Bulletins and News Discussion from October 9th to October 15th, 2023 - There Were Two Reigns of Terror - COTW: Palestine
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Palestine! 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.
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/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/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.
1-2 weeks ago: "Leftists have no idea about history. People can join bad organizations, even the Waffen-SS, to resist a foreign occupation and that doesn't make them a Nazi or a bad person."
Now: "Any Palestinian who joins or assists Hamas or any militant Palestinian group should be shot on sight. I support a complete siege of Gaza; all 2 million people inside must suffer, even die, for their crimes."
I was all for Palestine until they rudely interrupted my music festival next to the world’s largest concentration camp, forcing me to fly back to JFK in economy. They have left me no choice but to advocate for genocide.
Genuinely impressed by how mind-bogglingly stupid the average westerner is. Feed the westerner any propaganda slop and he'll eat it with a massive smile on his face while thanking his master. The allegedly propagandized asiatic Russian and the dumb bloodthirsty Arab already knows that most state news is fake and shouldn't be trusted, but the westerner can't even form an opinion without eating some slop first. You know as an Arab dude with a fucking family here in the West, it's getting harder and harder to live with such a hostile racist society. I've discussed with my wife if it's perhaps smarter to just cut loose the "privileges" of the West and move back into the Arab World and raise our future kids there. I'm close to the edge, I can't tolerate life here anymore.
Just wanna say a big fuck you to all the people that said the work Palestine Action were doing in the UK was useless and pointless adventurism or purely aesthetic.
Elbit Systems reduced their ammunition production by 75% in the last few years, and halved their drone production. All of this was happening in the UK and while it's probably only in the hundreds of thousands of 20mm - 40mm rounds and hundreds of drones these are still resources that have been deprived of Israel in this conflict.
Every single person that took part in those weapons factory attacks is a fucking hero in my eyes.
Watching a livestream from Gaza at the moment. It's night, and it's very eerie. Pretty much the entire city is pitch black, only a few lights can be seen in the distance. But the sounds, that's where it gets terrifying.
The nights are not calm, the Palestinian does not sleep, the night in Gaza is full of activity and dangers. There's the constant sound of an aircraft engine, it's very likely that this is at least one UAV flying above the city, watching them closely from above. From time to time, a jet engine can be heard, and not long after, an explosion. The explosions are heard intermittently, they break the silent of the night, they wake people up, and those who are not asleep will most likely rush towards the explosion to begin the horrible task of removing debris and see who can be pulled out alive... The average palestinian in Gaza does not sleep, they can't, they know that any minute now could be their demise. There's no shelters, no fancy Iron Dome, just counting on your blessings that the incoming missile doesn't hit your place. These nightly sounds are all meticulously crafted to break the Palestinian's spirit, every sound is there to remind them they're stuck in this concentration camp called Gaza.
To every fucker both-siding this conflict: First, suck every nanomillimeter of my third world cock. Second, watch 5 minutes of live night footage from Gaza. Tell me if the average brooklyn colonizer piece of shit in Tel Aviv has to live through the same horrors EVERY. FUCKING. NIGHT.
Holy fuck. I have no way of verifying whether this is real (the Instagram account is set to private now) but:
A famous pastry chef from Tel Aviv expressed his attitude to Zelensky with an original cake. He baked a cake in the shape of a gallows on which Vladimir Zelensky is hanged. According to Avi Melamedzon, the high level of corruption of the Zelensky government led to the fact that Ukrainian weapons were transferred to Hamas. And so the pastry chef expressed his anger.
Gotta say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the patsoc types like Jackson Hinkle actually being principled and openly cutting through the insane western media propaganda in recent days. It would've been very easy for them to fall back into the classic "muslim horde" mode of racism that many on the pro-Russian side in Ukraine sadly subscribe to. These people aren't exactly leftists, but their brand of politics has matured since the media insanity of Ukraine and many of them have progressed from what I saw as pure grifting. No matter how shitty some of them are, it still takes real balls to go against the dominant western narrative on not just Ukraine, but also Israel. They could've been like any "working class" Trump Republican who hates Ukraine to own the libs, but is now frothing at the mouth just wanting to kill Muslims. Guys like Hinkle were better than that, and they deserve some credit for being a little brave in this shitty world.
Hezbollah released footage of an ATGM attack on an IDF IFV "Zelda" (reddit country) type in northern Israel, a tit-for-tat response attack performed as a result of Israeli attacks on their observation points.
Tharallah is a laser guided ATGM that fired two missiles consecutively, the first one disables the armor and activates any trophy system that may be present. and the second missile penetrates the vehicle.
This is a very recently adapted and quite advanced ATGM which Hezbollah first tested out this year, 2023.
