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readytoescalate · 10 months ago

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"We Don't Need Safety — We Need To Escalate!"

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A critical reflection on the “framing of safety” emerging within the contemporary movement in solidarity with Palestine exploding across college campuses in the so-called United States.

It has become common for participants in the Palestine Liberation Encampments, which have spread across the United States, for protesters to call for participants to be “safe,” and especially for Black and brown students to be protected. While we must recognize that Black and brown students are more likely to be subjected to violence at the hands of the police in general, the framing of “safety” has had a conservatizing force for this movement – and as a result, has served to prevent escalation.

To be absolutely clear – the genocide unfolding in occupied Palestine must be stopped by any means necessary. At the same time, movements will always face both external limitations and internal limitations, while external limitations are easy to see – the most obvious example is direct police violence. Internal limitations are a bit more difficult to see – these are the ideas and inherited tactics which prevent us from accomplishing our goals. We wish to explain here how the language of “safety” is in fact a liberal ideology (we can call it “safety-ism”) which has a conservatizing effect on our movement and which prevents us from winning.

Let’s explain why this is troubling in the plainest possible language:

1. There Is No Such Thing As a Safe Protest

Protesting injustice is designed to place people in positions of risk. However, we assume a position of risk to topple a regime of structural violence. By taking brave risks together, we believe that we have the power to destroy the root causes of structural violence. We substitute the possibility of violence being meted out against ourselves as willing and courageous protesters for the unwilling and, in this case, GENOCIDAL, violence being used by the system in power.

2. The Palestinian Resistance Has Called for American University Students (and the Broader American Public) to ESCALATE Their Actions Against an Ongoing Genocide

History teaches us that when a genocide begins, the only way that the process of systematic killing stops is BY MAKING IT STOP. As such, the Palestinian Resistance–the people who are on the ground fighting and dying–are calling for American students to escalate. It is our duty to heed their call!

3. When the Situation Escalates, People Who Are Afraid Will Mask Their Fear Using Political Language – We Must Meet Them with Compassion but Refuse to Back Down

With great compassion, we recognize that escalation can be a scary prospect, especially for those who believe they have more to lose. At the same time, we must reject the use of politicized language to de-escalate protests. Nobody is making anybody do anything they don’t want to, and we need to maintain cohesion in the face of those attempting to spread fear. When people are afraid and using politicized language to get others to back down, it is best to meet these people with compassion, recognize their fears as legitimate, and then move forward with the tasks at hand. Again, what we are combating is genocide and so all forward initiative must be maintained at all costs.

4. We Keep Us Safe By Escalating

When the police are mobilizing to attack or evict us, we might be tempted to disperse in response. At the same time, our movements are kept safe through their escalation. If, following a raid on an encampment and arrests, students willfully go home, the administration will see that their strategy of repression is working and will double down on their violence. If, however, the movement continues to adapt and finds new ways of escalating, those same participants will be protected by the movement’s growing strength from which will flow public support, material support, spiritual support, and the knowledge that our risks have been worth it because the movement is fucking winning.

5. Black and Brown Protesters Who Choose to Escalate Carry the Torch of a Proud History of Militant Resistance

Remember, Black and brown protesters carry the torch of a proud tradition of direct resistance to colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Fred Hampton and Assata Shakur fought directly against the police of America. Martin Luther King Jr., contrary to the whitewashed image of him, led many Black Americans on nonviolent marches specifically designed to provoke the police to violence and thus show white America the reality of the racial system through images of the violence shown on the nightly news. Being Black does not mean that you need to have white people protect you with their skin privilege– Black Liberation will be won by Black people just as Palestinian Liberation will be won by Palestinian people directly.

6. Proximity to Suffering Does Not Automatically Produce the Best Political Ideas

At the same time, it is a reflection of the dehumanizing contours of racial ideology that equates Black and brown people with having the most daring and advanced political ideas. Of course, proximity to the worst aspects of this racist system can have a radicalizing effect on many Black and brown people. While we should all learn about and empathize with these experiences, we should not make the mistake that this necessarily means that Black and brown students always have the best political ideas. Doing so is an expression of racial ideology because it places an undue burden on Black and brown people, it is dehumanizing in that individual thought and political work are discounted for one’s identity, and, finally, it serves to prevent the most effective ideas from guiding our movement instead of a tokenizing ideology which discounts the content of Black ideas for any idea so long as it emerges from a Black person.

7. Only the Most Courageous People to the Front!

We have seen many times that in moments of looming confrontation, a call is made for “white people to the front” to protect Black and brown people from police violence. Unfortunately, doing so often contributes to violence against Black and brown students, but using moralizing language and playing upon white guilt to coerce often unwilling white participants to the front. These same people, who were not willing to be at the front, quickly cave at the first signs of violence. Instead – when shit is going down, we need to have the most courageous and willing people at the front. A coalition of the most courageous and willing will stand a much greater chance of repelling police encroachments and advancing the movement to victory.

Conclusion

By identifying the “safety-ism” as a conservatizing ideology, we seek to overcome its limitations and pose an alternative idea in its place. Heeding the call for escalation, we can call the alternative, revolutionary, idea “escalationism.” To achieve victory we must escalate the struggle and combat all forces – external and internal – which prevent us from doing so.

TOGETHER WE ESCALATE FOR PALESTINE AGAINST THE POLICE AROUND THE GLOBE FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE OPPRESSED AND THE END TO IMPERIALISM ONCE AND FOR ALL!

– Fire Ant Movement Defense

published by It's Going Down

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hussyknee · 1 year ago

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Just found out that the baby baked in an oven thing Zionists accused Hamas of doing is actually something Zionists themselves did during the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. And the fetus cut out of the pregnant woman's womb is something that was done in the massacre of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese militants in concert with Zionists. We already know that they rape women and children in detention. I think the only other huge fucking lie about Oct 7th was the beheaded babies, and I'm legitimately afraid of learning whether or not that was also just something Zionists themselves did at one point.

I mean it's not even improbable because this type of unfathomable cruelty is par for the course with genociders, that only happen when the dominant group has so much disproportionate power in the region that there is only mindless hatred and perfect impunity. (The Brits used to use native infants as crocodile bait.) The reports of IOF ripping babies from their mothers arms, shooting them dead, throwing them aside and dragging the mothers off in front of witnesses were numerous even before this. I've also heard reports of young parents being dragged off and abandoning their toddlers and infants on the roadsides (saw a video of it and I'm going to be haunted to my grave). So those premature babies being left to die of starvation at the hospital was shocking but only surprising because there were so many eyes on the situation due to the efforts of the aid workers and journalists. We thought that Western governments wouldn't pull this shit with the whole world watching. As it turned out, the only reason the last twenty-odd premature babies at Al Shifa Hospital survived was because the director of the place refused to leave them until they were safely shipped off to Egypt (unaccompanied, God knows if the parents will ever get them back. Egyptian governments refused to let the few critically injured people allowed safe passage by the US to go through without visas and passports so they died in the ambulances). Then the IOF kidnapped the director right afterwards. He's still missing.

The organ harvesting thing is also true btw. We've been talking about it ever since they made off with those dead bodies at Al Shifa Hospital. Whether they were going to use them to stage their own propaganda, harvest their organs and skin, or just did it to deprive their families of giving them a burial. Probably all three.

I'm so tired of you people refusing to pay any attention to the news streaming out of Gaza via their own citizen journalists and Al Jazeera and Quds News and families of activists and then accusing us of spreading conspiracy theories! "There's so much misinformation" just say you don't trust Palestinians to tell the truth about their own genocide with your whole chest. Say that your charges of antisemitism is about how much you fear Black people and Muslims. Say that you don't reblog calls for the Jewish community to interrogate their whiteness and their enmeshing with Zionism over the decades because you feel like "it's not your place" to amplify Black and brown people challenging whiteness. Say that you shut us down and police our language about Zionists because you're philosemites who believe Jews could never be as genocidal and bloodthirsty as every other group on the world given the same power. Say that you still don't think Zionists are "as bad as" Nazis because they haven't murdered enough people yet.

I'll take the Zionists cheering over the deaths of people we're mourning over all the hidden polite lethal racism you're hiding under your white liberal tongues. I can't take this death by a thousand cuts shit anymore. Seriously why are you scrolling past? You think we aren't talking about you?

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magz · 1 year ago

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Image Transcript: Our PCRF charity stream is this Saturday! While we are looking forward to a fun and entertaining few hours of drawing and fundraising, we also recognize that by choosing this particular cause to get involved in, we are stepping into topics that are significantly more sensitive than the content you are used to on our channel. We've listened to the concerns from the community and want to ensure we're setting the right expectations. Our primary goal with this stream is to provide aid to Palestinians facing a dire humanitarian crisis. We will be encouraging our audience to both donate to the PCRF and to urge their elected representatives to back a ceasefire. We believe that rallying our wonderful community towards tangible actions is the best use of our platform in this instance. We hold a strict policy against antisemitism and hate speech across all our streams, and this event will be no exception. Our moderators will be vigilant in maintaining a respectful and safe environment for everyone. We recognize that some phrases and slogans associated with Palestinian liberation can be controversial within our diverse community. While there are varied interpretations and feelings towards these expressions, we do not view them as inherently antisemitic. We do not believe it is our place to police the language that Palestinians use to advocate for their own freedom and safety, so we will not censor pro-Palestinian speech in chat during the stream. We recognize that this stance will not please everyone in our community, but ultimately it is what best reflects our values. If you have reservations about our decision on this matter, we respectfully suggest that this particular stream might not be for you. Choosing to do this stream meant accepting the risk of causing division within our community and potentially losing followers, but the chance to make a real difference for those in need far outweighs any drawbacks. Thank you to our wonderful community for predominantly being supportive of our decision to do this and for being caring compassionate people. Your encouragement reinforces our decision. Looking forward to Saturday! End Transcript

Drawfee, a comedy art YouTube and Twitch channel with almost 2Million subscribers

also having charity stream for Palestine Children Relief Fund

On February 24, 2024 3pm-6pm United States Eastern TimeZone (ET) on Twitch.

