news

In 2018, scientists confirmed the Gulf of Oman contains one of the world's largest marine dead zones, where the ocean contains little or no oxygen and marine wildlife cannot exist. The dead zone encompasses nearly the entire 165,000-square-kilometre (63,700 sq mi) Gulf of Oman and equivalent to the size of Florida, United States of America. The cause is a combination of increased ocean warming and increased runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers.

I'm doing ONE effortpost this week to explain some Lebanese/Arab intricacies while scrolling the news. What do the good people of the news mega want to read about?

1. A breakdown of the Lebanese Civil War and how it permanently fucked the country.

2. An explanation of how the modern Shia identity emerged post-1979 and how a small marginalized community basically became the face of anti-Israel jihad.

3. How Arab and Muslim attitudes towards Hezbollah changed between 2006 and 2024 due to their intervention in Syria.

Vote! But I'll probably just ignore the results and do the one I want

Surprised nobody here has posted about this yet. Walkout at UN for Netanyahoo

An israeli settler goes mad and has a break down after seeing the impact of Hezbollah’s missiles. He ends up screaming “Nasrallah”😂

A record large container ship has made the Arctic transit between Russia and China, saving a lot of time compared to the Suez route during the open water season.

https://gcaptain.com/first-panamax-containership-sprints-across-arctic-reaching-china-in-just-three-weeks/

Good news for eurasian integration, bad news for climate change

New Slammer

Context: video of Iron dome missile falling to catch a yemeni hypersonic missile

Can't find the mega but wtf Hexbear is leaking into Twitter

A US Navy replenishment ship sustained damage while operating in the Middle East in an incident that remains under investigation, according to a Navy official.

The USNS Big Horn was damaged after the ship refueled and replenished Navy vessels operating in the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and several guided-missile destroyers. The Navy official would not say where the incident occurred or what type of damage the replenishment oiler sustained.

lol

Southern Beirut suburbs are getting flattened and Israeli planes and warships are conducting other strikes that are getting close to Beirut International Airport. I can't believe it's happening again and again and again...

Jesus fucking christ, over a million displaced in Lebanon, the fucking demons will try to do gaza all over again

Last thing a poster sees before missile footage

Wakulla County (FL) is under mandatory evacuation orders ahead of the storm, except they left all the prisoners locked up to drown in the imminent flooding.

fucking bleak

Scottish study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated for HPV before age 14
Just noticed this article is actually from January but fuck it

Another Reaper downed in Yemen. We're up to 11.

It seems like the NYT is really ramping up anti-Iranian rhetoric lately. 26 articles (including some round-ups) since Sept. 18 have used the phrase "Iran-backed." Almost every article that even mentions anyone in the Axis of Resistance uses the phrase "Iran's proxies" or "Iranian proxies." This was not happening even a month or two ago. ("Iran-backed" is all over, yes, but "Iranian proxies" and its variants were mostly absent from the paper all summer.)

I can't get Google Trends to stop bugging out on me, but I wonder if this is the case for other State Department mouthpieces or if this is a NYT-specific editorial decision.

Let’s Go Bomb Tel-Aviv

it is september 23 and stalin saved the world from fascism

UN Speech Highlights:

Gustavo Petro, Colombia President

"In this room, a president's ability to communicate depends on the number of dollars in his budget, the number of warplanes he has (..) That’s why we're not heard when we vote to stop the genocide in Gaza..”

“When Gaza dies, all of humanity will die.” “It turns out that God's people were not the people of Israel.”

Lula da Silva, Brazil President

“It’s unjustified to keep Cuba on a unilateral list of states that supposedly promote terrorism and impose unilateral coercive measures that unduly penalize the most vulnerable populations."

Xiomara Castro, Honduras President

“Today I'm threatened by the same forces of capital that 15 years ago carried out a coup against President Manuel Zelaya (Her Husband). They threaten me because I have promoted structural changes in the economic model."

She called for a ceasefire in Lebanon before the United Nations. And also demands an end to the unjust blockades against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and demands that the United States remove Cuba from the list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’.

Resistance News Network

Hezbollah announces the martyrdom of its Secretary-General, His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon since 1992.

Glory to the martyrs.

The Cradle -

has been killed.

