there was no justification for this attack. there might have been, but there was not; it was random and senseless. the verdict is correct.

note that this is how such things are properly dealt with in a civilized country with a rule of law.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-attack-guilty-verdict-1.7029754

i'm neither pro-israel nor anti-palestine, and i'm generally very critical of israel. but, i thoroughly reject ethnic nationalism and am strongly suspicious of anybody that wants to take a side in the conflict on moral grounds. that position is not there, intellectually; that is an emotional position. they're all depraved monsters.

at the moment, the correct position is to support israel as it destroys hamas. the kind of right-wing religious extremism behind the oct 7th attacks cannot be tolerated; wiping out organized crime networks like hamas is one of the very few legitimate expressions of state power. if we are to have states at all, they must fulfill this function. as i do not have allegiances to either side, you should expect my position to alter with the facts.

i consider western liberals that want to imagine that hamas is advancing their own intellectual causes, which they learned about in schools thousands of miles away, to be comically ignorant and flatly outright stupid. the term 'useful idiot' comes to mind.

more than anything else, i am opposed to taking sides in this conflict, as the conflict is stupid and there is no right side. the debate as to which ethnic group owns a piece of land is an absurd anachronism that we need to stop bothering with.

it's not such a hard thing to imagine a single state where you give everybody equal rights and you just put the thugs in jail when they fight for "national independence". i've stated repeatedly that it might be helpful if they just bulldoze the religious monuments, and move on.

“We call on all those who share our vision of global working-class emancipation,” the chapter declared in a statement, “to join the fight to end the occupation and decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea.” 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/dsa-american-socialists-israel-palestine-divide/675989/

these words have no meaning. they're absurd. you can't even critique them.

hamas has no interest in global working-class emancipation at all, it wants to install a brutal theocratic dictatorship that viciously oppresses palestinian workers. nor does the supposed occupation of palestine have anything to do with a working class struggle, or does "decolonization" have any meaning in a marxist or socialist framework, which necessarily calls for the abolition of all nation states and their replacement by a globalist dictatorship of the proletariat.

you can't actually even make sense of any of this, you can't actually have a discourse or engage in debate. it's just a pot-pourri of buzz words and empty phrases; it's the intersectionality of ignorance and audacity. these people don't even understand the words they're using at all.

the truth is that the dsa are just the dumbest bourgeois liberals out there. don't waste your time with them, and don't waste your time with these kinds of discourses that frame hamas as taking part in an anti-capitalist struggle. it's nonsensical; it's ridiculous. hamas is an extreme right-wing terrorist group that any real leftist would understand the need to destroy as soon as and as thoroughly as possible.

unlike in kurdistan, i don't think that a stateless levant is a realistic idea. the kurds are relatively remote; their geography allows them their autonomy. that's not possible in the levant, where imperial powers will always be operating to advance their interests. however, this article presents a more subtle perspective of what a secular left on the ground in the middle east thinks about the situation, and it is certainly not pro-hamas or even hamas-sympathetic:

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/kurd-gaza-war-israel-response-democracy-middle-east-coexistence