On December 4th, Rwanda's Paul Kagame and the DRC's Felix Tshisekedi signed the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity (pictured above). Trump boasted that he was settling a war that had gone on for decades, and remarked, idiosyncratically, "[...] and now they’re going to spend a lot of time hugging, holding hands [...]"
A few days later, the M23 militia (backed by Rwanda) advanced into Uvira, a city near the DRC's eastern border with Burundi and a major commercial and strategic location in the region. Burundi, although a small country, is a significant ally to the DRC and has sent thousands of soldiers to aid them during conflicts; this offensive by M23 aims to cut off a direct route between the two, though they do still share quite a long border over Lake Tanganyika. Tens of thousands of civilians (possibly up to 200,000) fled as M23 approached.
Signed almost simultaneously with the Accords was a Strategic Partnership Agreement between the DRC and the United States, which effectively threw open its critical minerals in the east to American exploitation. These minerals include tin, tungsten, and tantalum, which is vital for many industries. The irony is that M23 has been taking territory in the eastern DRC in order to transport these very minerals to Rwanda and onwards to global supply chains. Signing the Accord was, therefore, a remarkably pointless endeavour for everybody involved. Burundi and the DRC have complained, calling for sanctions on Rwanda, and appeasing to Trump's pride, calling this a "slap in the face to the United States", though I doubt the US is ultimately all that bothered about it one way or another.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Jews are not an ethnicity. This is your Zionism coming out. The fact is that some of those killed were part of Chabad, an ultra orthodox Zionist cult that has a stranglehold on the Jewish diaspora far and wide and actively contributes to the genocide. Israel is raising its future soldiers abroad by making sure they grow up thinking they are the victims. These ultra orthodox enclaves are what fuel the genocide and settler colonialism.
This is how Zionists will succeed in their genocide in the west. They will make sure every MSM outlet the populace has will be pumping out Jewish pain. They already bought the platforms (like tiktok), silenced those who resist (like electric intifada). Now they will make sure every week is a stream of Jewish themed suffering.
This is Israel at its finest.
Oh piss off Jewish is absolutely an ethnicity, if you want to get super technical you can divide it into several distinct ones but that's pathological for this convo.
This absolutely cooked fucking daesh sympathising father and son pair were lashing out at people doing a religious celebration that has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of proclaimation of allegance to Israel because they were targetting people because of their ethinic and religous idenities. It's as fucking cooked as shooting up a mosque because daesh exists.
Jewish is a religion. The attempt to make it into an ethnicity is a zionist project, and the project historically of anti-semites. Jews from Poland have absolutely zero blood relation to the ancient semites of the levant
No, it is not. There are various ethnicities which have cultural affinity with Judaism, but this is true for many ethnicities with respect with religion. Armenians and Georgians have traditionally been Christians, Uyghurs and Hui have traditionally been Muslim, Thai and Tibetans have traditionally been Buddhist, etc. Pakistan tried pulling the "we are one big happy South Asian Muslim ummah family" card, but Bangladeshis still fought for and won their independence.
People have literally done genomic analysis on the diaspora. Disengage
The argument for Israels existence has included the affirmation that Jews are an ethnicity. Therefore they get to claim that their settler colony has legitimate beginnings as tied to the ancient Israelites who they claim are the ancestors of all Jewish people everywhere (the 2000 years myth). This is contentious considering the history of coerced conversion and separation of Jews into their own enclaves by many European nations and the mass migration and extermination of Jews in the 20th century by Germany and its European collaboraters. You can't simply just say "scientific studies have been done" off hand and expect that to work here, this is not reddit and this is the news mega. You could find "Jewish genes" in a non-jew from Germany because their family converted out of Judaism.
Even Chabad, the ultra Zionist cult, doesnt claim this (https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/498027/jewish/Is-Jewish-a-Race.htm), instead they opt for the explicitly religious ethnicity (that is also explicitly tied to a "pact" with Israel) which is not the same. We can classify Israel as a religious ethno-state, not an ethnic one as there are clear ethnic divisions between Ashkenazi, sephardim and mizrahi jews among other groups of Jews not originating from Europe at all. Israel also gains more ground as an ethno religious state and pushing Judaism as a covenant with the settler colonial state rather than any persons personal religious position. Every Jew in the world has been tied to Israel forcefully whether you think its legitimate or not by the Zionist entity. This is an ongoing process for 70 years that no western Jewish diaspora has really tried to reject besides some traditionalist enclaves.
If you're getting outflanked by Chabad maybe it's an indication that this ideological road you're going down is a dead end.