(A lot "nonpolitical" channels n people are able show support n help, in own ways. Don't forget you matter.)

https://twitch.tv/drawfeeshow/schedule

#copy-paste from transcriber #drawfee #addition #described #palestine #reblog #text post #r episodes without incident #s magz

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garudabluffs · 9 months ago

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youtube

College Campus Crisis: A Conversation with David Rothkopf May 7, 2024

I’ve been watching what’s been happening on college campuses with real uncertainty. I don’t believe we’re getting the full story from the media. Much like the horserace neck and neck BS they’re peddling for the election, I feel as if traditional media is pushing narratives with the protests that don’t tell the full picture and it leaves people feeling outraged or confused. As today’s guest David Rothkopf says, “If you want this crisis to be simple, you’re looking in the wrong place. It’s not simple. It’s difficult and it requires grown-ups who have a sense of history and the ability to weigh different and competing ideas at the same time.” As David so aptly points out, our tendency to be tribal has turned these conflicts on college campuses into a Rorschach test where we often end up seeing what we want to see. As Robert Reich said, “There should be nothing inherently anti-Semitic about condemning the ongoing destruction in Gaza”. And yet…that is not how it’s always playing out. So let’s talk about it.

VIDEO 58:28

you've just posed it in several ways you know the people who run

46:10 universities and Mayors and so forth need to approach this with a recognition

46:16 that open discourse on a university is a core principle and that it needs to be protected even if some of what the

46:22 protesters say is uncomfortable for people but that condu in it in the

46:27 context of a safe space and stripping away anything that may be considered

46:33 intimidating or inciting to violence is critical Outsiders don't have a place in

46:38 this there've got to be clear rules generally speaking keep the police off the campuses let the campuses resolve

46:45 these things on their own adding a you know sort of paramilitary element to these discussions doesn't help it but I

46:53 think the other part of it is that each of us has a responsibility to do the

46:58 work to understand what's going on and not to be easily swayed by you know

47:06 Talking Heads on TV who say well this is all anti-semitic or this is all virtuous

47:12 or this is you know it's it's not those things it's more complicated than that and you owe it to the people who are out

47:19 there protesting sincerely to try to get to their core message and understand it

47:2 4now you don't owe it to them for any other reason that this is how we help make our society work we listen to other

47:31 voices this is democracy we celebrate that there can be many voices here and..."

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[[it's SO complex & complicated, it's less-than-lifelike_ _ _ ]]

Western students can’t mask their vile anti-Semitism

May 08,2024 "Columbia University – my alma mater, I’m ashamed to say – has a lot to answer for."

"Zionism is the belief in Jews’ right to self-determination in the land that was historically their own, which gave them their name, which gave them their language and towards which they have prayed for hundreds of years, long before Islam or the word Palestine existed. It is supported by the overwhelming majority of Jews, because Israel is and has always been intrinsically connected to the story of the Jews."

"The irony is that the Jews are trying to go back to where they came from. That’s what this is all about. "

"Perhaps most chillingly, in the lobby of the Columbia Journalism School, arguably the world’s most prestigious facility for teaching the skills of ethical, impartial and accurate reporting, a wall has been erected in memory of journalists killed in Gaza. An analysis by the Daily Mail found that 21 of the 98 names displayed worked for Hamas’ propaganda TV and radio stations and 11 worked for outlets affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.

I wonder what the school’s founder Joseph Pulitzer – like me, a Jew – would have made of this propaganda masquerading as journalism in the faculty entrance hall that bears his name. I certainly would have felt extremely uncomfortable had I been forced to walk past this “wall of martyrs” every time I went to class."

READ MORE Western students can’t mask their vile anti-Semitism (msn.com)

#Middle East conflict #David Rothkopf #Politics Girl #Youtube

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schraubd · 7 years ago

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The Problem of "Centering" and the Jews

Note: I wrote this piece quite a few months ago, shopping around to the usual Jewish media outlets. None were interested, and I ended up letting it slide. But it popped back into my mind -- this Sophie Ellman-Golan article helped -- and so I decided to post it here. While I have updated it, some of the references are a bit dated (at least on an internet time scale). Nonetheless, I continue to think a critical look at how the idea of "centering" interacts with and can easily instantiate antisemitic tropes is deeply important. * * * In the early 2000s, Rosa Pegueros, a Salvadoran Jew, was a member of the listserv for contributors to the book This Bridge We Call Home, sequel to the tremendously influential volume This Bridge Called My Back. Another member of the listserv had written to the group with "an almost apologetic post mentioning that she is Jewish, implying that some of the members might not be comfortable with her presence for that reason." She had guessed she was the only Jewish contributor to the volume, so Pegueros wrote back, identifying herself as a Jew as a well and recounting a recent experience she perceived as antisemitic. Almost immediately, Peugeros wrote, another third contributor jumped into the conversation. "I can no longer sit back," she wrote, "and watch this list turn into another place where Jewishness is reduced to a site of oppression and victimization, rather than a complex site of both oppression and privilege—particularly in relationship to POC." Pegueros was stunned. At the time of this reply, there had been a grand total of two messages referencing Jewishness on the entire listserv. And yet, it seemed, that was too much -- it symbolized yet "another place" where discourse about oppression had become "a forum for Jews." This story has always stuck with me. And I thought of it when reading Jews for Racial and Economic Justice's guidebook to understanding antisemitism from a left-wing perspective. Among their final pieces of advice for Jews participating in anti-racism groups was to make antisemitism and Jewish issues "central, but not centered". It's good advice. Jewish issues are an important and indispensable part of anti-racist work. That said, we are not alone, and it is important to recognize that in many circumstances our discrete problems ought not to take center stage. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be heard. It just means they should not be given disproportionate attention such that they prevent other important questions and campaigns from proceeding. Ideally, "central, but not centered" in the anti-racism community means that Jewish issues should neither overwhelm the conversation nor be shunted aside and ignored outright.

Yet it also overlooks an important caveat. Too often, any discussion of Jewish issues is enough to be considered "centering" it. There is virtually no gap between spaces where Jews are silenced and spaces where Jews are accused of "centering". And so the reasonable request not to "center" Jewish issues easily can, and often does, become yet another tool enforcing Jewish silence. Pegueros' account is one striking example. I'll give another: several years ago, I was invited to a Jewish-run feminist blog to host a series of posts on antisemitism. Midway through the series, the blog's editors were challenged on the grounds that it was taking oxygen away from more pressing matters of racism. At the time, the blog had more posts on "racism" than "antisemitism" by an 8:1 margin (and, in my experience, that is uncommonly attentive to antisemitism on a feminist site -- Feministing, for example, has a grand total of two posts with the "anti-Semitism" tag in its entire history). No matter: the fact that Jewish feminists on a Jewish blog were discussing Jewish issues at all was viewed as excessive and self-centered.

Or consider Raphael Magarik's reply to Yishai Schwartz's essay contending that Cornel West has "a Jewish problem".

Schwartz's column takes issue with West's decision to situate his critique of fellow Black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates by reference to "the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people." Magarik's reply accuses Schwartz of making the West/Coates dispute fundamentally "about the Jews", exhibiting the "the moral narcissism in thinking that everything is about you, in reading arguments between Black intellectuals about the future of the American left and asking: How can I make this about the Jews?" Now, Magarik is surely correct that the Jewish angle of West's critique of Coates is a rather small element that should not become the "center of attention" and thereby obscure "the focus [on] Black struggles for liberation." But there is something quite baffling about his suggestion that a single column that was a drop in the bucket of commentary produced in the wake of the West/Coates exchange could suffice to make it the "center of attention". If Magarik believes Schwartz overreacted to some stray mentions of Jewish issues in an otherwise intramural African-American dispute, surely Magarik equally brought a howitzer to a knife fight by claiming that one article in Ha'aretz single-handedly recentered the conversation about the West/Coates feud onto the Jews.

What's going on here? How is it that the "centering" label -- certainly a valid concern in concept -- seems to routinely and pervasively attach itself to Jews at even the slightest intervention in policy debates?

The answer, as you might have guessed, relates to antisemitism.

As a social phenomenon, antisemitism is very frequently the trafficking in tropes about Jewish hyperpower, the sense that we either have or are on the cusp of taking over anything and everything. Frantz Fanon described antisemitism as follows: "Jews are feared because of their potential to appropriate. ‘They’ are everywhere. The banks, the stock exchanges, and the government are infested with them. They control everything. Soon the country will belong to them.” If we have an abstract understanding of Jews as omnipotent and omnipresent, no wonder that specific instances of Jewish social participation -- no matter how narrow the contribution might be -- are understood as a complete and total colonization of the space. What are the Jews, other than those who are already "everywhere"?

Sadly, the JFREJ pamphlet does not address this issue at all. When "central" crosses into "centering" will often be a matter of judgment, but while the JFREJ has much to say about Jews making "demands for attention" or paying heed to "how much oxygen they can suck out of the room", it does not grapple with how the structure of antisemitism mentalities often renders simply being Jewish (without a concurrent vow of monastic silence) enough to trigger these complaints. It doesn't seem to realize how this entire line of discourse itself can be and often is deeply interlaced with antisemitism. JFREJ's omission is particularly unfortunate since Jews have begun to internalize this sensibility. It's not that Jewish issues should predominate, or always be at the center of every conversation. It's the nagging sense that any discussion of Jewish issues -- no matter how it is prefaced, cabined, or hedged -- is an act of "centering", of taking over, of making it "about us." When the baseline of what counts as "centering" is so low, I know from personal experience that even the simplest asks for inclusion are agonizing. As early as 1982, the radical lesbian feminist Irene Klepfisz identified this propensity as a core part of both internalized and externalized antisemitism. She instructed activists -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike -- to ask themselves a series of questions, including whether they feel that dealing with antisemitism "drain[s] the movement of precious energy", whether they believe antisemitism "has been discussed too much already," and whether Jews "draw too much attention to themselves." Contemporary activists, including many Jews, could do worse than asking Klepfisz's questions. For example, when Jews and non-Jews in the queer community rallied against the effort by some activists to expel Jewish and Israeli LGBTQ organizations from LGBT conference "Creating Change", Mordechai Levovitz fretted that they had "promoted the much more nefarious anti-Semitic trope that Jews wield disproportionate power to get what we want." Levovitz didn't support the expulsion campaign. Still, he fretted that even the most basic demand of inclusion -- don't kick queer Jews out of the room -- was potentially flexing too much Jewish muscle. In this way, the distinction between "central" and "centering" collapses -- indeed, even the most tertiary questions are "centering" if Jews are the ones asking them. This is bad enough in a world where, we are told, oppressions are inextricably connected (you can tell whose perspective is and isn't valued in these communities based on whose attempts to speak are taken to be remedying an oversight and whose are viewed as self-centered derailing). But it verges on Kafka-esque when persons demand Jews "show up" and then get mad that they have a voice in the room; or proactively decide to put Jewish issues on their agenda and yet still demand Jews keep silent about them. Magarik says, for example, that Jews "were not the story" when the Movement for Black Lives included in its platform an accusation that Israel was creating genocide; we shouldn't have made it "about us". He's right, in the sense that this language should not have caused Jews to withdraw from the fight against police violence against communities of color. He's wrong in suggesting that Jews therefore needed to stop "wringing our hands" about how issues that cut deep to the core of our existence as a people were treated in the document. Jews didn't demand that the Movement for Black Lives talk about Jews, but once they elected to do so Jews were not obliged to choose between the right's silence of shunning and the left's silence of acquiescence. To say that Jews ought not "center" ourselves is not to say that there is no place for critical commentary at all. We are legitimate contributors to the discourse over our own lives. I'm not particularly interested in the substantive debate regarding whether Cornel West has a "Jewish problem" -- though Magarik's defense of West (that he "has a good reason for focusing on Palestine" because it "demarcates the difference between liberalism and radicalism") seems like it is worthy of some remark (of all the differences between liberals and "radicals", this is the issue that is the line of demarcation? And that doesn't exhibit some sign of centrality that Jews might have valid grounds to comment on, not the least of which could be wondering how it is a small country half a globe away came to occupy such pride of place?). The larger issue is the metadebate about whether it's valid to even ask the question; or more accurately, whether it is possible -- in any context, with any amount of disclaimers about relative prioritization -- to ask the question without it being read as "centering". The cleverest part of the whole play, after all, is that the very act of challenging this deliberative structure whereby any and all Jewish contributions suffice to center is that the challenge itself easily can become proof of our centrality.

