This Friday, on the first Good Friday of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV entered the Colosseum in Rome to begin the Via Crucis. The new 70-year-old pope decided to carry the cross through all 14 stations of the Way of the Cross, holding it up in front of his face for nearly two hours as he prayed “for victims of war, the defense of human dignity, the despairing, and the lonely.”

A chilling sight, seeing the new Pope walking the Way of the Cross where early Christians were martyred.

Talk about a powerful moment. For Christianity? Humanity?

This marks the first time a pope carried the cross for every station in more than three decades. Pope John Paul II was the last pope to do so, carrying the cross from 1980 to 1994.

When asked about his decision to carry the cross for all 14 stations, Pope Leo told reporters he saw it as a sign the world needed right now:

“I think it will be an important sign because of what the pope represents, a spiritual leader today in the world, for this voice that everyone wants to hear to say that Christ still suffers, and I carry all these sufferings too in my prayer.”

Pope Leo extended an invitation to all people, regardless of faith:

“I would like to invite all people of goodwill, all people of faith, all Christians to walk together, to walk with Christ who suffered for us to give salvation, life, and to seek how we may also be bearers of peace and not of hatred.”

Per OSV News, the meditations for this year’s Via Crucis celebration were written by Father Francesco Patton, who formerly served as custos of the Holy Land and drew on his experience walking the historical Way of the Cross through the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, describing it in both Jesus’ time and today as “a chaotic, distracting and noisy environment, surrounded by people who share our faith in him, but also by those who deride or insult him.”

Biblical parallel that’s somehow still accepted in 2026.

In this way, Father Patton said, the Via Crucis parallels how every Christian is called to incarnate faith, hope, and charity in the real world “where the believer faces ongoing challenges and must constantly strive to imitate Jesus.”

Do you see where I’m going with this? I mean, it’s Easter Sunday, the text and the context are practically writing themselves.

What kind of believer are you?

Each of the 14 stations of the Via Crucis Pope Leo walked in Rome’s Colosseum included a Scripture reading, a quotation from St. Francis, a meditation by Father Patton, and a short introspective litany.

Meditation for the first station:

“Jesus is condemned to death,” called leaders of every kind to account, with Father Patton writing that every person in authority will answer to God in the Last Judgment for how they exercise power, including “the power to judge; the power to start or end a war; the power to instill violence or peace; the power to fuel the desire for revenge or for reconciliation; the power to use the economy to oppress people or to liberate them from misery.”

The tenth station:

“Jesus is stripped of his garments,” drew a sharp connection between Christ’s humiliation and contemporary violations of human dignity. The meditations cited authoritarian regimes that force prisoners to remain half-naked in bare cells, torturers who tear away not only clothing but skin and flesh, sexual abusers who reduce victims to objects, and an entertainment industry that “exploits nudity for the sake of profit.”

The meditation concluded with a call to conversion, “Remind us, Lord, that each time we fail to recognize the dignity of others, our own dignity is diminished.”

The eleventh station:

“Jesus is nailed to the cross,” offered a meditation on the nature of true power in the eyes of God. “You show that true power is not that of those who use force and violence to impose themselves, but that of those who are capable of taking upon themselves the evil of humanity — ours, mine — and destroying it with the power of love that is manifest in forgiveness.”

The litany prayers that followed each meditation gave voice to a wide range of human suffering.

The eighth station:

“Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem,” the crowd prayed to “weep over the devastation of war” and “for massacres and genocides.”

OSV News reports that, throughout the evening, prayers were offered for political prisoners, for people searching for the ultimate meaning of life, for those suffering from addiction, for children whose childhoods have been stolen, for victims of trafficking, for the poor stripped of their dignity, for migrants and refugees, for the lonely, for mothers who have lost children and for those who die alone.

This was all lovely. In theory.

I’m a Roman Catholic. I don’t really practice my religion. I dabble in it. If you want to read about my (funny-ish) religious journey, check it out below.

Every Easter, for the past three years, I share the same post on social media with the same caption that says:

Wishing you a blessed Good Friday. Today, your horoscope and your Christian faith tell you to commemorate Jesus’ crucifixion by speaking out on the injustices in Gaza and today’s crucifying of an entire group of people at the birthplace of your favorite religious leader, because that’s the best possible way to honor him, your religion & your beliefs.

This year, I added the bombing of the sovereign state of Iran in an illegal war of conquest and the bombing of civilian infrastructures in Southern Lebanon to my yearly Good Friday post.

Every Easter, this post steers some trouble. People feel called out. And that is my intention. Every Easter or Christmas, when people dial up their Christian sentiments online, those sentiments, I feel, should be confronted with the reality of a live-streamed genocide, occupation, invasions of sovereign countries, and illegitimate wars of conquest filling our screens.

But I mostly do it to provoke religious people into translating their beliefs into actual words and tangible actions, especially now, in the times of unimaginable violence and impunity.

Does your God approve of this?

As I’m writing this, I took a short break to check my Instagram, and the first thing that filled my screen was two stories posted by a friend of mine: his favorite uncle, killed by an IDF bomb in a civilian village in southern Lebanon. On Easter morning. Just like that, a life that meant so much to someone, gone within minutes. Because people who already have land need more land. My heart sank.

What do you say to someone directly affected by the biblical prophecy of the cult next door?

Every year, I share my Easter post to see how people respond, how believers react, and whether anything changes — to see whether the scale of carnage we’ve been witnessing will move those who remain unmoved by the annihilation of people far away, people who don’t look like them or pray like them.

I’ve been busting my brain for the past three years trying to understand how a religious person can witness this level of suffering, carnage, death, torture, rape, dehumanization, man-made starvation, and medieval brutality, and remain unmoved. Or worse, justify it.

And I came up with nothing but — exceptionalism.

Religion, at its core, is sold to us as a belief rooted in principles of compassion, humility, and service to the oppressed and the less fortunate. Yet exceptionalism, by its nature, fosters superiority and exclusivity, making it an oxymoron when paired with the teachings of most religious doctrines.

So why do they go hand in hand so seamlessly? Why do so many religious people find themselves caught in a sense of exceptionalism, the belief that their faith or cultural identity places them above others?

A weapon.

This contradiction is precisely what turns a tool for unity into a force of division, and more often than not, into an actual weapon, as we see in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and across Africa.

Are people too naive to think this tension highlights how religious identity, when warped by exceptionalism, has strayed too far from its intended purpose? Or has this distortion always been a central feature of religion, wielded throughout history as a shield for those who subjugate others?

As I was breaking down the relationship between religion and exceptionalism for this piece, I came across an interview with George Galloway that filled in the gaps for me. George, as always, hits the mark:

“I honestly can’t understand how anyone can look at the pictures and videos that I’m looking at (carnage in Gaza) and come to any other conclusion, unless you believe in exceptionalism, unless you believe that some of us are more exceptional than others, some of us are chosen, therefore some of us by definition are not. I believe that all of us are God’s children, that none of us are exceptional, that none of us are God’s chosen people, that we are all God’s chosen people. We need to make a world that is fair and equitable.”

Exceptionalism is tricky.

It doesn’t reside solely among the privileged, the successful, the affluent, or the well-connected. It manifests in many forms. I’ve seen it among friends from humble beginnings who still believe that their European heritage, Western ideals, and lifestyle represent what the entire world should aspire to.

Arnaud Bertrand once asked himself if religion is either a legitimizing instrument of power — a crown on its head — or a thorn in power's side, standing with the powerless?

Whether we believe in God or not, we embody something greater, and it’s up to us to define that essence. Are we ready to acknowledge that we are all interconnected as part of the human race, and that nothing we hold dear should take precedence over the well-being of others?

Trump and his gang of criminals, driven by their partner — a biblically deranged cult in the Middle East — have pushed us toward a decade of economic uncertainty, and for those less geographically fortunate, toward death. We will all be affected by this war.

The marriage of religion and exceptionalism must be examined and checked daily, and I am not inclined to entertain those who use “their Christianity” to justify racial supremacy or to deflect from the injustices that sustain their privilege.

Everyone who has been paying attention over the past three years can see how often religion is used to legitimize power. Jesus Christ, whose resurrection is being celebrated today, preached humility, compassion, and care for the marginalized — values that stand in direct opposition to the priorities of modern power structures. Yet his teachings are constantly repurposed and commercialized to serve political agendas, including those that justify or accompany imperial wars.

The fact that the entire planet is now at the mercy of economic and geopolitical collapse, mass death and destruction, and even the threat of nuclear warheads, led by Christian Zionists, which contradicts the core teachings of Christianity, is a tragic consequence of bad theology.

Theological crisis.

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor, laid out this theological crisis forcefully in his sermon, “Christ is Still in the Rubble,” live from Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem in Dec 2024. He touches on what has been weighing on all of us: how can religious, church-going Christians stay silent on a live-streamed genocide in Gaza? And even worse, how can they support it?

Bombing civilian villages in South Lebanon and taking their land? Bombing Iran, a sovereign nation, in the middle of the negotiations, twice? Massacring 168 of their schoolgirls? 20 teenage female Volleyball players in a gymnasium? Does their God approve of this?

Key points from his speech worth pondering on:

“This is the result of an exclusionary mentality. Even God, we have made tribal, exclusionary, and selective — a God of one people at the expense of another, one religion over another, one nation over another. In our human racism, we have made God a racist!”

We have made God a racist. Have you ever heard anything so essential?

“Palestine is a human and moral cause, and for the church, it is a theological crisis. It’s about the credibility of our witness; it’s here that we come face to face with the tragic consequences of bad theology. Actually, this is much more than bad theology or even ideology. Zionism and Christian Zionism are ideologies of supremacy; it is racism.”

“Zionism and Christian Zionism turned God into a racist tribal deity of their own image. So we must call things for what they are, and today we also acknowledge all those who stood on the side of justice and truth. All those who said no to dehumanization, many of whom paid the heavy price.”

“Every Herod will pass, every Caesar will fade, for empires have an expiry date.⁠”

“And let us remember that according to Jesus, it is the meek, not the powerful, who inherit the land. In our pain and oppression, we might feel that death has the final word, that Herod is sovereign. But through the eyes of faith, we see that God has the final word.”

If you’re a Christian, does your God approve of this? Be honest with yourself. You’ve seen it all. How can you still justify this?

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I wrote an International Women’s Day poem in 2024, and I’ve been posting it every year since. It’s always current, always fitting — nothing seems to change. The world has descended into a permanent state of imperial stupor, so it always applies. It goes like this:

This year, I feel like expanding it, given the sheer Western arrogance of this moment — Women, Life, Freedom in action. “Help is on the way, Iran,” claim US and Israeli politicians, activists, influencers, and Iranian diaspora hasbarists; liberation underway, one bomb at a time, war openly marketed as feminism, and the liberation of the Iranian people.

Over the past two years, we watched Palestinian and Lebanese women face levels of violence, displacement, and trauma unimaginable to the rest of us. Entire families wiped out. Mothers and daughters buried under rubble. Hospitals and maternity destroyed.

Yet these women rarely appear in the speeches of the same politicians or social media posts of the people who suddenly invoke feminism when discussing Iran. Like we haven’t witnessed it, livestreamed, on our phones. Women’s rights are not universal principles. They are geopolitical talking points.

Liberating Iran.

This March, a week into the US and Israeli bombing of Iran, waking up every day to watch the Orientalist myth of “saving Muslim women from their oppressors” play out by dropping bombs on their schools and killing 168 of their children has been a hard pill to stomach.

I’m sick and tired of the language of women’s rights being repurposed every time the Western empire needs to justify wars and geopolitical violence against its adversaries around the world.

Bombs are humanitarian. Military strikes are feminist acts. And the Epstein class of pedophiles and sex traffickers controlling the US government now pose as guardians of oppressed women abroad to justify the imperial domination of the resource-rich Middle East.

We aren’t angry enough, people. They are taking us for fools.

Women, Life, Freedom.

Looks like they went down to the basement and dusted off the Women, Life, Freedom movement, right on schedule. Only when convenient. Only when it serves the Empire, and the Iranian diaspora Zionists.

Diaspora monarchists, Zionists, Washington neo-cons, Israel-first warmongers, and the Epstein class pedophiles grabbed the Women, Life, Freedom movement from the shelf, fronting as the champions of women’s rights, cheering the first two bombs dropped on an Iranian school, massacring 168 girls, and on a gymnasium, massacring 20 female teenage volleyball players.

There’s not a single mainstream media outlet that has published a story about a volleyball massacre. Drop Site News gave it some justice.

Saving Muslim women.

The Women, Life, Freedom movement emerged organically from the experiences of Iranian women confronting their own government and their own social constraints. It was a movement rooted in local agency. It has no business being hijacked by the pedophile class now feigning moral superiority.

Western governments have long justified intervention in the Middle East through a narrative that casts Muslim women as victims waiting to be rescued. The storyline is always the same: Muslim women are oppressed by their backwards culture, religion, and by men around them. Western powers must step in as liberators.

Liberators who preside over Western societies plagued by sexual violence, trafficking, exploitation, child abuse, and deep structural inequality. Liberated by the militaries that carry their own documented histories of abuse, including rape and sexual violence during occupations.

What did the US army do to women in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or to their female colleagues? What did the Israeli army do to women in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Israeli Detention Facilities?

The irony is obscene.

Marketing war as feminism.

Today, on International Women’s Day, the Israeli Defence Forces released a video of a female IDF soldier proclaiming, “As a woman, I’m not here to watch history from the side. I’m here to build it.”

A remarkable reach, and a signature of the most moral army in the world, which has vaporized close to 700,000 human beings in Gaza in the past two and a half years.

After everything we’ve seen come out of that society, what’s a little more purplewashing? Cloaking military action and the massacre of civilians in the language of gender equality, while concealing the suffering those actions produce.

The message is grotesque: our women participate in war equally, so our wars and our massacres are morally validated. Our female soldiers are commanders and pilots; we are a society with progressive values, unlike those backward barbarians we’re bombing into civilization.

The erasure of women’s agency.

The most damaging aspect of the saving Muslim women narrative is that it erases the agency of the very women it claims to defend. It portrays them as weak, oppressed, and in need of rescue, while simultaneously casting Arab men as inherently violent and oppressive.

Women are framed as helpless victims, we must bomb the country to save them; and men are dangerous enemies, we can kill them, they are terrorists. It is a brilliantly nefarious equation, long cultivated by the West and Israel to justify their imperial pursuits.

In reality, women across the Middle East have long histories of activism and political resistance. They have organised movements, led protests, fought authoritarianism, and challenged patriarchal structures within their own societies. Leila Khaled, anyone?

From Palestinian resistance movements to Iranian student activism, women in the region have repeatedly taken leading roles in struggles for justice. Western power structures have been able to sustain their lies about the Middle East for so long because of the Islamophobia deliberately planted in Western minds.

Yet Western narratives portray these women as passive victims waiting for outside salvation. If women are helpless, intervention becomes morally justified. If they are active political actors, the argument collapses.

Their struggle has never required scripts written in Washington or London to justify imperial supervision.

Accusation as strategy.

As I already mentioned, the idea of saving women relies on another stereotype about Middle Eastern men: that they are uniquely violent, backward, and oppressive. It serves several purposes at once. It justifies violence against those men, undermines their legitimate armed resistance to occupation by labeling it terrorism and extremism, and feeds the belief in Western moral superiority.

Western moral superiority, now plagued by the Epstein files. A ruling class entangled in pedophilia, sex trafficking, and exploitation wants to lecture the world about domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender inequality.

The myth that patriarchy belongs to other cultures is comforting to the West. It allows us to avoid confronting our own failures. Patriarchy is not a regional trait. It is a global system.

And the violence exported through imperial wars rarely stays contained abroad. It returns home through militarised policing, surveillance, and a political culture increasingly comfortable with dehumanisation.

The same societies that claim to protect women overseas shoot their own women in the face for protesting ICE violence, then lie about it to the public.

Whose Feminism?

International Women’s Day should be a moment to reflect on solidarity across borders. And solidarity requires honesty.

Unlike dishonest Iranian diaspora Zionists and monarchists who cheer the bombing of their own people “for freedom and democracy,” we need to stay on point: women around the world do not need bombs dropped in their name. They do not need their struggles instrumentalized for the geopolitical narratives of a biblically deranged Western ruling class.

If the language of women’s rights is to mean anything, it cannot be selectively deployed to justify war while ignoring violence produced by the very same policies.

Women around the world need the freedom to define their own struggles, their own movements, and their own futures. And that freedom begins with rejecting the idea that empire has anything to do with liberation. Empire does not liberate. It devastates.

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The Berlinale stage is not a neutral living room. It’s one of the most visible cultural platforms in the world, where silence is not accidental. Also, a tiny reminder — there is no such thing as “apolitical art.”

Every film, every performance, every red-carpet moment, every acceptance speech carries the fingerprints of the political world that produced it.

This year’s Berlin Film Festival is a parade of spineless, apolitical cowards posing as artists. It’s hard to comprehend the pile of nonsense that came out of so many mouths over the past couple of days.

Being an artist, standing on one of the world’s largest stages, at one of the most political festivals, backed by a government funding an ongoing genocide — while living through deadly ICE protests in the U.S., the Epstein scandal, a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, genocide in Sudan, human rights violations and sexual violence in Congo, and the rise of fascism in the UK, the U.S., and Germany — and then declare, “I choose to keep my work apolitical.”

As if that were possible.

As if culture floats above power.

As if silence is neutral.

Cowards.

At the press conference for filmmaker George Jaques’ Sunny Dancer, Bella Ramsey and Neil Patrick Harris were asked by a journalist whether they consider their “art to be political, and if so, how can movies these days help fight the rise of fascism in Europe and in America.”

Neil Patrick Harris: “I think we live in a strangely algorithmic and divided world right now. And so as artists, I’m always interested in doing things that are apolitical, because we’re all as humans wanting to connect in some way. That’s why we experience things together.”

George Jaques: “I think sometimes the most rebellious thing you can do is be optimistic. And we wanted to make a film about joy. I think, you know, there’s so much going on in the world right now, and I wanted to make something that really takes you somewhere else.”

Bella Ramsey: “Sunny Dancer was honestly, like, the best experience I’ve had in my career so far. It will be very hard to top. It’s a big statement, but it was probably the best professional six weeks, and also one of the best personal six weeks, of my frickin’ life.”

Journalists at the Sunny Dancer presser, bless their souls, wouldn’t be deterred. A writer from German broadcaster ZDF asked Harris, as a U.S. citizen, whether he “dared criticize the U.S. government and whether he believes democracy is in danger in the U.S.” The Berlinale moderator then interjected that the question “wasn’t relevant to Sunny Dancer.”

Neil Patrick Harris added he would rather discuss the film, saying: “I make my own choices as a performer, as an artist … I feel more the jester in the castle. So while I have my own political opinions, which are my own, I think as a performer, especially in this kind of movie, it’s trying to be as inclusive as possible to as many people as possible. So I never read this script as a political statement.”

The journalist from ARD broadcaster responded: “It’s embarrassing to say the film isn’t political. Without proper health insurance, I wouldn’t be here. I had cancer myself. So the film is political, and this festival must be political.”

Heroes.

Unlike Ethan Hawke, who just a few days ago said, “Anything that fights fascism, I’m all for it, fascism is on the rise in Europe and the U.S.,” but at the Berlinale stage, where it mattered, resorted to: "I feel like there's a slight agenda to your question that is different to my agenda. But I respect you and I respect the question."

At his press conference, Rupert Grint explained he’s against fascism, but the biggest festival stage on earth is not the moment where he thinks he should talk about it, then said: “Obviously, I’m against it. But I choose my moments when to speak.”

During her press conference, Michele Yeoh chose to say: “I don’t think I am in the position to really talk about the political situation in the U.S., and also I cannot presume to say I understand how it is," she said. "So, best not to talk about something I don’t know about. I think I want to concentrate on what is important for us, which is cinema.”

