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popop-maru · 2 months

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Hey so I once in a while post about Metalocalypse and I wanna say, at the possible expense of my ability to do that, @secret-tacos is my best friend of over 10 years. We've known each other for an eternity. I was a young teenager when I met him, we were both still discovering ourselves- We were different people, and we've been through a lot and learned who we are together. Nothing in this world will come between us, or sever the memories we've shared- And we've both met some shitty people who have tried.

For a while, we + some friends have discussed a lack of darker/more serious content in fandom, despite the show obviously being pretty dark itself (a recurring character is a registered sex offender, for one) and how people who DO make this content (while it may not be triggering in nature) that we've been friends with have been afraid to post things like guro for fear of being lumped in with the worst kinds of people, and that isn't an exaggeration.

I've seen people lump in "DNI if you do X/ship X" with terfs, zionists, etc. in the literal same sentence, and I think at that point you seriously need to step back and look at your life, and why you choose to engage with that content (even to rant about it) if it bothers you. But you also need to realize that these things are not real.

There is someone popular in this SAME FANDOM who has written dynamics involving adults and minors being romantic/sexual that makes me personally uncomfortable, and no you don't need to know why. You're not entitled to that information. But that isn't treated as a bad thing, people ignore it, and how its romanticized- Which is not a courtesy given to my friend, Damien.

So, my friend posts a list of prompts for fanart/fanfic involving various taboo themes. Some of them horror themes, some of them potential triggers, etc. He does this explicitly to give people, some of whom are friends, an excuse to create what they want while diverting the target onto his own back. If you do not like these things, then do not engage with them. It is that simple.

He did make the mistake of not trigger tagging the prompts, under the impression that just seeing the words (the offending ones being "noncon" and "incest") would not be a trigger for people, but others have talked to him about this and he's corrected it. That's over and done with.

What I don't understand is people who have gone out of their way to comment on the post and message him about how they DONT WANT TO INTERACT WITH THE POST. That doesn't make any sense to me. The only outcome I can see is that they want him to delete it, and possibly his blog, which isn't going to happen.

Nowhere did he say, either, that these things had to be sexual. Nowhere did he say that you couldn't write a dark, introspective fanfic about these things that ultimately speaks to something deeper. He also didn't say they COULDN'T be porn, he very much didn't say that.

I want to throw it out there, I'm not proship or comship or whatever else people want to call it nowadays, because I think its cringe and fail to spend all your free time arguing about what other people do online.

Just like I think it's stupid to go to someone else's blog and say how angry you are that you chose to go to their blog. Or to post in discord servers THAT HE'S IN about how much you hate his content. Or to follow him and reblog his art and then comment that you hate what he's doing.

You can put it on whatever morally pure pedestal you want, but that's just. Kind of mean and unnecessary.

The express challenge here is to give people a space to create dark content, and for people who DONT WANT TO SEE THAT to blacklist it and move on. Which was the outcome people wanted, but not the one we got.

I understand if you're a survivor and you're offended, and that isn't the intention at all. When people look at fiction, they do not think of you, and they do not want to hurt you. But I am still sorry if you've been hurt.

I understand the desire to rail against anyone who posts something you don't like. I do. You can't complain to the writers of the show directly about the content you dislike (and if you do, they won't listen) but if you want to complain about a specific blog? You can just go there and comment and hope that they get bullied off the website, that's something you can do right now and tell all your friends how you're morally right for it.

And you will. And you'll do it to me, too, and you'll tell everyone how good it felt to do it. Because you're such a good person, because it feels so good to be good, and everyone should know how good you are.

#metalocalypse #maru.txt #cw incest #cw noncon

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fursasaida · 3 years

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i can hear a woman sobbing in the hallway/stairwell and it is heartrending. i really want to go ask if she needs help, but for a variety of reasons ranging from language to the spatial conventions of privacy (such as it is) in new york city i’m pretty sure the right thing to do is to leave her to it. but oh my god. i hate this whole period of time, i hate how awful it is for everyone, i hate the relentless suffering. i hate. this.

i was just looking at somebody’s blog to decide whether to follow them, and the first post was about having been to 10 funerals in 2 years. brazil and india are being fucking mowed down and nobody who could do a thing about it is going to. i know so many people who have dead family members or family members in danger of dying, not all from covid--it’s just like everybody who had a black star on the horizon, some illness or something that could kill them, had that star suddenly shoot overhead this year. not even the pets are spared. i have my own damn dead family member. the cops ramped up their ongoing constitutional murder spree for the chauvin trial and they are going to kill and injure and (re)traumatize so many fucking people this summer. i had to turn down my friend’s very sweet offer to come all the way out here to where i live so he could spend one of his iftars this ramadan with just me because i haven’t had my second shot yet and i can’t cognitively process what is “acceptable risk” in the in between stage. people still want to fight about vaccines. crypto is negating what little dents have been made in energy consumption and yet my friends in the group chat have (tiny amounts of) money in it and joke around about the shifting prices. i am staring down a frankly horrific 4-5 weeks of workload and a similarly insane 9 months starting in august, and at best i can hope for a 3-week break in between when until recently i thought i’d have almost two whole months. protest is being further criminalized in 34 states. denmark is expelling its syrian asylees and no one will do anything about that either. the two places i care most about in the world are drowning in layer after layer of misery in a way i’ve never seen, and i have no idea when or if i will ever be able to go back responsibly. i got an email today that may mean i won’t get the summer money i have the past two years, and i am too exhausted to even contemplate how i would go about finding out if it does mean that. fascist zionists are terrorizing east jerusalem.

due to some stuff i won’t go into detail about, i am feeling Alone in a way i really haven’t the whole pandemic until the last few weeks. and this is made worse because the burnout of having been producing writing and intelligent off-the-cuff comments and research plans literally nonstop since fall 2019 is manifesting as an increasing inability to communicate--i can tell that my writing and talking make less sense than they used to, and that people are not always understanding me.

i want my dad.

#it's not any one of the things it's all of them at once #i could do grief and grad school and living in this fucked society without the pandemic.#i could do grad school and society and the pandemic without the grief.#etc.#ten days till my second shot and then i can at least hug somebody. jesus.#comorvidity #or as i was just saying really it's comorvidity-plus

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thedreadvampy · 7 years

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I started crying from an emotional scene in sense8 and now I can’t stop. I’m so angry about things people have done lately to hurt people I love and I’m so worried about my dad because it feels like he’s getting more and more into full on delusions and I can’t talk to him when he’s like this and saying awful things and denying there’s any trauma or history of mental illness in his family and I love my dad. I really love him but he’s getting older and as we get older he’s getting further and further away, I don’t want to wake up one day and find he’s died at like 90 or 95 and I haven’t seen him in a decade, I don’t want him to disappear when I’m not looking and I don’t want to lose him like I lost his mother where half the time after she went off her meds I couldn’t bear to be in the room with her because of the awful things she said but when she died I missed having her in my life so badly even though she hadn’t really been in my life since I was 9 or 10 except when I’d get little glimpses of the grandmother I loved still in there. but dad’s just the same he fluctuates wildly between being so caring and so sorry for the pain he’s caused and so fun to spend time with and then the next time I see him he’s gone off the deep end and all he wants to talk about is like. The New World Order and Zionists and the end of the world and this shit. I just want my dad back but I think I lost him the same time I lost granny or before that.

