Nabeel Awan

[Megatron @Megatron_ron]

BREAKING: 🇵🇱🇮🇱 Israel spied on all of Poland using software—allegedly intended for catching criminals—that it had sold to the country

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has called the Pegasus spyware scandal a "crime against the state," accusing the previous PiS government of exposing sensitive data on thousands of Polish citizens, including opposition figures and independent prosecutors, to Israeli company NSO Group without oversight.

Tusk said Poland spent over PLN 60 million on the spyware, including PLN 25 million from a fund for crime victims and over PLN 30 million paid to the Israeli supplier.

He said Polish intelligence confirmed that Israeli entities controlled the system, while its contract restricted surveillance of Russian, Belarusian, and North Korean numbers but permitted monitoring of Polish, French, and German citizens.

He called the affair one of Poland's biggest scandals since the fall of communism and vowed to hold those responsible accountable.

[Wajahat S. Khan @WajSKhan]

Aunty,

You're absolutely right about one thing: that the PTI has been in power for 13 years in KP. Besides that, here's a fact check with some context.

Structural gaps between Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa long predate PTI rule.

The 1981 census literacy stood at 16.7% in NWFP versus 27.4% in Punjab; by the 1998 census it was 37.3% versus 47.4%.

Punjab’s larger population, canal-irrigated agriculture from the colonial period, along with it's larger industrial base, have produced higher baseline development for not just decades, but more if you were to include the pre-Partition period -- as Gazetted in two centuries of colonial rule.

Moreover, under the 7th NFC Award (in force since 2010), the divisible pool is allocated primarily by population (82% weight), giving Punjab ~51.74% and KP ~14.62% plus a 1% war-on-terror top-up; absolute transfers therefore favor Punjab regardless of provincial performance.⁠

But you seem to brush over the fact that while you were getting glow ups in London and Jeddah, KP absorbed the principal costs of the post-2001 insurgency and successive military operations. SATP data record 5,883 terrorism-related fatalities in the province in 2009 alone (when you were still raising those lovely children in Mayfair). 2014's Operation Zarb-e-Azb, launched in North Waziristan -- where your father never once went as PM to visit troops -- displaced approximately 930,000 people.

Considering you were probably concentrating on your studies at King Edwards during this period, maybe a reminder is in order. The "threat" that you don't feel from India, rather from KP, thanks to the TTP and its network, grew out of the 1980s Afghan mujahideen infrastructure that Pakistan Army's then Chief, Zia-ul-Haq -- your father's personal mentor and sponsor -- had supported.

As for your father's last dance, well, violence fell sharply after the 2014–2017 operations (to roughly 100–200 annual fatalities by 2017–2019). But Daddy had nothing to do with military planning or ops -- rather, your father was flying out emissaries to talk to the TTP (but in a helicopter, not a Gulfstream, just FYI). It was the Raheels and the Tariq Khans and the Amir Riazes and the Asim Bajwas -- a lot considerably more talented and tolerant than the current one, that was handling the fighting.

Yes, violence did rise again after 2021. But it was after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, compounded by your Daddy's handpicked Chief, Qamar Bajwa, resettling the Taliban back in KP.

As for your allegations about inks to terrorism, here's the best part: senior PTI leaders were repeatedly assassinated by TTP during the peak years.

Look up these names, Auntry:

Israrullah Khan Gandapur: Serving as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Provincial Law Minister for PTI, he was killed on October 16, 2013.

Sardar Ikramullah Khan Gandapur: Following his brother's assassination, Ikramullah won the vacated provincial assembly seat (PK-67) in a by-election and later served as the provincial Agriculture Minister. On July 22, 2018, just three days before the general elections, he was as targeted by a suicide bomber. By the way, this was the same election in which neither you nor Daddy could participate because both of you were convicted for hiding away billions in the Panama Papers case.

Want more? Look up these PTI leaders, Aunty:

Malik Tariq Awan, Peshawari PTI leader -- Killed in 2022 in Peshawar.

Atif Munsif Khan, Abbottabad Tehsil Mayor -- Killed in 2023 along with nine others in an ambush on his vehicle.

