The people who hold onto the idea of revolting against the rulers are operating within a false dichotomy that presumes the only response to oppression is either to topple the state or to suffer in silence. This exposes to me their lack of any real world experience with genuine social and political movements, as well as their unfamiliarity with power dynamics in society.

The prohibition of revolting against the ruler in Islam does not in any way curtail your ability to oppose oppression effectively and positively if you are serious about improvement and not just interested in destruction and chaos.

https://youtu.be/l8ThRZwh6CE

It is also worth considering that many of the people of influence are unworthy of that influence, and it is granted by people who choose to value triviality and the entertainment value of toxic spectacles and simplistic opinions; as well as people who have power simply because we make them rich by our absurd self-enslavement to brands, to unnecessary consumption, and so on. If religious scholars and the Saliheen are not esteemed appropriately, we...no one but ourselves...have drained the Ahl al-Hal wal-'Aqd of righteous people

Muslims living in the West, at this point, remind me of those characters in zombie movies who are the few survivors navigating a terrain populated by savage, ravenous, infected zombies; constantly at risk of getting infected themselves while they wander through an apocalyptic wasteland

You know everyone...I realized that I have been using this Telegram channel wrong. Old guy, what to do? I should be sharing news, links, and so on, with my thoughts and comments; but I have almost only ever used it to share links to the Youtube videos whenever I post a new one...which is dumb. I appreciate that you bothered to follow this channel, and that you have stayed here despite it being essentially dormant. Insha'Allah, I will be more active here, since I always preferred writing to making videos anyway. Jazakum Allahu khayran all.

When you, say, read the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Economist; or watch CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News, and so on; you are very much an audience to a conversation between and amongst institutional power. The topics addressed, the views expressed, are not yours; they are of interest to, and framed according to, institutional power. You are, in every conceivable way, an audience, a consumer; not a participant in that conversation. The platform designated for you to participate in the conversation is social media; but if your participation conflicts with the framework of institutional power, you will be warned, flagged, or censored…BY institutional power. No one flags NYT articles, no one deletes a page out of the Economist; but your ability to engage in public discourse is conditional. Because, of course, it is not public discourse. It is a restricted access to public discourse on a platform of institutional power. We have accepted to be corralled into a corporate-owned and controlled replication of the public sphere where strict conformity to the parameters of institutional discourse can be enforced.

UAE, Turkiye ink agreement boosting trade to $40bn over five years

There will inevitably be a lot of bumps in the road moving ahead with Gulf and Turkish cooperation, for obvious historical reasons. Turkey was the most successful organizing element in the Muslim world for hundreds of years. Despite the current difficulties, Turkey remains one of, if not the most, solid Muslim countries in the world in terms of overall geopolitical fundamentals; but Saudi Arabia has unlimited capital. Just as rivalry existed between the Ottomans and the Arabs for a variety of reasons historically, Ankara and Riyadh today have competing credentials to deserve dominant status. I pray that, as with their relatively brief experiment with hostility towards Qatar — that ultimately failed epically — the Khaleej is realising that strategic cooperation better serves the interests of the region; with each nation bringing its resources to the table for collectively beneficial utilisation.

https://ift.tt/ueXto3F

Little by little, European commentators are comprehending what Middle Nation viewers knew a year ago.

https://gpovanman.wordpress.com/2023/03/06/big-brother-is-back/

I don't know if you all have seen, but Israel is currently rocked by massive protests — from marches and rallies in the streets, to soldiers refusing to serve under the Netanyahu government, and even citizens attacking military checkpoints. It is my hope — I will not be so confident as to say it is my belief — that we are seeing the last hurrah of extremist zionism.

There is an interesting lesson to be learned, I think, from what is going on in Israel right now. I have long maintained that Ariel Sharon was the most realistic and practical zionist leader they ever had. He had no illusions about what Israel was, and what it needed to be if it wanted to continue to exist — namely, an American dependency, a military outpost, that needed to sow conflict in the region and maintain a strict racist ideology, fueled by a steady stream of lunatic settlers from the West (who could be managed through payoffs and basically kept on the outskirts of Israeli society).

The Israeli Doves, the "liberals", wanted to have it both ways — they wanted to appear civilised and non-racist, while still maintaining the zionist enterprise. They were and are delusional. Someone like Sharon understood that the slogan "no justice, no peace" is just a statement of fact; and therefore, when you want to preserve an unjust state, you can forget about peace. The Liberals did not, and do not understand this harsh reality. Or, rather they did, but thought it made them look better if they pretended it wasn't the case.

Now, the problem for Israel is that those duplicitous Doves TAUGHT young generations their rhetorical delusions. In other words, younger people actually believe the rhetoric, and do not understand the reality it was meant to obfuscate. This will, insha'Allah, result in the total crumbling of the zionist experiment.

Now, what is the lesson here? We have our own people — speakers, influencers, imams, da'ees, academics, etc — who try to soften harsh realities about the irreconcilable differences we have with Western values and beliefs. I think they KNOW they are obfuscating; but the problem is, they are TEACHING young people who do not necessarily know better. And those young people will be the way the Deen manifests itself in at least the English-speaking world in the very near future.

Whereas Ariel Sharon was concerned with maintaining injustice, and thus did not delude himself into thinking peace was an option; we are sincerely interested in peace, and must therefore know that justice must precede it. In other words, you cannot actually speak untruthfully — unjustly — with the intention of doing so in order to get along peacefully. If you miseducate the youth on this point, you are prolonging injustice and impeding the possibility of real peace.

If you use strategic language and finesse when talking to non-Muslims about Islam, basically to lessen the extent to which they may feel it to be strange or in conflict with their values and beliefs; just be careful who is listening, because we should not be teaching our own youth this version of Islam. If we have to present Islam to our own young people the same way we present it to non-Muslims, because otherwise they will turn away from it, we have a very serious problem.

For anyone who does not know Edward Bernays, you really should learn about him. He was the father of modern PR, propaganda, marketing, and really, social engineering.

For example, when he had a cigarette company as a client, he created a whole movement to connect women's empowerment with smoking — this was the early days of feminism. He labelled cigarettes 'torches of freedom", and had smokes passed out to women marchers and so on. Suddenly, his client had a whole new market for their tobacco products.

You should think about this when you think about the LGBT and trans movements in the West (and globally). These are, in my opinion, essentially market-creation campaigns for Big Pharma.

French unions said they would cut electricity at "sensitive economic sites" with the aim of shutting down the country. It will also cut electricity to political HQs.