disabledwriters

They Fenced the Malls, Then Un-Fenced Them: A State That Manages Memory

I’m writing this from Jakarta, eleven days before the 81st Independence Day, and this week the country’s entire security apparatus stood on one stage at once to tell the public that nothing is happening. Coordinating Minister for Politics and Security Djamari Chaniago, flanked by TNI commander General Agus Subiyanto, National Police Chief General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, intelligence chief Muhammad Herindra, and Attorney General Sanitiar Burhanuddin, held a joint press conference on Wednesday insisting the domestic situation “remains secure and fully under control” and urging the public not to be swayed by “disinformation” about unrest this August. Five of the most powerful men in the country do not typically assemble to deny that nothing is wrong.

What none of those five men explained is the week that led up to that podium. Photos and videos of newly built fences barricading Kota Kasablanka mall in South Jakarta and Pakuwon mall in Bekasi spread across social media, prompting speculation that businesses were quietly bracing for unrest. The fences went up. Then, over the weekend, without explanation, the fences came down. In the gap between those two facts, old footage from last August’s uprising resurfaced online, presented as though it were happening now, alongside claims that Indonesian mainstream media was deliberately burying new protests. The government’s response was not to explain the fences. It was to announce that the Attorney General’s Office and National Police would pursue criminal charges against accounts spreading “hoaxes” about riots, and within days, police in Ciamis Regency, West Java, arrested a forty-five-year-old woman for uploading posts about a planned demonstration. A private citizen went from social media post to police custody faster than a mall fence went up and came back down.

None of this is new, and none of it is incidental. It is almost exactly a year since police in this country ran over a rideshare driver named Affan Kurniawan with an armoured van and kept driving, the video that turned a protest over parliamentary housing perks into the largest uprising this country has seen in a generation: nearly fifty cities, ten dead, more than a thousand injured, over three thousand arrested. Eight of those activists are still facing six to twelve years in prison for the crime of posting on social media about where the protests were. A Human Rights Watch report published barely a week ago documented how the Prabowo government keeps expanding the military’s footprint into mining, palm oil, and so-called food and energy estates, prosecuting the environmental defenders and Indigenous leaders standing in its way. A state apparatus that fences a mall overnight and arrests a woman in Ciamis for a Facebook post, while insisting both are nothing to see, is managing memory rather than disinformation, and this government has practice at that: this is the same state that made a genocider and the most corrupt president in its history (Bevins, 2020) a national hero, within a year after the current president, who’s also a documented human rights abuser, took office. A government fluent enough in rewriting its own history to canonise Soeharto has had plenty of practice managing the story ahead of managing the problem underneath it, and fencing a mall without a word of explanation is just this week’s version of that same habit.

The same expansion into mining, palm oil, and food and energy estates that HRW documented this month is the same mechanism showing up everywhere, not something unique to Jakarta. An economy that depends on extraction, whether it’s Gaza’s aquifers, Hormuz’s shipping lanes, or Kalimantan’s nickel, will always find a reason to militarise its own protection and call the militarisation routine, and a state built around protecting that extraction will always move faster to manage the story than to fix what the story is about. The Jakarta Post’s own editorial page noted this week that Indonesia’s GDP growth has already slowed to 5.29 percent as the Hormuz standoff ripples through import costs, a war Indonesia had no part in starting, absorbed into ordinary import bills while the same government spends its speed fencing malls against imagined unrest at home.

Solidarity that stops at a coastline is tourism. Below is this week’s list. A state that moves this fast to defend a mall has yet to move half that fast for anyone’s rent, anywhere. Give directly, share widely, and don’t let “under control” talk you out of noticing who’s actually being protected, and who’s being made an example of.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

https://blahaj.zone/notes/apkmnch1vzeq1yxk

@SabiLewSounds @mynameistillian @ellespeaks @sparkshocker @technocrow @magicalgrrrl @broodcoffee @cycletherapyHam @psychoalpastor @FictionAddict

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Hilal and Mohammad’s Gaza Family Need Help Now

Amidst the rubble of these difficult days, their son’s glasses were broken, leaving him unable to see or move due to severe astigmatism. It pains Hilal and her husband that they’re currently unable to provide a replacement. We appeal to compassionate hearts for a kind gesture so their little one can see his path again.
[View original post]

@Hilalgazayafa

Help Abed and Eman protect their little children

Abed and Eman are a family in Gaza seeking urgent help to protect their young children and survive. Please support their Chuffed campaign and share it widely with others today. [View original post]

@abed_in_gaza123

🗣️Support Corner🗣️

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This space is held together by adisabled Indonesian Muslim woman. Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my writing and mutual aid projects.