Jury.

Jury president Wim Wenders, producer Ewa Puszczyńska, and festival director Tricia Tuttle gave the most embarrassing examples of artists pretending art is apolitical for their own comfort.

At the opening jury press conference, the live feed cut out as a German journalist asked a question about why Berlinale had shown support for people in Iran and Ukraine, but never for Palestine, a fitting disruption for a festival in a country whose government is funding that genocide while beating and imprisoning its own citizens for protesting it:

“My question is, in light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you, as a member of the jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?”

At this moment, the live feed went down, cutting the live broadcast in the middle of a journalist's question.

The answer that came from Ewa Puszczyńska, the producer of Cold War and The Zone of Interest, two films about war and genocide, was the most shocking:

“Asking us this question is a little bit unfair… we use the word ‘change the world’ but we are trying to talk to people, every single viewer, and to make them think, but we cannot be responsible for what their decision would be to support Israel … to support Palestine.

We can talk about Senegal and all the other wars, you know, you just pointed [to] the most, the biggest, but there are many other wars where genocide is committed and we do not talk about that. So this is very complicated questions … And I think, as I said, it’s a bit unfair asking us what we think, how we support, or not support, or are talking to our governments or not.”

“I’m speaking for myself I go to elections. I go, I vote using my right as a citizen of Poland, as a citizen of Europe, of the world. I go to marches, I support causes which I think I should support. But all of us here may have other things and take other decisions. So I think asking us these questions and expecting the general kind of answer is not fair.”

Jury president Wim Wenders also attempted to shut down the question about genocide and human rights, saying:

“We cannot really enter the field of politics. We have to stay out of politics because if we made movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics … We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics, we have to do the work of people — not the work of politicians.”

The myth of the apolitical artist.

For decades, artists have been allowed to position themselves as “just storytellers.” As if storytelling does not define who is human, who is a villain, and who is disposable.

Art has always legitimized power, challenged power, normalized violence, built empathy, erased empathy, shaped national myths, and rehearsed political futures.

The idea of the apolitical artist is a fiction that protects comfort.

When fascism rises, and artists claim neutrality, what they are really protecting is access: to funding, to markets, to institutions, to safety.

Culture precedes policy.

Before laws change, culture shifts. Before a regime consolidates power, stories prepare the ground. Before people accept cruelty, they are taught who deserves it.

Cinema does this. Television does this. Literature does this. Culture trains emotional reflexes long before anyone reads a manifesto.

So when artists on global stages refuse to imagine a better world — refuse even to acknowledge the one unraveling in front of them — they are not staying out of politics. They are participating in it through omission.

Platforms carry responsibility.

Berlinale is not a private dinner conversation. It is one of the most significant cultural stages in the world. An actor may say, “I’m here to talk about my film.” But the film exists inside history. The industry exists inside geopolitics. The festival exists inside a political climate.

To pretend otherwise is aesthetic minimalism masquerading as moral restraint.

No one is asking artists to become policy experts.

But to say nothing, in an era openly flirting with authoritarianism, is not humility. It is a refusal to imagine a better world for all.

Art lost its moral force when it lost its nerve.

For years, mainstream art cultivated a tone: aesthetic, poetic, detached, safely humanist. The artist was meant to be visionary but never confrontational. Profound but never implicated. Empathetic but never specific.

This produced a generation of artists who explore trauma but avoid naming perpetrators, depict oppression but refuse to confront authoritarianism, celebrate “humanity” while violence unfolds in real time, and accept awards on global stages while declining to acknowledge the forces shaping the world around them.

Art lost moral teeth when artists were encouraged to stay in the realm of feeling, not responsibility.

But the world changed, and many artists did not.

The artists who matter now are the ones who refuse the fiction.

The artists who resonate today are the ones who understand that storytelling is not decorative. It is formative.

They are willing to connect their work to the world, acknowledge the systems that fund and distribute them, speak clearly about dehumanization, defend democracy without irony, and imagine futures that resist brutality.

Art has always been political — not because it waves slogans, but because it shapes perception. When artists claim neutrality, they misunderstand their own power.

And when they step onto a stage like Berlinale, they are already participating in the cultural architecture of the moment.

The question is not whether art is political. The question is whether artists are willing to admit it.

We live in a world where the separation between culture and politics has collapsed. Culture is politics. Politics is cultural. Narratives shape ideology more effectively than legislation. On a stage as large as Berlinale, refusing to engage is not modesty. It is a choice.

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Angelina Jolie, Louis Garrel, and the cast of Couture attended the film’s premiere at Pathé Palace in Paris. Louis and Angelina are rumored to be dating. The comments on social media flooded in: “She could be his mother.” “She’s too old for him.” “He should run.”

Angelina is 50 years old, Louis is 42.

I’ve been seeing this kind of commentary for years on the posts of many famous women over 45 — Kate Beckinsale, Sienna Miller, Heidi Klum, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and others. These comments are usually made by very young women, often sounding angry about how these women dress, how active they are on social media, how playful they are in their posts — but especially when they date younger men.

When I see men leaving these comments, I don’t flinch. They’re so obviously bitter and pathetic — a statistic that doesn’t deserve our time, no matter how ridiculous they sound.

But when women do this, it hurts me.

How can we do this to eachother, given everything that exists on this earth is constantly against us?

Internalized ageism, repackaged as concern.

What’s happening here?

Just take a look at some of these comments directed at Angelina:

@vanityfairfrance

Vanity Fair France on Instagram: "Louis Garrel, Angelina Jolie,…

I attempted to examine this phenomenon of women behaving this way toward women older than them — check out the post below to understand the response it attracted. 1 million views, over 2,000 comments, over 7,000 shares.

@mirandavidak

MIRANDA VIDAK on Instagram: "A few words on ageism."

What is happening with this youth panic disguised as morality?

Why does a woman living freely bother other (younger) women so much?

It’s because a woman who ages without apology unsettles the fantasy.

It goes deeper.

As I already said, this youth panic, disguised as morality, is age anxiety projected outward. It’s self-hatred on delay.

The fear isn’t age, it’s freedom. It’s the audacity to be with a younger man.

These are the same young women who insist they’re progressive, liberal, and pro-choice, then suddenly become guardians of who women are allowed to date once they cross an invisible age line.

This isn’t about concern. It’s internalized ageism dressed up as judgment. A belief quietly absorbed early on — that a woman’s value peaks young, and anything after that is embarrassing, predatory, or sad. Seeing an older woman desired and unapologetic about it threatens that narrative.

If women don’t expire on schedule, then youth stops being a guarantee. And that’s unsettling. The real discomfort isn’t her age — it’s her freedom. A woman who keeps living, dating, breathing, and taking up space long past the moment she was supposed to disappear.

Again, why is this happening?

It’s a mix of social conditioning, fear, and competition, and not something innate.

It’s because patriarchy teaches women that their value expires. From a young age, women are told youth = worth. Older women who are visible, confident, desired, or free directly threaten that lie.

It’s because of internalized misogyny. Instead of questioning the system that pits women against time, some younger women turn that anxiety outward and police other women.

It’s the scarcity mindset around men. Culture frames male attention as limited and something women must compete for. An older woman who doesn’t “step aside” disrupts that narrative.

It’s the fear of their own future. Seeing older women living fully forces a confrontation with aging, and many respond with denial or hostility rather than curiosity and reflection.

It’s social media distortion. Algorithms reward youth obsession, mockery, and cruelty. Ageist jokes get likes; empathy doesn’t trend as easily.

The irony?

Ageism toward older women is self-hatred on a delay. Every younger woman who mocks aging is rehearsing how she herself will be treated later, unless she chooses to unlearn it.

Older women aren’t the problem. Or your competition. The system that taught women to fear becoming one is.

For some younger women, ageism becomes a way to enforce the rules and feel temporarily safe within them. The irony is harsh: every ageist insult aimed at older women is a rehearsal for how society may one day treat them.

A woman left an interesting comment on my Instagram post about this subject — something I hadn’t given much thought to before. She said that many of these young women spewing ageist bile toward older women grow up to become older women who resent very young girls. I thought about it and realized I grew up around a few girlfriends who were openly angry in our early twenties when boys they liked chose older women. Today, those same women smirk at very young women.

That cycle of hell sent shivers down my spine. It has to be our mission in life, however hard it may be to contain your emotions or your regret, to never allow yourself to become either of those examples. A woman, at any age, is the only person who understands exactly what you went through and what you will go through.

We simply have to break this cycle.

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For the past two years, like anyone with a talent for words and a functioning conscience, I wrote about power. I wrote about wars, genocides, cruelty, violence, and the cost of bearing witness. That cost was high for me. I lost myself in the process. I became a shell of a human being — waking up every day to frantically research the latest atrocity that had happened while I slept, taking notes, consuming, sourcing, reliving it in my bones so I could put it on paper and pass the information on. I haven’t slept properly in two years; I was napping, researching, writing — rinse, repeat.

I stopped writing about myself, and in doing so, I stopped examining myself. I stopped caring for myself. I stopped examining the world; the art, music, and craft I had loved and written about for most of my life.

Live genocide, streamed daily on our phones, paralyzed me.

How do you write about your life, culture, movies, film, books, relationships, love, and tell all these beautiful stories while children are being shredded to pieces?

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I was blocked, and I was angry at my government for telling me this is normal. I have been researching, taking notes, saving, listening, reading, taking more notes, writing, and reporting on what I have learned to others, to the level of mental and physical exhaustion that became my constant. My permanent state.

I’m proud of what I have built on Antagolist and how many of you use it as a guideline, and a source of information, a take, an opinion, a breakdown, through these violent times. I have built a community of great people whom I discovered throughout this injustice — and if you are one of them reading this now, I’m grateful for you and our dialogues about dignity, community, and liberation. You keep me sane.

I won’t stop dismantling these systems with my words.

What I realized, though, is that I gave myself so fully to the work of breaking down the house of cards that funds and sustains such violence that I lost myself in the process. For the past two years, I felt as though I were outside my body, looking in — waiting for the nightmare to end so I could return to myself. And to my life.

I think it’s clear to all of us that this won’t be ending anytime soon. The atrocities keep piling up, growing bolder and more blatant, and by now we’ve learned how to live with a permanent fight-or-flight mode switched on.

Joy is resistance.

Around Thanksgiving, my Canadian friend told me to watch this new Canadian show, Heated Rivalry. I instantly said no. I removed the TV from my room so I could focus on writing and didn’t have time or focus to binge-watch anything. I had too many unfinished articles to work on and barely made time as it is.

But she insisted. Life-changing, she said.

For the past two years, I haven’t been able to write about anything beyond the constant stream of injustice, death, and manufactured narratives. There was no room left for anything else while mass suffering played out in real time, normalized and justified before our eyes.

I kept waiting for something, anything, that could pull me out of that paralysis, disrupt the despair, and remind me why storytelling still matters. But for a long time, nothing did.

I never imagined that the antidote to two years of genocide, permanent war, propaganda, and political decay would be two men fucking their way toward love.

I didn’t seek out this show for comfort. I wasn’t in the mood to be softened. I was exhausted, like everyone else, bracing for the next headline confirming how bad things were getting (are).

But it touched me. It sobered me up. It woke me up.

Love as counter-programming.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the mind-blowingly realistic depiction of sex turned into romance. It was the relief of realizing my nervous system hadn’t been lying to me all along — that I still knew the difference between something real and something manufactured.

We’re told, day after day, to accept stories that don’t match what we can see. That violence is unfortunate but necessary. That dissent is dangerous. That empathy is naive. That obedience is patriotism.

It’s all bullshit. They drained the joy out of us, and joy is resistance. Tenderness is resistance. They bombarded us with so much violence and cruelty that we began to accept it as a permanent state. The depravity they hurl at us daily is what numbs us, turning us into shells of human beings.

This little Canadian low-budget show snapped us all out of this despair.

Storytelling as recalibration.

Much of today’s culture is built for speed and profit. Stories are made to be easy to consume, not to stay with us. When everything is built on narrative, honest narrative becomes insurgent.

That is why a love story between two hockey players can matter more than a thousand prestige dramas engineered to launder power. That is why we all responded so intensely to something that simply feels honest. And that is why this show landed so precisely, and landed now — not as escape, but as recalibration.

It reminds us all how truth feels in the body.

Staying sane in this time of absolute, unchecked power, cruelty, injustice, and lawlessness means learning how to see clearly without being consumed by what we see. This moment isn’t asking for panic, but for coherence. And staying sane means filling your body with joy — music, craft, art, all the beauty life can still offer, despite the depravity we’re subjected to.

Returning to myself.

I have been exceptionally joyful these past two months, even as I continue to feel the cruelty we’re subjected to every day. I continue to witness the unabashed violence our government commits at home and abroad, analyze it, and write about it — but I counter it with JOY. I make sure to take in enough beautiful things to remain human, capable of feeling happiness, desire, love, lust, wonder, curiosity, kindness, and tenderness.

And it healed me.

I have more clarity and more strength to fight the unchecked power more precisely than ever before.

And I want to continue on this new (normal) path. I opened a Patreon account to start writing about myself again — unrestricted, unstructured trains of thought that help me examine my own consciousness and reclaim my truth.

I want to return to writing about the beautiful things that keep us human — the films I love to watch, the music I listen to, the books I read. I want to talk about love, real or on screen, about connection and self-examination. I want to laugh, to be joyful and silly. And I wholeheartedly reject letting the psychopaths in power turn me into a shell of the person I was for two years straight.

Staying true to yourself and your humanity, despite the horrors being committed in the world, is the greatest act of resistance and a middle finger to those trying to make you unfeeling.

Join me in this space.

William Faulkner once said that the only thing worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Whether we’re examining the real or the fictional, the truth is the same. Fiction is written from someone’s lived experience. And in a world that makes less and less sense, where violence is committed unchecked, where power toys with us through its depravity, the only thing that truly makes sense is connection with another human being.

The only thing that fully and absolutely makes sense, and is worth living for, is love.

And I, for one, want to exist in that space.

Hope you share it with me.

Head out to my Patreon, and subscribe — it’s going to be my personal space, a platform where I’ll be writing about us, me and you, and all the beautiful, joyous things still happening in this world.

I’ll also be sharing excerpts from my book (still in progress), as well as essays that will be published as part of an essay collection — all centered on love, acceptance, desire, and self-examination.

Antagolist will, as always, continue to interrogate power — examining the structures that shape our politics and our culture, and remaining a space for analysis, refusal, and the reclaiming of reality.

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Hi, folks. Three weeks into 2026, and wow. Checking in on you, and myself in the process. The first few days of the new year, along with the 2025 holiday season, felt promising.

What a beautiful thing it was to wake up on New Year’s Day and celebrate the inauguration of Mayor Mamdani — the joy, the hope, the inclusivity, the clarity of both the man and the message, all sprinkled with confetti as the final words were spoken, coming right after the high of a Heated Rivalry Christmas.

The year started strong, and we’ll hold on to that hope no matter what. Anything else would be capitulating to power — and we’re not the bending kind. Unless we choose to bend for things far more pleasurable than letting the government fuck us in the ass.

Did anyone truly believe we’d get a whole week into the new year without state violence, lightly seasoned with yet another breach of international law? I did. I was riding the high on my Mayor / Cottage crossover, and I foolishly believed we might have a chance of catching a breath.

And after two years of struggling to find my own sense of meaning, living in a country in perpetual decline, I was determined not to let 2026 be taken from me in the same way.

No can do, said the crime syndicate, pretending to be your government.

Only three days into the new year, and it’s already Grand Theft Venezuela — snatching presidents of foreign, sovereign countries to steal their resources, all in service of attacking another, bigger, badder enemy that threatens the ethnostate we’ve been propping up since 1948.

Only two weeks into the new year, and it’s the Israelization of the U.S. in full swing — IDF, sorry, my bad — ICE shooting citizens on the street, taking out nurses documenting violence and cruelty.

Bearing witness.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being a writer today — one that has nothing to do with motivation or creative block. It is the exhaustion of bearing witness. The cost of it.

When you just consume information, you read it, possibly share it — and it leaves you. I take that back: if you have a strong moral compass, it never fully leaves you. But you don’t have to sit inside it the way someone does who has to live in it — who has to stay with it long enough to research it, source it, and write about it.

And bearing witness, in this moment, is not a passive act. It is an active, grinding labor carried out in a world that produces suffering faster than it can be processed.

Frends, I’m exhausted.

This is not the fatigue of consuming news. It is the fatigue of carrying it. Witnessing without pause, of being unable to look away because looking away feels like moral failure, yet looking directly feels like erosion.

By the time you finish researching one atrocity, another one has already replaced it. By the time you shape a sentence to honor the dead, the algorithm has already moved on.

Seven million pieces of information a day. This is the reality of writing now. Not writing as commentary. But writing as moral documentation.

Your anger is needed.

The other day, I received a message from someone I know. She told me she appreciates everything I’ve been doing for the past two years — posting, writing, informing people about the genocide in Palestine, U.S. aggression around the world, and ICE violence at home.

Then she added that I don’t seem as angry as I used to. That it looks like I’m able to enjoy other things too, not just write about constant violence.

I think it’s your turn to be angry — I responded. For the past two years, she never said a word about a livestreamed genocide and shared my story about it twice.

For the past two years, many of us have been saying this clearly — If you stay silent about Palestine, the violence will come home. The same government that funds genocide abroad will use the same tools here.

You didn’t listen.

You thought what was happening to the Palestinian people was far away. Someone else’s problem. Not connected to your life. But now you’re seeing those same tactics used here, at home, in the U.S.

And now you’re angry. Now you want me to be angrier, too.

I already saw the worst things human beings can do to each other. I saw children’s limbs blown apart. I saw suffering that most people chose to scroll past.

You feel angrier than I do right now because you turned away when brown bodies were being destroyed. Now, when violence reaches people who look like you, it feels like the worst thing you’ve ever seen.

For me, it isn’t.

Bearing witness for two years — really bearing witness — cost me my health, my sanity, my sense of self. That’s the price of not looking away.

So yes. It’s your turn to be angry now. Feel it. Sit with it. Carry the weight yourself.

Connection has always been there. Palestine trained us to watch horror, scroll past it, and keep going — so that when violence shows up here, it doesn’t shock us anymore.

Your anger is needed now.

My anger is spent.

Writing in the violent world.

There will always be more suffering than you can document. More injustice than you can expose. More violence than you can contextualize. The work is not to capture everything — it is to refuse the lie that nothing can be captured truthfully.

This is why writing today feels less like creation and more like triage.

And maybe that is what it means to be a writer now: not a commentator on history, but a recorder of its fractures while they are still forming. Not someone who explains the world after the fact, but someone who stands inside it while it burns and refuses to pretend the fire is normal.

Writing in this moment is an act of defiance against erasure.

If this work feels unbearable, it is because it is being done correctly.

Despite all, the work continues. Not because it is rewarded — it often isn’t. Not because it is sustainable — it often isn’t. But because bearing witness is not optional for those who understand what silence protects.

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“My fellow New Yorkers — today begins a new era.

I stand before you moved by the privilege of taking this sacred oath, humbled by the faith that you have placed in me, and honored to serve as either your 111th or 112th Mayor of New York City. But I do not stand alone.

I stand alongside you, the tens of thousands gathered here in Lower Manhattan, warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.”

It was a long way to here — a year, to be exact — since I joined the new media team of Mayor Mamdani (I cannot stop saying those two words together), helping him reach this moment, standing in –10°C weather, limbs numb by the time he came out to address us all — and the New Yorkers watching at home.

It’s strange, my mother says, the levels of energy and persistance in the midst of so much exhausting, undersleeping that is what busy life in New York is — that i’m able to find in my body to rally for this man. It’s almost subhuman, all the canwassing and rallying we accomplished, with having full time jobs, so that this city ca finally be led by a man that tryly cares about all new yorkers.

