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Elia Ayoub (he/him)

@ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
51 followers 0 following 424 posts

I write essays, research and do podcasts but I’m mostly a full-time dad to a human toddler and two dogs. Words in 972Mag, Al Jazeera, Al Jumhuriya, Shado Mag etc From […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ spore.social/@ayoub, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/11/2025
Here's a quick episode on what the upcoming class on Lebanon (starting Jan 2026) is about and how you can register Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6ZtPEBJgru… (and on any other podcast app) All details here too […] [Original post on spore.social]
The TFTT logo shows a man with a fox both sitting on a driverless carriage filled with books - and they're all on the moon for some reason
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2025
My latest: Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope www.hauntologies.net/p/notes-on-ass…
Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2025
Happy to announce that The Kashmir Question is finally out on @thefirethesetimes.com with Ather Zia, Hafsa Kanjwal and Abdulla Moaswes Part 1, Origins, is out on all podcast apps. open.spotify.com/episode/2f7jPuIhnu… The […] [Original post on spore.social]
The Kashmir QuestionThe Kashmir Question: 1. Origins
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2025
For episode 200 (!) of The Fire These Times, @danaelkurd and I sat down with the brilliant @AstraTaylor and Naomi Klein to talk about the rise of end times fascism. On all podcast apps and Patreon (free) www.patreon.com/posts/132864144
The poster showing our four faces with the title being The Rise of End Times Fascism
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2025
What does a 2020 photo of Edward Said throwing a rock at the wall separating newly-liberated southern Lebanon and Israel have in common with the LA protests? A few thoughts on how 'violence' if framed. Article version (support if you can) www.hauntologies.net/p/framing-viol… 🧵 below
Edward Said throwing a rock
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2025
Super happy to finally be publishing Hidah, which I'm co-producing as part of the From The Periphery media collective. Hidah is a new podcast aiming uplift counter-colonial conversations from within Jewish communities across the global diaspora. In E1, we meet […] [Original post on spore.social]
Women in a field
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2025
If you stop thinking that Germany's response to anything Israel is about Holocaust guilt and instead about rewriting German history, you'd understand German politics better. 🧵 below and also www.hauntologies.net/p/germany-want…
""Frankly, we have imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years."
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/05/2025
2 Million Civilians to Be Concentrated in Three Zones 2 Million Civilians to Be Concentrated *Concentrated* *Concentrated* *Concentrated* *Concentrated* *Concentrated* *Concentrated* *Concentrated* *Concentrated* They are ANNOUNCING concentration camps archive.is/Q7klW
"75% of Gaza to Be Occupied in Two Months; 2 Million Civilians to Be Concentrated in Three Zones"
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/05/2025
Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution is out! In Episode 1, @leilashami and I go through what the STIR podcast is about, and why Syria? Available for free on Patreon and wherever you get your podcasts www.patreon.com/posts/128666665 Part of From The Periphery Media Collective
Illustration by Hisham Rifai. It shows a couple from the back with protesters in the background.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/04/2025
No pls don't stay away
Jon Stewart and Rory Stewart talking. The caption is ‘Come Back, America!’
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/04/2025
Dana El Kurd is joined by Michael Paarlberg to talk about El Salvador’s ‘state of exception’ under Nayib Bukele, how Trump sees that as a model, the conditions of prisons, and what this all means. On all podcast apps + www.patreon.com/posts/tftt-190-what…
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/04/2025
"And this earth belongs to you just as much as it does to anyone else" Molly Crabapple and I talk about the Jewish Labour Bund, and how their concept of Doikayt ('Hereness') resonates today. On all podcast apps as well as www.patreon.com/posts/tftt-189-doik…
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2025
Out now everywhere :) I spoke to Molly Crabapple about the importance of Doikayt now and her upcoming book on the Jewish Labour Bund. We also ranted about tech bros' lack of culture. www.patreon.com/posts/127000904
Text: The Fire These Times #189 (top), Where We live (left) that's our homeland (right), Molly Crabapple and Elia Ayoub (bottom) and Doikayt Now (center). There's also the sentence 'where we live etc' in Yiddish at the top behind a drawing of a man yelling (it's an old Yiddish poster). At the bottom you also got portraits of Molly and Elia, done by Molly
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/04/2025
So this happened, ‘rising in World Politics’
My ranking on Substack
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/04/2025
Still a classic
The pope looking miserable next to the Trump family
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/03/2025
“Cruel Zionist occupiers, every occupation ends” Tel Aviv - Yafa activists from the Radical Bloc calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine. www.instagram.com/reel/DHXMgfasqJt
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2025
Jewish Voice for Peace is occupying Trump tower to demand Mahmoud Khalil’s release, no muslim ban ever and to stop arming Israel www.instagram.com/p/DHJWluoAV1v
Protest at Trump towerProtest at Trump towerProtest at Trump tower
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2025
My latest on Hauntologies: Spartacus in Palestine (extracts) www.hauntologies.net/p/spartacus-in…
Spartacus in Palestine