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Flores Displacement Tops 180,327 as Kalimantan Burns

The death toll from the magnitude-7.7 earthquake that struck East Nusa Tenggara before dawn on August 15 reached 100 by August 24, national disaster agency chief Suhartoyo confirmed, up from 48 in the first two days alone. Displacement climbed even faster than the death count: 92,735 people forced from their homes as of August 21 had become 110,785 by the same day, then 180,327 by August 24, with 1,603 people still reported injured. The agency has logged 6,409 aftershocks across eight days and expects seismic activity to continue for up to four more weeks. That trajectory, nearly quadrupling in ten days, is what happens after the first week of international coverage moves on and the counting keeps going without an audience.

The same week, hotspots were burning across all five Indonesian provinces on Borneo and four on Sumatra: 38,310 hectares in West Kalimantan, 8,620 in South Kalimantan, 7,634 in Central Kalimantan, more than 2,700 hot spots detected in West Kalimantan alone and nearly 2,500 in Central Kalimantan. This was not weather. On August 23, national police arrested 72 people across those nine provinces (35 in Riau alone, 17 in South Sumatra, 11 in Central Kalimantan) in connection with 89 separate forest and land fire cases. Investigators seized matches and oil palm seedlings as evidence. Brigadier General Mohammad Irhamni, the police’s special crimes director, said plainly that “most of the suspects were accused of deliberately burning land to clear areas for plantations at lower cost,” and that at least four companies in West Kalimantan are now under investigation for financing or ordering the burns, facing possible permit revocation if it’s proven. “We will not stop at the perpetrators on the ground,” Irhamni said. “We will determine who benefited from these activities and who was ultimately behind them.” Underneath the arrests sits a second, quieter policy failure that The Jakarta Post documented separately: central government austerity measures have cut local firefighting budgets so deeply that districts can’t afford basic equipment like water pumps, in the same province where a water shortage was already hampering the response. A fire lit on purpose for palm oil profit, met by a firefighting budget cut on purpose. Neither half of that sentence is an accident, and neither is a natural disaster.

Meanwhile the government’s own free nutritious meal program kept making people sick. In North Sumatra, more than 350 students fell ill after a school kitchen left 200 to 300 kilograms of fish at room temperature for roughly twelve hours instead of refrigerating it. It was negligence the head of the National Nutrition Agency himself called reckless: “such negligence can have life-and-death consequences.” That single incident sits inside a much larger pattern: 40,759 students, teachers, pregnant women, and toddlers have fallen ill from the program since it launched. One kitchen was suspended. The program itself was not.

Two days before this roundup goes out, on August 27, the United Pati Community Alliance plans to march on Indonesia’s House of Representatives to demand asset seizure and the death penalty for convicted corruption offenders. The alliance exists because of last year’s crackdown in Pati, Central Java, where a 250 percent property tax hike following Prabowo-administration budget cuts triggered protests, police killed motorcycle taxi driver Affan Kurniawan with a tactical vehicle, and the state’s response left 11 people dead and hundreds injured. Lokataru director Delpedro Marhaen was detained on what rights groups called vague charges in the same crackdown, and Indonesia was subsequently placed in V-Dem’s “grey zone,” no longer meeting minimum standards for electoral democracy. Days before this year’s planned march, Bank Mandiri froze the account of the coalition’s coordinator, Supriyono: roughly Rp 80.9 million in personal savings and public donations meant to cover protesters’ food, transport, and lodging. The bank says it acted on an unnamed law enforcement request and has not identified the agency or the legal basis. Rights groups including CELIOS, YLBHI, and Amnesty International Indonesia say the freeze likely violates Article 140 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which requires a court order for exactly this kind of coercive measure, and have called it what it is: an attempt to cripple a protest through economic pressure rather than argument.

The tool Bank Mandiri used against Supriyono is not unique to Indonesia. Since the war with the US and Israel began on February 28, Amnesty International has documented at least 750 asset seizures inside Iran through a digital system called Saham, alongside more than 6,000 arbitrary arrests, an 88-day internet shutdown, and 39 political executions, sweeping up protesters, journalists, labour organisers, students, and Ahwazi Arab, Baluch, Baha’i, and Kurdish minorities. Tehran’s public prosecutor used a version of the same mechanism in April against a much narrower target: more than 100 Iranians connected to the London-based broadcasters Iran International and Manoto, accused of “supporting the enemy abroad”. That specific case carries a complication worth naming plainly. Iran International is funded through a Saudi businessman’s holding company and has been described by Bloomberg as “explicitly monarchist” and “pro-israel”; Manoto’s finances are opaque but widely suspected of similar Gulf backing; both networks have spent years promoting exiled would-be monarch Reza Pahlavi, who addressed CPAC in March and met Netanyahu in 2023. A Saudi- and Gulf-funded broadcasting operation gets frozen for a very different reason than a Central Java protest fund does, and conflating the two would blur a distinction worth keeping sharp. What holds across both cases regardless is the mechanism itself: seize first, let a court hear the appeal later if it hears one at all. That mechanism is what connects the 750 Iranians caught up in Saham, whatever their politics, to Supriyono’s frozen donation account in Pati.

