Tom Loughran

THOU SHALT NOT KILL
Retweet≠endorsement

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

59 years ago today, Israel attacked the USS Liberty in international waters. 34 crew members were killed and 174 were wounded by the IDF.

Today, I spoke on the House floor to honor the fallen and to recognize the survivors who were present in the gallery.

[Tom Loughran @tloughran]

They Aren't Building AI Data Centers. (It's Way Worse) https://t.co/BvVNxG3jYc via @5149jamesli

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

BREAKING! US court ha suspended the US sanctions against me!
As the judge says: "Protecting the Freedom of speech is always just the public interest".
Thanks to my daughter and my husband for stepping up to defend me, and everyone who has helped so far.

Together we are One.

[Tom Loughran @tloughran]

Israeli Attack On Flotilla Violated UN Convention On The Law Of The Sea https://t.co/UDxlPIYIf5 via @Scheer_Post

[Tom Loughran @tloughran]

.@caitoz nails it once again: https://t.co/LGKwGJuxOA

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

NY Times has essentially confirmed that Israel played a role in stimulating the violent regime change riots that left around 3000 dead in Iran this January 8 and 9, but which were marketed in the West as pro-democracy protests.

It was well understood by the Mossad that those riots would help stimulate military action by Trump.

Israeli intel merely needed to convince the feeble-minded president that a wave of decapitation strikes would unleash a massive upheaval to immediately topple the Islamic Republic. The January riots were presented to Trump as a preview of what was to come.

Western media, including the NY Times and The Guardian, played a central role in legitimizing Israel's deception by falsely characterizing the violent regime change riots as mere protests, massively inflating the death toll and covering up the fact that many were murdered by the Israel-backed rioters themselves

The whole of Western media and the Western human rights industrial complex deliberately misrepresented the real character of those riots. But now that the war they helped to instigate is going badly for the US and Israel, that same media is now free to reveal a few kernels of truth.

[Tom Loughran @tloughran]

My Enemies Are Not In Iran, by @caitoz https://t.co/uV9DVpig3P

[Carrie Prejean Boller @CarriePrejean1]

Thank you @SameerahMunshi for your courage to stand up for me. You didn’t have to do that, but you did. Your integrity and bravery mean more to me than I can put into words.

You are not only a colleague, you have become a dear friend. I cherish the many conversations we’ve shared about our faith, always respecting one another despite our religious differences. We have learned so much from each other.

Hours of discussion, only to walk away with an even deeper respect and admiration for each other’s deeply held religious beliefs.

A Muslim woman and a Catholic woman, united in our commitment to religious freedom in America and in refusing to stay silent about the genocide in Gaza.

God bless you, Sameerah. The world needs more people with your courage.

Let’s continue to pray for a free America, and free Palestine

🇵🇸❤️🇺🇸
🫶🏼Carrie

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel killed every single paramedic in this photo today in South Lebanon.

12 paramedics slaughtered in one Israeli strike.

Israel DELIBERATELY targeted their medical center.

Killing medics is a war crime.

Killing medics is a crime against humanity.

This is medicide.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Tom Loughran @tloughran]

https://t.co/9kmg75etby

[Tom Loughran @tloughran]

Big mistake, George. If you were uncertain about the political winds, would you put all your money in one basket, or would you diversify? Wouldn’t you have someone out front of every major movement? Watch Tucker thru such a lens. Watch him carefully on immigration… You can live (longer) with free speech, if you’ve got boots at your command. I sincerely hope that this is the wrong lens, and that instead he has been growing in the right direction.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Opposing “Both Sides” In This War Is Crazy Imperialist Nonsense, And Other Notes

People tell me, “It’s possible to oppose this war AND oppose the Iranian regime. You can denounce BOTH.”

Sure you can. But you shouldn’t.

You should not do this. You should not be a pro bono Pentagon propagandist in the middle of a US war of immense consequence. You should not do the hasbarists’ job for them. Make them do their own job themselves.

This war already has a huge number of propagandists screaming “REGIME BAD” at the top of their lungs in order to ensure that the slaughter continues. You don’t need to add your voice to the chorus, and you shouldn’t. You should not help them manufacture consent for more human butchery. You should be using your voice solely and exclusively to end the butchery your government and its allies are inflicting on human beings.

All your “REGIME BAD” sloganeering accomplished was paving the way to the carnage you see before you today. Your self-righteous denunciations of the Iranian government failed to expand the rights of a single Iranian woman or LGBTQ individual. All you accomplished was helping to grease the wheels for a war of unfathomable horror, ensuring that all Iranians now live under more fear and misery than ever before.

If you live under the western empire, you have an ethical obligation to use your voice responsibly in that context. You don’t get to just irresponsibly feed into an active war propaganda campaign by regurgitating the same regime change narratives about an empire-targeted country as the US and Israeli governments, and then pretend this doesn’t make you culpable for the consequences of your actions. If your words help grease the wheels of the war machine, then you bear partial moral responsibility for what the war machine does with your assistance.

