Rajeh A. Saadeh’s Post

As the Zionist ethnostate unleashes its gen0cidal operation against over 1.5 million Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, after rejecting every proposal made by the Palestinian resistance to end the hostilities and exchange prisoners, it is well past time for Americans to come to terms with how vicious the US' involvement in this is and that it's led by warmongering liberals and Democrats instead of warmongering conservatives and Republicans. The US is employing a strategy of deception, including against its own citizens, to enable this gen0cide to continue undisrupted. Believe what you're seeing. The US is working to create a false narrative of occasional disagreements with the Zionist ethnostate to: - save face and - confuse and weaken public opinion by creating the false hope that the US would never allow gen0cide and that surely the US would put a stop to it. History shows that US wouldn't merely allow gen0cide, but would participate in committing gen0cide. What's happening in Gaza is no exception. As much as it pains you, no matter if you remain in purposeful denial to maintain all of the assumptions upon which your worldview is based, the US would commit gen0cide. It's presently doing so under the leadership of Democrats. It'll continue to do so when under the leadership of Republicans. The US has been in on every part of the Palestinian gen0cide. The US is assisting in the Zionist ethnostate's gen0cide of Palestinians in Gaza in every way possible. And it will not stop doing so until all Palestinians are dead or civil unrest brings the US to a standstill. These are the only two options. Everything else, including elections, is all part of a massive psychological operation to deceive. Americans want things to be different so badly. Americans are told the US is different and try desperately to hold on to believe otherwise. But the US empire is intentionally and strategically using Americans' humanity against them so the US can commit gen0cide before American eyes and with Americans' consent. Like it or not, those are the facts. Until Americans realize that and come to grips with it, nothing will be done to stop the US war machine from killing innocent people, including Palestinians in Gaza, and may soon include Americans in the US. That's how imperialism and fascism work. The US is no exception.

"Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Recent scholarship shows how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe contributed to the long-term political development and the “rise of the West.” But the Church was also responsible for eradicating non-Christian minorities. Three factors explain ethnoreligious cleansing of non-Christians in medieval Western Europe: (1) the papacy as a supranational religious authority with increasing powers; (2) the dehumanization of non-Christians and their classification as monarchical property; and (3) fierce geopolitical competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that made them particularly vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. These findings also contribute to understanding recent and current ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria."

There are many Palestinian and Muslim Zionists. They're all over the west, particularly in the professional-managerial class for which Zionism is seemingly a prerequisite for capitalistic advancement and success. This is why these Zionists are all over LinkedIn. Despite speaking, acting, and voting no differently than proud Zionists, very few Palestinian or Muslim Zionists even realize they're Zionists. They tend to shriek in response to being exposed as Zionists while holding fast to the very worldview that makes them Zionists. They are ok with being Zionists; they just don't being called Zionists. Some of these Palestinian and Muslim compradors are paid. But like many Zionists in the west, most are brainwashed to support Zionism and repeat Zionist talking points their rulers tell them are acceptable. Without those views, many of those Palestinian and Muslim Zionists wouldn't be able to advance and succeed in the west. Like other Zionists, you often find Palestinian and Muslim Zionists doing things like: - condemning the resistance for using violence, including on October 7, to respond to the violence of settler colonialism imposed on Palestinians for 76+ years; - preaching that nonviolence is the only legitimate, acceptable way to resist violence; - opposing the liberation of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; - blaming Palestinians for anything that's attributable to the creation and maintenance of the Zionist ethnostate; - centering different narratives - like whether Harris' jenocide will be better than Trump's, imaginary antisemitism, and even real anti-Palestinian bigotry in higher education - that are pushed to distract from the ongoing US-backed jenocide of Palestinians by the Zionist ethnostate; - mindlessly bleating Zionist talking points about a "two-state solution" or "peace" or even "ceasefire now" when they really mean a return to how things were before October 7 when the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was happening a little more slowly; - chastising anti-Zionists for objecting to jenocide in ways that those supporting jenocide don't like; - voting for jenocide-committing Harris or jenocide-supporting Trump; - being tokenized by Zionist institutions - including political parties, higher education, bar associations, and nonprofit organizations - in exchange for being platformed and amplified; - and much more. This is Dr. Mahmoud Rida Abbas. He's the president of the Palestinian Authority, a subsidiary of the Zionist ethnostate. Based on his words and actions, he's a Zionist. That's why the US and Zionist ethnostate platformed and amplified him as their puppet. Palestinian and Muslim Zionists in the west have worldviews very similar to Abbas. That's why western institutions platform and amplify them as their puppets. Never forget the treachery of Abbas and all other Palestinian and Muslim Zionists. منافقون

