The Best Democracy Fear Can Buy https://xitter.cf/t.co/wNWErAfoYW
Brooklyn, NY
Joined January 2012
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The 2024 election is set to take place against the backdrop of 10/7 and the destruction of Gaza.
What is the cost of our democracy and is it worth it?
medium.com/@beninbf/the-best…
Benin Bryant retweeted
🇮🇪🇵🇸 “Israel thought they could get rid of us, and they can’t - this is proof of our existence.” - Palestinian goalkeeper Charlotte Phillips, flanked in Dalymount Park by her grandparents, who were both driven from their homes by Israel.
Her grandfather: “We would like to thank Ireland. Nobody has done what Ireland has done for us. Thank you very much, Ireland. We love you. We love you.”
Her grandmother: “The Irish people are so warm. Every time someone says something to me, I just want to cry because we have never seen this in our lives.”
#StopTheGame
Benin Bryant retweeted
The settler's obsession with the grateful native. Nauseating exploitation of the children whose parents YOU ALL killed. Or you sent your sons, brothers, fathers and friends to kill while you cheered.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Benin Bryant retweeted
⭕️ NEW: Coalition Launches “Drop the Genocide 20” Pledge
A coalition of Palestinian, antiwar, and progressive groups has launched #DropTheGenocide20, a campaign opposing the return of 20 senior Biden officials they charge with “promoting, lying about, and covering up the Gaza genocide” to future Democratic administrations or influential positions at think tanks, universities, NGOs and media organizations.
The coalition includes Just Foreign Policy, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Track AIPAC, Peace Action, Democratic Socialists of America and About Face. Organizers
The pledge asks signers to oppose hiring, consulting with, promoting or granting institutional power to those listed. Organizers call it a first step toward breaking the “cycle of elite immunity” that allows officials responsible for U.S. wars and war crimes to move into prestigious institutions without consequences.
◼️ The “Genocide 20” include:
1. Antony Blinken: Secretary of State
2. Jake Sullivan: National Security Advisor
3. Brett McGurk: White House Middle East and North Africa coordinator
4. David Satterfield: Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues
5. Jon Finer: Principal Deputy National Security Advisor
6. John Kirby: White House National Security Communications Advisor
7. Matthew Miller: State Department spokesperson
8. Linda Thomas-Greenfield: U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
9. Karine Jean-Pierre: White House press secretary
10. Barbara Leaf: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs
11. Dorothy Shea: Deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations
12. Jack Lew: U.S. ambassador to Israel
13. Lloyd Austin: Secretary of Defense
14. Samantha Power: USAID administrator
15. Stephanie Hallett: Deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Israel and former chargé d’affaires
16. Mira Resnick: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs, previously overseeing regional security and arms transfers
17. Julieta Valls Noyes: Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration
18. Michael Kurilla: Commander of U.S. Central Command
19. Uzra Zeya: Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights
20. Deborah Lipstadt: Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism
Please sign the #DropTheGenocide20 pledge demanding liberal electeds, media and think tanks––and anyone claiming to care about human rights––drop the Biden officials who oversaw, supported and lied about their role in the destruction of Gaza dropthegenocide20.org
Benin Bryant retweeted
They are the victims, they are the heroes, they are the cause. Their mugshots fill our timelines.
Over 200 Israeli filmmakers sign petition supporting the creators of 'NAZA' haaretz.com/israel-news/isra…
Benin Bryant retweeted
NAZA also serves the important propaganda function of allowing Israelis who knew very well what their entity was doing and supported it fully to pretend they are shocked and just found out, as they wake up to how bad the brand is now. It launders them into “moral” beings.
Benin Bryant retweeted
I love Black lefties so much because they truly get all of it on a whole different level
Benin Bryant retweeted
An excellent post. My only disagreement is that the “allies” are “well-meaning.” This behavior cannot by definition be well-meaning.