An earthquake response that can’t outrun its own displacement count, a fire season lit on purpose and met by a budget cut on purpose, a feeding program that keeps hospitalising the children it’s meant to feed, and a bank account frozen with the same seize-first mechanism Tehran has used against 750 of its own people this year: five angles on one state’s priorities, all visible in a single week. That does not make Flores and Kalimantan more urgent than whoever ends up listed below this piece. Austerity in East Nusa Tenggara and precarity in Manchester or Milwaukee happen on different continents, in different currencies, under different flags, and they still trace back to the same governing decision: a state, or a bloc of states, choosing in advance which lives get insured against catastrophe and which get a line item cut before the catastrophe even arrives. Most of the requests in this roundup come from disabled, unemployed, and otherwise structurally abandoned people across the globe: the same machine, running on different soil, in a currency that makes the neglect easier to miss. The Palestinians in this roundup’s spotlight section are living the sharpest edge of that same architecture from a different angle again, the same Washington weighing debt terms against an NTT earthquake is the Washington funding the siege this roundup covers elsewhere. Mutual aid runs on a different premise entirely: that a border does not get to decide who is owed solidarity and who gets a week of headlines instead. Give what you’re able to move directly, wherever on that list it lands. Where you can’t, carry the request further than your own feed reaches. Two funds are moving directly toward this week’s disasters: Setara Peduli NTT for earthquake relief across Flores and Lombok, and Urgent Karhutla for wildfire response across Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua. And if the August 27 mobilisation inside Indonesia is reachable for you, showing up or helping fund those who are is the same re-distributive instinct this roundup runs on every week.

A note before the list: mutualaidspace.org’s submission form is live. Submitting a request there gets it federated as @comrade, automatically tagged for wider reach, and listed publicly under Comrades & Community or Victims of Empire, whether or not the person asking has a Fediverse account of their own. No verification process, no proof of suffering required. More on the project itself: mutualaidspace.org/about

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

@monaant @AnthonyJK @tiredpinklover @OshunThaGreat @harrietteann @psychoalpastor @tea @aceofcosmicspace @sparkshocker @francesdanger

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Help us save my family in Gaza from hunger and killing.

Baraa is watching her son Ibrahim fight severe infections in a Gaza clinic after already losing her daughters. The family’s campaign covers his treatment and their survival from hunger and violence; open it, give directly. [View original post]

@baraa1998

Help Lina’s family survive and secure medical treatment for her injured husband and her whole family

Lina is struggling every day to provide for her children while caring for her injured husband and her mother-in-law who has cancer. Only £3,857 of the £10,000 goal is raised so far. [View original post]

@sham00

🗣️Support Corner🗣️

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This space is held together by adisabled Indonesian Muslim woman. Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my writing and mutual aid projects.

If you find this voluntary work worth supporting, please do so by pledging as little as $1 monthly via Liberapay or other tiers available across Liberapay, ko-fi, and Patreon. One-off support helps too. Any amount genuinely helps.

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BIRTHDAY MONTH’S ESSENTIALS $375+ DEADLINE 16/06/2026

May’s goal didn’t meet, but I’m not carrying that forward into June, because Alhamdulillah I didn’t die. I made the money stretch by eating less, forgetting to eat, and forgetting to take care of myself lol 😼👍🏻

June minimum for basic survival: $375
$250 groceries
$90 utilities + water
$35 internet + phone data

This is before meds, and before the building maintenance fee landing this month. With IDR continuing to collapse against the dollar, I’m hoping the $375 covers the maintenance invoice too. I genuinely don’t know yet.

It’s also my birthday month. I’d really like to spend it not thinking about whether I can afford groceries. That would be nice.

Monthly pledges are the most sustainable way to support this. One-off contributions also help. Sharing this post costs nothing and extends reach beyond exhausted circles.
This keeps me fed, medicated, and able to sustain the mutual aid infrastructure and writing I’ve been building. The work continues either way. It’s just harder when I’m hungry.
Support links in bio / QR code on the poster.

