A helicopter carrying President #EbrahimRaisi of #Iran & his foreign minister crashed on Sunday in the country’s mountainous northwest, acc/to state media, deepening the turmoil that has gripped the nation on both the international & domestic fronts in recent months.
#Raisi, 63, was traveling from Iran’s border w/ Azerbaijan to inaugurate a joint dam project.
An airstrike kills 27 people, mostly women and children, in central Gaza as Israel’s increasingly divided leadership debates who should govern the territory after the war, now in its eighth month. AP reports: https://flip.it/E.DkW9 #News#WorldNews#MiddleEast#Israel#Gaza
40 Rapid Response Teams Deployed in Area: #IRCS Chief
The head of #Iranian Red Crescent Society Pir Hossein Kolivand stated that 40 rapid response teams from the #IRCS are currently conducting search operations in the location where accident happened for the helicopter carrying President #Raisi and his companions ⏩
Today #Russia and #China play best friends forever and #USSR had been traditionally placed in the same “communist” basked as China. Some fun facts that especially tankies are getting completely wrong today.^1
Since 1950’s China and USSR were actually conflicted over each other’s interpretations of #Marxism and in 1960’s the conflict nearly escalated into a full-scale nuclear war between the two countries.
China criticised CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) over Soviet invasion of #Czechoslovakia (1968)^2 and “Brezhnev Doctrine” which denounced any Marxism version outside of the Soviet one as “reactionary” (Marxist newspeak for “heresy”). This included both Czechoslovak reforms and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in equal manner. At that time China actually developed complex relations with Eastern Bloc countries such as Romania and Czechoslovakia behind Kremlin’s back.
Essentially, everyone called each other “reactionary” and claimed their Marxism is the correct one. Any resemblance to past religious wars is entirely incidental. 😉 In 1968 Chinese diplomat Zhou Enlai speaking in Romanian embassy in Beijing called Soviets for “fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism and social imperialism”.^3
Does that ring any bells? 😉
Soviets and China had a number of unresolved border issues in Manchuria. In 1968 China started escalating these, actually killing Soviet border guards. Moscow, knowing of China’s nuclear weapons and Mao’s confrontative attitude preferred to deescalate… which only encouraged Chinese.
Does that remind anything from contemporary history? 😉
At the peak of the conflict in 1969 USSR found itself in the position of a country with high-tech army challenged by a low-tech army which relied on millions of conscripts and human wave tactics.
Does this ring any bells? 😉
In 1969 Soviet army managed to push back overwhelming several Chinese offensives near the island of Zhenbao in spite of their overwhelming numbers with ratios up to 1:10 Soviet to Chinese. That was possible primarily due to the technical advantage, such as then-advanced T-62 tanks.
A ceasefire was signed in 1969 - on Chinese side by the very same Zhou Enlai who called Soviets “fascists” only a year before, but the actual peace agreement was only signed in 1991. The conflict was only completely resolved in 2008 (!) when Russia ceded 340 km² of the disputed lands to China.
As you can see, contrary to the mythology carefully constructed by modern “geopolitical realists”, there’s nothing constant in Russian or Soviet policies. Russia can not always win armed conflicts, it can cede territories and in general conflicts can be won in spite of imbalance of power. Oh, and calling others “fascists” was used by everyone and Russia was both an user and a recipient of this nomination.
Remembering the ethnic cleansing, massacres and Zionist terrorism that lead to the creation of #Israel which remains to this day a pariah state and a plague on the Middle East and the world.
After 75 years of failure, one would imagine that a people would learn what works and what doesn’t, both from their own experience, as well as the experience of others.
For the #Arabs, the defeat in this war was and remains a searing trauma.
Not only had the goal that had united the Arabs in 1948—preventing the establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the #Arab#MiddleEast—been thwarted, but hundreds of thousands of Arabs living in #Palestine had been displaced by war.
In time, their #displacement became the enduring image of that defeat and humiliation.
Listen, all you Anglophone leftists who think about the world in post-colonial terms:
Palestinians are not "indigenous". There are no indigenous people in the Jordan valley, the regionhas been colonised again and again by one empire after another for thousands of years, dating back to the late Stone Age. Jews and Palestinians are close cousins, you can see in their genetic markers that today's Jews aren't very different from other inhabitants of that region.
🧵 #MiddleEast#Israel#Palestine
The #Biden admin has concluded it is “reasonable to assess” that #Israel’s military campaign in #Gaza has violated #InternationalLaw, but has not found specific instances that would justify the withholding of #military aid, #State Dept told #Congress Fri.
In the admin’s most detailed assessment of #Israel’s conduct in #Gaza, #State said in a written report to #Congress that Israel “has the knowledge, experience & tools to implement best practices for mitigating #civilian harm in its #military operations.”
But it added that “the results on the ground, including high levels of civilian casualties, raise substantial questions” as to whether the #IDF are using them sufficiently.
The report said that conclusion was based in part on the difficulty of collecting reliable information from the #war zone & the way #Hamas operates in densely populated areas. It also stressed that #Israel has begun the process of seeking accountability for possible violations of the #law, a key component in the #UnitedStates assessment about whether to provide #military aid to allies accused of #HumanRights violations.