But clever as it is, it can't and shouldn't be a satisfactory retort. There needs to be a lot more introspection about whether and how supposed allies of the Jews are willing to acknowledge the possibility that their instincts about when Jews are "centered" and when we're silenced are out-of-whack, without it becoming yet another basis of resentment for how we're making it all about us. And if we can't do that, then there is an antisemitism problem that really does need to be addressed. When discussing their struggles, members of other marginalized communities need not talk about Jews all the time, or most of the time, or even all that frequently. But what cannot stand is a claimed right to talk about Jews without having to talk with Jews. The idea that even the exploration of potential bias or prejudice lurking within our political movements represents a deliberative party foul is flatly incompatible with everything the left claims to believe about how to talk about matters of oppression. West decided to bring up the Jewish state in his Jeremiad against Coates. It was not a central part of his argument, and so it should not be a central part of the ensuing public discussion. But having put it on the table, it cannot be the case that Jews are forbidden entirely from offering critical commentary. One might say that a column or two in a few Jewish-oriented newspapers, lying at the tertiary edges of the overall debate, is precisely the right amount of attention that should have been given. If that's viewed as too much, then maybe the right question isn't about whether Jews are "centering" the discussion, but rather whether our presence really is a "central" part of anti-racism movements at all.

Drawing the line between "central" and "centering" is difficult, and requires work. There are situations where Jews demand too much attention, and there are times we are too self-effacing. But surely it takes more than a single solitary column to move from the latter to the former. More broadly, we're not going to get an accurate picture of how to mediate between "central" and "centering" unless we're willing to discuss how ingrained patterns of antisemitism condition our evaluations of Jewish political participation across the board.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2MjQd84

#anti-semitism #Jews #leftists

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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On the list of America’s irrational fears, Palestine is near the top. This is no small feat for a “country” with no actual territory and a population about the size of South Carolina. Despite its lack of an air force, navy, or any real army to speak of, Palestine has long been considered an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed power with one of the most powerful militaries in the world and the full backing of the United States. Since there’s no military or economic justification for this threat, a more nebulous one had to be invented. Thus, Palestinians are depicted in the media as hot-blooded terrorists, driven by the twin passions of fanatical Islam and a seething hatred for Western culture. So engrained is this belief that the op-ed page of the New York Times can “grapple with questions of [Palestinian] rights” by advocating openly for apartheid, forced expulsion, or worse.

This worldview demands an Olympian feat of mental gymnastics. It can only be maintained so long as most Americans have no firsthand contact with Palestine or Palestinian people. Even the smallest act of cultural exchange is enough to make us start questioning the panic-laced myths we’ve been taught since birth.

Of course, the best way to discover the truth about Palestine is to visit the country yourself, though most Americans don’t have the free time or financial resources to do so (this is not a coincidence). This means that those of us who are fortunate enough to visit have a responsibility to share what we’ve seen and heard, without lapsing into pre-fabricated narratives, even “sympathetic” ones. We can’t fight untruth by telling untruths from the opposite perspective. What we can do, however, is report what we saw and heard in Palestine. We can try to provide a snapshot of daily life and let people come to their own conclusions.

With this in mind, here’s what I learned during a recent trip to the Holy Land…

The Palestinian doorman of the Palm Hostel in Jerusalem is a large and friendly man who insists his name is Mike. My fiancée and I are skeptical, as we’d expected something a bit more Arabic. We ask him what his friends call him.

“Just Mike,” he says, and taps an L&M cigarette against the wooden desk. He’s sitting in a dark alcove with rough stone floors, nestled halfway up the staircase that leads from the fruit market to the Palm’s small arched doorway. A pleasant, musty oldness floats in the air. You could imagine Indiana Jones staying here, if he’d lost tenure and gone broke for some reason. To Westerners like us, it seems too exotic to have a doorman named Mike.

Before we can ask him again, though, Mike pounces with a question of his own. “You’re from the States, right?” He speaks English with a thick accent and slow but almost flawless diction, an odd combination that is causing my fiancée some visible confusion, which seems amusing to Mike. I tell him that we’re from Minnesota, a small and boring place in the center-north of the USA. His grin gets bigger, which makes me self-conscious, so I also explain that Minnesota has no mountains or sea, and the winters are very cold.

“Yeah, I know,” says Mike. “I lived in El Paso for thirty years. Border cop, K9 unit. It was a nice place. Had a couple kids there.” Now it’s my turn to gawk, and I start to race through all the possible scams he might be trying to pull. Mike seems to guess what I’m thinking. “Really. I even learned some Spanish.” He scrunches his brow in mock concentration and clamps a hairy hand over his forehead. “Hola. ¿Como estás?Una cerveza, por favor.” He opens his eyes and laughs. “Welcome to Jerusalem, guys. Damascus Gate is that way. Enjoy.”

I don’t know why I’m so surprised he knows a handful of Taco Bellisms, or why this convinces me of his honesty. However, now it’s impossible to walk away. We have too many questions. The first one: Why’d he return to Jerusalem? Mike looks down at his cigarette, smoldering into a fine grey tail of ash. He flicks it against a stone and a bright red ember blazes to life.

“This is my home. I had to.”

Later, as we sip sweet Turkish coffee outside a rug shop in the Old City, it occurs to me that Mike was the first Palestinian person I’d ever spoken with face-to-face. His life story seemed unusual, but I have no idea what’s “usual” when it comes to Palestinian lives. I’d never thought about them before, to be honest. The world has an infinite number of stories, and the days are not as long as I’d like. It’s not like I’d chosen to ignore Palestine. I just hadn’t chosen to be interested in it.

Which was odd, because Palestine has been all over the news since I was a kid. There isn’t a single specific story I recall, just a murky soup of words and phrases, like “fragile peace talks” and “two-state solution” and “violent demonstrations.” They all swirl together, settling under the stock image of a bombed-out warzone as the headlines mumbled something about Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I remember reading about rockets and settlements, refugees and suicide bombers, non-binding resolutions and vetoed Security Council decisions. Not a single detail had stuck. I could feign awareness of some important-sounding events—the Balfour Declaration, the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Summit—but I couldn’t say what decade they happened, or who was involved, or what was decided.

For years, I’d been under the impression that I knew enough about Palestine to be uninterested in what was happening there. This isn’t to say I felt any particular animosity toward the Palestinians. But it’s impossible to fight for every cause, no matter how righteous, if only for reasons of time. Every minute you spend feeding the hungry is a minute you’re not visiting the sick. Life is a zero sum game more often than we’d like to believe.

As we headed toward the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion, I began to feel uneasy. The Israeli police (indistinguishable from soldiers except for the patches on their uniforms) who stood guard at every corner still smiled at us, and they were still apologetic when they forbade us from walking down streets that were “for Muslims only, unfortunately.” Their English was excellent. Many of them were women. They were young and diverse and photogenic, a recruiter’s dream team. But all I could see were their bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Above every ancient stone arch bristled a nest of surveillance cameras. Only a few hours ago, I’d been able to block all that from my sight, leaving me free to enjoy the giddy sensation of strolling through the holiest city on earth.

The road ended at the Lion’s Gate. Just as we approached it, a battered Toyota came rattling through. It screeched to a halt and a squad of Israeli police surrounded the car. All four doors opened and out stepped a Palestinian family. The driver was a young man in his 20s, with short black hair cut in the style of Ronaldo, the famous Real Madrid footballer. When the police told him to turn around and face the wall, he did so without a word. It was obvious this was a daily ritual. The policeman who frisked him looked as bored as it’s possible to look when patting down another man’s genitals. Soon it was over, and the family got back in their car. One of the policemen pulled out his phone and started texting.

If I’d made a video of the search (which I didn’t) and showed it to you with the volume off, you probably wouldn’t find it very interesting. The Israeli police didn’t hurt the man, and he barely made eye contact with them. There were no outrageous racial slurs or savage beatings. The only thing you’d see is a group of people in camouflage battle gear standing around a small white sedan, with a middle-aged woman and a couple of young girls off to the right. Unless you have hawk-like eyesight and an exceptional knowledge of obscure uniform insignias, I doubt you’d be able to tell “which side” any of the participants might be on. All you could say for sure is that the police wanted to search the family’s bodies and belongings, and the family looked very unhappy about it, but the police had guns and cameras, and that settled things. It’s interesting what conclusions different people might draw from a scene like that.

Later that night, after we get back to the Palm, I tell Mike about what we saw. He asks what we’d thought. “It was fucked up,” we say.

Mike sighs. “You should see Bethlehem.”

Jerusalem is so close to Bethlehem that you barely have time to wonder why all the billboards that advertise luxury condos use English instead of Arabic as the second language before you arrive at the wall.

The wall is the most hideous structure I’ve ever seen. It’s a huge, groaning monument to death. Tall grey rectangles bite into the earth like iron teeth, horribly bare, cold, sterile, a towering monstrosity. The wall makes the air taste like poison.

We’re in the car of Mike’s cousin Harun, who is Palestinian, but his car has Israeli plates so we aren’t searched at the checkpoint. We inch past the concrete barriers and armored trucks. Harun holds his identity pass out the window, a soldier waves us through, and a few seconds later we’re in Bethlehem, a short drive from where Jesus Christ was born. It feels like entering prison. I don’t say prison in the sense of an ugly and depressing place you’d prefer not to visit. I say prison in the literal sense: a fortified enclosure where human beings are kept against their will by heavily armed guards who will shoot them if they try to leave. This is what modern life is like in Bethlehem, birthplace of our Lord and Savior.

