Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure
Bulletins and News Discussion from November 6th to November 12th, 2023 - Apartheid Antony's Asinine Adventure
...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
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Long ass tweet about PIJ, and how they’re not some spooky scary ISIS like group:
putting it in spoiler cuz it’s so long.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is often viewed in the west as an "extremist" group, mostly a misunderstanding based on their oh-so "scary" name.
Last Monday I was speaking to a Palestinian with considerable knowledge on the Palestinian resistance factions, and he told me something very interesting about the PIJ.
The PIJ is a fighting organization, not a political organization in the traditional sense. Unlike Hamas, Fatah or even the PFLP, the PIJ do not have any set-in-stone vision for a future Palestinian state.
The PIJ does not envision political leadership in a liberated Palestine. Their political program makes it abundantly clear that they will leave political decision-making be up to the Palestinian people to decide.
Their refusal to engage in bureaucratic politics also makes them the only resistance group none of their other groups dare to criticize. By solely focusing on the armed struggle, the PIJ would never be involved in murky corruption scandals like other groups have been in the past.
The PIJ is a moderately religious organization, and perhaps one could argue even more moderate than Hamas. Their political program calls for the total unification of the Islamic nation between both Sunnis and Shias, and envisions the fostering of a democratic culture in which all internal disputes can be resolved in a respectful and grounded manner without the interference of foreign powers.
Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan who passed away in May this year due to starvation from his hunger strike, was affiliated with the PIJ, and served as their spokesman in the early 2000s. He was a respected figure by all Palestinians across the political spectrum, and would often be seen mingling with student groups from all factions. Khader Adnan was, in many ways, the physical embodiment of the political catch-all nature of the PIJ.
And a few other key points that are also important to highlight:
The PIJ holds Palestinian Christians to exceptionally high esteem, and sees them as a crucial component to not just the Palestinian national identity, but to the struggle as well. They consider Palestine's Christian community to have exerted, and I quote, "a noteworthy and discernible influence on the trajectory of the Palestinian struggle."
On the question regarding the PIJ's stance towards Jews and Judaism, consider this translated excerpt from their political program: “Our fight for Palestine is directed against the Israeli establishment, which has seized our homeland and opposes our people and our nation. Any Jewish individual residing outside this establishment, irrespective of their location, does not endorse or back ‘Israel’ in its occupation of our land and rights, and is not an adversary us. We do not regard them as our foes. Our stance regarding others is determined by their stance on Palestine, regardless of their faith or heritage.”
https://twitter.com/aldanmarki/status/1722135302792237248
https://nitter.net/aldanmarki/status/1722135302792237248Permanently Deleted
White people getting scared by the word Jihad is like westerners getting scared by the color red
Please provide a content warning when discussing that color
smh didn't even censor the "e", i'm shook
As a western man I'm scared of wokism as well so please provide a content warning the next time you're going to use woke words like "content warning".
they’re not some spooky scary ISIS like group
Have you considered that non-political direct action is the most terrifying thing that governments populated by lawyers and bankers can imagine?
The founders of PIJ were Maoists originally
"After the 1967 Naksa and the waning of Arab Nationalism led by Nasser, there was a shift toward Marxism and socialism within the Palestinian left. The PLO contained within it different strands of socialism. There were the Marxist-Leninists of PFLP and Maoists in Fateh, for example. A little-known fact is that some of these Maoists went on to found PIJ and other political Islamic groups, namely Munir Shafiq and Fathi Shiqaqi. According to German scholar Manfred Sing:
Shafīq founded the political wing of the Islamic Jihad Brigades, the Fighting Islamic Tendency (al-Ittijāh al-Islāmī al-Mujāhid), which was instrumental in forming the liaison to Fatḥī Shiqāqī’s Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine.
Sing goes on to argue that it was precisely the Maoist concept of the ‘mass line’ through which the likes of Shafiq would undergo a process of “reformulation of armed struggle in Islamic terms” (5). By starting from the concept of fitra, Muhammad Al-Bahays and Basim Sultan Al-Tamimi – two other Maoists who turned toward a synthesis between Islam and socialism – argued against the spiritually corrupting consumer society of Europe and America. From this standpoint, we can make sense of Shafiq’s statement “pour moi, il y a aujourd’hui des Islamistes qui sont bien plus politiques et matérialistes, en un sens, que nombre de marxistes” (6). Islam was not then only the frame of reference for much of Palestinian society, but also provides a materialist and spiritual understanding of life on this earth. For Shiqaqi, Shafiq, Tamimi, and Bahays, they felt as if they started from Marx, Lenin, and Mao and moved to new frontiers.
Yet, it was not just the mass line that influenced them, but the power of sabr while they languished in Zionist prisons. They became genuine believers through their struggle against zulm. They felt as if Islam can answer questions and pose questions that socialism cannot."
wow that's fascinating, thanks for sharing!