Elia Suleiman's 'The Time That Remains', Kubrick's 'Spartacus' and Omar El Akkad's 'One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This'

Scene showing a screening of Spartacus to schoolchildren"Spartacus in Palestine”

Hauntologies.net 10 March 2025

This is because the story of Spartacus has been appropriated by the West and is a good example of the contradictions within Western liberalism, that same liberalism being currently challenged by fascism. As Omar El Akkad argues in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, "one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight [my emphasis], of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism" but "while the terrible thing is happening - while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed - any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization." In other words, because they are sufficiently removed from our time, some struggles, like that of the Spartacus uprising, are praised for their bravery and perseverance. At the same time, similar struggles, like the Palestinian one today, are condemned. "Spartacus in Palestine”

Hauntologies.net 10 March 2025

Palestinians do not get to be the underdog in this story, even though their opponent, Israel, is backed by the most powerful behemoth the world has ever seen, the USA. They don't get to be that because they still insist on being alive. Perhaps if they allow themselves to be crushed they may one day be romanticized. Once their homes are all demolished, their people exiled and their culture extinguished beyond the four walls of a bookshop, movie theater or museum, their names may finally be spoken out loud. "Spartacus in Palestine”

Hauntologies.net 10 March 2025

Palestinians are cursed for not being all long dead and buried. Their existence is a thorn on the side of those who wish to erase their very name. I'm reminded of a scene in Jean-Luc Goddard's Notre Musique (2014) which I've referenced many times in recent years. In it, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is speaking with the lIsraeli- French Jewish actor Sarah Adler. He explains (in Arabic) that we know of Trojan victims through the words of the Greek tragedian Euripides. Instead, Darwish says, he was "“looking for the poet of Troy because Troy didn't tell its story.” These are the stories that are missing. Troy, Palestine.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/03/2025
Kurdish organiser Dîlan joins @Ayman, Karena Avedissian and Israa on #TheFireTheseTimes to talk about #PKK leader #Öcalan 's statement. As it's a time-sensitive episode, we released it on Patreon and on all podcast feeds at the same time […] [Original post on spore.social]


Photo showing Ocalan in the center with other people blurred out. The portraits below him are of Ayman, Israa, Karena and Dilan. Text reads: "Ocalan's statement and the future of the PKK"
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2025
Now on Patreon: Black anarchism, abolition and the radical tradition, with William C Anderson in conversation with Elia Ayoub for The Fire These Times - with a new introduction for Black History Month. www.patreon.com/posts/black-history…
THE FIRE THESE TIMES BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPECIAL 

