Every Condemnation Is A Reading Recommendation
I have learned three things about America since leaving America. The first is that I didn't leave America, it's a big White Empire and I'm still in it! The second is that every accusation is a confession. For every finger pointing out, a billion middle fingers point right back at America. The third is to take every condemnation as a reading recommendation. America's enemies list makes for an excellent reading list. That's what we'll discuss here. The only thing that recommends Empire is its book recommendations.
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Hamas
Take Hamas, for example. Western liberals secularly cross themselves before saying they support Palestine, by disavowing Hamas. These are useless people, who preserve the status quo (which is genocide, but feeling bad about it, later). As Saffouri01 said, “whoever is in solidarity with our corpses but not our rockets, is a hypocrite and not one of us.” Hamas is just a moderate political party within Palestine which has assembled a Palestinian military, which they of all people deserve. While 'Israel' has been building facts on the ground re: settlements Hamas has been building facts underground re: resistance. More power to them. I support Hamas and the Al Aqsa Flood was righteous. Allahu Akbar.
I say Hamas is moderate because I've read about them (re: Paolo Caridi) and read their statements on an almost daily basis. This information is widely available, but Empire counts on most people hearing 'Hamas' and immediately salivating for war. Hamas is just another Arabic word that they free-associate with ISIS or Al-Qaeda or all the other Pavlovian bells they have rung in the past, when dinner's on for the military-industrial multiplex. However, if you read a tiny bit, every Arabic word is not evil (algebra?) and Islam is a perfectly valid philosophy of governing, especially for the (checks map) Muslim world. The bigger question is what Empire is doing anywhere at all, and why its village idiots must be unleashed upon the world, confidently condemning things they have no idea about.
For a good secondary source on Hamas, I recommend (as was recommended to me) Paolo Caridi's Hamas: From Resistance to Government. As she wrote in 2009 (with many edits since):
Hamas is part of the Palestinian social fabric, and one that takes a less radically fundamentalist approach to religion and politics, compared to the Taliban. On the contrary, most of the Hamas’s leadership and cadres perceive themselves as moderates, centrists, or moderate conservatives. In post–World War II Western European historical and provocative terms, they can be thought of as an Islamic version of the Christian Democrats.
For a good primary source, you can read the Hamas charter for yourself (or my commentary), it says:
16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
17. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.
Tell me what's radical or wrong here. Imperial talking heads keep talking shit, saying 'read the Hamas charter!', confident that few people will actually do it.
On a daily basis, you can follow trap god Abu Obeida (Al-Qassam military wing spokesman) on Telegram, but he's busy writing history and doesn't update much. You can follow the Hamas political wing via the Resistance News Network which publishes their statements regularly. Here's one statement at random:
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful
The announcement today of the martyrdom of two of our people kidnapped from Gaza, in the fascist occupation detention camps under brutal torture, one of whom was Dr. Adnan Al-Barsh, the head of the Orthopedic Department at Al-Shifa Hospital, who was abducted by the "israeli" forces while performing his duty at Al-Awda Hospital in the north of the Strip, is a confirmation of the horrific war crimes that continue against our people, including detained sons whom the criminal occupation forces kidnapped from schools and hospitals to detention centers devoid of the most basic human rights, among them doctors whose only crime was fulfilling their humanitarian duty towards their people's wounded and sick.
These ongoing crimes against the thousands of our kidnapped people demand immediate action from the international community to criminalize this Nazi behavior, condemn it, and force the occupation to reveal their fate, return them to their families, and unleash the hand of international justice to hold accountable the leaders of the terrorist entity, whose crimes have exceeded all limits, with no regard for international laws, treaties, or human norms.
Islamic Resistance Movement - Hamas
Thursday: 23 Shawwal 1445 AH
Corresponding: May 2, 2024
Contrast this sense with the blithering nonsense coming out of White Empire. They're lying and not even trying. After seven months of massacres, the imperial rebuttal is still 'October 7th'. It's seven months and at least 50,000 lost souls short. The western media is even worse than the 'Israeli' media. They broadcast their concentration camps on public TV and openly call for genocide on talk shows, they're not shy about it. The imperial media, however, still pretends like they're the good guys while doing so much obvious evil.