I just want to feel safe but my dad’s gone full on down to crazy town and the world’s a mess and I don’t know how I’m going to survive after I graduate again and all my memories of what happened in January are fracturing and flaking like every time this has happened before and this time I was reaching out for help, this time my friends made me believe I deserved help and it was a thing that mattered, but just like every other time I’m losing confidence in my version of events and I’m beginning to think again I’m overreacting or being unfair because I can’t remember any more what I said or what I did to stop it or whether I mixed up thought and speech and didn’t really say no properly even though I DID, I DID, I KNOW I DID BUT I’M GONNA LOSE THAT SOON, I already can’t remember if he stopped or I ran away or he kept going until he got bored and went to sleep, I’M LOSING IT JUST LIKE I LOST IT THE TIME BEFORE, and when they asked me to testify I couldn’t remember anything, any details, anything I did or said, I only remember fear and disgust and hurt and running away to hide. how do I know what’s real? I asked dad how he thought I could tell if I was having paranoid delusions because I was dropping a very loud hint about my concerns for his mental state, but actually yk I am scared about mental reliability for me as well because I can’t ever trust my memory because when it matters it flakes away and dad said people will tell you if you’re wrong (notwithstanding that he hasn’t noticed apparently that people DEFINITELY think he’s wrong on account of how he’s wrong) but how would they KNOW? Because I’m only ever asking for confirmation of things that happen when I’m alone with someone who (I believe) hurts me and who am I gonna ask about that? The creepy person who hurts me? How do I KNOW?

#i contacted the rape crisis centre after like a week or two of indecision #but now it's brought everything flooding back up again #i don't know if i can talk about it to these people they must hear such awful things every day #nothing that happens to me could possibly even be a blip next to the shit i know happens #they'll be kind and they'll be as helpful as they can but every word i say will sound so fucking trite #to me at least #spoilt little princess can't bear to take responsibility #guys i'm really tired of feeling this way #i just want to trust myself a fraction as much as i trust my loved ones #i just want to know what memories are true and what i made up to fill in holes #Oh also because I just read this back and it sounded weird THESE ARE TWO SEPERATE ISSUES #My dad is in no way involved in any of this recent trauma junk I just visited him last week and he was Uhhhh #Probably the most detached from reality I've seen him in the last couple of years #So my concern is VERY FRESH even though I know the crazy ebbs and flows with him just like his mother #So he'll probably be back to something approximating balance in a couple of months #I'm just sad because the last few times we've seen each other have been great and I really thought he was doing better #But I guess that was wishful thinking #Anyway yeah I ALSO went to the crisis centre the other day so that's also Fresh #So these are two things sitting right at the surface of my emotional state #That and my fuming about something someone I know said to Sam the other week #GODDAMN I'M ANGRY ABOUT THAT AND HAVE NO WAY TO RELEASE THAT ANGER #Like I just wanna hoist this asshole up by the collar and shout in their face in front of everyone and ask what the fuck their problem is #But that's pretty solidly Not Gonna Happen

