It has officially started, no words can describe the feeling in my heart right now. I have lots to say to Iran and the Axis, but this is not the time nor place. May God keep everyone home in Lebanon safe and strengthen their resolve. It has felt inevitable for months now, but I hate that we're so close to winter with how cold it gets in Lebanon. My aunties in Beirut started gathering supplies a few days ago, they have plenty of canned goods and stuff like rice stored now. My stubborn communist uncle was a "nothing ever happens guy" though so we're grilling him in the family group chat now. My cousin is home in Beirut now, we were worried for him because he works in Tyre which will most likely be pulverised by the Zionists. May God give us the chance to witness the total destruction of this cancerous entity.

Waiting for a response for any message in the family group chat right now is fucking torture, I literally can't deal with it anymore. I've sent my wife and the kid to her mom's for a few days, they can't see me and my dad like this. The two hours it took for my uncle to see the message and respond today were absolute hell, fuck this life. My aunt has little kids no older than 14, what if something happens. I've called my cousin from my mom's side who has a little farm outside of Damascus in Syria, he can take in my dad's family from Beirut, but how the fuck will they even leave with this situation, and my cousin is already dirt poor, how will he feed them. Too many thoughts spinning, nowhere to scream them out, nowhere to go and nothing to do, I almost wish I was there.

Today my heart broke because that guy I posted about, whom I'm helping and trying to find more donors, I asked him what will they do if this https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/middleeast/netanyahu-gaza-hamas-expulsions-plan-intl/index.html happens. He told me they're tired, exhausted and staying on north, that he wishes to die because he's tired of seeing death... I broke. I literally broke and cried until I knocked myself with xanax because it was unbearable. I was practically saying goodbye to him and his family today. Three months, we knew each other three months, we shared our thoughts, I would comfort him, he would comfort me... A part of me died today. Saying goodbye to him was one of the most hurtful thing to experience for me. He is my friend and my friend told me he's waiting to die and if Netanyahu does this, they're staying to die. He told me not to be sad, which made me sob even harder.

Damn fucking Israel and damn fucking USA. I wish Netanyahu, his government, his army and his settlers that Israel collapses, that they lose everything and one by one gets mysteriously shot in the head. Fuck you, Biden! Netanyahu, choke! I hate you all so much, I wish you all die in a stampedo of people who will beat you to death. One of those foots in the head is mine. Drop dead, scum, I wish you nothing but death and death of your families, that your seed disappears, like my Palestinians lost everything, like they'll never have children and future. FUCK YOU!!!

I have a friend from Lebanon, I haven't heard from him in months. I don't know what's with his family in Lebanon, is he ok...

Fucking Israel is taking everything from us. We're maybe tertiary victim of this, but we are also victims. One year we're watching this genocide, nothing was solved, it's even worse now and now they mutilated Lebanese men and bombing their land. We're empty, depressed, defeated and helpless together with the primary victims. Nothing we did didn't made Biden to fucking get Israel at its place. It's only worse.

Israel will be dead, Palestine will be free. Fuck you, Zionists, fuck off and die and choke in your blood. Monsters. Nothing but monsters and scum.

Conversation I just had -

Me: "You support Israel invading Lebanon?"

Lib: "Yes because Hezbollah have been firing rockets at settlements for months"

Me: "And you support Ukraine?"

Lib: "Yes Ukraine should defend itself because Russia invaded."

Me: "What was Ukraine doing to Donbass before Russia invaded?"

Lib: "Nothing"

We're about to witness a lynching perpetrated by the Judicial Branch of the United States. There isn't a follow up to that sentence I could write that wouldn't get me thrown in a van.

I can't believe it, I just can't swallow this news. Nasrallah is the resistance, he's Hezbollah, he's the man that defeated Israel twice, he's the greatest man that the region produced in the last 50 years, he's the one that you could listen to for hours without being bored. What a loss, what a tragedy.

It's a black day, it's very hard to process. I'm frightened of what comes next.

لبيك يا نصرالله لبيك يا سيد المقاومة

With Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah's martyrdom marking a very significant moment in the history of the resistance, I think that it puts a natural stop to my effortpost about the history about the pan-Shia moment. I'm also just too demoralised and sad to continue writing, maybe I'll one day do another one of these in happier times. Thank you all for reading these, I can answer any questions if God gives me strength. I have one favor to ask, can someone please post this in the history or effortpost comms?

Part One

Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment

Part Three, it also gets continued in the first comment

Part one effortpost here, I chose number two. Sorry for any grammatical fuckups in advance, it was too long to proof read.

The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part One

The year is 1978. Ayatollah Khomeini, the main voice of Shia Islamism has just been expelled from Najaf by Saddam Hussein. Najaf, the capital of Shia Islam and where the biggest Hawzas (Shia Islamic schools) are located, is a hotspot of political repression, executions, and arrests. The main Marja (basically Shia pope), Sayyid Abu Al Qasim Al Khoei is reduced to a strictly religious role, giving rulings about useless things like marriages and inheritance. His predecessor, Sayyid Muhsin Al Hakim, pushed the political buttons too hard with a ruling that deemed communists and Baathists as disbelievers, which made the Iraqi state go crazy and start a huge campaign of repression of anything political from the Shia elite. Khomeini’s development of the concept of Wilayat Al Faqih was very worrying for Baathist Iraq, so he was expelled from Najaf.

Shias in Iraq never got a place post-Sykes-Picot, with the Kingdom of Iraq being dominated by the Sunni Baghdadi elite. The period between 1958-1968 after the revolution was too chaotic and disjointed to produce an elite, with daily conflicts and coup attempts by adventurers with different ideologies. The Baathist period produced a new elite strictly dominated by Sunnis from Salahaddin Province, so the Shias just never got a seat at the table. Two ideologies penetrated the Shia mind, Islamism and Communism. Islamists were concentrated in Karbala and Najaf, two holy cities for Shia Islam. Communists where concentrated in Nasiriyah, Amarah and Basra, cities where poverty was rampant. Islamists were finally organised in the form of the Dawa Party, led by Musa Al Sadr’s cousin Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr. Musa Al Sadr would later rise as the spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community. Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr’s works and political activities really annoyed the Iraqi state, so he and his sister were executed by the state in 1980. Most of their followers were executed or exiled. Many of the influential families in Najaf and Karbala had some Persian ancestry, nearly all those families suffered from mass deportations as Saddam’s anti-Persian paranoia grew. The communists suffered from the same fate, with most communists either executed or exiled by the state due to their political activities.

Now we’re done with Iraq, let’s go to Iran. Shia Islamism is dead here too, the Shah’s security services arrests anyone with any political activity. Khomeini was successfully chased out 20 years ago, and there’s no organised political force that can even talk loudly without getting executed. The Shah is at least Shia Muslim on paper, he prays in public once every 10 years, visits the shrines in Qom and Mashhad occasionally, but to everyone with a functioning brain, this man is a disbeliever. There’s something brewing, but let’s wait with that story.