It also has the capability of simultaneously firing 4 missiles. For when you really really really really want something dead I suppose.
Highlight from Al-Qassam Brigades military spokesman Abu Obeida's speech yesterday:
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We heard today that the senile old man Yoav Gallant called us "human animals." Perhaps they meant the lions that trampled over their pig soldiers' necks inside their military bases, tanks, and fortresses.
To the extent that it even matters, all the smug liberal polisci browbeating of leftists over manufactured events like Hungary 1956, Tienanmen Square, Uyghurs, the Holodomor is over now. The DNC itself is co-responsible in a genocide.
Even the notion that liberal democracies should be anti-authoritarian is gone. The US has banned business boycotts of Israel and the EU has banned public criticism of genocide.
I really have to stress to westerners that there will be no exodus to Egypt or any other Arab country
One of the ironclad laws of Arab bourgeois politics is the halt of Palestinian movement, if even 10,000 Palestinians crossed the border Sisi will literally be couped by the military, he knows this and he hinted as much yesterday
The Israelis are pushing the Arab regimes up against a wall and the Americans with their typical arrogant amnesia aren't paying attention, if this keeps up the regimes are going to be forced to do something really fuckin funny
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Incredible to be living through events that, in 50, 70, maybe 100 years from now will be regarded with a similar degree of horror as the Holocaust. People living under communism in 2100 will wonder why we - as in, the mass of humanity living at the time - did nothing about the Palestinian Genocide of 2023. There will be people who get ancestry tests that reveal that they had Israeli settler grandparents and they will feel such intense shame and even try and hide the results. As we describe extremely bad people as "Hitler", they will describe similarly bad people as "Netanyahu", an example of almost superhuman evil. Goebbels and Himmler will have similar comparisons to current Israeli politicians.
This is been fucking me up so much that I've been crying the entire last three days. My girlfriend's family is of Palestinian descent, and seeing entire families been wiped out from the face of the planet, people who resembles me and my family holding their dead relatives in their hands it's really devastating. Also seeing the West always portraying themselves as the civilized ones is infuriating, fucking barbarians, they can get away with genocide in this century while the world watches. I cannot believe it.
One thing the Palestine situation has revealed is the pure, vapid emptiness of liberal ideology. I’ll bet you everything I own that every one of these universities putting out their genocide-supporting statements have some sort of land acknowledgement on their website.
It’s all virtue signaling. If indigenous Americans rose up and tried to take back their land, you’d see them change their tune real fuckin’ quick. They’d be shitting their pants over the brown savages coming to kill them and behead their precious white babies. They would demand concentration camps.
Modern liberal ideology is just conformism. It is a cynical weaponization of actual beliefs against anything revolutionary. It’s so-called “beliefs” can be twisted to mean anything at any time.
Remembering how "muslims should stay in their home countries and work to make it better instead of becoming refugees in the west" was a mainstream talking point for almost 2 decades
Chaim Rumkowski was a Jewish collaborator with the Nazis during World War II. Known as "King Chaim," Rumkowski accumulated massive wealth and power in the Lodz ghetto as he presided over the deportation of Lodz Jews to the death camps.
He harbored the conceit that he himself would be spared. But King Chaim was wrong. Here's how Wikipedia describes his ending:
In August 1944, Rumkowski and his family joined the last transport to Auschwitz, and he was murdered there on August 28, 1944, by Jewish Sondercommanado inmates who beat him to death as revenge for his role in the Holocaust.
I was reminded of this episode in Jewish history when it was reported this morning that "King Mehdi" Hasan was suspended from MSNBC for being a Muslim.
From John Wayne Westerns to horror movies about ancient Indian burial grounds, Orwell's leering 1984 bureaucrats with irish surnames, red Dawn and the turner diaries. Westerners are constantly anticipating the terror our society is built on being revisited on us.
A lie about Israeli babies being beheaded will always resonate with the average political subject in the west than the truth of thousands of Palestinian children murdered or starved.
Nonetheless, even with all their secular resistance slaughtered, all possibilities of diplomacy exhausted, their water and electricity cut off, Palestine and Hamas are still the moral betters of their oppressors.
Israel has now cut off food, water, gas, and electricity to Gaza. Israel is essentially in full control of Gaza's borders, and residents of Gaza have nowhere else to go.
Israel is denying Palestinians basic requirements for human life, while simultaneously bombing dense residential areas. I see no way to look at this other than genocide.
The fact that the US is sending a second carrier group that will take 2 weeks to arrive is indicative of western generals believing that the Israeli position is not strong enough, and that they think it will still be needed even 2 weeks from now is a strong indication they don't think this will be over quickly.
Everyone that spread doomer shit about violent resistance being pointless and doomed was completely fucking wrong.