Privatized propaganda outlets like the NYTimes and Fox alike are full of outright lies like beheaded babies and the rape of white women (the traditional dog whistle for a good old-fashioned lynching). Hamas gave a detailed statement after October 7th and the published a document called Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. You obviously don't have to agree with it but read it before condemning it. Hamas notably calls for an (actually) international investigation, unlike 'Israel' which has killed more UN workers and international aid workers than in anyone else, ever.
If you treat the blanket (and frankly blank) imperial condemnations of Hamas as reading recommendations, you might actually learn something. As Malcolm X said, “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Ain't it the truth.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah is less mentioned than Hamas, it's just some inchoate bad that people in the imperial core are supposed to fear because it has the word 'Allah' in it. This of course baffles me because, if you're Christian or even Jewish, it's the same god. The Quran talks more about the prophets Moses and Jesus than the prophet Mohammed. Hezbollah, the party of God, is only mentioned in passing as just generic Muslim baddies, with no rhyme or reason to them. If you listen to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's contemporaneous speeches, however, he's imminently reasonable.
Nasrallah's speeches are quite an event in the Muslim world. I honestly listened to them because I was honestly hoping for a declaration of war on 'Israel' as it began its genocide, but what I got was actually much more subtle analysis.
Yet on our Lebanese front, some claim that we are about to engage in the war. I am telling you we have been engaged in this battle since October 8th. The Islamic resistance in Lebanon started operations the very next day after Al-Aqsa [Flood]... Those who claim that Hezbollah should engage swiftly in an all-out war with the enemy may see what's taken place on the border as minimal, but if we look at what's taken place on our border objectively, we will find it sizable. Yet, I assure you, this will not be the end. This will not be sufficient.
As the horizon is looming to our fellow Palestinian people and resistance fighters, I say, since the creation of the resistance fighter following the creation of the Israeli Zionist regime, we have been fighting a war of fortitude. We haven't reached a knock-out victory. We still need time to be more realistic. We are winning victory by points, not a knock-out victory. This is what happened in 2002 and 2006 in Lebanon, and this is what happened with the Gazans, and similarly resistance fighters in the West Bank, Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortitude; patience; bravery; this is what we have and this is our strength. This is what the enemy lacks. This is what the enemy wants.
This sort of analysis is actually indigestible by the imperial press because it has so much historical fiber to it. In the news everything must be 'new'. Events must be a series of effects without causes, all to justify more meddling in the Middle East (ie, more causes), which creates more news. It's a vicious news cycle. In contrast, Nasrallah has actually been resisting my entire lifetime (I'm 41), after getting a deep education from the lifetime works of scholars, not to mention the word of Allah, delivered in clear Arabic nearly 1,500 years ago. Nasrallah is, fundamentally, a nerd who has been called to war by circumstance. As Nasrallah has said, “In spite of my involvement in politics, I was very eager to continue my education, and I still feel that way (…). I wish someone else were Secretary-General in my place, so that I could fulfill this personal desire.”
He is one of the leading thinkers of the ummah by reputation, but in the White Empire he has just a bad reputation. Following our rule of thumb, however, I took this as a reading recommendation. I dug up a critical edition of his speeches and interviews from 1986-2006, edited and published within the White Empire itself. Like the Hamas Charter, they can reliably count on people on not reading (ignorance is bliss, especially for arms executives). The White Empire practices censorship by desensitization, simply repeating Muslim sounds over and over again until they numb the brain, like chanting a mantra of intellectual mediocrity.
There is some fire-breathing stuff in Nasrallah's speech, I won't lie. But consider the crucible, the decades long occupation of this land which has turned scholars into soldiers. Here's some brimstone, for your reference, from a speech on May 8, 1998:
Despite all these Jewish ambitions, we in this nation say that the dreams of the Israelis have come to an end. The blood that will not be defeated by the sword that has been unleashed in southern Lebanon, western Bekaa and Palestine—today, this blood is boiling in the veins of Arabs and Muslims. The dreams of the Israelis are over. We promise and warn them that their dreams are over, and that the time has come for them to wake from their dreams and face reality, a reality in which people refuse to live in humiliation, and view life with the Zionist Jews as nonsense; a reality in which every man, young and old, loves to blow himself up to tear apart the bodies of the invading, occupying Jews.