It’s strange, my mother says, the amount of energy and persistence I have, in the middle of so much exhaustion and sleep deprivation — the kind that comes with life in New York — that I’m still able to find it in my body to rally for this man.

It almost feels subhuman, all the canvassing and rallying we managed while working full-time jobs, just so this city can finally be led by a man who truly cares about all New Yorkers.

That same endurance, the kind that keeps you moving through exhaustion, cold, and lack of sleep — didn’t come from nowhere. It was forged in the past year itself.

This past year has felt like a roller coaster — a terrifying one. The kind where one limb feels like it’s hanging out of the carriage, and you’re constantly shifting your weight, trying not to fall, while the whole thing keeps moving anyway. Turn after turn, you manage to stay in. You stay in one piece. Not because you’re fearless, but because you’ve learned how to brace.

Atrocity after atrocity. Your government insisting you didn’t see what you saw. And by the time you reach the next turn, a new form of violence has already replaced the one you were just forced to absorb.

This man kept me sane through all of it. It’s astonishing what a glimmer of hope, embodied in a single person, can do to a body worn down by years of watching children’s limbs blown apart, by a government that funds it, and by a media ecosystem that insists it didn’t happen.

Hope is contagious. Once it appears, it multiplies. It spreads. And that’s precisely why Mayor Mamdani is a threat to those who depend on despair — to those who don’t want you to recognize hope when it shows up, or to believe it could grow into something real.

A era of possible futures

Let’s cling to that hope. The era of possible futures can begin with one man — and metastasize into an unstoppable force. “8 and a half million New Yorkers will speak this new era into existence. It will be loud. It will be different.”

We have to imagine it.

Every minute of this inauguration inspired me, but one thing stood out. A poem “Proof” recited by its author and poet Cornelius Eady. Read it. Cling to it. Let it consume you. You have to imagine it! This is our time.

You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark?
Too Large, too Queer, Too Loud? 
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat? 
You have to imagine it. 
Who said you must keep quiet? 
Who heard your story then rolled their eyes? 
Who tried to change your name to invisible? 
You’ve got to imagine. 
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it? 
Who checked their watch and said not now? 
James Baldwin wrote the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it. 
New York, city of invention, 
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,
New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,
New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,
Where there is always soil
For your root.
This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us, the hollers and the rhythms and the beats of us and the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are. 
City of insistence, city of resistance. 
You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet. 
A joy that wears down the rock of no. 
Up from insults up from blocked doors, up from trick bags, up from fear, up from shame, up from the way it was done before. 
You have to imagine that space they said wasn’t yours. 
That time they said you’d never own. 
The invisible city lit on its way. 
This moment is our proof.

This moment is our proof.

Let it inspire you. Let Zohran’s inaugural address motivate you into imagining a new world, hopeful world, and let’s speak it into existence.

“Together, we will tell a new story of our city.

This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the one percent. Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor.

It will be a tale of 8 and a half million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe, each of them woven together.

8 and a half million New Yorkers will speak this new era into existence. It will be loud. It will be different. It will feel like the New York we love.

No matter how long you have called this city home, that love has shaped your life. I know that it has shaped mine.

So, standing together with the wind of purpose at our backs, we will do something that New Yorkers do better than anyone else: we will set an example for the world.

If what Sinatra said is true, let us prove that anyone can make it in New York—and anywhere else too.

Let us prove that when a city belongs to the people, there is no need too small to be met, no person too sick to be made healthy, no one too alone to feel like New York is their home.

The work continues, the work endures, the work, my friends, has only just begun.”

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Welcome to In Dialogue, the new section I’m launching on Antagolist, where I’ll be speaking with creators, writers, artists, activists, and people whose work helps us understand the world more honestly. These conversations will look at power and culture, yes — but also explore the human experiences beneath everything we’re living through. My hope is that this becomes a space where readers can feel grounded, understood, and less isolated in a world that often asks us to process too much on our own.

My first edition brings you a dialogue with Tiberius, actually, we did a one-on-one with this opener as he wanted to turn the tables on me too; we have become great friends and collaborators over the past two years, and his musings about the western imperial pursuits, liberation, dignity, sanity, moral clarity on his famous Twitter handle helped me regain sanity more times than I care to admit.

Miranda on Tiberius

Miranda: First of all, how are you? I think we don’t give ourselves much credit for how hard it is to exist in this current world right now, especially all of us that are making content to inform and make sense of it all, as opposed to those just consuming information — I feel like we’re on an apocalyptic hamster wheel, exhausted, but we cannot stop; so how are you?

Are you able to find the meaning in your existence, seeing the level of violence, carnage, gashlighting, lawlessness, tyranny, genocide — how do you cope with it all? For me, writing is how I cope. I’ve been running on virtually no sleep for two years, but digging into what’s happening, breaking it down for people’s easy consumption, and sharing that information is the only thing that keeps me sane.

Tiberius: You’ve gotten to the heart of it. There’s a deep helplessness that comes with being at the mercy of massive, corrupt power structures — a feeling that becomes unbearable when those same forces start killing innocent people simply for existing.

It’s always hard to reconcile that helplessness with the everyday trivialities of life, especially in the West’s often absurdly shallow and superficial routines. But the only real relief I’ve ever found for any sense of helplessness — and it really is just a feeling — is action.

Can I end imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid today, alone? Of course not. But I can contribute to the fight, and if enough of us do, then, together, we can. History shows this clearly: the world is littered with the bones of long-dead empires. That hope, that’s what keeps me sane, too.

Miranda: October 2023 and everything that followed created a strange loophole in time — one where everyone who was appalled by what we witnessed, and instantly saw things for what they were, somehow found each other online, even as the algorithm worked against it. I see that as a miracle. Amid all the carnage flashing daily on our phones, it felt as if some mythical hand had connected us all.

I don’t remember exactly when I “found you” online, but even before we ever spoke, your tweets were a lifeline for me. Each morning, I’d wake up with that familiar wave of anxiety and hopelessness creeping in — and then I’d go on your Twitter, read what you’d written that day, and feel a flicker of hope again. Hope in people, in community, in understanding what we’re witnessing, in connecting the dots — and in having the courage to say it out loud. Many people tell me my articles made them feel hopeful, but you were that glimmer of hope and sanity for me.

Tiberius: I can only express gratitude that my words, and yours, have been of some small use to those on our side of the line. Finding you, and others — too many to mention here — revealed to me that there remains, in the belly of the beast, where propaganda is more prevalent than air, a defiant, shared humanity within so many of us.

That’s why our helplessness is undeniably merely a perception. A cry for people of all nationalities, cultures, and religions to be treated with the basic dignities we ourselves enjoy and continue to fight for is built into the foundations of who most of us are. They — the people with their blood-soaked hands on the wheel — spend billions trying to condition us into apathy and indifference, even buying social media platforms to enable their depraved plots. But it won’t work. It can’t work.

Social media landscapes are today’s battlefields, where the virtue upheld by those of us who care about a universal framework of justice stands against the false perception of virtue that sustains the West. That’s why it’s so fundamentally important that we win on this front. So thank you — and thank you to everyone reading who has posted, shared, analyzed, debated with friends and family — all of it. Thank you, and please, don’t stop.

Miranda: Lots of people are speaking now, but at the beginning of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, it was a very lonely place. Not many of us did, and we were constantly harassed, threatened; you were doxxed. How hard was that for you? How did you find the way to continue speaking with all that hardship?

I was numb for the first few days, not gonna lie, when it was clear what Israel intended to commit in Gaza. I connected online with a Jordanian friend who explained to me how important it is for people with Western names in Western countries to speak out for Palestine, as everyone in the Middle East already knows what’s happening. I received that so seriously, like a mission, something I, a Westerner, a Eurocentric white privileged person, must do.

What was your path to being so vocal about it, and from the start? Were you involved before 2023? What tipped you off, if before Oct 7th? For me, it was the irregularities and propaganda around the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the grotesque handling of her funeral.

Tiberius: One of the biggest regrets I have about all of this is not making Palestine and other geopolitical tyrannies a bigger cornerstone of my political writing sooner. I came to the party late: I began posting about UK politics after feeling so hopeless and disenfranchised back in 2018 (the feelings had lasted years, decades even), and eventually this led me to bigger, but also more organised critiques of the Western systems. I’ve had my share of problems before that, but that’s no excuse. But even from 2018, I focused mostly on domestic politics. I realise now how big of a mistake that was. I was still involved, but much more on the fringes, having been active with some activist groups earlier, but I was a passenger for the most part as I figured a lot of things out.

Then October 7th happened, and it was evident that this had to become the central part of my efforts. And yes, that led to some pushback I’ve never experienced, no matter how strong my posting was before then. I was publicly calling for revolution — and not the nice kind — long before 2023, with no pushback at all. Now, if I posted some of those things, I’d lose my account, because Zionism will find ways to silence its critics, or at least attempt to. But, as you say yourself, nothing will stop me now. How can I let it, when I’m so privileged to begin with? It’s just not in my DNA to capitulate to the people at the heart of so much wrongdoing.

Miranda: How do you feel about all the people who only started speaking about Palestine well over two years in, when it was safe, to protect their social capital, as they saw the narrative being shaped by those who had spoken from the beginning and had turned the tide?

This might be the biggest disappointment of my life, to see how absolutely deplorable liberal progressives turned out to be on Palestine (PEP: Progressive Except Palestine) and how performative all their “activism” always was. They are the biggest collaborators and upholders of war crimes and fascism, and the reason why this world isn’t progressing.

I know you are also extremely annoyed with this and are trying to dismantle it daily on your Twitter. Why can’t people understand why we criticise and call out the left more than the right? I don’t expect much from the right, and yet all the people with the platforms, be it podcasters, streamers, or online personalities who are raging about Israel’s war crimes, are right-wing. Is that surprising to you?

Tiberius: The Right, at least those who have spoken out, have surprised me — in a good way. It speaks to at least a partial authenticity underlying their politics, in spite of so many things I fundamentally disagree with that they say and do (this doesn’t apply to the section who weaponise this for personal or nefarious ends, of course).

But there’s a large middle section, that encompasses many of the faux-left liberals and self-labelled pragmatics, that are so fundamentally superficial that they operate on pretentiousness and vibes. And calling out the depravity in your own government is perceived as contentious, so the cowards remained silent for so long, now only wearing a pin or saying a few hollow words to leverage the social capital of the turning tide. It’s sickening.

But, as infuriating as it is, the silver lining is that this moment — and Palestine generally — reveals the utter inadequacy of these people. The idols of yesterday are dead. They committed suicide on the alter of their own indifference. This creates a space for a new wave of people to step up and speak out more strongly than ever before — which many on both the right and left are doing.

Miranda: How do you deal with those people who still cannot understand the concept of uniparty working for the same donor class, or as I also like to call them the Epstein class? Why are people so unreceptive to this concept that has been clearly exposed for the past 2 years? How do you explain to them that the uniparty controls the West by constantly forcing us to pick a side—spending all our time raging about Trump on the Left or about trans people on the Right? Are you hopeful that most people will ever realize this dynamic is manufactured and begin working together?

Tiberius: The Epstein class, I like that. That needs to stick. I think this comes back to how attached people become to privilege, and the hesitation to step out of their comfort zone until it’s safe. In history, there has always been a minority that led the charge, that proved the beast can bleed. When people finally see that the monster in the room — a Western hegemony that speaks the language of justice while acting like a comic-book villain — is really just a cluster of pathetic little men clinging to power because they’re terrified of their own shadows, more will step up.

It’s infuriating, frustrating, and mind-numbing, but it’s human nature, I guess. I still grapple with it at times, but that’s essentially where we come in. Caitlin Johnson has a great piece on this where she says her job is to wake as many people from the machine as possible, with the sincere hope that those awakened will follow the long-trod path of fighting for a better, more just world.

Miranda: What was the most disappointing, most devastating thing you discovered or experienced over the past two years? For me, it was realizing just how far legacy media, especially the New York Times, is willing to go to run cover for this genocide.

I spent my entire life honing my writing to fit NYT standards; it was my holy grail, the endgame, the goal I set for myself. I grew up in a war, and like everyone from the Balkans, was forced into geopolitical literacy — naivety was a luxury we were never afforded. I know what media in bed with politicians can do, and even with that background and awareness, this still crushed me. It destroyed my faith to watch how meticulously my beloved NYT manufactured consent through unbearable journalistic malpractice. All the idols have fallen so hard over the past two years, and I don’t think we’ll ever recover from it.

Tiberius: This was definitely a high-water mark, but I have to return to this point because it matters. It’s a giant neon sign showing just how deeply fucked things truly are in the West. That reality is devastating, but the neon sign itself is, in a way, a good thing. We need these institutions to fall so that better, more deserving ones can rise.

Zionism is so deeply entwined with Western media that this was the one thing they were willing to sell themselves for. And they did. They betrayed everything they had built for the Zionists within their ranks, and it has hopefully delivered a fatal blow to whatever remaining legitimacy Western media was still clinging to.

The most devastating thing I experienced is realizing how widespread the banality of evil actually is. I often talk about the human baseline being compassion and care for others, and I fundamentally believe this is the case, and that inflicting harm on others is a perversion of who we are. However, understanding how significant that perversion is, and how deep it runs, was a shock. Maybe that’s because I’m a white man, maybe it’s due to my own privilege — it certainly plays a part — but I wasn’t prepared to see so many people cheering for the slaughter of children. I’ll never get used to that.

Miranda: I still can recite the speech by Julian Assange, about 10 years ago, where he said, “Democracies are always lied into a war. Iraq was a result of lies, Vietnam was the result of a Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a lie. It’s not just the lies by the intelligence analysts; it’s lies by the big media machine. And what is in the big media machine? It’s the various institutions that get too comfortable and too close to the table of power. The very tables that are meant to be reporting on, and policing, and getting into the historic record. Working against that trend and against corrupt, powerful organizations who are producing a distorted perspective through mainstream media vehicle — has been the internet. It has allowed one person with one truth to speak to every single person who wants to hear that truth.”

The Internet has truly killed the military-industrial complex’s business plan, because we became Wikileaks. We killed mainstream media. Regular people started researching, finding information, thinking critically about what we uncovered, and sharing it with anyone who wanted to hear it. We broke the most vicious, hundred-year, billion-dollar hasbara. Are we even aware of what we accomplished with nothing more than a phone in our hands?

Tiberius: No, and Assange was, like he often is, well ahead of the curve here. The media and political class aren’t distinct entities, not really. They’re often called bedfellows, but they’re the same thing. At least in the West. There is a myth of separation that their legitimacy relies on, but the cold truth is that only a very limited window of ideas are allowed to be discussed, and they’re almost exclusively pro-Empire.

I believe some legacy journalists genuinely want to tell the truth, and my earlier point about a universal desire for justice applies here as well. But many of these pieces are tactical concessions, published far too late and in passive voices, meant to offset the deep guilt of being complicit in a vast collection of crimes.

Returning to your question, I don’t think we are aware, but the testaments to it are everywhere, both good and bad. The sheer number of people who now support Palestine — with more young people in the United States supporting Palestine than Israel, of all places — is a massive positive testament to the work that has been done. The purchase of TikTok, and the ongoing slide into fascism and authoritarianism driven by a fragile and vulnerable Zionism, is the flipside of it. The work continues.

Miranda: We’re heading toward a very dubious future, with digital IDs being forced on people in Britain, and freedom of speech increasingly taken away in the United States and around the world to protect the ruling class, their wars, and the billionaire donor class that controls our politicians. The media sits at the table of power instead of reporting on it. In response, people are being forced to organize, protest, boycott, and create their own sources of free information — which is why both of us write, inform, and often challenge those who are still asleep. What are you hoping to achieve with your voice?

Tiberius: History shows there are certain characteristics that tend to precede a successful revolution. Elite divisions, economic crises, betrayed expectations, new moral visions emerging, organised networks outside the mainstream, state paralysis, and a catalytic spark — we are clearly in one of those periods now. Everyone knows things cannot continue like this indefinitely. The desperate efforts of the Epstein class (thanks!) are aimed at accelerating an authoritarian system to control us all, but we also know that will not work, at least not for long.

The question is what comes next, who gets to decide, and whether we can make it something better — significantly better — for everyone. That’s where independent media comes in. An uninformed electorate is ripe for control, sitting ducks. An informed electorate, armed with a sharp understanding of the games our oppressors play and a clear vision of the future we could build together based on justice and liberty, real justice and liberty, gives us a fighting chance. At scale, it gives us the edge, I think.

A good friend once told me that the vehicle delivering change has to embody that change if it hopes to succeed. Responsibile, independent media that rose up in the past two years does exactly that: gives a voice to the unheard, connects with different communities, and works for the benefit of people everywhere. If I can do that, then I can not only offer hope, but provide a platform for more people to step up, speak out, and push back against the helplessness we all feel inside.

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Tiberius on Miranda

Tiberius: You built Antagolist to confront establishment narratives head-on, writing with passion and conviction — you don’t pull punches, and that’s one thing I love about your writing. What is your mission? What space do you want to occupy?

Miranda: My mission is to collect, connect and organize with a collective of minds I’ve encountered on this two-year tour of grand awakening. Everything changed in our lives as we started seeing children’s limbs being blown off with our tax money, we changed our friends circles, many people even their relationships or marriages with people who didn’t seem to comprehend the importance of raising up, but continued to live on vibes, instead of clarity.

I’m adamant about needing all hands on deck; there is so much we can achieve together as a collective, from organizing for change to building movements and amplifying independent media. Reaching people with truth and information is a power that can threaten an establishment that does not work for the benefit of its own citizens, and that’s my mission.

I never really think about what space I should occupy; I just occupy it. I have an analytical mind and I explain things well to others, as you do too; your Twitter is one of the most legendary accounts that exists on that platform. And Antagolist will continue to be a space for analysis, refusal, and the reclaiming of reality.

Tiberius: In your earlier work, you sat at the heart of industries built on illusion: fashion, media, image-making. That’s a sharp contrast from where you are now: turning the lens back on power itself. How did that journey shape your understanding of propaganda and perception? Was there a moment when the facade cracked, or was this a gradual process of seeing the cracks appear and widen, until you couldn’t ignore them anymore?

Miranda: It’s not really a shift — I’ve always been political, regardless of the industry I worked in. I regularly pivoted to geopolitical conflicts while in college; even when I had to write papers on theater or a fashion house, I’d somehow end up connecting it to some war, conflict or political context in general.

I grew up in Croatia and was a teenager during the Croatian War of Independence. When you grow up in the Balkans, politics and conflict are part of your DNA — it’s our original setting. The First World War began there, the Second was fought there brutally, and the ‘90s war defined my generation. I often say that in that part of the world, we’re all walking on bones.

I still have a printout of the New York Times opinion piece on Bill Clinton, “Lucky Charms” from 1999; I keep it in the boxes with old letters, memories, photos, and VHS tapes. I should probably throw it out, but at this point it serves as a reminder of how much I’ve learned about the political theater of deception. My sister always says I’m completely uninterested in every conversation I half-listen to, and the only time I actually turn on is when politics come up. I’m passionate about changing this shithole of a world that’s designed for some people while brutal to others.

As for perception, I’ve worked in PR and marketing, which taught me how much propaganda is built into everyday consumerism, not to mention the ways people are persuaded to accept wars. That’s why I want to use everything I’ve learned to inform people, demystify the manipulation, and help anyone who is open to seeing clearly.

Tiberius: When you look at where we currently are — the censorship, the widespread collapse of trust, the open authoritarianism, the normalisation of dehumanising rhetoric — what feels different about this moment? Could it be just another cycle of decay that leads to a course-correction, with no real change in direction, or the point where the system finally loses control of its crooked narrative?