Thank you, thank you

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It’s Your Girl’s Birthday Month!

I’m going to be officially the same age as my mother when she had me! — I don’t hate doing this, but I don’t like it either. But I have to make this month about me 😤

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BIRTHDAY MONTH ESSENTIAL NEEDS — $375+ DEADLINE 16/06/2026

BIRTHDAY MONTH’S ESSENTIALS $375+ DEADLINE 16/06/2026 June minimum for basic survival: $375 $250 groceries $90 utilities + water $35 internet + phone data This is before meds, and before the building maintenance fee landing this month. Monthly pledges are the most sustainable way to support this. One-off contributions also help. Sharing this post costs nothing…

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Neither Did You

Salaam from Jakarta

I’ve always been open about my identity and positionality within global power structures, whether through my profile picture, casual social media posts, or published articles. Yet being mistaken for an American simply because I use English online is a regular occurrence. Perhaps it’s because I’m politically literate and outspoken about geopolitics, particularly how the internet is structured to serve the dominant narrative of the global terrorist state of America. Or perhaps it’s simply what USians do: assume everyone who speaks English is a USian.

My activism has largely been online these past few years due to disability. Through it, I’ve met and befriended many people from the US, which has made me somewhat familiar with the social dynamics of the metropole. But this isn’t about my online activism or presence; this is about being a Muslim woman.

Unlike in settler-colonial states or former empires such as the UK, Muslims in my country are the majority. Ironically, this is true of many formerly colonised nations and countries that experienced significant intervention from the US and its allies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Indonesia is home to more than 287 million people and has the largest Muslim population on earth, not in West Asia and North Africa as many assume, but here in Southeast Asia, where Islam reached the archipelago through Indian Ocean trade networks and became increasingly widespread between the 13th and 16th centuries.

There are more than 600 ethnic groups in Indonesia, with Javanese people making up roughly 40% of the population. I’m a Muslim Indonesian woman of Javanese and Minangkabau descent, which places me within a dominant ethnic and religious group in my country.

When we talk about dominant groups, we often think of ruling classes or those closest to power. Yet I’m also a woman in hijab whose perceived attractiveness makes people feel entitled to deny my disability. Being a woman is politically difficult enough; being disabled and perceived as “attractive” only adds further layers of dehumanisation. Does belonging to a dominant group stop being a privilege because of the ableist, classist, and sexist treatment I’ve experienced? No. It remains a privilege in more ways than one.

Does that grant me the right to deny who belongs in my country and who doesn’t?

As a Muslim, I have no right to tell people who belong in the world and who do not. But as someone historically literate about how Indonesian identity emerged, who understands its significance in anti-colonial struggle, and who is painfully aware of my own positionality within contemporary power structures, I state plainly: Indonesians have every right to decide who belongs in Indonesia without foreign powers dictating the answer for us.

That is not nationalism.

I simply understand how imperialism works. Indonesian nationality was not born from a dispute within a colony over who should govern it more effectively. It was not the result of settlers breaking away from a distant monarchy while remaining on stolen land. Indonesian identity emerged through resistance to more than three centuries of colonisation. It became the political identity through which the peoples of the archipelago reclaimed their dignity and self-determination just over eight decades ago.

Over the years, we have watched the United States establish itself as one of the greatest threats to humanity and world peace. Its treatment of Black and Brown communities never fails to enrage me.

An empire built through the replacement of Indigenous populations and the trafficking of enslaved Africans has its structural violence normalised and amplified daily through internet algorithms, mainstream media, and even conversations with some of my closest comrades in the US. A few days ago, a comrade sent me the following story while venting on Signal.

Because, of course, racists in the US continue to delude themselves into claiming ownership over stolen land and telling others they don’t belong there. Dasha Kilpatrick, a white woman in Texas, told two Muslim women that they had no place in a “Christian country.”

Well, Dasha, neither did you.

Islam reached Turtle Island long before Europeans arrived. Islam belongs in the US just as it belongs everywhere else. You and I both know who never belonged on Turtle Island.

Muslims in the US are not all immigrants. There are Indigenous Muslim Americans. There are Black American Muslims. There are converts. And even if they were immigrants, so what? It’s not as though the US is known for its altruistic efforts in a SWANA region that has endured repeated destabilisation, intervention, occupation, and war. Nor has that destabilisation slowed since the youngest member of the settler-colonial quartet was established in 1948.

An empire sustained through market domination, interventionism, historical revisionism, media manipulation, and the destabilisation of Global South countries shall never meet a peaceful end.