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thewebofslime · 5 years

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The cults never went away. They did, however, learn how to use the internet. Bill and Lorna Goldberg of Englewood have been dealing with cults for more than 40 years. It started when a relative of Lorna’s got involved with one back in the 1970s. “We had tried to get him out of the cult, and that failed,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We wanted to do something, so since we’re both clinical social workers, we started a support group.” Get The Jewish Standard Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories FREE SIGN UP He also teaches sociology of religion and other courses in the sociology department at Dominican College in Orangeburg. The support group, for people who have left a cult, still meets monthly. “We’ve had people from religious cults, from therapy cults, from science-fiction cults — UFO-type groups — to health cults that teach you the proper way to meditate so you can get the most nutrients from food,” he said. But while the teachings may differ, “the dynamics are all the same,” Mr. Goldberg said. What makes a group into a cult is “isolating an individual from their family, bombarding them with sensory input, giving them a pseudo-logical explanation as to why they have the answer and other people don’t. You’re told that ‘All your life you’ve been asleep — until we awakened you.’” “Cults have always been around,” he continued. “For the most part, they preyed on disaffected people, poor people. Middle-class America started to wake up to cults when it started being middle-class white kids who got involved. “People since time began have looked for answers, and that makes them vulnerable. Our society has become more and more cut off from each other, and cults offer a kind of love. It’s a pseudo-love, based on agreeing with each other, sharing a common purpose, and allowing oneself to be deceived in a common way by a charlatan. “People get hoodwinked.” Over the decades, the nature of the cults has morphed. At first, most of the people with whom he worked had been taken in by large, well-known groups. Now, “we’re getting people from a lot of smaller groups, with maybe 10 to 20 members.” Another change is that the Goldbergs now are working with people who grew up in cults and leave as adults. They’re second-generation cultists. How is a cult defined? For Mr. Goldberg, it’s based on the group’s impact, not on its ideology. People will call him up, concerned, generally, about a young adult child, though sometimes about an older parent. “‘Is that a cult?’” they’ll ask. “I say, that’s not the question to ask. The more pertinent question is that my child is involved in a group and I’m concerned about the changes I’ve seen in him or her, and my child is involved in the group in a cultic way,” he said. That’s a deeper involvement than spending a weekend eating vegetarian meals and chanting a bit. Often it involves “drastic and sudden personality changes. They’ll give up their aspirations for themselves. Give up their friends. They might leave school and move in with the group. That person is in trouble. For that person, that group is a cult. “There are certain red flags. For some families, it’s when they drop out of school. Or when they say they want nothing to do with their family, nothing to do with their friends. For others it’s when they empty out their bank account and give it to somebody.” So how does he help families concerned about a loved one entering a cult? “I try to help them to speak to the cult member in a way that’s going to be more likely to have the cult member re-examine their choice,” he said. “Don’t tell your son or your daughter what their experience is. Don’t say ‘You’re brainwashed, you’re in a cult.’ That doesn’t help. “What does help is saying to them, ‘You’ve had different groups you’ve been involved with in the past. At some point you’ve decided it’s time to move on. What will be the ways you’ll know it’s time to move on from this group you’re involved in? How will you know if this group is no longer meeting your needs?’ “One of the earmarks of a cult is that the person who’s involved can’t even conceive of ever leaving. They just see it as the answer for everything. If that’s the answer they give, I suggest the parents encourage their child to look at the dynamics of that. They should say, ‘In a period of X number of months, you’ve given up all your ambitions in order to follow a person. Maybe we need to look at how that came about.’ I also suggest they get in touch with somebody who left the group who can give the cult member a different perspective. I’ll talk to them about ways of getting the cult member to agree to speak to the person who left. The cults will always try to indoctrinate their followers to believe that speaking to somebody who left the group is the worst thing you can possibly do. They’ll use terms like ‘they’ll pollute your mind’ and ‘it’s like eating your own vomit’ to talk with them. They try to have cult members have these disgusting thoughts when it comes to somebody who left. “If the cult member doesn’t want to speak to somebody who left the group, then I advise the family to say, ‘Gee, that’s very upsetting to me, because you used to be so open-minded. Maybe that person has information you’re not privy to. And that’s what happens in cults — they say not to speak to anybody who left — so I see you acting in a cult-like way.” This line of approach doesn’t promise immediate results. “The thing is to keep the lines of communication open. Say that you and I can disagree about this group but the one thing I can’t ever tolerate is if we stop talking and I want you to promise me you’ll never stop talking even if we disagree. “In the early days of their recruitment, they’ll say, ‘Of course I’ll never stop talking with you. You’re my mommy.’ Because they don’t know what’s coming down the road, that the cult leader will tell them to cut ties with the people who will be most likely to get them to leave, which is the family. I try to help the family inoculate themselves by getting the cult member to say, ‘No, I will not stop talking to you even if we disagree.’ As long as they’re talking there’s hope.” Isolation is the central technique in cult recruiting. “They talk a person into isolating themselves. They say, this is a weekend or a week where you’re going to learn a lot of great things. Please don’t use your cell phones because you’ve got to experience it. You can’t explain to somebody what ice cream tastes like. You have to taste for yourself. Taste what we offer and see if it’s for you. “When they’ve got you in a place where you have no input from the outside world, they put you in a state of heightened suggestibility and narrow consciousness. Sometimes they use sleep deprivation. It’s a brainwash process. You come out feeling you have this sense of mission. “It’s an extreme part of the continuum of something like Birthright. You and I both believe Birthright is a wonderful thing. The kids come out of a Birthright trip to Israel — I’m not saying they’re brainwashed — with a heightened sense of being a Jew, with a feeling of kinship to Israel, which is exactly what we want our kids to have. It’s a very positive thing. These techniques can be used and made extreme by cults to completely change somebody’s ideology and personality. “The people who run Birthright are upfront about what they’re doing. They say the reason they’re doing this is because you’re a Jewish kid and they want you to have a good sense of Judaism. “Cults don’t do that. They use deception. They say they help mankind, and you end up fundraising so the guru can have another Rolls-Royce. One Jewish group that has straddled the line between religion and cult is Lev Tahor. The group, founded by Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, who since has died, has become most notorious for cloaking women and girls over 3 years old in black, head-to-toe, burqa-like coverings — and for repeated brushes with legal authorities, most recently involving the arrest of a Lev Tahor member for kidnapping two of Rabbi Helbrans’ grandchildren, after their mother — his daughter — tried to remove them from the group after she objected to the forced marriage of her 13-year-old daughter. The group has divided the ultra-Orthodox community, with some anti-Zionist sectors taking Lev Tahor’s side in its struggles against civil authorities in Israel, Canada, and Central America. Rabbi Helbrans was convicted in 1994 for kidnapping, after helping a bar mitzvah student hide from his mother. He served two years in prison for that felony. “The mother had immigrated from Russia with her young son,” Mr. Goldberg said. “The son was taking bar mitzvah lessons with somebody from Lev Tahor. Suddenly, the son just disappeared. He said, ‘I’m going to study Torah, I’m not coming home.’ The mother contacted me. I met with her son. He was as starry-eyed and other-worldly as anybody from any cult I ever worked with.” Cults have lost their high profile as a Jewish communal concern. Once, both the New York and Los Angeles Jewish federations had offices devoted to raising awareness about cults, and helping families whose members had gotten involved. “I wish they were both still around,” Mr. Goldberg said. The Goldbergs’ support group plays an important role for its members. “It’s really helpful for people to be with somebody else who has gone through the same experience,” he said. “When people leave a cult, they feel they have a foot in two different worlds. They have to re-examine everything that happened to them in the cult and put it into a new light. That what we do in our group.” One big shift in Mr. Goldberg’s work over the past generation: Now, the majority of people in his support group are people who were born and raised in a cult, and left as adults. “They never joined. Their parents joined. It’s a different situation. “Those who were recruited and left have to regain their pre-cult personalities. Those who were born into the cult never had a pre-cult personality. “Some of them are really severely emotionally damaged. Others — you’ll just be amazed by how strong they are. They’re strong in certain ways. They learn how to delay gratification. They tend to do well in school. They’ve learned to be single-minded in terms of following a pursuit. The price they pay in the cult is too great, but it’s a good quality. Many of them have learned skills. Knowing how to approach strangers and try to sell them something is a marketable skill. So is knowing how to cook for hundreds of people. “Of course, I see a skewed sampling. I’m sure there are people who are really struggling who haven’t come to grips with the symptoms and never get to me.” So how can parents inoculate children against growing up to join cults? For Mr. Goldberg, it comes down to critical thinking. When his now-adult son was little, they used to watch television together. And Mr. Goldberg would debunk the advertisements. “Whenever we would watch a commercial that painted something as wonderful, I’d say, ‘It’s not that wonderful. You’re not going to be running through fields of roses because you use this laundry detergent. Tony the Tiger is not your friend. He’s a cartoon character trying to get you to eat this cereal.’ I tried to help him see that it’s good to have a critical eye. “We’re naturally intuitive and emotional. We’re born that way. We have to be taught to be critical. When somebody tries to sell you something, I think you’ve got do develop the ability to look at it critically. When you have something you really want to believe, you should be doubly critical. There’s a lot of propaganda and we do go along with things because they strike us on an emotional level. Just be wary. “Before we buy a computer, we go on the internet, we listen to what people have said about the computer. We look at that its qualities are. We’re very critical. But before we go away for a weekend with somebody who says they have the answers that are going to change our lives, we just say OK? You have to be critical.”

