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glyko.bsky.social
glykosymoritis
@glyko.bsky.social
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A political diary: For a democratic secular masterless and borderless world; for individual and social autonomy*; for lifelong democratic civic education with democratic aim, the creation of participatory democratic citizenry. (Castoriadis*) #glykoreads
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glyko.bsky.social
A tale of two film festivals: The entire focus of anti-Zionist activism is the erasure of the Jewish state. If it’s any consolation, there will continue to be plenty of Chinese films to see. www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #IndieChina #IDFA
Borderless harassment has been a fixture of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian influence operations in the West for a long time. Meanwhile, China has set filmmaking policy in Hollywood for two decades through conditional agreements to show American movies in Chinese theaters. Now China has graduated to deciding which film festivals can be shown in New York City. "I hope this announcement of the cancellation of IndieChina Film Festival will make certain unknown forces stop harassing all the directors, guests, former staff, volunteers and my friends and family," Zhu said in a statement. IndieChina was a small festival. International Documentary Festival Amsterdam is, on the other hand, reputed to be the largest documentary festival in the world. IDFA is already under way. It has done nothing to unnerve the CCP, I guess. It's main target this year is, as with much of the entertainment industry, the democratic State of Israel. Late last month, Variety broke the story that IDFA was joining the boycott-and-blacklist trend aimed at the Jewish state. DocAviv, the main documentary film festival and organization in Israel, gets some public funding, as is common in the industry. So DocAviv, along with Kan and CoPro, were banned from IDFA. According to DocAviv artistic director Michal Weits, the groups received a letter from IDFA saying "that they are not going to provide us accreditation since we are complicit with the genocide, which is obviously not true."
November 19, 2025 at 7:14 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Muslim Brotherhood stole half a billion dollars from Gaza donations, Egyptian researcher Maher Farghali reported.
“It is typical of the Muslim Brotherhood to “exploit Gaza and Palestine for money,” the difference with this incident is that Hamas condemned the theft.“ www.jpost.com/middle-east/...
Hamas released a statement, which was viewed by The Jerusalem Post, on learning of the incident back in January 2024, titled "exposing and disavowing certain institutions and individuals," in which it prohibited any dealings with Waqf al-Ummah. Hamas spoke of "suspicious campaigns and funds collected in the name of Gaza, administered by some institutions abroad that exploited the emotions of our people and supporters under the pretext of relief and humanitarian aid." Hamas then said it has "no relationship whatsoever with these institutions and campaigns, does not supervise them, and has not authorized anyone to collect donations on its behalf." It claimed that it carried out an investigation and discovered that said organization "took advantage of the situation in Gaza to collect large sums of money in the name of humanitarian aid but failed to deliver these funds to their rightful recipients." It went on to state that "the movement [Hamas] has no relationship with the entity called: 'Wagf al-Ummah' (The Ummah Endowment Foundation)" and disavows several individuals associated with the movement named: Saeed Ibrahim "Abu Yunus," Fouad al-Dweib, Samer Saeed Abdullah al-Sammari, Khaldoun Hijazi, Ahmed al-Amri, and Zaid Omar Jaber.
November 19, 2025 at 7:04 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Zohran Mamdani and the rise of politics of stupid: There’s nothing “new” about the antisemites believing they are the Jews’ victims; that belief has been central to antisemitism whenever and wherever it has manifested itself. www.thejc.com/opinion/mayo... By Shany Mor #antisemitism #conspiracism
The mass delusions of the past year that have been laid down as membership requirements in the community of the good - that Israel's military response to the October 7 massacre is in the same legal and moral category as the mass murder of six million Jews in Europe in the 1940s, and that powerful forces are suppressing criticism of the most obsessively criticised state and society in the world - aren't just dangerous because they lead to violence. They re dangerous because, among other things, they lead to stupid. They empower stupid, ranging it at the front of politics in a way that could never have been tolerated without the delusions' iron grip. And they make otherwise smart political actors adopt stupid as a form of speech and ultimately a form of thought too. Sometimes this is for survival; often it is just a routine that breaks down resistance and, in time, becomes unnoticeable inside of a positive feedback loop. A politics of stupid is hard to resist once it takes over. In a reality where one needs to believe something that is verifiably false or logically incoherent just to prove your credentials as a serious thinker or, heaven help us, an expert, then the serious thinkers will either be genuinely stupid or will have so masterfully affected the pose of stupid that the habit becomes unbreakable.