Black Anarchism, abolition and the radical tradition

With William C Anderson and Elia Ayoub
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/02/2025
From Omar El Akkad’s “One day, everyone will have always been against this” (Omar will be a guest of The Fire These Times in the coming weeks.)
During the time I reported from Egypt, I had started work on American War. In one scene in the book, the United States, amid complete institutional collapse, is visited by the president of a new pan-Arab empire. The president delivers a speech venerating the two nations' shared desire for basic democratic rights. Years later, after I sold the manuscript, one of my editors returned the section to me and suggested it would hit harder if the speech itself were not so transparently insincere, if it seemed the head of this empire had at least some belief in the platitudes he was espousing. I had copied the text, almost word for word, from Barack Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, the one titled "A New Beginning."
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/02/2025
The real Caesar is finally revealed. His name is Farid al-Madhhan. He was the head of the Judicial Evidence Department of the Military Police in Damascus. It is thanks to him that we learned of so many of Assad’s victims.
Farid Al-Maddhan being interviewed
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/02/2025
Friend of a friend got this ad. Note that the PA is Israel’s ally and a core component of its surveillance apparatus in the occupied West Bank. But this is meant for Western consumption
A man masked with the keffyeh in front of a black and red background and s text saying that the PA’s education system rasies generations of terrorists.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2025
“I am forced to be an optimist. To be a pessimist is to accept that life is an academic matter” “I cannot afford despair [. . .] you can't tell the children there is no hope.” “I never have been in despair about the world. I've been enraged by it.” James Baldwin Also:
There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see. But there is some. There's more than one would think. In any case, if you break faith with what you know, that's a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that's enough. Love has never been a popular movement and no one's ever wanted really to be free. The world is held togther, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people. Otherwise, of course you're in despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that person, you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be.
James Baldwin
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2025
When Trump comes for the New York Times next they will find themselves with no allies left to defend them.
NYT describing ethnic cleansing as an audacious plan
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/02/2025
The NYT describing military occupation, the mass ethnic cleansing of two million people and the shredding of what’s left of international law :
“Trump proposes that the US takes over Gaza. All Palestinians there should be relocated”
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/01/2025
My latest www.hauntologies.net/p/punishing-th…
"Punishing the land: Israeli symbolism during the Gaza genocide."It is important to understand that punishing the land itself has always been part of the settler colonial process. The land is wrong, ugly. It must be corrected and beautified. It cannot serve as a permanent witness to what you have done to be here. It must be maimed by the same machine that maims Palestinian children and that has created the "the highest number of children amputees per capita anywhere in the world" in Gaza, to quote the UN Secretary= General Antonio Guterres. The war on the land is the same war that is committed against children. Questioning the innocence of children must necessarily be part of the process of genocide. The impossibility of their guilt is what the Israelis sought to bomb away, and that's what they achieved in Gaza: it is now completely normal in mainstream Israeli discourse to talk about killing large numbers of children.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/01/2025
Scene featured in the text: the ex-comrades of the Lebanese Communist Party being interviewed www.hauntologies.net/p/lebanons-los…
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/01/2025
Scene featured in the text: Ibrahim, former communist who joined #Hezbollah, talking to Maher Abi Samra www.hauntologies.net/p/lebanons-los… #Lebanon
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/01/2025
My latest: #Lebanon 's lost communist future, a look at Maher Abi Samra's 2011 film 'We Were Communists' www.hauntologies.net/p/lebanons-los… Some extracts
Again, the future is unwritten, and it is worth remembering that. Otherwise, we take the present for granted and that is effectively the same as expecting the present to be endlessly reproduced into the future. Why would anyone conclude that the future could be different, let alone better? This is the fundamental flaw in the realisms of our present, whether it be Ibrahim's sectarian realism or the much more globally widespread capitalist realism, to which we might add patriarchal realism, and so on. But these are real-isms. They are themselves beliefs that take a whole lot of variables as being constant. They are not. They change all the time, for better and for worse. I cannot prove this of course, but I think this is due to the fact that Ibrahim went a step further than Hussein did. In re-writing the past and interpreting that act as though the past was always going to lead to his future-less Hezbollah future, Ibrahim must have erased something of himself, something he never quite came to terms with.

