In front of the United States whitehouse there is a poster board with this written on it: "A message from Gaza: We do not just want your eyes on Rafah. We want your foot on "Israel's" neck. Organize and escalate."

Source image re-posted on X post by: @/mxyaslytherin with the caption "a reminder" [May 30th, 2024.]

We don’t talk about this Starbucks feminism enough.

from GoodVibePolitik on X.com

Montreal, Canada – Human rights advocates are accusing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government of misleading the public over weapons sales to Israel, which have come under greater scrutiny amid the deadly Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

At issue is legislation that prohibits the government from exporting military equipment to foreign actors if there is a risk it can be used in human rights abuses.

But regulatory loopholes, combined with a lack of clarity over what Canada sends to Israel, have complicated efforts to end the transfers.

Dozens of Canadian civil society groups this month urged Trudeau to end arms exports to Israel, arguing they violate Canadian and international law because the weapons could be used in the Gaza Strip. [...]

But advocates say this misrepresents the total volume of Canada’s military exports to Israel, which totalled more than $15m ($21.3m Canadian) in 2022, according to the government’s own figures. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @vague-humanoid

Source

I woke up to the news about Refaat Alreer. I still feel cold. Imagine seeing someone talking on your TL every day, narrating what the genociders are doing, counting the dead and telling their stories, amplifying his colleagues in Palestinian activism and academia, advocating and pleading endlessly for a ceasefire, delivering blistering witticisms about Zionist propaganda and then...he and his whole family are dead.

Two of my favourite tweets by him, calling out the craven Western media for never naming Israel.

It feels like a funeral today. My whole TL full of his students and Palestinians mourning Refaat alongside writers and journalists and academics from all over the Global South. The only people who matter to us is us.

Meanwhile, Zionists are attacking us under our mourning tweets, circulating the tweet where he laughed at the monstrous lie of Hamas cooking a baby in an oven during Oct 7th, one of the lies that fuelled the slaughter that eventually killed him too.

This was his last tweet.

USAmerican disability activist Imani Barbarin's tweet today was partially motivated by Refaat's death.

I need to go offline for a while.

I leave you with Refaat's last poem that was his pinned tweet for over a month. When a storyteller dies, generations are robbed of universes. When a poet dies, the world loses a piece of its soul.

You can find Refaat's book "Gaza Writes Back" in my gdrive folder of Palestinian literature. I don't know where the royalties will go now, but please also try and find it in a bookstore or library.

If you weren't Pro-Palestine already, I hope the fact that the US government is literally trying to censor people that don't agree with them opens your eyes

The sex-based apartheid against women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to, "Afghan men saw Afghan women enjoying freedom and got mad, so they established extremist religious governments to stop it." I am really tired of seeing this misconception and oversimplification spread around by leftists, liberals and feminists – it's racist, and simply not fucking true.

The majority of Afghans want a secular government and for the oppression of women to end. The Taliban represent a minority of Afghanistan's people. The deterioration of Afghan society – in particular, women's rights and freedoms – directly results from decades of foreign intervention, imperialism and occupation. Afghans did not destroy Afghanistan, the United States did, and the USSR paved the way for them to do so.

Had Afghanistan never been treated like a pawn in the games played by imperialistic powers, had we not been reduced to resources, strategic importance and a tool for weakening the enemy, extremism would have never come to power.

An overview of Afghanistan's recent history:

The USSR wanted to incorporate Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia and did so by sabotaging indigenous Afghan communist movements and replacing our leaders with those loyal to the USSR. The United States began funding and training Islamic extremists – the Mujahideen – to fight against the Soviet influence and subsequent invasion, and to help the CIA suppress any indigenous Afghan leftist movements. Those Mujahideen won the war, and then spent the next decade fighting for absolute control over Afghanistan.

During that time period, known as the Afghan Civil War, the Mujahideen became warlords, each enforcing their own laws on the regions they controlled. Kabul was nearly destroyed, and the chaos, destruction and death was largely ignored by the United States despite being the ones who caused and empowered it. This civil war era created the perfect, unstable environment needed to give a fringe but strong group like the Taliban a chance to rise to power. And after two decades of war, a singular entity taking control and bringing 'peace' was enticing to all Afghans, even if their views were objectively more extreme than what we had been enduring up to that point.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they allied with the same warlords that had been destroying our country the decade prior and whom they had rallied against the Soviets – these are the people that made up the Northern Alliance. The 'good guys' that America gave us were rapists, pillagers, and violent extremists, no better than the Taliban. And that's not even mentioning the horrible atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces themselves.

So, no, Afghan men did not collectively wake up one day and decide that women had too much freedom and rush to establish an extremist government overnight. No, this is not to excuse the misogyny of men in our society – the extremists had to already exist for Americans to fund and arm them against the Soviets – but rather to redirect the bulk of this racist blame to the actual culprits. The religious extremism and sex-based apartheid would not be oppressing and murdering us today if they hadn't been funded and supported by the United States of America thirty years ago. And despite all the abuses and restrictions, many Afghan women prefer the Taliban's current government to another American occupation. I felt safer walking in Taliban-controlled Kabul than I did being 'randomly searched' (sexually assaulted) by American military police in my village as a child.