I’m not the kind of Muslim who responds to blatant bigotry or microaggression by insisting that “Islam is a peaceful religion”, when such situations are never peaceful or safe for Muslims to begin with. That statement is true to those who don’t need reassurance; beyond that circle, it becomes a defensive posture built entirely around the aggressor’s comfort. I would rather eat glass than respond defensively to a claim that frames us as inherently violent. To engage the hypothetical is to accept the bigot’s premise. Why would I want to convince anyone who wants me harmed that I’m peaceful? People would have to pay me an enormous amount of money to perform patience I don’t possess for those who do not deserve it.

Kilpatrick is not even the only white woman whose racist tirade resulted in a financial windfall. I still vividly remember Shiloh Hendrix, who called a five-year-old Black child the n-word and then raised nearly a million US dollars afterward.

My birthday is in a few days. As a Muslim woman in the Global South, all I want for my birthday is for more white women to weaponise their white women’s tears to mobilise people to contribute meaningfully to mutual aid requests below and to every request under the hashtag #MutualAidRequest.

If Dasha Kilpatrick and Shiloh Hendrix can do it, the rest of you can too.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

@tiredpinklover @thereaders @SabiLewSounds @AnthonyJK @genXcrone @OshunThaGreat @cycletherapyHam @wrzky @pastelfluffyfox @squirrellilly

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Samar’s Urgent Plea: Save Qamar and Omar

Samar is the sole breadwinner for her family in Gaza, fighting every day to cover food and basic needs for her husband and children. Open her campaign and give directly.
[View original post]

@samargaza

Islam and Family in Gaza: Rebuilding Hope After War

Islam and her family have gone nearly a month without a single contribution to their campaign, their needs unmet and constant. Their campaign has stalled. Give directly and share this further than her reach.
[View original post]

@islamjamal

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The Sanctions Are the War

If you only track wars by whether missiles are currently in the air, you’ll miss most of what empire actually does for a living. This week the US carried out a new round of strikes on Iran, hitting more than 80 targets, air defence systems, command networks, coastal radar, and dozens of small boats near the Strait of Hormuz, and in the same breath reimposed the oil sanctions it had only recently, briefly, lifted. Iran has called it a “clear violation” of the memorandum the two countries signed last month and promised a “crushing response.” Buyers of Iranian oil now have until 17 July to unwind their transactions or face secondary sanctions themselves. Watch how quickly the headlines move on to the missiles and skip past that sentence. The missiles get the airtime. The sanctions get the casualties.

Because that is what sanctions are, whatever bloodless bureaucratic language gets used to describe them: a siege conducted through banking software instead of checkpoints. Sanctions do not degrade a regime’s capacity to hold power; regimes with oil wealth and repressive apparatus tend to survive them fine. What sanctions degrade is a population’s capacity to buy insulin, import dialysis equipment, keep a currency stable enough that a salary still buys groceries by the end of the month. This is not a side effect of the policy. It is the policy. Cutting off oil revenue is deliberately engineered to make ordinary Iranians so miserable that the political cost of the regime’s positions becomes unbearable, and it is engineered by people who will never have to explain to a mother in Tehran why the medication she needs is suddenly unavailable at any price.

I don’t say this to launder the Iranian state, which has plenty of its own violence to answer for against its own people, Kurds, Baluch, women, dissidents, workers. Solidarity with ordinary Iranians has never required pretending their government is innocent. But there is a difference between critiquing a state and starving a population to punish it, and Western commentary collapses that distinction on purpose, every single time, because “sanctions” sounds so much cleaner than “siege.” The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil. This was never really a conflict about ideology. It is a conflict about who gets to set the price of energy and who has to eat the consequences, and empire has decided, again, that the answer is: not us.

This is the same architecture as Gaza, as Sudan, as Congo, as the fuel riots in Jakarta; different theatres, same machine, extracting resources and disciplining anyone who threatens the terms of extraction, and calling the discipline “policy” so it never has to be called what it is. The people paying for this war will not be the ones who ordered the strikes or wrote the sanctions memo. They will be ordinary people absorbing the shock in their bodies, their currencies, their access to medicine, same as they always are. We can’t lift a siege from here. What we can do is keep the mutual aid network under this roof funded and moving, because every single person in the list below is also absorbing some version of the same extraction, just closer to home. Give directly. Boost past your feed. That’s the practice.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

https://transfem.social/notes/aofb4y1zi5ba1ewb

@wrzky @OshunThaGreat @broodcoffee @kshernandez @AnthonyJK @ellespeaks @lyrial @tiredpinklover @notkawaii_irl @magicalgrrrl

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Help Me Escape the Hell of Gaza, Ayham Needs You

Ayham is 18 and the sole provider for 12 people in Gaza — his own family and his martyred uncle’s family — after losing their home.
[View original post]

@ayham_ljboor2008

Etaf’s Family Deserves a Chance to Stay Together Now

Etaf’s family in Gaza cannot cover food or clean water and faces separation. They need direct redistribution to stay together.
[View original post]

@Etaf

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Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead. The War Didn’t End With Him.

