The radical Left’s merger with Islamist despotism
fathomjournal.org/the-radical-... #Islamism #authoritarianLeft #regressiveLeft

The Revolutionists is of immense cultural relevance today, during what looks ominously like the dawn of a new age of left-wing militancy and small-cell terrorism. The lessons a careful reader should glean from the earlier decade's macabre exposition of hubris and self-infatuation will be lost on those who share a comparable fanaticism and ego-centricity. The rest of us have no excuse.

The revolt of the revolting:
“The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s”, by the British author and journalist Jason Burke, tells Carlos’s story and those of many others like him. www.commentary.org/articles/noa... #authoritarianLeft #terrorism #BookReview

Venezuela's Interim President Delcy Rodriguez has entrusted her protection to Venezuelan bodyguards, according to four of the sources, unlike deposed president Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, the late president Hugo Chavez, who both relied on elite Cuban forces. Thirty-two Cubans were killed in the U.S. military attack that captured Maduro on January 3, according to the Cuban government. These soldiers and bodyguards were part of a deep security agreement between Caracas and Havana that began in the late 2000s in which Cuban intelligence agents embedded throughout the military and Venezuela's formidable DGCIM counterintelligence unit, which was fundamental to weeding out domestic opposition. "The Cuban influence was absolutely essential" to the survival of the Chavista government, said Alejandro Velasco, an associate professor of history at New York University and an expert on Venezuela. Inside DGCIM, some Cuban advisers have been removed from their posts, according to a former Venezuela intelligence official. Some of the Cuban medical workers and security advisers have travelled from Venezuela to Cuba on flights in recent weeks, two of the sources said. One source close to Venezuela's ruling party said the Cubans were departing on the orders of Rodriguez due to U.S. pressure. The other sources were not clear on whether the Cubans were being forced to leave by the new Venezuelan leadership, departing of their own accord, or being summoned home by Havana. The decision to sideline Cubans from the presidential guard and the counterintelligence unit has not been previously reported.

Cuban security advisers and doctors have been leaving #Venezuela as Interim President Delcy Rodriguez's government faces intense pressure from Washington to unwind Latin America’s most consequential leftist alliance… www.reuters.com/world/americ... #authoritarianLeft #trumpism #Cuba

The list has enough information to cite 68,800 deaths. Hamas has lost 25,000 fighters, which leaves 44,000 war deaths to account for. Included in that 44,000 are about 10,000 natural deaths. The remaining 34,000 would include civilians killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas and associated militant groups-either by execution, rocket misfires, turf wars, and the like. The result is that even when using Hamas's numbers, Israel's civilian-to-combatant death rate is close to 1:1, an unheard-of accomplishment in an urban war setting, let alone one in which much of the territory has been turned into Hamas human shields. Given that Hamas started the war, refused to surrender, and fired at Israel from civilian homes, the terrible tragedy of Gazan lives lost is laid at Hamas's feet. It feels pretty silly at this point to even consider the "genocide" accusation, but this is another opportunity to note that Hamas goaded its defenders out on that limb and then personally cut it off under their feet. While plenty of bad-faith actors have been accusing Israel of genocide since the war started, and are therefore immune to facts, I'm sure there are a number of decent folks who fell into the "genocide" trap because they followed a trend in the name of "human rights." I do not envy the humiliation they are experiencing now, but neither do I find such people particularly sympathetic. They ought to feel bad about what they've said and done, and I hope they do.

