Derek "numbers" Marknofski

In 1918, King Hussein of the Arabs—one of the great heroes of Arab history, the leader of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans along with the British—wrote an op-ed in the Al Qibla newspaper. He says that if the Arabs want the British and the rest of the world to care about their claim to their ancestral land, which they want back now that the Ottomans are gone, then they cannot deny the Zionists’ claim to their ancestral land in the Land of Israel. This isn't me. This is the leader of all the Arabs, King Hussein himself. And he says at the end of the op-ed, and I quote, "The Jews are the original sons of that land." If you don't care about King Hussein, nine months later, on December the 29th of 1918, King Hussein's son, Prince Faisal, who becomes King of Iraq, the first King of Iraq, has a banquet in his honor thrown by a bunch of British dignitaries, along with Lord Rothschild. And he stands up and gives a toast, and at the end of the toast he turns to Lord Rothschild and he says, "We Arabs cannot in good conscience deny the ancestral home of the Jewish people." And he turns to Lord Rothschild and he says, "To my Zionist friends, I say to you, welcome home."

The Five Steps of Leftist Radicalization: First, safe spaces. The 2010-2015 era. - People needed to be "protected" from "harmful" ideas. Second, cancel culture. The 2016-2020 era. - Social status removed from those with "harmful" ideas. Third, censorship. The 2021-2023 era. - Those with "harmful" ideas no longer allowed to speak. Fourth, structural exile. 2023-2025 era. - Your credential, career, or license dependent on ideological alignment. (Important to note human psyche equates exile with death). Fifth, direct violence normalized. 2025 and onwards. - Post Kirk assassination, the Leftist psyche fully accepts lethal violence against political opponents. And if this movement continues to radicalize, the next stage is predictable: collective violence—group against group.

Happy St. Paddy’s Day, ya gobshite antisemites in Ireland (and your diaspora cheerleaders)! 🍀🖕 While you’re out there necking green beer and pretending the Rothschilds are some global cabal sucking the life out of the world, let’s take a cheeky trip down memory lane to the 1840s when your ancestors were actually dying by the million in the Potato Famine. Baron Lionel de Rothschild—yeah, that Jewish banker you love to meme about—didn’t just write a pity cheque. The man was the absolute GOAT of famine relief: - He personally convened the very first meetings of the British Relief Association in his own London home in January 1847. - His firm kicked it off with a massive £1,000 donation (when Queen Victoria only coughed up £2,000). - Under his direct leadership, the BRA raised a staggering £600,000+ (tens of millions in today’s money) from 15,000+ donors worldwide — the single largest private relief effort Ireland ever saw. - He sat on the sub-committee that bought, shipped, and distributed food across the island, opened depots everywhere, and even sent multiple cargoes of wheat at his own personal expense. - The group fed hundreds of thousands, ran schools, and kept bodies out of mass graves when the British government was busy exporting food and twiddling its thumbs. More than the Sultan of Turkey, more than the Pope, more than the Choctaw Indians (who get all the cute memes), more than anyone — it was a Jew who actually saved your great-great-grannies’ arses. So next time you’re scrolling antisemitic conspiracy garbage or blaming “the Jews” for everything, raise a glass to the one who fed your starving family when nobody else gave a fuck. Sláinte, ya ungrateful pricks. Now go touch some grass… or better yet, touch a history book. Your friendly neighbourhood Jew who’s still here, still thriving, and still not running the world (but happy to remind you who kept yours spinning). 🖕🍀

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." - Father Dennis Edward O’Brien, Sergeant, USMC

Islam has been so aggressively racialized in Western discourse that many people are no longer capable of looking at it as a religion, ideology, or governing system. Instead, it is treated as a kind of ethnic inheritance—something biologically fused to the people associated with it. This distortion becomes especially obvious in the case of Iran. Iranian civilization did not begin with Islam, and Iranian identity is not reducible to any religion. Yet outsiders routinely speak as though “Iranian” and “Muslim” were naturally synonymous, as if a civilization thousands of years old can simply be collapsed into the religion of foreign people who conquered it after a single battle in 636. That mistake has real consequences. Once Islam is racialized, criticism of Islam is misread as hatred of a people rather than criticism of a doctrine. Resistance to Islamist rule is then treated as identity confusion. Iranian rejection of the Islamic Republic becomes framed as alienation from “their own culture,” when in reality the opposite is often true: the rejection is rooted in the desire to recover what Islamist rule has spent decades degrading, erasing, or subordinating. This is the point many people refuse to confront. Islam—especially in its politicized and totalizing forms—has long existed in tension with Iranian civilizational identity. It imposed itself upon an older language, older memory, and older cultural instincts, and demanded submission not only in matters of worship but in law, dress, speech, art, and the structure of public life. The Islamic Republic sharpened this tension by weaponizing Islam as an instrument of state power—turning it into the vocabulary of humiliation, the architecture of censorship, and the justification for violence. For that reason, it should not surprise anyone that many Iranians are willing to risk their lives resisting Islamist rule. That willingness reflects clarity. People will fight the thing they know is suffocating their nation. They will resist the ideology that has turned beauty into guilt, joy into sin, dissent into heresy, and national life into a hostage chamber. The Western inability to process this stems from deeply flawed intellectual categories. Christianity is treated as theology, liberalism as ideology, nationalism as doctrine, and Marxism as a political project—all open to criticism and blame. But Islam, within this framework, is treated as identity. Once that happens, criticism becomes taboo and the people living under Islamist regimes become analytically invisible. Their resistance cannot be understood because the framework itself is designed to shield the ideology from scrutiny. That is why Iranian people so often break Western narratives. Their experience exposes the central error: Islam is not an ethnicity and it is not the inescapable essence of every society it has ruled. It can be rejected, criticized, and resisted—especially when fused to state power. For many Iranians, Islam is not experienced as sentimental heritage but as conquest extended through law, punishment, and forced piety. It is remembered not as mere faith, but as a structure that has repeatedly demanded the shrinking of Iran into something narrower, sadder, uglier, and more obedient. That is why so many efforts to romanticize Islam as somehow organically identical with Iranian identity ring false, even obscene. They ask a civilization to treat the ideology that has governed and constrained it as the essence of its soul. A serious analysis of Iran requires abandoning these fraudulent categories. Islam must be treated as what it is: a religion, a set of doctrines, and, in many contexts, a political program with concrete consequences for law, liberty, culture, and power. Once that happens, Iranian resistance becomes perfectly intelligible. The Western discourse that claims to value freedom, dissent, and decolonial analysis, yet suddenly goes blind when the object of critique is Islam.

🚨🇮🇷🇦🇪 Fujairah suspending oil-loading operations. Iran warned. Then struck. Now the world's 3rd-largest oil storage hub and the last meaningful bypass route around the Strait of Hormuz is offline. Both doors are closed now. Reuters