Looking at the wall from the Israeli side breaks your heart because of its naked ugliness. On the Palestinian side, the unending slabs of concrete have been decorated with slogans, signs, and graffiti, which break your heart for different reasons. One of the hardest parts is reading the sumud series. These are short stories written on plain white posters, plastered to the wall about 10 feet up. Each story comes from a Palestinian woman or girl, and most are written in English, because the only people who read these stories are tourists.

One in particular catches my eye, by a woman named Antoinette:

All my life was in Jerusalem! I was there daily: I worked there at a school as a volunteer and all my friends live there. I used to belong to the Anglican Church in Jerusalem and was a volunteer there. I arranged the flowers and was active with the other women. I rented a flat but I was not allowed to stay because I do not have a Jerusalem ID card. Now I cannot go to Jerusalem: the wall separates me from my church, from my life. We are imprisoned here in Bethlehem. All my relationships with Jerusalem are dead. I am a dying woman.

The flowers are what gets me, because my mother also arranges flowers at church. Hers is an Eastern Orthodox congregation in Minneapolis, about 20 minutes by car from my childhood home. That’s about the same distance between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, although there aren’t any military checkpoints or armored cars patrolling the Minnesotan highways. Until today, I would’ve been unable to imagine what that would even look like. The situation here is so unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in real life that all I can think is, “it’s like a bad war movie.” For the Palestinian people who’ve been living under an increasingly brutal military occupation for the last 70 years, an entire lifetime, I can’t begin to guess at the depths of their helpless anger. What did Antoinette think, the first time the soldiers refused to let her pass? What did she say? What would my mother say? There wouldn’t be a goddamned thing she could do, or I could do, or my father or my sisters, or anyone else. We’d all just have to live with it, the soldiers groping us, beating us, mocking us. No wonder Antoinette gave up hope. In her place, would I be any different? We walk in silence for a long time.

We end up in a refugee camp called Aida, where more than 6,000 people live in an area roughly the size of a Super Target. Here, the air is literally poison. Israeli soldiers have fired so much tear gas into the tiny area that 100 percent of residents now suffer from its effects. If they were using the tear gas against, say, ISIS soldiers instead of Palestinian civilians, this would be a war crime, since “asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases” are banned by the Geneva Protocol. However, such practices are deemed to be acceptable in peacetime, since there’s no chance an unarmed civilian population would be able to retaliate with toxic agents of their own. Without the threat of escalation, chemical warfare is just crowd control.

Before we continue, there are three things you should know about Aida. The first is that there’s no clear dividing line between Aida and Bethlehem, so an unwary pedestrian can easily wander into the refugee camp without realizing it. The second thing is that it doesn’t look like a refugee camp, at least if you’re expecting a refugee camp to be full of emergency trailers, flimsy tents, and flaming barrels of trash. The third thing is that the kids who live there have terrible taste in soccer teams.

We meet the first group as soon as we enter the camp. There are five of them, all teenage boys. One of them is wearing a knockoff Yankees hat. They’re staring at us, and at once I’m very aware of my camera bag’s bulkiness and the blondeness of my fiancée’s hair. A loudspeaker crackles with the cry of the muzzein, and it’s only then that I realize how deeply we Americans have been conditioned to associate the Arabic language with violence and death. The boys exchange a quick burst of words, raising my blood pressure even higher, and cross the street toward us.

“Hello… what’s your name?” The kid who speaks first is tall and stocky, wearing the same black track jacket and blue jeans favored by 95 percent of the world’s male adolescents. He’s also sporting the Ronaldo haircut, as are several of his friends. Two of the kids start to pull out cigarettes, so I pull out my cigarettes faster and offer the pack to them. Is this a bad, irresponsible thing to do? Sure, and if you’re worried about the long-term health of these kids’ lungs, you should call the American manufacturers who supply Israel with the chemical weapons that are used to poison the air they breathe every day.

I tell the kid my name is Nick, and he shakes my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Shadi.” He’s carrying a rolled-up book, as are his friends, so I ask if he’s going to school. “Yeah bro, exams. We have three this week.” His friends laugh, and then engage in a quick tussle for the right of explaining that they’re heading to their math exam now, which is a boring and difficult subject, and I agree that it is, although at least you never have to use most of it after you finish school, a sentiment that earns me daps from Shadi and his friends, and we stand there giggling and smoking on the street corner of the refugee camp, though for a few moments we could be anywhere in the world.

My fiancée and I, both teachers by trade, start to pepper the kids with questions. Shadi says that he has one year left at the nearby high school, which is run by the UN refugee agency that was just stripped of half its funding by Trump. After he finishes, he plans to study at Bethlehem University. The other guys nod with approval, and speak of similar hopes. I ask them who their favorite footballer is, and they all say Ronaldo, at which I spit in disbelief, because everyone knows that Ronaldo sucks and Messi is much better, visca el Barça! Shadi and his friends break into huge grins, since few elements of brotherhood are more universal than talking shit about sports. Seconds later we’re howling with laughter as Shadi’s buddy makes insulting pantomimes about Messi’s diminutive size. A small part of my brain is loudly and repeatedly insisting that everything about this moment of life is batshit lunacy, that there’s no reason why I should be standing in a Palestinian refugee camp, yards away from buildings my country helped bomb into rubble, with my pretty fiancée and expensive camera, talking in English slang with a group of boys whose lungs are scarred with chemicals made in the USA, the exact kind of reckless young ruffians whose slingshots and stones are such a terrifying threat to the fearsome Israeli military, and the craziest thing of all is that here in the refugee camp, surrounded by derelict cars and rusty barbed wire and 6,000 displaced Palestinians, we are not in danger, at least not from whom you’d think. Here, in the refugee camp, we can joke around with people who speak our language and know our cultural references and actively seek to help us navigate their neighborhood. None of this is to say that Aida is a safe, comfortable, or morally defensible place to put human beings, but only that the people who live there treated us with such overwhelming kindness and decency that I have never been more ashamed at what my country does in my name. I tell Shadi and his friends to take the rest of my cigarettes, but they smile and decline.

“We, uh, have to go now,” says Shadi, as his friends start to walk up the street. “Do you have Facebook?” We do, because everyone does, and as we exchange information, I wish him good luck on his math exam. “No way, bro, I suck at math,” he says. We both laugh, and I pat him on the back.

“Fuck math. But hey, you’re gonna do great, Shadi.”

“Thanks bro. Fuck math.”

I hope he gets every question correct on his exam. I hope he goes to university and wins a scholarship to Oxford. I hope he invents some insanely popular widget and it makes him a billion dollars and he never has to breathe tear gas again.

We continue walking through Aida camp. The buildings are square, ugly, and drab, but the walls are decorated with colorful paintings of fish and butterflies and meadows (along with a somewhat darker array of scenes from the Israeli military occupation). We meet a group of cousins, aged four to 10, all girls, who ask if we can speak English. When we offer them a bag of candy, they take one piece each, and run away yelping when a man limps out the front door of their house. “Thank you,” he says, his face a mask of grave civility. Cars, all bearing green-and-white Palestinian plates instead of the blue-and-yellow Israeli ones, slow down so their drivers can shout “Hello!” We meet another group of kids, boys this time, who grab fistfuls of candy and make playful attempts to unfasten my wristwatch. We make a hasty retreat from this group. The streets are scorched in spots where tear gas canisters exploded. Narrow strips of pockmarked pavement lead us down steep hills and into winding alleys, and soon we’re lost.

This is how we meet Ahmed. He’s a tall man, about 40 years old, with a small black mustache and arms as thin as a stork’s legs. A yellow sofa leans against the concrete wall of the three-storey apartment building where he lives. Ahmed is sitting there with an elderly couple. He asks if we’d like a cup of tea, and although we’ve been warned about the old “come inside for a cup of tea” scam, we accept his offer. The elderly couple greets us in Arabic, and I try not to notice the large plastic bag of orange liquid peeking out from beneath the old man’s shirt.

While we climb the stairs to Ahmed’s apartment, he tells us that the old people are his parents. “They live here,” he says, pointing to the door on the first floor, “because they don’t walk very good. My mother has problems with her legs, my father is sick from the water.” He traces the pipes with his finger, and we see they’re coated in a thick reddish crust. “Here is the home of my big son,” he says when we reach the second floor. “He has a new baby.” We congratulate him on becoming a grandfather. “And I have a new baby, too! Come, I show you!” One more flight of stairs, and we arrive at Ahmed’s apartment.

It looks remarkably similar to a hundred other apartments we’ve visited. Framed photos of various family members hang on the living room walls, which are painted the same not-quite-white as most living room walls. There’s a beautiful red rug and a small TV. A woman is sitting on the sofa, nursing a baby as she folds socks. “My wife,” says Ahmed.

She speaks a little English too, and says that her name is Nada. She has a pale round face and long black hair. Her eyes are soft, kind, and completely exhausted. Yet if she’s annoyed or embarrassed by our presence, she doesn’t show it. She just hands the baby to Ahmed and goes to make the tea.

“I’m sorry for my house,” says Ahmed, cradling his son like a loaf of bread with legs. “We try to be clean, but…” There’s not so much as a slipper out of place, but I know what he means. “We rent this flat. And my son, and my parents. All rent. Before we have a farm, animals, olive trees, but now, we rent.” I ask about his job. He smiles and shakes his head. “I want a job,” he says, “I love to work. With my hands, with my mind. I love to work. But here, haven’t jobs.” For a second he looks like he’s going to continue this line of thinking, but he stops himself. “I help my wife, that is my job.” Ahmed laughs and passes his baby to my fiancée. “And he, he helps in the home?” She demurs while I protest in mock indignation. I do the dishes every morning before she even wakes up! Still laughing, Ahmed rubs his shins, and again it’s easy to forget we’re sitting in a refugee camp in Jesus’ hometown.

Then the baby wheezes. It’s a dry, scratchy wheeze. Ahmed squirms in his seat, looking embarrassed. The baby begins to cough. My fiancée rubs his back as the coughing turns wet and violent. Machine gun explosions blast from his tiny lungs. As an asthmatic, I recognize the sound of serious sickness. The baby writhes in my fiancée’s lap, struggling to breathe. He’s gasping and it’s getting worse fast. At moments like these, personal experience tells me that a nebulizer can be the difference between life and death. I don’t insult Ahmed by asking if he has one, because it’s clear that he doesn’t. All I can do is rub the boy’s chest with my finger, a stupid and useless massage. He kicks and stretches as if trying to wiggle away from the unseen demon that’s strangling him.

