Kyle Orton Profile picture
Write about terrorism and national security issues | Lot of history and religion | Regrettably, also some politics |
Sue Strong @strong_sue@mastodon.sdf.org 🇺🇦 Profile picture Crystal Steiniger 🌟🌟🌟 Profile picture প্রদীপ্ত মৈত্র (Pradipto Moitra) Profile picture ❌BigMamaTEA❌ Profile picture Stacey Profile picture 11 subscribed
Feb 26 10 tweets 5 min read
This is a completely anodyne statement of compassion and prudence - it is rather well attested that there is a contagious aspect to suicide. But the replies are absolutely unhinged from the "pro-Palestine" set. A truly suicidal movement, in every respect. If Aaron Bushnell, the US airman who immolated himself, is to be taken seriously ideologically - rather than us mourning the suicide of a disturbed person - the results are not pretty.

He was a straight-out HAMAS supporter, thought Israel was the Nazis of our time
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Jan 13 6 tweets 2 min read
#Israel's opening presentation before the ICJ show trial was very dignified and soberly done, not just by comparison with the raft of hysterical lies from the ANC's South Africa. A point #Israel made at the ICJ that it should have made more of before now: "genocide" describes Oct. 7 and HAMAS' public political program. The Genocide Convention mandates action to prevent or to punish. So, why have others not joined the operation to eliminate HAMAS?
Jan 2 7 tweets 2 min read
#Israel's strike in Beirut a short while ago killed Saleh al-Aruri, the overall deputy of #HAMAS. There are also reports in the Arab press that Osama Hamdan, the "official" HAMAS representative in #Lebanon, was killed, and it seems some "military wing" HAMAS officials, too. Note the reports #Israel struck near a "Hizballah headquarters": this refers to the #IRGC's nerve centre for the whole Northern Middle East, the most important outpost of the Islamic Revolution outside Iran.
Nov 30, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read
Henry Kissinger is dead at 100. His time in power abetted the onward march of Communism and brought the West to its lowest ebb at the end of the 1970s. We managed to halt and destroy the Soviet Union, but his empowerment of Red China is now the gravest threat to the Free World. Kissinger's "opening" to Red China was the most grotesque sell-out: he gave Peking everything it wanted, over Taiwan, before the "negotiations" even began. Afterwards, of course, at Tiananmen Square and beyond, Kissinger was always there to defend the CCP. kyleorton.substack.com/p/nixon-kissin…
Nov 10, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read
Alireza Panahian, the spokesman for the office of #Iran's Supreme Leader, says that the Gaza war is part of the Iranian Revolution's attritional jihad against Western civilisation. Panahian says no level of Palestinian civilian casualties is too high for this project. There has been an argument since 9/11 - sometimes made in good faith, sometimes not - that responding forcefully to Islamist terrorism only makes the problem worse. As against this essentially theological belief, we do get some data points, e.g.:
Nov 5, 2023 14 tweets 5 min read
#ISIS calls for Muslims to initiate a "hard and fast" terrorism campaign against Jews "all over the world" as part of its plan to destroy #Israel | kyleorton.substack.com/p/islamic-stat… Israel is not going to live under threat of this being repeated, and it is difficult to imagine any other State would even be asked to.
Oct 29, 2023 16 tweets 6 min read
A Senator in #Pakistan responds to the massacre in #Israel and the initiation of IDF defensive actions by praising Hitler - not merely in generic terms but specifically for the Holocaust.

(Apologists and perhaps he will try to deny "what he did" refers to the Shoah. Let's see.) Image #Israel has recalled her ambassador from #Turkey to reassess relations after Turkish ruler Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a particularly inflammatory speech yesterday that included inter alia threats to intervene military against Israel in Gaza.
Oct 28, 2023 20 tweets 6 min read
#Iran has had its agents sown into the "pro-Palestine" crowds at these massive antisemitic demonstrations in #Britain, the police have found, and the Iranians have been extensively involved in the online propaganda scene that feeds into these events. thetimes.co.uk/article/iran-a… As one shrewd analyst put it, #Iran's clerical regime is "best be understood as a #Soviet Union in Islamic garb."