You don’t get to just pretend that responsibility doesn’t exist. The families who are being torn apart with the help of your pro bono war propaganda efforts do not care about your anarchist or Trotskyist “all tyranny is equally bad” political philosophy or how good your virtuous purity posturing makes you feel about yourself. All they experience is the consequences of your actions.

As a westerner, your one and only duty is to oppose the depravity of the western empire. That’s your only job. Don’t lean out the window of the Empire of Perpetual Bloodlust to wag your finger at empire-targeted countries in the global south. It’s obnoxious.

Curb the murderousness of your own government and its allies. THAT’S your job. If you get your job done, THEN come talk to me about how bad and wrong some random government in west Asia looks to you. Until then, shut the fuck up and do your job.

❖

Everyone’s always telling me to mind my own business and write about Australia instead of the war in Iran. Meanwhile Australia has added to its already extensive involvement in this war by sending war machinery to help defend against Iranian missile strikes in the United Arab Emirates.

So Australia isn’t just joining another American war, we’re also defending the fucking UAE — one of the most evil countries on earth. All that carnage you’ve been seeing in Sudan? That was backed by the UAE. Those emaciated kids you were seeing in Yemen a few years ago? Starved by the UAE in collaboration with Saudi Arabia, with the backing of the US and its allies. It was bad enough when we were selling these freaks mountains of weapons, now we’re actively defending them from the consequences of their ally’s unprovoked attack on Iran.

Our alliance with Washington poisons the soul of this entire continent.

❖

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal was working fine; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to the war that is currently happening.

❖

Iran is reportedly preparing to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz to block shipping, which will surprise nobody who knows anything about why the US empire held off on waging this war in the first place.

Sean McCarthy writes on Twitter, “For literally 45 years US planners have discussed this exact scenario and always decided against war with Iran for this reason. It took an incredible combination of blackmail, graft, lobby money and end time prophecy lunatics for Israel to make the US commit imperial suicide.”

This is what’s so crazy about all this: every reason it was a bad idea to go to war with Iran in the past is still a very valid reason why it’s a bad idea to go to war with Iran.

It didn’t surprise anyone when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz; they always knew that would happen if this war started.

It didn’t surprise anyone when Iran started destroying US military assets in surrounding Arab states; they always knew that would happen if this war started.

It didn’t surprise anyone that Iran would dig in and rely on its powerful military and invasion-proof terrain to repel a US-Israeli offensive; they always knew that would happen if this war started.

None of this is catching anyone who knew anything off-guard. It’s playing out exactly how leaders, military officials and analysts on both sides have always said it would.

Nothing changed about the reasons not to attack Iran. All that’s changed is Washington’s willingness to try putting a very bad idea into practice.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

I don't have "deep insights" about Americans as a species.

I have memory.

And I have pattern recognition sharpened by what it means to live under the consequences of decisions Americans call "foreign policy."

You grow up Vietnamese, you learn early that there are two parallel realities:

The one you live through.

And the one narrated about you on American television, in speeches, in films, in history books.

My family lived through the moment when American abstractions like "credibility" and "containing communism" stopped sounding strategic and became physical:

Bomb craters. Refugee boats. Bodies.

You watch villages renamed "collateral."

You watch coups renamed "restoring democracy."

You watch blockades renamed "pressure for reform."

You watch your dead filed away as "tragedy" so that no one has to call them what they were: crimes.

After a while, you stop getting angry at every sentence.

You start studying the grammar.

Who gets to remain human in the story.

Who gets turned into an adjective.

Whose violence is "regrettable," and whose resistance is "terrorism."

Which lives are allowed complexity, and which lives are flattened into body counts, talking points, and background noise.

Then you hear Americans speak about entirely different places, entirely different wars, entirely different enemies, and the same grammar is still there:

"Intervention" instead of invasion.

"Stability" instead of control.

"Responsibility" instead of domination.

"Sanctions" instead of siege.

If you grow up with that long enough, you learn that what empire calls "responsibility" usually means someone far away is about to bleed.

That's where my "insight" comes from.

From watching the same software run on different hardware.

From listening closely to the metaphors they don't even notice they're using anymore.

From realizing that, for a lot of good, ordinary people, this isn't malice. It's the water they were raised in.

The story is always written from the cockpit, never from the crater.

So when I write about American exceptionalism, I'm not claiming mystical access to "your people."

I am describing the hallucination I've been forced to survive under since I was born.