Statement issued by Hezbollah:

"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful {So let those fight in the way of Allah who exchange the life of this world for the Hereafter. And whoever fights in the way of Allah and is killed or victorious - We will give him a great reward.} God Almighty is true

His Eminence, the Master of Resistance, the righteous servant, has passed away to be with his Lord and to His pleasure as a great martyr, a heroic, daring, brave, wise, insightful, and faithful leader, joining the caravan of martyrs of the eternal, luminous Karbala in the divine, faith-based path in the footsteps of the martyred prophets and imams. His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, has joined his great and immortal martyred comrades, whose path he led for nearly thirty years, during which he led them from victory to victory, succeeding the Master of the Martyrs of the Islamic Resistance in 1992 until the liberation of Lebanon in 2000 and to the glorious divine victory in 2006 and all the battles of honor and sacrifice, arriving at the battle of support and heroism in support of Palestine, Gaza, and the oppressed Palestinian people.

We offer our condolences to the Master of the Age (may God hasten his reappearance), the Guardian of the Muslims, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, may his shadow endure, the great authorities, the mujahideen, the believers, the nation of resistance, our patient and struggling Lebanese people, the entire Islamic nation, all the free and oppressed people in the world, and his honorable and patient family. We congratulate His Eminence the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, may God be pleased with him, on receiving the highest divine medal, the Imam Hussein Medal, peace be upon him, fulfilling his most precious wishes and the highest ranks of faith and pure belief, as a martyr on the path of Jerusalem and Palestine. We offer our condolences and congratulations to his fellow martyrs who joined his pure and holy procession following the treacherous Zionist raid on the southern suburb.

The leadership of Hezbollah pledges to the highest, most sacred and most precious martyr in our journey full of sacrifices and martyrs that it will continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, in support of Gaza and Palestine, and in defense of Lebanon and its steadfast and honorable people.

To the honorable mujahideen and the victorious and triumphant heroes of the Islamic Resistance, you are the trust of the beloved martyr Sayyid, and you are his brothers who were his impregnable shield and the jewel in the crown of heroism and sacrifice. Our leader, His Eminence the Sayyid, is still among us with his thought, spirit, line, and sacred approach, and you are committed to the pledge of loyalty and commitment to resistance and sacrifice until victory."

what the fuck is going on

When a brutal fascist regime is waging a war of terror against civilians, you think of where your sympathies lie.

So has Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Denmark's controversial foreign minister, who gave this statement to government broadcaster DR on September 26th 2024:

"I can certainly tell the difference between these countries. I know where my sympathy intuitively lies. I know which countries are democracies and which are not. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the end, everyone has a responsibility to ensure this doesn’t spiral completely out of control."

The statement is an example of democracy washing where the alleged democratic nature of the illegal zionist entity is used to justify their atrocities and shift blame to the victims.

Journalists from a free and independent news outlet might have asked him follow-up questions such as:

• Can an apartheid state be democratic?
• Can a state be democratic when a majority of the people it governs is denied the vote?
• How can war crimes be justified by the perpetrator's system of government?
• Are the lives of civilians living under an allegedly "undemocratic" form of government worth less than those of people living under presumably "democratic" regimes?

In some truly doomer news, it is September 28, only 3-4 months away from the end of 2024, and still no Irish Reunification of 2024

Death to Israel, death to Israel, death to Israel.

I want to see that terrorist state burned to the ground holy shit

Footage from the bombing just a little while ago in Beirut

https://nitter.poast.org/ME_Observer_/status/1839690676016992405#m

If I was Iran I would start building those nukes stat

Part three of my effortpost, these parts keep getting longer and longer. No proof reading as usual

Part One

Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment

The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part Three

We move 25 years into the future with part three, we’re now in the period after the defeat in ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the Houthi revolution in Yemen, Hezbollah’s victory against Israel in 2006, and the failure of the Bahraini Uprising in 2011.

