ذاریہ🇵🇸

Huge day for the Greens. Labour and the press will now do exactly what they did after the 2017 elections against Corbyn. The attacks will be ramped up, relentless, and vicious. We need message discipline and to not concede or apologise for anything.

Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was found dead after hours of searching under rubble. She was killed in an Israeli strike, after the Israeli army fired at ambulances trying to reach her, delaying her rescue. She is the fourth journalist killed by Israel while in the field since 2 March. She was a professional, kind and dedicated journalist, and always a pleasure to run into in the field.

Honored to be publishing this incredibly researched piece by @MujammaHaraket on @intifada: Debunking the lie that "Israel created Hamas" electronicintifada.net/content/debunk…

The inestimable Lara Sheehi will be in-conversation w/ @GhassanAbuSitt1, @Louis_Allday, and @RamiRmeileh at SOAS this week. The event will mark the publication of her new book. I really encourage you to attend if you're able. soas.ac.uk/about/event/bo…

People who call for an imaginary 'international military coalition' against Israel to be formed & simultaneously ignore (or far worse) Iran and the Axis of Resistance are absurd. Such a coalition already exists but many are too busy accepting imperialist lies about it to realise.

Some thoughts on the current moment Introduction US-Zionist forces are conducting an existential war to restore the economic and military foundations of imperialism. That is they are seeking to restore the monopoly over military force and capital that is central to the maintenance of the value draining imperialist world-system. Not only have they failed to achieve these strategic aims on the battlefield, but they have suffered in fact a series of damaging strategic reversals which have only heightened their existential crisis. It is this which drives their diplomatic fraud and intensification of the slaughter of the unarmed, as we have seen today in Beirut. But even this will not secure their strategic objectives, and will only lead to more damaging reversal for imperialism and zionism. Below, I work through: i) the strategic objectives of imperialism and zionism; ii) how they have not only failed, but suffered damaging reversals on the battlefield; iii) how this only intensifies the existential crisis of the US-Zionist led imperialist order. Here they return to their Dahiyeh Doctrine - the slaughter of the unarmed - in a desperate attempt to achieve what they could not one the battlefield. And iv) the irrefutable truth that Hormuz demonstrates regarding the underlying structural transformation that Iran and the axis have achieved and will maintain. I. Strategic Objectives, or What Brought on the War: The Existential Panic of the imperialist-zionist bloc The US-Zionist bloc has been desperately trying to disarm anti-imperialist forces across the region, but have failed in this objective everywhere - Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Iran. The Zionist project, and thus the broader US imperialist system, simply cannot sustain itself if it cannot achieve this objective. The escalation of war against Iran was motivated by this clear objective to disarm Iran, and fracture its internal unity, as this was understood as key to then being able to finally move to isolate and disarm the resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. II. Outcome of the battlefield: Strategic reversals This can be stated plainly and briefly: the ability of Iran to continue striking US assets and the entity for 40 days demonstrates the objective to disarm Iran failed. This failure is seen most profoundly in the fact that Iran in fact escalated the game to demonstrate that it is the sovereign power over Hormuz, and the US-Israeli bloc does not have the capabilities to deny this reality. This then has introduced a powerful economic weapon with which the "economic" leg of imperialism - the sanctions regime - has been brought to crisis. It is the imperialists, then, who have been suffering a form of disarmament - directly as they experience financial and military attrition, but also indirectly as their tactical blows do not translate to strategic gains. And this applies to the economic question as well, as they suffer, due to the Hormuz equation, a dimunition of the "force" of its economic weapon of sanctions. With regard to fracturing Iran, we have again witnessed a strategic reversal. Not only did Iranian society not fracture in the face of the assassinations and strikes on civilian infrastructure and life, but it rather only demonstrated greater cohesion and alignment with the Republic. The popular basis of sovereignty was renewed not diminished. And finally, on the question of the fronts, their inter-linkage only deepened. They were not isolated from one another. The entry of Hezbollah, while concerned primarily with changing the equation that has allowed Zionist forces to strike Lebanon over the past 15 months, also demonstrated a kinetic harmony with the Islamic Republic hitherto unseen. III. The Panic Deepens: A return to deception and Dahiyeh Historically, when the economic and military bases of Western imperialism have been challenged at this scale and cannot be contained via the battlefield, the imperialist power turns to diplomatic fraud (ie treaty making/breaking) and an intensification of a slaughter of the unarmed as a means to securing its objectives. Yesterday, the acceptance of Iran's 10 point basis amounted to an effective US-Zionist surrender. While Iran was aware that the deceptive forces of imperialism could break the treaty making process, it was also aware that it possessed a powerful weapon (Hormuz and the capabilities that underly it) with which compliance could be enforced over the long term. In an attemp to impose leverage over the "negotiations" that they could not do on the battlefield, the zionists returned to their Dahiyeh doctrine - a strategy to impose genocidal slaughter on the unarmed popular cradle of the resistance so that it might fracture internal unity and compel surrender by other means. The slaughter in Beirut has as its aim an intensification of the fracturing of Lebanese society, and a spreading of costs to all sectors, so that more forces would align with the comprador government and demand Hezbollah be disarmed and relations with Iran permanently severed. But here, again, we see zionism suffering a setback, a reversal in fact of its strategic aim. Reports that instead there is rising anger at the Nawaf Shalom government, and that popular forces in Iran demand a consolidation, not separation of the fronts. And, again, it is Zionism's constituencies of power holders that are increasingly turning against it, as seen in Spain's call for suspension of any trade deal with the entity. IV Hormuz is where the Truth is revealed The horrors inflicted on Beirut today will not go unanswered, and will only expedited and deepen the crisis for imperialism and zionism. It does nothing to change the new underlying structural equation in the region and the world-system - Iran's sovereign right over Hormuz, which is a sovereign control over the entry and exit of oil and capital into and out of the region. Here, see the highest reaches of anti-imperialism. The military basis of this sovereignright cannot be overturned, and will now join with the popular sovereign expression on the streets of Tehran tonight in imposing even greater costs on the entity. Rather than align with the dahiyeh doctrine strategic objectives of zionism in turning against the resistance, or suggesting an Iranian betrayal, the hour is at hand to intensify the cracks and divisions of the imperialist-zionist bloc. Honor the martyrs of Beirut by urgently renewing opposition to any sort of normalization with zionism wherever you are.

