Image is of the aftermath of an Israeli bombing of Beirut in 2006.
We are now almost one year into the war and genocide in Gaza. Despite profound hardship, the Gazan Resistance continues its battles against the enemy, entirely undeterred. Despite Israeli proclamations throughout 2024 that they have cleared out Hamas from various places throughout Gaza, we still see regular attacks and ambushes against Zionist forces. Just today (Monday), Al Qassam fighters ambushed and destroyed another convoy of Israeli vehicles. The predictions early on in the war were that Israel would defeat Hamas in mere months, needing only until December, then January, and so on. This has proven very much untrue. Israel is stuck in the mud; unable to destroy their enemy due to their lack of knowledge about the “Gaza Metro” and, of course, a lack of actual fighting skill, given how many times I’ve seen Zionists getting shot while they gaze wistfully out of windows.
The same quagmire will occur in Lebanon, only considerably worse. Both Nasrallah and Sinwar possess a similar strategy of luring Zionist forces onto known, friendly territory, replete with traps and ambushes, to bleed them dry of equipment, manpower, and the will to continue fighting. The scale of the invasion could fall anywhere on the spectrum from “very limited” - more of a series of raids on Hezbollah positions than truly trying to occupy land - to a total invasion which would seek to permanently take control of Southern Lebanon. Neither is likely to destroy, or even substantially diminish Hezbollah’s fighting abilities. This is not wishful thinking: Hezbollah has convincingly defeated Israel twice before in its history, pushing them from their territory, and both times Hezbollah had almost no missiles and a limited supply of other equipment, relying on improvisation as often as not. The Hezbollah of 2024 is an entirely different organization to that of the early 2000s.
Attempts to drive wedges between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon are also unlikely to succeed. Hezbollah is not just a military force, it is extremely interlinked into various communities throughout Lebanon, drawing upon those communities to recruit soldiers. Throughout its history, it has provided education, healthcare, reconstruction, and dozens of other services one would attribute to a state. Amal Saad’s recent suggestion of using “quasi-state actor” as a more respectful replacement for the typical “non-state actor” seems advisable. And the decentralized command structures, compartmented leadership, strong succession planning, and aforementioned community ties almost entirely neutralizes the effectiveness of assassinations. Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem has confirmed that Hezbollah’s path has been set by Nasrallah, and his martyrdom will not stop nor even pause their efforts. Additionally, he confirmed that despite the recent attacks by Israel which nominally focussed on destroying missile depots, Hezbollah’s supply of weapons has not been degraded, and they are still only using the minimum of their capabilities.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
just now
The Israeli military on Friday told the residents of over 20 more southern towns in Lebanon to evacuate immediately, spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X.
an hour ago
An Israeli strike has hit near the Masnaa border crossing, cutting off a road** hundreds of thousands** have used to flee in recent days, Reuters reports.
The crossing, between Syria and** Lebanon**, is now closed due to the strike, the Lebanese transport minister said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-04/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-live-updates/104430472
reporting is when uncritically publishing media releases from the police and military with no comment or thought
also the australian govt is now discussing expelling the Iranian ambassador because of a tweet about Hezbollah, very cool, i love a good will they, or wont they
Can any Spanish speakers confirm this?
https://xcancel.com/chuy90023/status/1841936132323303753A good chunk of Argentinian President Javier Milei’s recent UN speech was plagiarized word for word from The West Wing.
I want to believe. Someone has claimed the “there are no babies to kill” freak has been liquidated in Lebanon.
https://twitter.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/1841894709276316030?mx=1
“Sandton Drive” in Johannesburg is getting renamed to “Leila Khaled Drive” in 2 weeks time. Apart from the Zionist tears, the AmeriKKKan embassy on the street has to update their address, lmao
The embassy when it says 1 Leila Khaled Drive, Sandton Johannesburg:
I think the photo has a real filmic vibe. Caption…
Smoke rises from Beirut’s southern suburbs as a Hellenic Air Force crew evacuates Greek and Greek Cypriot nationals from Lebanon on Thursday.
for anyone who uses it, careful about going to r/ukrainerussiareport today, very upsetting execution vid on there rn
I made some context for the Nevatim base image going around
not a military expert by any means, but an arrow 3 missile costs ~$62 millions. some footage (cannot find it anymore, one was on a beach) showded basically intact “metal tubes”. some explosions of hits were so small, it seemed there wasnt even a warhead on it.
is there something to that?
l mean why spend money on warheads when gps/whatever can collect intel and force israel to spend $62 millions to try to intercept it?
Don’t call me a doomer, but it’s never been more over for Russia. The libs really are back. 2025 budget looking real bad…
The budget received 48 billion rubles from privatization in nine months
“Based on the results of the first 9 months of 2024, federal budget revenues from the privatization of federal property totaled 48 billion rubles. The size of the final revenues will depend on fluctuations in the market situation and the level of investment activity,” the report says.
At the same time, the budget law for 2024 sets privatization revenues at around 1 billion rubles.
However, in March of this year, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov stated the need to adjust this plan - the financial department believes that in 2024, budget revenues from privatization should amount to at least 100 billion rubles.
As follows from the explanatory note to the draft federal budget for a three-year period, the Russian budget revenues from the privatization of federal property in 2025-2027 are expected to be a little over 7 billion rubles in total, 2.4 billion rubles annually.