I am legitimately seeing what "paper tiger" really means.
People need to understand the effects of the current events of the collective psyche of the Arab World. You had populations whose connection to Palestinian cause in clear and quick decline, after the total loss of left-leaning pan-Arabism post-67 and Saddam's fuckups, and the wave of normalisation in culturally dominant states such as the UAE, Morocco and effectively Saudi Arabia. Then you had Egypt, whose population still absolutely loathed Israel despite normalising back in 1979, but the energy had been competely sapped out of everyone after US-backed coup in 2013. What has happened in the past week has breathed life back into the Palestinian struggle and also revived the struggle in the minds of hundreds of millions. Whenever Egypt collapses in the next 10 years, the leaders of that revolution or uprising are men and women that were further radicalized during the current events. When King Abdullah is chased out in Jordan, the leaders of that uprising will be the descendants of Palestinian refugees who were forced back into the struggle in October 2023. Every weirdo Saudi or Emirati nationalist who was making fun of Palestinians just two weeks ago, has now either been radicalized back into Arab and Muslim nationalism or chased out of Twitter. Just like 1948 gave birth to leftist pan-Arabism, then 1967 killed leftist pan-Arabism and revived Islamism, 2023 will give birth to a new kind of anti-colonial politics aligned with Russia and China, which will inevitably sweep the shakier Arab nations. The anti-colonial Palestinian struggle will survive another generation.
Unconfirmed rumors that Hamas militants have been dressing up as sexy ladies with flowing hair and makeup, getting IOF soldiers immeasurably horny, before running around a corner and extending a frying pan behind them. So far at least 5 occupiers have fallen victim to this cruel attack, I seek condemnation at an international level.
It is shocking how some people can treat the grief and suffering of other people so disrespectful.
From a Twitter post made by the Zionist entity's self-styled "embassy" in Copenhagen as comment to a video of masked men wearing Palestinian colors removing flowers that local residents sympathetic to the apartheid regime has put at the "embassy".
The tweet was posted while the occupation regime's air force was conducting terror bombings of civilian Palestinians in retaliating for the Al-Aqsa Flood.
Shoot and cry is easily one of the most disgusting forms of propaganda.
Will Lebanon’s heavily armed Hezbollah militia join the Israel-Hamas war? The answer could well determine the direction of a battle that is bound to reshape the Middle East...
If someone tells you that Hamas seeks the genocide of Jews generally, this is an antisemitic trope.
Officially, Hamas opposes Zionists but actually outlaws violence against non-zionist jews.
This rhetoric conflates jews with zionists, as imperialists and other anti semites love to do.
Article Thirty-One:
The Islamic Resistance Movement is a humanistic movement. It takes care of human rights and is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions. It does not antagonize anyone of them except if it is antagonized by it or stands in its way to hamper its moves and waste its efforts.
Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. Past and present history are the best witness to that.
It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror. Everyone of them is at variance with his fellow-religionists, not to speak about followers of other religionists. Past and present history are full of examples to prove this fact.
"They will not fight against you in a body, except in fenced towns, or from behind walls. Their strength in war among themselves is great: thou thinkest them to be united; but their hearts are divided. This, because they are people who do not understand." (The Emigration - verse 14).
Islam confers upon everyone his legitimate rights. Islam prevents the incursion on other people's rights. The Zionist Nazi activities against our people will not last for long. "For the state of injustice lasts but one day, while the state of justice lasts till Doomsday."
"As to those who have not borne arms against you on account of religion, nor turned you out of your dwellings, Allah forbiddeth you not to deal kindly with them, and to behave justly towards them; for Allah loveth those who act justly." (The Tried - verse 8).
You may notice that they argue that only an Islamic theocracy can bring about religious harmony, so like, Hamas still has terrible and right wing politics, but I wanted to set the record straight on a common bit of rhetoric you're going to see in the wild.
Erdogan claims the US has been training and arming all terrorist groups at some 20 military bases in Syria, and turning entire Middle East into a bloodshed by unleashing them.
So how's r/combatfootage doing since they banned footage from the Palestinian side, must get boring exclusively watching videos of screaming children and wailing parents
China is entering an active political struggle against the West
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at a conference with EU representative Borrell, spoke in support of Palestine, saying that the Palestinian people have been oppressed by Israel for more than half a century. He also added that he would speak in emergency consultations of the UN Security Council in support of a cessation of hostilities, and China would provide humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip.
Russian delegate to the UN Security Council: The escalation is very worrying and the region is on the brink of an unprecedented and uncomprehensive war
Venezuela: March in support of Palestine in Plaza Bolivar in Caracas.
Seeing libs accuse Russia and China of genocide in Ukraine and Xinjiang respectively was one thing, but seeing libs accuse Palestine of committing genocide in Israel is just fucking horrific and monstrous.