Let’s go to Lebanon. Shias in Lebanon are around half of the Muslim population. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but Shias are around 25% of the total population of the country. The Shia community here also never got a real seat at the table. The president holds most of the power and is always a Maronite. The prime minister gets fired every few weeks, but he’s always a Sunni and does nothing while the Maronite elite is pretending to be French and robbing the country. The speaker of the parliament is Shia, but toilet paper is more useful than that position. Feudalism didn’t really end in the Shia parts of Lebanon, most Shias were farmers who were getting fucked so hard on a daily basis that they didn’t have time to even think about politics. Remember we’re in 1978, where are the Shias in the middle of civil war? The answer is nowhere. The main sides are Maronites vs Sunni Muslims, communists and Palestinians. Shias were not a major factor here. The only notable Shia organization is the Amal Movement, led by Musa Al Sadr. Musa was a charismatic leader who would set the foundations of the modern Shia Lebanese identity, he was respected by all sectors of the cursed Lebanese society and his connections to Iran and Iraq were slowly starting to be important in a regional context. But nothing good lasts, as he was inexplicably disappeared and presumably killed by Gaddafi during a routine visit to Libya in August 1978.

Let’s go to Yemen and the Gulf. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Shias were an afterthought, they are 0% of the ruling families and have zero political representation. They’re allowed to do some rituals at home when no one sees, but if you open your mouth in public and say anything Shia Islamist, you’re getting disappeared and your whole family will probably be deported to Iran or something. Shias in Bahrain are the absolute majority and they’re significant minorities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen, the Shias are not the same kind of Shia as in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. The main group of Shia Muslims are either called Jaafari after the theological works of the sixth Shia Imam Jaafar Al Sadiq, or Ithna Ashari (Twelvers) due to their belief in twelve Imams after the Prophet Muhammed, starting with Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib and ending with Imam Muhammed Al Mahdi, also known as the Hidden Imam who according to Shia beliefs will reappear one day and basically set in motion the end of the physical world. The Shia of Yemen are known as Zaydis, after Zayd ibn Jaafar Al Sadiq, who the Zaidis recognized as 7th Imam, while the Twelvers recognized Musa ibn Jaafar Al Sadiq. The Zaidi Imamate in Northern Yemen continued for nearly a thousand years, but it could not withstand the post-WW2 chaos in the region and ended in nearly comic fashion after a coup led by local rivals and involvement from an exiled Iraqi officer. The Zaydi community here in 1978 is in disarray, with many converting to Sunni Islam out of convenience in a new world. There’s no organized Zaydi force or political party, they just farm in the highlands of Northern Yemen and chill out there. It is a fading group, but wait, something just happened in Yemen. Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Zaydi military officer from Sanaa, and one of the great adventurers of the 1900s in the Middle East, just did a military coup and took power in the failing state of North Yemen in July 1978.

How did this defeated religious group go from edges of the region to the dominant group in five countries and a political force that annoys America and Israel? We’ll find out in the next episode as we cover the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the formative value of the Iraq-Iran War, the failed Shaaban Revolution in Iraq, the rise of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, and the rise of the Houthi (Ansarallah) movement in Yemen.

Just before the UN meeting, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said: “The world is out of control. Nobody respects anybody.”

“The world is out of control. Nobody respects anybody. When the UN was created, it had 51 countries that were UN partners. Now there are 193. That means that more than 140 didn't take part when it was created. And the UN, which when it was created had the strength to create the State of Israel, doesn't have the courage to create the Palestinian State,” said the president at the event.

“The UN can't do it, it doesn't have the strength to decide. It wouldn't have been necessary to have had Russia's war with Ukraine, it wouldn't have been necessary to have had the genocide in the Gaza Strip, it wouldn't have been necessary to have had the invasion of Libya, the war in Iraq. All this could have been avoided if the UN had fulfilled its task of being a kind of world governance,” said Lula.

Mexico is seizing a quarry and port owned by a US mining company , aiming to turn it into a wildlife refuge
One last middle finger from AMLO 🫡

Hey, please read the first two parts of my effortpost on the evolution of the modern pan-shia ideology if you haven't done that already. Part three coming probably tomorrow, but I'm on 5k words in total already and I haven't even mentioned Syria and Bahrain in the last part, so this became a bit larger than expected lmao.

Part One

Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment

you're getting the third and probably final part tomorrow, be patient

From the Al-Jazeera live feed:

Biden says ‘time to finalise’ Gaza deal and ‘end this war’

US President Joe Biden has urged Israel and Hamas to finalise a months-old ceasefire proposal, telling the United Nations he was committed to ending the war on Gaza.

“Now is the time for the parties to finalise its terms,” he said of the deal brokered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

The deal will “bring the hostages home and secure security for Israel and Gaza free from Hamas’s grip, ease the suffering in Gaza and end this war,” Biden told the UN General Assembly.

I don’t recall Biden ever being more clear that what he wants isn’t a cease fire, it’s for Hamas to surrender. When he says “Gaza free from Hamas’ grip”, he’s saying he wants a Palestinian Authority situation - which is precisely what Israel wants. Literally everything he said there is just what Israel wants: return the hostages, keep Israel “secure”, and for Hamas to self-immolate and hand over Gaza to either to Zionist lapdogs or an international coalition of American lapdogs. The idea that this man is putting any pressure on Netanyahu is obviously ridiculous.

Confirming what we already knew: Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and the US did nothing but sell it more weapons violating its own laws

Looks like Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah will be buried in Karbala, Iraq, next to Imam Hussein. There's no more fitting spot on earth for him, I have made a promise to visit his grave as soon as possible. My wife has been feeling kinda homesick since birthing our son and she wants to go to Iraq for a few weeks, so there's a very good reason for me to follow along now.

Whatever bullshit you hear in the next few days from the US about trying to negotiate a ceasefire, remember that they just gifted the IDF another 8 billion dollars to subsidise their wars and genocide

Biden calls for end to Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan conflicts in farewell speech to UN General Assembly

Two tweets I thought were good:

From Rania Khalek (she lives in Lebanon):

At times like this we need this reminder.

Israel has never been more isolated, it’s unprecedented

Israel is going the way of apartheid South Africa & Rhodesia, two countries by the way that Israel was the last to support, even trying to get a nuclear weapon for South Africa.

Israel is going the way of all the British Colonies. Israel is going the way of Nazi Germany and of the slave owners across the Americas and the Caribbean.

There will come a day when Israeli apartheid falls. And historians will have plenty of documentation of who stood where when Israel carried out a holocaust in Gaza while terrorizing anyone who dared to intervene to stop a genocide.

I know I stand on the right side of history along with most of you.

And from Jason Hickel:

To sum up, Israel is conducting genocide in Gaza, ethnically cleansing the West Bank, and massacring civilians in Lebanon, all at the same time. The violence and chaos that the Zionist regime perpetrates is staggering in scale. It must be stopped and dismantled.

The Cradle: Netanyahu gave the orders to wipe out an entire neighborhood in southern Beirut from the UN headquarters in New York.

fucking die satanyahu

The US continues to be the cheapest empire in world history:
https://xcancel.com/usembassybeirut/status/1839648548310204785

The U.S. Embassy is not evacuating U.S. citizens at this time. There is a commercially available flight that U.S. citizens who expressed interest in departing Lebanon will have to book and pay directly with the airline.

Fresno mayor says city will arrest ‘defiant’ homeless people as Central Valley sweeps intensify

On Monday, a city ban on any encampments on public land goes into effect, soon to be followed on Oct. 13 by another policy prohibiting camping on private land — essentially making it illegal to camp in the city. Violations can bring a $1,000 fine or a year in jail.

. . .

Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer said he plans to add more teeth to the ban by ordering the police department to arrest the most troublesome, continuously service-resistant homeless people in Fresno. It could mean scores of people tossed in jail.

