That Israel is attempting to annex South Lebanon and displace over a million residents is no secret—such missions are claimed proudly now. Two related variables have changed over the last eighty years, though, as Israel has continuously assaulted Lebanon: the US position on these efforts (once opposed) and the mainstream press coverage (once empirical). Go back to 1982 and read The Washington Post’s reporting on another of Israel’s attempts to take Southern Lebanon (courtesy of the CIA): “Maj. Saad Haddad, a cashiered Lebanese officer, has been acting as Israel’s puppet warlord in the Litani River area for years.” Read that again—it was a sentence in an American newspaper you could buy at the airport. Statements like these (sassy, true) do not show up in corporate news now. The US and Israel are presented as saviors, defensive actors, or some illogical blend thereof. To that end, it seemed like a good time for conversations with Sina Rahmani and Calla Walsh, two sane and active human beings.

More importantly, though, a friend tells us that Mutual Aid for Lebanon and Lebanon Emergency Relief are both “very trusted, run by friends, with massive capacity on the ground.” While Iran beats back the Fourth Reich, we can do something concrete.

Sina Rahmani is a podcast producer and the host of The East is a Podcast.

SFJ: How does anyone stay connected and not spiral?

Sina Rahmani: The whole media info sphere that we’re a part of in the West is rotten. It’s like a 1995 Pontiac Sunfire sitting in Georgia, eaten away by corporate evil. Corporate news is simply a violent machine. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Iranian Persian language media, where you have this strange concurrence. On the one hand, you have a radical media class who are paid well and supported by people with deep pockets in the West who want to foment revolution in Iran. In the West, on the other hand, we have the opposite—it all works to keep revolution at bay, to keep you in a lullaby state. Most of the time, you are getting some kind of psyop or advertising, or both, mixed with a headline-grabbing conflict that the ruling class has decided you’re going to find out about. If it bleeds and it’s useful to American imperialism, it leads. That’s part of the story here, that the concept of the news itself is already gone beneath all of this. This is an object of class warfare. 

I don’t live in a city—I live in the country [north of Toronto]. There are no public screens around. But when you live in a city, there are screens everywhere and those are filled with advertisements, and those advertisements usually have some sort of news ticker at the bottom, and those news tickers are bought and paid for by very dark interests. You can’t even exist! It’s like a Blade Runner future, but it’s words and ideas coming at you. 

So right now the message is “Iran is bad.” I mean, it’s been like that for a while. But to go to your wider question, what do you do then? Start here: the New York Times does not exist. It does not exist. Don’t read it. Just follow conflicts. Don’t follow publications or institutions. We’ve been cultured to think through publications, these institutional forms of knowledge, but these publications are all bought and paid for. They’re all wretched and gone gone gone. I mean, you know this, Sasha. You worked inside of them forever. And then academia, same story. 

So what’s happened? People have migrated to the internet, and it’s a double edged sword. On the one hand, you have to sift through the incredible amount of garbage, all the shit they flooded the zone with—all this old footage or incorrect footage or mislabeled footage. The new Twitter encourages this, even pays for it. So you’re stuck in a mode of chasing down sources, curating them, aggregating them, sifting them for possible fakes and then doing this across multiple websites, using your brain to organize it all.

This is my job, following this stuff. But if you work eight, ten hours, and you come home to feed your kids, you have to live a normal life. You can’t do what I do. I am a childless, essentially jobless dude who can follow stuff full-time. Even then, I get a fraction of it. 

The tools on our side are insane, in a good way. The auto-translate function on these apps is much better now than it was even three years ago. You can get stuff faster. There’s no excuse now about language. I was forced to improve my Arabic in running this show [The East Is A Podcast], because I would just follow a ton of Arabic sources. Three years of taking Arabic and I can read a tweet: that’s it. Anything more than that, I have a panic attack. I have to work at it. It takes time. It takes resources. You have to look stuff up. Most people don’t have the time for that. I’m saying this out loud and if it’s true, that’s why guys like me exist. That’s why there’s an economy for guys like me. 

Sasha: You said follow conflicts, agreed, but following people also works. Like you on  Twitter, when you dunk on people, you’re often correcting a fundamental error the OP has made. A revolutionary goal: fact-checking. 

Sina: We know about all these terrible things now. That’s good. That’s objectively good for the planet. It is going to be ugly for our lives. And we know it. It is already ugly here. And people of our class will start to feel everything. The quality of life is about to plummet and it’s something we have to get used to. We’re going to start seeing the drywall tape of our society. 

This economic entity that’s both three countries and one, where we live, right? Canada, the US, and Mexico are deeply linked together in profound ways that have never really existed, ever. And the way that system keeps going is unlimited cash, unlimited energy, unlimited shipping, unlimited everything. But the days of plenty are over like that. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. We are watching the decline of the only world order you and I have ever experienced, the Pax Americana. They are burying it every day, in hilarious, cartoonish ways. Anything that happens in the US, we get it here in Canada, too. It was just a convenient arrangement that the Global South allowed you to have these resources. 