Garden variety liberals claim to 1) oppose the Zionist ethnostate's actions in Gaza and 2) support the ethnostate's "right to exist." The ethnostate's existence is inseparable from its genocidal murderousness. History has shown it cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny. It was set up as a settler-colonialist outpost for western imperialism, and that's what it has always been. It's impossible to drop an artificial ethnostate on top of an already-existing population in which the pre-existing population is legally subordinate to the new one without tremendous amounts of warfare, police violence, mass displacement, apartheid, disenfranchisement, and oppression. This is a historical fact. Of course, it's possible to have a nation in which Jews are welcome and safe. Many such countries exist outside of the Zionist ethnostate, and the majority of Jews live in them. What isn't possible is placing a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine, in which the indigenous people are treated as less than Jews, that doesn't necessarily require nonstop violence, tyranny, and abuse. These goals directly contradict one another, but it's what liberals pretend to believe is a realistic possibility. There could be a state where Palestinians and Jews coexist peacefully, but it would be so wildly different from the Zionist ethnostate that you can't pretend they would be the same. It would require a radically dramatic overhaul of ethnostate civilization, a comprehensive dismantling of deeply ingrained racism, a drastic restructuring of governmental and living systems, so much labor, sacrifice, humility, inner work, and reparations, that it would make the current and alternative states entirely different from one another. But this isn't even what liberals want when they say they oppose the ethnostate's atrocities in Gaza but support the ethnostate's "right to exist." They want the killing to stop but are ok with the ethnostate remaining the unjust and tyrannical apartheid entity it has always been. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want the status quo without the murderous savagery that's needed to maintain it. They pretend to live in a fantasyland where they feel better than they would here in the real world. This isn't limited to Palestine; it underpins liberals' positions on everything. On every issue, their position is essentially, "maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me." They don't want to do what's right; they just want to feel like they're right. Their ideology is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical, oligarchic one garnished with feel-good social justice slogans. A wolf in sheep's clothing. That's who liberals are. It's who they've always been. The issues and their arguments change, but their "maintain the status quo but let me feel nice about it" value system has always been this way.

I am delighted, grateful, and honored to inform you that "Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe" was published in the Spring 2024 issue of International Security! This article has been in the making for many, many years, such that some of you might have heard about it 8 years ago or even earlier! I am grateful to all for providing advice and commentary on previous versions of my arguments, and above all, for encouraging me to continue working on these puzzles of politics and religion. The article is available online and it is fully Open Access through the link below, so you can read, download, share, print, and assign it for free (and you can also cite it for free :) https://lnkd.in/di-fbTRK The article is 50 pages long with additional supplementary discussion online, so it should be ideal as summer reading :)  I am also copying the Abstract of the article below.   Abstract: Sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities lived across large swathes of medieval Western Europe. But all the Muslim communities and almost all the Jewish communities in polities that correspond to present-day England, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were eradicated between 1064 and 1526. Most studies of ethnoreligious violence in Europe focus on communal, regional, and national political dynamics to explain its outbreak and variation. Recent scholarship shows how the Catholic Church in medieval Europe contributed to the long-term political development and the “rise of the West.” But the Church was also responsible for eradicating non-Christian minorities. Three factors explain ethnoreligious cleansing of non-Christians in medieval Western Europe: (1) the papacy as a supranational religious authority with increasing powers; (2) the dehumanization of non-Christians and their classification as monarchical property; and (3) fierce geopolitical competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that made them particularly vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. These findings also contribute to understanding recent and current ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria.

Analysis | "A group of IOF soldiers stands in the middle of a seized and deteriorating home in #Gaza. The walls are graffitied if not by the men in the photo, then by their associates. One of them holds up an item left behind by the fleeing #Palestinian inhabitants: a red negligée. Once again, #colonial devastation is in the background, a shock of color representing the derision towards the devastation in the foreground. This is also how #sexuality appears in the #settlercolonial project. The material displacement and annihilation of indigenous populations are neither sufficient nor satisfactory for the colonizing force. It must also perform the ideological debasement of intimacy of the colonized." https://lnkd.in/ewx9wiuE

Ethnostate citizen and historian Ilan Pappé on the Zionist genocide of Palestinians in Gaza: "Even the Nakba [the ethnostate's creation through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948], which was an unimaginable catastrophe, does not compare to what we are seeing now – and what we are going to see in the next few months. We are, in my mind, in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians." "We are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it." "This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end. Such projects usually collapse violently. And thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project – and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope, it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel." "Collapse like this, however, produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void was not filled by any constructive and alternative project. In such a case, the chaos continues." "One thing is clear: whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look [to] Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future." "These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole."

New article by Benjamin Daßler, Bernhard Zangl and institute member Hilde van Meegdenburg: 'Is there a religious bias? Attitudes towards military humanitarian intervention in Germany' Is individual support for internationally agreed military humanitarian interventions (MHIs) subject to a religious bias? Conducting a vignette-based survey experiment, the paper provides micro-level evidence for such a bias within a highly unlikely sample: German university students. Participants in our survey experiment were more compassionate and indeed more supportive of an MHI when the victims of war-related violence were Christians rather than Muslims. The paper thus contributes to the literature on support for MHIs in two important ways: first, whereas the existing literature has a strong focus on the United States, this paper studies individuals’ support in another Western country that regularly contributes to MHIs, namely Germany. Second, while the existing literature has mainly examined how other social factors, such as the race or gender of the victims, affect individuals’ support for MHIs, drawing on social identity theory, this paper claims that religious identification also has an impact. Moreover, by showing that the religion of the victims of war-related violence shapes individuals’ attitudes towards MHIs through compassion, the paper also speaks to more recent literature that demonstrates that individuals’ attitudes towards refugees depend on – among other things – their religion. Against the background of a general rise of identitarian politics in many Western societies, our findings seem to be of particular relevance. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eTMUSAr3