paolo brianzi

[paolo brianzi @pbrianzi]

@IAPonomarenko 🌈🌈🤸‍♀️🤸‍♂️💛💙

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

Hi @NYCMayor the situation in Iran is extremely bad. Human rights organizations speculate that these are some of the worst crimes against humanity happening in the world right now.

We haven’t seen or heard you organize against the Islamic regime.

You said you care about universal dignity and justice for all.

We know you do not have the authority to arrest the regime’s president, Pezeshkian, when he arrives in New York in September to attend the UN conference.

However, we know you have the power to organize protests, as you have implored New Yorkers to do when Israel’s prime minister arrives at the same time as the regime’s president.

To protest the injustice and medieval atrocities happening to Iranians right now, can you please deliver a speech to New Yorkers, asking them to protest Pezeshkian when he arrives?

Iranians will continue to be massacred because of your continued silence, and you said silence was complicity in evil.

Please like and share to get the mayor’s attention to this matter. Thank you.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Hamas has launched an industrial‑scale campaign of terror, intimidation, interrogation, and blackmail against thousands of Gazans it suspects of planning to join tomorrow’s June 26 demonstrations against its violent, authoritarian rule. Hospitals across Gaza have been turned into makeshift police stations, interrogation sites, and torture centers. Clan elders are being coerced into issuing statements. Hamas operatives are stealing phones and posting fabricated messages to sabotage the protests. Families are being threatened, people placed under house arrest, and Hamas’s al‑Qassam brigades (the same forces responsible for October 7) have been fully mobilized to reinforce police and intelligence units with explicit shoot‑to‑kill orders.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press is largely absent, apparently because Israel is not involved – so no Jews, no news. And the Western “pro‑Palestine” industry is either celebrating the electoral victories of pro‑Hamas, hard‑left candidates or actively smearing Gaza’s protesters as collaborators undermining the “resistance.” As for the UN, NGOs, and major human‑rights organizations: silence. Not a word for Palestinians risking their lives to say they are done with Hamas’s terror and rule.

This is what the abandonment of Palestinians in Gaza looks like. Shame on all who stay silent in the face of jihadi, ISIS‑like violence against the very people they claim to champion.

[paolo brianzi @pbrianzi]

Xchè l'IDF dovrebbe mirare per uccidere un lattante? sarebbe assurdo. Quale guadagno militare sarebbe, e a quale costo sul palcoscenico pubblico. Non è assurdo invece accusare Israele di mostruosità, se il disegno è demonizzare e distruggere lo stato ebraico. Va avanti da decenni

[paolo brianzi @pbrianzi]

@GiorgioBollett1 @SignorErnesto https://t.co/9ptgu0akSB

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Will Europe Save Hamas in Gaza? I recently met with a high-ranking European official from a country deeply involved in the Israel and Palestine file to discuss Gaza’s future and immediate options for relieving civilians trapped under Hamas’s grip. I presented a simple proposal: create safe zones across the "Yellow Line" into the Israel‑controlled green zone and support new, organized, secure, Hamas‑free communities where Gazans could finally begin rebuilding their lives. Whether the issue is humane living conditions, deradicalization, education, healthcare, or shielding civilians from both Hamas or Israeli strikes, the green zone is the only place where meaningful action is possible. Instead of engaging, the official launched into a long monologue about their country’s contributions to the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA, and other institutions, all while insisting on their own “humility” as a faraway European nation.

Then came the truly alarming part: a casual normalization of Hamas. The official proudly described how easy it had been to work with Hamas before October 7, praising the group for providing “excellent security” and being “easier to work with than others.” What they called pragmatism was, in reality, a twenty‑year pattern of enabling a violent terrorist organization responsible for immense civilian suffering.

When I explained that any Hamas‑free zones would require vetting at the Yellow Line to prevent weapons or operatives from entering, the official reacted with shock. “This vetting would violate international law,” they repeated, insisting that their country could not fund projects with any checks on who enters. I noted the absurdity: I had undergone extensive vetting just to enter their country, and even this building, yet they believed Hamas fighters should be able to walk into new civilian safe zones unimpeded. Their only response was vague appeals to “international law,” which, in their interpretation, seems to require allowing terrorists to hide among civilians.