Rehan Zaib Khan, PTI Youth Leader -- Killed in broad daylight in 2024 while campaigning for NA-8 in Bajaur for the General Elections that you and Daddy and Chachoo stole.

Shah Khalid, Swabi PTI leader -- gunned down in Swabi just weeks before the stolen 2024 general elections.

Also in the lead up to those elections -- Malik Sameen Khan, North Waziristani PTI leader and elder, targeted and killed by unidentified gunmen in North Watziristan.

Look up these names. And think again about what you accuse the PTI of.

As for the “13 years of incompetence” framing, you omit federal responsibility for external and internal security, the costs of the 2018 FATA merger, and the fact that the steepest decline in KP violence coincided with early PTI provincial government plus large-scale military action.

Yes, Aunty: Terrorism actually dipped under Imran Khan's government. At least till your "Saada Chief" Bajwa didn't let the wolves back in post the US-pullout.

As for recent attack numbers that you love to cite, (PIPS: 111 in 2021 rising to 413 in 2025), remember that you track the post-2021 resurgence rather than a simple linear record of provincial governance.

If you've made it this far Aunty, here's the simplest part.

The KP's hard times didn't start under Imran.

But I can guarantee that they will not improve under you or your Daddy's illegal administration.

[Nancy Sidley @nancytsidley]

Ok guys, I’ve been looking into Malala Yousafzai’s charity, the Malala Fund and I have some questions.

According to its 2024–2025 financial reports:

Revenue: $16.48 MILLION
Expenses: $23.34 MILLION
Net assets: $42.97 MILLION

That means the charity spent approximately $6.86 MILLION MORE than it brought in‼️

And then there are the executive compensation figures:

CEO: Approximately $372,000
Chief Adviser: Approximately $320,000
COO: Approximately $241,000

The charity’s tax filings also disclose FIRST CLASS or PRIVATE travel for officers or key employees. ✈️ WTF?!

But here’s what I’d like to know:

How much of that $18.94 MILLION in program spending actually reaches girls and local educational organizations?

How much goes toward salaries, consultants, advocacy campaigns, and travel?

What measurable educational results can donors independently verify?

And why did a charity with $16.48 million in annual revenue spend over $23 million that year?!? 🤯

When you’re raising millions in the name of educating vulnerable girls, I don’t think asking where the money goes is unreasonable.

Charity should be about the cause, not the celebrity attached to it.

It now makes sense why Malala looked so comfortable dining at Claridge’s. Malala lives a life like a rockstar.

https://t.co/oacIR4mik1

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

It's worse than that. The real history of the Budapest Memorandum is not known (or is conveniently ignored). If it was, Sir Jacob's argument would be instantly exposed as a canard. Even @RnaudBertrand doesn't quite grasp it in his (excellent and worth reading) post below. The Budapest Memorandum *also* covered Belarus and Kazakhstan (who also gave up 'their' nuclear weapons, and who signed essentially identical, parallel documents at the same time as Ukraine signed its). All the documents contained a clause in which the USA, the UK and Russia promised "...to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by [Ukraine/Belarus/Kazakhstan] of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind."

When the United States imposed sanctions on Belarus in early 2013, Minsk complained bitterly to the US State Department that the sanctions directly contravened the Budapest Memorandum (rightly so, given any reasonable reading of the text possible). Washington's official response was that these sanctions didn't count. What the US State Department argued was that its policy to economically coerce Belarus to do what the US wanted was not in fact against the spirit of an agreement in which the US agreed "to refrain from economic coercion to...secure advantages of any kind" because, in this case, the US had unilaterally decided that this was to the benefit of Belarussians. (The Memorandum of course included no such caveats.) In case this argument was not sufficiently decisive, however, the US State Department also said that, as far as it was concerned, "the Memorandum is not legally binding."