We have to understand the weird philosemitism of US imperialism at this moment, where our ruling elites fall over themselves to prove how much Jewish life is more valuable than everybody else’s. If you don’t abide by it, they call you racist. Meanwhile, their entire fucking world order is racism. The basis of the West is racism. People become president of the whole thing using racism and then, somehow, one form of racism is the most evil thing in a system that is, itself, racism. We are confronting a wall of upside down logic that can make you despair.

Sasha:  How do you approach being around people and living a life?

Sina: I live in the country, so I see very few people. All of them are over 70 and they have no idea what to do with me. I miss urban life, but every time I go back to Toronto, I see this vile condo culture. I have a weird childhood nostalgia around Toronto because I grew up there, and I left just before the true condo boom started and, in that time, the whole city landscape changed. And what I came back to was gross. But to your question, if anything, I feel way less despair than I did about a month ago. I'll tell you that much. Just watching decolonization happen, it helps your heart, it makes you believe in something. It’s not schadenfreude because I’m going to pay for this, too. The costs of the Zionist project are now being borne by everyone. You want to set loose this insane colonial gangster settler state of murderers and psychopaths and hysterical freaks and racists on the Indigenous people of the region? Fine. Okay, you did that. The chaos that they have always exported is now returning in one tiny fraction, and it just happens to be in a way that hurts you the most, because money ultimately is what the West cares about. They ignored the genocide.

Iran is actually enforcing something like international law with what it’s doing in Hormuz, by forcing people to remove themselves from the genocidal world system of the US. If the US got to sanction Iran for years, then Iran is sanctioning the US back. The consequence of that violent siege of Iran and its allied countries is that now the view of them is inverted in a historic way. It’s a whole new planet. And the US could start actual World War three to destroy Iran, to start getting ships through. I don’t see it happening but crazier things have happened in human history.

Sasha: Iran is sticking to a basic principle. Trump is baffled because he doesn't understand the idea of principles (as opposed to whatever we call his reactive insecurity spasms) so he keeps declaring victory while Iran bombs US bases and puts out Lego videos about the Epstein class. It’s the first time in my life—I am almost 60, so I am low-key deceased—I’ve seen the US humiliated like this. Not that the US and its proxies can admit that it’s happening.

Sina: The Anglophone West media machine has never been so dysfunctional. But maybe it’s supposed to function like this? They want dysfunction. They want you hating everyone around you. For example, there was a psyop a couple of years ago where they said “South Asians are shitting in the beaches at Wasaga,” a beach outside of Toronto. Insane. If it was another group of people, it would be called blood libel. You’re castigating a whole group of people with this fake story but because it’s brown people, it’s okay. This is normal now in our media, that’s how Trump rose to prominence, just turning up the racism dial. 

Sasha: Some people in my extended family are part of something like that, the Facebook ecosystem. It’s like a slow drip of insanity that does groundwork for the bad guys by inducing this kind of self-perpetuating psychosis. 

But to your earlier point: if you flood the zone with shit and there is no Sina to sift it for you and no general move to any kind of sifting, you end up spinning like one of those AI slop horses. Not to get into what a friend calls “the erotics of defeatism,” but what is plausible? Why aren’t there a hundred Earthquake Factions? Or, let’s be real—three. The popular face of resistance is just the return of pink pussy hats, these No Kings class trips to visit the politics tree, complete with merch and police escorts.

Sina: Things like the Earthquake Faction are rare in our cowardly imperialist society. I would be afraid of doing something illegal, personally. I know that. Call me a coward or maybe that’s just where I am in my life. There are other people who choose to go in and they suffer. They face the consequences if they get caught. We have to remember that it’s not like people don't want to be in solidarity.

Sasha: In the States, you can lose your job or get shot, without warning. There are other countries where riots and direct action are seen as parts of political speech, even if they’re not welcomed. Here, in America, they are seen as rebellions that need to be put down. It doesn’t all morph back into speech acts. No Kings is accepted because it’s only a speech act, one without demands or consequences, and which reinforces the cult of personality by laying blame at one puppet’s feet. 

But it can feel impossible to choose a goal. Some of the recent fatigue around fighting Zionist aggression in the West is that passionate and organized activity can feel, in retrospect, like arts and crafts. Not because anything went wrong or actions were under-theorized but because you’re not throwing rocks through windows—you’re throwing rocks at a steel wall one thousand feet high. Do you pretend that isn’t the case to keep morale up? Or do you simply reboot your steadfastness and learn to be patient, as the resistance has always been?

Sina: The ennui of American imperial life is real. The banality of the evil of American life is overwhelming. There are probably thousands of people trying to fight it but we are facing the most powerful media apparatus ever arrayed. And it works in lockstep, so that viral news stories written by Zionists in Australia show up in your feed here. That’s deep infrastructural design. This is a project that was put in place long ago. We have asymmetric tools to use against that, independent sites that have direct messaging tools where those of us who decide to link up together can share knowledge and create things. And from that, people listen and get ideas and try to cultivate a healthier information environment. You plant some good stuff and you keep tilling more land.

Sasha: Like your very real and not symbolic greenhouse.

