Sayyed Houthi Underlined Palestinian Resistance Feats against Zionist Enemy in Gaza

Head of Yemen’s Ansarullah Movement Sayyed Abdul Malik Badreddine Al-Houthi indicated on Thursday that the extermination rate among the population in Gaza has reached nearly 9% — an extremely high and unprecedented level in modern warfare.

In a televised speech, Sayyed Houthi maintained that the American enemy is engineering this extermination through starvation, coupled with mass killing via death traps and execution centers.

The “Israeli” enemy is forcing Palestinians to choose between dying of hunger or approaching so-called aid distribution centers to be killed, he noted, adding that targeting those waiting for aid is among the most heinous crimes and worst forms of exploitation.

Sayyed Houthi pointed out the “Israeli” enemy has blocked aid entry through the United Nations for over 100 days to turn its centers into traps of extermination and execution.

“Zionists continue almost daily storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque, performing their Talmudic rituals, mocking dances, and expressing hostility toward Islam and Muslims.”

The “Israeli” decision to build 22 new settlements in the West Bank equates to a massive land seizure, he added.

“Practically, building new settlements ends the concept of a “two-state solution” as promoted by the UN and others. The Israeli enemy never intended to implement a two-state solution — it was merely a tactic of deception.”

Sayyed Houthi emphasized that the brave fighters in Gaza continue to confront the “Israeli” enemy with strength and effectiveness, inflicting direct losses, adding that there are precise, successful ambushes, and the enemy’s weekly losses testify to the effectiveness of these operations.

“Al-Qassam Brigades conducted over 16 diverse operations this week, including targeting vehicles and sniping enemy soldiers. The weekly losses of the Israeli enemy are significant, highlighting the resistance’s bravery, steadfastness, and impact.”

All Lebanese should rally further around the Resistance in Lebanon and Hezbollah as the true safeguard against the “Israeli” threat, Sayyed Houthi maintained.

“The support front from Yemen, the land of faith and jihad, continues its military operations in the battle of the Promised Conquest and Sacred Jihad, striking deep into occupied Palestine.”

Our operations this week are part of the continuous effort to impose an aerial blockade on the “Israeli” enemy, Sayyed Houthi maintained.

“Our forces aim to achieve this aerial blockade in response to the enemy’s escalation and its genocidal crimes. The naval blockade in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Bab Al-Mandeb remains ongoing; navigation for the Israeli enemy is banned, and it has ceased operations in the area of engagement.”

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=19672

Nature as Social Materiality

Have you ever loved anyone but not wanted to be anywhere near them? Have you ever had a genuine friend you consistently and continually avoided? I expect the answer to those questions is “No” because if you really love someone or participate in a genuine, heartfelt friendship then you find these things to be naturally maintained and enhanced by means of physical interaction with the people concerned. Having friends or loved ones almost certainly means physically interacting with them whenever you can, desiring to, and finding that doing so is a very material means of deepening the meaning and value to oneself of such relations and making you happier (whilst disseminating that amongst the participants generally as well). So this has material payoffs in terms of mood, temperament, mental health, and so on, for we must remember that feelings and emotions are things that are materially mediated and experienced too.

Personally, I would argue that such an understanding of relationships is one that accords with nature in the round in its material reality and manner of operation. On this understanding nature is, first and foremost, a material, physical place in which the life that is involved is socially entangled (to material benefit if also at material risk) as the normalised and regularised reality. Take a forest, for example. It is populated by trees, plants, animals and fungi (including underground mycelial networks) which is all interconnected in terms of its common existence (often by the making of literal physical connections, not least under the soil) and, without knowledge aforethought as humans might understand that, becomes a functioning organism in its own right (in such a way as it can, for example, at the macro level affect local weather or the moisture content of the forest floor) because of the interactions of supposedly independent forms of life across both species and phyla. In a forest, as in many other habitats, things that are completely different socially and materially interact with each other for common gain. (Imagine what might happen if they were socially isolationist and they didn’t do that!) In actual fact, the “common gain” part of that equation is not even necessary for even selfish gain is nevertheless a socially material achievement and requires engaging in the social materiality.

What applies to the forest also applies to the river (as Robert Macfarlane has recently argued in Is A River Alive?), to the sea or to the human town or city. We live in a physically material world and so social action in the material world is the means to achievement of desired outcomes including, but not restricted to, the needs of life maintenance itself. There are even people (such as atmospheric chemist James Lovelock or microbiologist Lynn Margulis) who argue that the earth’s surface (whether sea or land) and the atmosphere together are “alive” and that their social materiality, described in phenomena like symbiosis (life forms living together or actively co-existing) and autopoiesis (a faculty of self-maintenance natural to life and living systems and ecosystems), is actually what makes anything alive at all. In this understanding, everything is alive, as it were, “as one” in a relational, processual and systematic way; it is part of a social, participatory and material ecosystem of life that requires social materiality.

We do not know so much about the emotional needs of things like trees, plants or other animals, although studies (not to mention simple eyesight) don’t exactly deter one from thinking that most things like to “have friends” and “be happy” (often these seem connected), but we do know that most life, including we humans, is exceedingly social and there aren’t many things that survive better alone than socially. Many simply die much faster alone and live hard lives of little achievement into the bargain as the price that must be paid for being alone. (One example here is that studies of trees cut off from other examples of their kind have shown that such trees lose the powers of communication that trees in woods or forests seem to have. Not being able to use such a faculty, the tree loses it completely. The same is true of crops treated with artificial human pesticides that ignore the material sociality of the plant and its natural interaction with its habitat in favour of an artificial activity instead, one which actively changes the plant in the process.) The lion is better off in its pride, the bee better off in its hive, the fish better off in its shoal or the tree better off in its forest than it is in forsaking sociality for a singular existence. Of course, nature is not always so simple and all kinds of forms of life sometimes find themselves on their own and divorced from a sociality of species, kind or desire. So much the worse for them, so it seems. The best way to fulfil needs in a material world (in which needs, even emotional ones, can almost certainly be defined materially since emotions have material consequences) is to have material social relations which can satisfy them.

We may observe, then, that nature has formed in such a way that its materiality is habitually social. This is necessary for the maintenance of life while it lasts but, in anything that reproduces sexually, also in its creation as well. In many species, having numbers that act in concert is pertinent to survival. If a lion has more chance of catching prey if it has others to hunt with so does a herd of deer or buffalo have a better chance of survival precisely if they exist as a herd. If we think of all the many relationships formed around, and necessary for, parenting of offspring we see these are also based on a necessary social materiality without which species simply would not survive. Surviving on your own is much harder than surviving with others. Ask any bee hive or ant colony. Ask any flower which relies on various critters to pollinate it or spread its seeds. Everywhere we see social activity in a material world leading to both desired and necessary outcomes and to the maintenance of singular and collective well being.

We live in a materially social world for nature is social materiality.