Miranda: Well, that’s up to us, isn’t it? You saw what the Italian dockworkers did when the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was intercepted? Coordinated disruption in all major cities, and forced their government to retract statements, change policy. We need more angry people, more organizing, and less complacency.

What feels different about this moment is that we’ve reached a point where our governments know that we know what they’re doing. This isn’t 2003, when it was easier to lie us into a war without social media; this time they’re doing it in plain sight. Our government is occupied, it doesn’t work for our benefit, and the establishment running this show needs to be dismantled and guillotine dusted back from our basements.

Gaza opened everyone’s eyes. We cannot waste it. All those people in Palestine cannot die for nothing. They awakened us all, and we must push and organize to dismantle this system.

Tiberius: You’ve seen how narratives are manufactured from both the inside and the outside. What do you think people misunderstand most about the perception being managed by the existing media architecture? Is propaganda mainly about what is said, or about what never makes it through the filter? Is it top-down, or is it a culture of self-censorship because the rewards for kissing the ring, and the punishments for spitting on it, are so great?

Miranda: I really think people are just dumbed down and complacent with capitalism. The media is constantly banging the importance of making money on you; achieving fame, recognition, beauty, status — it sends you on a wild goose chase for things you’ll never attain, instead of encouraging you to demand a dignified life for everyone.

I often see girlfriends on social media posting the most idiotic takes, especially after Mamdani won the NY mayoral election. It’s always money, cars, travel, events, snapshots from expensive restaurants, paired with dramatic captions like, “Goodbye New York, dark times are coming.” They are politically illiterate and civically uninformed, and they’ve been dumbed down by mainstream media convincing them that this man will bring poverty. The reality is they live paycheck to paycheck, and their attachment to capitalism is purely aspirational, but completely misunderstood. They think capitalism means I’ll marry someone rich, as if that’s an economic ideology rather than a wish.

Mainstream media is heavily assisting the establishment in deceiving people this way.

Tiberius: Telling the truth has become a radical act — especially when the truth itself is being algorithmically managed by social media tycoons that are openly in support of an active genocide. As media creators, what responsibility do we carry? Where’s the line between provocation and precision?

Miranda: We carry all the responsibility. All of us who decided we cannot stay silent about these many atrocities funded with our money. We are the WikiLeaks now, and I’m extremely serious about my role in fighting the media machine, making cracks, and letting the truth out.

I worked on Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign, and it’s the best example I can give you. We were organized like a small, disciplined army; everyone knew what needed to be done at every point in the day, and we knew exactly what kind of content to put out to counter mainstream media manipulation. Our job was to get the message out before they could distort it. Zohran gave us access no one else had, and it became a collaboration of policy, ideas, and accuracy working in perfect unison, led by a once-in-a-generation smart, capable, charming, caring, authentic human being. And we managed to carry him from 1% to victory.

People don’t fully grasp the power we collectively hold. Donald Trump threatened New Yorkers with blocking federal funding if we voted for Mamdani, even threatened to send the National Guard — and we basically said fuck off and voted with our conscience. And I think what you saw in the Oval Office when he met with Zohran was respect. That bitch was fully impressed with our game. We outplayed the billionaire donors, we carried the message, and we beat the media machine.

Tiberius: People often say the bottleneck to change is money, politics, or apathy. But what if it’s the absence of honest media — a ‘big media machine’ that sits ‘too close to the table of power’, as Assange put it, where an honest, free press should be? Is the real barrier to liberation not the fact that Empire now controls not only the information we receive, but the platforms on which we receive it, and even the very language through which we think?

Miranda: Mainstream media owned by the billionaire donor class is definitely the barrier to liberation. The Western Empire has a stranglehold on the truth, and I really don’t understand why the Global South allows it, instead of creating alternatives to this blatant weaponization of information.

I read a great article about it by BettBeat Media, where they argue that “The Global South’s failure to develop alternative information infrastructure represents a catastrophic strategic blindness.” Everyone should read this article, it’s one of the most important analyses of the ailments of the society, caused by all of us allowing the enemy to have a total control over our communication.

All their points are so great, they are stressing the importance of reclaiming reality, reminding us information sovereignty is as important as economic sovereignty, and that narrative independence is a prerequisite to political independence.

“The machine is not invincible. It simply appears so because we have forgotten how to fight it. The first step is refusing to mistake its projections for reality, its manipulations for truth, its violence for justice. The second is building something better. The third is never, under any circumstances, allowing them to make us forget what we have seen. The dead children of Gaza are not misinformation. They are the truth the machine cannot tolerate, and therefore the truth around which resistance must organize. Their memory demands nothing less than the complete dismantling of the apparatus that made their murder possible—and profitable.”

We simply need to work toward the goal of reclaiming reality, and that is why you are here, reading this.

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There’s no greater paradox on earth than the week(end) of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday in America. It’s an unparalleled showcase of the nation’s essence, steeped in hypocrisy, morbidity, and violence. Nowhere else does the contradiction emerge more starkly than on a day meant for giving thanks and reflecting on gratitude, only to give way, as the weekend comes, to a chaotic celebration of consumerism and excess.

This year’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday feel especially jarring in the shadow of two years of genocide, displacement, and deliberate starvation unfolding on our phones — followed by a fake “ceasefire” and a mainstream media apparatus actively creating cover so those violations can continue.

We’re celebrating a day, a weekend, a holiday rooted in deliberate misinformation and the genocide of Native Americans — right after witnessing two years of a livestreamed genocide unfold on our phones, followed by a so-called “ceasefire” that ceased no fire, during which 342 Palestinians were killed, including 67 children, and 875 were wounded.

It’s hard to watch the Thanksgiving parade, and all the attempts to rewrite history with gratitude lists or “land acknowledgments” over turkey — the “friendly feast” narrative, designed to whitewash colonization, violence, and mass murder into a peaceful, benign story.

As if that weren’t enough, while the compassionate, clear-minded world supports the BDS, Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This consumerist frenzy stands in stark contrast to Native American spirituality, reverence for creation, environmental stewardship, and our basic human need for communion with nature and with one another.

Colonial damage is far greater than Thanksgiving.

But it endures as a symbol of colonialism, nauseatingly romanticized, yet rooted in the very foundations of settler colonialism. It’s not the primary act of colonialism, but it perpetuates a distorted view of history, obscuring the true scope of colonial violence.

The American settler-colonial model has served as a blueprint for other colonial powers. Its unprecedented success in establishing a settler society while marginalizing Indigenous populations is unmatched in scale. Now, Israel, in a cynical attempt to avoid scrutiny, argues that if America could do it, why can’t they?

We’ve witnessed two years of the first livestreamed genocide unfolding before our eyes, as ICE raids and state-sponsored terror crept into our reality. Our Western governments and their propagandists lie, fund, support, and justify atrocities at home and overseas. The history told by the West, from its very beginning, is a series of distorted, whitewashed, and romanticized lies.

We have to keep telling these truths.

Whether it’s the past or present, the only path forward is through unapologetic, radical truth, repeated relentlessly. We must expose lies, share them, and open as many eyes as possible. The education system is rigged in favor of the establishment, and history books reflect the bias of the victors. As Julian Assange warned, social media has the power to change these narratives, which we have proven with our relentless posting about Palestine:

“Working against corrupt, powerful organizations who are producing a distorted perspective through mainstream media vehicle — has been the internet. It has allowed one person with one truth to speak to every single person who wants to hear that truth.”

The livestreamed genocide in Gaza and the unspeakable horrors inflicted on a civilian population, funded and justified by the entire West, have laid bare the corruption, insincerity, and manipulation of our governments. The situation is so dire that we no longer resemble a functioning society, but a “transnational security elite that is busy carving up the world using our tax money” — another classic Julian.

Today, we are WikiLeaks.

Instead of living in a humane, civilized, and democratic society, we find ourselves forced to take on the responsibilities of our government, police, and media, much like the people of Amsterdam, exactly a year ago, who had to step in and defend themselves from Israeli football thugs rampaging around their city — while Dutch authorities failed to protect their own citizens.

Julian, again, explains this concept:

“To combat the elite we must not petition, we must take it over, we must form our own networks of strength and mutual value which can challenge those strengths and self-interested values of the warmongers.

When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public the American public and the public all over Europe and other countries, then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists.

Journalists are war criminals. While one might think that should lead us to a state of despair, that the reality around us is constructed by liars; it should also lead us to an optimistic understanding — because if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by the truth.

So that is our task, and it is your task — go and get the truth, get into the ballpark, get the ball, and give it to us, and we’ll spread it all over the world.”

Let’s start with debunking Thanksgiving myths.

Children in schools have been taught a Thanksgiving myth: friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, share a meal with them, and then disappear. They handed off America to white people so they could create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity, and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit.

That’s the story — a tale of Native people quietly conceding to colonialism. It’s a bloodless narrative and an extension of Manifest Destiny, the belief that white Americans were divinely ordained to expand across North America. This ideology justified westward expansion and fueled policies like the Trail of Tears, forced relocations, violent conflicts, and the systematic destruction of Native cultures, all cloaked in the language of destiny and divine right.

Manifest Destiny / We Are The Chosen People?

In 200-300 years, when all of us eyewitnesses are gone, along with our children to whom we’ll pass down the stories of the first live-streamed genocide in history, will Israelis invent warm, fuzzy tales about sharing falafels with Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza, before the latter peacefully decided to leave, so Israelis could create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity, and Zionism, for the rest of the world to profit?

The history of the West repeats itself, over and over. And it continues to do so, even in 2025, because we’ve grown complacent. We don’t confront power as fiercely or as consistently as we should; we’ve absorbed their gaslighting, their narratives, and the consumerism designed to keep us compliant. Instead of speaking radical truths whenever and wherever they’re needed, we’ve let ourselves be muted.

The people of Palestine have woken us up from this propaganda-induced coma, a term coined by Caitlin Johnstone, a much-needed voice tirelessly working to lead us out of the matrix. She also chose these apt, albeit fighting, words:

“The deck is stacked so heavily against truth, peace, and justice. You will watch powerlessly as your government backs genocides, starts wars, and unleashes nightmare after nightmare upon the global south.

We live in a tyrannical dystopia that’s driving humanity to its doom, and we need to wake up from the propaganda indoctrination and egoic delusions which keep us complying with the status quo so that we can use the power of our numbers to overthrow our oppressors and create a healthy world.”

A radical truth at every turn must become everyone’s mission.

The “First Thanksgiving” didn’t unfold as history tells you. The Wampanoag tribe taught the English settlers (Pilgrims) how to grow crops, leading to a successful harvest. However, the Wampanoag weren’t invited to a “peaceful feast”, otherwise known as the First Thanksgiving. In fact, 90 armed Wampanoag warriors arrived at the feast after hearing gunshots, coming not to celebrate but to protect their people.

This occurred only months after the Pilgrims had robbed their graves and stolen food meant for Native families. The so-called “First Thanksgiving” marked the beginning of violent conflicts, with the colonists later seizing land and imprisoning, enslaving, and executing Native people.

While the legacy of colonialism spans centuries, Thanksgiving perpetuates a narrative that oversimplifies and sanitizes the violence and dispossession endured by Indigenous peoples. Are you even aware of the scale of devastation the European settlers inflicted on Native American populations? It’s one of the most depraved, evil, and violent crimes in history. And what stings the most — it worked. It was successful.

Look at the numbers:

While Americans celebrate and indulge in turkey feasts, Native Americans mourn this day. Since 1970, many Native Americans have participated in the National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving Day, often held at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, to commemorate their ancestors and advocate for indigenous rights.

For many Native Americans, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of their oppression, the loss of their land, and the erasure of their culture.

Witnessing a livestreamed genocide for two years, with daily massacres landing on your phone as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, and the reality that America’s past violence mirrors what Israel is currently attempting, makes Thanksgiving and its associated history feel even more nauseating to participate in.

I saw Native Americans at every anti-genocide protest I attended. I’ve seen pictures of them standing in solidarity, in other cities across America. There is a unique bond between Native Americans and Indigenous Palestinians. They understand the pain of cultural erasure, having witnessed it firsthand, while the same attempt is now being made against Palestinians. The parallels are unavoidable, especially since the erasure of Native Americans succeeded, whereas, for 77 years, Palestinians have miraculously resisted erasure.

“We are not Red Indians.”

In his last interview in 2004, Yasser Arafat reflected upon his achievements. Among them was the fact that “the Palestine case was the biggest problem in the world” and that Israel had “failed to wipe us out.” As a final mark of that success, he added the declarative, comparative, and final point of distinction: “We are not the Red Indians, we will not go into the museum. We are a live people with a live cause, that we will carry with us until the end, until victory.”

Twenty years later, Palestine is still the moral center of the world.

For 77 years and counting, the plight of the Palestinian people has remained at a standstill, and that’s purposeful, as maintaining the status quo is necessary for the existence of the state of Israel.

But what’s truly fascinating is that Yasser Arafat got his wish: “For our movement, armed struggle means waging a mass revolutionary war. Therefore, the first stage of our work is to attract the masses. The first thing is to attract the masses of our people and make them live in a revolutionary atmosphere.”

As The Guardian pointed out ten years ago, on the 10th anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death: “He saw himself as part of a global movement and as a member of an international revolutionary fraternity against injustice — part of the global struggle of oppressed peoples for freedom and liberation.”

Keffiyeh Arafat wore came to symbolize revolution, not just the Palestinian struggle.

And it’s up to us, the global community, to never let the Palestinian people go into the museum. The struggle for Palestinian liberation is a fight against all forms of oppression.

Just as Thanksgiving has been rebranded into a “friendly feast” narrative, whitewashing colonization, violence, and mass murder into a benign story, Israel has spent 77 years attempting the same erasure of the Palestinian people, their culture, identity, sovereignty, and their land. We must resist the distorted version of history that allows Israel to claim the mantle of the “only democracy in the Middle East” and the “most moral army in the world,” obscuring the full scope of their shocking, barbaric violence toward the entire group of people whose land they covet.

We are a live people with a live cause, that we will carry with us until the end, until victory.” — Yasser Arafat

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Until Monday night, you could have optimistically believed that the UN was the most impotent organization in the world. I’ve endearingly called them content creators for the past two years. I truly saw no difference between them and an influencer trying to sell you the newest face cream, promising it will make you younger if you just keep applying it.

The UN is the most useless organization on earth; I’ve said it repeatedly. They show up to file reports, tally the dead, and archive what was already allowed to happen. Their entire job seems to be documenting the atrocities, never stopping them. Don’t even get me started on the veto power.

But, see that’s just the thing. They aren’t useless. The only catch is, they aren’t useful to you or me, or the Palestinian, Sudanese, or the Congolese people — they are useful to the Western establishment. They’re a crucial puzzle of the imperial project. They operate as partners of the Empire. And what they did on Monday effectively makes them part of the crime scene.

The resolution.

On Monday night, the UN Security Council adopted a US resolution detailing the mandate for the Gaza International Stabilization Force outlined in Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan.

Per Reuters, the text of the resolution says member states can take part in the Trump-chaired Board of Peace, envisioned as a transitional authority that would oversee “reconstruction and economic recovery of Gaza.” It also authorizes the international stabilization force, which would ensure a “process of demilitarizing Gaza, including by decommissioning weapons and destroying military infrastructure.”

This resolution was adopted 13-0-2; 13 countries voted in favor of it, 0 voted against it, and 2 abstained (Russia and China).

Demilitarizing Gaza.

These jokers really expect us to accept their morbid idea — that an occupied population without sovereignty, without a military, and without freedom of movement, one that has just been subjected to the most brutal genocidal campaign by the two most powerful psychopathic powers, is supposed to demilitarize?

Hamas, naturally, said — no way, Jose. In a statement, they reiterated that it will not disarm and argued that its fight against Israel is legitimate resistance, potentially pitting the resistance group against the international force authorized by this resolution.

A peace deal, anyone?

And what was Israel doing in the days leading to the United States passing the resolution that would come in and help them achieve military goals they themself couldn’t achieve for the past two years against the population in flip-flops, with homemade weapons?

On Sunday, per Al Jazeera, “Israel was engaged in a last-ditch bid to change the wording of a United Nations Security Council resolution on the next phase of United States President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan that was recently amended to mention a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood.”

Please mention the two-state solution one more time to me, I dare you.

On Sunday, Netanyahu repeated to his cabinet that his opposition to a Palestinian state had “not changed one bit”. This was one day before the United Nations Security Council would vote on the US-drafted resolution, which would mandate a transitional administration and an international stabilisation force (ISF) in Gaza.

Straight out of Shakespeare.

Iago, Lady Macbeth, and Richard III would be ashamed of what Netanyahu and his government pulled in the last 48 hours to prevent Palestinian statehood before the United Nations Security Council vote on Monday.

He engaged in a last-minute diplomatic push to alter the draft resolution, which the US had changed to include more defined language about Palestinian self-determination under pressure from Arab and Muslim countries expected to contribute troops to the International Stabilisation Force.

The draft now says that “conditions may be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” after reforms to the Palestinian Authority are “faithfully carried out and Gaza redevelopment has advanced”.

Do you finally realize the scope of this diplomatic farce?

All of you insincere Islamophobes who still parrot the — but Palestinians are refusing any peace deals and offers to have a state, are you finally there? Did you arrive at the Netanyahu pulling Shakespearian chess moves for decades to prevent any coexistence, like ever?

And this is where the United Nations comes in as his tool. Instead of holding him and the state of Israel accountable for the war crimes the entire world saw on their phones, livestreamed, they came out with this vote to legitimize this genocide, and the occupation of the Palestinian people.

Not much different from what the United Nations did in November 1947, when it proposed the partition of Palestine. This is simply a continuation of their original sin.

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The resistance factions came out, naturally, to call these efforts “a new attempt to impose another form of occupation on our land and people, and to legitimise foreign trusteeship”.

Palestinian voices and aspirations for sovereignty have been fully sidelined by the farce and the spectacle of Trump’s Gaza plan, which we knew would happen from its launch. The villains of the world, deciding the destiny of a nation they just bombarded to oblivion, allowing no Palestinians at the table, having a say in their own reality.

Al Jazeera also reports, as of late Sunday night, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions called on Algeria, a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, to reject the plan for stabilisation forces to be deployed in Gaza.

“We direct a sincere and fraternal appeal to the Algerian Republic, government and people, to continue adhering to its principled positions supporting Palestine, and its steadfast rejection of any projects targeting Gaza’s identity and our people’s right to self-determination.”

Algeria denied their plea.

Instead, they raised their hand and voted yes on this shameful resolution.

A book could be written about the scale of betrayal the Arab world’s leaders continue to inflict on the Palestinian people. It’s unbearable to watch.

The people in Gaza just endured two years of the most brutal assault, genocide, starvation of its people, fighting the entire Western empire and their most sophisticated weaponry — stateless people without sovereignty and military, and Israel still could not defeat them. The most powerful army in the Middle East, backed and funded by the biggest superpower on earth, could not defeat these orphans from defending their land.

Instead, they needed a resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council, so that the international community could send in the international boots on the ground, to impose Israeli goals — the ones they failed to secure militarily.

The world is literally being asked to police the Palestinian people for Israel!

Russia.

Russia had a golden chance here. The world is finally waking up to the lies — about Israel, about Ukraine, about the brutality of the American Empire. They had a rare opportunity to veto this humiliating resolution and show the world exactly where the violence is coming from, and which side of the hemisphere keeps failing at even the bare minimum of diplomacy.

In the weeks leading up to this vote, Russia was circulating its own resolution to rival the US version, offering stronger language on Palestinian statehood and stressing that the occupied West Bank and Gaza must be joined as a contiguous state under the Palestinian Authority.

They did not insist on their resolution, and they did not use this opportunity to veto the US resolution; instead, both Russia and China cowardly abstained.