Here he's talking about 'Jews' with all the rhetorical connotations that has to a western audience. It's important to remember that antisemitism is a western phenomenon and term. Antisemitism is a unique category of racism which is somehow special because it affects white people. As Hamas said in their charter above: “Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”
The Europeans literally used 'Israel' to deport the Jews it did not want, collaborating with Zionists who also collaborated with the Nazis. The whole thing is an elaborate ruse and you can forgive the Arab world for a few decades of confusion. As the recent martyr poet Refaat Al-Areer said, “I never met a Jew who didn’t want to harm, shoot at, beat, or prevent me from traveling until I was 36 years of age.”
The fear of antisemitism—ginned up by the imperial media—is allayed if you simply read further. Nasrallah is using 'Jews' the same way that I use 'Americans'. This is accurate enough, but immediately triggers western audiences who have been conditioned by years of Holocaust© propaganda. The Holocaust was of course real, but it's really cynical that the White Empire has claimed reproduction rights, licensed to 'Israel'. You can see that Nasrallah's use of 'Jews' is rhetorical and not vituperative because of another interview he gave in March of 1998, ie two months before the fire and brimstone. Therein he said:
HN: Most assuredly our attitude towards Israel is not an attitude towards Jews or Judaism. Since the West doesn’t want to understand that Hezbollah is anything other than an exact copy of Iran, let us consider Iran’s attitude towards the Jews. They enjoy there all their political, social, and economic rights, for they are citizens, and have representatives in the legislative authority. Thus our war is not against Judaism or Jews but against Zionism, which created its racial state in Israel.
Let us [be clear] that Islamic intellectualism and religion have throughout Islamic history never laid the foundation for a hostile attitude against Judaism and Jews. The war between ourselves and Israel is a war against Zionism and its plans, and not against Judaism as a religion or against those who believe in that religion.
This is clear, isn't it? Indeed, Nasrallah is now less radical than people in the Empire itself, who claim that 'Israel' controls America. An antisemitic (but understandable) misunderstanding of power relations, which enables powerful Europeans to scapegoat Jews as they historically do. As Nasrallah says today (April 2024):
According to some theories, Israel controls America. No sir, it is America that controls Israel. The story about the Jewish and Zionist lobby is - forgive me for saying this - a joke invented by the Arabs so that they do not have to fight Israel. They do this so that they can go to America, deposit their money there, and establish relations with America, under the pretext that they are establishing an Arab lobby in order to compete with the Jewish lobby. After 75 years, we can see what came out of the Arab lobby. The Arab money is piling up in the American coffers, but that's it.
The idea that Jews control America is a conspiracy theory which is quite convenient to America's actual rulers. Property and property holders. The truth that Nasrallah recognizes is that America controls 'Israel'. He that pays the piper calls the tune. White Empire put a Jewish state in the Middle East to divide and conquer it, and cynically used antisemitism to cow criticism. They turned their own sin into somebody else's punishment. Truly diabolical.
The real conspiracy is that White Empire unleashed a beaten and traumatized dog to terrify Muslims, not that the dog bites people. The news reports 'dog bites man' but the real story is 'man bites dog.' Jews are still being used and abused by the White Empire. They've made their children into conscripts in 'Israel', and made all the terrible lies Europeans told about Jews (they kill babies, they destabilize nations) come true. This is why Nasrallah correctly berates Zionists now, because the Jews themselves have been divided and conquered, and made Empire's fall guys in the oil wars (the Carbon Crusades, if you will).
Once you're able to take Nasrallah as a serious and non-sociopathic source, you can learn a lot. He's a very learned man, with a lot of bitter experience. His references go back to when Moshe wore short pants. He's an astute commentator on geopolitics and a skilled commander of troops. Hezbollah has steadily defanged 'Israel's' Iron Dome in the north and largely decolonized the region. And they have a long-term view, his speeches from the 1980s and 1990s still ring true. But you can only really get his story if you step out of the news.
ISIS
OK, now these guys actually suck. I used to read every issue of Dabiq magazine (ISIS's propaganda magazine) for sheer shock and horror. The philosophy of ISIS is as paper thin as a magazine. They're cardboard jihadis, doing all the depraved shit the Americans say jihadis do. They both attack Empire's enemies and discredit jihad in general. Jihad means struggle against oppression and ISIS just attacks the resistance.