Nada hurries back with the tea. “I’m sorry,” she says, picking up the baby. She coos to him in Arabic and rubs his back, both of which are comforting but neither of which can relax the inflamed tissues of her infant’s lungs. “My baby…” Unable to find the words in English, she looks to her husband.

Ahmed rubs his cheek. “When she is pregnant, one night the soldiers come. They say the children throw stones. They always throw stones. So the soldiers shoot gas in all the houses. In the windows, over there.” His voice gets quieter. “And she is very sick. When the baby is born, he is sick too.” I ask him if it’s possible to find medicine. “Sometimes yes,” says Ahmed, “but very, very expensive.” For the first time, there’s a note of frustration in his voice. “Everything is expensive here. You see this,” and he picks up a pack of diapers, “it cost me thirty shekels. 10 dollars, almost. And the baby needs so many things. It is impossible to buy. I haven’t money for meat, how can I buy medicine?” He points to a plastic bag with four small pitas. “This is our food. One bread for my two sons, and two breads for my wife. She must make milk for our baby.” When I ask him what he eats, he holds up his cup of tea.

Somehow Nada has soothed the baby out of danger. His breathing is almost normal again, just a quiet raspy crackle. She’s still staring at him, her big brown eyes wide with worry. I don’t know how many times she’s done this before. I don’t know how many times are left before her luck runs out.

Somehow she’s keeping her baby alive with nothing but the sheer force of her love. I ask to use the toilet so I don’t have to cry in front of her.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #foreign policy #long article #long reads #worth it #Israeli Occupation #freepalestine #apartheid

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even-dumber-mysteries · 1 year ago

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[ID: two screenshots form drawfeeshow's Instagram. The image reads:

"Our PCRF charity stream is this Saturday! While we are looking forward to a fun and entertaining few hours of drawing and fundraising, we also recognize that by choosing this particular cause to get involved in, we are stepping into topics that are significantly more sensitive than the content you are used to on our channel. We've listened to the concerns from the community and want to ensure we're setting the right expectations.

Our primary goal with this stream is to provide aid to Palestinians facing dire humanitarian crisis. We will be encouraging our audience to both donate to the PCRF and to urge their elected representatives to back a ceasefire. We believe that rallying our wonderful community towards tangible actions is the best use of our platform in this instance.

We hold a strict policy against antisemitism and hate speech across all our streams, and this event will be no exception. Our moderators will be vigilant in maintaining a respectful and safe enviroment for everyone.

We recognize that some phrases and slogans associated with Palestinian liberation can be controversial within our diverse community. While there are varied interpretations and feelings towards these expressions, we do not view them as inherently antisemitic. We do not believe it is our place to police the language that Palestinians use to advocate for their own freedom and safety, so we will not censor pro-Palestinian speech in chat during the stream. We recognize that this stance will not please everyone in our community, but ultimately it is what best reflects our values. If you have reservations about our decision on this matter, we respectfully suggest that this particular stream might not be for you.

Choosing to do this stream meant accepting the risk of causing a division within our community and potentially losing followers, but the chance to make a real difference for those in need far outweighs any drawbacks.

Thank you to our wonderful community for predominantly being supportive of our decision to do this and for being caring compassionate people. Your encouragement reinforces our decision. Looking forward to Saturday!

End ID.]

Charity Stream Alert!

Let's raise more money than they planned again! 🙌🏻

#wanted to add drawfee's statement #once again let me know if i'm doing image description wrong please #i will fix it!#drawfee #pcrf #palestinian children's relief fund #self reblog #image described

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johnhardinsawyer · 4 years ago

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No Longer Strangers

John Sawyer

Bedford Presbyterian Church

7 / 18 / 21

Ephesians 2:11-22

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“No Longer Strangers”

(A New Harmony)

Have you seen these flags that are flown at homes and businesses and put on t-shirts and bumper stickers? They look like American flags, but instead of being red, white, and blue, these flags are black and white. Have you seen these flags? Now, I’m not entirely sure what brought these white and black flags about, but someone, somewhere, is making some money selling them. I guess some people think they look kind of cool – and, maybe they do – but I’m not entirely sure what, exactly, these flags mean to many of the people who fly and wear them. I mean, I kind of know what these black and white flags mean, but a flag is a symbol – a powerful symbol – filled with so much meaning. Now, I want to be careful and say that I’m not trying to make a judgment statement here about who flies which flag. I am concerned, though, because it has begun to feel like the United States of America finds itself living under different flags – different ideologies, different forms of expressing ideas and loyalties – “United” in name, only. There is so much dissonance and very little harmony. We’re estranged from one another – strangers in this strange, yet beloved, land.

This is not the first time it’s been this way. Our ideological and cultural differences can cause us to operate in different social worlds, different media worlds, different social media worlds, even different physical worlds in terms of which town or neighborhood we choose to live in (or which town or neighborhood welcomes us in). We might live in the same country, and we might technically be speaking the same language as our neighbors – like English – but we’re really speaking different languages about what is important, and true, and good to us. And it is so hard for us to understand one another. It happens between people of different races and cultures. It happens between people of different ages, and generations, and socio-economic backgrounds, and access to technology. It happens within families and in schools. It even happens in the church.

So, whether we’re talking about God, or who we voted for, or where we think the country is headed, or what we think about the complexities of race relations and the police and school curriculum and all of the historical and emotional baggage contained therein, there are so many ways that people can be so far apart on so many things. We are strangers from one another – and, as we were taught as children, strangers can be dangerous, so. . . we stay away from one another, and the divide grows.

And then, along comes today’s reading from the Letter to the Ephesians and it totally upends the tribalistic differences to which we might cling. Because in Jesus Christ, any differences we might think are so important – any differences we might have to those around us – are wiped away and everyone is given a new identity. The artificial barriers of thought, and feeling, and education, and money, and other things that we humans build, are dismantled. Anything that separates us is torn down.

The Letter to the Ephesians was likely written by someone who was close to the Apostle Paul – one of his followers, perhaps. And the letter is written to the church at Ephesus, but it is really meant to be read by church – including ours.

Just so you know, the ancient city of Ephesus was a port town in present-day Turkey – across the Aegean Sea from Greece. Back in the time this letter was written, Ephesus was already well over 1,000 years old, and it was a thriving place with beautiful buildings, and a gigantic road from the harbor to the city – a first-century super-highway where eight chariots could ride side-by-side. Ephesus had a huge amphitheater, and a library the size of our sanctuary (a rarity in the ancient world), and the temple of Artemis, which was at least four times the size of our sanctuary.[1] In Greek mythology, Artemis was the daughter of Zeus – the goddess of the hunt.[2]

So, in addition to the local – native – people, and the Greeks who conquered and settled the area, and the Romans who later conquered and settled the area, people from all over the known world traveled to and through Ephesus over the years, bringing other cultures and religions with them. These included Jews from Palestine and, later on, Christians. As you might imagine, this bustling melting pot of cultures, and races, and religions, was not without conflict. Sound familiar? It was like there were multiple flags flying over the same city – as many flags as there were viewpoints and loyalties. And, apparently, there were people who thought that their way of living and practicing religion was the best way – that they were the in-crowd and everyone else was out. There might have even been people in the church at Ephesus who felt this way about other people in the same church. Can you imagine? Shocking, I know, but people back then didn’t have many options in terms of churches. It’s not like they could pack up and leave to go to the other church down the street. There was only one church at Ephesus.

And then this letter arrives, stating that God has a different way of life, and faith, and community in mind for us. There’s only one church, after all, so maybe we should live and work to make it so. Now, many of the people in the church were so-called Gentiles – they were not ethnic or religious Jews, descended from one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Instead, they were locals, of Greek, or Roman, or some other lineage, and they had heard the good news about this Palestinian Jew, Jesus Christ, and had come to believe in him. Just prior to today’s passage, we can read the words later made famous by Martin Luther and other Reformers: “[f]or by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. . .” (Ephesians 2:8) Another way of putting it is that, in the very act of coming to have faith in Jesus Christ, you and I are saved by God’s grace. So these Gentiles in Ephesus, who have come to trust and follow Jesus, now find themselves as members of Christ’s body. They are adopted, as we heard last week, and are given a new identity as God’s own children.

There’s only one problem, though. They go to church with people who love Jesus, too, but who look down their noses at these Gentiles because they are not Jewish. I mean, Jesus was Jewish, so shouldn’t everyone who loves Jesus be Jewish too – with all of the Jewish rules and regulations, including being circumcised? To which the author of the letter to the Ephesians says, basically, “Don’t you know that God is up to something new and different for all of humanity, not just one small part of it?”

You see, there are these things that divide us as people. Maybe it’s where we’re from, or what we believe, or who our family is, or what we’ve been taught about who we are. And all of this makes us different from those people, whoever they may be and whatever flag they may be flying or pledging allegiance to.

But, as the author of today’s passage writes,

. . . now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (2:13-14)

In other words, Christ Jesus bridges the divide between human beings and, through his loving sacrifice, he draws us close together and makes us one people. No more walls. No more hostility. No more flags. Only the cross of Jesus Christ.

Can we still fly a flag? Yes, if we need to. Can we still love our country or our heritage? Of course! But, in Christ Jesus, our true country is God’s kingdom and our true heritage is built upon the loving and faithful foundation of prophets, and apostles, and Jesus, himself.

In so many ways, the dividing lines that we draw and walls we build might feel like our natural default setting as human beings, but they really go against who we truly are – who God made us to be. As the Celtic Christian author, Philip Newell, writes:

Like never before in the history of humanity, we are becoming aware that what we do to a part we do to the whole, that the parts will not be well as long as the whole is neglected, and that the whole will not be well if the parts are neglected. We know that it is meaningless to speak of being truly well as parents if our children are unwell. We know that we cannot claim true wellness for our nation as long as other nations are suffering. And we know that the human species can in no sense be considered healthy when the body of the earth is deeply infected. Wellness is found not in isolation but in relationship. . . [The Holy] Spirit is breathing a new vision of oneness into our awareness today. And it transcends the narrow boundaries that our nations and religions have tried to place around us. A new and vast Pentecost is stirring in the human soul. How will we serve it?[3]

Now, this was written ten years ago, long before Covid-19 vaccines and Delta variants, but it somehow rings quite true in the face of all that we’re facing. We are connected to one another, even if we don’t act like it. I find Newell’s question compelling. The Holy Spirit “transcends the narrow boundaries that our nations and religions have tried to place around us. . . How will we serve it?”