Best part? Israel and Turkiye are supposed to be the two countries mediating this resolution on the ground in Gaza. Israel has already said it will not accept Turkiye, a key Gaza ceasefire mediator, having any role on the ground.

This means Israel, a country that has just committed a genocide on these people, will be the ones mediating this “peace deal!”

This farce is hard to swallow even for those least informed; this is like putting Hitler in charge of peace for the Jews in 1945.

Shameful. Humiliating.

Russia’s failure to use this moment to advance its own resolution, or at the very least veto this shameful US draft that renders Palestinian self-determination impossible, raises the question: in practice, how are Russia and China any different from Washington and Tel Aviv?

Sam Husseini tweeted what was on my mind, reading this unfortunate turn of events:

China and Russia abstained. All other US puppet United Nations Security Council members voted yes.

Mark today in your calendars folks: The start of a new imperial crusade.

Craig Mokhiber, a former United Nations human rights official and a specialist in international human rights law, posted a sobering tweet:

“The UN Security Council has just adopted the horrific US resolution with 13 yes votes and 2 abstentions. Not a single member of the Council had the courage, principle, or respect for international law to vote against this US-Israel colonial outrage.

This proposal has been rejected by Palestinian civil society and factions, and defenders of human rights and international law everywhere. 17 November 2025 is a day of shame for the United Nations, and for governments around the world on their knees before the US empire and its violent Israeli client. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom will continue undeterred, with or without them.”

Board of Peace.

Another important detail about this “peace resolution” for you to know. Drop Site News reminds that this vote installs Jared Kushner and Tony Blair’s concept for a foreign “Board of Peace” as Gaza’s governing authority, giving it control over the enclave’s resources and borders. The resolution authorizes the deployment of an International Stabilization Force to disarm the resistance in Gaza. It also creates a Palestinian executive committee for day-to-day administration and ties Israeli withdrawal to Hamas disarmament, with progress reports required every six months to the Security Council.

What to even say?

Hope you now understand that the United Nations’ purpose is not to uphold international law or bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice. Its purpose is to legitimize colonization, genocide, and imperial pursuits. After all, the UN was created to formalize and recognize the state of Israel on top of the existing Palestinian population. We should never forget its origins.

If the United Nations were actually doing what its mandate claims, it would place neutral forces in Gaza, work with the Palestinian resistance to secure the State of Palestine, disarm Israel, and remove all its nuclear weapons.

Great tweet by Sultan Khan:

The UN just wrapped the US occupation plan in blue flags and called it “peace.” A foreign council to rule Gaza, foreign soldiers to disarm the occupied, and Israel leaves only when Palestinians kneel.
This isn’t peacekeeping.
It’s empire management.
It’s genocide with official paperwork.

I want to leave you with this excellent United Nations Villain’s Origin Story, in case this article didn’t make it clear enough. This analysis is by a brilliant geopolitical, historical buff, Queniform. Please read this:

The UN Was Born as an Instrument of Partition. Today, It Returns to Its First Task.

Today, the UN approved an “international stabilization force” for Gaza - a polite phrase for an occupation army.

Strip the diplomatic veneer and the meaning is blunt: the world is being asked to send its own soldiers to finish what Israel’s armed groups failed to do. An international battalion to impose Israeli goals. Foreign sons dying for a land grab.

This is not a rupture.

This is continuity.

This is the UN returning to its original assignment.

From the Beginning, the UN Was the Administrative Wing of the Zionist Project.

The mythology says the UN was born to maintain peace after World War II. The record says something else. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan carved Palestine with a pen stroke so violent it still echoes. Jews, who owned only 7% of the land, were suddenly “awarded” 56%.

Not through history, not through purchase, not through population, not through consent — but through a vote orchestrated by Western powers already invested in a settler state to secure their imperial corridor between the Mediterranean and the Gulf.

This was no act of impartial global governance.

It was the handover ceremony of British colonialism to its chosen successor.

Britain had failed to break Palestinian resistance — even after the 1936 revolt, even after collective punishments, executions, home demolitions, curfews, and martial law.

So the mandate was passed to a new structure: the United Nations.

The partition plan wasn’t peacekeeping. It was dispossession in legal dress.

2025: The UN Returns to Form.

Fast-forward.

Israel’s army has exhausted itself in Gaza.

The global public has seen the atrocities and refuses to legitimize them.

So a familiar mechanism is revived:

When colonial violence reaches its limit, the UN steps in to launder the next phase.

Under “international mandate,” the same outcome is pursued:

The fragmentation of Palestine.

The containment of its people.

The protection of Israeli expansion.

The neutralization of resistance.

It is the Mandate system without the British flag.

It is the Partition Plan without the word “partition.”

Israel failed to conquer Gaza.

So now the “international community” is being marshalled to do it for them — to impose the political arrangement Israel could not secure militarily.

The World Is Being Asked to Police Palestine for Israel.

Make no mistake:

Occupation does not become legitimate when the uniform changes color.

An international army that enters Gaza against the will of its people is not peacekeeping — it is subcontracted apartheid.

A globalized settler-colonial force.

And its task is clear: to stabilize the conditions for another century of dispossession.

The UN’s Mandate Has Never Changed.

From 1947 to today, the institution has been consistent:

It did not stop the Nakba — it administered it.

It did not reverse the land theft — it codified it.

It did not restrain the settler state — it offered diplomatic scaffolding to build one.

It did not protect Palestinians — it provided procedural cover for their erasure.

What we are witnessing today is not an aberration.

It is the system functioning as designed.

The tragedy is not that the UN failed.

The tragedy is that people still expect the UN to be something it never was.

Its core purpose - from partition to peacekeeping mandates to today’s occupation force — has been to translate Western strategic interests into international legitimacy.

And Palestine has always been the proving ground of that architecture.

Hopeless?

Don’t be. Subjugated, occupied people never achieved their freedom through diplomacy. The path to freedom will be forged by the people of the land, not by resolutions. Hamas will not disarm, and we need to sharpen our resistance to the Zionist grip on politics, culture, and the imperial machinery that sustains it. We can’t give up. Keep fighting!

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November 4th, 11 am, Election Day.

Ladies and gents, my mayor. Your mayor. He belongs to all of us. Yes, I decided to call it already, on the morning of the election, with a whole day of voting ahead, and results to be announced. This reality is already manifested, and I refuse to accept any other version of it. Something has to give.

Elon Musk endorsed Andrew Cuomo for Mayor on Monday afternoon on Twitter. I refuse to call it X, even though I should; it sounds as idiotic as him. So far Andrew Cuomo has gotten the endorsement of Donald Trump, Eric Adams, and Elon Musk. A trifecta of criminals, war criminals, sexual assaulters, corrupt, paid for AIPAC shills — decided to support their billionaire buddy, political party be damned.

Do you now understand that there is no two-party system, and there is no actual democracy? You have the illusion of choice when it comes to a presidential election, but you know now it’s just a uniparty, working for the same billionaire donor, Epstein class. Making your life unbearable, unless you are a 1%-er, is a bipartisan effort.

Did you notice how fast, regardless of their party affiliation, the billionaire oligarchy came out, in the eleventh hour, to protect each other by endorsing Cuomo?

November 4th, 5:30 pm, Election Day.

For the past year, I have worked on Mamdani campaign as a creator and volunteer. I was a part of the Creators4Zohran collective, a canvasser, and today was the last day of our effort to get this man elected into office. The polling places are closing at 9 pm, and we are working until the last minute.

I got called around 5 pm to head out to the polling place next to my house, where a group of Cuomo voters came to intimidate young first-time voters and Zohran’s volunteers, also very young, there to answer questions about the campaign. I head out there, and the scene was quite interesting; Cuomo’s supporters had Israel flags and were yelling at everyone coming out, brave enough to admit they voted Mamdani.

My presence, along with a few peers, didn’t intimidate them, but it quieted them enough that they eventually left.

On my way home, I pondered what about this man angers them so much; and I recalled the piece by Alon Mizrahi — “They Don’t Hate Mamdani Because he’s a Muslim Radical. They Hate him Because he’s a Muslim Normal.” If you need to read one piece today, besides my own, hit this article by Alon — it walks you through the Mamdani phenomenon and explains why he unsettles the Western, Zionist-aligned establishment.

“I discovered Zohran Mamdani just a few weeks ago, on Twitter. I fell for him immediately. He has the clear marks of an excellent brown and Islamic (or at least Islamic-inspired) upbringing: calm, humility, a very sharpened sense of political criticism, but one rooted in a quest for harmony, rather than a revolution. He is, in short, everything white racists, white supremacists, and Zionists told us Muslims are definitely not.” — Alon Mizrahi

November 4th, 7:45 pm, Election Day.

I’m getting ready to go to Zohran’s victory party, before the results are in; I’m so sure of this victory. For the past year, I have been working a full time job, wrote for 4-5 hours per day, and two days I had off to rest, I didn’t have it, I worked on this campaign.

I feel this in my bones, something’s gotta give.

Zohran Mamdani, even without the win that’s surely coming later tonight, is a global powerhouse. How did this happen in such a short amount of time? Creator Matt Ransdell Jr., posted a great rundown of the phenomenon Mamdani:

“What is it about Mamdani that has two of the most powerful men on the planet, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, terrified that he’s gonna win so much so that they’re doing whatever they can at the wall at the buzzer just to prevent that from happening?

What is it about Zohran? Hear me when I say that Zohran Mamdani is good. I’m not talking about his talent. We can see that he’s talented. No, I am telling you Zohran is good — and I fear that a lot of people don’t know how to receive that, because this world has made them feel like they don’t deserve good things.

You might have a deeply rooted distrust of politicians, and that is fair, and you might have a deeply rooted distrust of the system, and that is fair too — but the system can’t change for the better until we elect good people to be in charge of changing it. That’s the opportunity we have here.

We have a good man asking you to vote for him, so that he can work for you. Zohran wants to work to better New York, for all of New York. Zohran is not in the pockets of billionaires and all the oligarchs because he’s in the public, with the people.

That would be good for the world, and I think we deserve something good. This is how it happens. This is how change happens. This is how movements happen.”

This is how change happens.

This is how movements happen.

November 4th, 8:50 pm, the Election Day.

I’m in Uber, headed toward Brooklyn Paramount, where Zohran will hold an election night watch party. I’m late, I stopped by the polling place again to help a few more kids volunteering from being intimidated by more nothing-better-to-do thugs trying to prevent the inevitable.

Polling places are open for another 10 minutes. I’m stuck in traffic. It’s 9:03 pm and Decision Desk projects Zohran Mamdani to win the New York City Mayor election.

I’m losing it in the car. I’m late. My trench buddies are calling me. My parents are calling me from Europe, they stayed up until 3 am to wait out the results. They are hopeful.

I arrive in Brooklyn, exit the Uber, run into the closest venue with the screen, and make it in time just as the AP Press officially called Zohran as our next major!

Mayor Mamdani

I start crying.

Everything I endured for the past 10-ish months came down on me, but mostly exhaustion and relief.

People can organize, and people can do it.

November 4th, 2:30 am, Election Day.

“To every New Yorker – whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all – thank you for the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your trust. I will wake each morning with a singular purpose: to make this city better for you than it was the day before.

Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.”

We did it.

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I estimated the time of Israel breaking the ceasefire by Thursday, this week. But they surpassed my expectations; only 10 days in, and 97 Palestinian people have been killed. The same people who cheered their miraculous survival for the past two years, only to be deceptively wiped out.

No word in legacy media.

Israel’s genocidal rapists, also known as the occupation army, ran into an unexploded artillery from their previous carpet bombing of Gaza, blamed Hamas for the explosion, started bombing Gaza again, over 120 times, killed almost as many people, and once again cut the aid to the Gaza Strip.

No proper word in legacy media, no storm caused for breaking the ceasefire, or killing civilians during one. Imagine what would happen if Hamas actually broke the ceasefire, killing 97 people along the way?

When the press asked Donald Trump about an incident, he said, “The ceasefire he brokered was still in place”. Hamas leadership, he said, may not be involved in the violations. “We think maybe the leadership isn’t involved in that,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Caught in lies, yet again.

When the Israeli genocidal regime and terrorist militia broke the ceasefire, after the explosion of their own making, this is what they said: “We struck Hamas targets across the enclave, including field commanders, gunmen, a tunnel and weapons depots, after militants launched an anti-tank missile and fired on its troops, killing the soldiers.”

They did none of that, as Hamas had no presence. They invented field commanders, gunmen, a tunnel, and a weapons depot. What did legacy media do? This time they did arrive to the party, but not to reprimand Israel for violating the ceasefire agreement, but to call it a test of the ceasefire.

The New York Times cooked up this gem —Flare-Up of Violence in Gaza Tests Cease-Fire; while CNN gifted us with — US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test as Israel and Hamas affirm commitment to deal.

We know why this ceasefire came about now. Israel was getting heavily boycotted in film, sports, and culture, and the masses were getting unruly. We also knew there was nothing to be excited about when the ceasefire was announced; we have seen too many ceasefires, and we have been paying attention.

This ceasefire means nothing.

David Miller of Tracking Power perfectly explains why: “What is often less well understood – especially when dealing with the Zionists – is that diplomacy is merely the continuation of war by other means.”

As yesterday showed you, don’t let yourselves be lulled by this ceasefire. This is just an obvious buying of some time to release the pressure on Israel, and once things calm down, they’ll resume their assault on Gaza in full effect. Probably even more, now that they don’t have to pretend to care about their extreme colonist POWs.

What’s most brutal about these two regimes, the US and Israel, working in unison, isn’t just their war crimes, but how shamelessly they use the language of peace to advance their goals of war. This face ceasefire plan continues the pattern of the ‘Deal of the Century’ in 2020 and the Oslo Accords of 1993 — using the language of coexistence to prolong Palestinian occupation and land theft.

You don’t cease fire in a genocide.

Fire is ceased in a war between two armies. This latest, manipulatively called “ceasefire,” is only the end of bombardment on a bigger scale; massacres will continue. A ceasefire without a Palestinian voice on the table, and without accountability for those in Gaza who have survived this long against so much, is just the maintenance of the biggest war crimes of our lived experience.

Ceasefire is the word used, so we don’t use the proper words that need to come after a livestreamed genocide — accountability, trials, reparations. Palestinian people deserve accountability, reparations, and trials for war crimes committed against their entire nation.

Until there is a plan on the table that goes after everyone who has participated in this crime of our lifetime, diplomacy is meaningless. Media conglomerates justifying genocide, corporations that profited from the sniping of children, and everyone who cheered and propagandized for this mass murder need to be held accountable. Without accountability, a ceasefire is meaningless. As I said, it’s the language of peace used to maintain their war crimes.

I could write for three days about why this ceasefire achieves nothing for the Palestinian people. If you have been in this movement for years, like most of my readers are, you already know this ceasefire is meaningless. Instead of delving into more analysis, I want to hear the Palestinian people speaking. What do they think? How do they feel about yet again and again, another fake diplomacy brought upon them, without anyone inviting them to have a seat at the table, yet again, designed to keep their status quo indefinite?

Let’s amplify their voices.

I want to introduce you to a Palestinian artist, an illustrator I’ve been following for two years. His work has been piercing my heart ever since I discovered it. I even included one of his illustrations in one of my most-read features, written after that performative glorious ceasefire in January 2024 — the one that never truly ceased any fire, but instead paved the way for the most gruesome, livestreamed massacre the world has ever witnessed.

In the days leading up to this deceptive ceasefire — the days it was announced, and those that followed — Kamal Sharaf offered the most nuanced commentary on this political theater, without uttering a single word.

There’s something about Palestinian art that transcends every boundary of what we understand as art. It’s not just expression — it’s survival. It’s the only language left to a people forbidden to speak their truth. Every line, every color carries the weight of generations silenced, displaced, erased, and yet, somehow, still capable of creating beauty.

Their art is not made for galleries or applause. It’s a record of existence, a heartbeat drawn against annihilation. That’s why Palestinian art feels different. Because it is different. It’s born from pain the world refuses to see, and from a love of land so powerful, it survives even when its people are buried beneath rubble.

His art explained it all.

I have nothing to add to it. Deception, manipulation, propaganda, deceit, pain, dehumanization, injustice — it’s all there.

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In light of Donald Trump and the entire Western empire gaslighting the world with yet another “peace deal” in the Middle East — one that offers neither peace nor the long-sought freedom of the Palestinian people — I want to remind you of the numerous “peace deals” this same gang of criminals has pushed before, including the latest one in Egypt just days ago.

Simultaneously, one year ago today, Yahya Sinwar was killed in the most legendary fashion imaginable — fighting the occupation to his last stick. These two events collide perfectly, demanding to be on your consciousness radar today.

The lastest was the so-called peace plan pompously called — “Deal of the Century” cooked up by Trump and his partner in crime Benjamin Netanyahu (or perhaps it’s the other way around) in 2018, and officially released in 2020.

The plan was as insulting to anyone’s intelligence as the one they’ve cooked up today. It allowed Israel to annex up to 40% of the West Bank, including all existing Israeli settlements and the Jordan Valley. Jerusalem would remain the undivided capital of Israel. Palestinians would be forced to accept Israeli security control over the entire region — and, of course, to demilitarize. The plan also effectively eliminated the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes inside Israel and sought to dissolve the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides aid to Palestinian refugees.

So you see — this criminal gang has been at this for a long time, starting with the one behind the Oslo Accords, which served only as a Nobel Peace Prize grab, just as Trump now hopes to do. No one cares about the actual rights or lives of the Palestinian people. No one. It’s all political theater — then and now.

The Interview.

Francesca Borri from La Reppublica did a rare interview with Yahya Sinwar, published on October 5th, 2018, that I find fascinating. He discusses the “Deal of The Century.” There is no better material to read to fully understand the nuances of the Palestinian people and their resistance, than this interview. Especially after what we have witnessed for the past two years.

The face-off between Francesca’s Western mindset and his exhausting sarcasm and self-deprecation traits only possessed by those who have endured the toughest lives — plays out like a theater.

This is a must read. Not only because he laid his life for his people, but because it fills in so many blind spots you might have about why Palestinian resistance exists.

His answers are a fascinating read:

Francesca: I know next to nothing about you. You’re said to be quite private. A man of few words. You rarely speak with journalists. Actually, this is your first time with Western media. But you have been leading Hamas for more than a year. Why speak now?

Yahya: “Because now I see a real opportunity for change.”

F: An opportunity? Now?

Y: “Now. Yes.”

F: To be honest, what looks most likely here is rather a new war. I was in Gaza last June, and it was just as usual. Flying bullets, tear gas. Wounded everywhere. And then airstrikes, rockets. Other airstrikes. A golden opportunity to get shot. Since April, since the start of this latest wave of protests, you’ve had nearly 200 dead.

Y: “While on the other side, there was only one dead. And so, first of all, I would say that ‘war’ is quite a misleading word: it’s not that there is a war, and on other days we have peace. We are always under occupation. It’s a daily aggression. It’s just of varying intensity. But anyway: the truth is that a new war is in no one’s interest. For sure, it’s not in ours. Who would like to face a nuclear power with slingshots? But if we can’t win, for Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat. Because it would be the fourth war. They should take over Gaza. And they are trying their best to get rid of the Palestinians of the West Bank, and keep a Jewish majority: I don’t think they want another two million Arabs. No. War achieves nothing.”

F: It sounds a bit odd, from someone who comes from the military wing of Hamas.

Y: “I am not the leader of a militia. I’m from Hamas. And that’s it. I am the Gaza leader of Hamas. Of something much more complex than a militia: a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend them, and their right to freedom and independence. You are a war correspondent. Do you like war?”

F: Not at all.

Y: “And so why should I? Whoever knows what war is, doesn’t like war.”

But you have been fighting for all your life.

Y: “And I am not saying I won’t fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don’t want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers, on the shore, chatting, and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It’s heartbreaking. And should break everybody. I want them free.”

