It has officially started, no words can describe the feeling in my heart right now. I have lots to say to Iran and the Axis, but this is not the time nor place. May God keep everyone home in Lebanon safe and strengthen their resolve. It has felt inevitable for months now, but I hate that we’re so close to winter with how cold it gets in Lebanon. My aunties in Beirut started gathering supplies a few days ago, they have plenty of canned goods and stuff like rice stored now. My stubborn communist uncle was a “nothing ever happens guy” though so we’re grilling him in the family group chat now. My cousin is home in Beirut now, we were worried for him because he works in Tyre which will most likely be pulverised by the Zionists. May God give us the chance to witness the total destruction of this cancerous entity.

Waiting for a response for any message in the family group chat right now is fucking torture, I literally can’t deal with it anymore. I’ve sent my wife and the kid to her mom’s for a few days, they can’t see me and my dad like this. The two hours it took for my uncle to see the message and respond today were absolute hell, fuck this life. My aunt has little kids no older than 14, what if something happens. I’ve called my cousin from my mom’s side who has a little farm outside of Damascus in Syria, he can take in my dad’s family from Beirut, but how the fuck will they even leave with this situation, and my cousin is already dirt poor, how will he feed them. Too many thoughts spinning, nowhere to scream them out, nowhere to go and nothing to do, I almost wish I was there.

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With Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s martyrdom marking a very significant moment in the history of the resistance, I think that it puts a natural stop to my effortpost about the history about the pan-Shia moment. I’m also just too demoralised and sad to continue writing, maybe I’ll one day do another one of these in happier times. Thank you all for reading these, I can answer any questions if God gives me strength. I have one favor to ask, can someone please post this in the history or effortpost comms?

Part One

Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment

Part Three, it also gets continued in the first comment

Today my heart broke because that guy I posted about, whom I’m helping and trying to find more donors, I asked him what will they do if this https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/middleeast/netanyahu-gaza-hamas-expulsions-plan-intl/index.html happens. He told me they’re tired, exhausted and staying on north, that he wishes to die because he’s tired of seeing death… I broke. I literally broke and cried until I knocked myself with xanax because it was unbearable. I was practically saying goodbye to him and his family today. Three months, we knew each other three months, we shared our thoughts, I would comfort him, he would comfort me… A part of me died today. Saying goodbye to him was one of the most hurtful thing to experience for me. He is my friend and my friend told me he’s waiting to die and if Netanyahu does this, they’re staying to die. He told me not to be sad, which made me sob even harder.

Damn fucking Israel and damn fucking USA. I wish Netanyahu, his government, his army and his settlers that Israel collapses, that they lose everything and one by one gets mysteriously shot in the head. Fuck you, Biden! Netanyahu, choke! I hate you all so much, I wish you all die in a stampedo of people who will beat you to death. One of those foots in the head is mine. Drop dead, scum, I wish you nothing but death and death of your families, that your seed disappears, like my Palestinians lost everything, like they’ll never have children and future. FUCK YOU!!!

I have a friend from Lebanon, I haven’t heard from him in months. I don’t know what’s with his family in Lebanon, is he ok…

Fucking Israel is taking everything from us. We’re maybe tertiary victim of this, but we are also victims. One year we’re watching this genocide, nothing was solved, it’s even worse now and now they mutilated Lebanese men and bombing their land. We’re empty, depressed, defeated and helpless together with the primary victims. Nothing we did didn’t made Biden to fucking get Israel at its place. It’s only worse.

Israel will be dead, Palestine will be free. Fuck you, Zionists, fuck off and die and choke in your blood. Monsters. Nothing but monsters and scum.

Conversation I just had -

Me: “You support Israel invading Lebanon?”

Lib: “Yes because Hezbollah have been firing rockets at settlements for months”

Me: “And you support Ukraine?”

Lib: “Yes Ukraine should defend itself because Russia invaded.”

Me: “What was Ukraine doing to Donbass before Russia invaded?”

Lib: “Nothing”

We’re about to witness a lynching perpetrated by the Judicial Branch of the United States. There isn’t a follow up to that sentence I could write that wouldn’t get me thrown in a van.

I can’t believe it, I just can’t swallow this news. Nasrallah is the resistance, he’s Hezbollah, he’s the man that defeated Israel twice, he’s the greatest man that the region produced in the last 50 years, he’s the one that you could listen to for hours without being bored. What a loss, what a tragedy.