I am not arguing that the US was the only guilty party here. But ask yourself this: If way back in 2013 the US believed it could break the Memorandum whenever it thought it was justified in doing so, and that the Memorandum was anyway not legally binding and so offered no legal constraints on US action, why do many British politicians (Sir Jacob is in the majority) contend that the Memorandum is a hard, legally binding, inviolable commitment to defend Ukraine? The answer, of course, is that it offers a patina of legality and moral force (one must fulfill one's promises!) to justify something that our elites wanted to do anyway -- hoping, of course, that nobody would bother reading the text or learning the history of the Budapest Memorandum.

And, of course, nobody who actually counts does read the Memorandum or learn its history in action! None many of the politicians in whose hands we place decisions of war and peace. They just think it sounds about right and that it suits their prejudices, so they repeat it rote. Not our Press, whose job it is in a free, democratic society to explore and parse such matters so they may present them in clear terms to the engaged citizen while holding the powerful to account. The Press, on the contrary -- increasingly credulous as they are, increasingly seeing themselves as activists rather than journalists as they do -- also swallow it whole and repeat the narrative rote. Sadly, despite @TuckerCarlson's scepticism, he was not sufficiently prepared, so he was unable to make the above argument. Had he done so, he would have exposed Sir Jacob as ignorant or dishonest (one hopes the former, at which stage a man as honorable as I believe Sir Jacob is would have done the intellectually honest thing and reassessed his position on the matter).

So, I guess it's up to people here to look into these matters and try to present the truth to our tiny followings. Not ideal: I don't have a sub-editor. But what's left?

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

🚨🇵🇹 Cristiano Ronaldo: “I decided to leave the camp without waiting for any further breach of word. For me the truth is still the most important thing in the relationship between people. However much it hurts, let them tell me the truth.

In fact, in a conversation I had with the President of the FPF and with the coach on the morning of the day of that press conference — they can certainly confirm this — I reaffirmed that if they did not want me there they should tell me. It was enough for them to be frank with me. I would accept that and I promised that we would prepare something beautiful, as I dream will happen, and no one would be left angry.
I remember it as if it were today. They replied in unison that no. That my place was in the National Team.

Never, at any moment, have I interfered in any technical or tactical decision of any coach or national team manager in almost 25 years of career.

I accept, for better or worse, what they propose that I do. I respect the decision, and when they break their word to me, I feel that my place is not there.

I also owe an apology to my national team teammates for having left the camp.

Despite the absolute breach of trust in the coach’s word, as those who witnessed these conversations can attest, I should not have done it. The responsibility is exclusively mine.

I apologise to the Portuguese people once again, but the breaking of one’s word has, for me, a defining impact. I felt that, from that point on, my remaining would only harm the working group, and I did what I have always said I would do if I did not feel useful: I packed my bags and left.

The consequence of this act of mine must be assessed and punished by the Portuguese Football Federation. I understand that the punishment should have no mitigating factors. I am not just any player; I am team captain, and that constitutes an aggravating factor.

I have already apologised, but I know that attitudes must have consequences. Anyone who is in football as I am knows that, regardless of each person’s status, the rules are the same for everyone.

On this subject, I have heard a great deal of talk about farewell matches, that I must have a dignified farewell and that the Federation wants to give me that opportunity.

I learned in life, often hungry and with nothing to eat, that no one gives anything to anyone.

I can promise all my fans, naturally and especially all Portuguese people, that we will have one or more farewell matches; there will be time for that.

But when I think of the national team, what I really think of is competing. That is what I thought on the day I was given the news of my father’s death.

I was at a camp with our national team and I decided to stay there until the end of the match the following day. I did for the country what I would never do for any club.

Therefore, if I am physically well, playing for my club, with goals I hope, after serving the suspension that may be applied to me, I will be available, as I have always been until today, to compete and win for our national team.

This is, believe me, the purest of truths.

Cristiano Ronaldo”.

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

🚨🇵🇹 Cristiano Ronaldo: “The coach had broken his word to me.

At the end of the match I only wanted everything to finish with the victory and to be alone. I did not go to greet the fans. A failing that is solely my responsibility and that should not have happened. I apologise to the Portuguese who supported us intensely there, I apologise to the fans, and I apologise to those who, without being Portuguese, may have travelled there to see me and whom I may have disappointed.

