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Idrees Ahmad | idreesahmad.bsky.social Profile picture
Idrees Ahmad | idreesahmad.bsky.social
@im_PULSE
Associate Editor—@newlinesmag; Contributing Editor—@lareviewofbooks; Bylines—@guardian @nybooks @foreignpolicy @WashingtonPost @TheTLS; Author—Dark Instruments
NM SCHOOL BONDS Profile picture David O'Brien Profile picture Jordan Šišovski Profile picture Dalimil Gala 🇨🇿 Profile picture 4 subscribed
Apr 6, 2023 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
This is why I will never forgive the likes of Noam Chomsky and Seymour Hersh and @LRB and @welt. After Assad's repeated and incontrovertible use of Sarin—one of the most excruciating forms of killing ever invented—they spent years trying to absolve the mass murderer. The @LRB gave several front pages to Seymour Hersh to promote his patently false claims based on a single unnamed source. I identified the source and, as I pointed out, he had lifted his story from the Canadian conspiracy site Globalresearch.ca. lareviewofbooks.org/article/danger…
Feb 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
At an "antiwar" event in DC featuring more Russian flags than at the Moscow Victory Day Parade, and bringing together the far-left and the alt-right, @rogerwaters videoed in to boldly condemn the man he believes is responsible for the destruction of Ukraine...Volodymyr Zelenskyy! It got even more comical. He claims Zelenskyy also blew up the Nordstream pipeline and thus is responsible for "a blatant act of war" and an "extreme act of global terrorism".
Feb 18, 2023 • 16 tweets • 8 min read
I grew up on @RATM & have respect for @tmorello as a musician. But I try to avoid his Twitter because I dread finding crap like this, a string of retweets from Putin/Assad/Xi/Maduro apologists making bumper sticker statements about western hypocrisy. Here's why it's so offensive. Let's start with Alan MacLeod, one of the people @tmorello frequently boosts. The man works for an Iranian regime-linked propaganda site whose main preoccupation is Putin and Assad apologia. buzzfeednews.com/article/rosieg…
Feb 3, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
It's clear by now that there is no depth to which @intifada won't sink. But exploiting the plight of an oppressed people to launch a malicious attack against a young Palestinian woman who lived through the actual intifada and has always spoken up for her people is truly depraved. It's not just that the ghouls that run this publication used a Russian leak to construct a story. But because it wasn't much of a story, they dragged in a Palestinian scholar to give it a sinister framing even though it is contradicted by their own actual report.
Feb 3, 2023 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
In 2018, @CJR published a hagiographic piece on Seymour Hersh 5 years after he had embarrassed himself with a false report on Syria, whose main claims were sourced from the Canadian conspiracy cite Globalresearch.ca. @kylepope refused to retract or publish a response. This was egregious because Hersh had been subsequently exposed for directly reproducing Russian propaganda in a report on the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack (which he had to publish in @Welt because even the @LRB had discovered by then that Hersh was fabricating).
Feb 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
This is astonishing. @CJR has published in four parts an article which is supposed to be an indictment of the press for being overzealous in its criticism of Trump. Its sources? Three Russia-friendly conspiracy theorists. @jelani9: what gives? Is @columbiajourn fine with its reputation being tarnished like this? Does @CJR know that its source Aaron Mate was fired from three journalism jobs and now does podcast for a Kremlin-linked conspiracy site and has actually aided the Russian government in covering up war crimes?
Nov 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
She visited Syria on @UNOCHA dime, where a murderous regime has killed half million & is preventing half its population from returning home. Her recommendation? Help ease the regime's burden so it can concentrate its resources on things that matter, such as bombing refugee camps. She speaks about the strain on Syria's healthcare system without mentioning the regime and Russia's systematic targeting of hospitals and medical personnel, as documented by @P4HR, @HRW, @amnesty and @UNCoISyria.
Jul 30, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
🧵A post by a leftwing professor has gone viral on Facebook & Instagram denouncing the Ukrainian first couple's photos in @voguemagazine as "vile". Others have called them "in poor taste". They are neither. Here's my response to such shameful commentary.
vogue.com/article/portra… Tankies, Trumpists & edgelords who have spent no time at all condemning actual atrocities in Ukraine say they are horrified by this photoshoot. If you knew nothing else about Ukraine, you'd think the only shots that caused damage in Ukraine were @annieleibovitz's.
May 25, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
🧵 On school shootings and gun control:

For 8 years on my way to work at Stirling University, I'd pass by Dunblane. The place looks idyllic, hardly like the scene of a massacre. Yet on March 3, 1996, a man drove there and shot 16 students and a teacher at the local high school. The killings happened in the schools gymnasium. The man was carrying two 9mm Browning HP handguns and two Smith & Wesson M19 revolvers with 743 cartridges—all legally purchased. One of the children studying a the school at the time was future Wimbledon champion Andy Murray
May 23, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As this journalist vs. academic debate is heating up with one side claiming the virtues of clear communication while the other of hard, unsung, intellectual labour, I want to make a few points, since I'm a misfit in both worlds. 1 I'm unconvinced that demands of journalistic narrative & storytelling make citation a hindrance. As it happens, journalists insert quotations freely when they want to advance an argument without being held accountable for it. A lot of journalism today is just he said, she said.
Apr 23, 2022 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
🧵I am reading the letter by German peaceniks to Olaf Scholz lobbying him against sending arms to Ukraine (which is not something he's doing anyway) and it bears closer scrutiny because it exemplifies a certain moral turpitude and loss of perspective.

berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesell… Firstly, I am glad to see that there aren't any names here that I recognise, apart from Hans von Sponeck's, whom I used to respect, but who already disgraced himself by participating in a Russian effort to undermine the OPCW's investigation into the chemical attack in Douma.
Apr 16, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Thread: You probably aren't surprised by Noam Chomsky's comments on Ukraine, blaming Ukrainians for the bloodshed by refusing to accept "the way the world works." Chomsky's intellectual blindspots are also the blindspots of most "anti-imperialists", so a few thoughts. The main problem with this worldview is that, as Chomsky and his comrade Tariq Ali said, they believe that Russia can't be imperialist. They think imperialism is what the US does—ergo, anti-imperialism is anti-Americanism. See, for example. english.alaraby.co.uk/opinion/chomsk…
Apr 12, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
A short thread on why @pinkfloyd's is the exemplary form of artistic solidarity and why under no circumstances must you sing "Imagine" to people confronting aggression or repression.

1. Pink Floyd are musicians and they showed respect not just by placing a Ukrainian artist at the centre of their work, but also by producing something of surpassing quality, something that could actually be on a Pink Floyd record, not just some well-intentioned filler.
Apr 4, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Thread: On this day, five years ago, the Syrian regime attacked the town of Khan Sheikoun with the nerve agent Sarin. 92 people were killed; many more left scarred for life. The way #Russia and its western sympathisers responded tells us a lot about what to expect in #Ukraine. Russia and the regime's immediate response was predictable: denial and deflection. There were the usual slew of mutually contradictory claims, whose aim is to bury the truth under the weight of competing claims. But what was less predictable was how westerners responded.
Apr 3, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Thread: this infographic produced by the Russian propaganda outlet Redfish, which tried to position itself as a progressive grassroots collective, visualises a specious counterfactual commonly raised by tankies and Quincy Institute style "realists". Here's why it's silly. Firstly, Russia is NOT surrounded by NATO. There are only two states bordering Russia that are NATO members: Latvia and Estonia. And not even the most shameless Russian propagandist could argue that the small Baltic state pose a threat to Russia.
Mar 29, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Ukraine is facing a war of aggression, so it's a moral imperative to stand in solidarity with its people and defenders. But we can do this without turning into a mirror image of the Kremlin's apologists. This atrocity was real & Ukrainian authorities have promised to investigate. For those saying Russian soldiers deserve it because of the crimes they've perpetrated against Ukrainians, there are a few things to consider. Firstly, there is no disagreement that Russia is waging a war of aggression and that its forces have engaged in a pattern of war crimes.
Mar 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The only satisfaction in last night's #Oscars was the vastly over-rated Power of the Slog not winning best picture. The line-up was so weak that they even had to put Don't Look Up in key categories. The actual best picture, Asghar Farhadi's "A Hero", was not even nominated. Here was my initial impression of Power of the Slog.

This film is beautifully shot and superbly acted. The writing however is weak, and the director uses a plodding pace to create the impression of profundity when the story is really trite. 1
Mar 26, 2022 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
THREAD: The problem with @Twitter and its indiscriminate @verified system, which allows disinformation agents not just to exploit the platform, but to actually thrive on it. This operator linked to the Iranian and Russian propaganda machinery got nearly 40K retweets for this. Notice the cynicism: the man actually works for the Iranian propaganda channel Press TV and is a contributor to the Syrian regime linked Al Mayadeen and the Russian RT. He is slamming Ukrainians for downplaying the number of bombs that were dropped on Syria—by HIS SIDE!
Mar 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I noted back in 2012, when @BarackObama drew a "red line" on the use of chemical weapons, that this offered no real protection, since most people in Syria were being killed by conventional weapons. Indeed, the belligerent sees it as a green light for conventional killing. In Syria, Assad understood that drawing a red line on a hypothetical is a way to evade responsibility for the actual killings that were going on. It was theatre. And to test this, Assad deliberately crossed the red line and, as he expected, the US retreated.
Mar 25, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
War also produces produces grifters, who lie to cover up crimes.

And it says a lot about @ProgIntl's values that it is promoting someone who has defended the crimes of the Chinese government in Xinjiang and whitewashed the crimes of the regime in Syria. Oh boy. It turns out the warm-up act for this unabashed apologist for mass crimes was....@tmorello!
Mar 25, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This by @chrislhayes is the kind of thoughtful commentary, with urgency befitting the moment, that you rarely see on television. Well worth your time. I agree with Chris that this is an epochal moment. But I have a few quibbles.

msnbc.com/all-in/watch/c… via @msnbc I agree with Chris that 9/11 wasn't the era-defining ideological battle that the current struggle against authoritarianism is going to be. And the war in Ukraine has certainly underscored the significance of this contest. But where we date the start of this contest is significant