Rustywheels

politics, football, nature, science

[Acyn @Acyn]

Reporter: Some members of the Jewish community, including Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer, were alarmed by the language you used at the rally last week, calling AIPAC monsters who move dark money.

Mamdani: I want to be very clear. We’re talking about a status quo where children are being killed on a daily basis. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the so-called ceasefire.

Even an Al Jazeera journalist, Ahmed Wishah, was killed this past Saturday by an Israeli strike. And when I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people not just in Palestine but, frankly, throughout much of the region.

And it is a status quo of immorality. It is one that I will not accept. And when it comes to the way in which they defend the status quo, oftentimes they defend it through direct contributions, as we are seeing right now in New York 13.

Oftentimes they also support the status quo through dark money, by funneling money that would have previously come directly from AIPAC through other organizations whose contributors’ identities are only made clear after an election.

And I think it is important that when we ask ourselves how such death and destruction is happening overseas, we also name those who allow it to take place.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Trevor Philips is neither sharp nor fearless: he is one of many second-raters who are being given rapid promotion by Bari Weiss because of his long record of making hostile comments about Muslims (for which he was suspended by Labour, until Keir Starmer, who shares his views, cancelled the enquiry) as well for justifying Israel's mass-slaughter of Palestinians. On the contrary, there is now no quicker route to advancement than to espouse such prejudices and to air them in sink holes like the Telegraph

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

The Jewish activist Tony Greenstein, whose opposition to the Gaza genocide will see him on trial in August for "supporting terrorism", is now being hounded – like other prominent Palestine solidarity activists – with a freeze on his bank accounts.

This is being directed by the government through the National Crime Agency.

Santander are the latest culprits to engage in what Greenstein calls "financial terrorism", after similar bank freezes from Nationwide, HSBC and First Direct.

One of the accounts frozen by Santander held money raised to help a Palestinian children's centre in Jenin.

As Greenstien notes, Jenin's children "suffer enough at the hands of the terrorist IDF without facing the terrorism of the British state acting via its banking system".

More here: https://t.co/RtpmLKSP9D

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

If you had any integrity, @YvetteCooperMP , and if you hadn't taken campaign donations from Labour Friends of Israel @_LFI,
you would be doing the same. You seem to have forgotten that
their PM has an arrest warrant out for him in the Hague

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

A transnational Jewish-Italian mob network centered on Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante ran Cuba as a privatized extraction arm of US empire: gambling, laundering, narcotics, prostitution, political bribery.

What the US could not openly run on its own border, the syndicate ran for it in Havana.

Batista was on a $ 1.28-million-a-month retainer, delivered every Monday at noon. His development bank bankrolled half of every new mob casino.

And this was not just gambling. Havana was a key node in the postwar heroin pipeline: Turkish opium, Marseille labs, Havana transshipment, New York distribution.

By the late 1960s, that French Connection network supplied most of America’s heroin.

Then Castro won.

In January 1959 the casinos were smashed, the bosses fled or were detained, and Batista escaped with a fortune estimated around $300 million.

The national lottery, once a graft channel, was converted into a housing fund.

But the mob did not disappear. It was redeployed.

Lansky’s lieutenant Doc Stacher later said Lansky offered to finance Castro’s assassination as early as 1959. By September 1960, the CIA was running the operation directly.

The Agency hired Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante. The opening offer was $150,000. The weapon: poison pills from the CIA’s Technical Services Division.

The 1975 Church Committee found concrete evidence of at least eight CIA plots against Castro between 1960 and 1965.

The same Havana-Miami underworld that lost Cuba in 1959 became useful again as the deniable violence arm of US policy.

Of the three mob figures the CIA hired, Giancana was murdered before he could testify to Congress. Rosselli was murdered after he did. Trafficante survived.

The continuity is structural, not anecdotal: Tampa, Havana, Miami. Casinos became exile paramilitaries. Exile paramilitaries became lobby infrastructure.

Jorge Mas Canosa, a Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA-radio figure, founded the Cuban American National Foundation in 1981 at the suggestion of Reagan's advisors. It was modeled on AIPAC and built to harden Cuba policy permanently.

The lobby's most famous operative was Luis Posada Carriles: CIA-trained, Bay of Pigs veteran, Iran-Contra contractor under Oliver North, perpetrator of the 1976 mid-air bombing of Cubana Flight 455 (73 dead) and the 1997 Havana hotel bombings. By 1998, he had publicly named Mas Canosa as his financier. He died free in Miami in 2018.

They did not just lobby. They wrote the laws.

1992: Cuban Democracy Act.
1996: Helms-Burton.
2019: Trump activates Title III, letting US claimants sue foreign firms using confiscated Cuban property.

Today the legal afterlife of Batista’s Cuba runs through federal court: hotel chains, expropriation claims, embargo law, and Miami political power.

Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State, is a product of that machine.

When he says “freedom in Cuba,” hear the history underneath it:

the old casino mobster class wants its island back

[Charles Watts @charles_watts]

Oh man 🥲

[gato fumante @KweenInYellow]

After he won the Pulitzer Prize, Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha was invited onto MSNBC where he was promptly interrogated about why he wasn't doing more to humanize the people slaughtering his family members in Gaza.

[Good Law Project @GoodLawProject]

We just thought we’d repost this video from last March before the Keir Starmer of it all goes out of date...

[Austen Ivereigh @austeni]

This is perfectly said:

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

📍 NEWCASTLE UNDER LYME - Locals were SHOCKED to found out the TRUE nature of Reform's plans.

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

Immigration makes Britain brilliant.

[Mark Seddon @MarkSeddon1962]

A thought or two for any putative Labour leaders going forward.

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Today is Nakba Day. @EmpirePodUK is one of the only history podcasts that has bothered to explain the events at the heart of the conflict in the Middle East. Listen as Professor Eugene Rogan explains how 750,000 Palestinians were turned into refugees at the creation of Israel

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

There is a name for boarding a ship and abducting innocent civilians in international waters, @BBCWorld. Its not called 'interception'. The word is piracy.

[Rustywheels @rustywheels]

https://t.co/08I6aiPwhJ

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

This is worth thinking about. Israel was asking Qatar to pay Hamas only a month before Oct 7.
Hmmmm.

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

#C4News last night reported on the wholesale targeting of ambulances & paramedics in Lebanon by Israel, including the recent 'triple hit', when Israel attacked an ambulance, then attacked paramedics who went to help, and then attacked further paramedics also trying to help.

[Rustywheels @rustywheels]

I have just pledged to visit my nearest General Strike 100 site.

Join me in celebrating 100 years since the 1926 General Strike here: https://t.co/Yp6RzdT7PC

#GeneralStrike100