With these demonstrations it is the same as the Soviets manipulating the "peace" demos in the 1970s and 80s.
meforum.org/62821/whither-…
Oct 15, 2023 28 tweets 10 min read
The demonstration in London yesterday was straightforwardly pro-Iran/HAMAS - favouring its massacre of Israeli civilians and wanting to shield it from consequences. If some attended under another impression, alas for them. There doesn't seem to have been much confusion, though. The people attending rallies, at a time when Israel is still uncovering the bodies, with paraglider symbols on their placards and backpacks could not be any clearer about their political alignment and desired outcome in the Holy Land if they brandished a swastika.
Oct 14, 2023 24 tweets 9 min read
#Iran/#HAMAS put out a video yesterday showing its jihadists holding #Israeli toddlers and at least one baby in a pram. The advertised intent is to use these captive children as human shields. Shows some of the categorical moral differences in this war: (1) it is inconceivable the IDF would randomly abduct Palestinian civilians; and (2) such hostages self-evidently would not deter IRGC/HAMAS, which itself uses Palestinian human shields.
Oct 12, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
Not a good sign that the messaging of #Iran's Supreme Leader, the man who organised and ordered the massacre of Jews in #Israel on Saturday, is indistinguishable from the statements of many university student bodies in Britain and America. Image The key point from @KMooreGilbert.
Aug 6, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
Succinctly put by Richard McNally in Remembering Trauma (2003), referring to the "recovered memory" silliness: "The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support." The evidence, as is intuitive, runs the other way: "extreme stress enhances memory for the central aspects of an overwhelming emotional experience". There might be a "freeze" in the moment to process a reaction, but you'll remember the event.
Jul 26, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
Claim that #Niger's president Mohamed Bazoum has been placed under arrest during a military coup.

BUT ... #Niger's president denies he has been arrested during the coup attempt
Jun 23, 2023 54 tweets 15 min read
Yevgeny Progozhin, nominal leader of the "#Wagner" group, essentially threatens a coup in #Russia, saying that the "evil" of the "military leadership" must be "stopped". "I ask nobody to resist": once "we finish what we started" to restore "justice", "we will return to the front"

Kremlin spokesman responds to Prigozhin's statement in effect threatening a coup in Russia
Mar 31, 2023 7 tweets 4 min read
Back in 1990, Bernard Lewis wrote of the dangerous development in academic history where criticism, indeed abuse, was being directed at whole disciplines studying non-Western regions, at least if they refused to tailor their findings to current fashions. jstor.org/stable/41211808 Lewis deals with the most infamous effort to prevent study of a non-Western region: the Saidian "Orientalist" thesis that Western scholarship on the Middle East was part of an Imperial enterprise. It does not meet even the most basic test of the timeline.
Feb 15, 2023 9 tweets 6 min read
Senior Biden officials confirm to @washingtonpost that they are not trying to help #Ukraine achieve victory; they are trying to empower Kyiv to negotiate with #Putin, i.e. agree to the partition of the country and continued Russian occupation of parts. washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… The Biden people show how susceptible they are to #Russia's vision, unsurprisingly since so many are Obama holdovers: they leaked a CIA assessment that #Ukraine is militarily unable to retake #Crimea to WaPo, and expressed worries about the Russian "mobilisation".
Dec 12, 2022 7 tweets 5 min read
.@shustry interviewed #Ukraine's President Zelensky on his way back from liberated #Kherson, a trip his security detail did not want him to make and that he concedes was a "bit reckless". A deeply interesting look at the man TIME made its Man of the Year. time.com/person-of-the-… After #Kherson was liberated from nine months of #Russian occupation, #Zelensky went down there to "show them that #Ukraine has returned ... Maybe it will give them enough of a boost to last a few more days. But I'm not sure. I don't lull myself with such illusions."
Dec 11, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Abu Agila Masud, whom the #US indicted two years ago over the 1988 Lockerbie/Pan Am atrocity, was kidnapped by a militia in #Libya a month ago and is now in American custody. Masud will make an initial appearance in court im Washington, D.C., next week. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla… #pt
Dec 11, 2022 12 tweets 9 min read
Signs that #Russia is re-escalating the "mobilisation", picking people up off the streets again to send to #Ukraine, presumably because so many of the mobiks have been killed already and now there is this insane effort to break through in Bakhmut. Helpful thread here on the background from #Bakhmut. Really, whatever happens in the next period, whether #Russia can break through #Ukraine's lines or not, there is no meaningful way of assessing this as anything but a catastrophe for the Russians
Nov 29, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
#Russian man claims he was in prison with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the nominal manager of "Wagner". Says Prigozhin was an "offended/outcast" (Обиженный), the lowest caste, who regularly provided sex to prisoners, including this man personally.

[Translated by @wartranslated] "[Priogozhin] had his place ... and agreed to his place. ... [T]hose who join Wagner ... are commanded and managed by a faggot ... [and therefore] become lower than faggots."
Nov 29, 2022 19 tweets 4 min read
Shapur Bakhtiar broke with a lifetime of opposition activity to form a government at the Shah's behest as the King left Iran in January 1979. A stern secularist, Bakhtiar tried fight the laws of gravity to pull his country back from the brink of madness as the Revolution crested. If everyone, even the greatest men, get only a sentence in history, Shapur Bakhtiar's is that he reigned in Iran for 37 days after 37 years in opposition. However, his life both before and after the Iranian Revolution is equally as interesting.