Ali Khamenei is dead, and the two things happening on either side of that fact are not the two things Western coverage keeps trying to merge into one story. On one side: PMOI Resistance Units launched a nationwide campaign of defiance on 10 July, following what the same outlets describe as lavish, militarised state funeral ceremonies for a man whose regime spent decades disappearing and executing its own dissidents. On the other side: the United States is now nine consecutive nights into a bombing campaign that has nothing to do with Iranian civil society and everything to do with a strait oil needs to move through. These are not the same story wearing two faces. One is Iranians deciding, on their own terms, what comes after a dead theocrat. The other is a foreign military using the resulting instability as cover to keep dropping ordnance on Bushehr and Jask.

I will not perform grief for Khamenei, and I will not pretend the Islamic Republic’s cruelty toward its own population, including the Muslims and ethnic minorities it has repressed hardest, is somehow beside the point. It isn’t. But cruelty by a government toward its own people has never once been the actual criterion the US applies before deciding whether to bomb a country, and this week supplied fresh proof: the UK formally designated the IRGC a terrorist organisation the same week Washington kept striking population centres that have nothing to do with the IRGC’s chain of command, and the same week two US service members were killed and a third went missing in an Iranian strike on a base in Jordan, a retaliation entirely predictable to anyone not invested in pretending bombing campaigns end wars rather than widen them. Designating an organisation a terrorist entity is meant to look like precision.

Nine nights of strikes across seven cities is a message about who gets to survive a transition of power and who doesn’t, sent from very far away by people who will never live with the aftermath.

What I actually want people organising in solidarity to sit with is that you can want the Islamic Republic gone and still refuse to hand that outcome’s authorship to the same states currently starving Gaza and propping up a genocide in the same region. Regime change engineered from outside, at the cost of civilian neighbourhoods, has never once produced the liberation it promises the population living through it. It produces exactly what it is producing right now, dead conscripts, missing soldiers, a resistance movement inside Iran that has to build its own legitimacy while a foreign air force turns its cities into a proving ground for a completely separate geopolitical argument about who controls Hormuz. Iranians deciding their own future and the US bombing Iranian cities are opposite processes that happen to share a timeline, not two chapters of the same liberation story.

Empire is opportunistic before it is anything else. It does not need to invent the crisis it exploits, a dead supreme leader, a domestic resistance movement, a currency in freefall somewhere else on the map; it only needs the crisis to already exist, and it will insert a bombing campaign, arms shipment, or a debt instrument into whatever gap that crisis opens. What gets lost in that insertion, every time, is the population who was actually trying to build something for themselves before the opportunist arrived.

None of that population is waiting on Washington, London, or a supreme leader’s funeral to eat this week, and neither should the people reading this. Below is this week’s mutual aid requests list. It includes requests with no connection to any government’s war aims, just people who need the rent covered or the lights on or a child fed. Move what you can there. Move what you can’t fund further than your own reach. That, unlike anything happening in a briefing room this week, actually reaches someone.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

@Toadlyturtle @ellespeaks @wrzky @devlin @MaskedRyder @thereaders @OshunThaGreat @cycletherapyHam @AnthonyJK @ashporter93

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Helping Malak to provide food and safety for the children.

Malak was a teacher before the war destroyed her home and income in Gaza. Now a mother without a safe home or stable income, she’s raising directly for food, warmth, and safety for her children.
[View original post]

@Malak1999

Help Eman’s Family Survive and Protect Her Unborn Child

Eman lost everything to war and is raising funds directly for food, treatment, and safe housing for her children, sick and malnourished from sustained deprivation. Redistribute what’s possible, share the rest.
[View original post]

@emanY2017

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They Called It a Parade Rehearsal: Indonesia’s Fences and Whose Security They Protect

Salaam from Jakarta.

Writing this may put me on their watch list because, oh no, I appear to use my critical thinking, possess empathy, and exercise my self-agency! The horror!

Anyway-

Remember the fencing and un-fencing of the malls I wrote about last week? This traces what came before those fences. Written from an actual repressive, authoritarian, post-colonial nation-state that hates human rights.