The reason people were willing to believe it is twofold. First, it is the quintessential example of the Big Lie. Hitler's belief was that the bigness of the lie not only lends it credibility but serves as an emotional, rather than rational, appeal. As we watch Israeli companies flood Gaza with sweets and drinks for Ramadan, we cannot maintain any rational, conscious interpretation other than Israel won a defensive war while protecting civilians to an extent never seen before. But those who shape their beliefs based on subconscious appeals to emotion? Who knows what contradictions they can maintain. The other reason is, yes, anti-Semitism. The public's willingness to believe the worst about Jews is not new, and it's not an accident. Those who have participated in the "genocide" Big Lie have not made an honest mistake. A mistake, perhaps-but not an honest one. For anyone who wants to put up guardrails for the next time Hamasniks try to snare them in a massive hoax, the most important detail in the new report is the demographics chart. Women's share of deaths is largely consistent with their share of the total population. Military-aged men, however, are a far larger share of fatalities than their share of the population.

Which means another key part of the anti-Israel narrative is definitive nonsense. That is the focus by Israel's critics on "women and children," the narrative that claims the Jews are "baby killers." When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she opposes Israel because "I care about little kids dying"; when Rashida Tlaib reads into the congressional record what she says are the names of "babies that the Israeli government has murdered"; when Elizabeth Warren tells a town hall audience that Israel is committing genocide and to "look at the children"; we are being fed the baby-killer trope from elected politicians. It's a lie, and a malignant one. Once again, Hamas's own numbers obliterate the lies that Western anti-Zionists cling to out of a misplaced sense of pride. Indeed, one rarely encounters people with less to be proud of.

Hamas debunks the ‘genocide’ narrative: Hamas has wrapped up its latest revision of casualty data in the Gaza war, and it makes clear why Israel’s critics have been flailing since the end of the war. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #authoritarianLeft #Islamism #antisemitism

Ah, there we are. Actors want an anti-Jewish blacklist. In the name of free speech and anti-fascism. And they want Germany to lead the way. The open letter claims that the world is living a re-run of the 1930s, but the real complaint is that it's not enough like the 1930s for Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton. It is simply a matter of public record that, as we have documented repeatedly, the artists being silenced over politics are Jews and Israelis, while performers who have made anti-Zionism their entire personality have received a boost in their public standing. The Toronto International Film Festival tried-and initially succeeded—to cut a film about an Israeli hero on October 7. Jewish writers are being iced out of the publishing industry while anti-Israel polemics get published no matter the content or quality. None of this is in dispute, because such discrimination is what is meant by "free speech" as expressed by the vapid celebrities who traffic in blood libels about the Jewish state. Gal Gadot faces pressure to avoid film festivals; Javier Bardem shows up to awards shows wearing a Palestinian Purim costume and he does not worry that he's going to be "punished" or "suppressed" for it.

The ‘Free Speech’ advocates who love blacklists: The folks advocating for blacklists have somehow positioned themselves as the leading “free speech” voices of our time. And the Sovietization of global anti-Israel discourse marches on. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #authoritarianLeft

In a worldwide study of more than 10 million tweets and posts published between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 7, 2024, the French researcher Hugo Micheron found that the number of shares and comments on the massacre swiftly reached a historic peak, higher than even the war in Ukraine, and remained abnormally high. All discussion groups across the globe were affected, even those having nothing to do with the Middle East, such as anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics. This is a new and unprecedented phenomenon, he told me. "With Oct.7, the very concept of war adds to its physical nature an informational component that touches everybody. We have entered the era of the First World War on information." What follows is an attempt to describe the effects of this information war launched by Hamas in Europe.

The Fall of Europe: From Paris to Birmingham to Brussels, antisemitism is the new normal—again www.tabletmag.com/sections/new... By @marcweitzmann.bsky.social #antisemitism #Islamism #Jihadism #authoritarianLeft #HistoricalPoliticalMemory