How will we serve the Holy Spirit in the spirit of the oneness to which God is calling us, and leading us, and perhaps dragging us against our wills as we pray with our lips for things to be on earth as they are in heaven and yet live in such a way that we would gladly have nothing to do with a neighbor who thinks or acts or lives differently from us?

This is tough stuff, my friends, but in Christ Jesus, the God who might seem so far off from sinful and petty human beings, like you and I, brings us near. And in Christ Jesus, the people who might seem so far off from us are brought near, too – from Mitch McConnell to Nancy Pelosi, from rainbow flags to MAGA hats, from Tucker Carlson to Bill Maher, from Black Lives Matter to Blue Lives Matter, from wherever you may be – and whatever flag you fly – and how you see the world to wherever those who are most strange to you and estranged from you are.

How will we serve the Spirit? By living and working and serving and loving until all people are no longer strangers. We have our work cut out for us – whether that work takes place deep in our own hearts or out in the world, dismantling our pride and our prejudice and making us one. Who is farthest away from you and how is the Spirit moving you to become one? In Christ Jesus, God is creating a new humanity that embraces our very human need for one another – our need for harmony and wholeness and peace. . . even with those people who seem so far off from us.

We have been saved by grace and this is not our own doing, but may we respond to God’s grace by living and working for God’s harmony, and wholeness, and peace.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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[1] Watson E. Mills, ed. Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1990) 255-256. James L. Blevins - “Ephesus”.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis.

[3] J. Philip Newell, A New Harmony: The Spirit, the Earth, and the Human Soul (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011) xiii-xiv.

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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Israeli Mob Organized Destruction of Arab Business on WhatsApp

A video posted to Twitter by the Israeli news channel Kan 11 on May 12 captured a mob of people destroying an Arab-owned ice cream shop in the city of Bat Yam. The video shows people kicking and swinging sticks to smash its glass storefront, tearing down a fence, and throwing it into the shop.

"I don't feel safe," Henry Sassin, the Arab owner of the ice cream shop, called Victory, told Israel's Channel 12. "They broke the entire place, all the glass. I have no idea what the damage is. We need to see what we can fix and what we can do."

The mob in Bat Yam, the same city where a mob dragged a man out of his car and nearly beat him to death, was one of many that caused chaos and destruction across Israel and in particular in its "mixed" cities, which have both large Jewish and Arab populations. Israeli and international media have said that cities like Bat Yam "erupted" in violence after protests in East Jerusalem against the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into Israel, and Israel's brutal bombing campaign against Gaza, which so far has killed more than 200 people, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that much of the mob violence by Israelis against Arabs in cities across the country is not spontaneous, and organized in private WhatsApp and Telegram groups.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Israeli extremists have formed more than 100 new groups on Facebook's Whatsapp to target attacks. Motherboard has also obtained a screenshot from one of these Whatsapp groups that specifically organized the destruction of Sassin's Victory ice cream shop.

"Shalom to all of Israel's Jewish citizens," the message, written in Hebrew, said. "I am honored to invite you to take part in a massive attack on Arabs that will take place today at 18:00 in the Bat Yam boardwalk (at Victory). Please arrive with the appropriate gear brass knuckles, swords, knives, sticks, pistols, and vehicles with bull bars."

The Whatsapp message calling for an attack on the Victory ice cream shop in Bat Yam.

Motherboard first saw the Whatsapp message shared on Facebook by a user who was condemning it. The Facebook user did not respond to a request for comment.

The Telegraph previously reported that the owner of the ice cream shop Sassin saw the message.

The message was shared in a Whatsapp group called "attacks on Arabs." FakeReporter, a group that monitors and reports disinformation and extremist content online, told Motherboard that it has seen the same message spread across many Whatsapp and Telegram groups. FakeReporter is partnered with the Democratic Bloc, an organization dedicated to defending democracy in Israel. Ori Kol, FakeReporter's cofounder, told Motherboard that the Whatsapp group is influenced by and includes members of "La Familia," the name for fans of Jerusalem's Israeli soccer team Beitar. Beitar's fans are infamously racist against Arabs, and are known to chant "death to the Arabs" at their soccer games. Another video of mobs in Bat Yam captures the same chant.

"Of course: wear a kippah, tzitzit, talit, and Israeli flag," the Whatsapp message said.

The kippah, tzitzit, and talit are Jewish garments that are worn by some observant Jews, and many Jews wear the tzitzit and kippah especially on a daily basis. The video of the mob destroying the Victory ice cream shop shared by Kan 11 shows that some of the people breaking the glass storefront are wearing the tzitzit (the white long threads hanging down the side of the legs), and in the kippah (the knitted cap on their head).

Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, told Motherboard that FakeReporter tried to warn Israeli police about the attack.

"The Victory message was circulating hours before the attack, and we sent it to the police," Schatz said. "The messages are explicitly calling for people to get armed, and to attack people, and how to not get caught by the police."

FakeReporter also showed Motherboard multiple messages that were shared across multiple Telegram and Whatsapp groups that were nearly identical to the one that called for the attack on the ice cream shop in Bat Yam. These groups, Kol said, have already been removed. One message, which was shared before the message calling for the attack on the ice cream shop, contained the exact same language but called for an attack in Tel Aviv. FakeReporter speculates that this attack was redirected to Bat Yam because there was too much police presence in Tel Aviv.

This message is identical to the one above, but was shared a day earlier and calls for violence in Tel Aviv instead of of Bat Yam.

Schatz said that FakeReporter tried to warn Israeli police about this online organizing for violence, but was initially ignored.

"The police still doesn't understand that this is taking place online and that they need to stop it," he said. "We directed them to 20 specific locations where people were planning attacks."

Today, Schatz said, the police is more responsive to its reports, and FakeReporter has a “direct connection” to the city of Haifa, which has a large Arab population.

“There's a ray of light here,” Schatz said. “The violence is surging, but a group of people got together [FakeReporter researchers], and without exaggeration, I think saved lives.”

Schatz also said that Telegram has not responded to its reporting, and that Facebook, which owns Whatsapp, has been slow to respond.

A WhatsApps spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement that "As a private messaging service, we do not have access to the contents of people's personal chats though when information is reported to us, we take action to ban accounts we believe may be involved in causing imminent harm. We also quickly respond to valid legal requests from law enforcement for the limited information available to us."

However, both Schatz and Kol believe it's primarily the government's responsibility to stop the violence.

"It shouldn't be our job to do this," Kol said. "The same way the Iron Dome protects us from rockets, it's the government's job to protect us from how the violence in the streets is being organized online."

Joseph Cox contributed reporting to this piece.

This piece has been updated to include a statement from WhatsApp.

Israeli Mob Organized Destruction of Arab Business on WhatsApp syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Thursday, April 15, 2021

Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic (NYT) Rory Levin, a sixth grader in Bloomington, Minnesota, used to hate going to school. He has a health condition that often makes him feel apprehensive around other students. Taking special-education classes did little to ease his anxiety. So when his district created a stand-alone digital-only program, Bloomington Online School, last year for the pandemic, Rory opted to try it. Now the 11-year-old is enjoying school for the first time, said his mother, Lisa Levin. He loves the live video classes and has made friends with other online students, she said. A year after the coronavirus set off a seismic disruption in public education, some of the remote programs that districts intended to be temporary are poised to outlast the pandemic. Even as students flock back to classrooms, a subset of families who have come to prefer online learning are pushing to keep it going—and school systems are rushing to accommodate them. At least several hundred of the nation’s 13,000 school districts have established virtual schools this academic year, with an eye to operating them for years to come, education researchers said. Unlike many makeshift pandemic school programs, these stand-alone virtual schools have their own teachers, who work only with remote students and use curricula designed for online learning.

U.S. Signals Support for Ukraine and Will Add Troops in Germany (NYT) The United States and NATO, anxious about a major Russian troop buildup on Ukraine’s border, signaled strong support for the Kyiv government on Tuesday. And in what was considered another message to Moscow, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said on Tuesday that the United States would increase its military presence in Germany by about 500 personnel and that it was scuttling plans introduced under President Donald J. Trump for a large troop reduction in Europe. The moves come as American and European officials have grown increasingly concerned about Moscow’s deployment of additional troops near the Ukraine border.

Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11 (NYT/Washington Post) President Biden will withdraw American combat troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, declaring an end to the nation’s longest war and overruling warnings from his military advisers that the departure could prompt a resurgence of the same terrorist threats that sent hundreds of thousands of troops into combat over the past 20 years. In rejecting the Pentagon’s push to remain until Afghan security forces can assert themselves against the Taliban, Mr. Biden forcibly stamped his views on a policy he has long debated but never controlled. Now, after years of arguing against an extended American military presence in Afghanistan, the president is doing things his way, with the deadline set for the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. A senior Biden administration official said the president had come to believe that a “conditions-based approach” would mean that American troops would never leave the country. The war has cost trillions of dollars in addition to the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. service members and at least 100,000 Afghan civilians.

St. Vincent seeks water, funds as volcano keeps erupting (AP) Leaders of volcano-wracked St. Vincent said Tuesday that water is running short as heavy ash contaminates supplies, and they estimated that the eastern Caribbean island will need hundreds of millions of dollars to recover from the eruption of La Soufriere. Between 16,000 to 20,000 people have been evacuated from the island’s northern region, where the exploding volcano is located, with more than 3,000 of them staying at more than 80 government shelters. Dozens of people stood in lines on Tuesday for water or to retrieve money sent by friends and family abroad. Among those standing in one crowd was retired police officer Paul Smart. “The volcano caught us with our pants down, and it’s very devastating,” he said. “No water, lots of dust in our home. We thank God we are alive, but we need more help at this moment.”

Mumbai imposes strict virus restrictions as infections surge (AP) The teeming metropolis of Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra, the Indian state worst hit by the pandemic, face stricter restrictions for 15 days starting Wednesday in an effort to stem the surge of coronavirus infections. Top state officials stressed that the closure of most industries, businesses, public places and limits on the movement of people didn’t constitute a lockdown. Last year, a sudden, harsh, nationwide lockdown left millions jobless overnight. Stranded in cities with no income or food, thousands of migrant workers walked on highways to get home. Since then, state leaders have repeatedly stressed that another lockdown wasn’t on the cards. The distinction did little to allay Ramachal Yadav’s anxieties. On Wednesday morning, he joined thousands of others at a Mumbai railway station getting on a train back home. “There is no work,” said the 45-year-old. India has detected over 180,000 new infections in the past 24 hours, about a third in Maharashtra state. India has so far confirmed over 13.9 million cases and 172,000 dead in what is likely an undercount.