Sina: Yes. In the information field, we are fighting against a genocidal crop-dusting force that has billions of English speakers working in tandem. Look at HBO, which you could call a violent, genocidal media organization just for Bill Maher. CNN has Jake Tapper, a Zionist, a genocidal psycho. The whole atmosphere is riddled with Zionists. It is not surprising then that the US launches a crazy illegal war and nobody ends up protesting. They’ve normalized American imperialism so much that Americans just say, “Yeah, what’s next?”

Sasha: In the first year of the genocide, when there was a lot of direct action going on, there was probably no illusion that we’d win over the majority opinion. But I think it is fair to say there was a hope that a groundswell would push an institutionalized voice to call for change and yank one of the levers in the right direction. And perhaps that happened with Zohran? But the movement is now in a position of x-raying Zohran every five minutes, ping-ponging between hope and despair because none of the positions between those two poles feels real. I mean, just now, he had a tweet that was critical of the JDL, around the Nerdeen Kiswani assassination plot, and then he took it down. What can anybody make of that? Governments and academics make official announcements on Twitter every day. It’s not like social media is some irrelevant screen saver. But if the field vibrates too much, you’re going to lay down and stop trying to focus. Maybe it wasn’t about flooding the zone with shit but making everything just precarious enough that none of our internal sensors work. God is overwhelmed by the wobble. RoboCop doesn’t even seem particularly exaggerated.

Sina: The remake of RoboCop starts with this fantasy of what the occupation of Tehran would look like. Really. The US empire is occupying Tehran, marching around with these robots. Tehran is a wasteland and the robots can’t deal with these Iranian guerrilla guys who are doing a martyrdom operation against the robots. It’s so ridiculous. 

The US has been priming the pump for decades and now they’ve got their war but I don’t think the Zionist lobby is powerful enough to compensate for the chaos that they’ve helped unleash. People will be broke and unable to pay their energy bills. They won’t be able to get jobs. Let me put it this way. The way they keep us from revolting is by bribing us with stuff. And when that stuff is out of reach? 

Sasha: Did you see that Ring camera ad during the Super Bowl, the one where everyone was being invited to spy on everyone else? That was the plot of a Fast and Furious movie in 2017, where the big villain weapon was called God’s Eye, every surveillance camera chained into one big death camera. 

Sina: They’re trying to hold back the reality, which is that the US empire’s tools were for a Cold War world. And that world is gone—it’s no more. Aircraft carriers won't help you, F-35s won't help you. Those images of Iran taking down an F-35? The US will never recover from that. The reputational damage, alone, from the US being booted out of the Persian Gulf, arguably the most important geostrategic region? They have no military power there, now, after a month, not even a month. If they can't stomp on Iran very quickly the way they stomped on Iraq, then what's the point? What's the point of this machine? What's the point of ever even imagining you could take on China? We're watching the flailing arms and legs of a dying world system that seems intent on bringing the world down with it. It should be cheering me up more.

I’m personally not a violent dude. I would never even throw a brick at a window. It's just not my style. But I'm pretty sure our societies are built in such a way that violence will inevitably take place, because of large scale demonstrations that are revolutionary, because our police are designed to respond that way with violence.

But the rage is cordoned off, almost entirely 100%. Given the scale of the violence that's reciprocated from the state that you would expect the armed nature of the US populace to factor into protest. But this is the strange, contradictory thing: the US populace is okay being gunned down by their police force in large numbers every year and like thrown into camps, thrown into like fucking labor, enslavement institutions. And it’s okay because it’s largely centered on a certain substratum of people, economic and racialized. The violence is like cordoned off. But things will escalate, as the cost of living increases and things become more desperate for more people. It won't be good enough to just turn the racism dial.

Sasha: It’s interesting to look at the things that cut across all of the cohorts in America. Like Luigi, popular across all spectrums, and the Epstein Files, also popular. And maybe Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes turning on Israel is not exactly an uncontaminated gift, but it’s a sign that the Zionist infotech printer can’t just go brrrr anymore. There are fruitful cracks. Will that lead to actual resistance? Will more people destroy ICE detention centers? I know a few people have tried burning them down.

Sina: The collapse will do a lot of the heavy lifting, in terms of radicalizing people. That’s the seed of a revolution—this system isn’t working. We’re facing an energy and a food crisis brought on by fertilizer shortages, and you also have a cost of living crisis. All of those three are swirled together in a geopolitical McFlurry of epic proportions.

Sasha: Covid and TikTok and Zionist real esate organizations like NYU all helped to bring about a material change that manifests in odd psychological flock behaviors. Now, kids wait on huge lines for croissants and coffee because they think they’ll look like losers if they’re alone. Embarrassing, but an indication of how quickly things can change. As my son, Sam, puts it, “There is a loop of hyperfocused investment chasing the activity of the kids posting about being in line—on lines online—which produces eleven Smash Burger spots and no decent delis.” Or think of the Bloomberg smoking ban—there was so much talk about how it would never work. Ayyy, New York is where you smoke and drink and everyone is a wise guy ehhh. Nonsense. After six months of the ban, it was like it had never been any different. Nobody talked about it ever again. 