November 19, 2025 at 6:48 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The neo-Nazi paramilitary group Rusich, which fights alongside Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine, has publicly announced a “contest” offering cryptocurrency rewards to fighters who send photographs of Ukrainian prisoners of war murdered via extrajudicial execution. theins.press/en/news/286916
The announcement, which was published on the group's channel on Telegram on Nov. 17, read: "We're announcing a contest. The first three people to send in photos with clearly executed prisoners in the background will receive a material reward in cryptocurrency from the Rusich Sabotage and Assault Reconnaissance Group. Send your photos anonymously, we'll definitely publish them." Executing prisoners is a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. Under the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I of 1977, the summary execution, torture, cruel treatment, and humiliation of POWs are all strictly prohibited. Those who order such acts are also considered war criminals. Article 25 of the Rome Statute likewise establishes criminal responsibility for anyone who "orders, solicits, or induces" the commission of such crimes. In 2022, neo-Nazi paramilitary and Rusich commander Alexei Milchakov, known by his call sign "Fritz," called for the torture and execution of Ukrainian prisoners. He published a so-called "manual for the disposal of Ukrainian POWs" on his Telegram channel. The post appeared shortly after the exchange of Vladimir Putin's ally Viktor Medvedchuk for Ukrainian prisoners, including commanders of the Azov Regiment. Milchakov gained notoriety in 2011 after posting photos of himself online with the severed head of a puppy. During the war in Donbas, he reportedly mutilated the bodies of slain Ukrainian soldiers, cutting off their ears and carving a swastika-like kolovrat symbol into their faces, later posting photos of the acts on social media. He also fought in Syria as part of the Wagner Group.
November 19, 2025 at 6:35 AM
glyko.bsky.social
“The fact that #Germany now relies on Israeli capabilities to defend its citizens carries deep historical resonance and stands as a testament to how our relationship is defined not by past wounds but by a shared commitment to prevent their return.” www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #Israel
In fact both Merz and Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker have been open about how their countries' role in the Holocaust informs their policymaking. "I would consider it a fatal mistake to exclude Israel" from Eurovision, Stocker said recently. "Based on our history alone, I would never be in favor of that." Their critics on the pro-Palestinian left, meanwhile, consistently try to use that history as a mark against them, arguing that Germany in particular "weaponizes" its guilt to "silence" Hamas's cheerleaders among artists and entertainers. This is an essential divide in 21st century politics: between those who believe that past persecution of the Jews requires the current persecution of Israel, and those who believe that the moral lessons of the 2oth century include a responsibility to oppose the scapegoating of the Jewish people. That isn't just the 20th century's lesson, of course. It's the lesson of history. And Merz has found an ingenious way to make it harder and harder for that history to return and claim more victims. One would think that arming the Jewish state would be an important priority for anyone who supports Israeli security. And it is. But Merz knows how effective it can be to reverse that dependency as well.
November 18, 2025 at 7:30 AM
glyko.bsky.social
The Trump administration is looking to forgo the stage in its peace plan calling for the deployment of a stabilization force to Gaza to disarm Hamas, so that it can move ahead with starting to rebuild the enclave,according to an Israeli TV report Sat. www.timesofisrael.com/us-said-cons... #terrorism
An Israeli security source said that since the White House is having trouble getting commitments from third-party countries to participate in disarming Hamas, it has since begun pursuing "interim solutions, which are currently unacceptable to Israel." "This interim situation is the worst there is," a senior Israeli source told the outlet. "Hamas has been strengthening in recent weeks since the end of the war." "There can be no rehabilitation before demilitarization. It is contrary to Trump's plan. Gaza must be demilitarized," a security official said.
November 18, 2025 at 7:20 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Jihadism and Russia: a toxic mix in the Sahel.