Beijing’s All For Collectivism, Until It’s Organized Labor (NPR) 31-year-old Chen Guojiang, better known as Mengzhua, was delivering hundreds of take-out food orders a day, zipping along Beijing’s streets on an electric scooter at death-defying speeds. Along the way, he filmed short videos documenting the viciously competitive conditions for China’s estimated 3 million workers who use digital platforms for delivery jobs. He also called for collective action against powerful e-commerce companies to demand better pay. Mengzhua disappeared in February. In March, news emerged that he was being held in detention for picking quarrels and provoking trouble—a catch-all charge commonly used to detain both petty criminals and political activists. After police confirmed Mengzhu would be tried on criminal charges, friends and supporters began collecting donations to cover his lawyer fees. Within days, they had raised about $20,000 and attracted the attention of China’s state security forces, who then contacted each of the donation campaign organizers to warn them not to help Mengzhu. An academic who studies Chinese labor activism said “Anything that coheres collective power for workers is seen as a threat to state power. [Authorities] cannot accept ... anything that looks a little bit like an independent trade union. That is a red line for the Chinese government.” Mengzhu’s social media accounts have been deleted, and he faces up to five years in prison.

Tensions Mount Over Taiwan (Foreign Policy) Twenty-five Chinese jets breached Taiwan’s air defense identification zone on Monday, China’s largest incursion into Taiwanese airspace in a year. The maneuver is part of a long-standing Chinese harassment campaign that intensified last year, when Taiwan saw a record 380 incursions. Intended to wear down Taiwanese morale, the constant intrusions force risky and costly scrambling by its fighters in response. Taiwan has said it will no longer respond by dispatching jets and, instead, by tracking the flights with missile defense systems. The intensified campaign in part results from increasing nationalism within the Chinese system. It is also a response to signals that the United States is growing closer to Taiwan. Last week, the Biden administration loosened restraints on U.S. officials meeting with their Taiwanese counterparts and dispatched a team of retired politicians to Taipei in what a White House official called a “personal signal” of his commitment. These gestures are all symbolic, but it’s hard to overstate how much they matter in generating anger inside the Chinese political system. Hatred of the idea of an independent Taiwan is drummed into Chinese kids from kindergarten. The chance of actual Chinese invasion still remains small, despite recent warnings from U.S. admirals. To assemble the forces required for even a chance of success would take China weeks at best and be visible well in advance. Rationally, an invasion would be a very high-risk move from a largely risk-averse leadership. The question is: Is the Chinese leadership acting rationally? In the last year, the tone of its rhetoric has intensified in a way that alarms even seasoned readers of Beijing’s language. Chinese diplomats’ aggressive posturing and state media’s violent rhetoric seem off—it could mean Beijing is capable of making dumb mistakes. In a system where backing down from conflict could leave military leaders or provincial officials politically exposed, a small clash in the ocean or in the air could very easily spin out of control.

Trump-era spike in Israeli settlement growth has only begun (AP) An aggressive Israeli settlement spree during the Trump era pushed deeper than ever into the occupied West Bank, territory the Palestinians seek for a state, with more than 9,000 homes built and thousands more in the pipeline, according to an AP investigation. Satellite images and data obtained by The Associated Press document for the first time the full impact of the policies of then-President Donald Trump, who abandoned decades-long U.S. opposition to the settlements and proposed a Mideast plan that would have allowed Israel to keep them all—even those deep inside the West Bank. Although the Trump plan has been scrapped, the lasting legacy of construction will make it even harder to create a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. President Joe Biden’s administration has embraced the two-state solution—which is still widely seen as the only solution to the decades-old conflict—but given no indication on how it plans to promote it.

Biden backs UAE arms sale (Foreign Policy) The Biden administration has decided to follow through on the sale of $23 billion worth of military equipment to the United Arab Emirates, HuffPost reported on Tuesday. The sale—which includes 50 F-35 fighter jets—had been finalized in the final hours of the Trump administration and was paused for review in the first weeks of Biden’s term. An attempt to block the sale in the Senate was defeated by a 49-47 vote in December. A White House review of U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia is still ongoing.

Study finds people want more than watchdogs for journalists (AP) A study of the public’s attitude toward the press reveals that distrust goes deeper than partisanship and down to how journalists define their very mission. The study defines five core principles or beliefs that drive most journalists: keep watch on public officials and the powerful; amplify voices that often go unheard; society works better with information out in the open; the more facts people have the closer they will get to the truth; and it’s necessary to spotlight a community’s problems to solve them. Yet the survey, which asked non-journalists a series of questions designed to measure support for each of those ideas, found unqualified majority support for only one of them. Two-thirds of those surveyed fully supported the fact-finding mission. Half of the public embraced the principle that it’s important for the media to give a voice to the less powerful, according to the survey, and slightly less than half fully supported the roles of oversight and promoting transparency. Less than a third of the respondents agreed completely with the idea that it’s important to aggressively point out problems. Only 11% of the public, most of them liberals, offered full support to all five ideas.

TP Victory (WSJ) We’ve done it: Americans have enough toilet paper. In January, sales of toilet paper were down 4.3 percent compared to January 2020, as a nation worked through a glut of toilet tissue accumulated in linen closets over the course of months. Following the domestic onset of the pandemic, Americans resorted to the Smaug strategy of bathroom tissue management, which was to hoard it and avariciously seek more out despite ample reserves. At the time, companies had difficulties expanding capacity to make more of it to keep pace, because toilet paper requires an enormous unique machine to make. It’s also very clear from the data it’s just a toilet paper stockpile America is working through; sales of paper towels were up 10 percent in January, and household cleaners were up 75 percent.

#headlines #news

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xhxhxhx · 7 years ago

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I first met Orde Wingate in James Barr’s A Line in the Sand (Bloomsbury, 2011), where he’s introduced as a “young, well-connected and faintly unhinged army officer” who had just been assigned to Palestine:

He admired the Jews’ industry (a Jew was ‘worth twenty, thirty or even a hundred’ Arabs, he believed) and he instinctively sympathised with their predicament because he had been an outsider all his life. The son of Plymouth Brethren, he had been ostracised at boarding school where, as a day-boy who disliked team sports, he acquired the nickname ‘Stinker’. It was only after he scraped into officer training that he realised he could turn his unsettling, cadaverous looks to his advantage – when he was challenged to run the gauntlet of his fellow cadets naked, Wingate walked up to each in turn and dared them to strike him, and thus made it through untouched. ‘He had fiery, searching, unsmiling eyes – extraordinary deep-set eyes that penetrated into your inner being in such a way that you could not conceal the slightest of your facial movements or say a single superfluous word,’ said David Hacohen, the man who had built Tegart’s fence. ‘He was fanatical,’ recalled the man who had shared an office with him in Jerusalem. ‘I liked him very much. I got on very well with him. But I must admit he was a fanatic.’

He requested permission to set up ‘Special Night Squads’ with British soldiers and Jewish auxiliaries to police the rebellious Arabs:

Fit, working in silence and trained in ambush tactics, they would try ‘to persuade the gangs that, in their predatory raids, there is every chance of their running into a Government gang which is determined to destroy them, not by an exchange of shots at a distance, but by bodily assault with bayonet and bomb’.

Wingate did not think it would take long to persuade the Arab gang-leaders to stay in at night. ‘In person they are feeble and their whole theory of war is to cut and run. Like all ignorant and primitive people they are especially liable to panic.’ Once the threat of the gangs had gone, the villagers would have no excuse for silence. At that point, Wingate argued, the British could more reasonably put the villages under pressure, because non-cooperation could only imply complicity with the gangs.

In 1938, the first Special Night Squads were set up. One of the Jewish recruits was the young Moshe Dayan, who thought Wingate -- who was now teaching himself Hebrew using the Bible -- rather strange:

[Dayan] was both inspired and intimidated by Wingate, who initially addressed his recruits in broken Hebrew, revolver in one hand, Bible in the other. ‘After a while we asked him to switch to English,’ said Dayan, ‘since we had difficulty in following his strange Hebrew accent and could understand only the recognisable biblical quotations in our language.’

In June 1938, the Squads began their raids, and Wingate went with them:

He struck one member of his squad across the face with a stick when the man failed to shoot an Arab horseman silhouetted against the skyline. On another occasion he interrogated one of four captured Arabs by choking him with a handful of grit and sand he had scooped up from the ground. When his prisoner still refused to talk, he turned to one of the Jewish recruits. ‘Shoot this man,’ he ordered, but the recruit hesitated. ‘Did you hear? Shoot him.’ The recruit did as he was told. Wingate turned to the three surviving detainees. ‘Now speak!’ he bellowed. Back at camp, Wingate’s men were bemused by his behaviour. He would sit in his tent naked, reading the Bible and scrubbing himself with a brush, or eating a raw onion as if it were an apple.

After a failed attack on an Arab gang in July 1938 -- Wingate had set up ambushes around the wrong village -- the Squads were disbanded. At this point, Wingate disappears from Barr’s narrative. He does not reappear.

Today, however, Wingate returned to me, in Artemis Cooper’s Cairo in the War (Hamish Hamilton, 1989):

In the summer of 1941, a remarkable soldier mounted a campaign against the formidable bureaucracy of GHQ, a campaign that nearly culminated in his own death. The imperfect instrument of a severe Puritan God, who had marked him for great things, Charles Orde Wingate had first come to Wavell’s attention in Palestine in 1936. The latter thought him brilliant but dangerous, with his passionate Zionist opinions which echoed the thunder of the Old Testament; and, like all fanatics, Wingate was short on both tact and humour.

In 1940, to increase pressure on the Italians in Abyssinia, Wavell asked Orde Wingate to organise assistance to the supporters of Haile Selassie. From a base in Khartoum, Wingate managed to form his unit, with little help from an obstinate and sluggish military administration. He was a difficult man whose eccentricities were famous: he carried an alarm clock rather than a watch so as to time appointments, and instead of taking baths to keep clean he brushed himself all over with a hairbrush.

By January 1941, his mixed band of Sudanese, Ethiopian and British troops named ‘Gideon Force’ was ready; and, accompanied by Haile Selassie, they crossed the frontier into Abyssinia. As Gideon Force made its way over the mountains, Italian garrisons fell and patriots flocked to the Emperor. It was a brilliant military operation, which enabled Haile Selassie to return to Addis Ababa in triumph at the head of his troops.

[Wingate had wanted to call his Palestinian Special Night Squads ‘Gideon Force’ too -- he even set himself up in Ein Harod, where Gideon had picked the three hundred men who would scatter the Midianites -- but the higher-ups hadn’t allowed it.]

