#national council

[sayruq]

The US, on 29 February, vetoed a UN Security Council (UNSC) statement that would have condemned Israel for the mass murder of over 100 Palestinian civilians who were awaiting the delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza City. “We don’t have all the facts on the ground – that’s the problem,” US deputy ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told reporters on Thursday. He then claimed there are “contradictory reports” about the Israeli army's latest massacre and highlighted that Washington was focused on finding “some language that everyone can agree on.” Thursday's veto is the fifth time Washington has blocked a UNSC statement or ceasefire resolution that would hold Israel accountable for the atrocities it has committed in Gaza.

[historyforfuture]

No difference except , the zionists made it worse , they stripped them from their clothes

[himejoshiangels]

no more buzzcut please!!

No more drawing duke bald, we've evolved past it. This is for everyone especially wfa onlys. I know most of yall don't like drawing bald people and what a coincidence neither do I! Lucky for you, in the comics, duke doesn't have a buzz cut his hair usually looks more like this

The buzzcut is a lazy, common thing that many artists less experienced with black hair default to when drawing black characters. In the age of artists actually learning more diverse black hairstyles, I say we include him in this movement!

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇸⚔️🇵🇸 🚨

UNITED STATES VETOS PALESTINIAN MEMBERSHIP TO THE UNITED NATIONS

In a vote today in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on a resolution to grant membership into the UN for Palestine was vetoed by the United States.

The vote for Palestinian membership was supported by the vast majority of UNSC members, with 12 votes in favor, one against, and two abstentions.

US representative to the UN for Special Political Affairs, Robert Wood, argued that Palestine could not be admitted as long as Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip, echoing Zionist arguments over Palestine's membership, at one point arguing, “there are unresolved questions as to whether [Palestine] meets the criteria to be considered a state," without ever mentioning the Israeli occupation that makes such criteria unlikely to ever be satisfied.

Palestine is currently a "Permanent Observer State" without voting rights at the United Nations.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[booasaur]

This is the Gaza Strip:

You might remember how earlier on, Israel ordered everyone to evacuate to the south of Gaza, and however painfully and sometimes fatally, many did, to Khan Younis and Rafah.

There've been attacks in "safe" zones throughout these last months, but tonight all eyes turn to Khan Younis.

Please keep raising awareness about Palestine. However much possible, participate in Bisan's strike this week, follow the BDS list, talk to friends and family and colleagues. Applying pressure is the only way anything will change.

[myfandomprompts]

#for scientific purposes only

[allyriadayne]

TYLAND LANNISTER IN EVERY EPISODE

>>> 1.04 King of the Narrow Sea

[sybaritick]

Absolutely thrilled to have stumbled across your 1972 security council rp tag. Legitimately exciting to know someone is into such a thing! If it's not too strange / personal to ask, would you be able to elaborate on what that entails and what's appealing about that specific rp for you? I'm curious but I can't quite get my head around it

I love talking about this stuff, so thanks for asking! I'm aware it's very weird but I think the reasoning behind it is surprisingly normal (in terms of how kinks develop).

I've explained this to a few friends on Discord so I will use those screenshots to assist me in this presentation.

so the backdrop to all of this is that I love to play the bad guy. As a small child in play-pretend games I would want to be the villain. I liked to be "it" during tag. As long as it's within the confines of a game/everyone knows we're just playing, I just like to be scary :)

But with this particular kink, I'm pretty sure it comes from some particular affecting experiences I had as a young teenager. I wrote my first Hetalia fanfic when I was 12 and then was very involved in model UN starting at age ~14. (I was really competitive about it and ended up even getting to a national competition once in high school, lol).

as a pretty weird teenage girl (now trans man) lot of my first experiences having crushes, or having someone else have a crush on me, were at model UN events. It let me feel powerful (because I was good at it) and I realized that having others act like I was powerful and threatening (in this ultimately harmless LARP type situation) was really hot to me.

(many such stories...)

I loved playing the US diplomat when I got to because obviously you get to play evil puppetmaster world power so I would lean into that and have fun with it.

The period of history I connected to most in terms of US interventionism was the Nixon era, just because there were so many examples during that period of the US trying to control the rest of the world. I ended up reading some Kissinger biographies (Kissinger by Walter Isaacson and Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek) when I was 18-19 and it really just cemented my obsession with the incredible harm he was able to cause and just how much of an affect he had on US foreign policy.

