Stef

[Zineb Riboua @zriboua]

The Arab Word is Watching a Different War:

Three reasons why it has been difficult to understand the Arab position:

The first is the Arab relationship with Iran. From the vantage point of Brussels or London, Iran presents itself as a resistance movement with a grievance against American hegemony and Israeli occupation, and this presentation maps comfortably onto familiar Western anticolonial frameworks.
What it does not map onto is the lived experience of Arab populations in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and across the Gulf. In those countries, Iran's presence meant Hezbollah holding the Lebanese state hostage to Tehran's decisions, thirty-five armed factions in Iraq drawing salaries from Iranian funds channeled through the Iraqi national treasury, and Houthi commanders answering to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while firing on Arab civilians from Yemeni soil. Freedom is not the word any serious Arab observer would use for what Iran brought.
Indeed, the Arab world's quarrel with Iran runs far deeper than American bases or Israeli airstrikes. What drives it is the systematic subversion of Arab sovereignty by a foreign power that uses the language of Islamic solidarity as cover for an imperial project conducted through proxies.
The second dimension is the proxy question itself, where Western analysis fails most comprehensively. Iran goes far beyond supporting armed groups. Parallel state structures get built inside Arab countries, financial systems get captured, and political figures get installed who owe their existence and survival entirely to Tehran.
The Iranians who have administered this project understand it as the export of a revolution, but what Arab populations have experienced is closer to a colonial occupation conducted through intermediaries, and as of now, they’re not mourning the Islamic Republic.
When Westerners treat these proxy networks as instruments of legitimate resistance rather than as mechanisms of subjugation, they endorse an imperial project while believing themselves to be opposing one, and as a matter of fact, make themselves the legitimizing force behind Iran’s war against the Arab world.
The third dimension is the most counterintuitive for a Western audience, and it is the one most consequential for how the current war is understood and misunderstood. For Arab nationalists, including secular nationalists and even those with deep reservations about Israeli policy, Iran represents a greater and more immediate threat than Israel does.
This is a position that Western media are structurally ill-equipped to render intelligible, because Western discourse on the Middle East has been organized for decades around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the primary axis of regional injustice.
The result is that when Western governments and Western publics take strong positions against Israel’s actions against Iran’s operations, they believe themselves to be standing with the Arab world. In reality, they are advancing a position that the Arab world does not share and has not asked for, while ignoring the threat that Arab governments and Arab populations actually live with.
The rhetorical use of Israel as a perpetual alibi for Iranian aggression has been one of the Islamic Republic’s most durable tools, and Western opinion has served as the unwitting amplifier of that tool across the entire duration of the Islamic Republic’s existence.

https://t.co/32dwric9G6

[Izabella Tabarovsky @IzaTabaro]

This is a beautiful post. It repeats, almost word for word, what Soviet propaganda said even as the USSR oppressed its Jews: there is no such thing as a Jewish people; Jews belong in the countries where they were born; Soviet Jews are part of the Soviet people and have nothing to do with Israel.

So Susan here is parroting ideas developed and operationalized by the KGB during the Cold War (and that go back to early Stalin and other Bolsheviks).

I also love how she reminds us that Jews lived in Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq, as well as in France and Germany, and then tells Jews to go to Europe or to hell. What happened, Susan? If Jews are Yemeni, Moroccan, Iraqi, and Egyptian, why send them to Europe? And if Israeli Jews are Middle Eastern, then they’re not European colonizers after all, are they?

Susan is right about one thing, though: Zionism is an expression of Jewish peoplehood. It’s why she and her friends hate it so much and fight it so vehemently. Undermine the idea of Jewish peoplehood, and you finally get the upper hand on the Jews.

This is precisely why Jews need to double down on Zionism.

By the way, did you know that Israel is one of the happiest countries on the planet? Am Yisrael Chai, Susan.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

Open Letter to Those in Hollywood Who Said "Free Palestine" But Never Said #FreeIran

We have watched you. We have listened to every word.
At podiums bathed in a billion lights, you declared "Free Palestine." The crowd roared. You felt righteous. You felt brave.

But you said nothing about Iran.

Nothing about Mahsa Amini, beaten to death by morality police for a strand of hair escaping her hijab. Nothing about the teenage girls shot in the streets for dancing. Nothing about the poets hanged at dawn, the dissidents tortured in Evin Prison, the 40,000 souls reportedly massacred when a regime decided its own people were the enemy. Nothing about the mothers arrested for weeping too loudly at their children's funerals.

You vowed not to work with anyone who "justifies genocide." So let me ask you directly:

Will you refuse to work with anyone who funds Hamas?
Because the Islamic Republic of Iran does exactly that. It arms Hamas. It funded the October 7 massacre — the single deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust — when 1,200 men, women, and children were slaughtered and taken hostage. Iran's regime did not weep for those children. It celebrated.

And you said nothing.

You called Israel's self-defense a "genocide" — Israel, a democracy where 20% of citizens are Arab, where Arab men and women sit in the Knesset, a country the size of New Jersey that has extended more peace offers than history has recorded acceptances.

Meanwhile, in Iran, a regime hangs gay men from cranes. It executes Christians for apostasy. It poisons schoolgirls with gas to deny them education. It has murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens — not collateral damage, targeted killing — with a bureaucratic efficiency that should make every self-proclaimed human rights advocate on earth scream.

Where is your open letter for them?

Where is your award-show moment for the 90 million Iranians suffocating under a boot the world has agreed, by its silence, to ignore?

I'll tell you what is happening, and I say it not with contempt but with grief: it is easy to condemn Israel. It comes with applause. It earns you the standing ovation, the social media adulation, the warm embrace of circles that have decided the Jewish state is the world's one acceptable villain. It costs you nothing.