Behaviors change. These massive lines for spots—bagels, Katz’s Delicatessen, hypebeast croissant shack pop-ups—could be solved in ten seconds, if you bothered to look for one of the other one thousand unhyped places. That’s why you’re in New York! But for a certain population that’s young enough to lack precedents, being on a line means you’re with everyone else and you feel safe, OK, not endangered. People don’t want what’s good, in the hierarchy of needs. First, they want to stave off anxiety and be around other people who are verifiably there with them (photographed). That isn’t completely illogical. 

So how do we see that in other settings? New York becoming the suburbs, New York becoming America. That sucks. But it happened. Now what? I mean, the streets are hollow, too. People think of them as solid. It’s not solid! Sorry—a chaotic riff but I mean simply to say that people are scared and behaviors can change, quickly.

Sina: It’s going to get worse and worse and worse! Our quality of life is directly linked to the success of our imperial ventures. Those imperial ventures are losing profitability at a shocking rate. You’re just going to get less because you deserve less and there’s less to go around and that’s it. That will wake us up and make us miss the world that Israel helped destroy, where Iran allowed the commerce of the world to proceed untaxed.

Maybe I just feel better because I’m Iranian. My Iranian side is happier because Iran could not sustain the position it was in. It was just getting strangled. This reversal of epic proportions is going to change the nature of Iran’s place in the world economy. I’m happy for that. Is that going to come at the cost of us? Yes, 100%. Is that going to make my life worse? Yes. Am I upset by that? No. It’s time we agree on that. 

Sasha: How do we make sure we aren’t missing these beautiful moments?

Sina: Localize your knowledge to conflicts, piece together what you can from the different sources, mainstream and otherwise, and then work hard to separate the different sides and how they inflect their worldviews into the various sources you're consuming. Critically read the sources that you’re consuming. The hard work is in triangulating it all. The internet makes it easy and phones make it easy. There are lots of good sources of information. You just have to work to find them.

Find some streamers or podcasters who do this work for you and make a community around them. They probably have Patreons. 

Sasha: The “Mossad did 9/11” hive is growing, finally. For me, it comes down to people. There are people who are informed, and they’re friends with other people who are equally informed. This kind of geometric expansion of knowledge is impossible to reproduce solely through reading. Informed people don’t fuck with people who are charlatans or grifters, and that network reliability increases what you can learn and how you learn it. There are grifters out there, people who have figured out a particular lick but don’t listen to the people coming up. 

Sina: There is a provincialism to American life and the intellectual class is a huge part of the problem, because they don’t see their own provincialism. They think they’re the most worldly people in the world because they went to Paris twice. Universities are a joke for that. Anybody who challenged the university on, say, Israel and Zionism got squashed or deleted. This is a not a place where free thinking is welcome.

If all these institutions are rotten in the state of Denmark, the only option is to find independent people. I guess that’s the other half of what you were saying in terms of what I was saying in terms of following conflicts. Typically you’ll find people who are directly involved in the conflict or people who are looking at it directly because they themselves are implicated in the conflict. They flooded the zone with shit. Sure. But you also have people who are liberated from their institutional bounds, who can say what they want to say, who are very good, who pull no punches. We are in the most democratic information environment ever, but also the most fascistic.

Sasha: I think of how many good friends I’ve made in the last three years and how I’m simultaneously more panicked about, let’s say, logistical, financial, security, whatever. But I feel inspired by the people around me. I see younger people who have lightning fast news-filtering reflexes. In the middle of the chaos, we can find a healthy community, the seeds in the rotting fruit.

Sina: It seemed like the people in charge never wanted any of this to be visible. We can’t show them My Lai as it’s happening—and then it happened. But here’s the crazy thing—the reason we saw it is because the Zionists wanted us to see it. That’s what makes this so fucked up. It’s My Lai every day and nobody gives a shit. They needed those videos to prove something to their own people. This happened with Azerbaijanis during the Artsakh Nagorno-Karabakh War. People used their phones to either consciously or subconsciously wage psychological war on soldiers and like, dudes just do this a lot in Syria, encourage this. There was a lot of violent murder of state officials and people and soldiers, and it was carried on by the West and shown as like a trophy to like, “Oh, look at this chaos!” They want you to see the destruction of Gaza. It unites them and it makes us terrified. It makes us feel bad. It is supposed to make us feel like they’re gods. But it didn’t work. They find themselves now in a position where not only are they besieged, but the world economy that serves them no longer helps them. It's a strain on them. Iran soured the milk that they feed on. Iran fights in a way that is not anything close to the way Zionists and imperialists do war. It’s different, partly because everyone loves the land of Palestine and doesn’t want to see it nuked, whereas Israelis hate Gaza and they want to see it flattened. Israelis hate Iran, they hate South Lebanon. They want to destroy these places. So, you know, there is something radicalizing in seeing those images and terrifying in seeing those images, because you get a glimpse of all the Angel of history moments. Like you get a glimpse of history, of like one brief snapshot of it.