#TheWebOfSlime

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clubofinfo · 6 years

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Expert: Back in the 1950s, the US intelligence community coined a term: “blowback”. It referred to the unintended consequences of a covert operation that ended up damaging one’s own cause. There are mounting indications that the intensifying campaign by the Israel lobby in the UK against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, is starting to have precisely such self-harming repercussions. A campaign of smears In the three years since he was elected to lead the Labour party, Corbyn has faced non-stop accusations that his party has an endemic “anti-Semitism problem”, despite all evidence to the contrary. Of late, Corbyn himself has become the chief target of such allegations. Last month the Daily Mail led a media mauling of Corbyn over disparaging comments he made in 2013 about a small group of pro-Israel zealots who had come to disrupt a Palestinian solidarity meeting. His reference to them as “Zionists”, it was claimed, served as code for “Jews” and was therefore anti-Semitic. Mounting evidence in both the UK and the US, where there has been a similar escalation of attacks on pro-Palestinian activists, often related to the international boycott movement (BDS), suggests that the Israeli government is taking a significant, if covert, role in coordinating and directing such efforts to sully the reputation of prominent critics. Corbyn’s supporters have argued instead that he is being subjected to a campaign of smears to oust him from the leadership because of his very public championing over many decades of the Palestinian cause. Israel lobbyists Al-Jazeera has produced two separate undercover documentary series on Israel lobbyists’ efforts in the UK and US to interfere in each country’s politics – probably in violation of local laws. Only the UK series has been aired so far. It showed an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, both plotting to “take down” a Conservative government minister seen as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and helping to create an anti-Corbyn front organisation in the Labour party. Masot worked closely with two key pro-Israel groups in Labour, the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. The latter includes some 80 Labour MPs. Under apparent pressure from the Israel lobby in the US, the series on the US lobby was suppressed. Last week Alain Gresh, the former editor of Le Monde diplomatique, published significant quotes from that censored documentary after viewing it secretly in Dubai. The US lobby’s aims and practices, as reported by Gresh, closely echo what has happened in the UK to Corbyn, as he has faced relentless allegations of anti-Semitism. The US documentary reportedly shows that Israel’s strategic affairs ministry has taken a leading role in directing the US lobby’s efforts. According to Gresh, senior members of the lobby are caught on camera admitting that they have built up a network of spies to gather information on prominent critics of Israel. In Gresh’s transcripted excerpts, Jacob Baime, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, a group of organisations fighting BDS, states: “When I got here a few years ago, the budget was $3,000. Today it’s like a million and a half [dollars], or more. … It’s a massive budget.” “It’s psychological warfare,” he adds, noting how the smears damage the targeted groups: “They either shut down, or they spend time investigating [the accusations against them] instead of attacking Israel. It’s extremely effective.” David Hazony, a senior member of another lobby group, The Israel Project, explains that a pressing aim is to curb political speech critical of Israel: What’s a bigger problem is the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanders people, bringing all the anti-Israel people into the Democratic Party. Then being pro-Israel becomes less a bipartisan issue, and then every time the White House changes, the policies towards Israel change. That becomes a dangerous thing for Israel. No discussion These reported quotes confirm much of what was already suspected. More than a decade ago scholars John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt wrote a book examining the composition and role of the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US. But until the broadcasting of the Al-Jazeera documentary last year no comparable effort had been made to shine a light on the situation in the UK. In fact, there was almost no discussion or even acknowledgment of the role of an Israel lobby in British public and political life. That is changing rapidly. Through its constant attacks on Corbyn, British activists are looking less like disparate individuals sympathetic to Israel and more recognisably like a US-style lobby – highly organised, on-message and all too ready to throw their weight around. The lobby was always there, of course. And, as in the US, it embraces a much wider body of support than right-wing Jewish leadership organisations like the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, or hardline lobbyists such as the Community Security Trust and BICOM. The earliest Zionists That should not surprise us. The earliest Zionists were not Jews but fundamentalist Christians. In the US, the largest group of Zionists by far are Christian evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to the Promised Land is the key to unlocking the second coming of the Messiah and an apocalyptic end-times. Though embraced by Israel, many of these Christian fundamentalists hold anti-Semitic views. In Britain, there is an unacknowledged legacy of anti-Semitic Christian support for Zionism. Lord Balfour, a devout Christian who regularly voiced bigotry towards Jews, was also the man who committed the British government in 1917 to create a home for Jews in Palestine. That set in motion today’s conflict between Israel and the native Palestinian population. In addition, many British gentiles, like other Europeans, live with understandable guilt about the Holocaust. One of the largest and most effective groups in Corbyn’s parliamentary party is Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), most of whose members are not Jewish. LFI takes some of the party’s most senior politicians on all-expenses-paid trips to Israel to wine and dine them as they are subjected to Israeli propaganda. Dozens of Labour MPs have remained loyal to LFI even as the organisation has repeatedly refused to criticise Israel over undeniable war crimes. When Israeli snipers executed dozens of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza in May, the LFI took to Twitter to blame Hamas for the deaths, not Israel. After facing a massive backlash online, the LFI simply deleted the tweet. A double whammy Historically the Israel lobby could remain relatively low-profile in the UK because it faced few challenges. Its role was chiefly to enforce a political orthodoxy about Israel in line with Britain’s role as Washington’s foreign policy junior partner. No British leader looked likely to step far from the Washington consensus. Until Corbyn. The Israel lobby in the UK now faces a double whammy. First, since Donald Trump entered the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dropped any pretence that Israel is willing to concede a Palestinian state, whatever the Palestinians do. Instead, Israel has isolated the Palestinian leadership diplomatically while seeking to terrorise the Palestinian population into absolute submission. That was all too clear over the summer when those Israeli snipers picked off demonstrators each week in Gaza. As a result, the Israel lobby stands more exposed than ever. It can no longer buy time for Israeli expansionism by credibly claiming, as it once did, that Israel seeks peace. Second, Israel’s partisans in the UK were caught off-guard by the unexpected rise of Corbyn to a place that puts him in sight of being the next prime minister. The use of social media by his supporters, meanwhile, has provided a counter-weight to the vilification campaign being amplified by the British media. The media have been only too willing to assist in the smearing of the Labour leader because they have their own separate interests in seeing Corbyn gone. He is a threat to the corporate business interests they represent. But not only has the messenger – the Israel lobby – now come under proper scrutiny for the first time, so has its message. Lack of irony The success of the lobby had depended not only on it remaining largely out of view. It also expected to shore up a largely pro-Israel environment without drawing attention to what was being advocated, beyond unquestioned soundbites. In doing so, it was able to entirely ignore those who had paid the price for Israel’s diplomatic impunity – the Palestinians. The campaign against Corbyn has not only forced the lobby to come out into the open, but the backlash to its campaign has forced the lobby to articulate for the first time what exactly it believes and what is at stake. The latest furore over Corbyn concerns a Youtube video of him speaking at a pro-Palestinian meeting in 2013, two years before he became Labour leader. He has been widely denounced in the media for making disparaging remarks about a small group of hardline pro-Israel partisans well-known for disrupting such meetings. He referred to them as “Zionists” and suggested that the reaction of this particular hardline group to a speech by the Palestinian ambassador had betrayed their lack of appreciation of “English irony”. Israel’s lobby, echoed by many liberal journalists, has suggested that Corbyn was using “Zionist” as code word for “Jew”, and that he had implied that all Jews – not the handful of pro-Israel zealots in attendance – lacked traits of Englishness. This, they say, was yet further evidence of his anti-semitism. Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s former chief rabbi, told the New Statesman last week that Corbyn’s comment was “the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech”. In that notorious speech, the right-wing politician sought to incite race hatred of immigrants. Calling Corbyn an “anti-Semite”, Sacks added: “It undermines the existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting them as essentially alien.” Treacherous words In a now familiar pattern to lobby claims, Sacks relied on the false premise that all Jews are Zionists. He conflated a religious or ethnic category with a political ideology. The Labour leader has held his ground on this occasion, pointing out that he was using the term “in the accurate political sense and not as a euphemism for Jewish people”. Others have noted that his accusers – many of them senior journalists – are the ones lacking a sense of irony. Corbyn was not “otherising” Jews, he was highlighting a paradox not confirming a prejudice: that a small group of Britons were so immersed in their partisan cause, Israel, that it had blinded them to the “English irony” employed by a foreigner, the Palestinian ambassador. However, the terms “anti-Semitism” and “Zionism” are likely to prove more treacherous to weaponise against Corbyn than the lobby thinks. As the anti-Semitism controversy is constantly reignited, a much clearer picture of the lobby’s implied logic is emerging, as illustrated by the hyperbolic, verging on delusional, language of Rabbi Sacks. The argument goes something like this: Israel is the only safe haven for Jews in times of trouble – and the only thing that stands between them and a future Holocaust. The movement that created Israel was the Zionist movement. Today most Jews are Zionists and believe Israel is at the core of their identity. Therefore, if you are too critical of Israel or Zionism, you must wish bad things for the Jewish people. That makes you an anti-Semite. Problematic premises It probably doesn’t require a logician to understand that there are several highly problematic premises propping up this argument. Let’s concentrate on two. The first is that it depends on a worldview in which the non-Jew is assumed to be anti-Semite until proven otherwise. For that reason Jews need to be eternally vigilant and distrustful of those outside their “tribe”. If that sounds improbable, it shouldn’t. That is exactly the lesson of the Holocaust taught to children in Israel from kindergarten onwards. Israel derives no universal message from the Holocaust. Its schools do not teach that we must avoid stigmatising others, and discourage sectarian and tribal indentifications that fuel prejudice and bigotry. How could it? After all, Israel’s core ideology, political Zionism, is premised on the idea of tribal and sectarian exclusivity – the “ingathering of exiles” to create a Jewish state. In Israel, the Holocaust supplies a different lesson. It teaches that Jews are under permanent threat from non-Jews, and that their only defence is to seek collective protection in a highly militarised state, armed with nuclear weapons. This idea was encapsulated in the famous saying by the late Israeli general Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog; too dangerous to bother.” A ‘globalised virus’ Israel’s ugly, self-serving tribal reading of history has been slowly spreading to Jews in Europe and the US. Fifteen years ago, a US scholar, Daniel J Goldhagen, published an influential essay in the Jewish weekly Forward titled “The Globalisation of anti-Semitism”. In it, he argued that anti-Semitism was a virus that could lie dormant for periods but would always find new ways to reinfect its hosts. “Globalized anti-Semitism has become part of the substructure of prejudice in the world,” he wrote. “It is relentlessly international in its focus on Israel at the center of the most conflict-ridden region today.” This theory is also known as the “new anti-Semitism”, a form of Jew hatred much harder to identify than the right-wing anti-Semitism of old. Through mutation, the new anti-Semitism had concealed its hatred of Jews by appearing to focus on Israel and dressing itself up in left-wing garb. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his latest comments about Corbyn, that is also an approximation of the argument made by Rabbi Sacks in a 2016 essay in which he writes: “Anti-Semitism is a virus that survives by mutating.” In a sign of how this kind of paranoia is becoming slowly normalised in Europe too, the Guardian published a commentary by a British journalist last month explaining her decision, Israel-style, to teach her three-year-old daughter about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. That, she hoped, would prepare her child for eventualities such as Corbyn becoming prime minister. But the increasing adoption of Israel’s tribalist doctrine among sections of the British Jewish community – and the related weaponisation of anti-Semitism – is likely to shed further light on what kind of a state hardline Zionists uphold as at the core of their identity. Paradoxically, the new anti-Semitism turns the tables by legitimising – in fact, necessitating – Jewish racism towards gentiles. Rather than Corbyn stigmatising Jews – except in some feverish imaginations – it is the pro-Israel lobby stigmatising non-Jews, by claiming that they are all tainted by Jew hatred, whether they know it or not. The more the lobby kicks up a hysteria about Corbyn’s supposed anti-Semitism, the clearer it becomes that the lobby regards much of the non-Jewish public as suspect too. Palestinians made invisible The other obvious lacuna in the lobby’s logic is that it only works if we completely remove the Palestinians from the story of Zionism and Israel. The idea of a harm-free Zionism might have been credible had it been possible to establish a Jewish state on an empty piece of land, as the early Zionists claimed Palestine to be. In reality there was a large native population who had to be displaced first. Israel’s creation as a Jewish state in 1948 was possible only if the Zionist movement undertook two steps that violate modern conceptions of human rights and liberal democratic practice. First, Israel had to carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing, forcing more than 80 per cent of the native Palestinian population outside the new borders of the Jewish state it created on the Palestinians’ homeland. Then, it needed to deny the small surviving community of Palestinians inside Israel the same rights as Israeli Jews, to ghettoise them and stop them from bringing their expelled relatives back to their homes. These weren’t poor choices made by flawed Israeli politicians. They were absolutely essential to the success of a Zionist project to create and maintain a Jewish state. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the structural racism of the Jewish state were unmentionable topics in “legitimate” public debates about Israel until very recently. That has been changing, in part because it has become much harder to conceal what kind of state Israel is. Its self-harming behaviour includes its recent decision to make explicit the state’s institutionalised racism with the passage in July of the Nation-State Basic Law. That law gives constitutional weight to the denial of equal rights to a fifth of Israel’s population, those who are Palestinian. The backlash against Corbyn and other Palestinian solidarity activists is evidence of the lobby’s fears that they can no longer hold the line against a growing realisation by western publics that there was a cost to Zionism’s success. That price was paid by Palestinians, and there has yet been no historical reckoning over their suffering. By veiling the historical record, Israel and the Zionist movement have avoided the kind of truth and reconciliation process that led to the ending of apartheid in South Africa. The lobby prefers that Israel’s version of apartheid continues. Loss of moral compass If there is one individual who personifies the loss of a moral compass in the weaponisation of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and Israel’s critics, it is Rabbi Sacks. Asked by the New Statesman what he thinks of the new Nation-State Basic Law, the normally erudite Sacks suddenly becomes lost for words. He asks a friend, or in his case his brother, for the answer: “I’m not an expert on this. My brother is, I’m not. He’s a lawyer in Jerusalem. He tells me that there’s absolutely nothing apartheid about this, it’s just correcting a lacuna… As far as I understand, it’s a technical process that has none of the implications that have been levelled at it.” Sacks, it seems, cannot identify apartheid when it is staring him the face, as long as it is disguised as “Jewish”. Similarly, he is blind to the history of Zionism and the mass dispossession of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba. He tells the New Statesman: “Jews did not wish to come back to their land [Palestine] to make any other people [Palestinians] suffer, and that goes very deep in the Jewish heart.” Not so deep, it seems, that Sacks can even identify who had to suffer to make possible that Jewish “return”. In a critique of Sacks’ lengthy 2016 essay on anti-Semitism, a liberal Jewish commentator Peter Beinart noted that the rabbi had mentioned the “Palestinians” by name only once. He berated Sacks for equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism: By denying that [Palestinians] might have any reason besides bigotry to dislike Zionism, it denies their historical experience and turns them into mere vessels for Jew-hatred. Thus, it does to Palestinians what anti-Semitism does to Jews. It dehumanizes them. Topsy-turvy world In a world that was not topsy-turvy, it would be Sacks and the Israel lobby that were being publicly upbraided for their racism. Instead Corbyn is being vilified by a wide spectrum of supposedly informed opinion in the UK – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – for standing in solidarity with Palestinians. It is, remember, the Palestinian people who have been the victims of more than a century of collusion between European colonialism and Zionism, and today are still being oppressed by an anachronistic ethnic state, Israel, determined to privilege its Jewishness at all costs. The lobby and its supporters are not just seeking to silence Corbyn. They also intend to silence the Palestinians and the growing ranks of people who choose to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians. But while the lobby may be winning on its own limited terms in harming Corbyn in mainstream discourse, deeper processes are exposing and weakening the lobby. It is overplaying its hand. A strong lobby is one that is largely invisible, one that – like the financial and arms industries – has no need to flex its muscles. In making so much noise to damage Corbyn, the Israel lobby is also for the first time being forced to bring out into the open the racist premises that always underpinned its arguments. Over time, that exposure is going to harm, not benefit, the apologists for Israel. • First published in Middle East Eye http://clubof.info/