That leaves a psychological question: of all the possible falsehoods progressives could have used to signal tribal loyalty, why have they chosen this one? A clue lies in the recurring allusions to the Holocaust. Long before 7 October, many on the far-left displayed a perverse urge to accuse Jews of the very crime they had suffered. They often did so in the crassest ways, coining portmanteaus like "Zionazism" or "Gazacaust." This eagerness betrays what the legal scholar Matthew Bolton has called a "taboo-breaking thrill of inverting, and thereby finally cancelling out, the Shoah." This desire long predates 7 October 2023. As the historian Norman Goda has documented, charges of genocide have been directed at the Jewish state throughout its existence. According to the Manichaean victim/oppressor binaries that dominate contemporary progressive discourse, Jews are "white-adjacent" and therefore burdened with all the sins of the colonial West. This logic is reinforced by academic theories of settler-colonialism. As Adam Kirsch notes in his book On Settler Colonialism, these theories consider genocide to be intrinsic to the settler-colonial project itself. Within that framework, Israel's very existence becomes genocidal: "If Israel is a settler colonial state, and settler colonialism entails genocide, then it is ideologically necessary for Israel to be committing genocide." As one academic paper on the Gaza war recently expounded, "Genocide is a fundamental feature of the structure of settler colonialism. It is a process and not an event." Even though the war now appears to be over, Israel will still be committing genocide simply by continuing to exist.

After 7 October, this pathology metastasized, moving from the margins of the academic Left to the progressive mainstream. At European universities, questioning the claim that Israel is committing genocide has become a cancellable offense equivalent to Holocaust denialism. Many of my own colleagues are now afraid to speak their minds on the topic of Gaza. Fortunately, some are starting to push back. Hundreds of scholars recently signed an open letter arguing that "to dilute the legal standards [of genocide] for ideological ends is a form of moral violence." Yet they remain a small minority. That such an obvious falsehood now enjoys near-unanimous assent across universities, media, civil society, and the NGO ecosystem —with dissent incurring severe social costs—is a damning indictment of the supposed rationality of our liberal institutions.

They don’t believe it either.
The Gaza genocide as ideological performance. maartenboudry.substack.com/p/they-dont-... By Maarten Boudry #antizionism = #antisemitism #authoritarianLeft

Your posture reveals a deeply authoritarian bent, one inherited from statist dictatorships and reinforced by anti-political habits of geopolitical thinking. It claims to oppose domination while reproducing domination at the level of interpretation, denying agency to the oppressed whenever it disrupts your comfort. This amounts to a catastrophic theoretical failure. A critique of imperialism that refuses to analyze non-Western authoritarianism becomes analytically incoherent. It reproduces the state-centric logic it claims to oppose, mistaking opposition to U.S. power for emancipation itself. Violence becomes excusable when it is rhetorically anti-Western. Resistance becomes romanticized without reference to its social content. Domination becomes tolerable so long as it wears the correct ideological costume. Your so-called anti-imperialism then functions as an identity that polices discourse, disciplines dissent, and forecloses solidarity across inconvenient lines. The result is orthodoxy.

If you genuinely oppose genocide, authoritarianism, and oppression in all their forms, abandon the childish comfort of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." That slogan amounts to abdication. It sacrifices principle for alignment, coherence for convenience, and real human beings for the illusion of geopolitical clarity. A Left that cannot stand with the oppressed has already forfeited its claim to emancipation.

Open letter to the anti imperialist Left: To those on the Left who speak fluently of genocide, apartheid, and colonial domination, this letter is addressed to you. tripleampersand.org/open-letter-... By Sirantos Fotopoulos #authoritarianLeft #ThirdWorldism #campism

The best answer I've heard comes from Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, an attorney with the Institute for Justice in Washington. Ms. Dehbozorgi, who spent her childhood in Iran, says the media isn't covering the atrocities in Iran because doing so would "require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white." The millions risking their lives to gather in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and countless other Iranian cities don't fit neatly into these categories, she says: "They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape."