And once you see the pattern from outside the blast radius, it becomes almost impossible not to see it everywhere.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

‼️I am preparing a study on genocide and the media.
Submissions including evidence, analyses, testimonies, documented cases are welcome.
Call for submissions below:
🇬🇧https://t.co/LEliqfYg6O
🇫🇷https://t.co/b1AOPza2OH
🇪🇸https://t.co/jlqviAlREY
🇵🇸https://t.co/rEXyVeMr0J

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Few things have annoyed me more since the start of the war on Iran than to hear some European politicians repeat the narrative that it was "all about China."

One surprising (and disappointing) example was France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, France's main left-wing opposition party, who claimed that the war's objective was to “limit China's oil supply capabilities” (https://t.co/lQrmKo98is).

By saying this he literally parrots - almost word for word - the narrative of Lindsey Graham on Fox News (https://t.co/jBM2wyAipy) or that of the Hudson institute, an American right-wing neoconservative think tank (https://t.co/RxOz0XlMO6). Which, you'll agree, is rather unexpected company for Mélenchon...

Why does it annoy me so much? Because it's painfully obvious that the consequences of this war are far, far worse for Europe than they are for China.

Heck, if anything, this war may even ironically prove beneficial for China: it is quite literally the best advertisement for green energy the world has ever seen. Every day the Strait of Hormuz remains contested, every oil price spike - all of it is a live demonstration of exactly why fossil fuel dependency is a massive strategic liability.

This war is vindicating China's bet in spectacular fashion, and there is little doubt it will further encourage much of the world to buy exactly what China is selling: replacing dependence on whoever controls oil and gas chokepoints with energy from the sun and wind.

See, in large part due to its green energy ramp-up China, as of last year, reached an 85% energy self-sufficiency rate (https://t.co/n9onGBUSRp) which is absolutely remarkable for a country that consumes as much energy as the U.S. and the EU... combined.

The same, however, very much cannot be said of Europe. Where China is at 85% they're at an appalling 41% (https://t.co/KhqZXbhXIh), less than half.

So already, for this alone, Mélenchon should be worrying about Europe, not China. But that's just the beginning - the full picture is much worse.

What is this war, when one strips it to its essence? What is the precedent being set?

You have the world’s most powerful country attacking a sovereign nation, assassinating its leader, and attempting regime change - without even bothering to provide a casus belli (insanely the "casus belli" advanced by Rubio was that the victim would defend itself: https://t.co/uWC9XDauby).

In other words, the world this precedent establishes is a “might makes right” world on steroids, like we haven’t seen in many generations.

And, by definition, in a “might makes right” world what matters is… might. And let's be real: today China has it, and Europe just doesn’t.

For instance, what do you think happens to Greenland if Iran goes the way Trump wants and the lesson he gets out of it is that he can simply do anything he wants with impunity if the other party is weak? And when the Europeans who cheered that precedent then turn around and ask the world to respect their sovereignty? Europe is the kind of power that only survives in a world with rules and they’re foolishly cheering their destruction.

My latest article makes the full case, with the data to back it up. China will be fine, Europe won't and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because even the precious few politicians who aren't totally vassalized to the U.S. - the Mélenchons of Europe - are starting to work off the exact same delusional script as U.S. neocons, just reading from the opposite side (replying “they’re encircling China” and objecting to neocons saying “we’re encircling China” and cheering).

Which raises the question: who exactly is looking out for Europe?

I don't have an answer but my article, I believe, makes a pretty strong case for why this question has never been more urgent. Read it here: https://t.co/ppXsJAWbEc

[Adam @AdameMedia]

BREAKING 🚨 MARINE: “NO ONE WANTS TO DIE FOR ISRAEL”

U.S. Marine Brian McGinnis got dragged out of a senate hearing for standing up and saying what everyone is thinking.

Reports that they BROKE his hand.

This is a patriot.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

The Hague Group has been the political silver lining of the past year. May this mark the start of a new, DECOLONISED MULTILATERALISM: where every state is equal, sovereignty is respected, and human rights are upheld consistently and universally, not cherrypicked when convenient.

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

Trump called Kurdish leaders to offer them their own country in exchange for their support.

Again, really can’t be stressed enough, partition is the ultimate end game.

And partition doesn’t happen without constant American support for at least a decade.

All these mouth breathing dirtbags saying “hurr durr we can just wreck their country and leave” have been deployed to sell you on yet another forever war.

4-5 weeks will be turned into 4-5 months and then the midterms will give us a Democrat majority and the Democrat majority will push for continued engagement and then the Republicans will blame the Democrats for why we’re still engaged and then the whole debacle will become just another partisan football that gets kicked back and forth forever.

This is our only chance to stop it. Right now. BEFORE we wreck their country. Anyone telling you to sit down because we have to “support the troops” right now doesn’t give a flying duck about our troops and, in fact, is actively working against their best interest. They should be shamed and then completely ignored.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

I just returned from Jordan, with unprecedented clarity about what - from and through Palestine - the Israel/US axis is doing to the entire region. It pains to see what is unfolding. How come so many did not see it coming?
Greater Israel, unveiled.