This is what losing the future does to you. It's not that he had to accept a communist future in order to avoid this conundrum but rather that the way he accepted Hezbollah's future-less future required him to change something fundamental about the way he was approaching the world. The future was never written. There was never any guarantee that it would end up being the communist one, or Hezbollah's lack of one. It could have easily been neither, and in many ways it was neither: Hezbollah integrated itself into the Lebanese sectarian system anyway, a process which permanently changed the party, including its idealism, which is what Ibrahim tells us appealed to him in the first place.The challenge, I think, is accepting that future uncertainty as a given fact of living in the present while also recognizing that acting in the present with a certain future in mind does impact that future's likelihood. This shouldn't be confused with some ‘the secret’ bullshit, but simply the logical conclusion reached by accepting that the future is unwritten and unpredictable. There is nothing in the stars that, for example, says that a dictator cannot collapse pretty quickly - just ask Bashar Al-Assad. There is no reason to believe that the world we currently live in will always be this way, that the specific configuration of, say, nation states and neoliberal capitalism, will continue into the future forever. They may for a period of time, but at some point they simply won't anymore. At the risk of sounding cheese-y again, nothing is permanent, and certainly no human social construct is. The Lebanese scholar Fadi Bardawil once told me that the value of digging up Lebanon's left-wing heritage is to serve as "an intergenerational conversation," to explore the successes and failures of a previous generation to help inform the younger ones. He also described it in archeological terms, as "excavating the experiences" of left-wing groups of the past.11 Bardawil suggests that the people whose thoughts he excavates believed that their own theoretical investigations and readings "were geared towards an intervention in the present."12  This is of crucial importance because, as we see in We Were Communists, whatever Left futurities they were proposing were unable to withstand internal contradictions within parties like the LCP in the face of either nationalism, sectarianism or Islamism.13 Exploring these contradictions by digging up the relevant archives can be really useful for us to learn from their experiences and understand what went wrong.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/01/2025
Out this Tuesday on the Patreon, I ask what does it mean to lose the future? through an exploration of Maher Abi Samra's 'We Were Communists' (2011) about four men who were in the Lebanese Communist Party www.patreon.com/fromtheperiphery
Four men sitting in a room. The text reads "Lebanon's Lost Communist Future: And What it Says About Our World"
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/01/2025
The ADL: You're a Palestinian who breathes? You're an antisemite You're Elon Musk who Sieg Heil? "it's an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm"
&% Ravin Boodram S| @rvbdrm.com (I @ADL This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety. It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge. In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead. 5:52 PM - Jan 20, 2025 - 3,828 Views January 20, 2025 at 3:02PM Everybody can reply 30 reposts 42 quotes 156 likes
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2025
I think it’s incredible that there are so many CEOs still comfortable being public all the time post-Luigi
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2025
The current US ambassador to Israel supports killing kids. It’s very straightforward. He’s a Democrat. That’s not even the next one yet. What sort of monsters do the Americans keep on sending?
The text: U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased
"The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story," Lew said. "It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate.
'Thirty-five children were killed. Well, it wasn't 35 children. It was many fewer."
"The children who were killed," he added,
"turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters."
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/01/2025
Who needs AI tech bros waging a war against human creativity when other humans are actively discouraging other humans from doing anything actually meaningful in their lives “Don’t think like a journalist. Think like an influencer” - he tells a young journalist.
The text: A young journalist just sent me an email asking "how do you pitch documentaries?" | liked my own reply so here it is:
Don't pitch. Ever.
The age of pitching is over. That was a cute thing people did in the 2010s. Now it's 2025 and no one says yes to anything. Every minute you spend building Canva decks and booking meetings will be a minute wasted. Pitching is a synonym for wasting time.
Instead you must make everything yourself. Anything that can be a TV show can start as a TikTok or YouTube series. Then if it works, you'll have a proven audience. And you'll own 100% of the IP.
But don't embark on making giant complicated projects that you'll give up on.
Keep your ideas simple to execute and simple to click on.
Stories about serial killers, billionaires and celebrities will always find an audience. Start there.
Don't think like a journalist. Think like an influencer. Your goal is to build your own audience on socials, YouTube and podcast platforms. That's the only way you'll thrive.
Good luck.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/01/2025
Two kids were killed by an IDF drone in the West Bank as they were heading to school archive.is/2025.01.12-191108/https:…
The two boys
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/01/2025
“Insufficiently Westernized” (After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture by Ammiel Alcaley, p.9)
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/01/2025
I’m so happy to see this initiative encouraging everyone to remember and commemorate the life and work of the Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz. Check out: rememberomaraziz.net
Photo of Omar Aziz with a black and red flag behind him. Under him are protesters waving the free Syria flag
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/01/2025
Our episode with Naomi Klein is now available on all podcast apps open.spotify.com/episode/3FReiKnSZL…
Four portraits mirrored and distorted .The text reads 'The Fire These Times #182: Our Mirror World". The participants are Naomi Klein, Anna, Dana El Kurd and Elia Ayoub
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/01/2025
Hey y’all our episode on The Fire These Times with Naomi Klein is finally out on our Patreon as early access www.patreon.com/posts/119524860
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/01/2025
Totally normal stuff
A map of North America showing the US replacing both Canada and the US
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/01/2025
Happy new year everyone
A nazi is dead
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/01/2025
Perfect encapsulation of how the Gaza genocide is just another job in Israel. Banality of evil, just following orders, and so on. It’s so institutionalised most individual participants do not have to think about it too much. This is how you streamline mass […] [Original post on spore.social]
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/01/2025
My latest on Hauntologies: Songs of the Syrian revolution www.hauntologies.net/p/songs-of-the…
SONGS
OF THE
SYRIAN
REVOL
UTION
HAUNTOLOGIES.NET