"Service-resistant." Death to Fresno. Death to America.

I don't have anything interesting to post right now so here's a picture of a PLA soldier on the disputed border with India. Nobody in the disputed territory is allowed guns so the PLA have polearms instead.

Thank fucking god that Syria isn't a nation led by a comprador shithead and is allowing Lebanese refugees in via border crossings. Incredibly difficult situation for Assad given the state that Syria was already in, massive respect for not hesitating. Hoping that Iran and friends can get enough food in to the refugees to prevent the famine we're seeing in Gaza, as the numbers of displaced might reach the hundreds of thousands by the end of this war. Now would be a good time for Russia to help things out with its big agricultural sector, for example.

Watching Hasan just now, he had a clip on that I think is perfect example of how Israeli / US propaganda seeps into the national consciousness (don't know how to link Youtube without trackers, but you can see the clip for yourself by searching for the account "CBS Mornings" and the title is "Breaking down the Middle East conflict: Israel's strikes on Hezbollah, U.S. troop movements".

First off, CBS Mornings is the kind of generic news program that my boomer parents watch. Like most of the non-cable news networks, the public sees it as "impartial", if maybe a little boring.

OK, so in this clip, you have 3 news anchors. In other countries there may be news anchors who know what they are talking about... but that's definitely not the case in the US. They're just... dumbasses with communications degrees who got where they are at because they are conventionally attractive, articulate, and can speak with authority. They don't actually know about or understand these issues. They ask dumbass questions that dumbass Americans themselves might ask someone, all done without any pushback or probing follow-through of interviewees. Because they themselves have no actual understanding the world around them.

The person they are asking their questions to - Samantha Vinograd - is NOT a dumbass. She is, however, a CIA/State Dept asset and not even shy about it. She knows the company line very well. So you have three dumbasses asking a real pro what to think about Israel. And she knows exactly how to play that fiddle and how to frame it. She doesn't even need to prepare for challenging questions because they will never come.

So your typical American watches this, and all they need to know is placed right in front of them, without having to do any sort of critical thought. It's people who are seemingly asking "good" questions even though they're not and have no idea what's going on, getting those questions answered by just the right person that the CIA/State Dept wants there.

I’m convinced 95 percent of the users on the Lebanon subreddit don’t actually live in Lebanon. (In fact many of them admit this already)

There’s no fucking way all the posts that are like “fuck Hezbollah for doing this” while Israel carpet bombs the country are legit . For lack of a better word that shit is so cucked there’s no way this isn’t all from people whose family moved out like 40-100 years ago

Ho Chi Minh's death on September 2 1969 did not stop the liberation of Ho Chi Minh City and the expulsion of the USians on April 30 1975.

look at this pathetic soon to be beheaded piece of shit, it's ridiculous

a life long nerd of capitalism who got to start the day in wall street, his pathetic little dream. Meanwhile, the argentinian province of Córdoba (where he won by a landslide, mind you) is being obliterated by fires (not strictly due to climate change or months long droughts, but by agro business like in the Amazon)

while he's celebrating the expansion of capitalism (which will end in it's ultimate demise), people are fleeing from their homes because his government butchered all regulations against forest fires. There are almost no state resources being mobilized to fight the fires, lots of them are being fought by regular people and volunteers.

also all argentinians bonds and shares in the exchange fell by 3% when milei spoke lmao. what a fucking baboon, with all respect to that noble animal

death to "israel"

The relations between the United States and Brazil worsens.

The Clinton Foundation had invited Brazilian President Lula da Silva to speak at the event. This had been agreed with the event's security team and the president's security guards.

However, during the speech, President Lula da Silva and his team were barred. The reason was that President Joe Biden had arrived for a “surprise” visit to the event. Apparently, the American security guards tried to stop the Brazilian security guards. Lula da Silva refused to go there under the protection of the American security guards, believing that he would be safer with the Brazilian security guards.

The organizers of the event apparently got angry, and Lula da Silva and his team withdrew from the event. The atmosphere at the event completes the list of annoyances caused by the US to Brazil in the diplomatic marathon. Although the US government had implied that Itamaraty would mediate in conflicts with Venezuela following Nicolás Maduro's election, the State Department called a meeting to discuss the situation in the neighboring country with Argentina, which had its ambassador expelled by Maduro.

The government was also unhappy that the White House had sent a second-ranking US government official to the pro-democracy meeting called by Brazil at the UN, which will be attended, among others, by Emmanuel Macron, President of France, Pedro Sanchez, Prime Minister of Spain, Gabriel Boric, President of Chile, and Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia. All political allies of Lula da Silva.

The US does this shit, and then are surprised when these countries ally with China and Russia. Also, Democrats treating Global South leaders worse than fucking George Bush.

https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1839453350854853047

There's actually a critical lesson to draw from this and other Ukrainian fiascos, of which the Bakhmut saga and the Zaporozhie Hundred Days come to mind: Ukraine will have ended up losing this war in large part because it consistently tried to fight beyond its means.

The Ukrainians started this war with an enormous army, well in excess of what the Russians could and actually did commit to the fight in 2022. That huge force (the "First Army") was badly mauled in early 2022, but it was rejuvenated later that year by a combination of ruthless mobilization and massive aid from NATO. This convinced the Russian Stavka to transition to the defensive and consolidate their position in Ukraine, withdrawing troops from more exposed positions in east Kharkov and right-bank Kherson. Any serious assessment of the situation at that point would have been that the Russians had consolidated into a basically impregnable position that the AFU was incapable of breaching (lest we forget in the wake of Russia's totally unhindered withdrawal from the area, their attempts at reducing the Kherson bridgehead by force in mid-2022 were bloody disasters), and the correct course of action was to start digging in and negotiate a peace treaty in the meantime.

The Ukrainian leadership instead threw a disturbingly large portion of the "Second Army" into Prigozhin's meatgrinder in Bakhmut and then ordered not one but two large-scale counteroffensives into Zaporozhie and the Bakhmut flanks using the post-Bakhmut remains of the "Second Army" and their NATO-supplied "Third Army." Those failed with enormous losses, opening the way for Russia to transition back to the offensive in late 2023 and begin systematically rolling Ukraine out of the Donbass. The correct course of action at this point was, again, to find a tenable defensive line and start digging. Zelensky instead ordered a "Hail Mary" offensive in Kursk with the remnants of the "Third Army" and significant elements from a lightly-equipped "Fourth Army," hoping Russian border defenses were weak despite their having ample warning of Ukrainian designs on the border region (courtesy of several earlier, smaller raids) and plenty of time to prepare. It proceeded to fail with enormous losses - Ukrainian forces breached the border, began to exploit, and ran square into a Russian haymaker counter-punch that stopped them in their tracks. The Ukrainians then reinforced failure, sending massive reinforcements into a death pit in an attempt to keep a sliver of Russian soil under their flag as a middle finger to Putin.