Forty-eight hours later we had a conversation — myself, the coach and Simão Coutinho — since he had been the one accompanying our conversations in August. It was a deep moment, very frank, without any kind of filter.

We agreed that there was only one way to close this “case”: that the coach repeat what he had just told me in private, in the presence of Simão Coutinho, but in the press room.

What was agreed was simple: the coach would begin the press conference with this subject, seeking to close the matter by telling the truth. He would say that I never asked to play any minutes, that it was the coach and no one else who proposed the plan for this camp to me, and that it was a mistake to put me on to warm up and then not bring me on, and that if it happened again he would not do it.

We ended that meeting with the coach asking me for a hug, promising me that he would say at the conference what he had just said to me, and that the matter would be overcome. I would not play in Denmark and I would play the match at the Dragão. All of this in the presence of Simão Coutinho, always.

At the coach’s request, a meeting then took place between himself, Simão Coutinho and Tiago Craveiro by videoconference, in which what we had discussed was summarised.

A short document was produced which I myself validated and which, with my knowledge, was delivered to the coach, as he had requested.
The conference was what is known: the posture had nothing to do with our meeting; I heard expressions and an aggressiveness that I do not believe I deserved, an attitude of “I want, I can and I command” that he never showed me, not even remotely, in private the day before.

The notes I validated were the following:
“I think it is important, also because it is the truth, to clarify a few things before talking about Denmark:
1. I myself, and no one else, proposed to Cristiano a plan for him this sporting season with the National Team. It was a long and very good conversation.
2. I know how much he lives and loves the national team and the weight he has in the world, and even more the weight and the positive influence he has had on the national team for 24 consecutive years.
3. The plan I proposed to Cristiano was accepted.
4. He never questioned my options. He was exemplary, loyal and professional.
5. The match in Norway was not part of the plan I drew up for him. However, I felt that he had managed to recover physically from the first match and I warned him that I might have to use him. Cristiano agreed.
6. I made a mistake by putting someone of the stature of Pelé or Maradona on to warm up and then not putting him in the game. If it were today I would not do it.
7. To close the subject: I want Cristiano in the National Team. In fact I do not want him a little, I want him a lot. Fortunately he also believes in me. He believed at Al Nassr and he does here as well.
8. About not greeting the fans. We have already spoken about that. Someone who has played more than 230 matches for the national team does not receive lessons from me on love for Portugal. It was a moment of frustration that erases nothing. He is the player who gives the most autographs, takes the most selfies, and shows the most affection to the fans. Let us not invent problems where they do not exist. When we are not happy we react. That was all.

None of these notes, therefore, said that the coach should even apologise to me.

It was the second time he had broken his word to me”.

[Ikram Yōusefzai @Ikramyousefzai]

Pakistan's first ever viral video, back before social media, when people used to send it to each other via Bluetooth. Even under a brutal dictatorship, we used to have this kind of debates, something that is only a dream in today's democracy

2005: 🇵🇰 Adnan Kakakheli vs Musharraf

[Enkidu Reborn @enkidureborn]

تحریک انصاف نے بہت بڑا کام کیا جب پختونخواہ پولیس کو سیاسی مداخلت سے پاک کیا۔ یہ تحریک انصاف کے منشور کے بنیادی نکات میں سے ایک تھا۔ اس کا خمیازہ تحریک انصاف کو خود بھگتنا پڑا۔

عمران خان نے ہیلتھ کارڈ دیا۔ ہزاروں لاکھوں لوگوں کا مفت علاج ہوا۔ کٹھ پتلیوں نے حکومت میں آتے ہی پہلا کام ہیلتھ کارڈ بند کرنے کا کیا۔ کہ اس سے مخالف کو ہمدردیاں م��تی ہیں۔عوام لاعلاج مرتے ہیں تو مریں۔

چینی پر سبسڈی کا سکینڈل آیا تو ترین سے بگاڑ لی۔ علیم خان کو راوی میں وہ سوسائٹی ریگولیٹ نہیں کرنے دی جو آب و تاب سے کھڑی ہے اور ہر سیلاب میں ڈوبتی ہے۔