It’s a black day, it’s very hard to process. I’m frightened of what comes next.

لبيك يا نصرالله لبيك يا سيد المقاومة

Just before the UN meeting, Brazilian President Lula da Silva said: “The world is out of control. Nobody respects anybody.”

“The world is out of control. Nobody respects anybody. When the UN was created, it had 51 countries that were UN partners. Now there are 193. That means that more than 140 didn’t take part when it was created. And the UN, which when it was created had the strength to create the State of Israel, doesn’t have the courage to create the Palestinian State,” said the president at the event.

“The UN can’t do it, it doesn’t have the strength to decide. It wouldn’t have been necessary to have had Russia’s war with Ukraine, it wouldn’t have been necessary to have had the genocide in the Gaza Strip, it wouldn’t have been necessary to have had the invasion of Libya, the war in Iraq. All this could have been avoided if the UN had fulfilled its task of being a kind of world governance,” said Lula.

Part one effortpost here, I chose number two. Sorry for any grammatical fuckups in advance, it was too long to proof read.

The Rise of the Collective Shia Identity: Part One

The year is 1978. Ayatollah Khomeini, the main voice of Shia Islamism has just been expelled from Najaf by Saddam Hussein. Najaf, the capital of Shia Islam and where the biggest Hawzas (Shia Islamic schools) are located, is a hotspot of political repression, executions, and arrests. The main Marja (basically Shia pope), Sayyid Abu Al Qasim Al Khoei is reduced to a strictly religious role, giving rulings about useless things like marriages and inheritance. His predecessor, Sayyid Muhsin Al Hakim, pushed the political buttons too hard with a ruling that deemed communists and Baathists as disbelievers, which made the Iraqi state go crazy and start a huge campaign of repression of anything political from the Shia elite. Khomeini’s development of the concept of Wilayat Al Faqih was very worrying for Baathist Iraq, so he was expelled from Najaf.

Shias in Iraq never got a place post-Sykes-Picot, with the Kingdom of Iraq being dominated by the Sunni Baghdadi elite. The period between 1958-1968 after the revolution was too chaotic and disjointed to produce an elite, with daily conflicts and coup attempts by adventurers with different ideologies. The Baathist period produced a new elite strictly dominated by Sunnis from Salahaddin Province, so the Shias just never got a seat at the table. Two ideologies penetrated the Shia mind, Islamism and Communism. Islamists were concentrated in Karbala and Najaf, two holy cities for Shia Islam. Communists where concentrated in Nasiriyah, Amarah and Basra, cities where poverty was rampant. Islamists were finally organised in the form of the Dawa Party, led by Musa Al Sadr’s cousin Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr. Musa Al Sadr would later rise as the spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community. Muhammed Baqir Al Sadr’s works and political activities really annoyed the Iraqi state, so he and his sister were executed by the state in 1980. Most of their followers were executed or exiled. Many of the influential families in Najaf and Karbala had some Persian ancestry, nearly all those families suffered from mass deportations as Saddam’s anti-Persian paranoia grew. The communists suffered from the same fate, with most communists either executed or exiled by the state due to their political activities.

Now we’re done with Iraq, let’s go to Iran. Shia Islamism is dead here too, the Shah’s security services arrests anyone with any political activity. Khomeini was successfully chased out 20 years ago, and there’s no organised political force that can even talk loudly without getting executed. The Shah is at least Shia Muslim on paper, he prays in public once every 10 years, visits the shrines in Qom and Mashhad occasionally, but to everyone with a functioning brain, this man is a disbeliever. There’s something brewing, but let’s wait with that story.

Let’s go to Lebanon. Shias in Lebanon are around half of the Muslim population. It’s hard to get exact numbers, but Shias are around 25% of the total population of the country. The Shia community here also never got a real seat at the table. The president holds most of the power and is always a Maronite. The prime minister gets fired every few weeks, but he’s always a Sunni and does nothing while the Maronite elite is pretending to be French and robbing the country. The speaker of the parliament is Shia, but toilet paper is more useful than that position. Feudalism didn’t really end in the Shia parts of Lebanon, most Shias were farmers who were getting fucked so hard on a daily basis that they didn’t have time to even think about politics. Remember we’re in 1978, where are the Shias in the middle of civil war? The answer is nowhere. The main sides are Maronites vs Sunni Muslims, communists and Palestinians. Shias were not a major factor here. The only notable Shia organization is the Amal Movement, led by Musa Al Sadr. Musa was a charismatic leader who would set the foundations of the modern Shia Lebanese identity, he was respected by all sectors of the cursed Lebanese society and his connections to Iran and Iraq were slowly starting to be important in a regional context. But nothing good lasts, as he was inexplicably disappeared and presumably killed by Gaddafi during a routine visit to Libya in August 1978.

