Just finished Bob Woodward's "War". A few takeaways. Biden and Harris detest Netanyahu and privately tried to discourage him from attacking Gaza, but Netanyahu received encouragement to "destroy Hamas" from the Jordanians, UAE, Saudis and Egyptians.
Netanyahu constantly ignored the counsel of the Biden Administration, but instead of confronting him or withholding support, the administration came out publicly strongly backing him, lest they be criticised for not standing fully with Israel.

You can't be both an Assadist and pro-Palestinian. Notice who @AlHaq_org has chosen as "voices of Palestine". Aaron Mate and Roger Waters! Same people who justified Assad's siege, starvation, bombing, gassing and depopulation of Palestinian refugees in Damascus's Yarmouk camp. Do you remember Yarmouk? The Palestinian refugee camp that was starved so mercilessly that when a rare UN convoy entered it, it led to this iconic photograph?

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.

https://twitter.com/izeidan88/status/1643399812446928896

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…

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".

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…

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/dcampbell_iptv/status/1621321277997813760

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).

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?

https://twitter.com/seth_hettena/status/1620884309262630913

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?

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.

https://twitter.com/AlenaDouhan/status/1590707762371399681

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.

🧵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.

🧵 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

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.

🧵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.

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.

https://twitter.com/geogvma/status/1515086399489384454

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…

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.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/redfishstream/status/1510271113942614020

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPR/status/1508772206020542471

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.

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

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!

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.

https://twitter.com/kiraincongress/status/1507325314925568007

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.