David Longman 🇺🇦 ☮ 🇵🇸

Apartheid Israel created the largest # of child amputees in modern history in Gaza and is now preventing crutches from entering Gaza. Israel is a caricature of pure evil.

What a quote! @99blackbaloons

I spent all day in Woolwich Crown Court yesterday for the Filton activists' sentencing hearing with my colleague @daniaakkad. The court heard that the Terrorism Act was never intended to cover direct action protest. It heard that all of the defendants had been cleared of violent intent and sentencing them as terrorists would mark a historic first for charges of criminal damage. It heard that the Suffragettes, who did "a bit of smashing themselves", would have been labelled as terrorists but have now been vindicated by history. It heard the activists' goal was to stop the supply chain of drones and weaponry to Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza. It heard that attaching a terrorism connection to a case without it ever being heard by a jury was unconstitutional and posed a threat to the criminal justice system itself. It heard that the "terrorism connection" has been disproportionately used against minority groups and those advocating for them while not being used for neo-Nazis and white supremacists, including the man who killed Jo Cox MP. It heard that the law has been reinterpreted since the action took place, meaning the activists could have had no idea that what they did could have been caught up in terrorism laws at the time of the protest. It heard that the prosecution submitted key evidence just eight days before the hearing, giving the defence no time to review it or even discuss it with their clients. Despite all of this, Judge Jeremy Johnson, who has already tried to refer the defence's lead barrister for contempt of court and been forced to apologise for it, sentenced the defendants as terrorists. The judgment was handed down within minutes, indicating Judge Johnson had already made his mind up before the hearing had begun. Being in court yesterday felt akin to witnessing a colonial crime: punishing activists with terrorism offences in order to set a precedent that taking direct action to stop a UK-backed genocide will not be tolerated.

BREAKING: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers an astonishing eulogy for the end of American dominance thanks to Donald Trump: "This bargain no longer works." It's rare that a world leader speaks so candidly about how the world really functions. This speech will be studied in the history books... "We knew the story of the international rules-based world order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically," Carney said during an address at the Davos World Economic Forum. "And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim." "This fiction was useful and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes," he continued. "So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works." "Let me be direct, we are in the midst of a rupture not a transition," said Carney. "Over the past two decades a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid the bare risks of extreme global integration." "But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons," he said, clearly referring to Trump. "Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructures as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination." Carney's analysis offers a refreshingly honest perspective on the post-World War II order. Western nations, led by the United States, created a sophisticated network of global institutions and rules that privileged their interests, often at the expense of developing nations. It was a flawed system that nonetheless brought peace, stability, and prosperity to the nations that it was created to benefit. "The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied, the WTO, the U.N., the COP, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat," Carney said. "And as a result many countries are drawing the same conclusions, that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains," he continued. "And this impulse is understandable, a country that can't feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself." Carney was driving at a hard truth that MAGA refuses to acknowledge. Despite what Trump thinks, European nations haven't been content to accept a kind of vassal state status simply because they're scared of the United States. They've gone along with the world that America designed because it directly benefited them in concrete ways. Now that Trump is stripping away those benefits, they're going to begin decoupling economically and strategically from the United States. Canada's massive recent trade deal with China proves that. The problem is that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters are too ignorant and paranoid to understand that the system they're destroying helps them. They take for granted the American dollar's status as the global reserve currency. Once these hidden pillars that hold up the world start crumbling, quality of life in the U.S. will plummet. "But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable and there's another truth..." Carney continued. "If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate." "Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty, sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure." There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. Thanks to the stupidity, pettiness, and egomania of Donald Trump, America has been hurled into a dangerous new status quo. The rest of the world will never trust us in the same way again, but if we can remove him from power and vote in Democrats, we can at least set about undoing some of the damage. The future is uncertain, but what is certain is that our country will only survive if Democrats are the ones at the wheel. Please ❤️ and share if you think that Trump is destroying America.

I explain why the accusation that Israel is committing "genocide" is blood libel. Me: The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths is, I mean, I think it is a kind of blood libel. It's trying to import the moral opprobrium that we associate with genocide to a designated enemy, in this case, Israel. I think because I alluded to my side bias, the sides in this case being the sides that a lot of hard left critical theory has defined, namely white oppressors against everyone else's victims. Moynihan: It's pretty strong to say this is like a blood libel. Me: Well, it is a blood libel in the sense that it is an accusation of deliberate murder, ill-founded in that the, and one could disagree with Israel's campaign against Gaza, one could say that this is not justifiable, it's not a just war. It's still different from deliberately murdering as many people as possible, as in, and we know there have been genocides. I think it really is a terrible blood libel, and it's a sign of how people's moralizing in the service of demonizing and dichotomizing, dividing the world into good and evil can just flatten their ability to analyze and to think clearly.