West needs a strategy to counter southern spread of instability into coastal states archive.ph/AZl1q #ISIS #AlQaida #AfricaCorps #Islamism #Jihadism #terrorism
Three years ago, Mali's military junta expelled French troops, a two-fingered gesture to the old conial power that was applauded by many in the country, In France's place came Russian mercenaries promising protection for the junta and defeat of a dogged Islamist insurgency. Today, as al-Qaida-affiliated Jama a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) encircles the capital Bamako with a crushing fuel blockade, and with talk of yet another coup, it is clear the Russians have brought neither peace nor stability. Almost without the world noticing, the Sahel has become the epicentre of global terrorism. More than half of terrorism-related deaths last year took place in the semi-arid strip south of the Sahara, according to the Global Terrorism Index, with groups affiliated with Isis and al-Qaeda responsible for most. In neighbouring Burkina Faso, which is top of the terrorism list in terms of deaths, something similar is happening even if the regime itself is not yet teetering. There, the government of another leader who came to power in a coup, Ibrahim Traoré - whose nationalist rhetoric has made him a hero to many - controls less than half the country's territory, with JNIM exerting authority over much of the rest. It was Traoré who told his fellow African leaders to "stop behaving like puppets every time the imperialists pull the strings". But Sahelian countries are in danger of swapping one kind of imperialism for another. Russian mercenaries, initially with Wagner and now with its replacement Africa Corps, have been linked with human rights abuses. In Mali, Russians have shown scant appetite for countering the Bamako siege and more for protecting gold mines.
November 18, 2025 at 7:14 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Eritrea, Ethiopia and the missteps that could lead to war: Abiy Ahmed’s naval ambitions and Isaias Afwerki’s proxy tactics are testing a fragile peace, which is one miscalculation away from unraveling
newlinesmag.com/argument/eri... By Mohamed Kheir Omer #Assab #Eritrea #Ethiopia
At the heart of the conflict is the port of Assab in Eritrea's far south. It is about 40 miles from the Ethiopian border at its closest point and between 50 and 55 miles from Ethiopia's Afar Region along the old main road that passes through Kombolcha. The port of Assab is too close to Ethiopia for the Ethiopian government to consider engaging in conflict there, while its position also makes it hard for Eritrea to defend it effectively. For Isaias, losing Assab would shatter the myth of invincibility that sustains his rule, after he led the defeat of one of the strongest armies in sub-Saharan Africa during Eritrea's 30-year liberation war against Ethiopia. For Abiy, capturing it would crown his promise to restore Ethiopia's maritime future and establish a naval force. On the map, Assab is a dot; in both capitals, it is destiny. For Ethiopia, the port represents a lost limb - proof that landlocked status can be reversed. For Eritrea, it is the fortress of sovereignty. A dockworker who spent years working at the base leased by the UAE at Assab recalled the day Emirati ships left in 2021. "They took everything - cranes, tanks, even the air conditioners," he told New Lines. "Since then, the port sleeps." The withdrawal stripped Eritrea of a wealthy patron. The UAE turned east toward Somaliland and Sudan, drawing closer to Addis Ababa with loans, drones and currency deals. The Afar-Tigray-Sudan triangle bristles with shifting loyalties. Command lines blur easily. In Tigray, a silent coup by some army generals in October 2024 replaced the Tigray Interim Administration with a hard-line TPLF faction led by Debretsion, who is allied to Eritrea. Young TDF members demonstrated for five days in a row in various towns, demanding higher pay and improvements to their livelihoods. They blocked roads. "We are not the TPLF's army," some of them shouted. To observers in Asmara, such unrest signals a lost opportunity - and that Tigray might not fight with Eritrea against Addis Ababa in a new war.