The meeting ended on an even more surreal note. When the official asked what would happen to Hamas fighters left in the red zone, I said I didn’t care; they could fight the Israeli military on their own all they wanted once they no longer held two million civilians hostage. The official lamented that “this isn’t the old American West” and expressed concern for what would happen to Hamas without human shields. Disgust doesn’t begin to describe my feelings and reactions.

I left convinced of something long suspected: Hamas’s twenty‑year rule was sustained not only by its own brutality but by an ecosystem of NGOs, donor nations, Western European governments, journalists, academics, activists, lawyers, and even self‑styled human‑rights defenders who normalized Hamas, treated it as a legitimate authority, or tolerated its abuses because their hostility toward Israel outweighed their concern for Gazans.

[paolo brianzi @pbrianzi]

@marattin Le ragioni che spingono i cantanti a mettere le spillette proGaza sono fin troppo chiare. De Gregori non vede quali sarebbero le competenze/sensibilità particolari che rendono il giudizio politico di un artista più meritevole di quello di un medico. Come Kundera, se ne astiene.

[Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg]

As I write and document quite explicitly in the piece, Einstein was a binationalist before Israel's founding (as were many notable Zionists!), but then became a supporter of Israel once it was established in 1948. He hosted Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion at his home in 1951. When he turned down the Israeli presidency in 1952, he referred to the country as "our state of Israel." Do you think they would have offered the job to an enemy? In reality, Einstein was an ally of the socialist government in power and a harsh critic of the Israeli right that opposed it -- which was actually a problem, because the presidency is supposed to be nonpartisan. Einstein regularly lambasted the Israeli right, not Israel or the Zionist project, which is quite clear if one actually reads the critical statements and who he refers to.

In 1955, in one of his last interviews, Einstein said "I have great hopes for the future of the Jewish state." https://t.co/wXpI229f9q
The last speech Einstein composed was intended to mark the 7th anniversary of Israel's founding, and he wrote it in conjunction with Abba Eban, Israel's ambassador to the United States (not the sort of thing an anti-Zionist would do). Explaining his idea in a letter to the embassy, Einstein wrote that "a somewhat critical attitude concerning the behavior of the world powers toward Israel and the Arab states could have a salutary influence. It is easier for me to say those things than for any person connected officially with organized Jewish life. To do this well it has to be carefully prepared in cooperation with responsible Israelis."

Einstein died days before Israel's Independence Day, but we have the text of the undelivered speech. In it, Einstein wrote:

"The establishment of the State of Israel was internationally approved and recognized largely for the purpose of rescuing the remnant of the Jewish people from unspeakable horrors of persecution and oppression. Another purpose was to provide conditions in which the spiritual and cultural life of a Hebrew society could find free expression. Thus the establishment of Israel is an event which actively engages the conscience of this generation.

It is, therefore, a bitter paradox to find that a state which was destined to be a shelter for a martyred people is itself threatened by grave dangers to its own security. The universal conscience cannot be indifferent to such a peril."

He also wrote: "It is anomalous that world opinion should only criticise Israel's response to hostility and should not actively seek to bring an end to the Arab hostility which is the root cause of the tension."

And, as Einstein always did, he closed with an appeal for peace, coupling his defense of Israel with this conclusion: "International policies for the Middle East should be dominated by efforts to secure peace in Israel and its neighbors." He never stopped advocating for Israeli-Arab peace, and raised the same point in that final interview cited above. To him, all these sentiments were not contradictory but complementary.
https://t.co/8ba6h2iRCh
He bequeathed his intellectual assets and likeness to Hebrew University.

One does not need to align with Einstein's approach to Israel and Zionism to acknowledge the reality of what it actually was. Einstein was a physicist who died in 1955, not some oracle on world politics, and it is perfectly reasonable to disagree today with his views on these and many other subjects. What is not reasonable is to adulterate those views in service of a contemporary ideological agenda.

All of this material is either explicitly discussed or linked in the article. I'm a little confused and surprised that you missed it.

[IlGuffanti 🇮🇹 🇺🇦 @guffanti_marco]

<Appena ne avremo la possibilità, CANCELLEREMO ISRAELE >.