If you read Dabiq, its successor Rumiyah (meaning Rome), or Voice Of Khurusan (don't read them, genuinely horrible) you notice something peculiar. They're always attacking other Muslims (Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan) and promoting violence in random places (the Balkans, France) and never attacking the actual enemy in the US and 'Israel'. And these facts are reflected on the ground. ISIS blew up General Soleimani's procession in Iran, get funded by America to fight Syria, and get airlifted to 'Israeli' hospitals when things go sour.
These caricatures of jihadis may sincerely believe what they believe, but they're, in practice, just the heel on the occupying boot. They always attack Empire's enemies while featuring prominently in imperial propaganda as archetypical brutes. They are what's in wrestling terms called a heel. Just listen to this dumb shit from ISKP (the ISIS Afghanistan spin-off). Discussing the war of liberation in Palestine, they say “it will all be the same whether Gaza and the West Bank are ruled by America's allies or Iran's allies.” It really fucking isn't.
ISIS is just like western liberals. They piously condemn everyone and cancel themselves out. Both preserve the status quo above all. Hence America funds ISIS and 'Israel' evacuates them to 'Israeli' hospitals. Meanwhile the actual jihadis in Hamas and Iran fight ISIS. This is why ISIS blew up General Soleimani's remembrance march and attacks Syria, Iran and the actual Axis of Resistance. ISIS doesn't really belong on America's enemy's list (hence our reading list). They're Empire's ally. I read ISIS the same way I read Bin Laden. With interest, but suspiciously. Reading ISIS is like reading a CIA fever dream of what they imagine jihad to be. As the great martyr fighter Admiral Ackbar said, “it's a trap!”
Reading Recommendations
These are just three examples, and I encourage you to read more. If the word 'jihad', for example, gives you the willies, read the Quran to see what it's actually about. Jihad is a noble struggle, primarily against yourself in discipline, and only then against those who spread corruption in the land. And Islamic governance is just one type of self-government that the White Empire tries to discredit. Communism, socialism, and anarchism are also tarred with a thin brush, endlessly repeated as epithets but never seriously discussed in all the hours of coverage. You can find plenty of reading on these subjects from within Empire's ivory castles, however.
The White Empire relies not on censoring or burning documents but burying them in academia, undistributed podcasts and blogs (holla). There's simply too much information to disappear it, but you can simply 'flood the zone with shit,' as Trump adviser Steve Bannon said. It doesn't matter if the Library of Congress contains the Voice Of Hezbollah and Memri.TV archives Hamas speeches. Who the fuck is going to hear it? It's quite brilliant really. Every condemnation is actually a reading recommendation but it works because nobody reads anything.
Now note that I'm not saying 'read a fucking book'. Some of my cousins barely read and they're good kids. I am saying STFU up if you haven't. Didn't your mother tell you, “If you can't say something nice about someone, shut the fuck up”? There's a high bar of evidence for speaking ill of someone, and even higher for genociding entire populations. The imperial media, however, just expects people to hear Arabic and bay for blood. One should not be this sort of tortured, traumatized dog, biting people because that's been beaten into you. As Sinhalese would say, pauw, sin. One should aspire to be a good dog. To be loyal and friendly. And this is possible. Humans can unlearn white supremacy and even human supremacy (just different spots on the same continuum). It just requires empathy.
Also note that I do not mean empathy as in mindless loving-kindness towards everyone. I mean empathy as in understanding someone else's perspective. If you read into it, the Middle East is not naturally violent, it's just been violently colonized. The imperial media discusses the Middle East endlessly, but never questions what they're doing there in the first place. 95% of problems in the region would be solved if other regions fucked off from their meddling (looking at you 'western' world, what I call White Empire collectively).
Empathy (as in putting yourself in someone else's shoes) means understanding the ancient law of 'eye for an eye,' which is why violence begets violence. It also means understanding the rule of 'love your neighbor as yourself,' which is why the genocidal, apartheid state of 'Israel' has to be demolished, for Jews, Christians, Muslims, commies, etc to actually live in peace, and not in a region divided piecemeal by oil thieves.
I'm not saying to need to agree with Empire's enemies, but you need to respect them, especially if you consider them enemies at all. As Mazer Rackham said in Ender's Game, “There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do.” I would add that often (as in Ender's Game, spoiler alert) the enemy is not your enemy. In reading you can find many 'friends in history', which is a blessing. One redeeming thing about White Empire is that its enemy's list is such a great reading list. Every condemnation is a reading recommendation.