Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism. Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Everyone deserves Human Rights

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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • In Matt Nelson’s words:

    “My name is Matt Nelson and I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he said in a video first uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. “We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

    “We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care,” Nelson continued. “The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the [International Criminal Court] indictment of [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.”

    “A democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interests of the wealthy,” he added. “Take the power back. Free Palestine.”


  • Lets look more into the details about that. UNRWA has taken that sort of thing very seriously, especially since Oct 7th. These 9 were fired because the evidence presented by Israeli officials, with no independent verification, showed it was possible they were involved.

    That doesn’t show that they were terrorists or working for/with Hamas on Oct 7th. It showed that it was possible that they violated UNRWA’s policy of Neutrality, and for that they were fired. So trying to attribute this to UNRWA workers in general makes no sense, it’s just used to justify Israel’s attacks on UNRWA staff and other aid workers working in Gaza during a genocide.

    “In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member’s involvement, while in nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff members’ involvement,” he said.

    With respect to the remaining nine cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS indicated that the UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the 7 October attacks.

    Asked about the extent of the staff members’ alleged involvement, Mr. Haq responded that he did not have specific information about the allegations.

    He said the OIOS investigation involved visits to Israel for discussions with officials and to see and review information held by authorities there.

    “However, one thing I’d like to point out is that since information used by Israeli officials to support the allegations have remained in Israeli custody, OIOS was not able to independently authenticate most of the information provided to it,” he noted

    He also appointed an independent review panel to conduct a separate assessment into UNRWA to determine whether the agency was doing everything it could to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they arise.

    The panel – headed by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna - published its report in April.






  • I did accidentally respond to the wrong comment. It was in response to when you said:

    First of all its ghoulishly disingenuous for you to conflate providing arms. Which is wrong I’m not justifying that. To actually killing people. That’s straight up empty virtue signaling and not solving or convincing anyone of anything.

    This is not analogous to a murder case. When it comes to International and US Law, the US is complicit in the genocide because we are actively providing the arms being used for said genocide.

    Also, I’m not a leninist nor a stalinist.

    I’m a leftist and I’m very anti-authoritian. I even explicitly state that in my profile. The name is just an edgy pun.


  • Zionism is a settler colonialism project was able to start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.

    Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history.

    Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.

    That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.

    Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.

    Quote

    Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for thenewcomers. The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat. An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.


  • In a new research briefing submitted to the U.S. government today as part of the National Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability with Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services (NSM-20) process, Amnesty International USA details civilian deaths and injuries with U.S.-made weapons, as well as other cases that highlight an overall pattern of unlawful attacks by Israeli forces. The briefing also details practices by Israeli forces inconsistent with best practices for mitigating civilian harm and provides clear examples of the misuse of defense articles, the commission of torture, and the use of unlawful lethal force. Lastly, the briefing also details the denial of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population of Gaza.

    “It’s shocking that the Biden administration continues to hold that the government of Israel is not violating international humanitarian law with U.S.-provided weapons when our research shows otherwise and international law experts disagree,” said Amanda Klasing, National Director for Government Relations with Amnesty International USA. “The International Court of Justice found the risk of genocide in Gaza is plausible and ordered provisional measures. President Biden must end U.S. complicity with the government of Israel’s grave violations of international law and immediately suspend the transfer of weapons to the government of Israel.”

    “The evidence is clear and overwhelming: the government of Israel is using U.S.-made weapons in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law, and in a manner that is inconsistent with U.S. law and policy, said Klasing. “In order to follow U.S. laws and policies, the United States must immediately suspend any transfer of arms to the government of Israel.”







  • Netanyahu has been stalling for months

    Along with the issues over the prisoner exchange, the negotiations have been stuck, in part, over the fate of the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of land in Gaza along the border with Egypt. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has insisted the Israeli military should remain in the corridor, while Hamas has said any deal requires Israel to withdraw from Gaza, including that border zone.

    Several of the officials familiar with the negotiations expressed concern that Mr. Netanyahu had in recent weeks put forward new demands that could further delay or even torpedo an agreement, including keeping Israeli forces in the corridor.



  • Discrediting death tolls is a type of genocide denial, there are certainly much more dead than has not been accounted for yet, due to the ongoing genocide. The methodology used to determine the conservative estimate of 1:4 direct to indirect deaths is cited and is an extensive document. Very weird to simply discredit it and claim “no methodology” for either the Gaza Health Ministry or The Lancet publication. Their analysis of total deaths, including direct and indirect deaths, is certainly an underestimation.

    By June 19, 2024, 37,396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.

    In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58 260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85 750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024











  • You get that’s general findings from a global poll right? When you look at US polling on the issue, it’s pretty clear

    Recent polling has repeatedly demonstrated that Democratic voters overwhelmingly support the conditioning of U.S. military aid. A Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) survey from March found that 52% of Americans want the U.S. to halt weapons shipments to Israel in order to force a ceasefire. 62% of Biden voters said “The US should stop weapons shipments to Israel until Israel discontinues its attacks on the people of Gaza,” while only 14% disagreed with the statement.

    The numbers from a June CBS News poll were even higher, with more than 60% of all voters and almost 80% of Democrats saying the U.S. shouldn’t send Israel weapons.

    In case you ignored the polls from the article. Here’s another:

    An April 2024 poll of likely voters across the U.S. found that 30% strongly supported withholding military funds to Israel until the attacks on Gaza stop; another 25% somewhat supported that conditional aid policy.

    Below we asked all respondents what minimum combination of policies would secure (for non-Biden voters) or solidify (for Biden voters) a vote for Biden for President. A third or more voters in every state except Minnesota said a lasting ceasefire was among the minimum policies that would be needed to secure solidify their votes

    Although voters are split on whether they approve or disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war, the vast majority (≥ ~75%) across all states still support an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Only a small minority of voters, from 11.2% to 16.1% in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, respectively, strongly approve of the President’s approach on Gaza. Of those, the vast majority in each state (≥64%) strongly support an immediate and permanent ceasefire. That is to say, a change in approach would not lose those votes, but staying on the current path risks doing so.