Secondo me, se si concentra bene, anche @lageIoni potrebbe arrivare a capire il concetto di “preventiva”.
Forse.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

Holy shit. Wow.

This is HANDS DOWN the best take I’ve heard.

If there is one video you listen to today it’s this one.

Every single word of this and it’s a huge “f*ck you” to @antonioguterres for propping up the barbaric terrorist Islamic Regime in Iran.

Must be shared everywhere in my opinion.

Unfortunately I have no idea who this young British woman is to credit her, if you know who it is feel free to tag below.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This is long. Apologies for that. There's a brand new ahistorical lie being put out by the usual ahistorical bigots. So I decided to create a tiny little paper trail disproving it, in case y'all need it.

The old campaign of "Zionism is plain ol' colonialism and Jews didn't even need an Israel" is in retreat, mainly because it's so patently and easily dismantled. (I know it doesn't feel like it's in retreat, because the loudest activists still scream it; but more and more people know the answers and shout them back.)

So now they're on to the next ahistorical argument for the destruction of Israel: That Zionism actually hated Jews and rejected the most desperate and impoverished ones.

Because Zionism, the last refuge of the most desperate Jews who ever lived, was secretly actually opposed to their survival. Or something.

It's good to see this change, because it means that real history can still filter through the system. The truth matters. They have to respond to it.

Now to this latest pile of claptrap. Watch the short video and come back to this point.

--

I'll cut to the chase. Yes, Ruppin -- the weirdest and most ideologically creepy of Zionist planners -- and other Zionist officials used their influence with the British to try to filter the limited numbers of visas being handed out for immigration to focus on the most "productive" immigrants. For the plain-spoken economic planners, the reasoning was simple economic logic: The Yishuv was too poor to take in charity cases. For the Marxist, the logic was more romantic and agriculturally-inclined: the ideal citizen of their new Jewish state was imagined as a Schopenhauer-quoting farmer.

Yes, ideologues from the 1920s were weird.

This was all fairly harmless to the Jewish refugee masses as long as the doors to America and the West were open. Millions went to America; a scant few tens of thousands went to farm the kibbutzim and moshavim of the land of Israel.

But then things turned grim and desperate, as much for the Jews in Europe as for the Zionist project in Palestine.

America began closing its doors in the quota acts of 1921 and 1924, as did many other nations. Meanwhile, the pogroms in Europe grew in number and intensity and oppressive laws against Jews proliferated. Just as more and more Jews sought to flee Europe, fewer and fewer countries would take them in.

And just then, at the start of the greatest emergency in the long history of the Jews -- the moment and context that the fake historian in this video wants you to ignore -- the economy of the nascent Jewish polity collapsed.

It was the Polish Jews who did it. (Just kidding.) (Kinda.)

New anti-Jewish laws and economic crises in Poland beginning in 1924 drove tens of thousands of middle-class Polish Jews to immigrate to the Yishuv. (America had just passed the Quota Act of 1924; its doors were well and truly closed.) They came with their life savings in Polish zloties, and they helped jump-start an investment and housing boom in Tel Aviv.

And then, in 1925, the Polish economy collapsed and the zloty's value plummeted. Thousands of half-built houses and shops were frozen in place. Thousands of families were suddenly without work and without savings. Thousands more construction laborers suddenly had nothing to do and no one to pay them.

The "Fourth Aliyah" that began in 1924 brought roughly 80,000 people to Palestine; more in three years than the previous 40 years combined. The West's doors had closed. But as the economic implosion set in, that Aliyah ground to a halt. In 1927, more Jews left than arrived, mostly returning to Europe. The dangers of Europe were better than literal hunger in Tel Aviv.

Yes, literal hunger had set in. At the meeting of the Histadrut Executive on December 12, 1926, Ben Gurion and the other leaders talked about the hunger crisis. In a diary entry that month, Ben Gurion wrote that "men, women, and children are wandering the streets of Tel Aviv, hungry for bread... I have seen people fainting from hunger in the streets."

The social safety net of the pre-state Yishuv was overwhelmed. The economy was spiraling.

And Yishuv officials vowed to even more carefully control the flow of incoming immigrants and capital.