Early this month, footage of military tactical vehicles lined up near Monas started circulating, and for a few hours half the country wondered whether the state was quietly prepositioning for another crackdown. Police and the armed forces spent days walking it back: the vehicles were personnel transport trucks for the 81st Independence Day commemoration, the fencing going up around business districts and malls was store management being cautious, nothing to see, the Daily Operational Reporting System confirms national stability, please stop spreading hoaxes. Major General Muhammad Nas asked the public directly not to treat the rehearsal as provocation. But aren’t they threatening the public with the display of what would happen if anyone exercises any political agency by voicing out their concern and criticism? Who arrests anyone on the basis of an allegation with evidence that is still under investigation? What kind of justice is that? Do not bring up national security when the biggest threat to people’s freedom is their own government and its state apparatus. So whose security are you protecting with your justice system if you start arresting anyone exercising their rights to criticise the people whose salaries are paid by ordinary people’s taxes?

DM was charged under Article 48 paragraph (1) in conjunction with Article 32 paragraph (1), Article 51 paragraph (1) in conjunction with Article 35 of the ITE Law, and Article 264 of the new Criminal Code, over an alleged post about a protest call. The first two provisions exist to punish people who break into someone else’s electronic system and alter data that isn’t theirs, or forge a document to make it pass as authentic. Neither describes a social media post published under someone’s own name. Only Article 264 even applies to speech: broadcasting news that is uncertain, exaggerated, or incomplete, which the person knows or reasonably should know may cause unrest. It is close to the same provision Indonesia’s own Constitutional Court struck down in 2023 for being too vague to satisfy legal certainty, brought back almost word for word in the new Criminal Code regardless.

How would people know it’s fake news, rather than the state apparatus wanting to suppress dissent and dictate what counts as fact and what counts as fake? The law expects people to use their own critical thinking to avoid broadcasting or disseminating news that is uncertain, exaggerated, or incomplete, which the person knows or reasonably should know may cause unrest, while voicing any concern or criticism can be met with exactly this kind of response from the people whose salaries are paid by taxpayers.

Pretty rich, coming from a government whose president claimed Iran already has nuclear weapons with no source, met with a swift denial from Tehran, then let two people who commented on that same claim get arrested under the exact law built to punish an unverified claim. Parroting decades of Zionist lies costs him nothing; repeating it back costs everyone else their freedom.

I believe the fences went up for Independence Day. I do not believe the instinct behind them is about Independence Day at all. A state doesn’t reach for fencing around shopping centres and industrial zones because it feels secure. It reaches for that because it remembers this past June, barely two months ago, when a 32 percent fuel price hike landed on top of 268 trillion rupiah in spending riddled with corruption and the resurrection of dwifungsi ABRI, the military’s old claim to civilian institutions that Reformasi was supposed to have buried in 1998; students tore down barricades from Jakarta to Bandung to North and South Sumatra under a protest name precise enough to sting: “Heading to Bankrupt Indonesia.” The state remembers what it built its own crisis out of. So it fences the mall before it fences its own decisions.

Dwifungsi ABRI, the doctrine that gives Indonesia’s military a permanent civilian governing role, is Cold War containment architecture, built with direct US backing under Suharto to guarantee a compliant, anti-communist, capital-friendly Indonesia for decades after 1965’s mass killings cleared the ground for it; that whole charade did not spring from nowhere. The muscle memory currently fencing Jakarta’s malls in anticipation of protests that officials insist aren’t coming was assembled, in large part, by the same imperial logic that disciplines populations everywhere it operates. Different stage, same script: discipline the population before the population organises, and call the discipline a routine.

Is this nationalism? Is this for national security? Is this new, or has it been this way even after the fall of Suharto’s tyrannical government? The assassination of a prominent human rights lawyer and activist mid-flight in 2004 should give you the answer.

What I have an interest in is naming, precisely, what the fencing is for. Independence Day is the occasion, not the reason. The fencing is insurance, purchased in advance, against the possibility that ordinary Indonesians decide again that a government spending on lawmaker perks and military expansion while the rupiah sits near 18,000 to the dollar has forfeited its claim to their patience. Jakarta’s fences, Gaza’s Yellow Line, and Tehran’s file-sharing arrangement with Washington all run on the same premise: that people organising for survival are the emergency, and people extracting from them are the stability.