These libs are really going to undo everything that the Cabinet of Ministers have been doing over the past two years.
I will write more in the coming days, but the Central Bank is now forecasting that economic growth in 2025 will be slowed to 1.5-1.7% - that’s practically no growth at all. The financial sector has made a comeback, and the real sector is going to be sacrificed.
Last summer, Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Alexey Zabotkin openly stated that while the Cabinet of Ministers subsidizes the economy with the help of preferential programs, the Central Bank will tighten monetary policy in response.
An open declaration of war by the Central Bank libs against the Russian government. A year later, it’s very clear who now has the upper hand.
The Saudis realized their oil refineries are completely toast if they continue to do nothing:
https://twitter.com/SinaToossi/status/1841893818976608575?mx=1Not that I think it matters overly much - I can’t say I give a single solitary shit about Mohammed bin Salman - but China must be looking at this whole situation hiding behind their hands a little. Brought Saudi Arabia and Iran closer together in opposition to US planning, and now we might, before too long, see Iran (or groups allied to them) blowing up their refineries in a giant war, alongside those in other regional monarchies.
The @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net approach would be to praise America for subverting that Chinese plan, and I can’t really say that’s terribly wrong, but the Biden admin October Surprise-ing itself due to potentially dramatically raising oil prices also doesn’t seem very productive. Perhaps they’ll tell Israel to hold off until mid-November.
Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: Middle East Exploding, Ukraine Crumbling! the US Take Action?
Michael Hudson had a normal one today. Even Richard Wolff was like wtf.
Also a lot of interesting anecdotes of Hudson (who apparently still live in the 1970s) during his time at the Hudson Institute (no relation, named after Hudson River) dealing with the neocons.
Judge for yourself if these are banger quotes or the deranged ramblings of a madman:
- “The United States doesn’t want to see a ceasefire, it wants to use Israel as a catapult; everything that happened today was planned out just 50 years back in 1973-74. I sat in meetings with the head of Mossad who then became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor. The whole strategy was worked out essentially by the Defense Department by the neoliberals and [Henry] “Scoop” Jackson - the ultra-right wing neocon who sponsored them all.”
- “The starting point for all US strategy since the 1970s was that Democracies no longer can field a domestic army with a military draft. America is not in a position able to field enough of an army to invade a country.”
- “That means today’s tactics are limited to bombing, not occupying countries. Neither the Israeli army or any other army are really able to invade and try to take over a country the way armies did during WWII.”
- “The US wars haven’t scaled back because it has a fallback position - it was going to rely on foreign troops to do the fighting as proxies instead of itself. The first example was to create the Wahhabi Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter mobilized them against the secular Afghan interests. Carter justified this by saying, yes they’re Muslims, but after all we all believe in God, so the answer to the secular state of Afghanistan was Wahhabi fanaticism”
- “The US realized that in order for a country to fight to the last Afghan, the last Israeli, the last Ukrainian, you really need a country whose spirit is one of hatred.”
- “Herman Kahn’s (model for Dr. Strangelove) greatest achievement was to convince the US empire builders that the key to achieving their control of the Middle East was to rely on Israeli as their Foreign Legion.”
- “The US realized then that the only kind of full scale war that a Democracy can afford is an Atomic War, but that only works against adversaries who can’t retaliate. The result of today’s military alliances means that any attempt to use nuclear weapons is going to risk full scale nuclear war. What is left for the US? There is only one form of non-Atomic war that Democracies can afford, and that’s Terrorism. You should look at Ukraine and Israel as the Terrorist alternative to Atomic War.”
- “The whole idea of Ukraine and Israel is to bomb civilians, not military targets. It’s a fight to destroy the population under an Ideology of Genocide - that is absolutely central and not an accident.”
- “Zionism has been Christianized and has accepted the hatred of the Other”
- “There cannot be peace in Asia or in Ukraine, because then the status quo would remain and the US would not be able to take over these countries as satellites; peace would mean dependent countries gaining independence”
- “Many neocons at the Hudson Institute, 50 years ago, were Trotskyists or their fathers were Trotskyists and they have picked up Trotsky’s idea of Permanent Revolution; but instead of the Permanent Revolution spreading from the Soviet Union, the neocons believe the Permanent Revolution is the American Empire itself spreading to the entire world.”
- “Who wants to live in a world where we can’t control? Who wants to live in a world where we can’t siphon off their economic surplus for ourselves? That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with.”
just got the call a lil bit ago, ILA strike over. We are having a celebration dinner. 90 day extension. Woop 🙌🏽
Traffic through the Suez Canal has fallen from around 2,000 transits per month before November 2023 to around 800 in August,
Greece-based Conbulk Shipmanagement Corporation stopped Red Sea voyages after its vessel MV Groton was attacked twice in August.
Torben Kolln, managing director of German-based container shipping group Leonhardt & Blumberg, said the Red Sea and wider Gulf of Aden was a “no go” area for their fleet.
An executive at a third shipping company, which has also received a letter, said they decided to end business with Israel in order to be able to continue to use the Red Sea route.
The Houthis have not stopped all traffic and the majority of Chinese and Russian-owned ships - which they do not see as affiliated with Israel - are able to sail through unhindered with lower insurance costs.