And while this was happening the front in the Donbass started to collapse with Russian troops making large advances and seizing key terrain, in no small part because the AFU's resources had been systematically redirected to a tertiary operation far to the north. We've seen, again and again and again, that when the Ukrainians got resources and generated forces, rather than admitting they are the weaker power here and working to strengthen their positions and conciliate, they instead squandered them on hugely ambitious and equally doomed offensives. In 2023 these offensives were aimed at restoring their pre-2014 borders when Donetsk may as well have been on the Moon for them, while in 2024 their ambitions transitioned to the outright insanity of conquering southwest Russia despite the fact they'd been on the military back foot for the last year. These are the moves of a power setting objectives beyond its means to achieve, and they will probably end up dooming Ukraine as a sovereign state going forward.

mfw the first tenured professor fired for anti-Zionist speech is Jewish:
https://xcancel.com/natashalennard/status/1839285771892633911

Hezbollah protesters in Melbourne may face police, visa scrutiny

A protester with a photo of Nasrallah during a pro-Palestine rally for Gaza and Lebanon at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne on Sunday.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke threatened to consider canceling visas for people supporting such groups.

“Any indication of support for a terrorist organisation is unequivocally condemned,” Burke said in a statement on Sunday.

“It draws the immediate attention of our security agencies.

“There is a higher level of scrutiny if anyone is on a visa.

“I have made clear from day one, that I will consider refusing and cancelling visas for anyone who seeks to incite discord in Australia.”

https://archive.md/dnsqv

What a fucking joke, Posy Parker is coming back to australia in under a month for a "conservative conference", and they're getting ready to round up Brown kids. I saw somewhere that a 13 year old got pepper sprayed in the face for carrying a Hezbollah flag yesterday as well.

The most recent Trump shooter is offering $150k to anyone that kills Trump

Colombia President Petro at the UN: "The control of humanity on the basis of barbarism is under construction, and its demonstration is Gaza and Lebanon. When Gaza dies, all of humanity will die."

Been feeling somewhat similarly lately. Like you know the world is gonna keep on spinning regardless, but if such open evil isn't extinguished, what hope is there for humanity?

US just announced additional troop deployment to the middle east

(just taking the first link to source it)

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/23/nation/us-troops-israel-lebanon-hezbollah-middle-east/

looks like Israel is getting hit by Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq simultaneously

It isn't wise to fall into the stupidity that is the Great Man Theory, even more so since we're leftists and we uphold other ideals. We seek to build movements from the ground up, leaders are important for articulation but our collective fates are NOT tied to them. The same goes for Nasrallah, he was indeed a great leader and very important for Hezbollah in it's resistance against the genocidal entity. His death is a heavy blow but the movement will continue because it has a great and noble goal -- the liberation of their land from the zionist occupier. He himself spoke about this, he himself was aware that he will die sooner or later, and he made it clear that the fight must go on despite this. Now, the man is a martyr, he's in a position where he can't be killed nor touched.

Let us not forget also that movements like Hezbollah have a different approach to death itself. A dead palestinian or a dead lebanese is a martyr, not something to hide or be ashamed of. People who die are mourned, cried but also celebrated, remembered, elevated to greatness even. That's a key difference between the arab resistance movements and the genocidal entity that is "Israel", one is not afraid to die, the other hides behind military hardware and will take the first plane out of Tel Aviv as Ansar Allah fires a missile or two. One proudly announces their dead as martyrs, vows to keep fighting for them, meanwhile "Israel" hides behind censorship and will never release their death toll in Gaza and the northern front, they're ashamed of their dead.

Leave the Great Man Theory for losers like the fascists, liberals and monarchists, those who will tie their fates to individuals. Mourn the death of a great leader, but go on. The path ahead is full of problems and obstacles, but one shall never lose track of the ultimate goal: the elimination of the genocidal entity that will mark an important victory in our greater anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and therefore anti-capitalist struggle.

I normally feel very ashamed to be an American, but today it feels exceptionally so. If you don’t live in a country that is actively supporting this genocide, then consider yourself fortunate. It feels like shit being from this shithole. Death to America.

"I support a two-state solution!" is an extremely common liberal deflection technique when they are pressed to have an opinion on zionist atrocities.

In South Africa, the apartheid regime tried having a two-state solution as well by creating Bantustans, pro forma independent countries for black people carved out of South Africa proper, de facto under the total control of the white supremacist rulers of South Africa who controlled their borders and installed corrupt comprador rulers to keep the people in control.

Even if we ignore the fact that nobody in Palestine wants a partition, the indigenous population wants their country to be free, the zionists wants everything for themselves, a two-state solution in Palestine would be nothing but a rebranded Bantustan solution. They would be allowed to have a flag and a football team and a president but the west and the zionists would be in total control. It is highly unlikely that a pro forma independent Palestinian rump state would be allowed to control their own borders, airspace and territorial waters or to have armed forces capable of effectively defending them against the zionists. Being torn in half by the zionist entity, a rump Palestine would have a very hard time developing economically and the nation would be saturated by western NGO's, pumping money into ensuring that elites friendly to western imperialism govern.

In South Africa, the creation of Bantustans gave the regime an excuse to strip black Africans of their citizenship, as they were now considered "citizens" of one of the Bantustans, thereby making their existence even more precarious. One could easily imagine a similar process happening if western imperialists decided to actually make a two-state solution happen.

In the case of South Africa virtually nobody outside the Boer minority saw the Bantustans than anything other than what they were, a legalese fig leaf to justify apartheid. They remained universally unrecognised Internationally and they fell with the apartheid regime. Unlike back then liberals today are ready to play along with the creation of a Bantustan but the fact remains that no liberal reform or milquetoast half-measure will be able to protect Palestinians against the abuses of settler colonialism. They are in danger as long as Zionism holds any power in Palestine. Jews living in Palestine can not be free from hate and fascism before they live as equals with their neighbours. Palestine can only be free when it is free from the river to the sea.

Terrorist getting arrested in Morocco:
https://xcancel.com/RyanRozbiani/status/1839102434498822423

Israeli soldier Moshe Avichzer was reportedly detained in July while vacationing in Marrakesh.

He is accused of committing war crimes in Gaza after completing a three-month tour of duty there.

Avichzer had shared photos from his vacation in Morocco shortly after posting images of himself amid destroyed Palestinian homes and rubble in Gaza.

Following protests by hundreds of Moroccans demanding his prosecution as a war criminal, a Moroccan court is now reportedly preparing to hear his case.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Electoralism - one party is going to lose this November, and regardless of who loses it will be hilarious AF to laugh at the losers

Wow! Another “unprecedented” weather event

So glad this is just temporary and not a consequence of something

you know, with the pager bombs and stuff, is this why everyone in congress was making such a big fuss about chinese manufactured electronics? that they were afraid china was gonna do what we're doing?

“In dark times, should the stars also go out?”

Lebanon strikes are preparation for ground incursion, Israel army chief tells troops

In case you didn't know already, it's war, folks. Israel must lose.

Are we at a point where we can start to blame Iran for their slow ass reaction times? I understand the strategic planning and patience and all that. But it just gets frustrating seeing the cities of Iran's "allies" get flattened every few years while the Iranians are chilling in the driving seat of the resistance while not even fucking touching the steering wheel. Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansarallah and Syria keep taking the devastating hits while Iran is egging everyone on. This doesn't feel like an equal relationship anymore like in the days of the Syrian Civil War when Iranians were on the frontlines of Aleppo and Mosul. Israel doesn't stop because Iran isn't protecting their allies anymore, they're using them as a sponge to suck up the hits while Iran is protected and trading with the likes of the UAE. I'm just rambling here, but it gets frustrating seeing Beirut getting pulverised and we can't even get a little drone strike from Iran despite failing to protect Haniyeh in fucking Tehran. Resistance leaders were safer in fucking Qatar than the supposed HQ of the resistance

1000 deaths upon any US soldier setting foot in Israel to take part in the massacre. A bullet from a ghoul to your dome is too merciful for you, but I'll settle for it.