The US didn’t agree to a ceasefire but acquiesced to a new balance of power. By insisting on ending the war rather than settling for a temporary ceasefire, Iran moved beyond merely restoring deterrence, whether as denial or as punishment. It exercised deterrence as compellence, forcing the US to change its behaviour and to negotiate under Iranian terms of reference, with the US in an unfamiliar role as the subject of demands rather than their issuer. Iran went far beyond what ceasefires and classical deterrence typically achieve, which is simply a return to the status quo ante. Instead, the confrontation produced a new strategic reality whereby Iran was able to redraw the political map of the region in which Iran has emerged not just intact but as the most formidable counter-hegemonic force shaping the new regional order.

This should be applied to the entirety of the Western political, media, and intellectual classes. They have for decades operated on a racist premise, that the Islamic Republic was an irrational actor posing an existential threat to the world. When what it actually has posed is a threat to the genocidal basis of Western imperialism and zionism. This is the sin for which the West will never forgive those it holds beneath itself. If you accept Western supremacy, then you can be recognized as a good obedient culture and receive ngo funding, foreign direct investment, access to export markets. But the moment a challenge is made to the military and economic basis of imperialism, here those making such a challenge are racialized as irrational, authoritarian, as without legitimacy, outside the family of nations. See North Korea, a state which had 20 percent of its population murdered by the West, but whose assumed irrational character now unifies the entirety of the Western political spectrum. The Western political and media classes dutifully reproduce the narrative of the "regime" in Iran threatening the region, the world for 47 years, due to some apparent irrational theocratic hatred (the "Mullahs"). This is premised upon a forgetting - a forgetting of the 1948 Nakba against Palestinians, of the 1953 coup against Iranians to prevent them from controlling their national wealth. And this forgetting enables a racist re-presentation of the Islamic Revolution. A revolution that rationally speaks and directs force against imperialism and zionism, in real solidarity with the Palestinians, is recast as an irrational actor spreading violence in pursuit of theocratic hatred. It is this racist denial of Iranian sovereignty which has laid the ground for Trump to launch his genocidal threats so openly. It is beyond time for Western intellectuals who claim to advance universal values to reject this racist framing of the Islamic Republic, and turn their attention inwards and see how it is they who have constituted the existential threat to all that is good in this world.

