Army Detachment Steiner will be doing the mining

There is proof of RAF killing at least one civilian. It is drone footage of Russian APC shooting at a man peeking from behind a fence.

But the best theory I've seen is that most of these people were killed by a Ukrainian mortar strike. And the fact that Ukraine hasn't provided drone footage of RAF killing other civilians suggests that it was indeed done by Ukraine (because there is no way they didn't have drones filming that place 24/7)

I don't have a link to direct proof, maybe there will never be any the way these things get lost in the fog of war, but I'll copy in a comment from a couple of years ago

spoiler

Bucha was definitely perpetrated by the Ukrainians, specifically the neonazi paramilitary battalions "Tornado" and "Safari" - seriously, "Safari battalion"

Many of the bodies in the streets were clearly from Ukrainian mortar impacts, as on satellite photos they appear at the same time as mortar craters while the Russians were still holding the town (the media's only explanation for this is that Russia shelled their own positions because their asiatic brainpan makes them self-destructively evil). The photos of people who were executed show them with white armbands, which the Russians used to mark friendlies, and even with Russian ration packs. Why would the Russian armed forces, at the very edge of a perilously extended advance with incredibly stretched supply lines, give away rations probably worth their weight in gold to people they were then going to kill, and then leave behind the rations? Conversely, to Ukrainian fascists, receiving aid from the enemy obviously makes you a traitor - a position made law by the Kiev regime just a few months later - and for a fascist that means summary execution. There was even a short video from the time, where one soldier clearly asks "can I shoot the ones without blue armbands?" (Ukraine uses blue for friendlies) and someone else just says "yes".

I expect the same killings by the Ukrainians took place in every town the Russians vacated, but it was definitely a concerted intelligence and media effort to specifically pick out the one town whose name in English looks and sounds like the word "Butcher" (this particularly stinks of MI6). The UK even refused Russia's request for a UN security council meeting about it.

Add in the UAF's behavior in Kursk and it's pretty clear which side is the one purposefully killing civilians.

free prisoner

Western academic and bourgeois intellectual spaces continue to mischaracterize Hezbollah, alongside powers and forces of Islamic Resistance in the region, such as Iran or Palestine, as representing the intellectual pauperization of Arab resistance, inferior to the archetypal Arab left. All too often, Leftist movements and interpretations of history hold a Manichean dichotomy between secularism and religion that, ironically, contributes to a more idealistic and dogmatically atheistic view on struggle. Western academia and its ideological compradors in the Arab world fail to acknowledge the Islamic Resistance on its own terms – doing so would expose contradictions in the Westernized epistemology of history and decolonization devoid of its full spiritual and dialectical dimensions. As Martyr Imad Mughnieh said, ‘The material element is a component that helps the axis, but the essence of this axis is the spirit’ (Tasnim News 2015).

Deficiencies in understanding the Islamic resistance – and its main state backer, Iran – are also due to an adversarial relationship between the US and Iran, the lack of translation and general access to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Islamic Revolutionary literature. More importantly, there is a widespread hostility against anti-imperialist scholarship in Western academia, where structuralist approaches are seldom offered to understand the Islamic Republic and the regional resistance factions, and the challenges imposed upon them by US imperialism, thus contributing to a ‘poverty of analysis’ (Farnia 2023).

it is disappointing. it's their choice whether they want to be rockstars or revolutionaries i suppose. easy for me to say but i wish they had doubled down and tested the courts.

This was easy to see coming. I think alot of Kneecap's international audience don't understand that their personas, songs and whole aesthetic are making fun of the post-troubles west Belfast hoods. People who were (like Kneecap) born in or after the 90s and are aping an exaggerated form of surface level republicanism that lingered beyond the ceasefire especially in Nationalist strongholds like West Belfast. When talking about the influence of the Troubles on the post-GFA generations I am often reminded of a quote from Marx; "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living". These hard lads who run around pretending they're in the IRA because they sell drugs and spray slogans on walls are really just using the aesthetics of resistance to mask the fact that they are actively harming their own communities.

I believe Kneecap's popularity abroad stems from this mask of resistance that they initially put on to mock destructive elements in their own community but that people missing the local context see as genuine and are using to LARP as revolutionaries. I don't personally know them so I wont make judgements but sometimes it seems like the lads in Kneecap have also fallen for this trap themselves.

At the end of the day they are really just like any other successful band, and they will prioritise their income above their empty slogans any day.

In the UK, sure, even if said laws are upheld arbitrarily. And as far as I know they didn't make any actual statements explicitly supporting Hezb or Hamas anyway. Plus, Kneecap are Irish!

I went to one rally for Palestine in Manchester and one of the speakers was unequivocally supporting armed resistance in Palestine - Not just in her speeches but her entire online presence. She even led chants of "Yemen Yemen make us proud - Turn another ship around!". She was raided by counter terror police and dragged in for questioning but in the end she was let go and she continues to go to events.

I know of another case where someone was being tried for flying a PKK flag at a Kurdish solidarity rally, but that also hasn't gone far yet.

Not that I dont think the UK govt would try to make an example of Kneecap, but there are much more politically exposed people than them getting into less trouble.

IMO the statement is more about protecting their income than anything - They're due to play at Glastonbury this year and their agents are probably threatening them to not jeopardize that gig.

If they were already targeted by the state then does this actually matter, does the English courts generally allow take backsies for "supporting terrorism"?

😔

They spent most of their statement condemning the genocide and highlighting it. While this isn't my favorite outcome, it makes sense given the risk.

Yeah, this is a media attack. They've been pretty much left alone since Coachella. Sounds like their agents were in panic mode.

How long can they keep these attacks for?