We start in Yemen, which was reunited into one state after the end of the Cold War. The first president of the new reunited Yemeni state is no one other than Ali Abdullah Saleh, former president of North Yemen and one of our favourite adventurers like we said earlier. The first real event in the history of Yemen is the start of the 1994 civil war, which ended in a decisive victory for Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Republican forces over the remnants of the South Yemen Communist Party. The republican victory could not be achieved without the strong support by Sunni Jihadist forces who received massive concessions by Saleh in order to secure their support in the war. The growing voice of the hardline Sunni Islamists in Saleh’s government angered the Houthi family, who returned to Yemen from Iran somewhere around reunification, with the aim of reviving the Zaydi traditions that were slowly fading away as Yemen took a more “Sunni” character. It is clear that the Houthis’ stay in Iran led to them being greatly influenced by Khomeini’s pan-Shia ideology, as they founded a youth group called the Believing Youth when they returned to Yemen. The Believing Youth was a loose collection of after-school workshops and summer camps for kids in the mountains of North Yemen, where they would read works by Khomeini, Nasrallah and Al Sadr. The Believing Youth would grow in size, and by the early 00s, their presence would be felt even in Friday prayers in the Grand Mosque of the capital Sanaa. Like a true paranoid Arab government, the Yemeni government would ultimately decide to arrest Hussein Al Houthi, the founder of the BY and brother of the Abdul Malik Al Houthi that we all know and love. The government failed in their attempt to arrest Hussein Al Houthi, who retreated to the mountains of Saada and started a large insurgency again the Yemeni government. He would be killed in late 2004, but a low-level insurgency continued until the Arab Spring hit in 2011.

Yemen had some of the largest protests in the whole region, which turned violent very quickly. The escalation of the protests wasn’t surprising at all, Yemen was the poorest and the least developed Arab nation out of all the relevant ones, and Saleh had been ruling the country in some form for 33 years while achieving literally nothing of note. The Houthis and their supporters would become one of the largest factions against the government in peaceful protest, and later in armed struggle against a government long past its expiry date. After around a year of clashes everywhere in Yemen, Saleh would resign and sign a power transfer agreement in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a place where no real peace has ever been established. An election was held in 2012, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, Saleh’s best friend and former vice president would win the election with 100% of the votes in a real democracy moment. Saleh was there again in Yemen for Hadi’s inauguration. The Houthis, the southern secession movement and the Islamists all rightfully boycotted this sham election. Two years later, the Houthis would launch an offensive from the mountains towards the capital Sanaa and capture the capital very quickly after the collapse of the government forces. The Houthis then absorbed the bulk of the Yemeni Army and essentially became the new government itself, they’re not an armed group anymore, but the Yemeni state itself. When did the Houthis become a real “Shia” force and a part of the Axis of Resistance? Good question. The founding principles of the Believing Youth were explicitly Khomeinist, in response to the gradual Sunnification of the Zaydi Shia Yemenis after the final collapse of the Zaydi Imamate in the 1960s. There’s no proof of direct Iranian involvement in the founding of the group, nor any proof of direct support until the explosion of the conflict after the Arab Spring. Shiaism itself evolved with the absorption of the Houthis into the wider Shia umbrella, as it followed a similar previous step with the absorption of Assad’s Alawite faith into a wider Twelver-adjacent umbrella. The Houthis aren’t Hezbollah, where the founding itself was influenced directly by Iran, but they became closer and closer to Iran as their war with Saudi Arabia started in 2015. Just like the Iraq-Iran War became the origin story of all of the heroes of the new pan-Shia ideology, the Houthi victory in the war against Saudi Arabia and the Arab Alliance became the mythological origin of the first “pan-Shia” generation of Yemen. One such hero is Saleh Al Sammad, the first president of Yemen under Houthi rule, who was killed in a Saudi drone strike back in 2018. He received the Khomeinist martyr treatment, which was a first in Yemen. Shia-style mourning ceremonies have entered the Yemeni mainstream, and celebration of the Prophet’s birthday is now a big day in Yemen, in a clear departure from the hardline Sunni position that forbids that. The Houthis, or Ansarallah as they should be called, are now a fully integrated member of the pan-Shia movement despite not having a direct line back to Khomeini or the Al Sadr family.