And before that there's huge rubble and a 500 year-long war of settlers versus natives. And this is the most violent instantiation of it, localized temporally. And a lot of it just backfires. Think of the famous Sinwar footage. They thought, “Look, we can get anyone!” But the rest of the world was like, “Dude looks brave. That’s sick.” They thought it was like the highlight reel at the end of the soccer game. 

Sasha: The hasbara became their beepers. Their ugliness has scarred them. 

Sina: Here’s another example. When they killed Khameni, right, you had all those ridiculous dancing Iranians. And after a couple of days, the heroin hit died off quick, that flexing on your enemies thrill. And now what? They lost the Persian Gulf. So they got one night of chanting and they lost their Arab money printing machines. To me, that’s not a trade I would make. I let the guy live. He can die all on his own. An old man, probably.

And Iran, the Islamic Republic, it probably was going down if they just left it alone, the way the US was torturing it. But this is the thing. These imperialist pigs, man, they are addicted to flexing, and they just flexed and tried to keep it real for their own people and their own sense of victory. But keeping it real went wrong in this case, and it’s costing them severely and it’s costing their patron severely, which hurts them even more, because if their patron can’t protect itself, then that means the patron can’t protect you. So that emotional affective bubble that the US provided is gone, and that ain't never coming back. No more Top Gun. No more Fonz. No more hot dogs. 

This Zio-American imperial project needs an infinite, Scrooge-level chest of money to keep going. Once that dries up, there’s going to be a lot less Zionism. Money’s too tight for Zionism. Iran brought the dead mouse of Zionism to everyone’s doorstep and said, “Here, you have to deal with this now, not just us.”

Calla Walsh is a writer and journalist who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is now based in Beirut. She was formerly a co-founder of Palestine Action US and co-chair of the National Network on Cuba. You can read some of her writing at calla.substack.com.

SFJ: What’s it like in Beirut now?

Calla Walsh: You hear drones, warplanes, bombings, and sonic booms at all hours of the day. There’s been a total media blackout on what is happening in Lebanon, since the war of aggression intensified, but let’s remember the war never actually stopped after the 2024 ceasefire. Almost no one was talking about how for the past 15 months, Lebanon, mainly the south, of course, was getting bombed every single day during the so-called ceasefire. The situation is catastrophic — over a million people  in Lebanon are displaced, but at the same time, the resistance is very strong. 

We heard 15 months of very defeatist rhetoric about Hezbollah and its weakening because of the losses that it suffered during the 2024 war. But we’re seeing now that those losses forced it to spend those 15 months working every single day, starting the day after the ceasefire began, to rebuild its capacity and reach where it’s at now: launching record operations; firing missiles over 200 kilometers into occupied Palestine; reaching the settlements in the Gaza envelope; deploying surface-to-air missiles against IOF warplanes over Dahieh for the first time; repelling airborne invasion attempts in the Bekaa; destroying over 50 Merkava tanks in a single day. (I wrote about this “Merkava Massacre.”)

I’m in Beirut, where many displaced people have ended up. And it’s not to say that there isn’t solidarity and community here, to some degree even across different sects, but it’s not the same as in Iran where people are rallying by the millions in the streets every night, the government is paying for displaced families to be housed in hotels, etc. 

The Lebanese government is essentially a US vassal. People call it the Lebanese Authority because it is essentially what the Palestinian Authority is in terms of being an illegitimate, imperialist, US-imposed government that is doing nothing to help the people at all and is in fact working towards, even if they're not saying it explicitly, normalization with “Israel.” They’re negotiating directly with the Zionist entity in violation of their own Constitution. 

We just had a week of downpours, which is good for the fighting conditions in the battlefield, but it’s very bad for all the displaced people sleeping in tents, in the streets. Not a single one of these people, when you hear them interviewed, is complaining. They are more than willing to make these kinds of sacrifices like sleeping in a tent in order for the resistance to defend the country.

Sasha: How do people gather information there? 

Calla: It’s not monolithic for sure. I mean, Lebanese society is the opposite of monolithic. Since Lebanon won independence from colonialism, it’s been governed by this confessional sectarian system, which was the construct of the colonizers and imperialists—to intensify all sectarian divisions in the interest of imperialism. 

So many people get their news directly from the resistance Telegram channels where they announce every single operation that they do, or from pro-resistance news outlets such as Al-Manar (English/Arabic) which recently launched an English language Twitter account. Mostly it’s in Arabic. They also have a Spanish-language Telegram that’s very active. Other pro-resistance channels include Al Mayadeen, of course (English/Arabic), Al-Mahatta (Arabic but you can use auto-translate subtitles), Al-Akhbar (English/Arabic), and Free Palestine TV (English). Internationally, not limited to Lebanon, there are independent outlets such as The Cradle, Resistance News Network (mirror channel for people in regions where it’s banned), and Vocal Politics. 

A lot of the Western funding and NGO funding goes directly into undermining this media ecosystem in favor of normalization with “Israel.” There have even been Lebanese media organizations, before the war started, who were doing events directly with Israelis, which again is in violation of Lebanese law, but facing no punishment at all. The Lebanese government has cracked down on journalists such as Hasan Illaik for simply criticizing the president for failing to protect the South and the Lebanese people from daily massacres. 