بیوروکریسی پر چیک اینڈ بیلنس کے لیے سیٹزن پورٹل بنایا۔ غیر فعال کردیا۔ کسانوں کو گندم کا پورا اور بہترین ریٹ دیا۔ اسے ختم کردیا۔ بابر ستار نا��د تھا لیکن جج لگایا کہ انصاف کرے گا۔ اسے کھڈے لائن لگادیا۔ مغرب کو ناراض کرکے افغانستان سے تعلقات اچھے رکھے تاکہ پاکستان میں امن رہے۔ رجیم چینج کروا لیا امریکہ کا مہرہ نہیں بنا کہ پاکستان کسی مصیبت میں نا پھنسے۔

سمجھ نہیں آرہی کہ اس ملک کو مکمل اوورہالنگ کی ضرورت زیادہ ہے یا یہاں سرے سے کوئی سسٹم بنایا ہی نہیں جانا چاہیے۔

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Macron's former Prime Minister, who is candidate at France's next presidential elections, proposes to "build the United States of Europe" 👇

I've been hearing this discourse ever since I was a child, that we cannot compete with the US and China without a strong Europe.

Which, granted, makes a lot of sense on paper: if you're to compete against giants, you've got to be a giant yourself. Logical, right?

Except, in practice, the exact opposite occurred. Just look at the evolution of relative share of global GDP (https://t.co/X0iTKx9hcy): in 1992, the year of the Maastricht treaty (which officially created the EU), the countries making up the EU used to have 28.8% of global GDP which was actually more than the US (25.7%) and China (1.9%) combined!

Fast forward to today and both the US and China's shares have grown - in the case of China it's grown considerably - but Europe's share has shrunk to around 17%, the same share as China, losing about 40% of its economic weight in a mere 3 decades.

Which means that, very concretely, more Europe - and there has been, treaty after treaty, more and more Europe - has so far meant more and more economic irrelevance. The more we built Europe - this supposed economic giant on paper - the smaller we got economically.

And it's not a China story, it's not that simple: if it were, the US's global share of GDP would have shrunk alongside Europe, but it just didn't. Which means it's really a Europe problem.

And, unfortunately, it's not just the economy. More Europe has meant more irrelevance and weakness in just about all fields that matter.

Take foreign affairs for instance. There used to be a time when Europe's voice mattered in the world - or at least that of the countries making up Europe.

When, say, De Gaulle could, in the space of a single year, pull France out of NATO (https://t.co/asl494VdaU), ask American troops to leave French soil (https://t.co/7IM0R10bGi), and then fly to Phnom Penh to tell a packed stadium that the US had no business waging war in Vietnam (https://t.co/LMipIYWaKa). Try to picture a single European leader doing even one of those three things today.

Heck, in 2009 France got **back** in NATO, a sad illustration that the "strong Europe" we were promised as a counterweight to the US has in practice meant ever deeper subordination to it.

It's even written in black and white in the Lisbon Treaty itself (https://t.co/PRy91R7Dip), which states that NATO "remains the foundation" of its members' collective defence. So much for the independent giant...

Or take another critical dimension of power: technology. The countries of Europe used to sit at the technological frontier: Concorde, Ariane, the TGV, the World Wide Web invented at CERN, etc. A reminder that as late as 2007 a single European company, namely Nokia, sold 4 out of every 10 mobile phones on the planet.

Today look at the ASPI Critical Technology Tracker (https://t.co/JkfQboeBFn): out of the 74 critical technologies of the future, in how many is any European country in the lead? Answer: not a single one of them.

And I'm not even speaking about energy, culture, and a dozen other fields where the story is identical.

On energy alone: European companies now pay 2 to 3 times more for their electricity than their American and Chinese competitors, and just last year Brussels pledged to buy $750 billion worth of American energy as part of a trade "deal" for which it received, in exchange, 15% tariffs on its exports. Some giant...

Long story short, there is the logic on paper and then there is the logic in practice: when you see that the patient has been getting steadily sicker for 3 decades, and that the doctor's only answer, year after year, is to increase the dose of the very same medicine, at some point you have to question the medicine. Or the doctor.

