For in the martyrs, generations find life,
And in the captives, freedom and redemption.
And the red freedom has a door,
Struck by every bloodied hand.

-The Tragedy of Damascus, Ahmed Shawqi, 1926

October 7th, 2023 was a great day, a historic day. Tufan Al-Aqsa was the greatest anti-imperial revolt of our lifetimes, and the decisive one (I pray). On that day, I remember hearing of incredibly brave men breaking out of the prison they made of Gaza and thinking wow, finally. After centuries of oppression, an escape. As the poem Yahya al-Sinwar oft recited went,

The cry of every free soul echoed from the heart,
A cry of defiance, proud and untamed.
May God bless their news, which reached
The ear of the sovereign, shaking his resolve.

It is detailed to the world as a message,
And summarized to the horizons like a flash of lightning.
The horror of the events nearly made it seem
Like a myth, yet it is the truth.

At that point, I didn't really know who Hamas was but I quickly read up and they're great. I thought 'Israel' was there to stay, and they're not, they were defeated that very day. Tufan Al-Aqsa changed the world, including the simulation inside my brain. Nothing will be the same, and that's a good thing. God knows we needed a change.

As the martyr Khamenei the Elder said, a few weeks afterwards, "The blow that has been inflicted on the usurping regime in #AlAqsaFlood was a decisive blow. It is irreparable. As time passes, it becomes even more apparent that it is irreparable." And, indeed, in the three years since, much has been revealed. The weakness of 'Israel', weaker than a spider's web. And also their viciousness, taking out their rage on civilians and especially children. The existence of a White Empire, as all wagons circled to slaughter the natives yet again. But this time, something was different.

How Censorship Shows The Truth

Think about what you have seen and what you have not seen and you can see the White Empire that hides in the background, like the white of this page. Yet if you read their censorship, you can see them twisting from a mortal wound, in a violent yet impotent rage. Their first task was to demonize the armed resistance, with the usual lies about raping White women to raise a lynch mob. And next, of course, the mass lynching, to terrorize the population into submission. And you can see this by their own admission and omission.

Admission

What has not been censored is the horror. The Whites bombed hospitals, massacred camps, starved and sickened everyone, and did it all in public. They want us to see, films like NAZA are not them confessing, they're bragging. This is terrorism, the point of which is to terrify people into submission. Terrorism is something the White Empire has perfected and copyrighted to replicate endlessly, and the most vile perpetrators are their contractors. And, of course, they're masters of the art themselves. The Whites are not ashamed by you seeing them kill, on the contrary, it thrills them. Like the fact that White elites are pedophiles, they want you to know, and want you to feel helpless to do anything about it. This learned helplessness is what they're trying to teach, and what hapless liberals preach. As the poet Shawqi warned then,

When those who seek justice arrive,
They say, “A group has gone out and caused a rift.”

And so they demonize the resistance, soft 'liberal' colonizers (but weren't colonizers always liberals?) trying to divide what they cannot conquer, which the poet also warned against. He said,

O people of Syria, cast aside your hopes,
Throw away the dreams you once held.
For it is a trick of politics to deceive you,
With titles of leadership that are but chains.

How many times have you been misled by the helpless,
Just as the neck of the crucified man bends?
The openings of power emerge, then fade,
And no lasting glory comes to the divisive.

So they broadcast the horror and censor the honor and use the 'two sides' of their politics to both kill you and march in your funeral. But the one thing they cannot have you see is the brave men marching against them. Because that would be their own funeral.

Omission

So look at what has been censored, what is illegal to say inside the White Empire and banned (like me) on almost all of its platforms. That will tell you what actual threatens them, and it isn't statements from White people who also condemn Hamas. What has been censored is the armed resistance, and those who commend them.

What they fear and what they hide is the great heroism of men breaking out of a concentration camp, crushing the military bases occupying them, and taking prisoners of war to exchange for the thousands the Empire holds in rape and torture dungeouns. But what they could not hide was the sustained years of heroism of men in the field, taking down tanks with their hands while the Empire killed babies in incubators and bombed hospitals. It is this resistance that the Empire calls terrorism because they are scared of it. But we are years past the day when, as the martyr Nasrallah said, the will of the people becomes apparent to all, and when resistance becomes a clarion call. They cannot hold back the flood that is upon us now.

See what they show and what they censor, what they want you to know and what they want you to forget. They want you to know that they can kill children, torture pediatricians to death, bomb hospitals and schools, and target all civilians. They want you to see all of this, in fact, they advertise it. But they don't want you to know that you can resist this, that people in the most desperate states can, will, and did. That is why you can support the dead bodies of Palestinians but not the arms defending them. They want you to think resistance is futile, and it's not, resistance is fertile and it grows in Palestinian soil, as much at the colonizers ravage it. And, like life itself, this rebellious spirit spreads.