I think a notable example since the war started is a channel here called MTV Lebanon. I think they started in the 2000s and have always been a mouthpiece of US imperialism. And they did this in the last war as well, I believe, but very recently, they released a report basically pinpointing some buildings in Dahieh saying these are Hezbollah targets. And within hours, the IOF bombed these buildings. And in response, of course, they got a lot of criticism from the people and from the resistance community.

There’s a cyber resistance hacker group called Fatamiyoun, and they hacked MTV Lebanon’s website. They say they seized a bunch of personal data from all the MTV Lebanon employees and are using this operation to pressure them to stop attacking the resistance, the families of the martyrs, the South. And they also hacked the Lebanese Ministry of Information's website to pressure them to not allow enemy news outlets like MTV to operate freely in the country. So the media battlefield is very important. 

The IOF has always targeted Lebanese journalists in the South. [This interview was conducted before the IOF’s assassination on 28 March of Al Manar’s Hajj Ali Shoeib and Al Mayadeen’s Fatima and Mohammed Ftouni, who were the voices and souls of the Lebanese nation. It was a cowardly war crime by the IOF—after days of record humiliations by the resistance in southern Lebanon, they resorted to attacking the voices of truth. There was no field reporter in the Arab region, probably the world, more experienced and brave than Hajj Ali Shoeib. His willingness to stand with just his camera, microphone, and press vest inches away from cowardly IOF soldiers with machine guns and tanks humiliated and enraged the Zionists. Fatima Ftouni refused to leave the south, reporting from the frontlines, even covering the massacre of seven of her family members from live on air. Their assassination was a huge blow to Lebanon and the journalist community, especially those who worked personally with them and were mentored by them. We all have a duty to carry on their work.]

I'm sure many people saw the video of Steve Sweeney, who’s a journalist for RT, getting attacked by a GBU bomb, dropped from an IOF fighter jet the other week as he was reporting on the destruction of bridges in the South, which of course was a deliberate assassination, or intimidation, attempt.

But he said, after he was treated for his shrapnel wounds, “Me getting attacked is not the story. This Nakba, this ethnic cleansing of over a million people that they’re carrying out in the South is the real story.” It’s not being talked about in the Western media at all. And unfortunately there is very little mobilization in the West for Iran or Lebanon right now, and I fear the liberal counterinsurgency successfully single-issued the Palestinian struggle in the eyes of most Western activists, as if the Palestinian struggle could possibly be disconnected from that of the Axis of Resistance as a whole.

Not enough people understand the genocide in Gaza as part and parcel of what is happening in Lebanon and Iran, and these attempts to overthrow the resistance in Iran and Lebanon are paving the way to fully colonize Palestine, to annex the West Bank, to build the “Greater Israel project.” They know they can’t actually get away with that as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran exists, as long as Hezbollah exists and keeps preventing them from completing this project.

Sasha: How long have you been in Beirut?

Calla: I’ve lived here since September. I haven't been public about me living here for privacy reasons, but it’s at a point where I feel like anyone and everyone living here needs to be speaking up as much as possible about what is happening, which is why I am. Also The Free Press kind of doxxed me for being here.

Sasha: It’s clear the United States and Israel are not achieving any of their objectives, whatever they are.

Calla: They don’t have any.

Sasha: What do you hear people in Beirut saying? Many have been living through this insane groundhog day of violence over and over again, so how do they talk about the current moment? And are they more encouraged? Are they less encouraged?

Calla: As a disclaimer, I should have said this in the beginning, I’m by no means an expert on Lebanon. There are Lebanese journalists who people should follow that know far more than me. I just live here. And the people I talk to don’t necessarily represent the full spectrum of Lebanese society. I surround myself with people who politically support the resistance, of course. 

To speak to one of the first things you asked, in terms of Lebanon’s relationship to Iran, I think there is this pervasive misunderstanding that Hezbollah “entered the war” just for Iran. I’ve even seen this repeated by some journalists who are self-proclaimed pro-resistance and anti-imperialist in the first days of the war. I think this really misunderstands why Hezbollah resumed its resistance operations. The martyrdom of Sayyed Khamenei played a role, but that was not the main reason. Iran doesn’t necessarily need the help, they’re fighting very strongly. The Lebanese resistance resumed its operations to win a better agreement for Lebanon, to win survival itself for Lebanon, because this is the decisive moment. In many ways, the choice was to fight together now or fight alone later. “Israeli” media admits this themselves. They are very worried about their ability to fight on multiple fronts at the same time, between Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and now Yemen. 

The night that Hezbollah fired the first rockets, which was a small barrage to give people in the south time to evacuate, the “Israeli” cabinet was having a meeting planning a preemptive operation against Hezb, which had the intelligence to know this and struck first. The “Israelis” say this, that “They struck first and surprised us. We were planning our own surprise attack.” 