De Gaulle, coming back to him because he was in my view one of the most prescient statesmen we ever produced, saw it coming clear as day: as early as 1962 he warned that a supranational Europe, having dissolved the only entities capable of having a will and a policy of their own - nations - would have no policy at all, and would end up following someone else's. He warned that "there would perhaps be a federator, but he would not be European" (https://t.co/hrhtRKUDd9).

In the same 1962 press conference he also beautifully said that "Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand belong to all of Europe to the very extent that they were respectively and eminently Italian, German and French. They would not have served Europe much had they been stateless men and had they thought, written in some integrated Esperanto or Volapük."

That was his conviction: that Europe's genius is really the sum of its singular geniuses, and that you cannot add them up by melting them down.

If you make some sort of soup out of French, Italian, Greek, and Spanish cuisine, all thrown in the same pot, you don't get all the flavors at once. Instead, you've destroyed four of the world's great culinary traditions to produce something no one wants to eat.

I'm not anti-European, by the way, and neither was De Gaulle. I do believe - and so did he - that Europe should be a power in its own right. What De Gaulle called a "European Europe": independent of Washington, speaking with its own voice, master of its own destiny.

He simply understood that only nations can carry such an ambition, because only nations have a will. Which is the great irony of this whole story: those who claim to want a strong Europe are busy dismantling the only thing that could ever make it one - the sovereignty of nations.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[ابراهيم ناجي Ibrahim Naji @Ibrahim___Yemen]

Calling us Houthis is like calling the Iranian people Khomeinis. Wouldn't it be better to call us Yemenis instead of Houthis?

I wish that were the case, because "Houthi" is the title of the leader of the Yemeni revolution, Sayyid Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi, while the entire population participated in the September 21, 2014 revolution. Therefore, you should call us by our true name: Yemenis or Ansar Allah (Supporters of God).

The name "Houthis" is used by our enemies to belittle us and deny our existence as a state, government, people, and army. Therefore, I hope you will not call us by the name our enemies use for us.

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

Norman Finkelstein: "The other heroes are the Yemenis. Why are they standing in solidarity with Gaza? Because what was done to Gaza was done to them. They faced the same horror. It is the human solidarity of the most wretched of the earth. It is beautiful. I deeply respect that."

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

What a time to be alive: Germany aims to develop the largest military in Europe, and the Europeans are cheering it on. Germany's political class is in full consensus in its enthusiasm for the war with Russia, with only the "far-right" party in opposition. The new reincarnation of Hitler who leads this racist 'Nazi party' opposing the war, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian woman with a Sri Lankan partner. Merz fully supports the genocide in Gaza, argues that Israel is "doing our dirty work" by attacking Iran, wants to take the lead in the proxy war against Russia, and defends democracy by crushing dissent. When the US destroyed Nord Stream, Germany blamed Russia. When the US provided subsidies that incentivised uncompetitive German companies to move to the US, Germany blamed Russia for its deindustrialisation. When the US threatened to annex Greenland, Merz responded by warning about a Russian threat to Greenland. Germany is now attempting to reverse its deindustrialisation with a booming military budget. In the First World War, Germany framed its military actions that resulted in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as liberating Ukraine from Moscow, while in reality Germany was establising its dominance over the region. In the Second World War, Germany yet again claimed to liberate Ukraine from Moscow, while actually treating it as an imperial conquest. This time around, Germany "liberated Ukraine" by toppling its democratically-elected government against the will of the majority of Ukrainians to convert it into a frontline state in an anti-Russian military alliance. Germany supported the brutality against Donbas and the purging of Ukraine's dissenting political opposition, opposition media, Russian language, and the Orthodox Church. The Minsk peace agreement negotiated by Germany was admitted to be a fraud to prepare Ukraine for war, and Germany is pumping in weapons. While most Ukrainians want a negotiated settlement, Germany boycotts diplomacy, pushes to deport Ukrainian refugees, and to conscript Ukrainian women to keep the war going - all under the slogan of "standing with Ukraine". Yet, the electoral defeat of Merz and his policies is framed as a threat to democracy and any criticism of make you a traitor who spreads Russian propaganda. How will this end?

