...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.
Can anybody reading this - read Portuguese? I assume the coverage in English won't be that good and I'd like to know more from media outlets who know what they're talking about.
"Israel" has the right to defend itself. Sao Paulo must be indiscriminately carpet bombed to stop a new Holocaust from happening.
seeing reports that Hamas tunnels go all the way to Munich, Israel please save Germany by carpet bombing Bavaria
? why tf would Hezbollah be in Brazil lmao
My take from five days ago...
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Khalil might be in Buenos Aires and if so - he should be developing support for the cause and not watching football, partying, and chasing women which he'll claim is "building support networks" in his slightly broken yet charming Spanish.
it's so stupid, I don't understand why AJ is even dignifying this by reporting it
My hunch is that it's due to SEO concerns. Being first means you get the most page views and the greatest engagement but it comes at the expense of accuracy.
if we ever hear about this again, it's just gonna be like 2 bolsonaristas who retweeted something that had a hezbollah flag in the background or something and wrote dumb death threats
You misspelled "Hezbollah gave aid and training to individuals seeking to carry out MULTIPLE terror attacks."
The Israelis and the US have been trying to claim this for years. They have been trying to claim they are in Venezuela, too.
idk. Sometimes western intelligence just makes shit up. Sometimes people who trained with one group are part of another group and end up doing their own thing, and western intel says they're part of the same group. Sometimes western intel is just flat out wrong. Sometimes weird shit happens. There was a PFLP sponsored attack on an airport years back that was carried out by three Japanese nationals who were members of the Japanese Red Army. They weren't suspected on their way in because why would three Japanese guys be launching an attack on an airport in the middle east under the command of the PFLP?
The attack itself was a total clusterfuck. Lots of dead civilians, either shot but the red army guys or shot in the crossfire with security forces depending on who you ask, one of the red army guys killed himself maybe maybe not accidentally, one was shot to death, and one was captured alive. Dude's apparently still alive in the middle east somewhere while the Japanese government fumes about not being able to extradite him.
illich Ramirez Sanchez is another guy who is a little unusual at face value. He's a Venezuelan national and a communist and spent most of his adult life fighting for or on behalf of Palestinian liberation groups, mostly in and around Europe. Venezuelan guy fighting for the PFLP in France? World's a small weird place. Dude's currently in prison in France serving a bunch of life sentences for a couple of things he did and a couple of things he probably didn't do.
Nobody seems to have more than the press release information about the arrests today. I'm only seeing basic articles like this one. Two arrests, 11 search warrants. One guy was arrested getting off the plane from Lebanon. There are two more suspects still in Lebanon. Apparently the plan was to attack "Jewish community buildings" in Brazil, although the only named building I've seen so far is the Israeli embassy. There isn't a lot of detail. All of the articles have almost word for word the same text.
The main media empire in Brazil is O Globo which is heavily paywalled. They are... not very good. I found this non-paywalled article, and it is... oof, some hot garbage. In the first paragraph it erroneously says the people arrested today were linked to ISIS, not Hezbollah. The article as a whole is trying to draw a line between these arrests and the arrests of 11 people in 2016 who were, lol, "Hezbollah members who swore allegiance to the Islamic State over the Internet" and were going to attack the Rio Olympics. Written like it's all the same nefarious plot.
For the record, I'm not Brazilian and Portuguese is like my 5th language (who's counting). But the Brazilian mainstream press is possibly the worst I've ever seen in any country.
lol, lmao.
I only have one.
Rub it in why don't you?
I'm not trying to dunk on you. Brazilian media is just, oof, so so bad.
But I haven't read that for myself. Haha.
Yeah, and I just stopped Hamas terrorists from blowing Earth up with their secret death star