With Sarout
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/12/2024
The mother of Abdul Baset al-Sarout is back in Homs and this is how the crowd greeter her: “oh mother of the martyr we are your children” She said that after liberating Syria we must liberate Palestine. www.instagram.com/reel/DENtCxWuLtp
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/12/2024
One of the ways Israeli soldiers are having fun doing a genocide in Gaza is by forcing female medical workers to strip at gunpoint after destroying their hospital. These people are part of ‘normal’ Israeli society. www.instagram.com/reel/DEFdTyzIBWO
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/12/2024
I published my 2016 MA thesis “Jewish Identity and Language Politics: Hebrew, Yiddish and the contemporary debates on Zionism” in full on www.hauntologies.net/p/the-zionist-…
The Zionist War on
Yiddish in
Palestine
My Master's Thesis: "Jewish
Identity and Language Politics:
Hebrew, Yiddish and the
contemporary debates on Zionism"
in Full
WWW.HAUNTOLOGIES.NET"The Zionist War on Yiddish in Palestine"
Hauntologies.net 28 Dec 2024
In January of 1945, a well-known heroine of the anti-Nazi resistance
in the Vilna ghetto, Ruzhka Korchack, was invited to a conference in
what would become Israel to speak about her experience fighting the
Nazis. Being a Jew from Lithuania, she spoke the language of Eastern
European Jews: Yiddish. While her speech was well-received by the
audience, another speaker came after her and complained of the
language she spoke in, calling it "a foreign, grating language" in
Hebrew. So shocked were members of the audience, that that speaker
was "prevented from finishing his speech by outrage in the
auditorium." This becomes all the more surprising when it is revealed
that the man who seemed obsessed with an anti-Nazi Jewish
partisan fighter's choice of language, her native language and that of
millions of Ashkenazi (of European origins) Jews, was none other than
David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. Even more troubling is
the fact that Ben Gurion, born David Grün in Ptonsk, Poland, was
himself a native Yiddish speaker."The Zionist War on Yiddish in Palestine"
Hauntologies.net 28 Dec 2024
One can argue that such attitudes were to be expected given the
obsession with strength associated with early Zionism. Indeed,
confronting the perceived 'weakness' of the Diaspora Jew was the
idea of the 'Sabra', named after a desert cactus, the name used to
describe all Jews born in Israel, around 70% of Israel's Jewish
population today. Instead of being "weak and effeminate" like the
Diaspora Jew, the Sabra Israeli Jew would be "an ideal of Jewish
muscular masculinity." Some Zionists even suggested replacing the
'weak' word 'Jew' with the stronger-sounding 'Hebrew man'
reflecting the idea of "the creation of a New Hebrew Man as the
driving force behind future settler-colonization of Palestine." This
relation with masculinity will be discussed in the second section, and
in particular how it's being challenged today, as it points to the fact
that "Zionism was not only a political project but also a sexual one"
and, Israeli scholar Raz Yosef argues, "the main goal of the Zionist
ideology was to redeem the Jews from their former representations
and normalize the Jewish male body.""The Zionist War on Yiddish in Palestine"
Hauntologies.net 28 Dec 2024
Therein lies one of the principle internal paradoxes of Zionism.
Whereas, similarly to other nationalisms, the "construction and
development of a new Zionist Jewish identity also necessitated the
presence of others to relate to" as Yonathan Mendel and Ronald
Ranta point out, the choice of which group to emulate and which
group to discard will seem counterintuitive to us today. Indeed, the
diaspora Jew, the Jew facing antisemitism in the West, was viewed as
"culturally stagnant, passive and backward" whereas the European
Gentile, the very source of the antisemitism that prompted Jews to
turn to Zionism as a solution in the first place, "was viewed as
antagonistic, but whom Zionists wished to resemble culturally."
