Where the hell are the "international observers" who were queuing to visit the "mass graves" in Ukraine? Where is EU? Where are US state department? Where is UN?
What does it take for the world to (at least) investigate these allegations?
He was not an islamophobic Nazi loving Russian opposition character like Navalny who died of heart failure, no one in the "civilized west" will care about him or even bother learning his name, much less making official statement about his murder.
This politician @kimvsparrentak made a speech of an hour at a public event hosted by @waag@DeGroene and @gemeenteamsterdam where she publicly and very vocally expressed that we should change the way we do social media.
I was there and called her out on only being really present at X and Insta and not on the Fediverse. Her reaction was not 'that is a lost cause, there is no interaction there'. It was: "I am willing to give it a go again." Which in my view is very good news.
Please understand that it is very hard for politicians to join the Fediverse since their public agenda's are in large part ran by 'PR agents' that are usually well versed in the use of BigTech, since that is what is most visible and most used for the last few decades.
I will make sure to ask her that you are among the very first of people that will be followed by her. 😎
Axios reports that members of the US #Congress in both parties warned the ICC that arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials will be met with US retaliation, and legislation to that effect is already in the works.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had issued a statement on Monday calling the reported warrants "disgraceful" and "lawless."
Not to forget UK and Germany increasing weapons sale and suppression of protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza and daily terror attacks by illegal settlers (with IDF backing) against Palestinians all over occupied West Bank.
As the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampment enters its sixth day, organizers have called on the entire student body to walk out of class to ramp up pressure on the administration to divest from Israel. Breakthrough News will be covering the action LIVE from inside the encampment April 22, 12pm ET
Last year the Financial Ombudsman received around 3,900 complaints about debanking... up from 2,700 the year before.
Around a third of cases were upheld (in favour if customers) up a little from 2022.
The proportion of complaints from small businesses has also risen.
You'd perhaps have expected (after his promises) that Nigel Farage would be campaigning loudly on behalf of these customers... but actually once his case was resolved, of course, he moved on.
FFS you couldn't make it up... at the very same time that Rishi Sunak is looking to restrict eligibility for benefits for the disabled & long-term sick as an 'incentive' to get them 'back to work'.... the Work & Health Programme, that actually does that very thing has lost funding & will close in the next six months!
So with one hand he takes away financial support & tells people to do more to get into work, and then with other removes services that will help them do exactly that.
Some 52 years ago, when I was in 4th grade of primary school, I found a book "who put glasses on the kid's eyes" in a small book shop in open bazaar of my hometown Ahvaz in khuzestan province of Iran.
A few days later, we had to bring a book to school and read it in front of the class. Happy as I was to have found a great book, I took it to school and read it in front of the class.
I couldn't understand why my teacher was acting so scared and stopped me before I had finished the book and sent me to the principals office.
I was nervous, didn't know what I had done wrong and our principal, who was a really nice man, and went to the same university as my oldest sister took the book and asked me where I had bought it. I knew something was wrong, so I said I bought it at the book store of our local mosque, to protect the guy who was my source of cheap and lovely books and would buy back my old ones to help me afford buying new ones.
In the evening my father came home, agitated and clearly upset. Asked me what I have done and I explained the situation, including the fact that I lied about wher I had bought the book. Told him the highlight of the book about a happy child who was living in a town with happy people who were all wearing glasses.
He was seeing flowers, colorful houses. Nice people and happy children all around him, birds flying in the sky and everyone were so friendly to him.
Until one day he fell of and his glasses broke. He couldn't believe his eyes, the flowers, colorful houses and happy people were all gone. All he could see was a run down city, with piles of garbage everywhere, people wearing worn out clothes, looking hungry and sick.
He was nece happy after that, he couldn't believe that everyone were walking around with glasses and we're happy all the time. But he was sad and miserable, because he had seen his town without those glasses.
Anyway. My father took me to a building close to the main police station on the other side of the Karun river, he spent almost entire day in a room where I could people screaming at him and a few times someone his the table very hard. But couldn't hear what they were saying.
My dad came out. Pulled my hand without saying a word, we walked for an hour to get home, didn't take taxi as we used to do.
He didn't say a word during the whole day and told me to go over my books and bring all the books I had bought from that shop, he through them in a metal bucket and poured some fuel over it, set them on fire and waited until they were completely burned, mixed the ashes to turn them into dust, filled the bucket with water and through it in the toilet.
He told me to never go back to that shop and be careful to take any books to school from now on.
That' was my first interaction with the notorious Savak police of Shah of Iran. In the next days, all the 4 book stores in our town were raided. Books confiscated and doors locked. Never heard about any of them again.
Reading the comments of pro Israeli accounts on mastodon reminded me of that book and that experience that changed my life when I was only 8 years old.
This post specially triggered those memories. Unlike the kid in my book and the people living in the town, these people know very well tat what they are posting is not true, they have seen the horror of the past 76 years of occupation, they have seen the 66 times they were subject to UNSC charges, and 45 that were vetoed by the US..
But they don't care, they see themselves as victims. They don't see the millions of starving palestinians, or the millions living in refuge camps around the world as worthy of their empathy or cause of why Palestinians and some of the world is fed up with their out of control criminal behavior
They don't have glasses on their eyes, they have chosen to be selective and above the laws of the world.
West will condemn Iran’s attack, but largely ignore ‘Israeli provocations’
We spoke to Nader Hashemi, associate professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University, about the potential reaction around the world to Iran’s attack on Israel last night.
Hashemi said Iran will be widely condemned for its attack, unlike the series of Israeli provocations and attacks both within Iran and throughout the Middle East that have killed senior Iranian military officials and targeted key Iranian economic and nuclear sites, condemnations of which have been more muted.
“President Biden is rallying the G7 who will issue a condemnatory statement of Iran along these lines,” Hashemi said.
“In the Global South the response will be more measured” he said, adding “there will be calls for restraint, de-escalation and diplomacy without directly blaming Iran or Israel”.
“Arab and Muslim public opinion will note how many Arab states deployed military resources to protect Israel while doing the opposite in the context of the mass starvation and genocide in Gaza,” Hashemi concluded.
What happened to "civilized west'" support of law and order and enforcing the demands of #UN Security Council and #ICJ?
7 days have passed, Israel not only ignored the ruling, it has escalated their war crimes in both #Gaza and occupied West Bank.
They haven't allowed humanitarian aid, but murdered western volunteers feeding the starving palestinians.
#US hasn't pushed for ceasefire and release of the hostages, instead they have given billions of dollars worth of 2000 pound bombs and F-35 fighter jets to Israel.
#Canada hasn't stopped selling weapons to Israel despite them laying about it and ignoring the parliament ruling.
Nothing says #freeMarket#capitalism like trying to legislatively prop up a preferred industry by banning new, competing technologies. Just the latest example of the blinding #hypocrisy of the #GOP. Sorry, but we have to leverage the power of the state to make sure everything is the same as we remember from our childhoods. Progress is an existential threat!