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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

@iyad_elbaghdadi

11 Sep

Optimism is not a plan. Anger is not power. Euphoria is not a national vision. Emotions are not a roadmap.

Mental prisons are more oppressive than physical prisons. And the worst prisons are those we build for ourselves

I'm a strategist. My job is to live in the future. To look at the big picture, to see everything as a trend, to think 20 moves ahead (and 20 years ahead). My brain is wired this way now.

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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

@iyad_elbaghdadi

30 Aug

Very quick stream of consciousness (again), apologies in advance for all the typos, mistakes, inaccuracies etc. Among Islamist militants there have been (generally) two models:

The Caliphate model calls for the establishment of a global empire (although they'll resent the word "empire"). The Emirate model calls for the establishment of local rule (a state with limited borders) and a governance model, sometimes as the goal, sometimes as a start.

ISIS generally represents the first model. The Taliban represents the second model. ISIS refers to itself as Dawlat al-Khilafa (the Caliphate state). The Taliban's official name for Afghanistan is "the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan".

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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

@iyad_elbaghdadi

29 Aug

I think it's time that Middle Eastern activists of a certain... ideological extraction realize that the US politicians will never save you, will never center you, will never exact justice for you, and will never put you first. Piggybacking off another's power is disempowering.

Inherent in their faith (and disappointment) in one US president after another is a belief that the US "rules the world", so all they must do is bend US power, however slightly, to our benefit. But this is based on an antiquated worldview. Even when it wasn't, it never worked.

(I'm tweeting this because something came up on my TL and I did not want to respond directly. Yes this is a subtweet.)

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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

@iyad_elbaghdadi

29 Aug

https://twitter.com/dali_mahfoudh/status/1431949566505623552

I literally described what happened and how I felt about, and for that I'm called "arrogant and bad faith". For describing how humiliated I felt, I'm being called "arrogant". Look, you can dislike what I'm saying, but you cannot argue my lived experience and how it made me feel.

https://twitter.com/dali_mahfoudh/status/1431949566505623552

To be Palestinian is not merely a nationality, it's also a lived experience. And since my people have been atomized and isolated from each other, this has become *multiple* lived experiences. I came face to face with that between 2014 and today.

Nobody should shy away from talking about their experiences because we're all equally valid as human beings. You cannot shut someone's lived experience with your opinion. You cannot argue other people's emotions. And you cannot become the arbiter for who does or doesn't matter.

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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

@iyad_elbaghdadi

27 Aug

Wanna write a scifi story about a portal that opens up in China to another habitable planet halfway across the universe, resulting in China becoming 1000x as rich and powerful as it is now and all the upheavals that would follow

Part of that is China developing 23rd century technology, dominating the world and having to evolve social and economic structures fit for a 23rd century society meanwhile the rest of the world is still dragging its ass from the 20th

Then the new Chinese empire will tell the rest of the world that the reason China is so advanced has nothing to do with that portal or the new planet, it's because Chinese people are inherently better than all other humans, and their history proves it

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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

@iyad_elbaghdadi

27 Aug

Some of the most bitter battles fought by Islamists were against other Islamists. It is not a unified movement, partly because as with all identitarian movements, whenever a "center" forms it's immediately outflanked by a group claiming to be more representative of the identity.

This is why identitarian movements (and identitarian political systems) often tend towards more extreme expressions/conceptions of the identity. There's always someone who can claim to be "more intensely Islamic", etc. You can replace "Islamic" with any other identity here.

And since we're talking about politics, power, broken countries and broken psyches, being "more intensely Islamic" is never about values but about external/extrinsic markers. It's not "our prayers are deepest" or "we treat orphans better", it's "we kill apostates and hide women"

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İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي

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