Remember when Kamala talked abt how america was finally not at war anymore at the debates (which in itself was bullshit too but all of its direct combat involvement left was low profile for people to care about)

that’s on track to last long isn’t it

It's hard not to feel stabbed in the back by Iran. All that Resistance Axis talk, but we're slowly realising that we're just their Ukraine, they want the fight to be to the last Lebanese, Gazan and Syrian, but not to the first Iranian. This is just brutal, we lost our finest men in Haniyeh, Nasrallah and countless others, while they're doing fucking deals under the table. This is not an equal relationship anymore, we're just the bumper for their safety. May God have mercy on Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis, they would weep if they saw the state of the Axis today. I don't want to be full on doomer, but the concept of the Axis itself is eroding under this Iranian inaction and lack of will.

The Lebanon massacres and bombings are very popular in Israel

NYC Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on corruption charges: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/25/nyregion/eric-adams-indicted-corruption#eric-adams-indicted

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5y32qew9z2t

Israeli air strikes kill 274, Lebanon says, as thousands flee south of country

15:45 BST

Lebanese authorities have just updated the death toll from today's Israeli air strikes.

At least 274 people have now been killed, 21 of whom were children, according to Lebanon's health minister.

A further 1,024 people have been wounded in the strikes, the minister adds.

Goddamn. They're actually escalating toward a full-on war. Bye Israel.

Just had my a talk with somebody who seemed distraught about what was going in Lebanon asking me about what was hezbollah doing and if all thoses loses that the zionits are claiming are true. She is a really smart woman but it made me realise that most people aren't like the people here on this site who are well versed in how the empire function and the situation on the ground. It Shows the effectiveness of the total information blackout of the entity as well. I just showed her video of hezbollah tunnels and talked quickly about the logistical network of the resistance.

Asked why he supports fracking, Fetterman said “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”

Nasrallah wouldn’t want you to be a doomer.

Yes Israel has a genocide case against them at the ICJ, but what if they could have two genocide cases against them?

If there was any doubt which countries are Israeli allies by now

Hezbollah targets the city of Haifa for the first time since the war started last October

Israel launches strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen

"Our message is clear - for us, no place is too far," - Defence Minister Yoav Gallant

They are 1000000% trying to start an all-out regional war and get the US involved. Iran will be next unless there is retaliation

VIDEOS are coming out of NC, TN, GA, ect. Appalachia and Smokey mountain regions got wrecked hard. Like permanently changed landscape hard. Mostly the absofuck ton of rain flooding these valley towns like Asheville and Chimney Rock. Roadways bridges HULK SMASH. Jamed with logs ripped off from landslides and busted riverbanks.

Layers of mud and sediment blanket entire towns.

This is not going to be a quick or easy cleanup. The toll on lives is increasing as well. 64 was the latest number from what I've seen.

Ashville, NC

NYP stating 1000 people unaccounted for in NC

A brief recap of events today on the Lebanon front.

The fascist Tel Aviv regime carried out another major act of aggression. Hundreds of Zionist genocidal airstrikes on Lebanon killed 492 civilians (and wounded 1,645 others). One Zionist attack tried, but failed, at assassinating Hezbollah resistance commander Ali Karaki. Other Zionist attacks assassinated three Shia clergymen in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah resistance forces struck back, firing 180 rockets at the Zionists’ Ramat David Airbase (southeast of Haifa) and the Rafael Advanced Defense Systems military industrial plant (in the Zevulun area north of Haifa). Other rockets struck the Zionist cities of Haifa, Tiberias, and Safad; the Yoav barracks; the Ein Zeitim military base; and several illegal settlements in the Zionist-occupied West Bank (Bruchin, Karnei Shomron, and Maale Shomron). A resistance ATGM also destroyed a “Merkava” tank near El Marj.

Lebanon death toll has risen to almost 500

Putin says that Russia will be updating its nuclear policy to include aggression by non-nuclear states backed by nuclear powers (proxy wars, essentially)
On one hand I definitely see the need for that kind of policy but it is a bit of a

SF Chronicle: Police are deliberately ramming suspects’ cars. Dozens have died — including bystanders

Since 2017, at least 87 people across the country have been killed after police officers rammed vehicles they were pursuing, often at extremely high speeds, a Chronicle investigation found.

Nearly half of those who died — 37 people, including seven children — were not the fleeing drivers. Instead, they were passengers or bystanders. In Tifton, Ga., a grandmother was killed when a fleeing car deliberately struck by police careened into her front yard.

Yemen has struck Tel Aviv with missile(s) again. Millions of settlers forced into shelters in the middle of the night.

edit: conflicted information about whether it was intercepted or not (you can imagine which side is saying it was intercepted) but it definitely at least reached the skies over Tel Aviv and was not detected/shot down before that point. I'm leaning on the side of "not intercepted" based on what I've seen but it's not clear yet. Apparently Ansarallah will make a statement in the coming hours.

edit2: looks like no hit, though maybe some injuries caused by accidents getting into shelters? it was unclear to me what actually caused the injuries (if real) so I was confused about whether it was a hit or not. anyway, still unclear what has happened and what the target(s) were, still waiting on the Ansarallah statement

I saw a TikTok video the other day with Shir Hever, a political economist born in the illegal zionist entity. In his view the zionist project is effectively over as "any regime that commits genocide also commits suicide".

He claims that every sector of the entity's economy is collapsing due to the genocide: tourism has disappeared, academic exchange with the rest of the world is ending and investment in the high tech sector is drying up fast. The settlers themselves are moving their money out of the entity as well with zionist pension funds increasingly preferring investments abroad over domestic.

Settlers are also leaving the entity like never before. Up to half a million settlers has left since the Al-Aqsa Flood and it is especially the highly educated with resources and prospects abroad who are leaving. It has become very hard to get a doctor's appointment due to the number of doctors leaving. Even the regime itself has no clear idea of how many are leaving, as the people at the central bureau of statistics who were supposed to do the calculations has also left.

According to Hever the zionist project has come to an end and the current system of injustice is coming apart. To him, emulating South Africa's transition away from apartheid is the only way forward of "Israelis" are to have a future in Palestine.

https://xcancel.com/maphumanintent/status/1720933055307600231

Fun theoretical exercise I'm currently working on for the @fortisanalysis side of things:

US refineries (total) only store about 40 million gallons of military-grade jet fuel at any given time, or about 36,400 flight hours for an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet launched from an aircraft carrier. For 40 x -18's per carrier, this is about 910 flight hours. A carrier holds roughly 3 million gallons of fuel for its wing, about 68 flight hours per bird. Now consider that a notional mixed complement of 20 x F-35's and 20 X F-15EX's operating out of Kadena AFB would consume about 62,400 gallons per hour combined. Thus, just a single carrier wing and a single AFB wing's complement of fighters (80 combined) theoretically all operating at once would drink 106,400 gal/hr.

So...

