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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-human-shields.html

    After Israeli soldiers found Mohammed Shubeir hiding with his family in early March, they detained him for roughly 10 days before releasing him without charge, he said.

    During that time, Mr. Shubeir said, the soldiers used him as a human shield.

    Mr. Shubeir, then 17, said he was forced to walk handcuffed through the empty ruins of his hometown, Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, searching for explosives set by Hamas. To avoid being blown up themselves, the soldiers made him go ahead, Mr. Shubeir said.

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/middleeast/israel-gaza-human-shields-investigation-intl/index.html

    In an interview with CNN late last year, an Israeli soldier said his unit had forced a Palestinian man to enter a building ahead of troops…

    The exact scale and scope of the practice by the Israeli military is not known. But the testimony of both the soldier and five civilians last year indicated that it was widespread across the territory: in northern Gaza, Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.

    One of the civilians, Mohammad Saad, age 20, told CNN that IDF soldiers had detained him in Rafah.

    “They would ask us to do things like, ‘move this carpet,’ saying they were looking for tunnels,” he said. “‘Film under the stairs,’ they would say. If they found something, they would tell us to bring it outside. For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard.”

    https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israeli-soldier-palestinians-human-shields-gaza/

    Tommy [an anonymized name] said his commander ordered his unit to use Gazan civilians to search buildings for explosives instead of dogs…

    Breaking the Silence has acted as a watchdog body over the Israeli military for more than 20 years. It said it had corroborated Tommy’s account with other soldiers.


    Multiple eyewitness accounts from both sides, and stories from anonymous sources match up with each other, as well as with stories of named sources.








  • I’m not sure what you mean about “the greatest global crisis since WWII” during 2020

    Covid. It hit the U.S. in March 2020.

    The “talking points against the left” already happened and do happen regardless of Bernie backing Biden.

    You’re right that they will trot it out whatever the facts are, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stick. It didn’t stick after 2016 because Bernie campaigned for Hillary after dropping out, and so far I haven’t seen it stick that well after 2024 because “I won’t endorse genocide” is hard to honestly oppose, especially when Trump forced Israel into a ceasefire before he even got inaugurated.

    It would have stuck in 2020 had Bernie split the party, because that really would have had an impact on a Biden loss.

    Bernie contributed to helping radicalize people, but then he reached his limits and pulled back, and from where I’m standing, he’s no longer much of a help with that.

    That’s about where I am, yeah.


  • Bernie is done as a political force, and failing the easiest “do you oppose genocide” test ever is inexcusable. There’s a big danger of projecting this backwards and taking the wrong lessons from 2016-2020, though.

    I give his campaigns as a whole and the volunteers and activists in its orbit some credit for helping educate people and get them more active in politics as a whole. But the man himself caved pretty easily and backed Biden.

    I think you’re vastly underselling the importance of education/activation and overselling Bernie’s alternatives once the fix came in during the 2020 primary.

    Showing people that there’s a viable set of policies to the left of Obama is the very first step towards anything resembling a socialist mass movement. Making Medicare for All the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign checked so many boxes: popular, radical, building off an existing program, and highlighting a huge difference between Obama Democrats and even a tiny step left of them. Most succinctly, it’s the first major Democratic policy proposal since the 60s that hasn’t been neoliberal “give a tax credit so qualifying businesses can do it” garbage. There’s a reason why so many leftists today trace part of their radicalization back to Bernie.

    And once the fix was in during 2020, Bernie had exactly two choices: back Biden or split the party in the middle of the greatest global crisis since, what, WWII? Keep in mind the split would have been over essentially internal party politics (“you played too dirty in the primary”). There’s no principled stance to fall back on, and you’d just be handing neoliberal Dems endless talking points against the left for decades to come.


  • Trump is making all sorts of anti-imperialist noises, just like he did during his first term. Running against the War on Terror was popular for Democrats in '04 and '08, and for Republicans in 2016. There has been a sea change in public opinion towards Palestine in the last 15 months.

    There is a lot of opposition to anti-imperialism, but there’s a ton of support, too, and that’s without any major political figure taking a dedicated anti-imperialist stance in decades, maybe going back even further than WWII.







  • Hezbollah surrendering without a ceasefire in Gaza

    I don’t think they surrendered to anyone – they just negotiated a ceasefire between them and Israel. Bad, but they’re not off the board like Syria.

    Assad won’t really be missed for anything but his compliance in transporting weapons to Lebanon.

    Who knows what information Hezbollah had about the impending collapse of Syria that we didn’t have? Who knows how that impacted their ceasefire decision?




  • As a result of Yoon’s enhanced role in U.S. military strategy in Asia, the disgraced president has been the darling of the think tanks and Korea “experts” in the U.S. capital. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell has even suggested that Yoon should get a Nobel Peace Prize for putting aside Korean differences with Japan to make the trilateral alliance work.

    Is there even one foreign leader the U.S. likes who is actually decent?

    Yet even as the United States backs Yoon’s stance on North Korea, the enhanced ties between the Pentagon and the South Korean Army, coupled with memories of what happened in Gwangju 44 years ago, is an explosive combination. Many Koreans remember that after Chun’s coup and the slaughter in Gwangju, President Jimmy Carter directed the Pentagon to help the Korean martial law command crush the uprising by sending an aircraft carrier and advanced reconnaissance aircraft to monitor the actions of the Korean troops dispatched to the city from the Combined Forces Command. After assisting Chun to reassert military control over the country, South Korea suffered seven more years of authoritarian rule.

    Even in the most generous possible reading, the South Korean government has been a straight-up U.S. puppet for much of its history.