November 18, 2025 at 6:53 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Ireland’s smug position on defence is testing Europe’s patience: Our lack of preparedness will come sharply into focus once we take over the presidency of the EU next year, potentially putting visiting leaders’ safety at risk archive.ph/JH0UI #Ireland #defence #NATO #RussiaUkraineWar
Ireland’s smug position on defence is testing Europe’s patience: Our lack of preparedness will come sharply into focus once we take over the presidency of the EU next year, potentially putting visiting leaders’ safety at risk https://archive.ph/JH0UI By @alisonoconn #defence
November 17, 2025 at 7:06 AM
glyko.bsky.social
While the world is distracted, #Iran executes critics with impunity: Even seasoned observers are stunned by the regime’s renewed campaign of killing. Families of the condemned are asking why the West doesn’t seem to care www.thetimes.com/article/c1c4... #Islamism #dissent #executions
Iran has long held the grim distinction of carrying out the most executions per capita in the world. Now it is in the midst of one of the deadliest waves of state killings in decades: analysts say more than 1,025 people were executed in the first nine months of this year, surpassing last year's total, and 204 in September alone. The executions have intensified as the regime confronts pressures at home and abroad. Across the country, prisoners are said to be on hunger strike, staging what may be their final protest against the regime. European dignitaries have signed an open letter warning of the fate of the 17 political prisoners facing imminent execution, but the killing spree has otherwise gone largely unnoticed abroad. With the world transfixed by wars and the spectacle of American politics, Tehran appears to have found a rare window in which to kill without consequence. The scale and speed of the executions recall the regime's darkest chapter: the mass executions of 1988, when thousands of political prisoners were put to death in a matter of months. This year marks the most intensive use of capital punishment since then. Among those executed in September were six women, bringing the number of women killed this year to 37.
November 17, 2025 at 6:43 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them www.derekthompson.org/p/the-monks-... By @dkthomp.bsky.social
The sociologist Max Weber proposed that Christian asceticism gave birth to capitalism. Today it is capitalism that is birthing a wretched asceticism, as the casino economy turns our young people monastic. The monks at the casino represent an inversion of that old Christian principle. Whereas the Protestants that Weber studied were socially giving and financially stingy— their financial prudence created savings that could be invested in new enterprises-today's monks are risk-averse in the world of bodies and risk-chasing in the world of bets.
November 16, 2025 at 9:16 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show. www.reuters.com/investigatio... #Meta #fraud
The details of Meta's confidential self-appraisal are drawn from documents created between 2021 and this year across Meta's finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. Together, they reflect Meta's efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms - and the company's hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests. Meta's acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions. "If regulators wouldn't tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn't tolerate it in tech," he told Reuters. In a statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the documents seen by Reuters "present a selective view that distorts Meta's approach to fraud and scams." The company's internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was "rough and overly-inclusive," Stone said. The company had later determined that the true number was lower, because the estimate included "many" legitimate ads as well, he said. He declined to provide an updated figure. "The assessment was done to validate our planned integrity investments - including in combatting frauds and scams - which we did," Stone said. He added: "We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don't want this content, legitimate advertisers don't want it and we don't want it either."
November 16, 2025 at 8:57 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Alibaba provides tech support for Chinese military “operations” against targets in the US, according to intelligence cited in a White House national security memo raising concerns about the technology giant. archive.ph/Ly3qn #communism #PLA #Alibaba
According to the White House memo, Alibaba also provides the Chinese government and PLA with access to customer data that includes IP addresses, WiFi information and payment records, as well as different Al-related services. It said employees had transferred knowledge about "zero-day" exploits to the PLA — previously unknown software vulnerabilities that developers had no opportunity to patch. Alibaba rejected the claims, saying: "The claims purportedly based on US intelligence that was leaked by your source are complete nonsense. This is plainly an attempt to manipulate public opinion and malign Alibaba."
November 16, 2025 at 8:49 AM
glyko.bsky.social
While the West has engaged in critical discussions over the transatlantic slave trade for many years, the same cannot be said for swathes of the Middle East: a region in which slavery and the accompanying trade endured without pause from the seventh to the 20th centuries archive.ph/lWpqK #SlaveTrade
As the Sudanese-British journalist Zeinab Badawi has argued in An African History of Africa, while Arab societies benefited enormously from enslaved African labour for more than a millennium, there has been little, if any, meaningful examination of the subject in Arab states, and no public debate on reparations. "The silence must be broken," she writes. Under pressure from African and Caribbean states, together with organisations like the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the debate continues in the West, but no such discourse is underway in the Muslim world. The reality is that there is barely any public discussion in Arab countries, Turkey or Iran, of the historical practice of slavery, let alone the issue of reparations. The inability or unwillingness to reckon with the legacy of slavery is not a marginal issue. The Atlantic trade accounted for between 11-14 million enslaved Africans, the corresponding trade with the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, was probably responsible for 12-15 million, possibly as many as 17 million if India is included. That is without Malaysia and Indonesia.