The net stores of military jet fuel immediately available from US refiners above the global contingency supplies managed by the Defense Logistics Agency at any time represents about 375 net flight hours for one carrier and one air wing...less than 16 days of high intensity air operations by far fewer assets than the US would throw into an all-out theater conflict in the Pacific Rim. DLA Energy ended FY2022 with 1.68 billion gallons of on hand inventory of jet fuel to serve the entire DOD combined inventory of 14,000+ aviation assets - cargo, fighter, rotary wing, bombers, drones, tankers, and recon. Which begs the question: How fast would two theaters of conflict burn through all contingency supplies of fuel? And what does DOD do when the well runs dry?

Reminder that for the Gulf War's air campaign, the US had nearly 6 months to prepare, move assets into place, build up whole new infrastructure, etc., right next to Iraq without the Iraqis being able to do much to respond. Westerners love to call back on that campaign to justify their belief that the US/NATO could totally destroy any opponent in just a few weeks with their superior air forces, but completely ignore the logistical realities of actually doing so. And today, with the proliferation of long-range precision munitions, actually managing to build up the concentrations of forces and supplies necessary for large campaigns like this is substantially more difficult - we see this already in Ukraine, with Russian deep strikes doing significant damage, taking out ammunition depots and arms shipments, and wiping out various gatherings of Ukrainian troops and mercenaries.

If Iraq had the ballistic missiles that Yemen wields today, things could have gone very differently back then.

It's been seven hours, if Nasrallah was dead it'd be out by now, this is a media blitz designed to distract from the civilian deaths caused by the bombings, bombings that took place while the UN was in session and the perpetrator was participating

Hezbollah reports are straight up being ignored in favor of Reuter based "Hezbollah sources" because this media operation is nothing but an attempt to suffocate the story before it becomes an international scandal, there is evidence of active collusion or parallel coordination by all major western news orgs and even Al Jazeera, they're all pushing the Nasrallah angle over the civilians deaths

Missouri's governor and Supreme Court have both ruled - they really want to murder an innocent man tomorrow.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marcellus-williams-execution-missouri-supreme-court-governor-mike-parson/

Surprised nobody here has posted about this yet. Walkout at UN for Netanyahoo

What weapon systems do Hezbollah need to shoot down an F35? Something Chinese I'm guessing?

China has expressed explicit support for Lebanon here: https://archive.is/FCjiB

Beijing will continue to stand on the "side of justice and on the side of Arab brothers, including Lebanon," said Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Hopefully that converts to actual materiel support because I really want them to shoot some of these raiding jets down. Surely this is a good opportunity for China to actually field test some of these weapons for efficacy.

An israeli settler goes mad and has a break down after seeing the impact of Hezbollah’s missiles. He ends up screaming “Nasrallah”😂

Nasrallah, May your next missile blow up on netenyahu

In 2018, scientists confirmed the Gulf of Oman contains one of the world's largest marine dead zones, where the ocean contains little or no oxygen and marine wildlife cannot exist. The dead zone encompasses nearly the entire 165,000-square-kilometre (63,700 sq mi) Gulf of Oman and equivalent to the size of Florida, United States of America. The cause is a combination of increased ocean warming and increased runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers.

Allegedly Pezeshkian has put out a statement saying that they were promised a ceasefire if they did not retaliate for Haniyeh's death and they were lied to. (Obviously)

Goes to show how strong the demand is for a ceasefire. Every single time ive heard somebody reporting from Gaza it seems like every day the people are desperate to know when a ceasefire will arrive, making the demand on the side of the negotiators so high up as a priority but obviously the Zionists and US are just using it as a form of political warfare as thousands die.

Also seeing reports of a thwarted terrorist attack in Iran today. If this new status quo becomes consolidated, it looks like the regional war started yesterday.

A record large container ship has made the Arctic transit between Russia and China, saving a lot of time compared to the Suez route during the open water season.

https://gcaptain.com/first-panamax-containership-sprints-across-arctic-reaching-china-in-just-three-weeks/

Good news for eurasian integration, bad news for climate change

Can't find the mega but wtf Hexbear is leaking into Twitter

Not sure what the original source is for this, but accounts I trust are posting it:

https://t.me/Middle_East_Spectator/10284

NEW: The United States reportedly offered Iran significant sanctions relief and a guaranteed permanent ceasefire in Gaza based on Hamas' proposed terms (and Hamas was informed of this), in exchange for the Islamic Republic delaying its retaliation against Israel for Ismael Haniyeh; not a single sanction was lifted, nor was a ceasefire reached in Gaza

Embarrassing if true. If history teaches us anything, it's to never accept a deal like this from the US.

New Slammer

Context: video of Iron dome missile falling to catch a yemeni hypersonic missile

Man why the fuck do I even use this site? One (1) person dies and the resistance is over, welp we did our best folks but I guess Israel won. Great Man theory is true, who knew. Hezbollah didn't level Tel Aviv in a week so it's done. Never mind that Israel is itching to kick off its own Vietnam with a ground invasion.

If you're going to just repeat Zionazi propaganda you might as well do it on Reddit, maybe they'll appreciate it.

A US Navy replenishment ship sustained damage while operating in the Middle East in an incident that remains under investigation, according to a Navy official.

The USNS Big Horn was damaged after the ship refueled and replenished Navy vessels operating in the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and several guided-missile destroyers. The Navy official would not say where the incident occurred or what type of damage the replenishment oiler sustained.

lol

I'm doing ONE effortpost this week to explain some Lebanese/Arab intricacies while scrolling the news. What do the good people of the news mega want to read about?

1. A breakdown of the Lebanese Civil War and how it permanently fucked the country.
2. An explanation of how the modern Shia identity emerged post-1979 and how a small marginalized community basically became the face of anti-Israel jihad.
3. How Arab and Muslim attitudes towards Hezbollah changed between 2006 and 2024 due to their intervention in Syria.

Vote! But I'll probably just ignore the results and do the one I want

Scottish study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated for HPV before age 14
Just noticed this article is actually from January but fuck it

Let’s Go Bomb Tel-Aviv

Wakulla County (FL) is under mandatory evacuation orders ahead of the storm, except they left all the prisoners locked up to drown in the imminent flooding.

fucking bleak

It seems like the NYT is really ramping up anti-Iranian rhetoric lately. 26 articles (including some round-ups) since Sept. 18 have used the phrase "Iran-backed." Almost every article that even mentions anyone in the Axis of Resistance uses the phrase "Iran's proxies" or "Iranian proxies." This was not happening even a month or two ago. ("Iran-backed" is all over, yes, but "Iranian proxies" and its variants were mostly absent from the paper all summer.)

I can't get Google Trends to stop bugging out on me, but I wonder if this is the case for other State Department mouthpieces or if this is a NYT-specific editorial decision.

Death to Israel, death to Israel, death to Israel.

I want to see that terrorist state burned to the ground holy shit

Footage from the bombing just a little while ago in Beirut

https://nitter.poast.org/ME_Observer_/status/1839690676016992405#m

Another Reaper downed in Yemen. We're up to 11.

NPR: The Pentagon says it wants to prevent Iran from spreading the conflict in the Middle East

Just uncritically reported from NPR. No discussion of who is actually spreading conflict in the region. In fact Israel is mentioned 3 times in the article while Iran is mentioned 6 times including the headline. Palestine isn't mentioned at all, and Gaza appears only once, in the context of Iran supporting Hamas.

it is september 23 and stalin saved the world from fascism

A chunk of recent news has been about about why younger boys are turning more conservative while younger girls are not.

