @martinezdefence]

Israeli legal exceptionalism produces remarkable contradictions in Canadian foreign policy. Canada fulfills its international legal obligations when it is politically advantageous to do so. But when the Israeli military is at the centre of the issue, Canada refuses to uphold the rule of law.

Article 6(3) of the Arms Trade Treaty requires Canada to not authorize conventional arms transfers to a receiving party if at the time of the authorization Canada is aware that "the arms or items would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which it is a Party."

Canada imposes a comprehensive sanctions regime on Russia, with a two-way arms embargo covering every sector of the arms trade being one of its central features. This prohibits persons in Canada and Canadians abroad from exporting arms and related material to Russia. It also prohibits the provision of any services to Russia which would bolster Russia’s military capacity.

Yet despite the Gaza genocide, countless atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli armed forces, and the ICC investigation into Israel's international crimes, no such sanctions are applied to Israeli arms manufacturers or other individuals or entities involved in the arms trade. In fact, Canadian companies continue to supply parts to Elbit Systems - Israel's largest arms manufacturer.