F: Borders have been basically sealed off for 11 years. Gaza doesn’t even have water anymore. Only seawater. Salt water. How is living here?

Y: “What do you think? 55 percent of the population is under 15 years old. We are not speaking of “terrorists”: we are speaking of kids. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. I want them free.”

F: 80 percent of the population depends on aid. And 50 percent is food insecure - 50 percent is hungry. According to the UN, shortly, Gaza will be unfit for life. But in these years, Hamas has found resources to dig its tunnels.

Y: “And luckily. Otherwise, we would all be dead. The way you see it, it’s the way the Zionist propaganda tells it. The siege didn’t follow the tunnels. It wasn’t a reaction to tunnels. It’s the other way round. There was a siege, and a humanitarian crisis, and to survive, we had no other option than to dig tunnels. There were times when even milk was banned.”

F: You know what I mean. Don’t you think you bear some responsibility?

Y: “Responsibility is on the besieger. Not on the besieged. My responsibility is to work with whoever can help us to end this deadly and unjust siege, and I am thinking especially of the international community. Because Gaza can’t go on like this. The situation here is unsustainable. And in this way, an explosion, an escalation is unavoidable.”

F: And so why didn’t you buy milk, rather than guns?

Y: “If we hadn’t bought guns, we wouldn’t be alive by now. We’ve bought it, don’t worry. We’ve bought milk, and much else: food, medicine. We are 2 million. Do you have any idea what does it mean to get food and medicine for 2 million people? Tunnels are used only minimally for resistance, and because otherwise you may not die of hunger, but you would die of airstrikes. And Hamas pays for resistance out of its own pocket, not with public funds. Out of its own pocket.”

F: So Hamas has been doing well in government.

Y: “What do you think? That being in power in Gaza is like being in power in Paris? We have been in power for years in many municipalities, exactly because of our reputation for efficiency and transparency. Then in 2006 we won the general elections: and we were blacklisted. There is no electricity, it’s true. And this affects everything else. But do you think that we have no engineers? That we are unable to build a turbine? Of course we are. But how? With sand? You can have the best surgeon in town: but you are expecting him to operate with fork and knife. Look at your skin: it’s already peeling away. Here if you arrive from outside, if you arrive from the world, you get sick straight away. What should grab your eye, is that we are still alive.”

F: And so now, Hamas is apparently thinking of a ceasefire. Negotiators are working around the clock. What do you mean by ceasefire?

Y: “I mean a ceasefire. Quietness. The end of the siege.”

F: Quietness for quietness.

Y: “No, wait. Quietness for quietness, and the end of the siege. A siege is not quietness.”

F: “And quietness... For how long?

Y: “That’s not the main issue, honestly. What really matters is rather what happens on the ground. Because if the ceasefire means that we don’t get bombed, but still we have no water, no electricity, nothing, still we are under siege, it makes no sense. Because the siege is a type of war: it’s just war through other means. And it’s also a crime, under international law. There’s no ceasefire under siege. But if we see Gaza returning to normalcy, on the contrary, if we see not only aid, but investments, development, because we are not beggars, we want to work, study, travel, like all of you — we want to live, and to stand on our own. If we start to see a difference, we can go on. And Hamas will do its best. But there is no security, no stability, neither here nor in the region, without justice. Without freedom and justice. I don’t want the peace of the graveyard.”

F: Ok, but... Maybe it’s just a trick to reorganize yourself. And in six months, to go back to war. Why should Israelis trust you?

Y: “First of all, I never went to war: war came to me. And my question, in all truth, is the opposite. Why should I trust them? They left Gaza in 2005: and they simply reshaped the occupation. They were inside: now they block borders. Who knows what’s really going on in their mind? And yet, that’s what trust is all about. And perhaps, that’s our mistake. We always think in terms of: the first step. Who’s gonna do the first step, you or me?”

F: Ok, but... Again. Should the ceasefire not work…

Y: '“But for once, can we imagine instead what happens, if it works? Because it might be a powerful motivation for doing our best to make it work, no? If for a moment we imagined Gaza as it actually was, not a long time ago — have you ever seen some photos of the 1950s? When in summer, we had tourists from everywhere?”

And Gaza had plenty of cafés, shops. Palm trees. I’ve seen those photos. Yes.

Y: “But today as well, have you seen how brilliant our youths are? Despite it all. How talented, how inventive, dynamic they are? With old fax machines, old computers, a group of twenty-somethings assembled a 3D printer: to produce the medical equipment that is barred from entry. That’s Gaza. We are not only destitution. Barefoot children. We can be like Singapore. Like Dubai. And let’s make time work for us. Heal our wounds. I have been in jail for 25 years. He lost a son [Sinwar points at one of his advisers, Ed.], killed in a raid. Your translator: he lost two brothers. The man who served us tea: his wife died from an infection, no big deal, a cut: but there were no antibiotics. And that’s how she died. For something any pharmacist could treat. Do you think it’s easy, for us? But let’s start with this ceasefire. Let’s give our kids the life we never had. And they will be better than us. With a different life, they will build a different future.”

F: You are giving up?

Y: “We’ve been struggling all our lives to get a normal life. A life free from occupation. From aggression. We are not surrendering. We are persisting.”

F: And during this ceasefire, Hamas would keep its weapons? Or you would accept, I don’t know, an international protection, like the blue helmets?

Y: “Like Srebrenica?”

F: I guess it’s a no.

Y: “You guessed right.”

F: Sorry if I persist at it, but should this ceasefire not work? Not to jinx it, but the past is not really encouraging. So far, hardliners have knocked down any deal attempt.

Y: “First of all, you seem to be quite confident; but there is no agreement yet. We are ready to sign it, Hamas and nearly all Palestinian groups, we are ready to sign it and comply with it; but for now, there is only the occupation. But having said that — if we will be attacked, that’s obvious, we will defend ourselves. As always. And we will have a new war. But then, in a year, you will be here again. And again I will be here to say — war achieves nothing.”

F: You have an iconic weapon: rockets. Quite makeshift rockets, actually, which are usually stopped by the Iron Dome. And to which Israel replies with its much more powerful missiles. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Have rockets been useful?

Y: “Let’s be clear: armed resistance is our right, under international law. But we don’t have only rockets. At all. We have been using a variety of means of resistance. Always. Such a question, honestly, is more for you than for me: for all of you journalists. We achieve the headlines only with blood. No blood, no news. But the problem is not our resistance: it is their occupation. With no occupation, we wouldn’t have rockets. We wouldn’t have stones, molotov cocktails. Nothing. We would all have a normal life.”

F: But do you think they have fulfilled their purpose?

Y: “Certainly not. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. But so, what about the occupation? What was its purpose? Raising killers? Have you watched the video where a soldier shoots at us as if we were bowling pins? And he laughs, and laughs. They were people like Freud, Einstein. Kafka. Experts of maths, of philosophy. Now they are experts of drones. Of extrajudicial executions.”

F: You now have a new iconic weapon: arson kites. They are driving Israel crazy. Because they elude the Iron Dome. And neither can they be shot down one by one.

Y: “Kites are not a weapon. At most, they set some stubble on fire. An extinguisher, and it’s over. They are not a weapon, they are a message. Because they are just twine and paper, and an oil-soaked rug, while each battery of the Iron Dome costs 100 million dollars. Those kites say: you are immensely more powerful. But you will never win. Really. Never.”

F: West Bank Palestinians face the same occupation, and yet they opted for quite a different strategy. Appealing to the UN. To the international community.

Y: “And that’s crucial. All is crucial. It’s all means of resistance. But, if I may say so, sorry, when it comes to Palestine, the international community is a part of the problem. When we won the elections, and we won a free and fair election, the reaction was a blockade. Immediately. We’ve proposed a government with Fatah, and not one time, a hundred times: nothing. The only reply has been the blockade. If it turned out the way it did, it is also your fault [of the international community]. And now, too. You warn Hamas: We’ll deal with you only if there is Fatah. Then you warn Fatah: We’ll deal with you only if there isn’t Hamas. The rift we have been so criticized for is also an effect of the blockade. Of your pressures. Those are, sometimes, nothing but threats.”

F: The blockade is because Hamas is viewed as an antisystemic movement. As an unconstitutional movement, so to speak. That doesn’t abide by the rules of the game.

Y: “Which game? The occupation?”

F: You know. Oslo. The two-state solution.

Y: “But Oslo is over. I think that’s the only point everyone agrees upon, here. It’s been simply an excuse to distract the world with endless negotiations, and in the meantime, build settlements everywhere, and physically erase any feasibility of a Palestinian state. 25 years have come and gone. And what did we get? Nothing. But most of all, why do you insist on always mentioning Oslo? Why do you never speak of what happened later? Like the National Unity Document, for instance. Based on the well-known 2006 Prisoners’ Document. And that outlines our current strategy, I mean, Hamas, Fatah, all of us, all together: a state along 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital. And with the right of return for refugees, of course. 12 years have come and gone. And you keep on asking: Why don’t you accept the 1967 borders? I’ve got the feeling that the problem is not on our side.”

F: The international community spends a million dollars on the Palestinians.

Y: “Spends. Exactly. It simply spends. Wrongly. You honoured the Oslo Accords with a Nobel Peace Prize, and you vanished. Nobody monitored their implementation. The key question is: Was it the right strategy to help establish our own state, and all its institutions? And among other things, I have to remind you that the 4th Geneva Convention is clear: the cost of the occupation is on the shoulders of the occupier. It’s not your job to build roads. Schools. And above all, to rebuild again what they demolished. Instead of opposing the occupation, you make it easier.”

F: Anyway, the staunchest opponent of this ceasefire seems to be not Israel, which is now focused on Iran, but Fatah. Which fears it might be a Hamas success.

Y: “A success? This ceasefire is not for Hamas or Fatah: it is for Gaza. And then, look. For me, what matters is that you finally realize that Hamas is here. That it exists. That there is no future without Hamas, there is no possible deal whatsoever, because we are part and parcel of this society, even if we lose the next election. We are a piece of Palestine. More so than that, we are a piece of the history of the entire Arab world, which includes Islamists as well as seculars, nationalists. Leftists. All that said, let’s avoid the word success, please. It’s outrageous for all the terminally ill patients who are right now at the border, waiting for it to open. For all the fathers who won’t dare to look at their kids tonight, because they won’t have a meal. What success are we talking about?”

F: You went to jail when you were 27. And when you got out, you were 50. How was readjusting to life? To the world?

Y: “When I entered, it was 1988. There was still the Cold War. And here, the Intifada. To spread the latest news, we printed fliers. I came out, and I found the internet. But to be honest, I never came out. I have only changed prisons. And despite it all, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher.”

F: What have you learned from prison?

Y: “A lot. Prison builds you. Especially if you are Palestinian, because you live amid checkpoints, walls, restrictions of all kinds, and only in prison you finally meet other Palestinians, and you have time for talking, for thinking. Thinking about yourself, too. About what you believe in, the price you are willing to pay. But it’s as if now I ask you: what have you learned from war? You would say: A lot. You would say: War builds you. But for sure, you would not like to have ever been in a war. I have learned a lot, yes. But I don’t wish prison on anybody. Not even to those who today, across that barbed wire, knock us down like bowling pins and laugh, and don’t realize that they might end up for 25 years in the Hague.”

F: In the International Criminal Court.

Y: “Of course. Because again: there’s no future without justice. And we’ll seek justice.”

F: But you know that some Palestinians, too, might end up in the Hague.

Y: “Under international law, we have the right to resist the occupation. But the Court is the Court, of course. And it will work on whatever it has to work on. And yet, its role is essential. And not only because to stop crimes, it’s essential to punish criminals. Its role is essential for the victims as well. Because only a trial allows a reconstruction of what happened, and in this way, its processing, somehow. When it comes to grief, no third party can replace the victims. No political deal whatsoever can overcome their loss. And move on. That’s up to the victims.”

F: You were released in the Gilad Shalit swap. And Hamas currently has two Israelis, plus the remains of two soldiers killed during the last war. In a ceasefire deal, I guess the prisoner swap for you would be an essential clause.

Y: “More than essential. A must. It isn’t a political issue: for me, it is a moral issue. Your readers probably believe that if you are in jail, you are a terrorist or somehow an outlaw. A car thief. No. We all get arrested, sooner or later. But literally. All of us. Take a look at Military Order 101. Without an army authorization, it’s a crime even to wave a flag, or be in more than ten people in the same room for a tea, chatting about politics. Imagine, for example, you are just chatting about Trump, but you can be sentenced to up to 10 years. Somehow, it’s a rite of passage. It’s our coming of age. Because if there is something we are united by, something that really makes us all equal, all Palestinians, it is prison. And for me, it is a moral obligation: I will try more than my best to free those who are still inside.”

F: In some way, you achieved more through kidnappings than through rockets.

Y: “Which kidnappings?”

F: Like Gilad Shalit’s.

Y: “Gilad Shalit wasn’t a hostage; he was a war prisoner. You see why we rarely speak with journalists? A soldier gets killed, and you publish a photo where he is on the beach, and your readers think that we shot him in Tel Aviv. No. That guy wasn’t killed while wearing Bermuda shorts and carrying a surfboard, but while wearing a uniform, carrying an M16, and firing on us.”

F: And with the ceasefire?

Y: “With the ceasefire, no one will fire on us, right? And so no one will be captured?”

F: You were talking of prison. Of coming of age. Hamas turned 30. How did you change?

Y: “How did you see all this, thirty years ago?”

F: Thirty years ago, I was 8 years old.

Y: “And that’s it: we changed as you changed. As everybody changed. It was 1988: and as I told you, we still had the Cold War. And the world was much more ideological than today. Much more in black and white. Friends and enemies. And our world, too, was a bit like that. Then, over time, you learn that you can find friends, and enemies, also where you wouldn’t expect.”

F: Hamas Charter is still quite black and white.

Y: “That’s our first document. And perhaps, what do you think, the last ones matter more? Why do you ask me about a Charter of 30 years ago, and not the one that followed it? And the one that shows all our evolution? Dozens and dozens of documents. It’s all there. Our relationship with civil society, and with other political groups, the regional context. The international context. And the occupation, of course. The answer to all your questions is there. And truthfully, we expected you to see that, get the signal, and start a dialogue with Hamas. Because again, we are not a transitory phenomenon. There is no future without Hamas. And yet you keep asking about something from 30 years ago. And about Oslo. And so, as for Oslo, I’ve got the feeling that the problem is not on our side.”

F: And whose is the problem?

Y: “Of all those who still view us as an armed group, and nothing more. You don’t have any idea of what Hamas really looks like. Just a glimpse: half of our employees are women. Would you ever guess that? You focus on resistance, on the means, rather than the goal, which is a state based on democracy, pluralism. Cooperation. A state that protects rights and freedom. And where differences are faced through words. Not through guns. Hamas is much more than its military operations. It’s in our DNA. We are first and foremost a social movement. Not just a political movement. We set up soup kitchens, schools, hospitals. To do your part, you don’t need to be the Minister of Welfare. If you are Hamas, you are a citizen before being a voter.”

F: Most of my readers, yet, think of Hamas, and don’t think of charities. They rather think of the Second Intifada. Of suicide attacks. And for Israelis, you are a terrorist.

Y: “And that’s what they are for me - in light of their crimes against us.”

F: But for your children, what kind of life do you hope for?

Y: “A life as Palestinians, of course. Head high. Always. Despite it all, I hope they will be strong and keep on struggling till the day they get freedom and independence. I want my kids to dream of becoming doctors, not to treat only the wounded, but cancer. Like all the kids in the world. I want them to be safe as Palestinians, so that they can be much more than just Palestinians.”

F: I forgot to ask you about the Deal of the Century. Of Donald Trump’s peace plan. Even though it’s not very clear what it’s all about. There’s nothing on paper.

Y: “It’s actually a very clear obliteration of any of our prospects of freedom and independence. There’s no sovereignty, no Jerusalem. No right of return. There is only one stance: our NO. And that’s not only Hamas’ position. That’s something we all agree about. No.”

F: And so, for now, you will go on with protests. With the demonstrations that you started in April. Every Friday. Along the fence. You’ve been seen there quite often.

Y: “And I’ll tell you two names only: Ibrahim Abu Thuraja and Fadi Abu Salah. They were both 29. And they were both in wheelchairs. Just two of the many amputees of the last wars. And that’s when you realize that here you don’t get killed because you are a danger, because what a danger you are, in a wheelchair, for an army that is across a barbed wire, hundreds of meters away from you? No. Here, you don’t get killed for what you do, but for what you are. You get killed because you are Palestinian. You don’t stand a chance.”

F: Should you sum up all this in one sentence? All that you said. In one sentence only. What’s the message you would like readers to remember the most?

Y: “It’s time for a change. It’s time to end this siege. End this occupation.”

F: And do you think you will be believed?

Y: “Look. You were here in June. Together with hundreds of other journalists. And your reportage was the toughest one, with us. And you are also translated into Hebrew. And yet you are here. Again. Because you deeply respect us, and we deeply respect you. Sometimes, somehow, the messenger is also the message. You will leave now and write it all. Will you be read? Will you be listened to? I don’t know. But we have done our part.”

F: “You seem to be quite confident.”

Y: “I’m just realistic. It’s time for a change.”

Before you go.

I want you to marinate on this interview. Before October 7th and everything you’ve witnessed since, before your friends or colleagues try to sway you with statements like “but they won the land in the fair war of ‘67”—know the history, understand the context, and know what preceded the last two years of a genocide you’ve witnessed, livestreamed on your phone:

Haifa Massacre 1937, Jerusalem Massacre 1937, Haifa Massacre 1938, Balad al-Sheikh Massacre 1939, Haifa Massacre 1939, Haifa Massacre 1947, Abbasiya Massacre 1947, Al-Khisas Massacre 1947, Bab al-Amud Massacre 1947, Jerusalem Massacre 1947, Sheikh Bureik Massacre 1947, Jaffa Massacre 1948, Deir Yassin Massacre 1948, Tantura Massacre 1948, Qibya Massacre 1953, Khan Yunis Massacre 1956, Jerusalem Massacre 1967, Sabra and Shatila Massacre 1982, Al-Aqsa Massacre 1990, Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre 1994, Jenin Refugee Camp April 2002, Gaza Massacre 2008-09, Gaza Massacre 2012, Gaza Massacre 2014, Gaza Massacre 2018-19, Gaza Massacre 2021, and Gaza Genocide 2023-24-25.

“But, it’s complicated.”

I have no better closer than Ta-Nehisi Coates, when he was told that the conflict in Palestine was “complicated”, he called that word “horseshit.”

He answered: “Complicated was how people had described slavery and then segregation. It’s complicated when you want to take something from somebody.”

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You need to know three essential truths. Your government cares more about Israel than about its own people. Your government prioritizes Israel over its own citizens. Your government stands with Israel, not with you.

Now that almost all of the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarians have been released from Israeli dungeons, let’s unpack what transpired and truly grasp the intricacies of this moment. These people embarked on this mission and risked their lives so that we could reach these conclusions — and conclude we must.

Let’s recap.

Israel rolled up to the international waters and snatched people. Sprayed them with skunk water, held them at gunpoint. Took them to dungeons, detained them, gave them no water for 48 hours, gave them infested food, and mattresses. Made them drink toilet water. Made them kneel with zip ties behind their backs for 15 hours. Refused them essential medicine. Foreigners. In international waters. Europeans, Americans, Australians, Brits, Canadians. Taken, snatched, detained.

I watched a live stream from the airport in Athens and Madrid last night and saw a group of recently released detainees arrive — without bras or underpants, dressed in white t-shirts, gray sweatpants, and sweatshirts. They looked visibly disheveled, yet determined not to speak about what they had endured, choosing to redirect the focus to the Palestinian people and the genocide still ongoing.

