THREAD: On Wednesday 8 October Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal that may lead to an end to the Gaza Genocide. While it is likely to save numerous lives, at least for the time being, and should be welcomed for that reason alone, it is hardly a peace agreement nor one that lays the basis for attaining Palestinian rights.

THREAD: In an article brought to my attention by Frances Coppola @Frances_Coppola , Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University examines the Irgun’s 22 July 1946 terrorist bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which at the time served as the headquarters of the British administration in Palestine. The terror attack killed 42 Arabs, 28 Brits, 17 Jews, 2 Armenians, and a Greek. According to Hoffman, the bombing “for decades to come would hold the infamous distinction as the most lethal terrorist attack in history: surpassed only in 1983 with the suicide bomb attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut.”

THREAD: The widespread disgust and revulsion directed at Van Jones for mocking the corpses of thousands of Palestinian babies shredded beyond recognition by Israel’s US-armed military is, needless to say, entirely justified. Jones’s subsequent attempt at contrition for using these Palestinian corpses as – in his own words – “a punch line”, which predictably drew immediate laughter from Bill Maher, Thomas Friedman, and their audience, adds only insult to injury.

THREAD: The Hasbara Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest offering is entitled “Requiem for Gaza Greenhouses”. It has been difficult to avoid its shrill chorus these past several days. According to the libretto composed by Israel and its flunkies, once again and ever so coincidentally playing like a well-conducted ensemble, the Gaza greenhouses were deliberately destroyed by Palestinians in an orgy of Islamic rage immediately after Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip. More importantly, this act of wanton destruction proves Palestinians should never have a state, and therefore that no government should have recognized Palestine this past week.

THREAD: “First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People”. I first came across this phrase, which is often invoked by the Islamophobic far right and Israel flunkies (these are often one and the same) during the past year. According to those who so eagerly disseminate it, it is a slogan/proverb that forms a key tenet of Islamist and particularly Jihadi ideology – to the extent, that is, that one is permitted to distinguish between Islam, Muslims, and political movements that seek to make Islam the dominant force in state and society.

THREAD: On 1 April 1988, at the height of the popular uprising in the occupied Palestinian territories commonly known as the First Intifada, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed that Israel would crush the Palestinians “like grasshoppers”. Speaking in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which he repeatedly vowed Israel would rule permanently, Shamir added: ''Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls.''

THREAD: On 29 August 2025, Little Marco for a Big Israel announced that the United States will deny and where relevant revoke visas to any member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or Palestinian Authority (PA) seeking to participate in the “upcoming [session of the] United Nations General Assembly”. Only currently serving members of the Palestinian Mission to the United Nations in New York are exempted. The US move constitutes the most brazen violation of Washington’s treaty obligations under the 1947 US UN Headquarters Agreement since the Reagan administration in December 1988 refused to provide PLO leader Yasir Arafat with a visa to address the General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York.

THREAD: I’ve watched the Adam Friedland (@AdamFriedland) interview with Israel groupie Ritchie Torres twice. It made for utterly compelling viewing. @AdamFriedland Several aspects stood out for me.

THREAD: The Hasbara Symphony Orchestra has been playing overtime (tempo: goebbelissimo fortissimo) to legitimize what Israel has confirmed was the pre-meditated assassination of Al-Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza City, Anas al-Sharif, on 10 August 2025. The justifications being put forward by Israel, its apologists, and flunkies for al-Sharif’s murder fall into several categories:

THREAD: The difference between Holocaust denial and Gaza Genocide denial is that Holocaust denial is either illegal or a criminal offence in many countries, and is for the most part the preserve of marginalized and isolated cooks and conspiracy theorists. No self-respecting journalist considers Holocaust denial a legitimate point of view, and no serious media organization argues that the duty of impartiality requires it to provide Holocaust denial with a platform in any serious discussion about Germany’s extermination of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War.

THREAD: In a post yesterday I argued that AI assistants like Grok are unreliable for resolving questions which require judgement and interpretation, and can be useful only when the question posed to such assistants concerns matters of settled fact that have one, and only one, correct answer. I gave the example of “In what year did Napoleon invade Russia?” versus “Why did Napoleon invade Russia?” to illustrate my point. That, at least, was my view until several people responded with examples in which Grok is unreliable even with respect to matters of settled fact, because it provided multiple, contradictory, and incompatible responses to what are essentially “yes or no” questions. So I stand corrected.

THREAD (also available as a single text on my substack mouinrabbani.substack.com): Now that France and Britain, both members of the United Nations Security Council and G7, have indicated they are prepared to recognize the State of Palestine, the dam has burst. Today Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indicated his government too intends to recognize Palestine during the upcoming session of the UN General Assembly in New York, and a growing number of Western states are adopting or preparing similar positions. It is far from certain whether any of these governments will actually follow through on their statements of intent, and by attaching various conditions to their plans they have already provided themselves with an escape clause should they find it necessary to use it.