Isn't that precisely the problem early European zionist settlers ran into? They had very little in common with African and Asian Jews, who they needed as footsoldiers and demographic padding (feels gross to say, but it is what it was, along with needing "Israel" to be the sole "homeland" of Jews, especially in the region) for their colonial project. They came up with various reasonings to make a national group out of all these ethnicities, one of which is the Chabad line you're mentioning. They also felt comfortable crushing and erasing the cultural traditions of those non-European Jewish groups, and even at times those of European Jews, in service of their homogenization project.
Hence the destruction of the Yiddish language, and its replacement by the artificially constructed fake Hebrew language
Disengage preceded by an argument doesn’t count by the way. They may be courteous and decide not to respond, but you can’t use it to get the last word
This is correct.
We may need to remove the word “lengthy” from the code of conduct to prevent rules lawyering like she is trying in another reply
We don't have to. Litigating the disengage rule with further replies is also not allowed.
Edit: disengage is meant as a safety/de-escalating tool, not.a rhetorical strategy.
And the rules around disengage are (primarily) to counter people using it as a rhetorical strategy. Now that we have a block button, it’s essentially unnecessary imo, but that’s a topic for another time
A short statement of fact for further reading is not a lengthy argument.
It's to the letter of the rule but clearly not to the spirit of the rule. Please just stop responding to folks and take some time to cool off
It’s clearly an argument where you’re using disengage to get the last word. Are European Jews not white, since Jewish is an ethnicity? Was a German Jew not German, but Jewish?
Depends who you ask, I suppose. Both zionists and antisemites would say "no". Although, to be fair (not to zionists and antisemites, of course, but to insurgentrat), people can belong to several ethnic groups.
For what it's worth, I agree with the comment by insurgentrat elsewhere in the thread that says "Jewish" is a collection of several distinct ethnicities. They have some cultural relation, of course, but outside the frameworks of zionism or antisemitism, I don't think it makes much sense for "Jewish" to be a single ethnic group. Or rather, they have more cultural relation than they did in the past, largely because of antisemitism and zionism as historical forces. You could make the argument for a strict single homogeneous ethnic group (which I want to emphasize insurgentrat did not do in this thread), but I think it would largely be based on zionist conceptions of Jewishness.
Whether that distinction makes a difference in this case (as insurgentrat said it didn't) is up for debate. I think it doesn't really. However, I agree that it's not sufficient to say this was simply an act of ethnic hatred when it clearly may have been partially targeted based on the affiliations with Chabad and almost definitely would never have happened if not for the "Israeli" genocide. I think that's the more important debate to be having in this thread, rather than whether "Jewish" is an ethnicity.
Of course, mixed people exist, but the idea that a religion is an ethnicity encompassing all practitioners worldwide is not the case, even with the qualifiers of subcategories within that ethnicities.
I agree that there's no coherent conception of a unified worldwide Jewish ethnicity (rather than religion) that isn't indebted both historically and ideologically to both zionism and antisemitism.
Yeah I realize there’s nuance within the religion, but if one of ethnic categories cited is Mizrahi, I’m (proverbially) jumping off a building
I mean, it is an ethnic category (just one purely based on zionism), those can be defined by various historical processes which can be artificial.
Like (OK not "like" at all because they're completely different, but they're similar only in the sense that they're both the result of displacement and homogenization of diverse groups with superficial common characteristics) "African American" is an ethnic category principally defined by being descendants of African slaves brought to Amerikkka, "Mizrahi" is an ethnic category defined by being the socially lower-ranked group of settlers who stole "Israel" from Palestinians - mainly in practice footsoldiers for European zionists, sometimes made so by coercion and deception. It's purely a zionist invention, but it's still a real group.
Edit: of course, I agree that it's probably not a productive categorization for people looking to organize a non-religious conception of Jewishness that isn't based on zionism.
FWIW Mizrahi is the term for Arab Jew in Israel because they are too racist and evil to associate themselves with the word Arab.
I'm aware, but as a result of this they have formed a common culture distinct from just being Arab Jews. AFAIK a significant amount (but not all) of that culture historically has been to performatively act in incredibly toxic and violently racist ways against Palestinian Arabs to prove that you're not an Arab, but it's still there. Hence why some anti-zionist Arab Jews refer to themselves as Arab Jews - to separate themselves from all that. It also includes the history of being displaced from their homes by the creation of "Israel", not always voluntarily - though I doubt very many Mizrahim today accurately attribute blame for that event.
Another example, I'm a Catholic in latam who definitely shares a little bit of genetic heritage with lots of Catholics in the Philippines, but otherwise we have nothing in common; not language (well maybe a bit but let's say for Tagalog speakers), culture, political reality, etc. If having a religion and a little bit of genes in common with a group of people that lives several oceans away makes you the same ethnicity, ethnicity becomes a pretty useless concept.
you can't make an argument and disengage in the same comment, this is breaking site rules
That's true that's why I'm ethnically Muslim and part of the billion+ Islamic ethnic group.