Every time Palestinians express their dissatisfaction at ceremonial wins that produce no tangible change, there is always a group of well-meaning "allies" who get extremely angry that we are not content with the crumbs this world has to offer us. It happens whenever an op-ed about Palestine written by a POC comes out in the NYTimes, or when an Arab author wins a prize from PEN, or when a liberal Israeli comes to a college campus to tell us about our own oppression. It happens when books (written by people who have benefitted from our subjugation) hit # 1, and, indeed, when an "Israeli-Palestinian" documentary wins an Oscar.
I'm not interested in debating the merit of the film, how well it was shot, its critical acclaim: many of you are missing the point. We do not need, and many of us do not want, our oppressors to validate our stories. In the same way we do not need a liberal Zionist like Yuval to get on stage and speak over us, we do not need a Haaretz or NYTimes journalist to break an "investigation" about the lived experiences of Palestinians that they have been yelling about for decades. This is a form of theater, a spectacle, and a lot of us are growing tired of it.
And yet, if we verbalize this, we are told that we are being "unreasonable," "unfair," "inflammatory," "unforgiving," "too harsh." We are asked "Did you even read/watch/visit __?!" (an insulting question to begin with; we do not need to view these things to understand the premise of it is problematic) and if we say yes, the follow-up is almost always a variation of "This is just pushing people away from the Pro-Palestine cause" and, of course, "Who do you think this is helping?"
But what some of you fail to understand is this is not about how other people feel, this is about our dignity and our refusal to keep accepting the bare minimum. Many of you have become way too comfortable telling Palestinians how we should feel about our own oppressors. What makes people comfortable enough to send us these patronizing messages. Do you not hear yourselves? Do you not read back your replies and think: perhaps this is a time for me to sit, observe, and listen, instead of speaking over the very people I claim to support? Liberal Zionism has become so pervasive in arts and culture, and it becomes clearer every day that the solidarity our allies show is, for the most part, conditional.
We are tired. We do not want awards or shoutouts from the same establishments that manufacture consent to kill us. We just want liberation. Please stop telling us to be content with what we've got and to just "let people be happy." We are not spectacles for your enjoyment. We've tried to appeal to the elite for decades and it hasn't gotten us very far. As always, this will make me the "never satisfied," "always angry" Palestinian. So be it.
Benin Bryant retweeted
Every time Palestinians express their dissatisfaction at ceremonial wins that produce no tangible change, there is always a group of well-meaning "allies" who get extremely angry that we are not content with the crumbs this world has to offer us. It happens whenever an op-ed about Palestine written by a POC comes out in the NYTimes, or when an Arab author wins a prize from PEN, or when a liberal Israeli comes to a college campus to tell us about our own oppression. It happens when books (written by people who have benefitted from our subjugation) hit # 1, and, indeed, when an "Israeli-Palestinian" documentary wins an Oscar.
I'm not interested in debating the merit of the film, how well it was shot, its critical acclaim: many of you are missing the point. We do not need, and many of us do not want, our oppressors to validate our stories. In the same way we do not need a liberal Zionist like Yuval to get on stage and speak over us, we do not need a Haaretz or NYTimes journalist to break an "investigation" about the lived experiences of Palestinians that they have been yelling about for decades. This is a form of theater, a spectacle, and a lot of us are growing tired of it.
And yet, if we verbalize this, we are told that we are being "unreasonable," "unfair," "inflammatory," "unforgiving," "too harsh." We are asked "Did you even read/watch/visit __?!" (an insulting question to begin with; we do not need to view these things to understand the premise of it is problematic) and if we say yes, the follow-up is almost always a variation of "This is just pushing people away from the Pro-Palestine cause" and, of course, "Who do you think this is helping?"
But what some of you fail to understand is this is not about how other people feel, this is about our dignity and our refusal to keep accepting the bare minimum. Many of you have become way too comfortable telling Palestinians how we should feel about our own oppressors. What makes people comfortable enough to send us these patronizing messages. Do you not hear yourselves? Do you not read back your replies and think: perhaps this is a time for me to sit, observe, and listen, instead of speaking over the very people I claim to support? Liberal Zionism has become so pervasive in arts and culture, and it becomes clearer every day that the solidarity our allies show is, for the most part, conditional.