I'm starting to think the western liberal tendency of calling all acts of violence they dislike genocide is a form of soft Holocaust denial. They've all seen the way outright Holocaust deniers are rightfully shunned and near universally derided. Now these disgusting opportunists call everything they dislike a genocide because they've gotten it in their heads that using the word genocide means no one is allowed to disagree with them.
In doing so, they continuously trivialize the Holocaust by implying the problem with Holocaust denial is that it is merely the denial of a claimed genocide and not because there exists a massive amount of irrefutable historical evidence demonstrating this totally unparalleled evil actually happened.
Iranian news outlet Tasnim said in a report on 9 October, citing an informed Palestinian source, that elements of the Israeli army who had been collaborating with Hamas provided the resistance group with “crucial information” that aided in the successful launching of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
“Some of the information [used] during the infiltration phases [of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood] had been acquired through long-time collaboration of certain Israeli military personnel with the resistance groups. This information played a crucial role in facilitating the infiltration of forces into Israeli districts, especially the military bases surrounding Gaza,” Tasnim said, citing exclusive information from the Palestinian source. According to the official, this cooperation goes beyond “mere intelligence matters” and has been ongoing for some time.
The official states that this collaboration relates specifically to the increase over the years of weapons theft from Israeli bases. In 2012, Haaretz reported that $14 million worth of equipment had been stolen from Israeli military bases. In May 2019, Maariv newspaper reported the disappearance of nearly 50 M16 rifles, many of which were never recovered. Many instances of theft from Israeli bases have been reported since. “Robbers often easily breach security and steal military equipment, bullets, rifles, generators, and even military vehicles,” the report says. “The robberies are often committed in cooperation with the Israeli military forces stationed at these bases,” it adds, citing “an unnamed Israeli officer at the logistics directorate.”
Palestinian resistance groups have increasingly been gaining access to and using Israeli weapons, the report explains, adding that these weapons are either obtained from traffickers, or stolen from bases through collaboration “with certain Israeli military forces who have renounced Zionism.” The Iranian news outlet referred to these forces as a “secret Palestinian army.”
The report also highlights the significant surge in drug use and addiction to narcotics among Israeli forces as a major factor in the trade of arms between Palestinians and Israeli officers. As a result of this collaboration between Palestinians and Israeli army elements – which the report says Israel is aware of to an extent – Tel Aviv has been forced to “eliminate” many of its rebellious or treasonous army officers and soldiers.
💬 Statement by 🟢 #Hamas regarding the allegations of targetting children:
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
The Palestinian resistance does not target children, and Western media outlets must ensure accuracy and not blindly side with the zionist narrative filled with lies and slanders.
We, in the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, firmly deny the fabricated allegations promoted by some Western media outlets, which unprofessionally adopt the zionist narrative full of lies and slanders against our Palestinian people and their resistance. The latest of these was the claim of killing children, beheading them, and targeting civilians. We consider this adoption and bias towards the zionist narrative without verification as nothing but a media downfall in an attempt to cover up the crimes of the occupation and its massacres committed day and night in Gaza.
These actions amount to war crimes and genocide by targeting civilians, cutting off electricity, water, food, and medical supplies.
The Palestinian resistance and Al-Qassam Brigades targeted the zionist military and security system in the Al-Aqsa Storm battle, which are legitimate targets. At the same time, they aimed to avoid civilians. Many field video clips witnessed this, and many settlers spoke about it with documented testimoniesthrough the media.
The biased Western media outlets, which favor the zionist narrative, failed to mention the extent of zionist criminality against our people in the Gaza Strip, which completely wiped out entire neighborhoods, bombed residential buildings over the heads of their residents, leading to the killing of 950 Palestinian civilians so far, including 260 children and 230 women, all killed without prior warning.
This zionist crime can only be described as genocide and war crimes. We, therefore, call on these Western media outlets to be objective and professional in reporting and covering the events of the zionist aggression and not to blatantly and blindly adopt the zionist narrative.
Zionists are either some of the stupidest people or the most evil liars you can possibly encounter. I can't tell you the number of times I have seen asshole say that Gaza isn't a ghetto or concentration camp (which itself is a distinction largely without a difference) because it has a high birth rate. You know, high birth rates, that thing you find in stable and prosperous places like Western Europe or Japan.
Started researching origins of Israel/Palestine beginning in the Bronze Ages til present to dunk on everyone with their shitty takes. I am and never have been a big history person, but I've more or less gone through the Bronze Ages - 1940's and figured out surrounding context for myself, just need to flesh out my notes. I'd love suggestions on what to study that could be important to getting an advanced grasp on the relations over the years, from any time period. Plsthx