When I fill out surveys I make sure in the "other" box I write in "Muslim" instead of South Asian.
You keep throwing around words like "absolutely nothing" like it insists upon itself when I've already demonstrated that its not as binary as this.
I see for you, you've already made up your mind on how to feel, and you've spent it on it "being disappointing" that the Zionist colluding Australian government is using this as a cynical political cover to crush opposition.
And it’s all lives matter to mention that more children were killed in the last 72 hours in Palestine specifically assisted by Chabad and the corpse rabbi. Poor Australians
if anything it "all lives matter" to downplay mass death of POC to hyperfocus on a few whities getting killed. That's what the racists do in the US, they ignore the mass death and systemic suffering of POC to hyperfixate on anecdotes of crimes against white people
This is how I initially read the "all lives matter" comment, actually, as a criticism of the hyperfocusing people are doing on this tragedy while ignoring the Gaza genocide, with the remark that it's the first massacre in 20 years being to underscore that.
i think the original comment was implying the opposite. That we are doing "all lives matter" by wanting to refocus on Palestine instead of hyperfixating on a small attack in Australia
It might, but the reason I'm still not quite fully sure is that that would make absolutely no sense at all, for exactly the reason you're pointing out.
Reminded me of this the "lost Jewish tribe" in South Asia. 💀
But yes, apparently it is basic fact that all Jews are ethnically related so much so that Chabad now posits that Judaism is your allegiance to israel and not any particular genetic or ethnographic marker.
I'm being more and more convinced that antisemitism is the new "authoritarianism" in the west.
We don't conflate Shintoists as an ethnic group even though the vast majority of Shintoists belong to a single ethnic group and most people of that ethnic group perform Shinto rituals at least on a cultural level. Imagine some dude walking around saying they have "Shinto blood."
I don't wholly disagree, but I think the comparison would be valid only if Daesh were occupying Belgium and doing a genocide of Christians, and the mosque in question were affiliated with Daesh and had a genocidal Imam who was constantly hanging out with Daesh soldiers. I'm being facetious here, but I think it illustrates why this is a very flawed comparison. None of which makes the attack good or right.
As I said, I agree that the attack was bad and wrong. Unfortunately, zionists using this as an excuse to intensify support for genocide will increase the likelihood of it happening again.
As I say in the OP, instead of having some coherent platform against right wing violence they're suppressing pro Palestinian protests and adopting fringe Zionist positions on antisemitism.
Daesh did kill a lot of people at their peak, and destroy a lot of irreplaceable cultural heritage, and broke up families. They just mostly hurt other Muslims so the awareness of their horror didn't penetrate as far in MSM in the anglosphere.
I am not interested in constructing some flawless argument in an offhand comment. I just think it's fucking disgusting to attack people for their religious, cultural, or ethnic affiliation on the assumption they are somehow guilty because people claiming to represent them on said base are fucking lunatics.
Claiming that idk because some people in a crowd that somewhat shot into might have been horrible and that somehow makes the act less bad is an absolutely hideous thing to bring up and plays into the hands of the genocidal maniacs in Israel claiming it's somehow in the Jewish diaspora common culture to be senseless butchers of Palestinian people.
There are Zionists and antizionists in Australia, some are Jewish on both sides. Shit the premier of NSW is a Zionist and he's some Irish decendent Catholic bible thumping weirdo and he's one of the most ardent Zionists in the NSW public sphere.
I'm aware, but as you say, they did it mostly to Muslims (and Christians + other minorities in West Asia), who are typically not the perpetrators of the mosque shootings in the west you were referring to. Daesh attacks against crackers (who do that kind of shooting) were extremely few. So your analogy didn't make sense to me as a comparison to this attack.
Edit: clarified the above paragraph a bit.
I agree. But you can't make an analysis where you ignore that Chabad are genocidal zionists and that's almost certainly part of the reason this congregation in particular was attacked. Again, that doesn't make it right (even if all those present were zionists, which is definitely not the case because some were children), but it is reality. And as long as the "Israeli" state continues this genocide, this type of thing will happen more and more frequently. This isn't even the first Chabad congregation that was targeted, it happened in Manchester a few months ago. The point being that it can hardly be said conclusively that this was done only for reasons of ethnic hatred.
Of course, as you say, the people who did this are cooked Daesh sympathizers, they definitely ALSO did it for hateful reasons. No one does something like this without being completely cooked regardless, this kind of adventurist violence is not the actions of organized and principled political actors.
Alright fair.