We are tired. We do not want awards or shoutouts from the same establishments that manufacture consent to kill us. We just want liberation. Please stop telling us to be content with what we've got and to just "let people be happy." We are not spectacles for your enjoyment. We've tried to appeal to the elite for decades and it hasn't gotten us very far. As always, this will make me the "never satisfied," "always angry" Palestinian. So be it.
Benin Bryant retweeted
The Keeper's Daughter: In defense of Rula Jebreal
susanabulhawa.substack.com/p…
Benin Bryant retweeted
The manufactured meltdown over Rula Jebreal's "AIPAC monkey" gaffe is a cynical psy-op designed to bury the grassroots rebellion against one of the Israel lobby's most critical assets.
Grassroots Democrats are in open revolt against Israel, AIPAC and the Gaza genocide, and there is no one more poised to stomp on their faces than Hakeem Jeffries. As the recipient of over $1.4 million in Israel lobby donations, he's one of AIPAC's most important investments. Under no circumstances can he afford to defy the all-White cast of Jewish supremacist millionaires and billionaires who fueled his rise.
Jeffries is so thoroughly controlled by Zionist forces that he once paid tribute to apartheid Israel by paraphrasing George Wallace's infamous "segregation forever" inaugural address. He knew exactly what he was doing, and which elements he was pandering to.
For her part, Rula Jebreal has no formal role in the Democratic Party, and negligible influence. She's a Palestinian pundit who made her now-notorious comments on the podcast of Wajahat Ali, a Muslim Democratic operative who's generally parotted the pro-war positions of party leadership, but who's drawn the line at the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The two instantly became punching bags for the most opportunistic factions of Black misleadership, who depend on AIPAC and corporate America to sustain their positions. This includes much of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has traditionally functioned as a mechanism for elite control of Black politics. (Browse the corporate advisory council on the CBC Foundation's website for a quick look at who pulls its strings).
If and when Jeffries becomes House Speaker after November, he will present his rise as a landmark of racial progress, and the ratification of his personal vision. But like Barack Obama, whose career was propelled by a pair of wealthy pro-Israel Chicagoland families, Jeffries owes the Zionist billionaire class for his place in history.
As Speaker, Jeffries will therefore be expected to ram through wildly unpopular bills supplying arms and aid to Israel's genocide machine, cancelling free speech on campus, and further integrating Israel's military-intelligence apparatus with America's.
By making road kill out of Rula and Waj, Jeffries' backers hope to terrify his grassroots opposition into silence. If you even refer to him as AIPAC Shakur, or describe him as a servant of AIPAC, the toxic remnants of KHive will brand you as the bastard love child of Strom Thurmond and Eva Braun, and the CBC and Neera Tanden will boost their attacks in tandem with the NY Post.
The DSA, Abdul Seyed, Zohran, and everyone in between have been delivered with marching orders: fall back on the whole Gaza genocide thing, stay in your lane, and most importantly, don't knock the hustle.
Hakeem Jeffries serves his AIPAC masters
Back in 1992, Hakeem Jeffries published an oped for his college newspaper denouncing Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell as "House Negroes" and "Token Blacks" propped up by racist monied elements to advance the interests of the white conservative establishment. He even quoted Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader who resisted the US Marine invasion of his country, to paint the US military as the "policemen of the Wall Street bankers."
Just over 30 years later, @RepJeffries junketed to Israel as the leader of an AIPAC delegation for Democratic members of Congress, including several Black and Latino progressives. Together, the Democrats behaved as through they were on a cultural-business exchange trip to Panama, not a propaganda tour of an apartheid state mired in political crisis and led by the most unabashedly racist government in its history.
At the peak of a career propelled by AIPAC and Wall Street donors, Jeffries has become the mirror reflection of the opportunistic Black politician he denounced when he was younger and less ambitious. But while Clarence Thomas revels in liberal America's contempt, Jeffries mimics the rhetorical techniques of Jesse Jackson and caters aggressively to the social concerns of the Democratic Party's donor class. In this way, he has become arguably more effective than Thomas in serving what he once described as "an elite business class through the promotion of multinational corporations and the military complex."