Saying #FreeIran costs you something. It means confronting a regime your silence has helped legitimize. It means standing with people whose suffering has no fashionable hashtag, no viral aesthetic, no coalition of celebrities amplifying their pain.

The FBI documented a 400% rise in antisemitic incidents since October 7 — synagogues vandalized, Jewish children harassed in schools, people beaten on city streets for wearing a Star of David. Words like genocide, genocide, genocide do not exist in a vacuum. They land in a world already primed to hate, and they hand that hatred a moral permission slip.

So I am asking you — as someone who refuses to let selective outrage masquerade as conscience — to do better.

Say #FreeIran.

Say it without waiting for applause. Say it for Mahsa. Say it for the teenagers in Evin. Say it for the 90 million people who wake up every morning in a cage their government built while the world's moral celebrities looked the other way.

You told us you believe in peace. Then believe in it for everyone.

Because a conscience activated only for approved victims is not a conscience at all.

It is a performance.

And unlike your films, this performance has a body count.

With unflinching honesty- Dr. Afshine Emrani Humanist. The son of Iran. A voice that will not be quiet.

[Claire Lehmann @clairlemon]

American leftists will try to argue that synagogues being attacked in the US is just "blowback" from the war in Iran. But Australia is not leading any war in Iran, & 15 of our Jews were recently massacred on a beach. Jew hate can't be reduced to your petty partisan obsessions.

[Pendar @legomahi]

To the "anti-war" liberals sipping lattes while lecturing us on peace:

I spent the first 8 years of my life in bomb shelters during the longest war of the 20th century. Don’t you dare tell me what war looks like. I know the sound of sirens.

But I also know what it's like to watch a 16-year-old boy fall to his death because he was running from police who raided a party for the "crime" of dancing. I know the scream of a mother identifying her daughter’s body-murdered for a few loose strands of hair.

You want "peace" because it keeps your conscience clean. You’d rather Iranians rot in a silent, "stable" graveyard under the Islamic Regime's gender apartheid than witness the chaos of their liberation.

Iranians in Iran aren't naive. They know the West acts for its own interests. But they have reached the point where the gamble of a war is more hopeful than the certainty of this regime. If they are willing to risk everything to breathe, who the hell are you to tell them to stay in their cage?

Stop using their "safety" as an excuse for your cowardice. Iranians want a life, not just a pulse.

[bita // بیتا @_b33ts]

Iranian here!

I want to thank American leftists for educating me these past few days & correcting my understanding of Iran & radical Islam

I almost trusted my own experience, my parents’ trauma, and what my family in Iran endures daily instead of your wisdom. What would I have done without your tweets & tiktoks ❤️

[Dr. Sheila Nazarian @sheilanazarian]

How do you go from “woman, life, freedom” to defending the IRGC? Is there a term that describes this insanity?

[H. Ferdosy | ح. فردوسی @AuthorHFerry]

My family lives in Iran. I have more stakes in this war than all of those Western keyboard warriors and keffiyeh Karens. I can wake up tomorrow and not have a mom. Still, that's not the reason I'm not okay.

I know war is scary and it endangers everyone, but nothing is more emotionally taxing right now than seeing the world's reaction to our plight.

It's after 3 years of Iranian people's tireless advocacy amid absolute silence from these loud, heartless so-called human rights advocates, after the streets of Iran ran with the blood of 500+ in 2022, after the execution of 1400 (and these are just recorded estimates), after the imprisonment of torture of thousands of people in Iranian prisons, some of whom my friends, after seeing the economy do to a level where people are lucky to have a slice of bread as their only meal of the day while our entire national wealth is funneled either to the terrorists in the region or to the penthouses Israel just took out with the murderers who lived in them, after all that, to see keffiyeh Karen, who has been silent about our suffering until this very moment, proudly raise the Islamic Republic's bloody flag and say, "Hands off Iran."

No, keffiyeh Karen. No. You hands off Iran. Keep my country's name out of your mouth and my country's thought out of your mind. You don't care about us. We don't need you.

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

As an Iranian, I wish nothing more than for the self righteous westerners who say “Iran has the right to defend itself,” to live under the regime and find out exactly what it means to be “defended.”

[Moe Ali @iTsAnToOnY]

Thread: What is happening in Sudan!

I am writing this for non Arabic speakers, I will explain what has been happening in Sudan during the last 9 months, since 15th of April 2023.

#KeepEyesOnSudan

Help Sudan!!

If you see it, its your responsibility to spread it.

[Stef @stefserps]

@itsdrdmusic I almost had a panic attack do not scare us like that

[Dr. Nicole LePera @Theholisticpsyc]

You know you have authentic friends in your life when:

[The Notorious J.O.V. @whotfisjovana]

seeing Danny Devito walking his wiener dog is the serotonin i didn’t know i needed

[Robert Schultz @_RobertSchultz]

at my girlfriend’s house for thanksgiving and i asked if we could watch the game and she said “of course!” then put on a gossip girl thanksgiving episode

[The Ginger Swindler @lilydsmith]

This can’t possibly be the same 9pm I used to be starting to get ready for a night out at

[Nicholas Ferroni @NicholasFerroni]

If you are okay with having Muslim, Jewish and Hindu students sit through a Christian prayer in public school, and not okay with having Christian students sit through a Muslim, Jewish or Hindu prayer, then it’s NOT religious freedom- it’s religious oppression.

[Anna Merlan @annamerlan]

If a pro-life politician crowing about today’s decision ever paid for your abortion and it feels like the right time to talk about it, my email is [email protected]

[neen @neenaab3]

Your son made me take plan b after we hooked up but carry on