Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don’t seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan’s supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan’s party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as “the coalition of losers” by Khan’s supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
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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 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. - 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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
A lot of the even progressive or nominally leftist streamers, podcasters, and other talking heads who are covering the lies about sexual violence on Oct 7 always include disclaimers like, “I’m not saying no sexual violence occurred, in fact I find it very likely it did, but no evidence has been produced…”
Find it very likely why? Because it was Palestinians? Because some of them were Hamas? Because any incident of mass violence is likely to include sexual violence? Because they were overwhelmingly young men? Because Israel said so? What? It strikes me as still buying heavily into “gotta condemn Hamas, no matter what” bullshit. Or am I missing something, other than the obvious racism?
This is a flatly true statement, certainly so in the context of October 7 where the commandos were followed out of the fence by an assortment of civilians with varied motivations once the Israelis failed to respond to the raid.
What’s key is that the charge of a deliberate and systematic program of sexual violence on the part of the Gazan resistance is an absurd and racially charged slander.
Yes, and that’s just led me to a sudden realization - the number of r*pes committed by Hamas, and the civilians in their wake, in the few days they were outside the fence must obviously be several orders of magnitude lower than the number committed by the IOF since then.
I remember a hostage testimony from one woman, about how they were treated fairly well by their Hamas captors, and one of them even played arm wrestling with her daughter - but the Hamas soldier had to put a cloth over his hand, because (due to his deeply held religious beliefs, of course) he was not allowed to directly touch a woman outside of marriage. The idea that THOSE guys could have committed more sexual violence in a few days, than the army made up of guys posting things like this:
(CW: implied SV)
running rampant for five months, is obviously ridiculous.
Always projection. They just remember what they do when they go pillaging and assume it must be how the Palestinians acted as well.
It’s because that’s the core of the message the western media is trying to propagate. The point of the original reports of babies, rapes, etc, are not that people will continue to believe them as such, but just that they believe them “in the abstract” (to say “I am not saying that this incidence happened, but something bad must have happened”). The same applies to reports about every official enemy of the US empire (and it’s most common for propaganda against china). These events and these places are not real for most people, so the media promotes fake reports that will later be proven wrong or retracted because what they offer is painting a picture of these events and places. The aim is to create a general feeling to the western audience that bad things happen on both sides.
“Hamas is bad” is the consequence of these stories, and that is the most important goal of the western media. For the western powers it is fine for people in the west to feel sad or bad or empathize with the ills and suffering of Palestinians. The important thing is that they do not support any political vehicle for the actual liberation of Palestinian people: in this case, armed struggle.
I don’t think it’s racism. A lot of these online commentators and media people got their brains broken by constantly arguing online and developed a series of verbal “tics” meant to preempt their opponent’s arguments. That’s where all this “to be fair” and " i’m not saying that" shit comes from. And yeah, it’s fine when they do it for things that don’t matter, but it’s really annoying when they basically start giving creedense to outrageous atrocity propaganda just to win online arguments.
This is the same thing as when western leftists condemn the USSR for red fascism so that they may earn brownie points from liberals (they won’t)
The one that annoys the most is when they use that one woman in the black bikini skirt as proof of SV, my friend these were her party clothes… She was in a party, even her Instagram was her wearing it
Yeah. An Intercept article linked to this site oct7factcheck.com by the way. I don’t know how much to trust it yet, but it appears to have at least some decent info on it. Like, it recognizes that there was significant “friendly fire” that killed Israelis… (I’m not even sure if “friendly fire” is the right word, TBH; that applies when militants hit their comrades, but it seems a little off to me to apply it to either negligent or intentional—i.e. mass Hannibal Doctrine—murder of non-militants.)
They thought they were playing Death-match and not Team-Death match
Possibly just hedging against future debate lords.
Al-Qassam militants covering their hands with cloth so they don’t directly touch female hostages: To be fair, there was probably r-word going around.
IOF goons sniffing the panties and fondling the bras that belong to Palestinian women on Tiktok: There’s absolutely zero evidence of r-word conducted by the most moral army in the world.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a music festival where 0 sexual violence occurred
The word likely is doing a lot of lifting there. October 7th was not “mass violence” by Hamas. The mass violence was done by the IDF. Some Hamas fighters assaulted military installations and killed some soldiers, the others took civilian hostages with the goal of swapping them for Palestinian prisoners. Some took their hostages back to Gaza, the rest tried to stay put in homes and were killed by the IDF along with their hostages.
Sexual violence is generally a part of longer operations as command structures break down. October 7th was a short operation that took years of preparation and had a strict veil of silence. It required strong discipline. The fighters had likely trained together but they didn’t have the type of relationship that develops in an occupation. They had not been involved in the moral degradation that comes with being an invader who is forced to dehumanize their victims in order to cope with the violence of a sustained presence where they are not wanted. Many of them were religious and would have held the others to their standards and none of them would have risked going off alone. They were freedom fighters working for a high ideal not conscripted grunts who were bored or angry with their commanders. Their goals were not vengeance but for the freedom of their friends and family at home and the prisoners held by the zionist entity.
There is no reason to suspect that sexual violence happened at all. There is no evidence of it and there are many logical explanations as to why there would not have been sexual violence.
Yeah. This seems far more correct to me.
I guess “TBF” Palestinians other than Hamas did also break out of the walls, once they saw there was a breach. And the explanation might not hold as much for them. But 1. again there’s no particular reason to think they engaged in sexual violence, and 2. putting that at Hamas’ feet would be wrong. Of course, most media doesn’t even acknowledge that anyone other than Hamas was involved, so this is another whole level of we need to get past that ideological blindness before we can even begin talking about this shit.