Has anyone considered that this is because of the musicians having a reduction in cultural influence? In the past, musicians were the primary cultural influencers of this age group. I think this is still true for women while I think men now primarily get their cultural influences from either videogame influencers or get sucked into manosphere(incelosphere) spaces via sports. I think the pipeline of sports into manosphere (particularly combat sports) is under-discussed.

I wonder too if covid damaging live music played a role in the shift too. Thinking back, the way boys used to try to "get girls" was via music and live gigs and stuff. The music had a positive influence on them. Whereas now they're inundated with shit about dominating and taking women like they're meat by these dickbags that onboard them into incelosphere via combat sports.

China has asked its citizens to leave Israel as soon as possible.

In some truly doomer news, it is September 28, only 3-4 months away from the end of 2024, and still no Irish Reunification of 2024

When a brutal fascist regime is waging a war of terror against civilians, you think of where your sympathies lie.

So has Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Denmark's controversial foreign minister, who gave this statement to government broadcaster DR on September 26th 2024:

"I can certainly tell the difference between these countries. I know where my sympathy intuitively lies. I know which countries are democracies and which are not. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the end, everyone has a responsibility to ensure this doesn’t spiral completely out of control."

The statement is an example of democracy washing where the alleged democratic nature of the illegal zionist entity is used to justify their atrocities and shift blame to the victims.

Journalists from a free and independent news outlet might have asked him follow-up questions such as:

• Can an apartheid state be democratic?
• Can a state be democratic when a majority of the people it governs is denied the vote?
• How can war crimes be justified by the perpetrator's system of government?
• Are the lives of civilians living under an allegedly "undemocratic" form of government worth less than those of people living under presumably "democratic" regimes?

Am I making an incorrect comparison by saying what the US did to Cambodia is the same thing that Israel doing to Gaza and Lebanon? The rationale for bombing Cambodia was that there were Vietnamese soldiers there, so fair game to wipe out entire villages in case maybe there was a Vietnamese soldier there? Seems to me that is the precise justification that Israel uses when they level a building with dozens of women and children.

Jesus fucking christ, over a million displaced in Lebanon, the fucking demons will try to do gaza all over again

https://xcancel.com/fresh_sadegh/status/1840511947839619357#m

Protests outside the Supreme National Security Council of Iran. There is reportedly a meeting underway there, presumably relating to Pezeshkian's failed sellout deal.

Watched some local news here in the EU and got to hear a lieutenant or something from a military academy being interviewed say that Iran doesn't want a direct confrontation with Israel, but wants to fight Israel "to the last Hezbollah member"

Iraqi resistance drone attack hits Israel’s Eilat port

what the fuck is going on

Part three of my effortpost, these parts keep getting longer and longer. No proof reading as usual

Part One

Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment

The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part Three

We move 25 years into the future with part three, we’re now in the period after the defeat in ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the Houthi revolution in Yemen, Hezbollah’s victory against Israel in 2006, and the failure of the Bahraini Uprising in 2011.

We start in Yemen, which was reunited into one state after the end of the Cold War. The first president of the new reunited Yemeni state is no one other than Ali Abdullah Saleh, former president of North Yemen and one of our favourite adventurers like we said earlier. The first real event in the history of Yemen is the start of the 1994 civil war, which ended in a decisive victory for Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Republican forces over the remnants of the South Yemen Communist Party. The republican victory could not be achieved without the strong support by Sunni Jihadist forces who received massive concessions by Saleh in order to secure their support in the war. The growing voice of the hardline Sunni Islamists in Saleh’s government angered the Houthi family, who returned to Yemen from Iran somewhere around reunification, with the aim of reviving the Zaydi traditions that were slowly fading away as Yemen took a more “Sunni” character. It is clear that the Houthis’ stay in Iran led to them being greatly influenced by Khomeini’s pan-Shia ideology, as they founded a youth group called the Believing Youth when they returned to Yemen. The Believing Youth was a loose collection of after-school workshops and summer camps for kids in the mountains of North Yemen, where they would read works by Khomeini, Nasrallah and Al Sadr. The Believing Youth would grow in size, and by the early 00s, their presence would be felt even in Friday prayers in the Grand Mosque of the capital Sanaa. Like a true paranoid Arab government, the Yemeni government would ultimately decide to arrest Hussein Al Houthi, the founder of the BY and brother of the Abdul Malik Al Houthi that we all know and love. The government failed in their attempt to arrest Hussein Al Houthi, who retreated to the mountains of Saada and started a large insurgency again the Yemeni government. He would be killed in late 2004, but a low-level insurgency continued until the Arab Spring hit in 2011.

Yemen had some of the largest protests in the whole region, which turned violent very quickly. The escalation of the protests wasn’t surprising at all, Yemen was the poorest and the least developed Arab nation out of all the relevant ones, and Saleh had been ruling the country in some form for 33 years while achieving literally nothing of note. The Houthis and their supporters would become one of the largest factions against the government in peaceful protest, and later in armed struggle against a government long past its expiry date. After around a year of clashes everywhere in Yemen, Saleh would resign and sign a power transfer agreement in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a place where no real peace has ever been established. An election was held in 2012, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s best friend and former vice president would win the election with 100% of the votes in a real democracy moment. Saleh was there again in Yemen for Hadi’s inauguration. The Houthis, the southern secession movement and the Islamists all rightfully boycotted this sham election. Two years later, the Houthis would launch an offensive from the mountains towards the capital Sanaa and capture the capital very quickly after the collapse of the government forces. The Houthis then absorbed the bulk of the Yemeni Army and essentially became the new government itself, they’re not an armed group anymore, but the Yemeni state itself. When did the Houthis become a real “Shia” force and a part of the Axis of Resistance? Good question. The founding principles of the Believing Youth were explicitly Khomeinist, in response to the gradual Sunnification of the Zaydi Shia Yemenis after the final collapse of the Zaydi Imamate in the 1960s. There’s no proof of direct Iranian involvement in the founding of the group, nor any proof of direct support until the explosion of the conflict after the Arab Spring. Shiaism itself evolved with the absorption of the Houthis into the wider Shia umbrella, as it followed a similar previous step with the absorption of Assad’s Alawite faith into a wider Twelver-adjacent umbrella. The Houthis aren’t Hezbollah, where the founding itself was influenced directly by Iran, but they became closer and closer to Iran as their war with Saudi Arabia started in 2015. Just like the Iraq-Iran War became the origin story of all of the heroes of the new pan-Shia ideology, the Houthi victory in the war against Saudi Arabia and the Arab Alliance became the mythological origin of the first “pan-Shia” generation of Yemen. One such hero is Saleh Al Sammad, the first president of Yemen under Houthi rule, who was killed in a Saudi drone strike back in 2018. He received the Khomeinist martyr treatment, which was a first in Yemen. Shia-style mourning ceremonies have entered the Yemeni mainstream, and celebration of the Prophet’s birthday is now a big day in Yemen, in a clear departure from the hardline Sunni position that forbids that. The Houthis, or Ansarallah as they should be called, are now a fully integrated member of the pan-Shia movement despite not having a direct line back to Khomeini or the Al Sadr family.