[Arjun* @mxtaverse]

As they say, the best comedy makes you laugh, and then makes you think. This bit by Varun Grover did exactly that.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Karbala was not a defeat.

This must be understood. Without understanding this, you cannot understand anything about why Iran fights the way it fights, with the commitment it has, in the face of what it faces.

In 680 CE, Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, took a small group of seventy-two companions and family members to stand against the army of Yazid at a plain called Karbala. He knew he was going to lose. He knew most of them would die. His companions knew it too. He gave them every opportunity to leave. Some did. Most stayed.

They fought. They fell. Hussein was killed. His head was taken. The women and children were taken prisoner.

By every conventional measure: a defeat. A massacre.

And that defeat has been burning in the hearts of hundreds of millions of people for nearly fourteen hundred years.

Not as a wound to be avenged and then forgotten. As a permanent reference point. As the axis around which a certain understanding of justice and resistance and the willingness to stand for truth regardless of the odds has organized itself for fourteen centuries.

When an Iranian soldier goes to war, he understands himself in relation to Karbala. When an Iranian martyr falls, he understands his fall in relation to Karbala. When the movement suffers losses, it understands those losses in relation to Karbala.

The defeat at Karbala became the spiritual engine of a resistance tradition that has not stopped running since.

The empire has no historical reference point that functions like this. It has no equivalent depth of motivational infrastructure. It has soldiers who are paid and trained and equipped.

Iran has soldiers who believe. These are not the same thing.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Decades of missing context and self-serving narratives from establishment media have ensured most westerners entirely misunderstand the differences between Muslims, Islam and Islamism – just as they do the differences between Jews, Judaism and Zionism.

Here's my beginner's guide to fill in the gaps:

There is nothing unique or strange about Islam. Islam is a religion, whose adherents are called Muslims. Islamists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Islamic identity as a way to legitmise efforts to advance that project. Muslims and Islamists are different things.

If that distinction is not clear, think of a parallel case. Judaism is a religion, whose adherents are called Jews. Zionists, on the other hand, wish to pursue a political project, and use their Jewish identity as a way to legitimise efforts to advance that project. Jews and Zionists are different things.

Notably, with the help of western colonial powers over the past century, one prominent group of Zionists had great success in realising their political project. In 1948 they established a self-declared “Jewish” state of Israel by violently expelling Palestinians from their homeland.

Today, most Zionists identify at some level with the state of Israel. That is because doing so is advantageous, given that Israel is tightly integrated into “the West” and there are material and emotional benefits to be gained from identifying with it.

The record of the Islamists has been far more mixed and variable. The Republic of Iran was founded by clerical Islamists in a 1979 revolution against the despotic rule of a western-back monarchy led by the Shah. Afghanisan is ruled by the Islamists of the Taliban, young radicals who emerged after prolonged super-power meddling by the Soviets and Americans left their country ravaged and in the grip of feudal warlords. Nato-member Turkey is led by an Islamist government.

Each has a different, and conflicting, Islamist programme. This fact alone should highlight that there is no single, monolithic “Islamist” ideology.

Some groups of Islamists seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Islamists are the head-chopping zealots of Islamic State.

The same can be said of Zionists. Some seek violent change, others want peaceful change, depending on how they view their political project. Not all Zionists are the genocidal, child-killing soldiers sent by the state of Israel into Gaza.

The same kind of distinction can be made between the religion of Hinduism and the political ideology of Hindutva. The current government of India – led by Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party – is fiercely ultra-nationalist and anti-Muslim. But there is nothing intrinsic to Hinduism that leads to Modi’s political project. Rather, Hindutvaism fits Modi’s political objectives.

And we can see similar political tendencies over much of Christianity’s history, from the Crusades 1,000 years ago through the forced Christian conversions of the West’s colonial era to a modern Christian nationalism that prevails in Trump’s MAGA movement in the United States, and dominates major political movements in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Italy and elsewhere.