November 16, 2025 at 8:20 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Putin is turning eighth-grade classrooms into army training grounds: A vast militarization of Russia’s education system is gathering pace in classrooms, where active soldiers train students to handle weapons www.wsj.com/world/russia... By Matthew Luxmoore #totalitarianism #militarism #putinism
A class of Russian first-graders stood to attention this fall as a soldier who had served on the front line in Ukraine inspected their military uniforms. The pupils, age 6 to 8, adjusted collars, swiveled belts and repositioned the name badges on their chests. Then, they settled behind their desks for an hour of Russian language study. Drills of this kind, which took place in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine and were broadcast on Russian state television, are happening across Russia as the Kremlin reaches into the country's schools to prepare potential combatants for future wars. It is part of a dramatic transformation of Russia's education system that gained pace after the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea in 2014 but was supercharged by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the conflict approaches the four-year mark, military-style training and war topics are embedded in Russia's school curriculum, while the budget for such programs has ballooned as the focus has turned to the youngest grades. By eighth grade, weapons training-once extracurricular —is now mandatory. Teens are taught army discipline, military history and how to assemble Kalashnikovs and fly drones. History textbooks portraying the West as Russia's enemy and Ukraine as its stooge will soon be rolled out for the youngest grades, the government says. Outside of the classroom, the Defense Ministry has its own Youth Army, with a claimed 1.85 million members age 8 to 18 integrated into the school sustem.
November 15, 2025 at 7:55 AM
glyko.bsky.social
China’s new aircraft supercarrier challenges U.S. dominance in Pacific: The Fujian & its strike group represent a strategic game changer that will bring 🇨🇳closer to its goal of eroding U.S. maritime primacy in its backyard. archive.ph/Cfl5R By Christian Shepherd and Álvaro Valiño
China's efforts to blunt American maritime power in the Pacific, a region the United States has long considered its domain, received a major boost this month with the official launch of its third — and most advanced by far — aircraft carrier, the Fujian. The 80,000-ton supercarrier, which can accommodate about 60 aircraft and will be accompanied by as many as 10 warships, will dramatically narrow the naval capability gap between the U.S. and China, according to American, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese analysts. It will also enable Beijing to further intimidate rivals in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. China's leap in carrier technology China has gone from zero to three carriers in only 13 years. It now has the second-largest carrier fleet in the world and is rapidly closing the technology gap with the U.S.
November 15, 2025 at 7:47 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Four simple questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene: A few recent breaks with her party do not negate a lifetime of conspiracies. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202... By @yair-rosenberg.bsky.social #racism #antisemitism #conspiracism #opportunism
A handful of recent apostasies from her party does not negate Greene's lifetime of conspiracies. Taken together, the above positions do not suggest a stable person of sound judgment. Rather, they paint a picture of someone consistently unable to distinguish partisan fantasy from reality, who ping-pongs from conspiratorial extreme to conspiratorial extreme. "Everybody's like, 'Marjorie Taylor Greene has changed," she said of herself on The View. "Oh no, nothing has changed about me." People-even politicians-should be allowed to grow and not be forever reduced to the worst version of themselves. But there is a difference between an honest evolution, which entails accountability, and shallow opportunism, which offers none. Which category does Greene fall into? Given her significant following and stated political ambitions, it's in everyone's best interest to find out. But for that to happen, her interlocutors will have to start asking her the hard questions she's thus far avoided.
November 15, 2025 at 7:31 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Belgian ISIS fighter convicted of Yazidi genocide in landmark Brussels ruling: A Brussels court has found Belgian jihadi Sammy Djedou guilty of genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria, marking a historic first for the country.
www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1837... #YazidiGenocide
Djedou, a former IS fighter, was long believed to have been killed in Syria after the Pentagon reported his death. But with no official confirmation ever reaching Belgian authorities, he was tried in absentia in Belgium's first case involving mass atrocities committed against the Yazidi community. The court ruled that Djedou was guilty of genocide for his role from 2014 onwards in IS's campaign to wipe out the Yazidis. He was also convicted of crimes against humanity, including the rape and sexual enslavement of Yazidi women. The verdict makes Belgium only the fourth country in the world to secure a genocide conviction linked to the Yazidi atrocities, following rulings in Germany in 2021, the Netherlands in 2024 and Sweden earlier this year.