The rebellion that started in Palestine has ignited a regional war as al-Sinwar promised. It has engulfed the Greater Israel that is the Gulf States, and left them trembling and half-dead. It has destroyed or degraded every imperial base in the region and, from land, the Americans have fled. As the IRGC (of Iran) said on this anniversary, "This operation not only shattered the myth of the Zionist army's invincibility forever, but transformed the Resistance Front across the region into an undeniable strategic reality. From Gaza to Lebanon, from Yemen to Iraq and Syria, and from Islamic Iran to the heart of the occupied territories, all stood in a single, coordinated formation, challenging the Zionist enemy and its American and regional supporters."

In lieu of the mouthful that is "the Zionist enemy and its American and regional supporters" I offer the epithet (and epitaph) White Empire instead. We have lived, or more often died, under a White Empire for over 500 years now. That's why the poem of Shawqi decrying France is still relevant, it's the same phenomenon. It's not just 'Israel', it's not even America, it's all of these guys. The Jews who became Nazis, fervently, the Americans who've been genociding the region since 2001, certainly, but also the British who do the overflight and the Europeans, like the Spanish, who pretend like they're the good guys while still participating.

Colonizers stay colonizing and they keep lying. As the poet said, "For colonizers, though they may soften, Have hearts as hard as stone, devoid of mercy." There is no reasoning with these people, they are not even people, just stand-ins for corporations, but there is defeating them. Samuel Huntington said the White Empire conquered the world only through its superior violence, and that's how it is liberated. As Frantz Fanon said, "In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives." That is the lesson written in the blood of Palestinians, that is the resounding mark they have left on the red door of freedom, and the Resistance hammers on behind them, and any heart that beats joins them.

This is what October 7th marks. The greatest rebellion against White Empire since the Haitian Revolution in 1791, and the greatest mental liberation since Marx. October 7th was when people locked inside a concentration camp broke out and broke the Empire in half. It has exposed that liberals, too, are useless, because they are in solidarity with Palestinian corpses but not their rockets. When they ask, accusingly, do you condemn Hamas? that's actually a useful water mark. Are you with the rising flood, or are you still trying to bail the Empire out?

I could compare October 7th to the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion and what we've seen since to the Holocaust, but why? World War II has been relentlessly propagandized to enable the endless war crimes that followed (World War Too). And this is something different, something entirely new, wherein history will be rewritten in a different hue. The Al-Aqsa Flood marks the turning point of World War III, the war against the Muslim world the Empire has been waging since 2001 at least, with plenty genocides and invasions of people at least as important as Czechoslovakians. While 9/11 lives on in infamy (Al-Qaeda was and is the Empire's contractor), 7/10 lives in glory (Hamas is ours, and its own actor). We are witness to Palestinians rewriting history in their own words, their own deeds, and the only ink that doesn't run. Their own blood.

It is just as the Whites speak about their own Revolutions, which they jealously trademark just like their World Wars. As the poet said,

France knows the blood of the revolutionaries,
And understands it is light and truth.
It flowed through your land, bringing life,
Like the waters of the sky, it nourished you.
A country where its youth died for it to live,
And they fell so their people could survive.
And the peoples were liberated by their swords,
So how could they be enslaved by their own hands?

Since what they oppositely call the War on Terror, the White Empire has terrorized the entire region and enslaved it via corrupt compradors, but the great rebellion against them all has begun. If more than White lives count, then this is truly World War III and the Al-Aqsa Flood marks its turning point, when we turn them out. This is our Stalingrad, a razed city that nonetheless (forgive me, oh martyrs) marks the turning point, when the White armies got trounced and turned around.

And just look at them now. Beyond the terrorism, and all the martyrdoms, and the ravaging of land and human hearts, what have they won? 'Israel' itself was defeated on October 7th and survived only with the full force of the Empire supporting them. Now the Empire itself has been pushed out of their Persian Gulf bases, their vassal states are being humiliated, and when they leave – and they will leave, they always leave – Jerusalem will only be a stone's throw away, as the martyr Nasrallah said. That is the meaning of Tufan Al-Aqsa. It ends in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. That may seem a long way away, but think of where we were before October 7th, and what you thought, if you thought about it at all. As the poet said, and as the martyr commander did,

For in the martyrs, generations find life,
And in the captives, freedom and redemption.
And the red freedom has a door,
Struck by every bloodied hand.

So may it be, on this strange and mournful day, as the martyr commander Yahya Al-Sinwar said in his last public prayer,