This Zachary Foster fellow, a self-proclaimed "historian," takes those real fears based on real suffering and shrinks them to "Zionists hated poor and desperate Jews."

He then points out that similar fears about unrestricted immigration continued after 1948.

He skips over the 1940s, of course, because it's inconvenient to the anti-Zionist that the British shut the gates to Palestine (and India, and pretty much everywhere else) to Jews from 1939 to 1948.

But his examples from 1948 are an astonishing insult to history and to your intelligence. Because soon after independence, those gates were opened wide, absorbing 140,000 of Europe's displaced persons and many hundreds of thousands of impoverished Jews from the Arab world. Most came with nothing in their pockets.

And this is how the fake historian depicts that moment, and the scant few immigration restrictions that remained in place: "When in theory now you have the resources of the state, you have an army, you have help from the United States and the Soviet Union, both countries that recognize your state just minutes after its establishment."

It's an interesting depiction. Let's look at the state of the newborn state of Israel in its first few years of existence and see if we can't understand why it might be afraid of mass immigration -- a fear it overcame to take in vast numbers, but the fear was nevertheless there. And for good reason.

Israel's economy from 1948 to, say, 1952 was in what might best be described as a controlled collapse. Israel was trying to do something that practically violated the laws of economics: Fighting an existential war while doubling its population and building a sovereign infrastructure from scratch, and doing it with no foreign currency reserves whatsoever.

It went from 650,000 Jews in 1948 to 1.5 million in 1952. Most of these, as I said, arrived with nothing, refugees from post-war Europe or expellees from Arab lands.

They needed homes (vast tent cities proliferated), food, healthcare and jobs. And the only way to feed them or provide fuel for heat and transportation was to import it. But the Yishuv didn't have the cash or the credit to buy those things on the international markets.

The only way to prevent mass starvation and bankruptcy was the "austerity plan" of 1949, in which the government imposed a brutal rationing system that gave every citizen a small booklet of coupons that could be traded for about 1,600 to 2,000 calories' worth of food each day.

The balled-pasta "ptitim" that are a staple of Israeli kids' diets were invented in those years to simulate rice, because real rice was too expensive to import. Kids got protein from egg powder. A black market proliferated in which as much as 40% of the country's food was traded at inflated prices.

And all that -- the spending on the war, the black-market prices, the massive influx -- drove runaway inflation.

But there wasn't much Israel could do to finesse its monetary policy. It had no central bank yet (this would be founded in 1954). It had no credit rating internationally.

So to pay for the austerity coupons, the doubling of the population and the war, the government just printed money, endless reams of increasingly inflated money.

By 1952, the Israeli Pound had lost almost all its value, forcing a devaluation and a forced internal "loan" -- the government literally took 10% of everyone's savings in exchange for state bonds.

Foster claims American and Soviet aid was available at the time. Not sure what he's talking about. There was zero Soviet aid, as far as I know. And the modest American loans were all, well, loans. And they came amid a total arms embargo at Israel's most desperate moment.

So what actually prevented a final and complete collapse of the brand new state? German reparations.

In late 1951, an insolvent Israel teetering on the edge of ruin and unable to pay for the fuel to keep its power plants running agreed to open negotiations with West Germany for reparations for the property stolen from Jews by the Nazi regime.

The roughly $840 million (in 1952 dollars; over $10 billion today) that West Germany would transfer over the next 12 years was a colossal amount, almost a third of the new country's annual GDP.

It shored up Israel's currency and paid for the ships, fuel and machinery that established Israel's earliest industrial base.

When Israel flung open its doors, the result was total economic collapse. It still did so, and would do so again and again -- because it actually was the refuge it claimed to be.

But if you're a lying ideologue, you'll pretend that Zionist officials' well-founded fears about mass unskilled immigration destabilizing the economy somehow undermined Zionism's core story about itself. They were right to be afraid, and they were right to fling open the doors despite those fears.

Foster also refers to a tiny handful of temporary "health filters" enacted by Israeli officials -- which were soon lifted and were controversial even in real time. They don't reflect the broader reality; they're the cherry-picked and quote-mined history of someone who doesn't see himself as a historian, but as an activist, someone willing to lie for the cause.