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hanzi83 · 6 years

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My Concern About My City

I wanted to address a tweet I sent out because I am concerned for my city and what has been becoming more normal the last few years with terror attacks and more shootings. It has made me wonder if there is more to the story with these, and if they are slowly creating situations where we ring in a police state to even this city.

I know most people’s critical thinking skills have gone out the window when these things happen because I can see the bigger picture, and while I believe others see the bigger picture, their ignorance is bliss to them, because I feel people who are associated with powerful people, and have their connections, can pretend to look at a situation like it is presented and whenever I bring it up to people I know, they get uncomfortable with it because my thinking is dangerous.

It is not a coincidence that the Stern Show “fans” on Reddit are constantly putting out how dangerous I am and I might do something drastic to cause violence, even though I have vehemently put out there nonstop that I am not a violent person, I don’t intend to cause any violence, nor do I have the smarts to put together such a fucking plot when I can barely read a fucking article because of all the information coming out in this era of information. I feel like the more I have been outspoken about this stuff and the more they try to lump me in with right wing conspiracies, and admittedly when I got into conspiracies, I could admit I fell into right wing thinking, without even realizing it because it wasn’t mainstream right wing thinking, but since then I have used my platform to voice that there are right wing Astroturf movements that exist online, because we live in a time where people distrust the mainstream media, and rightfully so, but people online have taken advantage of that.

I notice more and more the more crimes committed by these lone shooters, or terror attacks, their background and personality resemble traits that I might possess and I notice they are trying to link me to those kind of people. I wouldn’t be shocked if they fuck me over and frame me for something. I have suggested it, I have also reached out to media outlets to keep an eye, and no one returns any message back to me, probably because they know that my tablets and laptops are monitored, like the “fans” on Reddit keep hinting, and those hints are always them knowing things in advance, or posting my blogs before I even post them on the Tumblr site I post them on, like they have access to my laptop or something. I have pointed this out in the midst of irrational rants. They are reporting my accounts for being suicidal, and by looking at it you can assume I might be, even though I have clarified time after time I just have rants to clear the irrational clutter from my head, because I have no one else to confide in.

I know it will bite me in the ass because people will go through old tweets, but conveniently ignore the tweets where I address what I am doing, and to me these people are employed to do that, they don’t actually care what someone has said or how it might be controversial, their job is to look over people’s tweets, that the system are aware of well before someone is hired for something. The system, to me, always knows what is going on and what people are all about, and the controversy is meant for storyline so people on social media can make money with their sites, blogs, podcasts and it becomes fodder where we have these discussions, and because I point that out, I have become even bigger enemy to a lot of people, whether it be my own friends, family, associates, industry type, government agents etc and I think people might plot to fucking do something to me and then they can blame me for something.

I put out these blogs because I know if something like this could happen, then people who will report on it, will then chastise me and say I am fucking deranged and crazy and drag my name through the mud, but these people will only do that because they are puppets to the system, even if they claim they are independent to some degree. I don’t think anyone is truly independent. Certain factions report some truthful things, and to be able to get your voice heard you also have to sell out a little bit, so there is always some form of discredit being served to argue against each other. So some people might have taken Russian money, while the people in the mainstream are taking the US Empire’s money that has backed Saudi Arabia, and Israel while staying silent about it. I don’t trust anyone fully.

No one in my life has my back. Everything is a lie. People sold out so they can get access to sporting events, concert tickets, public figures showing up at their establishments, and the quid pro quo of that is to be an employed fan boy online. Why do you think people spend so much time arguing online, and writing these essays like posts on Reddit all fucking day long? They claim they are at work and taking a break, but really? You have this supposed work you are doing, but you have time to argue online with multiple burner accounts? This is a fucking job. People think the internet is free and it is being cracked down on, the internet was never free. It was always meant to serve as an experiment because they knew where the world was going, just because these public figures play dumb about it, doesn’t mean they aren’t lying.

I literally have no fucking ally in this world. I do wish I could die, but I know I can’t be suicidal because they will use it to fuck with me and use to further perpetuate what Stern has put out there about me and how he has painted me over the years. He does this to all people who he has exploited for his gain and when he drives them so off the wall, no one cares about them. None of these media outlets look into what Stern might be organizing, and maybe I am wrong and he isn’t, but you can’t look at the cast of characters who have been on his show, and seen their outcomes and not think there is something there that needs to be looked into.

I suspect, in my opinion, like everything in this blog is just a personal opinion, based off facts that have happened in history, but then I apply my theories to this situation. So I could be wrong, but to me it is not a coincidence these people are putting out I am dangerous, I am going to end up killing people, they already have put out that I beat up a gay couple at my gym or a restaurant. They could be doing it just to get a rise out of me, but even if that is the case, these people know I am mentally ill. These same people tell me to stay off line, but that is like saying “Hey if you don’t want to get raped, maybe you shouldn’t walk outside your house, or maybe if you don’t want to be robbed, maybe you shouldn’t live in a house” What gives these people the right to fucking sully my name. I will sully my name on my own, thank you very much.

I worry for my life and I would rather be gone from here, but they keep me here and put me through this and no one in my life has my fucking back and I lash out on them because of the years of cooperating with Zionist like people, and using me by bringing me out to gatherings, so I am paraded in front of people who might be fans of mine, while they profit, and then tell me I am crazy for not buying into their “genuine” invitations. Because of me, people have gotten their connections to the system and are allowed becoming friends with people in the industry but have blacklisted me. Even my own friends don’t want me to succeed, unless they have something on the surface to do with it.

I have been approached privately about people needing me alive, and never specifying why they need me. I have been approached by people telling me they had my back or they encouraged me so they can take credit if something ever happens to vindicate me. They assumed when I was banned from the show, and I felt nostalgic for old friendships that I would crawl back and reach out. I can’t go out on my own, I have to be accompanied all over the fucking place, so people associated with me can be seen, and they are given some form of internet points for some type of currency. Internet points have become currency. I used to think it was pointless, but every like, retweet or point on Reddit given, is worth something but you will never know or want to admit it. I believe I have angered people with my blogs and my irrational tweets that they would do something to get me fucked over.

I have put it out there and none of you media outlets ever wanted to intercept it. You will wait until something evil goes down whether it is to fucking kill me, or whether it framing me for something. You will not even bat an eye and you are supposed to be respected and credible people? You won’t cross Stern because you know behind the scenes he will destroy you. I am willing to believe he is one of the people who fucked over some of these people being exposed for past antics as well. He has right wing Nazis like the Proud Boys mad at him, but to me it feels like it is manufactured so it sets the tone that Howard not being for Alex Jones, will anger the white supremacists, so now people opposing Howard are of that ilk. It is why they keep lumping me in with it, and even one of the people who was also banned from calling into the show was a staunch Trump supporter and he shows up on my platforms and says to me “Hanzi I was banned from Stern as well, you are in good company” No I am not in your company. I am not a fucking Trump supporter, just because I don’t agree with the centrist liberal that exist on things, doesn’t mean I am a republican Trump supporter.

I notice ever since I have put out theories that I think Howard might be a Trump supporter, even though he says he was a Hilary supporter, even though that isn’t any better in my opinion, but I don’t believe someone who has had Trump at his wedding and vice versa and helped normalize him to his audience as this hip business man who just loves getting pussy, is not a Trump supporter of any kind. So this narrative of Howard being some soft liberal now is such a fucking lie that is what it seems to me at least. If he was such a staunch liberal like all those that oppose him claim, then why would he be such a supporter of Israel and encourage death to the Palestinians in the area. None of the liberal people who are fans of his and associate with him would ever call him out on that. They laugh their fucking ass off at all the exploited whackos on the show.