Benin Bryant retweeted
So many DSAers worked so hard to get candidates like AOC & Zohran elected all for them to pledge loyalty to Zionist, anti-single payer corporatists like Jeffries.
Benin Bryant retweeted
The main criticism of AOC’s backtracking on her “wokeness” assumes that she is censoring her more radical opinions in order to be accepted by the establishment. I have a much more cynical view of celebrity politicians. I believe she espoused those politics because they were useful to advancing her career. Now that her career requires her to distance herself from those positions, she is doing that instead. The advancement of her career is her ideology. The same way democrats are critizing Israel right now. They can't advance their career otherwise.
Benin Bryant retweeted
A privileged Egyptian-American in Michigan with real estate properties in Dubai is condemning stateless orphans who took up arms against a brutal occupation that starves, kills, and imprisons them while he himself brunches with Zionist war criminals that destroyed Libya and Gaza.
Abdul El-Sayed on Hamas:
I condemned Hamas on day one, right? I think they’re wrong.
I think they committed war crimes. That’s not hard to say.
I just don’t know why it’s also not hard to say that, in response, the Israeli government also committed war crimes, including genocide.
I believe that it is up to a free Palestinian people and free Jewish Israeli people to decide what the ultimate peace ought to look like.
I just know that right now our tax dollars are making it far worse.
Source: The Jim Acosta Show
Benin Bryant retweeted
Since his Senate primary win, @AbdulElSayed's statements have become more abysmal and disgraceful.
This does not look like a man of dignity, principles, and honour but rather someone who chases power and self-interest.
From garnering génocidaires' support to writing off efficacious bills to end Israel's occupation and political clout in the US, he is just another microcosm, maybe inferior, of Mamdani.
Time will only tell.
El-Sayed says he'd consider supporting aid to Israel only "in a scenario where there were equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for the Palestinian people and Jewish Israeli people and they had come together to achieve that ultimate peace, and there were circumstances in which that was guaranteed."
Benin Bryant retweeted
Nobody is afraid of him. They're setting his milquetoast, "progressivism" up as the boundary of acceptable discourse - and him and other radlibs up as "insurgents" - precisely because it, he and them are all entirely harmless.
Why Is Everyone Scared of Hasan Piker?
@hasanthehun's incendiary clips about Israel have brought flak from both sides of the aisle. But what he wants, he says, is to make people listen.
Read: rollingstone.com/culture/cul…
Benin Bryant retweeted
I understand the pragmatic approach of needing all endorsements to win in November, fine.
But embracing the person who spat in our faces in 2024 and never took any accountability in her role perpetuating a GENOCIDE, a genocide she still supports as far as I know, is a bad look to say the least.
She stands for everything Abdul says he’s running against. She also LOST Michigan in 2024, so I don’t understand the benefit of boasting this way about her endorsement.
I hope this isn’t the beginning of a pivot to the right.
It would behoove these insurgent progressive candidates to remember WHY they are ascendant. It’s not bc they are leading the shift to the left but because the movement has led the way, along with the sacrifices of the Palestinian people.
Palestinians have been annihilated on our phone screens for almost 3 years. To allow for the revival of the very people who helped mass murder them would be an unforgivable and shameful betrayal of every orphaned child amputee still dodging U.S.-funded bombs in Gaza.
Vice President @KamalaHarris understands the key role control of the US Senate plays in lowering prices for Michiganders and holding Trump accountable. To achieve a Senate majority in 2026, we need to win Michigan, and that means beating Mike Rogers. Trump and his allies prey on our divisions—which is why it’s so important to bring communities together right now. Her support in this race is critical to building an unstoppable coalition against Rogers, Trump, and their assault on our rights and democracy. Just like I stood with her in her effort to defeat Trump, I’m so humbled and grateful for her support in this race to defeat his minion Mike Rogers.