At any rate, by 1948, not only was Israel taking in the poor and desperate -- literal DPs stranded in Germany for years after the war with no one on Earth willing to take them in -- but it willingly suffered near-total economic collapse in order to be that safe haven.

No one else on Earth was willing to do that.

And faced with that history, the best that the anti-Zionist can summon is, "sometimes the Zionists were afraid they wouldn't be able to support the poor and sick immigrants."

This is the history that Foster shrinks down to "Zionism rejected desperate Jews."

One final thought: Look, it's not his fault. He has the same problem every anti-Zionist has. Very nearly the entirety of the Eastern Hemisphere's Jews emptied into Israel, usually when no one else would take them.

It's an annoying fact, because it's hard to hate the last survivors of a vast cleansing from whole continents.

Hard, but not impossible. The trick is to just pretend that none of that history actually happened.

See? Nothin' to it.

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

Negotiating with Islamic Republic isn’t just a betrayal of the 36,000 people massacred in Iran. Khamenei isn’t a regional dictator. He is the godfather of terror. We’re dying so you don’t have to watch “Allahu Akbar” murders on your own streets in the West

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

Mamdani, Mayor of New York, this is for you.

This image is of an Iranian woman killed by the Islamic Republic’s bullets.
More than 36,000 people have been slaughtered.
And yet you and your office, remain silent.
Dictators rely on two weapons: violence at home and silence abroad.
Your silence has a reason.
When the massacre of Iranians doesn’t fit your politics, your politics have failed humanity.
I am an immigrant living in New York.
This week, a murderer sent by the Islamic Republic was sentenced here for targeting me because I led a campaign against forced hijab.

If you don’t care about Iranians, understand this:
the killers of the Islamic regime are already here, operating, recruiting, and walking freely in New York. Islamic Republic officials are enjoying

Islamic Republic officials and their children, enjoy freedom in New York City, while the same regime shoots Iranian children for demanding that very freedom.
Silence is not neutrality.
It is a choice. And you are making it. Big Sham.

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

The images emerging now from Iran of young people, older people, boys and girls, who were murdered in the last few weeks by the Iranian Islamic dictator, the Islamic Corps of Revolutionary Guards, Basij militia and imported killers from Iraq, are heartbreaking but also enraging.
Some depict beautiful people at play, at the gym, dancing, on motorbikes; some makeshift morgues full of bodies; some streetscenes where killers shoot down unarmed protesters; and many show families opening bodybags to find their dead children shot in the head; others discover bodies of protesters wounded then executed in hospital beds and particularly women with uteruses removed or other horrors to conceal brutal rapes... Many are not young but it looks like the slaughter of the best and brightest of Iran Gen Z. Ive tried to repost these here.
I dont want us to tire of theses or look away. So many are these images that it is hard to open the images or repost them.
I have been contacted by people in Iran (who weirdly read my books in pirated Farsi editions) who manage to come online in various ways and they beg me to keep posting these images and faces and keep talking about them. Embarrassingly they thank me just for doing this! That is why i am writing this now. We must keep going and keep doing so.
The numbers killed are astonishing: based on sources within the murderous dictatorship, it may be as many as 36000 were murdered just in the first days of the terror 8/9 January and more later - making it likely that 40,000 is a horribly plausible estimate.
This makes this event the most greatest massacre in modern Iranian history by far, the greatest single event slaughter in modern MIddle Eastern history since 1900 - along with the Assad's liquidation of an entire town, site of Islamist insurgents, Hama, in 1982 when around 30,000 were killed. Both of them not taking place in wars but in cold blood - and this Iranian atrocity being far more terrible since none of the protesters were armed.
We live in a time of egregious comparisons to the Holocaust when the Holocaust is repellently abused and minimized by cynical cretins - radiohosts, podders, politicians- to criticize anything from vaccination to ICE raids. But here is a comparison that stands in its scale and horror: in size and horror this does resemble the two days of Babi Yar near Kiev in Sept 1941 where 33,000 Jews were killed. It is also worth pointing out that an entire progressive movement arose against the autocracy of the Shah. And his was an autocracy. But in his forty year one reign, only around 3000 people were killed, mainly in the last year before his downfall. This week alone would have murdered in the streets, torturechambers, hospitals of Iran. It is very striking that the UN has barely commented on this; its sec-general has been shamed publically by dissident @AlinejadMasih; many countries have refused to vote against Iran; many of those formerly known as 'progressives' are silent or supporting the regime - incredibly; some famous so-called 'humanitarian' NGOs - many of them organizations i revered since my childhood; hello Amnesty where is your other ball now - are silent. In doing so, they have discredited any claim to humanitarian credentials and exposed themselves.
Many Iranians dissidents have asked where are all the 'humanitarian' protesters who filled our streets, where are the righteous actors and other boobies now? It says alot that a comedian @omid9 is still doing more than BBC or Sky to cover this story. There are a plethora of great Iranian writers historians activists on X covering this. The killing is still going on.
The tyranny is fatally damaged, it may fall on its own ultimately, it is now even more tainted, more likely metamorphose into an ICRG dictatorship. But history shows declining damaged regiimes can survive for years. Britain - as usual desperately doing a lamely virtuous catchup following more determinated players in foreign policy, sometimes sensible things, othertimes foolish - is i think banning ICRG but when the lumbering EU is ahead of you, we should worry; it should also seize the properties owned by Khamenei family and dynasties; and do more.
For now all depends on the US President; depending on the details, a US strike might make its downfall more likely or it might not. What can we do? Not enough but keep posting the pictures for a start....