Jimmy Kimmel will get all this praise for his socially conscious efforts and teaching Kanye about why it is bad for supporting Trump, but he would never speak out on his friend that has said and done some fucked up shit in the past. He would never call him out for the exploits he has been up to. Stern is protected and will always be. Just when it becomes evident that he did this shit, don’t come to me like I didn’t warn any of you. Now that I am aware of what role people locally might play, they will make sure the exposition of Stern is prolonged because they are betting on him ever being exposed for anything he may have ever done, because they don’t want me to have that vindication, and maybe if I believed and groveled for their approval in the last 3 years they would have been more supportive, but these people have made their own deals and injected people in their circle to get into the industry so they have someone to latch onto. I call it out and it just gets worse. My tablets, laptops etc are hacked, and not in a malicious way, but more subtly to show me that they can flex their muscles.

These people take pleasure in my misery and it sucks because they gotten all the fucking shit they have wanted. They have partied, and used sex to get their way allegedly, they have had elaborate vacations and have industry connections and yet they will only allow me to be in their presence in a limited capacity and then act shady about it. I can tell by who they defend and how defensive they get about certain people I might go off on, that they are employed in some manner. You better not say anything about the Six God, because maybe they let their women get fucked by them or something. I don’t fucking know. Everything is exchanged by sex, and that is the real reason why people are these staunch male feminists. Maybe their online crew gets access to cam shows by these industry chicks, because I feel like male and females, moonlight on the side and sell sex. That is my opinion and why these people are suddenly these male feminists even though it seems like they are bribed to be that way. That is just m fucking take.

This will probably get me killed. I wouldn’t be surprised if these people set me up for something and as long as they profited off my misery and helped Zionists fuck with my life, they won’t need me anymore and that is why they have to hide who they are associated with. I will be alone forever. No woman should want me ever and if you do, you should check your mental health. Maybe you were sent my way after the system type dudes fucked you inside and out and now are ordering you to be an agent to control my life and manipulate me. I don’t know. Don’ worry after writing this blog, I will notice more people at local establishments look at me weird, because truth is they hate my guts and never liked me. I can tell by how different certain chicks look at me when I walk in there, like they don’t know who I am, but are told to not talk to me or acknowledge me.

So I went off the rails with this, but the basic gist is I am not a terrorist, I don’t support extremism against innocent people, I am not smart enough to be a fucking terrorist, I don’t have any weapons, nor do I have access to it. I don’t want to commit violence. I am allowed to question the system though, even though I don’t have all the fucking facts. I am building a portfolio of blogs, tweets, videos etc, to showcase there is proof there and if any of you in the media play dumb about it, you didn’t care for the fucking truth. You will throw me to the wolves no problem. Fuck my entire life. I can’t trust people in my life. They don’t want the best for me, they just want to be seen with me, so then it gives them some credibility with the people behind the scenes and it gets them more access and perks. No one will ever fucking admit to anything. I hope all of you who have done this, have to deal with people in your family and life having this kind of depression. I don’t know how a lot of you were allowed to have families; you are immature assholes who fuck with people’s lives. You are the ones who should be investigated.

#Hanzi Toronto 2018 Howard Stern Show Trolls Government Agents Zionism Online Conspiracy Theorist Trump Terror Frame Portfolio #Media outlets independent mainstream irrational anger safety paid points currency

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party-hard-or-die · 6 years

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Inside Qatar

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – There was much bonhomie as a few dozen people, including members of Congress and U.S. administration officials, gathered last week for dinner in a posh Washington neighborhood in honor of Qatar’s foreign minister.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump meets Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., April 10, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sat next to the minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.

“You have been a great friend to the United States,” Mnuchin told Thani, praising Qatar for its cooperation on counter-terrorism financing efforts.

The scene was a stark contrast from just a year ago.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed ties with Qatar in June 2017, accusing it of fomenting regional unrest, supporting terrorism and getting too close to Iran, all of which Doha denies.

At the time, a dinner with Qatari officials at a Washington steakhouse to garner support from members of Congress was a muted affair, without anyone with influence in the Trump administration at the event, according to a person who attended. President Donald Trump followed the boycott with tweets suggesting Qatar funded terrorism, even though other U.S. officials emphasized it was an ally.

“When the blockade happened they (Qatar) had no presence on the Hill,” said Joey Allaham, a former adviser to Qatar who was paid $1.45 million, including costs, for his advocacy work.

A year later the boycott remains in force, as the rivals have failed to resolve their dispute. But Qatar has managed to persuade certain lawmakers and influential Americans that it is a U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism and victim of an unfair boycott, interviews with advisers on both sides show.

Several Qatari lobbyists said the aggressive strategy, which has cost the small OPEC member tens of millions of dollars, has been about reaching people close to Trump as well as lobbying on Capitol Hill.

The country has also hired some people seen as close to Trump, pledged billions of dollars in U.S. investments or business and sponsored Doha visits, according to its advisers and public filings.

SIMMERING TENSIONS

Qatar’s boycott followed long simmering tensions in the region, with countries such as Saudi and the UAE angry about the tiny but rich Gulf nation’s outsized role in regional affairs, sponsoring factions in revolts and civil wars and brokering peace deals across the Middle East.

The United States, closely allied to countries on both sides, has found itself in the middle and tried unsuccessfully to mediate. Qatar hosts the Middle East headquarters for U.S. air forces. An administration official said the United States fears the rift could allow Iran to enhance its position in the Gulf if Tehran supported the Qataris.

Trump wants “the dispute eased and eventually resolved, as it only benefits Iran,” a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said.

Indeed, since the boycott Iran and Qatar ties have improved. Tehran opened its airspace to Qatar Airways when Saudis and others closed theirs, while Qatar restored full diplomatic relations with Iran.

This boycott violates the “right of an independent country like Qatar to choose its allies,” said an Iranian official, who previously served as ambassador to the UAE.

Iran’s foreign ministry declined to comment.

Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, said: “Rather than hoping for Washington to enforce a solution to the crisis, Qatar should establish a dialogue directly with the UAE and its neighbors.”

The Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

LOBBYING BATTLE

Rich from large natural gas reserves, Qatar has lavished at least $24 million on lobbying in Washington since the start of 2017. That compares with a total of $8.5 million Qatar paid in 2015 and 2016 for lobbying, Justice Department filings show. (For a graphic, click tmsnrt.rs/2N8ZwFr)

It has hired people close to Trump. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for example, said he worked for the Qataris on an investigation and visited Doha just weeks before becoming Trump’s personal lawyer in April.

Giuliani declined to give details, telling Reuters that he has not spoken to Trump about his Qatar work.

Qatar’s opponents have a formidable offensive of their own. The UAE and Saudi Arabia shelled out about $25 million each over the same period and had allies such as Elliott Broidy, a Republican fundraiser also close to Trump.

In May last year, Broidy bankrolled a conference about Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that Egypt and other Doha rivals have accused of terrorism, according to Mark Dubowitz, head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think-tank that organized the conference.