"a whole civilization will die" and "less radicalized minds" in the same paragraph is the most American thing ever

Today's videos of Iranian villagers grabbing rifles to fire at US helicopters are a reminder that resistance is not an organisation that can be destroyed but a fundamental human disposition in the face of invasion and occupation, which transcends time and place. It was precisely this disposition that gave rise to the Islamic Revolution, which was at one and the same time a revolt against internal tyranny and a war of liberation against American imperial power in Iran, and it is the same disposition that produced Hizbullah in South Lebanon. This is why Hizbullah’s “Islamic Resistance”, with a capital R, should not be understood as a singular bounded political project, but as the most recent historical expression of resistance with a small r, of resistances in the plural, each the historically specific expression of a condition that recurs wherever occupation does. That this disposition is recognised in international law through the peremptory right of peoples to self-determination is therefore worth noting, not least because international law was constructed by the colonial powers whose occupations made resistance necessary in the first place. Yet mass resistance across the Global South forced its recognition as jus cogens, a norm extracted from below rather than granted from above. Seen in this light, the question of whether Hizbullah can be disarmed or destroyed misses the deeper point. Even in the most implausible scenario where Hizbullah were militarily eradicated what would remain would not be a pacified population but an occupied one, and occupied populations resist even when some or even most of the population choose neutrality or accommodation. Those who accommodate do not nullify the sovereign disposition of those who refuse; they merely miscalculate that submission offers survivability. But even in the unlikely scenario where survival could be guaranteed, resistance would still emerge, because occupation demands not only material submission but the relinquishment of dignity and the right to determine the conditions of one’s collective existence and future, which is the essence of sovereignty. The specific form, organisation, and ideology through which resistance expresses itself may change. In South Lebanon and Iran, however, that logic has taken a form particularly resistant to dismantlement, rooted not only in weapons but in the collective memory of communities shaped by occupation and in the Karbala paradigm that transforms martyrdom into a forward-looking act of sovereignty, neither of which can be proscribed or dismantled.

Now up in @proteanmag: honored to publish Mary Turfah (@maryturfah) in conversation with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah (@GhassanAbuSitt1) about Palestinian health sovereignty, the colonial hubris of Western "humanitarianism," and so much more. proteanmag.com/2026/04/02/hea…

Wanna read a good piece about this from the left as an anti-colonial critique? Here you go. “Israel is a political entity, not a people: a state that brutalizes civilians as Israel does today should not exist.” parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-r…

This is horrifying - possibly one of the worst massacres in recent years. A drug rehabilitation hospital? A criminal government and criminal military enacting the violence that was allowed and normalized in Gaza. Expect more of this by every government that wages war.

my response to Mayor Mamdani, the reporters calling me, etc.

burn this world

this is one of the most heartbreaking things i’ve read.

This kills me. It was just another day for him, going to school, seeing his friends, planning on seeing his parents when he came home later that day. All of that ended by the bombs of powers that wish to see his people slaughtered for reasons he may not even have comprehended.

When a house is set on fire, the entire neighbourhood feels the effects.

I’m losing my mind — they are just slaughtering people in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran like it’s nothing. It’s absolutely nothing to them to just slaughter our peoples with such ease while they justify it across every major news channel, every major institution of power and prominence.

Apocalyptic scenes from Tehran tonight. I’ve never seen something like this.