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

I Raised This Angel for 23 Years. Now I’m Forced to Stare at Her Body in the Grave.

Among grieving crowds in Isfahan, at her daughter’s grave, the mother of Sahba Rashtian, holding her photo,cries out:
“I raised this angel myself for twenty-three years. Now I must stare at her in the heart of the grave?”

On January 9, in Isfahan, Sahba Rashtian, a passionate Premier League football player, athlete, lover of nature and art, and a painter, was shot from the side by a sniper and killed.

#IranRevolution2026
#DigitalBlackoutIran

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

Hello everyone.

The FBI just informed me that on January 28, I will once again come face to face with yet ANOTHER man who tried to assassinate me on U.S. soil. This man was hired to kill me at a university in Connecticut, where I was scheduled to give a talk about the situation in Iran.

His name is Carlisle Rivera. He was recruited by Farhad Shakeri, an IRGC agent who was also involved in a separate assassination plot targeting President Trump.

This is the true nature of the Islamic Republic a regime that is massacring people right now inside Iran, having killed up to 20,000 people, while using the same terror networks to hunt its critics abroad, no matter where they are. Seeing this play out in a U.S. federal courtroom matters. It puts their crimes on the official record. It lets the world know who they really are.

This is the Islamic Republic’s playbook: silence people at home with bullets, chase them abroad with assassins, and when that fails, smear them.

I am strong because millions of unarmed people inside Iran, with no protection and no voice, are risking everything and are ready to die for a free Iran. I will do the same.

Please stand by my side in federal court. We are in this together.

Because this regime is not a threat only to Iranians. It is a threat to people across the region and far beyond. The Islamic Republic sends drones to kill innocent Ukrainians. Through the IRGC and its violent proxies, it exports repression and terror well beyond Iran’s borders, including deep involvement in Venezuela. It has targeted Jewish communities, attacked synagogues, and murdered civilians because of who they are. It has pursued dissidents on European soil and attempted assassinations on American soil.

This is why we must stand together, alongside the people of Iran who are risking their lives to push back against tyranny, not only for their freedom, but to protect global security and the safety of people everywhere.

January 28, 2026, at 11:00 a.m.
Judge Liman’s courtroom
500 Pearl Street, Courtroom 15C

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

A few moments before the bullets.
A brief crack in the internet blackout and this is what she chose to write:

“I’m connected for just a moment and I only want to write:
Woman, Life, Freedom.
Forever.”

Her name was Raha Bohlulipour, 19 years old, studied Italian in Tehran. Killed by security forces for the crime of demanding freedom.
She once wrote: “I am a big fan of life.”

For wanting a normal life,
the Islamic Republic shot her in the lung and killed her on January 9.
#IranMassacre
#IranRevolution2026

[Reza Pahlavi @PahlaviReza]

Mr. President, this is an urgent and immediate call for your attention, support, and action. Last night you saw the millions of brave Iranians in the streets facing down live bullets. Today, they are facing not just bullets but a total communications blackout. No Internet. No landlines.