I'm particularly interested in economic coercion/the IMF and World Bank as instruments of US hegemony. Actually...

but ofc it's not just the 1970s, I like fantastical modern scenarios too:

(removed my boyfriend's name, sure it's just a first name but do they really wanna be in this post)

so yeah! tl;dr: it's a power thing, I like it in a D/s way. I got some wires crossed in my brain and "I like when people act scared of me [sexual]" became associated with "I like when people act scared of me because they're aware of the rotten machine of US global hegemony that lurks behind my words [sexual apparently]"

[intricatecakes]

The UN-approved ceasefire is for the NEXT TWO WEEKS ONLY. Keep protesting, keep boycotting, keep calling your government representatives until the ceasefire is PERMANENT.

[sayruq]

The U.S. will use its veto power against a Palestinian bid to be recognized as a member state of the United Nations during a vote at the Security Council expected to take place Thursday evening. Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department, described as premature an effort by the Palestinian Authority (PA) to gain member status at the U.N. He said there was not unanimity among the Security Council’s 15 members that the Palestinian Authority had met the criteria for membership, with unresolved questions over the governance of the Gaza Strip, where Israel is in a war to defeat and eliminate the controlling power, Hamas. “And for that reason, the United States is voting no on this proposed Security Council resolution,” Patel said.

Earlier it was revealed that the United States was secretly pressuring other members of the Security Council to shoot down a Palestinian state membership so the US wouldn't have to use its veto as that would lead to a wave of local and international criticism for Joe Biden.

[historyforfuture]

Just a minute of what are citizens of GAZA living at any time any where they go .

#A Genocide not a war

[phoenixyfriend]

The Shift in America's Support of Israel as of 3/25/24

Okay, so there have been three specific incidents recently that I'd like to cover for you guys.

Chuck Schumer's speech calling for a new election in Israel, which I have spoken about here and here. (3/14/24)

Congress voting to ban UNRWA funding until 2025, which I've seen a lot of people talking about, but often without an actual understanding of what the situation actually is. (It's bad, but it's not the same type of bad as people think.) (3/24/24)

The US abstaining from a UN Security Council vote, which is effectively voting against Israel when they have thus far been the only ones to use veto power in this manner. (3/25/24)

I'm not going to go into detail about Schumer, since I've already covered it. tldr: it's a very specifically worded speech that does not explicitly threaten Israel, but if you do even the slightest bit of reading between the lines, that is absolutely what is happening.

Also, before I move forward: the US may not be donating to UNRWA for the rest of the fiscal year, but you can. They have direct donation links.

UNRWA funding has been on hold for a while, but this is... complicated. Not morally, because UNRWA does need funding and to defund it is truly unconscionable, but many of the "Biden signed it into law" posts are approaching it with this implied message that UNRWA would have funding if not for Biden signing it.

Except that isn't really how the US government works. Especially this government.

Funding for 2024 was supposed to be passed months ago. We are on the verge of another government shutdown. UNRWA funding is not on the table until the House swings blue. I hate to be the one to say this, but it's... like, it's not something I can change alone. I know you're tired of hearing it, but voting in November is the key to fixing a whole lot of problems.

One of the core duties of Congress is passing budgets. For those budgets to pass, they need to be approved by the House (Republican Majority), the Senate (Democrat Majority), and the President. The reason it has taken five months to pass a yearly budget (the deadline iirc was September or October) is because anything approved by one chamber is shot down by the other.

UNRWA's de-funding is tied to Ukraine funding (and a few other things). Biden refusing to sign would not have brought back UNRWA funding. The funding is already on hold. We do not have the votes to bring it back. We just straight up do not have enough seats in the House to make that happen. Biden refusing to sign would have resulted in both UNRWA and Ukraine not having funding, indefinitely. Signing it resulted in one of the two getting funding.

This is not a situation where funding was approved and now cut. This is not a situation where money was already flowing to UNRWA. This is a situation where money wasn't going anywhere, because Congress is a split shitshow.

Think of it like this: Funding is water coming from a spigot. Congress can turn it on or off, and it's currently off. Biden can smack away the hand coming to twist the valve, but he can't touch the valve himself. That's what the presidential veto is. Unfortunately, the spigot is already off, and Biden can't twist it back on when Congress isn't already reaching to do so.