The main point is this: followers of political movements can – and often do – draw on the language of the religions they grew up with to rationalise their political programmes and invest them with a supposed divine legitimacy. Those programmes can be more or less violent, often depending on the circumstances such movements face.

The West’s obsession with associating Islam, and not Juadism, with violence – even as a self-declared “Jewish state” commits genocide – tells us precisely nothing about those two religions. But it does tell us something about the political interests of the West.

This is an extract from my essay Islam vs the West: The four biggest fallacies about Islam explained. Find a link to the full article in the reply post below ⬇️

[Pravin Sawhney @PravinSawhney]

Saw Main Vaapas Aaunga movie yesterday.
Understood why my late parents who came from Pakistan (Punjab) spoke endlessly about their land of birth. They had good memories of growing up years & the friends they made & left behind never to meet again. They understood that both sides suffered - perhaps it was unavoiable since the times were such. They had wisdom to teach me to think beyond one's religion . That all humans deserve respect & dignity. This could be one reason why I am most comfortable in Kashmir - Muslim majority place much like my parents' Punjab.
Now, this is not my emotive rambling. But a good reason why I want India & Pakistan to normalise relations. Make it easy for both sides to walk across Attari-Wagah border.
My big thank you to all who made this movie. Special thanks to Imtiaz Ali & the great Naseeruddin Shah!

[LongArc @LongArc_]

The Myth of Western Civilization

Civilization's don't develop in isolation, they are co-produced through exchange and interaction.

[Warfare Analysis @warfareanalysis]

Quick comments on the migration gates Morocco opened on Spain:

1- Ceuta and Melilla are originally Moroccan. They were occupied by Spain. However, if elections were held among the native Arab residents of Ceuta and Melilla, the overwhelming majority would choose Spain.

Not only that, if elections were held in any city in North Africa and its residents were given the choice between joining Spain or remaining part of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, or Egypt, they would choose to become part of Spain.

Because that would free them from their failed authoritarian regimes, which have failed even to build hospitals or schools, or even allow them freedom of expression about their own miserable living conditions.

Those residents would say:

“Why should I take the risk and possibly die in the Mediterranean? Migration has come to my home.”

2- The migration issue has always been used by these unelected, authoritarian regimes, whose only legitimacy comes from Western recognition, as a pressure card.

Since there is no doubt that the Moroccan police are complicit in opening the border gates, this does not elevate the Moroccan regime. Rather, it shows that its own citizens want to escape its hell and its failure.

3- There is no doubt that Israel and the anti-immigration Trump administration have a hand in this. The evidence is the celebration by media outlets and accounts affiliated with Israel and the right wing, which are sharing these videos and describing them as an “invasion.”

Morocco is a country that normalized relations with Israel, has joint military cooperation with it, and Trump recognized the disputed Western Sahara as part of Morocco. None of that comes without a price, especially after Spain’s positive stance on Gaza and the Palestinian cause.

4- The ruling institutions in France, Spain, and Italy should understand that the peoples of North Africa want nothing more than to live with dignity in their own homelands, and that the only thing capable of stopping migration from North Africa is not the repressive regimes that use it as a pressure card, but hope for these peoples in their own countries.

If the peoples of North Africa rid themselves of these repressive regimes, this would not only stop migration, but would also open the door for the voluntary return of migrants in Europe who fled the hell of these regimes.

The peoples of North Africa are not hostile to Spain because it stood with the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Rather, if there were a government that comes from the will of the people, this would serve as a motive for building relations based on mutual respect and mutual benefit.

[Namkeen Chai نمکین چائے @enigmaakh]

یہ گانا تقریبا پندرہ سال پرانا ہے۔ کیا آپ یقین کر سکتے ہیں؟ مگر آج بھی اسکے بول اتنے ہی سچے، موزوں اور حالات کے عین مطابق محسوس ہوتے ہیں!

بس اپنی زندگی کے پانچ منٹ نکال کر اسے ضرور سنیے۔ جیسے اسکے بول ہیں:

"اُٹھ جوانا، تیرا مُلک ڈُبیا۔"

اسے سنتے ہوئے بھی میرا دل رو پڑا ہے۔