November 15, 2025 at 7:04 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Sky News Arabia accused of whitewashing genocide: UAE-based channel, which is co-owned by fund attempting to buy Telegraph stake, downplayed atrocities committed in Sudan archive.ph/cZWcR By Memphis Barker #SudanWar #genocide #UAE #SkyNews
One of the channel's correspondents was filmed hugging a female commander in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group opposed to the government, who had previously urged fighters to carry out mass rape. The reporter - who is married to a senior RSF official - last week became the first to reach El Fasher, the capital of Darfur state, where analysts estimate thousands if not tens of thousands of people have been killed by the rebel militia. On Wednesday, the broadcaster released an interview with a doctor who claimed he had not seen a single dead body, even though nearly 500 people are thought to have been killed in the building where he worked. Other reporting also appears to have downplayed satellite images of piles of bloodied bodies.
November 15, 2025 at 6:56 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Why British universities are bowing to Beijing: Commercial interests appear to be compromising academic freedom thecritic.co.uk/why-british-... By Freddie Attenborough #academia #communism #liberalism #SelfCensorship
[British] universities now face a very different kind of balancing act being thrust upon them: a reckoning between money and liberal ideals. And in a chronically mismanaged Britain, now apparently resigned to pawning its tattered ornaments and threadbare pageantry to the highest bidder in a desperate scramble to survive amid the wastelands of an entirely amoral global capitalism, they're discovering that it is not they, but the Chinese state, with its thumb pressed firmly on the scales.
November 15, 2025 at 6:46 AM
glyko.bsky.social
After five Gaza Independent candidates won [UK] parliamentary seats last year, the campaign group that backed them — The Muslim Vote — declared: “This is just the beginning.” They were not bluffing.
thecritic.co.uk/sectarian-vo... By Emma Schubart #Islamism #sectarianism
The significance of all this is not simply that Muslim voters are choosing Muslim candidates. The concern is that these candidates are advancing a fundamentally different understanding of what politics is for. For most Britons, politics is civic: a negotiation of competing interests inside a shared national framework. But for the Gaza Independents, politics is explicitly transnational. It's about asserting religious identity in the public sphere and organising civic power around an "armed struggle" taking place 4,000 kilometres away. These elected officials do not treat their councils or Parliament as a place to balance opposing needs; they treat it as an extension of an Islamic cause in which British institutions are instruments of Mohammedan moral alignment.
November 14, 2025 at 7:26 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Jewish students, members of the group 'Occupy Against Antisemitism,' are barricading themselves in the student council building in protest of the hostile atmosphere on campus; 'We demand that the University of Berlin be a safe place for Jewish and Israeli students,' the protesters declared.
After two years in which buildings and rooms at universities in Berlin became focal points for pro-Palestinian activists—who barricaded themselves there to protest Israel and the war in Gaza-Jewish students at Technische Universitat Berlin (Berlin Technical University) have decided to adopt the same tactic. Since Monday morning they have been barricading themselves in the building of the general student assembly. The occupation is intended to shine a spotlight on and draw attention to the antisemitic biases occurring at the university, and the praise that terror organizations receive across campus and within the student council and among the student body in general.
November 14, 2025 at 7:10 AM
glyko.bsky.social
Literal Blood Libels and the Modern University www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/... #antisemitism #academia #enlightenment
Western academia is in far worse shape than even its loudest critics allege. This is not about bias or "wokeness" in the classroom; it is about the shattering of intellectual pursuit in America, in Britain, and elsewhere. It is a de-enlightenment. The Damascus Affair was a major moment in the history of the American Jewish community, which organized multiple protests and turned itself into the shield of the Diaspora. President Martin Van Buren himself intervened, having his secretary of state decry "such barbarous measures" still happening in the world. Once upon a time Americans believed that the Damascus Affair was more proof of the value of Western Civilization and the rights and norms that came along with it. Western Civilization was the solution, so it was thought, to the persistence of medieval brain rot into the modern era. And now Western educational institutions are the carriers of that brain rot.
