...one has to wonder what the latest Blinken round of visits to the Middle East was supposed to accomplish, since all it did was expose our impotence. Even the Financial Times could not hide that the meetings with Netanyahu and then Arab leaders were a train wreck. Netanyahu rejected even any itty bitty ceasefire, branded a humanitarian pause, to get relief in, demanding that Hamas release all hostages first. The fact that Israel has welched or underperformed on its past begrudging promises to let trucks from Egypt in, would make that a non-starter even before getting to Hamas being sure to stick to its position of wanting to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners. And of course the Arab states are not about to budge. Blinken got a more pointed version of what he was told before.
Antony Blinken faced intense pressure from regional allies to facilitate an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, laying bare the stark gap between US support for Israel and the outrage in Arab capitals over the siege and bombardment of the strip….
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, demanded an unconditional ceasefire, a commitment that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bluntly rejected after meeting Blinken on Friday.
Blinken had been expected to “brainstorm” with Arab diplomats the future of Gaza, home to 2.3mn Palestinians, after the war ends. Safadi bluntly rejected those talks as premature. “How can we even entertain what will happen in Gaza when we do not know how Gaza will be left?” he asked Blinken. “Are we going to be talking about a wasteland? Are we talking about a whole population reduced to refugees?”
This comes off as the sort of thing someone who had just read classic texts on negotiating trying to put in practice: “Gee, let’s get a dialogue going! Let’s get to ‘Yes’ on some less fraught issues to pave the way for further agreement!” In addition, “brainstorming” is cringemakingly American. You don’t do that with people who are mad at you. You don’t do that in a crisis. Between independent entities, you do not do that at the top level. You have low level people or emissaries float ideas. So why this exercise? The worst is that Biden and Blinken come off as so disconnected from reality that they though they might get someone to accommodate US needs.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
You're going to have to (hex)bear with me on the update this week. Have you been feeling generally pretty terrible this last month or so? So have I, and doomscrolling and archiving it all is my quasi-job at this point. Not good, folks, more and more people are saying it. I'll get over it eventually.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
I've noticed some liberals state: "The casualties aren't high enough to be a genocide". This is such a wild and ugly retort to the outcry against this campaign against Gaza.
Meanwhile China’s deathless approach was unquestionably genocide in liberal minds.
Saw a guy today on twitter refer to it as "China's now-completed genocide of the Uyghurs" or something like that. There aren't any Uyghurs left, people, just empty houses and smoldering furnaces.
Standard liberal bad faith tactic: starting their argument from a presupposed basis as if it had been proven
Genocide is when you teach a second language, and the more languages you teach, the more genocidal it becomes.
Freedom is when you kill children, and the more children you kill, the more freedomer it is.
I'm pretty sure Xinjiang schools have the Uighur language, which is, what, a turkic language? I'm afraid I don't know. But I think that's the primary language of education with Mandarin as secondary.
Just show them this and ask them to explain how that computes
Not white enough to count as people
More Palestinians have died than Bosnians that died at Srebrenica. An order of magnitude more Palestinians have been effectively expelled from their homes than Bosnians during this period, as well. Make them deny Srebrenica and the Bosnian genocide if that is their stance.
How many people who aren't political nerds even know about a genocide that happened in the late 20th century?
Even leftists need to educate themselves about Yugoslavia. I'm doing my part and reading To Kill A Nation. So much I didn't know.
It's obviously not their real stance. They're making shit up as they go along to keep up the pretense that they're anything other than genocide supporters.
I know, that's why you have to try and make them deny another genocide.
Meanwhile MFs were literally describing a Ukrainian tank column getting bombed as a genocide like a year ago
It's a common liberal deflection tactic. They know their actual position is abhorrent so they make up an endless list of technicalities that just so happens not to apply in the current situation.
Genocide in Palestine? No sweaty, the number of victims is too low.
Fascist movements gaining political power? No sweaty, these people claim to be democratic so they can't be fascists.
Poverty in our society? No sweaty, these people have refrigerators so they can't be poor.
then why did you call russia's action genocide. white supremacist assholes
Russia moved children outside of warzones and then returned them when asked, which is the worst genocidal act imaginable. Most children in Gaza are actually very small Hamas agents and so are lawful combatants and actually you're an anti-semitic terrorist if you don't want to kill them
Srebrenica had less deaths and it is considered genocide. Also why would fucking libs want the children in a war zone? Russia and ussr know what horrible fate those kids might have
The official death toll of Kristallnacht was 91
Sorry. Genocide only happens at the 3 million mark.
Did anyone point out that the conflict isn't over and Israel is currently trying to starve out Gaza?
I get the impression that a lot of people don't understand or haven't considered that dehydration and starvation don't kill people for a while then kill a whole lot of people all at once. I've been terrified that all of Gaza is going to die one day from dehydration ever since Bibi turned the water off.
According to the UN definition of genocide it doesn't need to be that high or killing entire region to be one
Never again, the libs say while they wait for the death count to be high enough.
"Never again" they insist, "Will we allow ourselves to stand by and let a genocide be labeled as such"
Genuinely shocked how many people who aren't explicitly Zionist believe it is "Never again if the victims are Jewish people".
It's not a genocide unless its from the Auschwitz region of Germany. This is just a sparkling massacre.
(Shoutout to the person here that came up with that. It's a banger)
this line doesn't even work, because (Jewish) Zionism is actually from Germany lmao
I don't see why that's a problem with the joke?
Oh, okay. Zionism was from Germany, so Zionist genocide would actually be small batch craft distilled artisinal genocide.
Checkmate, though - Herzl was from I think Austria-Hungary.
Auschwitz is in Poland, FYI.
Lmao where was this logic during Ukraine?
I thought that the value of a life was inversely proportional to the population of a country, as demonstrated by units of 9/11?
I've screamed a few times that just because your army sucks at genocide doesn't mean it's not a genocide.
Hit them with the the legalese definition of genocide. "The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group."
There is no time that 10,000 people would seem like anything but a large amount of deliberate killings. (ask them to give an example to refute this) The definition itself speaks more to the intention of the killing than it does to the number and the rhetoric coming out of the israeli government clearly states they want to kill everyone in gaza or displace them and destroy their cultural identity.
Liberals are really, actually just becoming fascists
how
like why do we have to do this again? The Soviets and everyone else did so much why do we have to do it all again?