What's happening in Iran is a human rights nightmare. The United Nations Human Rights Council is supposed to care about such things. It's right there in the name. The Human Rights Council in recent years has been a merry-go-round of "genocide" accusations against Israel. Yet it has issued zero resolutions and held no inquiries about Iran. Most tellingly, there is no global demand for humanitarian aid for the Iranian protesters, or even a cease-fire, from the people and institutions who don't hesitate to weigh in on Israel and Gaza. At this week's Golden Globes ceremony in Los Angeles, not one of the Hollywood celebrities found a moment to shout out the Iranian nation in its time of suffering. Filmmaker Judd Apatow stole a moment in the spotlight to call the American president a dictator. Actor Mark Ruffalo spent his red-carpet time accusing the Trump administration of terrorizing its own people. Neither had a word of support for innocent Iranians being gunned down for protesting an actual dictatorship. The Iranian people are fighting to end a 46-year reign of murder, oppression and brutal submission of women. The media is downplaying the protests or ignoring them outright. Why? The best answer I've heard comes from Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, an attorney with the Institute for Justice in Washington. Ms. Dehbozorgi, who spent her childhood in Iran, says the media isn't covering the atrocities in Iran because doing so would "require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white."

The Pro-Gaza Left Is Oh So Quiet on Iran: Maybe it wasn’t about peace and human rights at all.
It’s almost as if the Free Palestine movement has nothing to do with freedom, human rights or the welfare of innocents at all. www.wsj.com/opinion/free... #authoritarianLeft #IranMassacre

"What did y'all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers," wrote Somali-American essayist Najma Sharif on X after the Hamas attacks of October 7. The line was meant as a provocation, but it captured something essential. In much of the contemporary West, decolonization has become a political theology-and, for some, an authorization of revolutionary violence. The days after October 7 showed how deeply this worldview has taken hold. Across Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, university protests and pundits denounced Israel as a "settler-colonial state," insisted that "decolonization is not a metaphor," and called for "globalizing the Intifada." People often confuse these ideas with Islamism or with remnants of Communism. The confusion is understandable: Islamists condemn Israel in theological terms, and Communists cast global politics as a struggle between exploiters and the exploited. But today's condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage— a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

After October 7, this Third-Worldist moral script fused seamlessly with decolonial academic language. Anti-Israel sentiment reorganized itself around a single idea: decolonization became both the governing explanation and the desired political conclusion. Israel could appear only as the last "settler colony" of the West, and Palestinians only as the final authentic representatives of global resistance. History, politics, and the region's internal complexities no longer mattered. The categories predetermined the outcome. Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn't vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology-applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict. This universal script-oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized-explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

The Third-Worldist logic:
Today’s condemnation of Israel—and America—comes from an intellectual lineage that sees the West as a permanent oppressor and any movement opposed to it as righteous. www.city-journal.org/article/isra... By Zineb Riboua
#decolonization #authoritarianLeft #Islamism

However, the visit was cancelled after the Bristol branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign intervened, reportedly helped by Left-wing members of the National Education Union (NEU). Steve Reed, the Communities Secretary, described the news as "an outrage". He told Jewish News: "I have a colleague who is Jewish, who has been banned from visiting a school and refused permission to visit a school in his own constituency, in case his presence inflames the teachers. That is an absolute outrage." Mr Reed added that those responsible "will be called in, and they will be held to account for doing that, because you cannot have people with those kinds of attitudes teaching our children". In a Facebook post on Sept 5, the Bristol branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign described Mr Egan's ban as "a win for safeguarding" and the power of union reps, parents and campaigners "standing together". It added: "Victory for parents, teachers and the community. The planned school visit today (Friday Sept 5) by Damian Egan, MP for Bristol North East, has been cancelled after concerns were raised by the NEU trade union staff group, parents and local constituents. "This is a clear message - politicians who openly support Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza are not welcome in our schools." Mr Egan, the NEU and Bristol Brunel Academy have been approached for comment. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has previously warned of threats to free speech in school rows over alleged insults to Islam. In an article for The Telegraph last week, he claimed communities had been left to "police themselves" as officers gave in to Islamists.