THREAD (also available as a single text on my substack mouinrabbani.substack.com): When US president Harry Truman addressed a group of US diplomats stationed in the Middle East in late 1945, after they had urged him to withhold support for the Zionist objective of statehood in Palestine because it would lead to protracted conflict in the Middle East and undermine their efforts to promote US interests, he spoke the following words: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."

THREAD (Also posted on my Substack: ): The former president of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari has died in London at age 82.mouinrabbani.substack.com Buhari served three terms as the country’s head of state. In his first stint, he was installed in the top job in 1983 after participating in a military coup, then ousted in a further putsch two years later. More recently he was elected to the presidency in 2015, serving two terms until 2023.

THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS A SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK): Taqiyya. Prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and the tsunami of Islamophobia it unleashed, I’d never heard of taqiyya. Nor had any of the Muslims or those identified as Muslims I had encountered before that time. More precisely, the topic never came up. Not once. As explained by Islamophobes, and Israel flunkies in particular, taqiyya means not only “liar” but much, much more. In their telling, taqiyya not only permits but positively requires Muslims to lie and conceal, about anything and everything, in order to achieve their collective objective of global domination, transforming the entire planet into an Islamic caliphate. Through subterfuge, of course. It is a divine license, directed provided by Allah, to fabricate and dissemble at will. It is the primary religious obligation of every Muslim, whether religious or not, far exceeding the Shahada and the other pillars of the Muslim faith.

THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK): During the Gaza Genocide Israel flunkies have become obsessed with the proposition that Palestinians do not exist and never have existed. In their telling, those who call themselves Palestinians are, if anything, just generic Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, or Egyptians and Jordanians in disguise. They come from virtually everywhere, except Palestine. The surnames of some, which reference foreign cities or countries, prove it, just like Tom Holland and Jools Holland are indisputably Dutch, and the Russian-British scholar Isaiah Berlin was German. Just as importantly, these ideological fanatics insist that there is not and cannot be such a thing as a Palestinian people. In their telling this political collective is a fabrication, and anyone claiming to be part of it a fraud.

THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK)
A Hasbara Symphony Orchestra fan favorite, often played during encores, is the funereal sonata, “Hamas Throws Gays from Buildings”. Although it has recently been overtaken by the more upbeat waltz, “No Roofs Left Because We Flattened All the Buildings”, the two are often played in succession. To bolster their claims, Israel flunkies have published videos and provided other evidence of this horrific practice, but never provided the name or any other identifying information of a single gay Palestinian man who was thrown to his death by Hamas from the rooftop of one of the Gaza Strip’s former buildings.

THREAD: Identity is a dynamic, multi-dimensional, and typically contextual phenomenon. Groups and individuals don’t have fixed, static identities, because these typically change over time and place. Identity is furthermore not exclusively self-generated, but also exists and is formed in the eye of the beholder. A US soldier in Iraq, for example, may view herself as just another American, New Yorker, and military officer, but be perceived by her peers primarily as an African-American or woman (or African-American woman), and by Iraqis as nothing other than an illegitimate foreign occupier.

This guy seems addicted to Nazi tropes, and has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers for this very reason.

https://twitter.com/ImtiazMadmood/status/1937485392300720312

THREAD: It seems a ceasefire has been achieved in what US President Trump is now calling the “Twelve-Day War” between Israel and Iran. What motivated the parties involved to accept it? For the United States, the calculation is fairly straightforward. It viewed the war launched by Israel against Iran primarily as an instrument to improve its negotiating position vis-à-vis Tehran. If Israel succeeded, Iran would be compelled to comprehensively dismantle its nuclear program, renounce its right to enrich uranium on its own territory as guaranteed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), terminate its ballistic missile program, and sever links with militant movements in the region in a subsequent agreement dictated by Washington.

THREAD: On 21 June 2025 the United States bombed Iran, concentrating its massive firepower on three Iranian nuclear installations. It was, by any measure, and like the war launched by Israel on 13 June, an unprovoked attack. None of the justifications offer pass the smell test. As for the status of these attacks under international law, any such analysis is irrelevant, because international law as we have known it no longer exists. For good measure Israel and the United States have most likely also administered a fatal blow to the nuclear regulatory regime. I continue to maintain that the latest developments were not inevitable, and that the Trump administration did not assume office with a determination and plan to go to war against Iran. The evidence suggests that Trump, and key members of his entourage, were serious about pursuing negotiations with Tehran, but that Trump and his de facto Secretary of State Steve Witkoff were then persuaded on a different course of action by a coalition consisting of Israel, its loyalists in the US (including within the administration), and anti-Iran war hawks.