Something about their clothes was so unsettling. Why are they all dressed in grey sweats? Why did all the women walk out without bras? Men dangling without underpants? What in the Jim Jones is going on here? It quite literally looked like they had all just been rescued from a cult about to catapult them to a semi-voluntary death.

Meanwhile, no countries reacted.

No countries took any action for their own citizens. This means that if you were on one of these Flotillas and were kidnapped by an aggressive, vindictive, trigger-happy “army” currently committing genocide, your country wouldn’t do anything for you. Your embassy wouldn’t rescue you or even inquire about you. The country of your birth or citizenship — the one you pay taxes to, whose government is supposed to work for you — would leave you stranded and unprotected, for Israel.

What an unbelievably tough pill to swallow! Realizing there are simply no adults here. The people who rule you, the ruling class, or as I endearingly call them, the Epstein class, are simply all compromised.

Performative actions?

Meanwhile, Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said on Monday that the country will file a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) regarding the events of the Global Sumud Flotilla: “Any attack on persons in international waters constitutes a deprivation of liberty under domestic and international law.”

Will they actually do anything? Or will they send a warship to “help” the Flotilla and then pull it back from the international waters at the moment they actually needed the protection?

Sweden’s Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard also let out some words and said that the allegations regarding the abusive treatment of climate activist Greta Thunberg are “very serious” if confirmed. ⁠

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal gives us another indication of where the US government stands, and who’s actually in control:

“Passengers from the Sumud Freedom flotilla, including Greta Thunberg, have been led out after being abused for a week. Mike Huckabee, the supposed US ambassador to Israel, has mocked Greta Thunberg on his Twitter account. Other American citizens are due to be kidnapped by Israel, and what Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador, is saying is: we will not provide consular representation to US citizens because I actually represent Israel.” American citizens attempting to bring aid to Gaza, being kidnapped on the high seas by Israel, will not receive consular representation as they’re abused by Israeli foreign police and security personnel. That is disgusting.”

While none of the Global Sumud Flotilla vessels reached Gaza to deliver aid to the starving population, having been illegally intercepted by the Israeli regime in international waters, the mission was nonetheless a great success. It achieved exactly what its organizers intended: pressing the record button and aiming it at the many illegal actions of the Israeli regime.

This is precisely why Western governments are working overtime to shield Israel instead of protecting their own citizens — because the only way to make Israel’s crimes appear acceptable to the public is through political power, media control, and diplomatic protection that make the illegitimate seem legitimate.

We are here to remind them, it won’t work.

People are coming! The Global Sumud Flotilla stands as the most successful mission to break the naval siege of Gaza to date — crossing Gaza’s maritime borders, entering Palestinian territorial waters, and reaching 42.5 nautical miles from the Strip before being intercepted.

After decades of the Israeli genocidal regime controlling the narrative and portraying itself as a victim surrounded by radical terrorists, humanitarians on the Flotillas revealed the true face of the occupation, backed by the entire West, showing the world what the Palestinian people have endured for decades.

Israel has been pouring millions into censoring voices and manufacturing propaganda. Palestinians simply pressed the record button. They didn’t need PR firms or celebrity endorsements — all they needed was a phone. And the humanitarians aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla carried their phones on a mission to break the naval siege of Gaza, exposing the occupation from the opposite side of the border.

The power of the people, united in the absence of functioning governments, rules, and laws, becomes all the more dangerous to the ruling class.

Your governments know this.

Israel knows this.

The people are coming!

And we have only just begun.

Before you go, check out the picture of Greta Thunberg and Tiago Avila after being intercepted by Israel. Look at Thiago, one of the coordinators of the Global Freedom Flotilla, look at his smile, in the face of what’s to come — detention, torture, and starvation. The calm on his face, the fearless conviction, and the unwavering resolve speak louder than any words.

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While none of the Global Sumud Flotilla vessels reached Gaza to deliver aid to the starving population, having been illegally intercepted by the Israeli regime in international waters, the mission was nonetheless a great success. It achieved exactly what its organizers intended: pressing the record button and aiming it at the many illegal actions of the Israeli regime.

You should feel good about this mission.

Here’s why:

Sumud stands as the most successful Flotilla mission to date, technically breaking the naval siege, crossing Gaza’s maritime borders, and entering Palestinian territorial waters, reaching 42.5 nautical miles from the Strip, before interception.

After decades of the Israeli genocidal regime controlling the narrative and portraying itself as a victim surrounded by radical terrorists, humanitarians on the Flotillas revealed the true face of the occupation, backed by the entire West, showing the world what the Palestinian people have endured for decades.

Israel has been pouring millions into censoring voices and manufacturing propaganda. Palestinians simply pressed the record button. They didn’t need PR firms or celebrity endorsements — all they needed was a phone. And the humanitarians aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla carried their phones on a mission to break the naval siege of Gaza, exposing the occupation from the opposite side of the border.

The occupation pays influencers, curates photo ops, silences dissent, and manipulates headlines. Flotilla missions expose the fallacies of the Israeli narrative with every trip to Gaza. Israel claims it has the right to kidnap humanitarians at sea because they “illegally entered Israeli waters,” while simultaneously insisting they do not occupy Gaza. If Israel does not occupy Gaza, and humanitarians are sailing toward a people whom Israel claims not to occupy, how can Israel legally intercept a peaceful international aid mission heading toward a territory it does not occupy?

Imagine how fragile the illusion Israel and its allies have built, if just a few phones pointed at their actions are enough to dismantle it. Global Sumud Flotilla showed the world that Israeli illusions and lies require constant upkeep, endless throwing money at it, and sailing to Gaza simply ruins their business plan. This is why all the Flotilla missions are despised by Israel.

Itamar Ben-Gvir came out of his dungeon to yell at humanitarians, calling them terrorists; imagine an actual convicted terrorist calling humanitarians — terrorists, his anger and foaming at the mouth expose how pressed and worried he is about their narrative crumbling down in real time. Why would he be so pressed if the Flotilla’s actions are insignificant?

Everything you ever knew about Israel was a controlled narrative. The only reason the truth managed to come out is because they did not count on the fact that most people did not get convinced, regardless of their decades-long efforts, to see Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians as lesser people, deserving of death. And because one little owned by China, which did not control the algorithm, and allowed the truth to be spread.

That is why all Flotilla missions are essential in exposing the reality of Palestinian suffering. It’s a chip in the narrative, it’s exposing to the world a genocidal regime that is claiming not to starve the population they are holding under siege, refusing to allow a drop of help and humanity, dignity, and support to reach the people they claim not to hate.

It’s a win.

This week’s investigative report taught us that Israel is paying influencers $7,000 to post their controlled narrative in the service of upholding the genocidal campaign in Gaza. Since they intercepted all the Flotillas, Israel has been tripping over their own feet to make these propaganda explainer videos, claiming no aid was on the vessels. And all that the pro-Palestinian side has to do — is turn our phones on.

Humanitarians on the Flotilla crushed all their narratives and propaganda with a simple record button.

Justice moves slowly, yet this is a win.

The empire is relentless, but so are we.

Next time? 400 ships!

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When I first began drafting this article, the title TikToks and Peace Deals came to me instantly. But then I paused and asked myself — why am I merging these two events from the past 24 hours, instead of writing a separate analysis of each?

Because they are connected, friends. One feeds the other; both are steps toward the same plan, the same goal, the same scheme. They unfolded simultaneously, and that was no accident.

Yesterday, Trump and Netanyahu announced a 21-point peace plan for Gaza. That very same day, the sale of TikTok was finalized, officially announced as the latest acquisition by Larry Ellison, a staunch Zionist and the biggest private donor to the IDF.

The 21-Point Peace Plan

Before I delve into the points of this brilliant plan, generously offered by colonizers to the people they have been slaughtering daily for 723 days, shredding their children to pieces, a quick disclaimer: if you are excited about the prospect of a peace offering from two of the world’s biggest con men, don’t be.

This peace plan should insult anyone with eyes and attention. It has nothing to do with peace — it is a trick to preserve imperial power. There is absolutely no peace under occupation. The only thing that needs to happen here and now is the liberation of the Palestinian people.

We are constantly gaslit into thinking there is a war between Israel and Hamas, instead of calling it what it is, a wholesale, merciless, joyful slaughter of an entire people whose land you want to take.

Don’t you dare see this as a win for the Palestinian people.

Victims of aggression should never, under any circumstances, be asked to negotiate with their abuser. An occupying power that has subjugated, dehumanized, and slaughtered a people, with the imperial backers who fund and enable it — has no place deciding the future of those they have been massacring for two years.

The points:

1. Gaza will be a de-radicalized, terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.

2. Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of its people.

3. If Israel and Hamas agree to the proposal, the war will immediately end, with the IDF halting all operations and gradually withdrawing from the Strip.

4. Within 48 hours of Israel publicly accepting the deal, all living and deceased hostages will be returned.

5. Once the hostages are returned, Israel will free several hundred Palestinian security prisoners serving life sentences and over 1,000 Gazans arrested since the start of the war, along with the bodies of several hundred Palestinians.

6. Once the hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence will be granted amnesty, while members who wish to leave the Strip will be granted safe passage to receiving countries.

7. Once this agreement is reached, aid will surge into the Strip at rates no lower than the benchmarks set in the January 2025 hostage deal, which included 600 trucks of aid per day, along with the rehabilitation of critical infrastructure and the entry of equipment for removing rubble.

8. Aid will be distributed — without interference from either side — by the United Nations and the Red Crescent, along with other international organizations not associated with either Israel or Hamas.

9. Gaza will be administered by a temporary, transitional government of Palestinian technocrats who will be responsible for providing day-to-day services for the people of the Strip.

10. An economic plan will be created to rebuild Gaza through the convening of experts with experience in constructing modern Middle East cities and through the consideration of existing plans aimed at attracting investments and creating jobs.

11. An economic zone will be established, with reduced tariffs and access rates to be negotiated by participating countries.

12. No one will be forced to leave Gaza, but those who choose to leave will be allowed to return. Moreover, Gazans will be encouraged to remain in the Strip and offered an opportunity to build a better future there.

13. Hamas will have no role in Gaza’s governance. There will be a commitment to destroy and stop building any offensive military infrastructure, including tunnels. Gaza’s new leaders will commit to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.

14. A security guarantee will be provided by regional partners to ensure that Hamas and other Gaza factions comply with their obligations and that Gaza ceases to pose a threat to Israel or its own people.

15. The US will work with Arab and other international partners to develop a temporary international stabilization force that will immediately deploy in Gaza to oversee security in the Strip. The force will develop and train a Palestinian police force, which will serve as a long-term internal security body.

16. Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza, and the IDF will gradually hand over territory it currently occupies, as the replacement security forces establish control and stability in the Strip.

17. If Hamas delays or rejects this proposal, the above points will proceed in terror-free areas, which the IDF will gradually hand over to the international stabilization force.

18. Israel agrees not to carry out future strikes in Qatar. The US and the international community acknowledge Doha’s important mediating role in the Gaza conflict.

19. A process will be established to de-radicalize the population. This will include an interfaith dialogue aimed at changing mindsets and narratives in Israel and Gaza.

20. When Gaza’s redevelopment has been advanced and the PA reform program has been implemented, the conditions may be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood.

21. The US will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful coexistence.

Timing.

If you are wondering about the peculiar timing of this “peace deal”, the timing is not accidental. Two losers, pretending to be winners in the White House yesterday, are fully aware, in the words of Alon Mizrahi, that — “Palestine is inches away from a historic victory over Zionism. This is why they are pushing now to make this stupid offer. Because they are sensing the defeat is going to be formal, very soon.”

The representatives of 77 countries walked out on Netanyahu’s speech at the UN.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro addressed pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside UN headquarters in New York during the UN General Assembly, calling for a global armed force with the priority to liberate Palestinians, and urged US soldiers “not to point their guns at people. Disobey the orders of Trump. Obey the orders of humanity.”

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said, addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, that — “Indonesia is prepared to deploy 20,000 or even more of our sons and daughters to help secure peace in Gaza.”

A Spanish Naval ship is following the Global Sumud Flotilla, days away from the Gaza Strip.

A cultural resistance to Zionism has only just begun. Resistance in education, entertainment, media, sports. These two rolled up to the White House mic with their so-called peace plan, desperate to preempt and avoid any framework grounded in international law.

Tony Blair?

I can’t even comment on Tony Blair. It’s too comical. It’s like they’re fucking with us, punking us, to get a reaction. So I will leave mine out and use the words of Liam Cunningham, instead: “If Blair is unavailable as the new King of Gaza, I’d like to nominate Pol Pot or Radovan Karadžić.”

Ok, fine, one more, by Normal Island News: “I don’t think you understand, Tony Blair is the most qualified person to lead Gaza because he is the only candidate responsible for more deaths in the Middle East than Netanyahu.”

The Trump and Netanyahu press conference, announcing the “peace deal,” was truly the most laughable moment in international diplomacy. A comedy. This empire is truly on its last legs. Don’t be fooled by this public repackaging of failures as victory.

Trump’s opening sentence. A functioning adult actually said this:

“So, this is a big, big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the great days ever in civilization. Things that have been going on for hundreds of years and thousands of years. We’re going to at least we’re at a minimum very, very close, and I think we’re beyond very close.”

Netanyahu saying sorry to Qatar, practically saying sorry I missed:

“I said to, uh, the uh, sorry, the prime minister of Qatar, Israel was targeting terrorists, wasn’t targeting Qatar. And of course, we regretted the loss of the Qatari, uh, citizens, wasn’t our target. And I very much appreciate President Trump’s proposal to have a trilateral body, the United States, Israel, and Qatar, to work out respective grievances.”

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The two profoundly contemptuous points of this peace plan are “demilitarization and de-radicalization of Gaza.” De-radicalizing WHO, exactly? A poll conducted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz found that 82% of citizens of Israel want to expel Palestinians from Gaza, and 47% want to kill every single man, woman, and child in Gaza. A former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, said that Israel is waging a “war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians”. So, again, WHO needs to be demilitarized and de-radicalized here?

Israel wins TikTok

This takeover was planned for a very long time. About when your government started to propagandize you into thinking your TikTok is under the “influence of the Chinese government.” Therefore, it was so much better to work towards putting it under the influence of another, foreign state — that’s actually hostile, violent, and indicted for a plausible genocide.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos puts it in appropriate words, in her Israel wins TikTok piece:

“A year ago, powerful critics in Congress and the tech world were complaining that TikTok was promoting anti-Israel messaging and were suggesting it needed to be shut down. Turns out it didn’t need to be eliminated. TikTok is a message force multiplier after all, and only requires, apparently, the right people to own it.”

New owner, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is the second richest man in the world, and the biggest private donor to the IDF.

Jeff Yass is a current TikTok investor with funding ties to the IDF and AIPAC, anti-Muslim campaigns that advocate for US confrontation with Iran.

Lovely bunch.

Per WikiLeaks, Larry Ellison — who made his fortune developing Oracle, a database system he originally built for the CIA, already controls CBS, Paramount, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, Nickelodeon, as well as Channel 10 in Australia and Channel 5 in the UK.

Ellison is also expected to finalize control over Warner Bros. Discovery, including CNN, HBO, and the Discovery Channel, before the end of 2025.

Even before the forced sale was finalised, censorship of TikTok content critical of Israel reached extreme levels as the platform moved to align with its prospective new owners.

FOX, a Rupert Murdoch asset, is also seeking to join the Larry Ellison consortium, a move that could enable cross-promotion between Fox and TikTok, further tightening the Israeli-aligned information bubble.

Disapproval of what Israel is doing in Gaza has risen to 60% of the US population, nearly double the approval rate of 32%.

Israeli-aligned Jewish billionaires control OpenAI, Google, Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Palantir, CBS, HBO, and most of Conde Nast (Reddit, Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair) as well as numerous Hollywood studios, regional papers, and radio stations.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks points out how Europe remains largely absent, offering little real competition in the information space. Its one real success story? Telegram, which it managed to comprehensively alienate after France arrested its founder, supposedly for not handing over enough user data.

Will the EU and other US allies align with the Israelified TikTok algorithm, or attempt to create a politicised alternative of their own? — WikiLeaks asks the question, and I say, probably not.

Zionists are used to throwing money at problems, but they cannot seem to comprehend that we have simply seen too much. There is no amount of “information” that can justify or explain genocide. Their arrogance and conviction in their own otherworldliness prevent them from understanding the reality of what they are dealing with. A global uprising against their war crimes, manipulation, propaganda, and dehumanization of an entire people whose land they covet.

You have the power in numbers, the power of boycott, you decide what you will support with your money. Instead of feeling defeated by an Israelified peace deals, TikToks, media, and an entire world, get to work.

Boycotts ultimately ended the South African apartheid, and not military intervention. You decide what news you will consume, where you’ll subscribe, and what company you’ll support. Only last week, you saw what a boycott can do in the case of Jimmy Kimmel. You saw what the Italian people did on the streets of their major cities.

The ideology of Zionism that is subjugating, blackmailing, and harassing an entire planet has to be fought, religiously, until your last breath. Is quite literally a fight for what’s left of humanity.

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A week ago, Disney decided to suspend production on The Jimmy Kimmel Show. Five days of protests and a boycott of Disney followed, resulting in an estimated loss of about $4 billion as viewers canceled their Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ subscriptions. This Monday afternoon, Disney announced they had decided to reinstate The Jimmy Kimmel Show. On Tuesday night, Jimmy was back on air.

What was this? A haiku? A rare moment of swift, undeniable effectiveness? Stories this brief and consequential are almost unheard of. Rarely does a push and change arrive this fast, sharp, and unmistakable.

In full transparency, I began drafting this article over the weekend, several days before Disney announced they would reinstate Jimmy. His return isn’t the punchline of this article. What prompted me to cover this topic was the flood of white, progressive liberals descending into my Instagram inbox, all at once deciding we should rage more over the blatant attack on Jimmy Kimmel’s freedom of speech — and questioning why I hadn’t commented on the suspension.

Why haven’t you said anything, Miranda? This is the most blatant, infringement on free speech by the government that we have ever witnessed!

I love liberals. Their disconnection from the real world, from anything beyond the safety of their own bubble — paired with an arrogance rooted in mediocrity, is something I’ve been studying closely for the past two years. I’m a lifelong Democrat; as a teenager, I collected articles on Bill Clinton — I thought I was a liberal too. But the past 700+ days have opened my eyes to a devastating truth: liberal progressiveness extends only to issues that affect them, and this self-centeredness is what keeps the world from progressing. The performative rage and mediocrity embedded in the white liberal mindset is a phenomenon worth examining.

But, Jimmy!

When a white, influential celebrity is taken off the air and his freedom of speech is snatched away, that usually marks the final stage of government control. So when I receive messages like, “Do you not see what’s happening, what Trump is doing to us, this authoritarianism and control and suppression is so dangerous, and we are descending into fascism,” I can’t help but see you as an unserious person. The suppression of your freedoms did not start with Jimmy; he is the final stage.

You wont get my rage about Jimmy, as requested in my inbox, because we have been warning you for the past two years — this was coming.

We have been telling you to vote globally, not just domestically, and warning you that the genocide carried out with bombs funded by your money will come home.

You want me to rage about Jimmy?

Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, commented on Late Night with Seth Meyers that taking Jimmy off air was “pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

And I have to ask: are you all collectively serious here?

Thirty-eight US states have anti-BDS laws, making it illegal to boycott Israel. The direct infringement by the government on free speech, action, and thought has been here for a very long time.

I know Miranda, but when a white, rich celebrity …

We told you this would happen. We warned you that it starts in the Middle East, gets practiced there, and then comes home. We told you that the crimes you have been witnessing abroad are tests to see how much the government can get away with taking from you.

Welcome aboard.

Where were you for the past two years when Meta suppressed all our content, removed our posts, videos, and images for protesting a genocide?