We travel to Iraq again now. In 2003, something called the Iraq War, and the American Occupation happens. The Americans basically allow anyone that hates Saddam on their team, so the team that takes over the Iraqi state post-Saddam is a very dysfunctional one where Communists, Khomeinists, Kurdish nationalists, Sunni Muslim Brotherhood members, Liberal CIA assets, and random minority representants were supposed to pretend to play politics while the Americans were robbing the country. There was one crucial group that the Americans missed while building the political playhouse. That group was the Sadrists under the leadership of Muqtada Al Sadr, son of Muhammed Sadiq Al Sadr. The Sadrists split in two sometime in the late 90s, but no one had noticed that under the media suppression in Saddam’s Iraq and the general American disinterest in Iraqi attitudes while they were planning to invade Iraq. One group of Sadrists stayed in the Dawa Party and adopted more Khomeinist and pan-Shia ideas, while poorer Sadrists under Muqtada’s leadership from the slums were more into nationalist and isolationist policies within Iraq’s border. Muqtada’s group would later be called the Sadrist Movement and its military wing, the Mahdi Army, would become the main player in the Iraqi Insurgency against the American occupation and later in the sectarian civil war phase of the occupation. Muqtada’s eccentric behaviour continues to this day and the Sadrists still get themselves into wacky situations, as the group slowly morphs into a cult that finds itself on the fringes of Shiaism itself, but that’s an effortpost for another day. The Iraqi state found itself under pan-Shia Dawa Party rule from 2005 to 2018, but nothing formative happened on a state level, mostly due to the failure of the American occupation and the grave incompetence of the new cast in Iraq. The most notable change during that period was that Iran was slowly becoming the main foreign player in Iraq, after several missteps by the US and their Arab allies. The war against ISIS is when large sections of Iraqi Shia society were absorbed into the Iranian pan-Shia network with the creation of the Hashd Al Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Units, or PMU for short). The PMU was essentially Iraq’s own Hezbollah, an explicitly pan-Shia organization that was created with a clear religious background. The creation of the PMU itself came after a ruling from Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, who is the current Grand Marja of the faith. He issued a ruling that called for global Shia jihad against ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi Army and the fall of large cities such as Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit into ISIS hands. Iranian government support through the IRGC was open and direct, with PMU head Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis and IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani being on the frontlines together and forming a shared war room. The pan-Shia framework of open commemoration of martyrs with clear religious messaging was fully imported to Iraq and became the dominant ideological marker in the Shia south of Iraq. I remember visiting Baghdad with my wife sometime before Covid and literally every single street in the capital had some pictures of martyrs.

cont.

anybody have that post-wwII historical excerpt that was posted on the old sub, where they US is dragging its feet on prosecuting some particularly heinous nazis, and the soviets are like "just shoot them! you know they are guilty!"

Israeli fighter jets forced to flee Lebanon airspace: Hezbollah

Hezbollah says its air defence units engaged and successfully forced two Israeli aircraft to leave Lebanese airspace “using appropriate weapons” near the Lebanese towns of Hula and Meiss el-Jabal.

Fighters also targeted the Kiryat Motzkin settlement with a barrage of rockets and carried out a second round of strikes with Fadi-1 missiles.

Israel has launched waves of deadly air strikes on Lebanon since Monday, killing nearly 700 people. The international community has warned against Israeli attacks on Lebanon as they raise the spectre of spreading the Gaza war regionally.

Hate it when Zionists keep getting reasons to celebrate. Those miserable excuses for human beings deserve to be suffering all the time.

Apparently the welding on US nuclear submarines and carriers are so bad that it's being investigated as possible sabotage

Joe Biden says Nasrallah's assassination “is a measure of justice for his many victims”, which include Americans, and calls for the two sides to accept diplomatic agreements to end the war. “It's time for the threats to Israel to be removed and for the Middle East to have stability,” he said.

So after teamsters national do the smart thing by endorsing neither party as being pro-worker, locals in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin break ranks to endorse Kamala Harris for president

https://archive.is/ncZAG

Interesting tidbit of information in this article:

China now has the world’s only major stock market in which state-owned companies are valued on par with those in the private sector. Individual fortunes have shrunk dramatically over the past three years; the number of billionaires has fallen 35 per cent in China, even as it rose 12 per cent in the rest of the world.

Bibi gave a speech to literally only a bunch of Israelis he brought to the UN? Wtf was that?

I only now checked the news today by accident, death to Israel. I feel completely sickened. Nasrallah was a greater man than any Israeli can ever be.

This is so blatantly an act of war. Lebanon is at war whether it is announced by either side or not. What will still be standing by the time troops begin moving? Maybe the whole nation will be treated like Gaza but the rubble will grind down the Israelis, but by god the death toll of that. They are losing more and more equivalents to North Vietnam or the like, a place that is secure and safe for planning operations.

The death of a leader is not game over, but if Israel can keep decapitating these organizations, an orderly and planned out resistance becomes more and more difficult.

I keep thinking of Finkelstein's story about his mother testifying against that female concentration camp guard and them walking out of the court and seeing the woman just walking around and his mother says "GET HER, THEY THINK WE ARE SHEEP" and him doing unspecified actions. Make them pay, they think you are sheep

Press Release PFLP

🔴 The Popular Front: The enemy is spreading illusions and lies, and the resistance is based on solid ground and strong will

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine confirmed that what the enemy and its terrorist army are doing is committing massacres against civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure, and there is no truth to the lies and illusions it is spreading about undermining the capabilities of the resistance, whether in Palestine or Lebanon.

The Front explained that the resistance's responses and operations in all fields prove that they are based on solid ground and a strong, unyielding will, and a sincere, steadfast incubator that time rarely produces in terms of loyalty, sincerity, sacrifice and redemption.

The Front stressed that the enemy is trying to sell illusions that no one else will buy, similar to its talk about destroying most of the resistance's missile capabilities or its talk about the end of the Gaza resistance, which was confirmed by the resistance operations in recent days despite the horror of the crimes committed by the occupation against our people and our people.

The Front saluted the heroes of the resistance in all arenas, especially the brothers, comrades in blood and field, in Hezbollah, who stood firm in the face of our enemy's criminal attack, and responded to the aggression with determination and strength.

The Front stressed that what is required today from the masses of our nation and our peoples, and the free and struggling people around the world, is to escalate the struggle against the forces of aggression and the parties supporting our criminal enemy, and to strengthen support for the resistance, its incubators, and our steadfast people rooted in their land.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Central Media Department

September 24 2024

China publicly test launches ICBM for the first time in decades

Malawi is the only African country to vote against the most recent UNGA resolution on 19 September which ordered "israel" to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank. They also established an embassy on 24 April in Tel-Aviv, coincidentally when South Africa had already suspended relations with the Nazi entity. Another nation in Africa who is concerningly comfortable with "israel" is also just 1,300 kilometers from Gauteng.

https://t.me/warmonitors/28214

Israel just carpet bombed a densely populated area in Beirut

Israeli Minister of "Diaspora Affairs & Combatting Antisemitism" calls for destroying the “hostile Shia population” in South Lebanon by establishing a “buffer zone free of enemy population.”

Watching Iran bumble it's way through this war, I have to imagine is what it felt like to watch the post-Stalin Soviets abandon their allies one by one to fight Western dogs that got unlimited backing, out of the fear of a nuclear war with the West, until there was no one left and they were effectively encircled. All of the people driving NATO policy are the same freaks who were either in charge when the Cold War was happening, or were being groomed by them. I desperately hope they have finally learned their lesson that the West will not negotiate with them in good faith.