A Jewish MP was banned from visiting a school after a campaign by pro-Palestine protesters.
Damien Egan, the Labour MP for Bristol North East, had planned to visit Bristol Brunel Academy in September. archive.ph/UtX4M#select... #authoritarianLeft #Islamism #antisemitism

Much of the evidence of links between Hizbollah and Venezuela dates from Project Cassandra, one of the most comprehensive criminal investigations into the Lebanese group's international ties. But Hizbollah's relationships in Venezuela appear to have continued since that probe, which ended in 2016. A complaint filed in a US federal court against the cryptocurrency exchange Binance in December alleged that Venezuela-based, Hizbollah-linked gold smugglers and money launderers had moved tens of millions of dollars in crypto through the exchange. Binance said in response to the case that it fully complied with "internationally recognised sanctions laws". In one of its most significant findings, Project Cassandra uncovered links between a high-ranking Hizbollah official and a Medellin-based Lebanese drug kingpin with ties to the militant group, Ayman Jomaa. Jomaa was accused of running one of the largest and most sophisticated international drug smuggling and money laundering networks, involving Colombia and Venezuela, that the DEA had ever seen. In his testimony, Noriega stated that "Venezuela has provided thousands of phone IDs, passports and visas to persons of Middle Eastern origin" - claims echoed to the FT by ex-US officials and the intelligence official. Tareck El Aissami, a former Maduro confidant and vice-president sanctioned by the US, Canada and the EU, was key to the passports scheme, said the person familiar with the situation. El Aissami has been indicted on corruption and sanctions-dodging charges in the US.

#Venezuela: the Hizbollah connection.
Across thousands of miles, the Lebanese militant group forged illicit business links with a Caracas regime frozen out by the US archive.ph/y0PS2 #authoritarianLeft #Islamism #Hezbollah #IranProxies

How one Egyptian activist accidentally exposed the British establishment | Ben Sixsmith | The Critic Magazine I try to avoid judging people by their worst tweets. Twitter, as a medium, encourages us to be at our most provocative and uncompromising. (Except me, of course — my tweets are always nuanced and…

How one Egyptian activist accidentally exposed the British establishment: Alaa Abd El-Fattah is a symptom of the problem more than he is the problem thecritic.co.uk/how-one-egyp... #authoritarianLeft #Islamism

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has long used detained Americans, whether guilty or innocent of serious crimes, as bargaining chips in negotiations with Washington, his greatest adversary. President Trump has made the release of Americans held overseas a priority in his two presidencies, and sent his envoy, Richard Grenell, to Venezuela to negotiate a prisoner deal days after the start of his second term. The ensuing period of talks between U.S. and Venezuelan officials resulted in the release of 17 American citizens and permanent residents held in Venezuela.

Venezuela detains Americans amid growing U.S. pressure: Venezuelan security forces have detained several Americans in the months since the Trump administration began a military and economic pressure campaign against Maduro’s government… archive.ph/IBxq1 #authoritarianLeft

Will Trump attack Venezuela? Russia evacuates diplomats’ families Moscow is said to view the situation in Caracas in ‘very grim terms’ after the US ordered a naval blockade and deployed warships

Will Trump attack Venezuela? Russia evacuates diplomats’ families: Moscow is said to view the situation in Caracas in ‘very grim terms’ after the US ordered a naval blockade and deployed warships www.thetimes.com/article/0e20... #authoritarianLeft #narcostate

Cuba faces its most severe economic crisis since 1959, with a 15% economic contraction since 2018. A quarter of Cuba's population, over 2.7 million people, has fled since 2020 due to widespread hunger, disease and lack of basic services. U.S. pressure on Venezuela, including a partial blockade targeting oil tankers, threatens Cuba's vital oil supply.