Let’s go to Yemen and the Gulf. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Shias were an afterthought, they are 0% of the ruling families and have zero political representation. They’re allowed to do some rituals at home when no one sees, but if you open your mouth in public and say anything Shia Islamist, you’re getting disappeared and your whole family will probably be deported to Iran or something. Shias in Bahrain are the absolute majority and they’re significant minorities in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen, the Shias are not the same kind of Shia as in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. The main group of Shia Muslims are either called Jaafari after the theological works of the sixth Shia Imam Jaafar Al Sadiq, or Ithna Ashari (Twelvers) due to their belief in twelve Imams after the Prophet Muhammed, starting with Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib and ending with Imam Muhammed Al Mahdi, also known as the Hidden Imam who according to Shia beliefs will reappear one day and basically set in motion the end of the physical world. The Shia of Yemen are known as Zaydis, after Zayd ibn Jaafar Al Sadiq, who the Zaidis recognized as 7th Imam, while the Twelvers recognized Musa ibn Jaafar Al Sadiq. The Zaidi Imamate in Northern Yemen continued for nearly a thousand years, but it could not withstand the post-WW2 chaos in the region and ended in nearly comic fashion after a coup led by local rivals and involvement from an exiled Iraqi officer. The Zaydi community here in 1978 is in disarray, with many converting to Sunni Islam out of convenience in a new world. There’s no organized Zaydi force or political party, they just farm in the highlands of Northern Yemen and chill out there. It is a fading group, but wait, something just happened in Yemen. Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Zaydi military officer from Sanaa, and one of the great adventurers of the 1900s in the Middle East, just did a military coup and took power in the failing state of North Yemen in July 1978.

How did this defeated religious group go from edges of the region to the dominant group in five countries and a political force that annoys America and Israel? We’ll find out in the next episode as we cover the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the formative value of the Iraq-Iran War, the failed Shaaban Revolution in Iraq, the rise of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, and the rise of the Houthi (Ansarallah) movement in Yemen.

Hey, please read the first two parts of my effortpost on the evolution of the modern pan-shia ideology if you haven’t done that already. Part three coming probably tomorrow, but I’m on 5k words in total already and I haven’t even mentioned Syria and Bahrain in the last part, so this became a bit larger than expected lmao.

Part One

Part Two, it gets continued in the first comment

you’re getting the third and probably final part tomorrow, be patient

Mexico is seizing a quarry and port owned by a US mining company , aiming to turn it into a wildlife refuge
One last middle finger from AMLO 🫡

From the Al-Jazeera live feed:

Biden says ‘time to finalise’ Gaza deal and ‘end this war’

US President Joe Biden has urged Israel and Hamas to finalise a months-old ceasefire proposal, telling the United Nations he was committed to ending the war on Gaza.

“Now is the time for the parties to finalise its terms,” he said of the deal brokered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

The deal will “bring the hostages home and secure security for Israel and Gaza free from Hamas’s grip, ease the suffering in Gaza and end this war,” Biden told the UN General Assembly.

I don’t recall Biden ever being more clear that what he wants isn’t a cease fire, it’s for Hamas to surrender. When he says “Gaza free from Hamas’ grip”, he’s saying he wants a Palestinian Authority situation - which is precisely what Israel wants. Literally everything he said there is just what Israel wants: return the hostages, keep Israel “secure”, and for Hamas to self-immolate and hand over Gaza to either to Zionist lapdogs or an international coalition of American lapdogs. The idea that this man is putting any pressure on Netanyahu is obviously ridiculous.

Looks like Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah will be buried in Karbala, Iraq, next to Imam Hussein. There’s no more fitting spot on earth for him, I have made a promise to visit his grave as soon as possible. My wife has been feeling kinda homesick since birthing our son and she wants to go to Iraq for a few weeks, so there’s a very good reason for me to follow along now.