Where were you when all the big social media profiles drawing attention to a livestream genocide our country is supporting and funding were removed, and banned indefinitely?

Where were you when the US students on US campuses were beaten, jailed, detained, suspended from universities for protesting their school funding the Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza?

Where were you when Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, was snatched from his apartment, detained for 3 months, dragged through courts, and about to be deported for merely protesting a genocide of his people?

The occupation has been home for a long time, folks.

Where were you when the Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was snatched on the street, detained, and held in immigration detention for 3 months for merely co-authoring an op-ed critical of her university’s response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

Where were you when we warned that the Israeli army was training police in your American cities, and that those techniques used on Palestinian civilians would one day be used on you?

Where were you when we told you to pay attention to the IDF snatching Palestinian civilians from the streets in the West Bank and warned that those techniques would be tested on American streets?

You’re late, and you’re PEP.

PEP folks, Progressive Except Palestine. Mythical creatures who earned their own Wikipedia page for tireless work on every performative progressive issue except Palestine — decided Disney was worth boycotting over a ban on a white, rich, influential American celebrity, but not for supporting, funding, and propagandizing the slaughter of an entire people.

In the words of Mehdi Hasan: I don’t accept your progressive credentials.

There is a legend on Instagram named Dylan Horner who captured my entire sentiment about white, progressive liberals — those who ignored genocide for two years, yet rushed to rally, rage, protest, and cancel Disney subscriptions over the freedom of speech of an influential rich man, but not for children with shredded limbs and their entire families being wiped away in your timeline.

You have to watch this unraveling of so-called progressiveness — his delivery is beyond what I can capture here, but I’ve included the words below.

So now we understand the collective importance of boycotting a company and canceling our Disney subscriptions when it's a straight white man who gets silenced, right?

It will never cease to amaze me the level of mediocrity that comes out of the white liberal mindset, or even just the white Democratic mindset, and that you guys keep wondering why society can't progress, yet you wait till the last possible moment when something directly impacts you before you do the bare minimum.

I'm gonna hold your delicate little hands, and tell you that if you think the worst thing the parent company of Walt Disney and ABC did in the last couple years was canceling the Jimmy Kimmel Show, wait until you find out how they feel about bombing innocent civilians and slaughtering children.

To clock in at September 2025, and your form of activism is to cancel your Disney subscription; at this rate, diva, you might as well just keep it.

Go take a look through history and tell me at what stage authority and dictators start going after media and affluent straight white men — spoiler alert, it's not the beginning stages.

In the words of Jerry Greenfield, who just the other day did more than just cancel a Disney subscription for being silenced, he actually left Ben & Jerry's because their parent company was silencing their views on human rights and any outspokenness. It's easy to stand up and speak out when there's nothing at stake. The real test of values is when times are challenging, and you have something to lose.

You all need to take the note of that.

Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air prompted you to rally in the streets and cancel your Disney, Hulu, and ESPN subscriptions. This was your red line — not Disney funding genocide, not Hulu running atrocity propaganda ads for Israel during children’s programming, and not Marvel whitewashing Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

Confront your bias, performative rage, and self-centeredness of your progressive liberal mindset by understanding what Disney has done before taking Jimmy off the air.

The breakdown.

Disney is contributing to Israeli genocide in Gaza through its financial donations to Israeli relief organizations and pro-Israel bias in its films and news coverage. Hulu, a subsidiary of Disney, has been running the most grotesque ads, even on children’s programs, about “40 infants were murdered in Israel.” After that fabricated story had been debunked even by Israeli media, Disney never offered an apology or correction.

Specifics.

Donations to Israeli causes: In October 2023, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced a $2 million donation to humanitarian organizations in Israel, including Magen David Adom.

Silencing pro-Palestinian voices: Disney tried to intervene in a public disagreement between Snow White co-stars Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler over the conflict. Zegler, who has expressed pro-Palestinian views, reportedly posted "Free Palestine" on social media, leading to Disney’s attempt to censor her. Disney never censored Gal Gadot, a former Israeli soldier and an outspoken supporter of Israel, not even after Gadot hosted a screening of an Israeli military propaganda film that justified the genocide in Gaza.

Introduction of an Israeli superhero: In 2022, Marvel Studios, owned by Disney, announced it would introduce a superhero named Sabra, an Israeli Mossad agent, in the film Captain America: Brave New World. This attempt at culturewashing Israeli war crimes led to a backlash and calls for a boycott, citing the controversial role of Israel’s intelligence agency.

Involvement of IDF soldiers: Disney has been casting Israeli actors who have served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), such as Gal Gadot, in films like Snow White, which resulted in boycotts of the film and Disney+ subscriptions.

Biased news reporting: Disney's subsidiary, ABC News, has been pushing a pro-Israel narrative that continuously ignores Palestinian perspectives and war crimes. ABC News constantly portrays Israel's actions as "self-defense" while downplaying Palestinian suffering.

Hulu running Israeli propaganda ads: In early 2024, Israeli propaganda videos ran on Hulu, which is owned by Disney, in another example of Disney's complicity in promoting pro-Israel messages.

Disney has largely maintained its position, insisting that its actions support “innocent people affected by the war and condemn terrorism,” while its approach shows a clear bias that disregards the devastating impact on Palestinian civilians.

All of this didn’t move you to cancel your Disney subscription, but removing Jimmy Kimmel, in the words of Dave Smith, “a guy backed by every giant corporation in the world” — did. I’ll let Dave elaborate on this. You should watch Dave’s podcast on this whole Jimmy business and how it intersects with the limitations of a liberal mindset.

Please watch. Let’s do better.

“There’s something particularly infuriating to see someone like Jimmy Kimmel, who of like I’m saying with all the liberals is just totally ignorant of all of this in his own mind, I’m sure actually does conceive this as it’s like — the regime is Trump and we’re the little guy standing up to them. Yeah, we’re the little guy backed by every giant corporation in the world. It’s unbelievable. It’s almost like the whole nature of the government is just the gang that’s perceived as legitimate.”

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We all saw that video this morning — a child with a charred face, taking their last breath, intestines spilling out of their tiny body. I instinctively said her, though it could just as easily have been him. I was so distraught I didn’t even check; the body was so destroyed I couldn’t tell the child’s sex.

I think the sight of intestines spilling from a tiny human body is the moment to say — ENOUGH. Ostracize everyone who still has the gall to claim, or who keeps convincing themselves, that Palestinian children are merely “collateral damage” in some gruesome “war” between “Israel and Hamas.” There is no war. This is the annihilation of a people whose land you want to seize, a biblical need to erase the Palestinians, or, as they prefer to call them, Arabs — from existence.

Children are a demographic threat to that goal, to Zionism, and to the ethnostate upheld through relentless violence.

If you haven’t seen the video, I advise you to see it, however gruesome. We have to bear witness, and we absolutely CANNOT normalize seeing this level of medieval violence being done to CHILDREN, women, and men of Palestine.

I want to make you all aware of the speech by the great Naomi Klein, in April of 2004, at the public Seder, and a protest in New York City, against Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses; support of ecofeminism, organized labour, and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism, and capitalism. Naomi Klein is Jewish.

A Seder is a ceremonial Passover meal celebrated on the first one or two nights of the Passover holiday, involving a specific order of rituals, symbolic foods like bitter herbs and matzah, and the retelling of the biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt.

This is the transcript of Naomi Klein’s speech, also published at The Guardian:

We need an exodus from Zionism

This Passover, we don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name

Published on Wed, April 24th, 2004.

By Naomi Klein

I’ve been thinking about Moses, and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.

The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: what kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?

But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.

What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.

That false idol is called Zionism.

Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.

It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.

Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.

From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism equates Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and client states.

From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons.

Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here.

It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.

We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.

It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.

Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child.

Including the love we have as a people for text and for education.

Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets – this is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education.

Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call in the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students daring to ask them basic questions, such as: how can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?

The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long.

So tonight we say: it ends here.

Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature.

Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred – including against us as Jews.

Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.

Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in that chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.

Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even – especially – the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirit.

So look around. This, here, is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost.

We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. Freedom from an ideology that has no plan for peace other than deals with murderous theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world.

We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.

That is the false idol.

And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.

What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.

And to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say: “Let our people go.”

We say: “We have already gone. And your kids? They’re with us now.

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Something felt different about Sunday’s Emmy Awards. There was a shift in the air, a sense of … overcoming. But overcoming what, exactly? Everything. A barrier that held some of us from really spouting those words out: genocide, Israel, boycott. Fear of retribution. Loss of jobs, livelihoods. Hateful comments.

As words like overcoming, crossing the bridge, opening the floodgates, breaking the dam circled in my head all day, I noticed others naming the same shift, sharing the same language, as if we’d all felt it at once.

This Substack note from the author Trita Parsi hit the nail on the head. The key barrier in revolutions is the public fearing the dictator. Overcoming that barrier is when the public stops fearing the dictator. Similarly, the fear of retribution by elements supporting Israel’s genocide had been overcome. Do you feel the shift?

Listen to what Javier Bardem said on the Emmys red carpet, when interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter:

“Here I am today, denouncing the genocide in Gaza. I am talking about the IAGS, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, who study thoroughly genocide and has declared it is a genocide. That’s why we ask for a commercial and diplomatic blockade and also sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide. Free Palestine.”

The clip was reposted several times by Variety — no censorship. Variety, a magazine that relentlessly published hit pieces on actresses Rachel Zegler and Melisa Barrera, framing their empathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people as inflammatory political rhetoric that borders on hate speech.

These are the articles they published over the course of last year:

Inside Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Fiasco: Death Threats, Beefed-Up Security and a Social Media Guru for Rachel Zegler

Spyglass Says Melissa Barrera Was Fired From ‘Scream’ Due to Rhetoric That ‘Flagrantly Crosses the Line Into Hate Speech’ (EXCLUSIVE)

A Fired ‘Scream’ Star, Clients Booted From Agencies and a Secret Tom Cruise Meeting: Inside Hollywood’s Divide Over Israel

Melissa Barrera Ignites More Controversy With New Social Media Posts, Sparking Heated Debate at WME

To have Variety magazine publish Javier Bardem’s full statement on the Emmys red carpet is nothing short of a miracle, given their track record of culturewashing Israel’s war crimes in Palestine.

Javier was on a mission, using this platform to promote the Film Workers for Palestine — a call endorsed by filmmakers and cinema workers to stand for an end to genocide, and for a free Palestine. They organized a pledge, signed by 3,900 industry names declaring the signees will not work with Israeli institutions and film companies that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” The pledge states that examples of complicity include “whitewashing or justifying genocide and apartheid, and/or partnering with the government committing them.”

He pivoted every single question from himself and his project, to Palestine.

Listen to

Interviewer: First of all, I got to ask you about the Keffiyah?

Javier: “At the end of August, the AGS, the International Association of Genocide Scholars who study thoroughly the word genocide, the concept of genocide, called what is going on in Gaza today a genocide. And that's why we want to ask for a commercial and diplomatic blockade and sanctions on Israel to stop this genocide, free Palestine.”

Interviewer: And you know there's been that was a long time coming. I think there was a lot of debate over many months and people were so reluctant to say it. How frustrating was that for you for them to to wait for them to finally confirm something that a lot of people had already known?

Javier: “Yeah. And also we are getting together, the Film Workers for Palestine. It's a great union, group that is getting more and more people attached. It's also important to clarify, we do not target individuals. What we target are those complicit film companies, and institutions that are involved in whitewashing or justifying the genocide of Israel in Gaza. And it's an apartheid regime. And we stand with those who fight and stand in solidarity with the oppressed.

Interviewer: Yeah. And that was an important distinction.

Javier: “Absolutely. Institutions and companies. And if you want to work on a movie, you have to have a very thorough check out of who's behind it, and to see what is their relationship with the genocide, and then take your decisions. I know my decision. I will never work with some company now that are not are not condemning the genocide in Israel in in Gaza.”

Interviewer: Are you having conversations with Elise and your reps? Because of course I know…

Javier: I know what I'm doing. I know what I can bring. It's okay. Me not getting jobs is absolutely irrelevant compared to what is going on there. It's it's that easy.

Interviewer: Yeah. I mean, what an amazing statement you're making that a lot of people have been afraid to make.

Javier: Their silence, because they're afraid, is their support to the genocide.

Interviewer: And then let's talk about you and this nomination by the way, which was so deserved.

Javier: “It's so hard to pivot to something from real life. And I thank you very much for your microphone and your time and your attention and your camera to give me the platform to speak about what it matters.”

I'm so happy that uh the Sound of Hadi had sorry made it into the Grand Jury Prize because it's going to bring attention to it, and there's another great Palestinian movie called ‘All That Is Left of You’ that you will hear about in Toronto, and it's a great movie, and it's about time to bring those stories, and to give them screen time for people to understand what we're talking about. This thing didn't start on October 7th. This thing started in 1948.

Interviewer: Wow.

Yes, exactly that. Wow.

Listen to his entire red-carpet interview.

Fuck ICE and Free Palestine? Listen to Hannah Einbinder iconic line while receiving her award.

And also her words in the Emmy Presser, clearly calling out Israel human right’s violations and war crimes.

Mohammed El-Kurd explained the importance of this moment, and why the choice of both Javier and Hannah’s words moved beyond symbolism of solidarity to a full-throated call for tangible actions against the perpetrator, Israel:

“If you felt that the Javier Bardem/Hannah Einbinder’s statements last night were refreshing, and unlike the usual red carpet lip-service, it is because they weren’t vague or preemptively defensive, nor did they reduce the genocide to a faceless “humanitarian crisis.” They denounced the culprit unequivocally and named what justice demanded: sanctions.

I'm rarely impressed with celebrity displays of solidarity, not only due to suspicions of opportunism or whatnot, but mostly because, so often, they're painfully timid and hesitant, defanging their political stances with euphemisms, disclaimers and bothsidesism, or refusing to name the perpetrators—these silly linguistic tricks meant to appease all sides end up rendering well-intentioned gestures hollow and perfunctory. Such reticence does nothing to raise the ceiling and is a complete waste of social capital.

In the case of Bardem and Einbinder, however, it wasn't the keffiyeh or the ceasefire pin that were impressive, it was Bardem's full-throated call for "commercial and diplomatic blockade, and also sanctions on Israel."

It was Einbinder’s saying “Free Palestine” in a room full of powerful Zionists, instead of opting to use the classic (and very feeble) talking point of “women, children, etc.” Meaning, instead of taking the easy route of talking about Gaza as if it's an unfortunate natural disaster, she explicitly adopted the slogan of our movement, a slogan rooted in anti-Zionist, anti-colonial struggle for land and liberation, coupling it with the local struggle against ICE, and later renouncing Israel, not just “Netanyahu’s government,” as an “ethnonationalist state” that must be exiled outside of American mainstream Jewry.

One only gets a few minutes on stage or talking to the press, and they chose to use that time to move beyond the symbolism of the pin and the scarf and into tangible action, however limited it may be: vowing to cut ties with those complicit in genocide and demanding they be sanctioned.”

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Yesterday at work, I went on lunch break with two colleagues. The usual casual chatter suddenly swerved: Did you hear Charlie Kirk got killed? My friends gasped: Oh my God, really? How? Where? I replied: There’s a video of it, you didn’t see? No, show me! — they demanded in unison.

I pulled out my phone, that infamous device carrying death, blood, and the breathless children whose limbs I’ve seen dangling from walls these past two years, and searched for a video of Charlie Kirk’s execution. I roll it, and both of my colleagues gasp in horror.

Oh my God, Miranda, that’s horrible! Oh my god, you didn’t warn me, it’s so graphic and horrific, I’m going to be sick — one of them comments.

Why? I ask her. Haven’t you seen blown-up children and their limbs severed for the past two years? What’s so horrific about this one, after seeing tiny bodies being blown to pieces or riddled with 335 bullets in a small 6-year-old body?

Yeah, I did," she answers, but it wasn’t graphic like this, she says. It wasn’t this gory that you see blood popping out of his veins like this, she says.

I stand in horror at her horror, and all I can muster is — ARE YOU SERIOUS?

For reference, this is an amazingly kind, great human being. Probably one of the kindest souls I've ever encountered. My shock at her shock is palpable.

I pull out my phone again, the one that holds about 60,000 pictures and videos of severed limbs of Palestinian children, women, men, PEOPLE, and I show her. I roll through the videos of blown-apart limbs, children lying on the cold hospital floor screaming for parents who will never come, surgeries without anesthesia because Israel denied it to maximize death, frantic international doctors rushing to treat the endless stream of broken bodies.

She’s watching, but not in the same horror as she watched Charlie Kirk’s blood spray from his neck. She didn’t grasp at Palestinian children like she did watching Charlie’s death. She confirms it’s terrible, but doesn’t say it’s much worse than watching a white man taken out.

Why did I say white here? I don’t know, you tell me? What difference does he hold, that of those children, women, and men being brutally taken out for the past 700 + days?

Substack doesn’t let me post the most gruesome videos of limbs severed on the hospital floor, or limbs stuck in the rubble, so this is the best I could do here. But I showed her the most violent ones, and she informed me that — yes, this is horrible too, but that video of Charlie was too graphic and uncomfortable.

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This is an empathetic person. This is a kind person. So why is it that people in the West seem coded not to feel the same anguish when darker skin bleeds, when bullets pierce darker bodies, as they do when it’s white skin violently bleeding? How do we explain this phenomenon — this failure to grieve for people who live over there somewhere, even as it is our bombs, our governments, our money that make their suffering possible?

Islamophobia is the most successful gaslight of all time, working so well on our psyche that we aren’t even aware what has been done to us.

The number of people who messaged me to comment on news about Charlie Kirk being killed, the ones that I haven't spoken to for 2 years, the ones that stayed away from my inbox like it’s a plague that will burn their eyes if they look at the content I have been posting for 2 years — it’s … I have no word to insert actually.

IT’S.

I feel so defeated, knowing you could exist and find the way to explain this to yourselves.

It’s hard to breathe knowing that the graphic murder of a white man will move you to speak out, whether you stand with him politically or against him — while the mounting piles of children, and let’s stop saying only children here, because women and men deserve equal treatment in the realm of humanity we must demand for everyone on this earth, somehow don’t move you. All this while you know full well that it’s your money paying for the bombs that maul them to death.

Seeing what the American politicians wrote on Twitter in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death was a perfect coordination of hypocrisy, a dance only this country could choreograph so well.

Barack Obama wrote on X, “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.”

Joe Biden wrote on X, “There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.”

Kamala Harris wrote on X: “I am deeply disturbed by the shooting in Utah. Doug and I send our prayers to Charlie Kirk and his family. Let me be clear: Political violence has no place in America. I condemn this act, and we all must work together to ensure this does not lead to more violence.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, "We ask everyone to pray for him and his family. This is detestable what's happened. Political violence has become all too common in American society, and this is not who we are. It must stop.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on X before the announcement of Kirk's death, "There is no place in our country for political violence. Period, full stop."

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X. "The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X: "Political violence has no place in America. This shooting is horrifying, and I’m praying for Charlie Kirk and his family."

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote before the announcement of Kirk's death: "The scourge of gun violence and political violence must end. The shooting of Charlie Kirk is the latest incident of this chaos, and it must stop. We cannot go down this road."

George W. Bush issued a statement, saying: "Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square. Members of other political parties are not our enemies; they are our fellow citizens."

Bill Clinton said in a social media post: "I hope we all go through some serious introspection and redouble our efforts to engage in debate passionately, yet peacefully."

Political violence must stop. We need to debate passionately, yet peacefully. Political violence has no place in our country. It should only be reserved for the poor countries we plunder and bomb to pieces. Violence should be reserved for negotiating teams in Iran, whom we bomb on the last day of peaceful negotiations, or Qatar, while we called upon them to negotiate a ceasefire solution with us. Political violence should absolutely never, ever be home again!

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