The people in this week’s roundup are absorbing extraction of their own, in rent, food, medicine, and the everyday cost of staying alive under systems built to make that expensive on purpose, wherever they are. Read through the requests, give what you can, and share what you can’t fund yourself. From each according to their capacity, to each according to their needs; that has never once needed a state’s permission.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

@jack_mendo @broodcoffee @AnthonyJK @squirrellilly @ellespeaks @SabiLewSounds @ash @nighttimeapparition @Kuniti_shino @tiredpinklover

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Help Save Mitqal’s Family

Mithqal is living through ongoing bombing and unreliable internet access in Gaza, and asks for support to cover food, water, and other basic survival needs.
[View original post]

@Mithqal

Donate and help Ala’a and her children

Alaa is a mother in North Gaza raising her children alone while her husband is imprisoned. Hunger is exhausting her children, her daughter is sick, and Alaa asks for support to help her family survive. [View original post]

@allaasamour90

🗣️Support Corner🗣️

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This space is held together by adisabled Indonesian Muslim woman. Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my writing and mutual aid projects.

If you find this voluntary work worth supporting, please do so by pledging as little as $1 monthly via Liberapay or other tiers available across Liberapay, ko-fi, and Patreon. One-off support helps too. Any amount genuinely helps.

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Netanyahu and Trump Are Fighting Over Who Gets Credit. Nobody Is Fighting Over the Mosque.

There is a special kind of obscenity reserved for empire’s inner circle when they start competing for credit. This week in Washington, Netanyahu eulogised the late Senator Lindsey Graham as “Israel’s number one friend,” and Trump corrected him on the spot: no, actually, I’m israel’s number one friend, Lindsey was only ever number two. Two men who between them have overseen a war on Iran, a permission structure for continued strikes on Gaza, and arms sales to a NATO member Israel considers hostile, spent a public moment jockeying over a rivalry medal. That is what passes for statecraft at the top of the imperial core: theatre about loyalty, staged for cameras, while the actual violence those loyalties produce goes on without commentary.

The theatre needed cover, and it got some. Israeli security reportedly had Netanyahu’s flight to Washington leave in secrecy over fears Iran was escalating efforts against Israeli officials, while Israel spent the same week quietly deepening defence ties with other Middle Eastern governments in case the Iran war widens. None of that made the headlines Netanyahu and Trump’s exchange did, because a rivalry between two powerful men is a better story than the actual machinery being assembled behind them. That is the function of political theatre: it is distraction, it is the very mechanism by which atrocity gets to keep happening off-camera while the cameras are pointed at something that flatters somebody’s ego.

Off-camera, on 29 July, israeli jets hit the Al-Muttaqin Mosque near Gaza City’s YMCA, killing one Palestinian and wounding more than twelve, and destroying tents sheltering displaced families. This happened under a ceasefire the same government in Washington calls a diplomatic achievement, weeks after Israeli strikes killed eight people including two children on 8 July under the same ceasefire. A mosque does not destroy itself and a tent full of displaced children does not catch fire on its own; someone gave the order, someone flew the jet, and someone in Washington keeps calling this peace regardless. The gap between what gets a headline about who is whose “number one friend” and what gets buried under “conflict resumes despite ceasefire” is the gap empire lives in. It needs that gap. Its survival depends on which stories get amplified and which get filed as background noise.

Refuse the gap. The people whose homes and mosques and tents are the background noise in this story are named, specific, and reachable in the Palestinian Campaign Spotlight and Gaza Verified Archive further down this roundup, alongside every other name on this week’s list living under the same imperial weight: not an abstraction, but a set of people who need money moved toward them this week regardless of what Netanyahu and Trump said to each other at a podium. Give what you can directly to the requests below. Share what you can’t give, so someone with more capacity sees it. The theatre doesn’t stop because you noticed it; it stops mattering when enough people decide the mosque is the story, not the rivalry.

✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨

@QuyetPawz @wrzky @broodcoffee @SabiLewSounds @ellespeaks @sparkshocker @CursedSilicon @thoughtpunks @ottercynical @shrugdealer @AnthonyJK @OshunThaGreat

✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨

Help Nada survive in Gaza

Nada is due for a curettage on Monday and needs two units of blood to safely undergo it. She’s raising directly for the procedure after repeated appeals raised no donations. Redistribute toward the cost directly, or share the post itself, which is what she’s asked for.
[View original post]

@nadeeneid

Sayah in Gaza: Urgent Hope for Sustained Nourishment

Sayah’s wife is pregnant and suffering severe anaemia, unable to access the vitamins and blood supplements she needs in Gaza. The family is raising directly for her treatment, with $24 of the $100 needed raised so far. Redistribute toward the remaining $76 directly, or share so someone else does. [View original post]

@Sayah_123gaza

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