There’s always this narrative that Hezb is just a mere proxy of Iran and not an organic, revolutionary Lebanese party/movement/resistance force. We also see the Axis is operating more like an axis than ever. It’s moving very cohesively in that Iran is making the cessation of aggression against all regional resistance fronts, including full IOF withdrawal from Lebanon, one of its ceasefire conditions. Well not even a ceasefire condition, a condition that has to be met in order for Iran to enter negotiations at all.

Same goes for the Iraqi resistance. They just ceased operations against the US embassy in Baghdad for five days and gave them a chance to stop bombing Dahieh, to stop bombing the southern suburbs of Beirut as a condition for them to stop attacking the US embassy. 

But yes, parts of Lebanon are very westernized and penetrated by Western capital in many ways. The state is a shell of a state. And there’s many people who do believe in anti-resistance propaganda, unfortunately.

Sasha: Does anybody there talk about it as a war against all these years of Western incursions? Everybody knows that, I am simply curious if people talk about it like that.

Calla: I think so. I think that is the big question now—“Is this the final battle?” Before the war started, Iran said this could be the final battle between Iran and Zionism. And clearly their goal is not just another ceasefire that could leadend to a resumption of hostility a few months later, which was what happened after the June 2025, 12-day war. They want the decolonization of the region. They want the expulsion of US imperialism from the region. And then “Israel” is left alone fighting on multiple fronts.

I’ve asked this question to friends here, “Does this seem like the final battle?” And a lot of people say, “Well, we thought that during the last war.” So I don’t want to celebrate too quickly. I think it will be a very, very long battle.

Something I’ve been thinking and writing about is the battle over global energy infrastructure. It feels a bit like the moment when COVID was first starting and most people did not realize the apocalyptic moment we were about to be in. This is the fault of the US and “Israel” for launching a war of aggression and targeting Iran's energy infrastructure, starting with the water desalination plants, then the South Pars gas field, which is the biggest gas field in the world, which of course led to Iran's retaliation on US and Israeli affiliated energy infrastructure in the region. And last night, Trump threatened to start attacking Iran’s power plants if they do not reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

From my understanding, Iran has a very thorough power grid system that would be very difficult to fully dismantle. But anyways, Iran has promised time and time again, “If you do this, we will turn your energy infrastructure into ashes.” And this means entire regions of the world could soon go dark. It's not limited just to West Asia. I mean, we're already seeing gas prices rise across the world, and this also could cause a global famine because 50% of agriculture is produced with nitrogen fertilizer, and much of that is reliance on the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz as a transit point, as a production point. And we’re already seeing the price of fertilizer absolutely spike. It’s about to be the planting season in the Northern Hemisphere and this could lead to mass starvation, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

Sasha: Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said, and I quote: “We believe the aggressor should be punched in the face so that it learns a lesson and never again even thinks about attacking our beloved Iran. The Zionist regime sees its disgraceful survival in continuing the cycle of ‘war – negotiation – ceasefire, and then war again’ in order to consolidate its dominance. We will break this cycle.” For my adult life, the world has been held hostage to this idea that the US military could simply crush anyone and everything in its way. To see that assertion proven false is exhilarating.

Calla: I feel the same way. I feel grateful to be alive and witnessing this moment despite how horrific it is in many ways. I mean, it’s always been horrific. But what Iran is demonstrating is the absolute humiliation of empire and it's serving justice for the oppressed of the entire earth, whether they realize/acknowledge it or not, even for people who are oppressed in the United States. 

Iran also is making very effective propaganda. I say propaganda in a positive light because propaganda means to propagate. But moves like launching drones and missiles in memory of the victims of Epstein Island, in honor of Rachel Corrie, in honor of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, showing to the people of the West that they're also fighting for us to be free from our pedophilic, cannibalistic, genocidal regimes. 

I want to reference something, what Bikrum Gill was saying on Sina’s show with Helyeh Doutaghi in Iran. He was talking about how what Iran is doing right now is something we never saw during any of the anti-colonial wars, the scale on which they are battling the entire infrastructure of imperialism and its capital flows. It’s one thing to expel colonialism from your territory, which Iran did when it won independence and then in 1979, expelling neocolonialism. But it’s another thing to battle that system as a whole, on the global scale. We’re seeing something really unprecedented. In many ways it feels too big for any of us to comprehend at this moment.

Sasha: Did you have a closing comment?

Calla: Yes! There have been these kinds of compounding crises, especially since 2020. I understand imperialism as a world system that serves to benefit the people of the imperial core, to keep them invested in continuing this system. Even the working classes of the imperial core, we understand that they're exploited by their own ruling classes, but they still benefit from the system in many ways and are invested in it through the labor aristocracy, through unequal exchange. But the US empire is so clearly in decline, and I think the population in the core is not able to reap the benefits of imperialism in the same way that they maybe were before, at the height of the empire. Now it’s like a rabid dog, desperate, unpredictable, dangerous, lashing out, that needs to be put down. 

