ELIJAH MAGNIER—Rouhani’s government wished to explore several avenues unrelated to the nuclear deal, following Raisi’s decision to suspend all talks before he takes office and appoints a new negotiation team. Rouhani thought the humanitarian dossier had a higher chance of success than the nuclear deal. Therefore, throughout the sixth round of negotiations in Vienna, the Iranian negotiator agreed with the British negotiator on every single detail related to the swap of 10 prisoners between the US and Iran. Because Iran refuses any direct negotiations with the US, the British acted as an intermediary and agreed on all details relating to the deal’s announcement, the names of those to be released on both sides, and the dates.
IMPERIALIST SICKNESS
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Washington’s Terrorist Friends: Prominent Americans Continue to Support a Murderous Cult
17 minutes readPHILIP GIRALDI—The group currently operates out of a secretive, heavily guarded 84 acre compound in Albania that is covertly supported by the United States intelligence community, as well as through a “political wing” front office in Paris, where it refers to itself as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). MEK is financially supported by Saudi Arabia, which enables it to stage events in the United States and in Europe where it generously pays politicians to make fifteen-minute speeches praising the organization and everything it does. It’s bribing of inside the Beltway power brokers and its support by Israel proved so successful that it was removed from the State Department terrorist list in 2012 by Hillary Clinton even though it had killed Americans in the 1970s.
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JAY THARAPPEL—On one end of the spectrum there’s Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah who all argued that an unjust status quo is preferable to the anarchy that would likely follow its overthrow, whereas on the other end of the spectrum, there are the Zaydis who argue that Muslims have an obligation to rebel against unjust and corrupt rulers.
Saudi Arabia is favourable to the “quietism” of the former sort, whereas the Yemeni national resistance led by Ansarullah are Zaydis, who far from being “sectarian” are more accurately the bridge between Sunni & Shia in the sense that they accept the legitimacy of the first three Caliphs (proto-Sunni) while reserving their preference for Ali (proto-Shia), and therefore, they are sometimes referred to as “the Sunnis of the Shia, and the Shia of the Sunnis”.
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Keith Olbermann Wants Jimmy Dore Banned From All Platforms
16 minutes readCAITLIN JOHNSTONE—You can always count on the less reality-anchored pundits to say out loud what the rest are thinking in private. Support for internet censorship is now a mainstream position among the so-called “moderates” of the warmongering corporatist Democratic Party, not just for people to their right but for people to their left as well. If it were up to these freaks the entire internet would just be a bunch of Wall Street liberals agreeing with each other that Trump is bad and Jen Psaki is a strong yet sensual warrior princess.
The Emma Vigeland tweet that Dore was riffing on in the clip was more hand-wringing about a “red-brown alliance” that all grown adults should realize by now was never anything other than a narrative management campaign to keep leftists from moving too far from the establishment-authorized Overton window of acceptable opinion.
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Empire Files: What the Russian Revolution Proved Possible / (PLUS: Anti-Communism, America’s Unofficial Religion)
13 minutes readNov. 7, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the seizure of power by workers and peasants in the Russian Revolution, regarded as the most world-altering event in the history of civilization. To understand the context of this first socialist experiment, how it happened and what caused the many problems it faced, Abby Martin sits down with Brian Becker, long-time socialist organizer and co-author of the new book “Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World.”