U.S. oil blockade of #Venezuela pushes #Cuba toward collapse:
The Communist-ruled island was already suffering from food shortages, blackouts and an exodus of people; now it faces the loss of cheap oil from Nicolás Maduro archive.ph/kVeyK #authoritarianLeft #narcostate

Leaving the country carries the risk that Machado could be barred from returning. It could diminish her influence at home, as has happened to several opposition leaders forced into exile in the past. Venezuela's attorney general, Tarek William Saab, has said that Machado would be considered a fugitive if she traveled to Norway. Venezuelan opposition activists said that having Machado out of Venezuela will energize their cause, allowing the opposition leader to more effectively lobby foreign governments than she could from a remote video connection, and push for more economic and political pressure on Maduro. Machado has voiced support for Trump's military buildup in the region and argued that a credible threat of force is needed to push Maduro from power. Asked whether she would support U.S. airstrikes on the country, Machado didn't address the question directly, saying the Venezuelan people didn't want a war. "It was Maduro who declared a war on the Venezuelan people with state terrorism and abroad with narco terrorism," she said. "What we have asked, and I have been very insistent in this, is the international community to help us stop the flows of resources, criminal resources, which are used by the regime for repression of the Venezuelan people."

Disguised and in Danger: How a Nobel Peace Prize Winner Escaped #Venezuela: Opposition leader María Corina Machado slipped through 10 military checkpoints to reach a fishing boat bound for Curaçao and a private jet headed to Norway archive.ph/suioD #authoritarianLeft #NarcoState

Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities. Corrupt military officers and drug gangs smuggle shipments by light aircraft, fishing boats, semisubmersible vessels and freighters heading east, international law-enforcement officials have said publicly. The cocaine flows to West Africa, where an informal network of jihadist-linked smugglers and their allies then move the drug north to feed high and rising demand in Europe. "Cocaine in the 198os is not the same as the one we see today," said Jesus Romero, a retired U.S. military intelligence officer. "There are direct linkages to terrorist organizations to support their cause." Unprecedented levels of cocaine production in Colombia in recent years have overwhelmed traditional smuggling routes, leading traffickers to exploit Venezuela's strategic location, ineffectual security institutions and long coastline, the law-enforcement officials have said. That has led cocaine consumption to rise worldwide in regions that hadn't been major consumers, from Australia to Eastern Europe, United Nations drug researchers say. The confluence of drug smugglers, jihadists and corrupt officials is part of a growing global alignment among criminal gangs, militant groups and rogue governments that threatens democratic norms and social stability, with profound potential ramifications.

How Venezuelan gangs and African Jihadists are flooding Europe with cocaine: Surging trans-Atlantic drug flows mean that cocaine seizures in Europe now exceed those in North America archive.ph/3SoGb
#Drugtrafficking #Jihadism #AuthoritarianLeft #OrganisedCrime

BDS Cannot Be Negotiated With In 1948, Golda Meir famously visited a synagogue in Moscow on the High Holidays, a historic visit by an official of the State of Israel. Meir was the young state’s

BDS cannot be negotiated with:
The challenge facing the Jews of the world is to recognize that this is not a negotiation. They cannot plea bargain their way out of anti-Semitism. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... By @sethamandel.bsky.social #antisemitism #authoritarianLeft #BDS

goth is not just music. And veganism is not just a diet
#goth #vegan #gothvegan #not-just-music #authoritarianleft
#anti-hierarchy

It is no surprise that a majority of Jewish New Yorkers would feel less safe in a city run by Zohran Mamdani. It is less clear why anyone would associate themselves with Mamdani and his tinpot Stalinists at the DSA. And it is most confusing of all why any politician's membership in such a group should be acceptable.