November 14, 2025 at 6:55 AM
glyko.bsky.social
At least 12 people have been killed in a suicide blast in Islamabad carried out by the #Pakistan Taliban, as the country’s defence minister said a deadly surge in terror attacks had put the country in a “state of war”. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n... #Islamism #terrorism #Taliban
The attack was claimed by the Pakistan Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. "Judges, lawyers and officials who carried out rulings under Pakistan's un-Islamic laws were targeted," the TTP said in a statement, threatening more attacks until Islamic sharia law was implemented in the Muslim-majority country. Pakistan is facing a deadly and destabilising rise in attacks by TTP militants that has thrown the country into its worst security crisis in more than a decade. TTP militants have carried out more than 600 attacks in Pakistan this year alone - mostly in the region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Afghanistan - leaving hundreds dead. However, Tuesday's suicide attack was the most significant to target Islamabad for years. Pakistan's government has accused the Afghan Taliban of giving a safe haven and armed support to TTP fighters, a claim that Kabul denies. Last month, the accusations led to deadly clashes erupting along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, which left dozens dead. The two countries remain in fragile ceasefire talks that so far have failed to reach any agreements over the handling of cross-border terrorism.
November 13, 2025 at 6:58 AM
glyko.bsky.social
9. The BBC knew a devastating claim about Gaza starvation was incorrect. They asked an Israeli representative on Newsnight about it anyway. In May 2025 in a now notorious incident, the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Tom Fletcher, publicly claimed that 14,000 babies in Gaza were at risk of starving to death within the next 48 hours if Israel did not lift an aid blockade. The story gained worldwide attention. Interestingly, it was the BBC itself which found the major discrepancy in what Fletcher had said, and the truth. Fletcher had cited an IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) report - but what the report had actually said was that 14,000 children were at risk of acute malnutrition over the course of a year if the blockade was not lifted. The BBC, as Prescott says, "updated its online articles accordingly". Yet, he writes, "despite this, Fletcher's inaccurate claim was put to Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon on Newsnight. Why, when the BBC knew the suggestion was wrong?" In that same programme, Prescott sets out, images of a baby, Siwar Ashour, were featured. Ashour suffered from allergies and a congenital condition - and required specialist formula. "By the time of broadcast, the BBC already knew the story was out of date and that baby Siwar had received the necessary formula a week earlier, she was maintaining weight and had been discharged from hospital", Prescott writes. "None of that was revealed in the programme - meaning the BBC had broadcast another inaccurate story." Prescott also makes clear that "this was not the first or last time the BBC has reported stories about starvation in Gaza without telling audiences that the person highlighted has pre-existing medical conditions that might explain their emaciated appearance." He cited a case from August 2025, when a BBC headline informed readers that a 'Malnutritioned Gaza woman flown to Italy dies in hospital'. This version, he described, was "shared around the world". O… 10. The IC] did not rule that there was a "plausible case of genocide" in Gaza. The BBC suggested that it had - too many times to count It was in a BBC Hardtalk interview that that IC]'s former president, Joan Donoghue - who was on the panel which considered South Africa's submission against Israel to the court - clarified that it was not correct to say the IC] had ruled there was a "plausible case of genocide" in Gaza. A report to the BBC's EGSC, however, flagged "numerous instances" where the Corporation had suggested exactly that, Prescott said, describing it "being used on BBC reports, analysis and live two-ways on both television and radio. It was also cited by international editor Jeremy Bowen and on Newsnight." He described how the report to the EGSC said "there were too many instances of the BBC misrepresenting the ICJ's ruling to be listed in full." Prescott pointed out that "the IC] report runs to just 26 pages and was written in non-technical language. Had no BBC reporter troubled themselves to read it?" He said the internal BBC review had concluded that the IC] report "is very clear and explicitly states that the court is not making any determination on the merits of South Africa's case. The IC] said it was only assessing whether what South Africa had alleged was potentially covered by the genocide convention."
November 13, 2025 at 6:22 AM