And so we’ve heard this platitude for so many years, and we hear it now again:” let this moment radicalize you.” If you weren’t radicalized in 2020, if you weren't radicalized by the Al-Aqsa Flood, if you weren’t radicalized by the Epstein files, there’s something wrong with you. Of course it’s never too late, by all means, get radicalized. But when do we move on from just being outraged and radicalized and into putting that all into action? What better example of that is burning a weapons factory to the ground? I mean, when I saw those images of the Earthquake Faction, this new group that claimed the arson of this Elbit factory in the Czech Republic, when I saw those images, I thought an Iranian missile had struck the factory. That’s how destroyed and burnt to the ground it was. The equipment to do that action probably costs less than $1,000. I’m not saying everyone should go do arson right now. I mean, by all means, if you’re down to do arson, then you should, especially now as we’re seeing the military industrial complex in a greater crisis than ever as they’re running out of their air defense interceptors and all these weapon systems that take years and years and billions of dollars to produce, and being cut off from supply chains of key materials by the war, while Iran has much more efficient indigenous weapons production. It’s actually more effective than ever to target these supply chains, to target them at their production points. And it also sends a message to people in the besieged, colonized countries, undergrowing genocide that there are people who are willing to do more than just march in the streets with them. And mass mobilizations are important too, but in whatever way, shape or form, we all need to be thinking about how we can build an international popular cradle of resistance.

This conversation between Mary Turfah and Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah covers what allegedly humanitarian groups are doing in Palestine, but also what Turfah calls the “psychological war.” Ghassan Abu Sitta: “The real job of the humanitarian sector for global capital was to give the pretense of cultural superiority. And now that we’re down to a bare-knuckle fight over whiteness and racial hierarchy, they have to send the bulldozer to look for the Israeli body, surrounded by buildings full of Palestinian bodies under the rubble.”

The Good Shepherd Collective just published a reported piece about the organizations funding both the Zionist movement and those allegedly dismantling it, drawing on a database of 14,653 nonprofits. One point: “The violence across the West Bank, the settler attacks, and the home demolitions do not sustain themselves. It requires funding, and a significant share of that funding runs through the US tax-exempt charitable system. Every dollar that moves through a ‘friends of’ organization to an Israeli entity operating in the West Bank, the Naqab, the Golan Heights, carries a US tax subsidy with it. US taxpayers are underwriting this, whether they know it or not.”

Abdaljawad Omar’s analysis of the passing of a new death penalty law in occupied Palestine points out that this asymmetrical approach dates back to the British Mandate era, when the execution policy changed as the person standing before the judge changed. “Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons.” In another piece, “The Burden Assumed,” Omar discusses the trope of the burden, and how it is activated across struggles and cohorts. “For there is a particular kind of statecraft,” he writes, “that finds its most honest expression not in doctrine or diplomacy but in a song: the casual, hummed bellicosity with which Senator John McCain, presidential hopeful and tribune of American military virtue, once offered his strategic vision for the Islamic Republic—bomb, bomb Iran—to the appreciative laughter of a campaign crowd, as though the distance between the joke and the policy were not, in the end, so very great.” 

I also loved “Welcome to the Rubble-based Order,” by Shivangi Mariam Raj: “Rubble is a technology to industrialise death: it is streamlined, it follows the supply chain, it carries law itself as part of its technique.”

“The Conscripted Container,” by Lama Zuhair Khouri, is a remarkable piece about psychological change over time, and a very specific kind of self-censorship: “She did not arrive fully formed. She was produced — slowly, across three institutions, by formations so gradual she could not feel them happening.” Summarizing this essay would do it grave injustice. You need to spend time with it, as the author spent time with herself. It appears in a magazine called The Key, which has become indispensable very quickly. Editor-in-chief Sara Yasin told me, “The Key is a new, ambitious online publication — brought to you by the same people who run the Palestine Festival of Literature — that will cover Palestine as the core issue at the heart of the modern world. Every two weeks, we will publish between one and three stories focused on high-quality analysis, interviews, essays, reviews and reportage that covers Israel’s genocide against Palestinians through the lens of literature, art, and culture.”

It is worth following The Public Source “a Beirut-based ​magazine ​of long-form journalism, photography, comics, and critical commentary from the left.” One of the journalists who writes for TPS, Lylla Younes, has also done pieces on Lebanon for Drop Site, Democracy Now!, and Lux, all worth reading (or watching). In addition to Drop Site, The Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss are worth checking on a daily basis.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to The WAWOG Bulletin, as well as the weekly newsletter, KITE, from the Sarah Lawrence Coalition for Palestine. Email sl.fs.jpalestine@proton.me to be added to their list.

Crucial Telegram accounts: Bint Jbeil News is the best source for updates on South Lebanon, but also offers general, reliable, consistent updates Sohaib Mosalamat is a Palestinian journalist and provides consistent news updates as well as political updates especially from Palestine, but consistent around the region. This Telegram channel auto-translates all the big regional accounts and aggregates them into a single channel. On Twitter, go with Middle East Observer, Arya Yadeghaar, and MenchOsint.

I’m obsessed with Tricontinental magazine and this recent Archive Stories feature is an embarrassment of riches. I reviewed the new Ben Lerner book.