Is this bad? Yes! UNRWA's funding should never have been cut! We should still be very, very upset about this! But I need you to understand that the way the US government works is not a dictatorship. Biden cannot just overrule Congress, especially when we're on the verge of another shutdown.

I do not think it is fair or even really acceptable that UNRWA's funding was viewed as an appropriate point of compromise. I'm just, unfortunately, also aware that this particular legislation is a tug-of-war that was never going to end with funding going to Palestine, not with the current Republican control of the House.

"But Biden sent money to Israel a bunch of times--" Yeah, and he's paying for it in the polls. He's aware that people are pissed at him. That choice is already biting him in the ass.

Biden is not perfect and I am never going to claim he is, but please recognize that the UNRWA funding pull is not a current action. It is a past action that is now being sustained because the House is red. You want to bring back UNRWA funding? Get rid of Marjorie Taylor Green and her entire cohort.

The other reason I'm less than eager to view that UNRWA thing as Biden being pro-Israel is because the US has finally abstained on a UN vote instead of vetoing.

When the US has been the only voice on Israel's side in the Security Council this whole time, abstention is functionally voting against them. We already knew that 13-14 of the other 14 members were going to vote pro-ceasefire. They have been this entire time. The US abstaining is functionally agreeing.

Why did the US not just vote for the ceasefire, then? No idea. Might be a treaty thing. I don't really need to know, because the result is that the UN Security Council has finally passed a measure against Israel, and those things are legally binding, and we know it's a big step because Israel's government is not happy.

When paired with the Schumer speech from a week and a half ago, it indicates a major shift in US foreign policy.

From the Al Jazeera article:

The US had repeatedly blocked Security Council resolutions that put pressure on Israel but has increasingly shown frustration with its ally as civilian casualties mount and the UN warns of impending famine in Gaza. Speaking after the vote, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield blamed Hamas for the delay in passing a ceasefire resolution. “We did not agree with everything with the resolution,” which she said was the reason why the US abstained. “Certain key edits were ignored, including our request to add a condemnation of Hamas,” Thomas-Greenfield said. [...] The White House said the final resolution did not have language the US considers essential and its abstention does not represent a shift in policy. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the US failure to veto the resolution is a “clear retreat” from its previous position and would hurt war efforts against Hamas as well as efforts to release Israeli captives held in Gaza.

This action has also resulted in Israel pulling plans for "a high-level delegation" to visit the US for discussions on the invasion of Rafah (which Biden has purportedly been warning against for a while).

“We’re very disappointed that they won’t be coming to Washington, DC, to allow us to have a fulsome conversation with them about viable alternatives to them going in on the ground in Rafah,” [John] Kirby told reporters. [...] Last week, Netanyahu promised to defy US appeals and expand Israel’s military campaign to Rafah even without its ally’s support.

There are other complications and details here, such as that the resolution does not call for a permanent ceasefire, and that US tensions with Russia and China are still somehow playing a role in the negotiations over the ceasefire text, but ultimately...

The US abstaining is a good thing. Schumer's speech is a good thing. They are not enough, but they are good things. They are steps forward.

The pull of funding from UNRWA is not a good thing. It is, in fact, a very, very bad thing. It just also looks a lot like it was unavoidable.

So call your reps, and vote come November. It's a long slog and we all know it, but we can't make change without dedication.

To support my blogging so I can move out of my parents’ house, I do have a ko-fi. Alternately, you can donate to one of the charities I list in this post.

[intersectionalpraxis]

I have zero sympathy for zionists.

[gobcorend]

"(...) it must be shown to American Jews that the choice between Israel’s survival and Palestinian rights is a false one; that it is in fact Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and reflexive resort to criminal force that are pushing it toward destruction; that it is possible to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict so that everyone, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab, can preserve their full human dignity; and that such a settlement has been within reach for decades, but that Israel—with critical U.S. backing, largely because of the Israel lobby—has blocked it."

--- Norman G. Finkelstein in the book 'Knowing Too Much'

[decolonize-the-left]

The USA, Canada, & Europe need to cease all aid for Israel and pull all military out of the middle east and Red Sea NOW.

And for their complicity, strip them of their security council veto powers in the UN

End the occupation.

pass it on

[i-am-aprl]

Every word uttered is a FACT