Palestine’s occupation has an advanced economy but the PRC does not. Good to know!

I’d have an uneasy time fasting given my need to eat before taking my medication, and I don’t have enough faith to pray five times daily. The need to pray that many times a day sounds like it would be good for self-discipline, as does the need to fast for Ramadhan in addition to the other dietary restrictions, but I feel like I’d have a hard time handling those tasks. Besides, I don’t feel like there is a divine presence somewhere, and adhering to monotheistic practices when I’m atheist sounds dishonest.

Islam also shares some of the same problems as Orthodox Judaism, for instance, it mandates circumcision, which is a painful violation of children’s autonomy; I still get depressed when I think about my circumcision. Likewise, I am uncomfortable with compulsory dress codes, and segregating the sexes is a practice that makes me feel uneasy. I consider these (apart from mandatory circumcision) to be annoying inconveniences rather than serious problems, though.

I am not one of those Christopher Hitchens types who think that Islam is just barbarism and its ordinary adherents are violent savages. The work The Study of Islamic Origins notes striking similarities, if not outright borrowings, from Judaism (which is usually good). I have respect for many Muslims such as Omar Mukhtar, Malcolm X, and a certain Sephardic Muslim whom I know. I find various tenets in Islam, such as its rejection of ‘original sin’, to be more reasonable than some in mainstream Christianity. Lastly, I would say that ordinary Muslims are not vastly different from other Abrahamists, therefore I have little reason to be hostile to Islam.

Do anticommunists… not know that the Republic of Cuba, the DPRK, and a few other people’s republics still exist?

Or do anticommunists think that history only happens in predominately ‘White’ countries?

Standing with these terrorist groups is the opposite of standing with the Lebanese, the Palestinians, the Iranians, and the Yemenis.

As if standing with the IDF were at all better. What a joke.

Any simpleton with a basic grasp of modern Palestinian history can surmise that the ‘State of Israel’ was ultimately a product of European colonialism. Otherwise, al-Quds/Jerusalem would not have looked like this:

Prime Minister David Ben‐Gurion opposed the establishment of a Holocaust memorial day and referred to the survivors as the “dust of human beings”.

Captain Obvious isn’t antisemitic, Herzlians.

Just because liberals voted for the Fascists in 1924, repeatedly praised Fascism in the press, applauded the Fascists for suppressing worker demonstrations, trained dozens of Fascist cadets, elected politicians sympathetic to Fascism, repeatedly overlooked or trivialized Fascist oppression, chanted “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!” alongside Fascists in German government chambers, suppressed militant antifascists regularly, signed a naval pact with Fascists, extended credit to Fascists, signed military alliances with the Fascists, partitioned Czechoslovakia for the Fascists, tolerated businesses that marketed products (including oil and nickel) to Fascists, became economically critical to the Axis war machine, provided bank accounts for Fascists, bailed out Axis businessmen, held more Axis POWs than Jewish refugees, collaborated with self‐identified fascists, directly incorporated former Axis intelligence into the state, started Operation Paperclip and kept the employés, started Operation Bloodstone, appointed former Axis leaders to high ranks within the NATO, accepted surviving Axis collaborators as party members, endorsed an underground network of neofascists, allow monuments to Axis collaborators, martyrize Axis collaborators, and contribute to neofascism in Ukraine, doesn’t mean that liberalism enables fascism or fascists.

Name one time that liberalism enabled fascism.

‘WE ZIONISTS ARE PERFECTLY NORMAL PEOPLE!’

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11237996

I thought about writing a note likening this to colonial powers despoiling indigenous populations, but I decided against it on the grounds that the similarities were too obvious. Perhaps that would have made my topic more interesting anyway, though. What do you think?

Thank you. I struggle with mental illness but I still have the decency to tell that supporting an apartheid régime is not in our best interest. The reasons that so many Yankees approve of it are fairly complex and can’t be boiled down to a disability.

Ke Dio bendiga a Palestina.

Wow! A dying empire doesn’t want to waste resources for decades fighting another war that it can’t win‽

I’m so surprised!

/c/shitultrassay

Japanese nationalists control Japan’s education system. Of course ordinary Japanese students are not going to learn about the Empire of Japan’s easily verifiable atrocities, just like how the settler population in the Levant is highly unlikely to learn about the Nakba in schools.

The upper classes’ armies have plenty of reasons to commit massacres: it makes theft easier, it frees up land for settlers, it eliminates economic competitors, and it enforces dominance. The Imperialists were not evil for the sake of being evil; their immorality benefited them.

The atrocities against Nanjing were not something that a Chinese propagandist made up long after the fact. It is easy to find sources from the late 1930s detailing them. Here:

A 1938 book partly about the Imperial atrocities in Nanking.

Telegram detailing the atrocities, dated January 19, 1938.

NSFL article from LIFE, dated May 16, 1938.

Is it just me, or are we suffering more technical difficulties than usual?

For a while I could tolerate them, but now they’re slowly killing my interest in revisiting this network; I’d rather be replaying computer games.

Operation Paperclip was far more consequential than Operation Osoaviakhim. Not to mention that Operation Osoaviakhim was much more of a reparation than Operation Paperclip was. Contrary to what @Archangel1313@lemmy.ca thinks, the differences between these two programmes are not trivia worth overlooking.

The weakening of support from American Jews, although welcome, is not a decisive factor for the simple reason that contrary to the propaganda of the [neo]imperialist politicians and the anti-Semitic Right, U.S. support has never depended on Jewish support for Israel. Jews provided the moral alibi and political shield for that support. They have never been the reason for that support.

The one thing that I miss about Windows is how much easier it was to install and try computer games. Recently I purchased The Settlers® 2: Gold Edition through Good Old Games, and after installing it through Minigalaxy I tried to play it but DOSBox stalled on me until I forced it to crash. WINE gave me an error message, too, and I ran into similar difficulties when I tried to replay Majesty Gold HD. I don’t know how to fix my problems (yet) but the repeated complications almost make me miss Windows. Almost.

I bet that the régime is going to abolish the age restrictions on recruitment soon. This ruling class is going to expend everything that it has before it allows the occupation to collapse.

True, Douhet did not invent the phenomenon of intentionally bombing civilians. Even so, he normalised the practice of aerially bombing civilians on purpose as if it were a legitimate warfare tactic; even if he did not introduce the concept of the USAF, there can be no doubt that he contributed to normalising the phenomenon.