Ali Khamenei, fearing the end of his criminal regime at the hands of the people and with the help of your powerful promise to support the protesters, has threatened the people on the streets with a brutal crack down. And he wants to use this blackout to murder these young heroes.

I have called the people to the streets to fight for their freedom and to overwhelm the security forces with sheer numbers. Last night they did that. Your threat to this criminal regime has also kept the regime’s thugs at bay. But time is of the essence. The people will be on the streets again in an hour. I am asking you to help.

You have proven and I know you are a man of peace and a man of your word. Please be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran.

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

What’s going on in Iran, how did we get here, and why you should pay attention.
In collaboration with @TheFP

[C.A. Carnevale-Maffè @carloalberto]

Non solo petrolio.

E non state ad accapigliarvi sulla presunta “esportazione della democrazia”.

Manca un importante tassello economico (e geopolitico) all’analisi dei possibili effetti dell’operazione “Absolute Resolve”: i minerali critici (oltre alla già conclamata espulsione dí avversari strategici da un territorio vicino).

Il Venezuela custodisce importanti riserve di coltan (columbite-tantalite), conosciuto come Blue Gold: non è una "terra rara" in senso stretto, ma un minerale che contiene due elementi cruciali, il tantalio e il niobio, entrambi considerati materie prime critiche dalla NATO, essenziali per l'elettronica, specialmente il tantalio usato per i condensatori. Poi neodimio per i sistemi di guida missilistica, e ancora: antimonio, cobalto, cassiterite, bauxite, litio. E poi, immancabili: oro e argento.
La Cina, che già controlla tra il 60% e il 95% della capacità di processing di gran parte dei minerali critici, stava di fatto perdendo il controllo della filiera di estrazione ed elaborazione dei minerali in Venezuela.
Il Pentagono, dopo le restrizioni imposte da Pechino sull’esportazione di terre rare come ritorsione ai dazi di Trump, non poteva rischiare di rimanere escluso dalle catene di approvvigionamento. Ciò ha reso l’intervento militare urgente e non procrastinabile.

Il petrolio di Caracas, che ha caratteristiche più pesanti di quelle dei giacimenti USA, richiederà infatti grandi investimenti in infrastrutture di estrazione, e quindi costituisce un obiettivo strategico più collocato nel medio termine.

La narrativa della operazione anti-droga è chiaramente puro marketing politico a uso MAGA. La presunta “deposizione di un dittatore”, invece, vista la situazione attuale a Caracas, rimane al più una proiezione del wishful thinking per anime belle.

Qui nel link un’interessante e ben documentata analisi sul tema materiali critici.

https://t.co/vivrtJnJn7

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

His name was Rami Ayyad.

He was a Palestinian Christian living in Gaza, part of a community that once numbered several thousand and today is reduced to a few hundred at most. He managed the Holy Bible Society bookstore, a small Christian institution that had operated quietly for years.

By the mid-2000s, pressure on Gaza’s Christians had intensified. Armed Islamist groups were asserting control. Alcohol shops were bombed. Christian schools were attacked. Churches were vandalized. Christians were increasingly viewed not as Palestinians, but as outsiders.

Rami Ayyad was repeatedly threatened. He received letters and phone calls telling him to convert to Islam or shut down the bookstore. Gunmen reportedly warned him directly. The bookstore itself was attacked before his murder.

In October 2007, he was abducted on his way home. His body was found days later, shot multiple times. Local church leaders did not hesitate to say what happened. He was murdered because he was Christian. International human rights organizations reached the same conclusion.

No serious investigation followed. No perpetrators were publicly brought to justice. The message was understood clearly by Gaza’s remaining Christians. Stay silent. Stay invisible. Or leave.

Many did leave.

This is the part rarely mentioned. Palestinians who are not Muslim do not only live under conflict. They also live under religious intimidation from within their own society. Their stories disappear.

And so today, people who claim to defend Palestinian human rights ignore this case entirely. No marches. No slogans. No condemnation. Because acknowledging Rami Ayyad means admitting that oppression come from inside.