Why would any politician want their name to be associated with a classic race-war hate group?
The DSA held its national convention this weekend and did us all the favor of making clear that it is self-consciously incompatible with public service www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #AuthoritarianLeft

In other words—and this is the key point in understanding the escalation—these students at Columbia University and other expensive universities have been the most pampered young adults in the history of the universe. Though of course there will be individual exceptions, as a group these folks have been handed more and asked to do less than anyone who walked the earth before them. The students themselves unintentionally acknowledged this generality last night. After they left their occupation, many of them made a circle outside and cultishly chanted a bunch of slogans, including: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” I don’t know how people who have actually been kept in chains would feel about this kind of appropriation by the ultra-privileged, but it tells us something important about the mindset of the comfortable elite: They find themselves and their lives utterly boring. These activists’ anger at previous generations isn’t for withholding opportunity, it’s for the opportunity itself. There are two kinds of Columbia students who talk unironically about losing their chains: those who know they are privileged and pretend otherwise as a form of escapism, and those who actually think being told to go to class at their expensive private institution is what everybody in history has meant by “chains.”

Trauma envy and the campus intifada www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #authoritarianLeft #LeftAntisemitism

The bloodshed that Hamas unleashed on October 7th and beyond should have laid to rest any lingering fantasies about “liberation” through terror. Yet, in far too many quarters—campuses, editorial boards—the old cult of death persists. We hear allusions to “resistance,” references to “dispossession,” and pious invocations of struggles against occupation. Behind this sanitized language lies a darker truth: Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth has come to life, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Palestinian cult of martyrdom and genocidal posturing. For decades, radical intellectuals and professors helped conjure this nightmare. Now, it is the time to confront their legacy: Hamas is their murderous ideas realized.

The children of Fanon: The root of our evil critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-childr... By Hussein Aboubakr Mansour #Islamism #terrorism #authoritarianLeft #FrantzFanon

Since the Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, Diaspora Jews have found themselves under sustained assault on a variety of fronts, from much of the radical left, and its Islamist allies. People who pose as guardians of equality and anti-racism are leading violent demonstrations praising mass murder attacks against Israelis. They are urging the exclusion of all Jews who do not endorse their views from the mainstream of the social order. How did it come to pass that such a significant portion of the contemporary radical left now resembles fascist and Nazi groups of the past?

The Nazification of the Postmodernist Left fathomjournal.org/the-nazifica... By Shalom Lappin #AntisemiticLeft #AuthoritarianLeft #antisemitism

BBC editor may sue Owen Jones over Israel bias claim The Guardian’s Owen Jones wrote an article that led Raffi Berg, the BBC’s Middle East ­online editor, to receive death threats and anti-­semitic abuse

Raffi Berg, the BBC’s Middle East ­online editor, is considering taking legal action against The Guardian’s Owen Jones after he wrote an article that led to death threats and anti-semitic abuse. www.thetimes.com/article/e801... #antisemitism #AuthoritarianLeft

Iran Increases Military Presence In Venezuela With Drone Factory As Maduro Claims New Term In Office Despite Condemnation Iranian officials and military personnel are residing in the South American country, with some members being offered political asylum should they need it

#Iran increases military presence in #Venezuela with drone factory as Maduro claims new term in office despite condemnation: Iranian officials and military personnel are residing in the South American country, with some members being offered political asylum should they need it #AuthoritarianLeft

The ‘anthropological change’ happening in Venezuela: Maduro is still in place, but a pro-democracy movement is transforming the beleaguered country. archive.ph/v1Arw By
@anneapplebaum.bsky.social #AuthoritarianLeft
#Venezuela

Spanish party leader accuses Israel of genocide in Syria Spanish Podemos Party general secretary Ione Belarra attacked Israel's bombardment of Syrian military assets remnant from the Assad regime as genocide.

Spanish party leader accuses Israel of genocide in Syria: Spanish Podemos Party general secretary Ione Belarra attacked Israel's bombardment of Syrian military assets remnant from the Assad regime as genocide. m.jpost.com/bds-threat/a... #authoritarianLeft #antisemitism

And that is exactly what happened. What a pathetic guy.
#authoritarianLeft #bluesky

The Anti-Zionist Protesters and the Left: An End to Denial.
Stop projecting humane beliefs onto groups whose ugly ideas are very clear. archive.ph/jazUu By Jonathan Chait #authoritarianLeft #Islamism