Political Memes

I'm an Iraqi. I lived there. The birthplace location on my passport says "Baghdad, Iraq". My family has literally lived through these events. I have family in both Iraq and Iran. I know what happened to me, my family, and what's going on in my country, you don't. The sheer arrogance of you thinking that you could double down on lecturing me about my own lived experiences makes you a living example of the ignorant and chauvinistic westerner stereotype.

Ahemd Al Basheer has 7.5 million subscribers on his youtube channel, and virtually all of those are Iraqis. He is an Iraqi who also lived through all these events who made a show exposing Iraq's problems to Iraqis in Iraqi Arabic. The only people who tune are Iraqis because other Arabs simply won't understand all the Iraqi references, jokes, and politics. It would be like Australians tuning in to Canadian political shows, it almost never happens. There's only like 46 million Iraqis in the world both in Iraq and diaspora. That means 16% of all Iraqis in the world watch this guy, and that's just going off of subscriber numbers. His channel more than 1.6 BILLION views. He's not some rando youtuber, he literally is one of the biggest voices in the country.

Compare that to Hakim, who virtually no Iraqi has ever heard of. When Iraqis see the name Hakim, they think of the Egyptian singer, not this guy. He has a small channel of 300k subscribers that is exclusively in English catering to a Western Marxist audience. Meaning that all videos come from an ideological lens, which means he is inherently not objective or in tune with the rest of the country since the overwhelming majority of Iraqis are not Marixst. Regardless, his entire channel is designed to maximize profit from sponsorships, constant merch drops, ads, and begging people to subscribe to his Patreon in every god damn video. It's literally a grift. Oh also, this guy has a history of saying some vile shit like saying the ethnic cleansing under Stalin was a good thing or that the Soviet invasion of Poland was justified or him denying but also simultaneously praising the genocide that was committed by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds.

Like this is the guy who you're proudly watching? This is your source of information on the country? If Hakim is where you get your info on Iraq, then you literally have no information hygiene. Let's take a second and consider the two options here. One is a Marxist grifter who spreads misinformation to appease an English speaking Western audience, the other one is one the most prominent figures in Iraqi culture and politics and his content is made for Iraqis... hmm, I wonder which one gives me better insight on the country.

The fact that you don't even know who Ahmed Al Basheer even is or what he stand for tells me all I need to know about you. You know NOTHING about this country or this region of the world, yet you speak as if you know more than the people who lived through these events themselves. You don't understand Iraqi history, you don't know who the prominent Iraqi figures are, you can't speak our language, you know nothing about our culture, and you certainly don't know what we've been through. Like it's one thing to be ignorant, but it's another when you're doubling down on it. That's just Dunning–Kruger effect. If you're going to continue being a clown then you'll get treated like one.