Putting it in a different way, the oppressor was to be emulated while
the oppressed was to be discarded as a weak and dying breed. This
even took an extreme form with the idea of Jews dying in the
Holocaust "like sheep to the slaughter" which endured in Zionist
culture, and especially in Israel itself.
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Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/12/2024
Anyone who gives two f- about antisemitism in any serious way must recognise that no single actor has done more damage in the fight against antisemitism than Israel itself. Their cynicism knows no end. Israel has settled Palestinian and Syrian lands and they […] [Original post on spore.social]
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THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
ISRAEL AT WAR - DAY 449
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IRISH PRESIDENT: 'GROSS DEFAMATION AND SLANDER'
'Antisemitic liar: FM blasts
Irish president's claim Israel
wants to settle Egypt
After announcing closure of Dublin embassy, Sa'ar rips
into Ireland's Higgins for saying Israel is breaching
Lebanese and Syrian sovereignty
By TOI STAFF
18 Dec 2024, 10:27 am
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa ar addresses the press ahead of his New Hope
party's weekly faction meeting in the Knesset, December 16, 2024. (Chaim
Goldbergl/Flash90)
105 5
Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/12/2024
My latest on Hauntologies: what I learned from Elias Khoury, the Lebanese writer and intellectual who passed away in September open.substack.com/pub/eliaayoub/p/d…
Destroying the
Language of Power
What Elias Khoury (1948-2024)
Taught Me
WWW.HAUNTOLOGIES.NET"Destroying the Language of Power: What Elias Khoury (1948-2024)
Taught Me"
Hauntologies.net 26 Dec 2024
During the thawra, Khoury_penned an open letter to Samir Kassir in
which he described a people being reborn. Crucially, he insisted on
including freedom for Palestinians and Syrians in his retelling of it.
This was not common in Lebanon, which is what made Khoury stand
out. Most Lebanese protesters did not welcome non-Lebanese among
them, leading to a melancholy among Palestinians and Syrians who
also opposed the same regime which victimized them even more than
it did the Lebanese."Destroying the Language of Power: What Elias Khoury (1948-2024)
Taught Me"
Hauntologies.net 26 Dec 2024
At the heart of the problem, Khoury tells us, is a desire to politically
enforce single identities in a region that has always been defined by a
plurality: "No one has one single identity. Having one identity means
you are a fascist! We have multiple layers of identities, and this is
richness, not poorness." Contrary to what might be assumed, this
does not "automatically lead to civil wars, savagery, and massacres."
It "can (his emphasis)" do so "if a structure is pushing it forwards," as
is the case with Israeli Zionism and Syrian Assadism. Such structures
narrow possibilities of self-identification, usually to religions. This is
why Khoury, who comes from a Lebanese Christian family (Khoury
just means 'priest' in Arabic), preferred to identify as a Lebanese and
an Arab. When people confused him for a Palestinian, it made him
proud."Destroying the Language of Power: What Elias Khoury (1948-2024)
Taught Me"
Hauntologies.net 26 Dec 2024
Khoury, who was a decade older than Samir Kassir and called him
"my little brother," would outlive him by nearly two more decades.
Their relationship was a model for those of us who reject the
cynicism at the heart of the Lebanese establishment. To support
justice in both Palestine and Syria, therefore, is to reject entire
mechanisms put in place to separate these two struggles. To do so in
Lebanon is to also recognize that freedom for the Lebanese is not
possible without freedom for Palestinians and Syrians as neither the
Israeli establishment nor the Syrian one have ever tolerated having
free neighbors.
110 1
Elia Ayoub (he/him) @ayoub.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/12/2024
Merry Christmas everyone
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