We travel to Iraq again now. In 2003, something called the Iraq War, and the American Occupation happens. The Americans basically allow anyone that hates Saddam on their team, so the team that takes over the Iraqi state post-Saddam is a very dysfunctional one where Communists, Khomeinists, Kurdish nationalists, Sunni Muslim Brotherhood members, Liberal CIA assets, and random minority representants were supposed to pretend to play politics while the Americans were robbing the country. There was one crucial group that the Americans missed while building the political playhouse. That group was the Sadrists under the leadership of Muqtada Al Sadr, son of Muhammed Sadiq Al Sadr. The Sadrists split in two sometime in the late 90s, but no one had noticed that under the media suppression in Saddam’s Iraq and the general American disinterest in Iraqi attitudes while they were planning to invade Iraq. One group of Sadrists stayed in the Dawa Party and adopted more Khomeinist and pan-Shia ideas, while poorer Sadrists under Muqtada’s leadership from the slums were more into nationalist and isolationist policies within Iraq’s border. Muqtada’s group would later be called the Sadrist Movement and its military wing, the Mahdi Army, would become the main player in the Iraqi Insurgency against the American occupation and later in the sectarian civil war phase of the occupation. Muqtada’s eccentric behaviour continues to this day and the Sadrists still get themselves into wacky situations, as the group slowly morphs into a cult that finds itself on the fringes of Shiaism itself, but that’s an effortpost for another day. The Iraqi state found itself under pan-Shia Dawa Party rule from 2005 to 2018, but nothing formative happened on a state level, mostly due to the failure of the American occupation and the grave incompetence of the new cast in Iraq. The most notable change during that period was that Iran was slowly becoming the main foreign player in Iraq, after several missteps by the US and their Arab allies. The war against ISIS is when large sections of Iraqi Shia society were absorbed into the Iranian pan-Shia network with the creation of the Hashd Al Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Units, or PMU for short). The PMU was essentially Iraq’s own Hezbollah, an explicitly pan-Shia organization that was created with a clear religious background. The creation of the PMU itself came after a ruling from Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, who is the current Grand Marja of the faith. He issued a ruling that called for global Shia jihad against ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi Army and the fall of large cities such as Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit into ISIS hands. Iranian government support through the IRGC was open and direct, with PMU head Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis and IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani being on the frontlines together and forming a shared war room. The pan-Shia framework of open commemoration of martyrs with clear religious messaging was fully imported to Iraq and became the dominant ideological marker in the Shia south of Iraq. I remember visiting Baghdad with my wife sometime before Covid and literally every single street in the capital had some pictures of martyrs.

cont.

NPR: The Pentagon says it wants to prevent Iran from spreading the conflict in the Middle East

Just uncritically reported from NPR. No discussion of who is actually spreading conflict in the region. In fact Israel is mentioned 3 times in the article while Iran is mentioned 6 times including the headline. Palestine isn't mentioned at all, and Gaza appears only once, in the context of Iran supporting Hamas.

A chunk of recent news has been about about why younger boys are turning more conservative while younger girls are not.

Has anyone considered that this is because of the musicians having a reduction in cultural influence? In the past, musicians were the primary cultural influencers of this age group. I think this is still true for women while I think men now primarily get their cultural influences from either videogame influencers or get sucked into manosphere(incelosphere) spaces via sports. I think the pipeline of sports into manosphere (particularly combat sports) is under-discussed.

I wonder too if covid damaging live music played a role in the shift too. Thinking back, the way boys used to try to "get girls" was via music and live gigs and stuff. The music had a positive influence on them. Whereas now they're inundated with shit about dominating and taking women like they're meat by these dickbags that onboard them into incelosphere via combat sports.

https://xcancel.com/fresh_sadegh/status/1840511947839619357#m

Protests outside the Supreme National Security Council of Iran. There is reportedly a meeting underway there, presumably relating to Pezeshkian's failed sellout deal.

Am I making an incorrect comparison by saying what the US did to Cambodia is the same thing that Israel doing to Gaza and Lebanon? The rationale for bombing Cambodia was that there were Vietnamese soldiers there, so fair game to wipe out entire villages in case maybe there was a Vietnamese soldier there? Seems to me that is the precise justification that Israel uses when they level a building with dozens of women and children.

anybody have that post-wwII historical excerpt that was posted on the old sub, where they US is dragging its feet on prosecuting some particularly heinous nazis, and the soviets are like "just shoot them! you know they are guilty!"

Watched some local news here in the EU and got to hear a lieutenant or something from a military academy being interviewed say that Iran doesn't want a direct confrontation with Israel, but wants to fight Israel "to the last Hezbollah member"

China has asked its citizens to leave Israel as soon as possible.

Malawi is the only African country to vote against the most recent UNGA resolution on 19 September which ordered "israel" to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank. They also established an embassy on 24 April in Tel-Aviv, coincidentally when South Africa had already suspended relations with the Nazi entity. Another nation in Africa who is concerningly comfortable with "israel" is also just 1,300 kilometers from Gauteng.

Iraqi resistance drone attack hits Israel’s Eilat port