Imperialism is inextricably linked with patriarchal violence and women's oppression. You cannot talk about the deterioration of Afghanistan without talking about the true cause of said decline: The United States of America. Americans of all political views, including leftists and feminists, are guilty of reducing or outright ignoring Western responsibility for female oppression in the Global South, finding it much easier to place all blame on the foreign brown man or our supposedly backwards, savage cultures, when the most responsibility belongs with Western governments and their meddling games that forced the most violent misogynists among us into power.

(Most of this information comes from my own experience living as an Afghan Hazara woman in Afghanistan, but Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence covers this in much more detail. If you want more on the Soviet-Afghan war and Afghanistan's socialist history, Revolutionary Afghanistan is an English-language source from a more leftist perspective)

"Elderly Palestinian couple looking at their former home, now occupied by a couple from Brooklyn. 🇵🇸" [@/RamAbdu on X. April 4th, 2024.]

alt text included. from Ricardo Gamboa, 10/Mar/2024:

From “The Holocaust Industry” by Norman Finkelstein. A highly recommended read.

The AJC (American Jewish Committee) and ADL (Anti-Defamation League) would offer up files on alleged Jewish subversives— or, Jewish political opposition who aligned with Leftism— to US government agencies. In direct fashion with the United States’ McCarthy era of anti-Communist fear-mongering, Leftist Jews were uprooted and eliminated with support of Right-Wing Jewry. Due to the United States’ alignment with a barely de-Nazified Germany in opposition to the growing Soviet Union, Leftism and Communism on the home front had to be eliminated somehow… and that included within Jewish communities.

Finkelstein goes on to discuss how Jewish elites** needed to align themselves with US interests not only for survival, but for assimilation and safety from being once again deemed “untrustworthy aliens” that had led to the Nazi Holocaust. With the Communist the main enemy of the United States— the ideological juxtaposition— Jewish elites did not shy from selling out their own for favouring from the United States. Align with the Communists? That’s a one way ticket to another Shoah.

The Rosenbergs, were Jewish Communists spied for the Soviet Union. As Paul Von Blum wrote for truthdig: “Both were convincted of conspiracy to commit espionage— not espionage and certainly not treason, though these are the charges that stuck win the minds of millions of uninformed Americans. They were tried before Judge Irving Kaufman of the U.S. District Court. The prosecutorial team was headed by Irving Saypol and included the loathsome Roy Cohn (later chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and attorney to Donald Trump). Conspicuously, all of the prosecution team and the judge were Jews, an attempt to avoid charges of state anti-Semitism. But it is difficult to avoid that allegation in light of the way of anti-Semitism and anti-communism were entwined in the early postwar decades.” I highly urge reading this article on McCarthyism and the Rosenberg’s, it’s wonderfully written piece. The United States was drenched in fear being face to face with an enemy that challenged their very existence; the weakness of Capitalism showing, the rising Red Scare and unity of the People vs the State. The Rosenbergs were put to death as an example, to show what is not Jewish— an ideological framework for what would soon be an eventual catalyst for Zionism, “the Right Jews”. The Jews that point their guns at the United States enemies, the Jews that wont wave a red flag and find liberation within the people. The United States only want Jews that conform.

The Rosenbergs were stripped of their Jewishness purely for being Leftists. And this removal of Jewish identity in association with Leftism stands today— Pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist Jews are “not really Jewish”. Our existences erased and challenged, because we oppose Facism itself. History is a flat circle, with anti-Communism at it’s core, and Capitalism pulling the strings. Jewish-American State allyship is a one-sided relationship purely to preserve the Capitalist interests of the United States: destroying Jewish communities, religious and spiritual practices and our instinctive desire for a better world. Zionism and Right Wing ideologies have infected Judaism and Jewish peoplehood, and it is a truth that must be accepted, acknowledged, and then something must be done about it. Because we are raised to believe otherwise. And that is the problem.

Zionism is not Judaism, and antisemitism is interwoven with anti-Communism. It is the final wake up call that the West are trying to silence.

** For context, Finkelstein uses “American Jewish elites” to refer to ‘individuals prominent in the organizational and cultural life of the mainstream Jewish community.” This is not an antisemitic trope, elites is often coined to denote a figure in a position of power or influence. There are, will be and has been Jewish people in positions of power, exploitation and privilege.

The Palestinian Youth Movement, which has many chapters and affiliated groups in throughout Canada, decries the terrorist attacks on Yemen by the U.S. and U.K., which Canada has 'provided support' for (Jan 11th 2024). They point out that these attacks coincide with the ICJ hearing against Israel for its genocide, and that these governemnts are mobilizing their ressources to commit terrorist acts against Yemeni civilians rather than to serve their own citizens.

Numerous pro-Palestinian organizations in Canada have already cosigned this statement.

Kissinger’s Murderous Legacy

3 million+ bangladeshis

3 million+ vietnamese

2.5 million+ cambodians

1.1 million+ iraqis

1 million+ indonesians

900,000+ angolans

300,000+ east timorians

200,000+ laotians

60,000+ mozambiqueans

40,000+ chileans

30,000+ argentinians

20,000+ western saharans

15,000+ egyptians

11,000+ guinea bisseauans

10,000+ indians

10,000+ pakistanis

10,000+ zimbabweans

6,500+ cypriots

3,500+ syrians

Henry Kissinger may have had the biggest hand in mass murder than anyone in human history.

Good riddance.