It was at this conference that Ed Royce, chairman of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed plans for a bill naming Qatar a sponsor of terrorism. Royce introduced the bill two days after the conference.

Royce’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Qatar “swarmed the Hill” to oppose the bill, including appealing to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, two lobbyists said. The bill has stalled in Congress.

Ryan’s office referred questions on the bill to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who did not respond to a request for comment.

“Understandably, the Qataris called in all their lobbyists and favors to try to derail the bill, though the final chapter on these issues has yet to be written,” said Broidy, who has sued Qatar for allegedly hacking his emails. Qatar denies his allegations.

UNLIKELY ALLIES

Qatar has also reached out to unlikely allies. In January, Qatar’s lobbyists flew Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, first class on Qatar Airways and put him up at the five-star Sheraton Grand Doha Resort for meetings with the country’s leaders.

That included a two-hour, one-on-one palace meeting with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

Klein said Qatari officials promised to kill an Al Jazeera documentary critical of Israel supporters in the United States, eliminate anti-Semitic books from a Doha book fair, and work to release kidnapped Israelis.

Klein remains critical of Qatar but said in an interview last week that he is encouraged by some steps taken to address his concerns. He said the documentary has not aired and he continues to work with officials on other issues.

Last fall, Trump met Sheikh Tamim on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. A Qatari lobbyist said Doha’s message to the United States was they would spend more money on the American base in the country and buy aircraft from Boeing Co.

Within a week of the meeting, state-owned Qatar Airways said it would buy six Boeing aircraft, valued at $2.16 billion. Boeing declined to comment.

Sheikh Tamim met Trump again this April at the White House.

“It took time and resources to replace the blockading states’ lies with the truth, including inviting delegations to visit Qatar and investigate the blockade for themselves,” said Jassim al-Thani, spokesman for the Qatar embassy in Washington.

Additional reporting by John Walcott and Yara Bayoumy in WASHINGTON, Noah Browning in DUBAI and Parisa Hafezi in ANKARA.; Editing By Paritosh Bansal

The post Inside Qatar appeared first on World The News.

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dragnews · 6 years

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Inside Qatar

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sat next to the minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.

“You have been a great friend to the United States,” Mnuchin told Thani, praising Qatar for its cooperation on counter-terrorism financing efforts.

The scene was a stark contrast from just a year ago.

“When the blockade happened they (Qatar) had no presence on the Hill,” said Joey Allaham, a former adviser to Qatar who was paid $1.45 million, including costs, for his advocacy work.

The country has also hired some people seen as close to Trump, pledged billions of dollars in U.S. investments or business and sponsored Doha visits, according to its advisers and public filings.

SIMMERING TENSIONS

Trump wants “the dispute eased and eventually resolved, as it only benefits Iran,” a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said.

This boycott violates the “right of an independent country like Qatar to choose its allies,” said an Iranian official, who previously served as ambassador to the UAE.

Iran’s foreign ministry declined to comment.

The Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

LOBBYING BATTLE

Giuliani declined to give details, telling Reuters that he has not spoken to Trump about his Qatar work.

Royce’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Qatar “swarmed the Hill” to oppose the bill, including appealing to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, two lobbyists said. The bill has stalled in Congress.

Ryan’s office referred questions on the bill to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who did not respond to a request for comment.

UNLIKELY ALLIES

That included a two-hour, one-on-one palace meeting with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

Within a week of the meeting, state-owned Qatar Airways said it would buy six Boeing aircraft, valued at $2.16 billion. Boeing declined to comment.

Sheikh Tamim met Trump again this April at the White House.

Additional reporting by John Walcott and Yara Bayoumy in WASHINGTON, Noah Browning in DUBAI and Parisa Hafezi in ANKARA.; Editing By Paritosh Bansal

The post Inside Qatar appeared first on World The News.

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cleopatrarps · 6 years

Text

Inside Qatar

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sat next to the minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.

“You have been a great friend to the United States,” Mnuchin told Thani, praising Qatar for its cooperation on counter-terrorism financing efforts.

The scene was a stark contrast from just a year ago.

“When the blockade happened they (Qatar) had no presence on the Hill,” said Joey Allaham, a former adviser to Qatar who was paid $1.45 million, including costs, for his advocacy work.

The country has also hired some people seen as close to Trump, pledged billions of dollars in U.S. investments or business and sponsored Doha visits, according to its advisers and public filings.

SIMMERING TENSIONS

Trump wants “the dispute eased and eventually resolved, as it only benefits Iran,” a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said.

This boycott violates the “right of an independent country like Qatar to choose its allies,” said an Iranian official, who previously served as ambassador to the UAE.

Iran’s foreign ministry declined to comment.

The Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

LOBBYING BATTLE

Giuliani declined to give details, telling Reuters that he has not spoken to Trump about his Qatar work.

Royce’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Qatar “swarmed the Hill” to oppose the bill, including appealing to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, two lobbyists said. The bill has stalled in Congress.

Ryan’s office referred questions on the bill to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who did not respond to a request for comment.

UNLIKELY ALLIES

That included a two-hour, one-on-one palace meeting with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

Within a week of the meeting, state-owned Qatar Airways said it would buy six Boeing aircraft, valued at $2.16 billion. Boeing declined to comment.

Sheikh Tamim met Trump again this April at the White House.

Additional reporting by John Walcott and Yara Bayoumy in WASHINGTON, Noah Browning in DUBAI and Parisa Hafezi in ANKARA.; Editing By Paritosh Bansal

The post Inside Qatar appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2IS2omY via News of World

#Daily World News #Daily Entertainment #Daily Sports #Today News #World The News

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newestbalance · 6 years

Text

Inside Qatar

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sat next to the minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.

“You have been a great friend to the United States,” Mnuchin told Thani, praising Qatar for its cooperation on counter-terrorism financing efforts.

The scene was a stark contrast from just a year ago.

“When the blockade happened they (Qatar) had no presence on the Hill,” said Joey Allaham, a former adviser to Qatar who was paid $1.45 million, including costs, for his advocacy work.

The country has also hired some people seen as close to Trump, pledged billions of dollars in U.S. investments or business and sponsored Doha visits, according to its advisers and public filings.

SIMMERING TENSIONS

Trump wants “the dispute eased and eventually resolved, as it only benefits Iran,” a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said.

This boycott violates the “right of an independent country like Qatar to choose its allies,” said an Iranian official, who previously served as ambassador to the UAE.

Iran’s foreign ministry declined to comment.

The Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

LOBBYING BATTLE

Giuliani declined to give details, telling Reuters that he has not spoken to Trump about his Qatar work.

Royce’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Qatar “swarmed the Hill” to oppose the bill, including appealing to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, two lobbyists said. The bill has stalled in Congress.

Ryan’s office referred questions on the bill to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who did not respond to a request for comment.

UNLIKELY ALLIES

That included a two-hour, one-on-one palace meeting with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

Within a week of the meeting, state-owned Qatar Airways said it would buy six Boeing aircraft, valued at $2.16 billion. Boeing declined to comment.

Sheikh Tamim met Trump again this April at the White House.

Additional reporting by John Walcott and Yara Bayoumy in WASHINGTON, Noah Browning in DUBAI and Parisa Hafezi in ANKARA.; Editing By Paritosh Bansal

The post Inside Qatar appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2IS2omY via Everyday News

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