Bulletins and News Discussion from September 30th to October 6th, 2024 - Qassam, Qassem, Quagmire
Bulletins and News Discussion from September 30th to October 6th, 2024 - Qassam, Qassem, Quagmire
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.
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Every South African White politician from the Apartheid era looks like the most evil dude you can imagine
"Die groot krokodil" (the big crocodile) PW Botha, and "Pik" (short for "pikkewyn", means penguin)" Botha are probably the most egregious examples. Yes, they are two different people. And yes, Afrikaans surnames are pretty repetitive, lots of Botha's, Van De Merwe's, Van Wyk's, Du Toit's and Du Plessis' who are completely unrelated to each other.
Ronald Reagan organised a phone call between Republicans who were on the fence about supporting sanctions against apartheid, and Pik Botha, who was seen as a reformist moderate within the apartheid government, with the goal of getting these Republicans to be oppose putting sanctions on apartheid. Apparently Pik Botha was so racist that these Republicans ended up supporting sanctions against apartheid South Africa. The moderates and reformists of the apartheid regime were too racist for Reagan era Republicans. Think about that for a second...
The moderates and reformists of the apartheid regime were too racist for Reagan era Republicans. Think about that for a second...
Fucking hell. Democrats would support them now
"We have to support South African expansion and it's control over Namibia to prevent Cuban and Soviet proxies in Angola from taking over the region. South Africa has the right to defend itself against terrorist activity from the ANC internally, as well as defending it's territory in Namibia."
- Tim Waltz during the year 1984, probably
That’s honestly not too far off from how it was actually defended in America at the time
At least South Africa had been under an arms embargo for over 20 years back then, and US sanctions were only a few years away. Israel still gets billions of dollars from the US in arms deals, and US sanctions seem to be an eternity away.
Unsurprisingly, Israel was one of the only countries that didn't follow the arms embargo, and went through backdoors to help apartheid South Africa obtain nuclear weapons and modernise their Mirage lll fleet of fighter jets.
This implies that one day reactionaries will pretend that they were always on the Palestinian side and mainstream journalists will decide that mentioning their support for Zionism would simply be impolite.
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It's bewildered me how the US has gotten worse. I guess declining empire shit. But also I can't help but to think of AIPAC's Blitzkrieg to prevent even the slightest criticism of Israel, Evangelical nuts in the government, and that Joe Biden was literally one of the most pro Israel senators in the 80's.
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Lots of them moved to Israel and “converted to Judaism” after the fall of Apartheid
Are there numbers on that, I’m curious if it’s more than a few
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Jews_in_Israel
11,381 in 2020. They make up the wealthiest suburb in all of Israel, built in the style “they were familiar with” around a country club with pools.
As of 2020 would be more accurate wording. And 914 000 people have left South Africa between 2000 and 2020. So the amount of people that choose to emigrate to Israel is a very small fraction of the total amount of people leaving the country, around 1.25%, probably lower because of the extensive co-operation between apartheid South Africa and Israel in the past, so some probably moved to Israel before 2000. Though I have met an Afrikaner Zionist before, and they were as disgusting as you would expect. I hope the government prosecutes any of these people if they dare to return to South Africa.
The most popular destinations for South Africans leaving the country are other settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand along with the USA, the original colonist countries like Great Britain and The Netherlands, and other sub-imperialist countries like the UAE. In fact, there are over 114 000 South Africans living in the UAE. The more socially liberal people that are prepared to deal with the cold tend to immigrate to the Nordic countries, but the weather and culture is usually too big an obstacle for most.
And yes the "every house with a pool, and a big backyard, in a fancy boomed off suburb or security estate, with a live in
servant, sorry uhh amaid, sorry again the correct term nowadays is domestic worker, along with a gardener", is the lifestyle most upper class South Africans are used to. It's why so many of them continue to live in South Africa even when we didn't have electricity for 8-12 hours a day. They know that they will never be able to obtain such a lifestyle anywhere else with their current skillset. Only the super rich live like that in the first world. No one in the Professional Managerial Class in Europe or the USA can afford to live like that. South Africa is one of the only countries unequal enough to make that a reality.I fucking thought this was a meme, how is it not Russians
remember that brief period from 1983 to 2023 when American liberals pretended to be against racism?
They still pretend they are against racism, that's why they're doing all the "if Trump wins he will round up every minority!" bullshit now. It just doesn't stop them from pretending that racism is not racism whenever that is opportune to them.
Democrats are a comparable level of evil to republicans but unlike republicans who embrace being horrible pig people and have an entire subculture built on thinking that being an asshole is cool, democrats wants to pretend they're good, progressive, reasonable people while they're doing evil shit.
Watch DW reporting on Britain giving up some african island, they are straight up saying it is a bad move because something something China.