Apart from the addition of a bar to the DSO he had won in Palestine, the congratulations of Wingate’s superiors were brief. In Harar, he was told that Gideon Force was to be disbanded. He appeared to take the news calmly, and said he would return to Cairo to lobby for permission to raise a Jewish army in Palestine.

In June 1941, GHQ was still recovering from the three defeats of Cyrenaica, Greece and Crete. No one had time for the guerilla hero of Abyssinia. He was ordered to revert to the rank of major; and, when he tried to get the allowances due to his volunteer soldiers in Gideon Force, he was informed that this was not possible because the claims had not been submitted at the correct time. The final straw was to be told that, because his men fought behind enemy lines, they did not qualify as ‘a unit in the field’.

What happened next was gracefully passed over by Wavell, when he came to write up Wingate’s life for the Dictionary of National Biography; but the incident is described at length in Christopher Sykes’s book. Sykes was well-placed to find out about it, for one of those involved in the story was his old boss Colonel Thornhill, for whom he had worked in SOE. Thornhill was an amiable, indiscreet man who was often to be found propping up the bar in Shepheard’s or the Continental, and who had been so disastrously involved in the Aziz el Masri affair.

Wingate took a room in the Continental Hotel. There he wrote a blistering report on the treatment of Gideon Force, and how it had been hampered and obstructed by those he chose to call the ‘military apes’. It did not make him any friends at GHQ, and Wavell – though he sided with Wingate on the subject of allowances – was heard to say that the report might almost justify placing him under arrest for insubordination.

Wingate was now seriously ill with malaria, but would not see an army doctor for fear of being relegated to a staff job. However, he did manage to visit a local doctor, who prescribed a drug called atabrine to reduce his temperature. He over-dosed himself liberally which inflamed his nerves, already ragged from brooding alone in his room. In the struggles he had had to set up Gideon Force, and the way the military administration had dealt with it, he saw a plot to absorb Ethiopia into the British Empire. It was too late to do anything. He had failed himself, his men, the Emperor Haile Selassie, and God.

On the afternoon of 4 July Wingate’s temperature stood at 104° and he had run out of pills. He made his way out of the hotel in an effort to find the doctor and get some more atabrine, but so feverish was he that he could not remember the way, and thought he was going mad. He went back to the Continental, and decided to kill himself. On the way to his room, Wingate met the floor steward who brought him his food; and rather than arouse the man’s suspicions, he closed but did not lock the door to his room. He had already stabbed his throat once with his hunting knife when he staggered back to the door, locked it, and then returned to the bathroom to try again. He plunged the knife into what he hoped was the jugular, and then collapsed on the floor.

As luck would have it, the next door room was occupied by the inquisitive Colonel Thornhill. Having heard a number of very strange noises coming through the wall, Thornhill knocked on Wingate’s door. There was no answer. Thornhill alerted the manager. With the master key they got in, and Wingate was rushed to the 15th Scottish Hospital. He was operated on immediately and, thanks to Thornhill and the surgeon’s skill, his life was saved.

The story provoked mixed reactions at GHQ; but as one brigadier put it, whether he was court-martialled or put in a lunatic asylum the career of the troublesome Major Wingate was over. Major Simonds, who had been part of Gideon Force, visited Wingate in hospital and asked the reason for his attempted suicide. The reply was: ‘I did it to call attention to our wrongs.’

There was a verandah at the end of the ward and, as Wingate became stronger, he walked up and down it of an evening. Once, he heard a woman call him by name from the private wing. It was Pistol-Packing Mary Newall, whose No. 11 Convoy was soon to be amalgamated into the ATS. She was in hospital with duodenal ulcers.

In her straightforward, no-nonsense way, she told him that there had been a suicide in her own family; and that if he wanted to talk, he should talk to her. From then on Orde Wingate spent many hours sitting with Mrs Newall, talking and reading his Bible aloud. ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ said Wingate, as he finished reading the Book of Job. ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Newall. ‘I’ve been asleep for the last half hour.’ Since she had many visitors, Wingate began to meet people again. His spirits lightened, and he began to feel that God had forgiven him. One visitor was rather taken aback, however, when Wingate remarked that anyone who wanted to slit their own throat should have a hot bath first, otherwise – as he had found – the muscles would be too tense to cut.

What a character! What a lunatic!

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armeniaitn · 5 years ago

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Letters to the Editor: August 5, 2020: Propagandizing for the enemy

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/letters-to-the-editor-august-5-2020-propagandizing-for-the-enemy-43229-04-08-2020/

Letters to the Editor: August 5, 2020: Propagandizing for the enemy

Propagandizing for the enemyWith the headline “Netanyahu: Annexation is still on the agenda” (August 4), the reporters are apparently still buying into our enemies’ propaganda line – if not stating an outright lie!It’s also laughable, as the article starts by quoting the prime minister himself saying that Israel may still apply sovereignty.It has been pointed out by many columnists in The Jerusalem Post that the term “annexation” is a misnomer. The proper term is “applying sovereignty” or applying Israeli law to the areas mentioned in the Trump peace plan.So why does the Post continue to mislead the entire world by putting the word “annexation” in the headline?The article itself mentions the terms applying sovereignty or law no fewer than nine times. Nowhere is the word “annexation” mentioned – except when quoting the French foreign minister.AVRAHAM FRIEDMAN Ganei Modi’in PHYLLIS HECHT Hashmonaim The Trump and Netanyahu monstersIn “Callous inhumanity” (August 4), Heather Stone manages to cramp into her short article demonizing US President Donald Trump words and slurs including: he is callous, inhumane, inept, narcissistic, ruthless, prostrated himself, enables hate, emboldens violence, depraved indifference, doesn’t value the lives of civilians, soldiers or schoolchildren and more. Guess what? The writer is the Chair of Democrats Abroad – Israel. Does she really believe that this type of “political hate journalism” will influence anybody to change their voting preferences to Democratic? Rather the opposite. The article is hysterical, largely unsubstantiated and says nothing about real issues of concern, such as the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren approach to Israel and the takeover of the Democratic Party by the radical anti-Israeli left wing. YIGAL HOROWITZ Beersheba Regarding Ehud Olmert’s latest article (“Police vs. the citizens,” (July 31), my previous letters regarding Olmert’s “yellow journalism” have not been published, but enough is enough! What kind of excuse for commentary is “until Netanyahu leaves and with him his delusional wife and deranged son!” This is not journalism, it is simply dirty revenge. I do not remember anyone attacking Olmert’s family using such words during his terms in office. While Olmert evidently hopes that Netanyahu will soon disappear into the depths of the sea or some other place, we might recall that Maasiyahu Prison served well enough for Olmert. The author of this letter was never the prime minister of Israel, but has also never been imprisoned for any criminal offence.PROF. KENNETH KOSLOWE Petah Tikva I rubbed my eyes three times before re-reading “Yair Netanyahu given tweeting restraining order” (August 3). I had to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me.To censure a son for defending his father would, in normal circumstances, be ridiculous, but here, when the man is being constantly vilified, cursed, slandered, witch-hunted and judged guilty before trial, it is unforgivable.Let your readers (and the honorable judge of the Jerusalem Magistrates Court) put themselves in the position of young Netanyahu, watching every day and all hours of the day and night how a mob led by mobsters (protest leaders Gonen Ben Itzhak, Yishai Hadas and Haim Shadmi) screams through the streets of our capital city, unable to digest the fact that their philosophies (nay – their motives) do not represent the majority of our citizens, as shown decisively in all the elections of the last 30 years. Unable to defeat the older Netanyahu by fair means, they have descended to the foul means of incitement to riot. What would you do, if not stand up to defend your father? Well, if you would not, then you are all either lying to yourselves, or just plain degenerate.You may not agree with or even condone his coarseness of tongue and forthright manner of reacting, but just think how hurt this young man is seeing the father whom he has venerated for so many years and felt pride in his tremendous achievements for the benefit of the people of Israel and the unprecedented upswing of diplomatic prestige in the international sphere that he orchestrated – seeing him torn to pieces by our “unbiased” media and unfettered mobsters.LAURENCE BECKER Jerusalem Could someone please explain to me (and to other bewildered people) why the government allows demonstrations of tens of thousands, where social distancing is a bad joke, and we can only have 20 or so people at my son’s wedding at the end of the month? What is the logic behind this rule?Perhaps we should call it a demonstration, (but for love and happiness). Then we will get a permit for the 300 we wanted to have.And it won’t be violent.BATYA BERLINGER Jerusalem Inclusion confusion“US Jews opposing Israeli policy must be included in Jewish unity talks” (August 2), comes from the extreme Left, as indicated by its use of the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian loaded terminology such as “occupation.” Writer Ilan Bloch claims “millions” of American Jews who are “deeply engaged with Israel see its actions as going against the essence of Judaism itself.”Really? Does the writer have any solid evidence to support these wild assertions? Deeply engaged? Really?Are these “millions” really knowledgeable about Judaism? How many of the alleged “millions” had anything remotely resembling a Jewish education?There were so many untruths and distortions in the article that discredit it, but the basic point the author seems to be making is, “You may disagree with us profoundly but please don’t ignore us or forget us.”To which the only reasonable answer can be, “So don’t try to impose your outdated irrelevant political and fundamentally non-Jewish secular positions and beliefs on us.”DR. JOSEPH BERGER Netanya Disengaged and enragedRegarding “Disengagement was ‘absolute mistake” says mission commander” (July 31), the anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from the 21 communities comprising Gush Katif on Tisha Be’av 2005) seems to bring out chest-thumpers who confess their wrongdoing. Contrite retired generals (like Gershon HaCohen featured in this article), politicians and policy makers join the ever-growing list of those who admit their folly, their fateful and fraught mistakes that led to the forceful disgorging of 8,500 law-abiding civilians.Indeed, prime minister Ariel Sharon and his government (including then foreign affairs and finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu) all bear shame for supporting and executing what was arguably the greatest tragedy in modern Israeli history. In fact, it was an orchestrated and stinking maneuver featuring Likud and their cynical coalition partners, assisted by a gleeful Supreme Court.How does a catastrophe like that occur? Where are the checks and balances crucial to democracy?But beyond skewed governmental decisions, where were the common sense and basic decency that dictate that the innocent get support and protection, while the terrorists get a good thrashing?Personally, I’ve had enough of the hand-wringing politicians and leaders who, like clockwork, annually cry “Peccavi.”Israel deserves better. We must make our leaders take responsibility for their actions, through mandated accountability and transparency. To the point, laws need to be put into place, a Freedom of Information Act that gives ordinary citizens the right to pry open – unhindered and in a timely manner – government archives. Existing, empty laws that shield corrupt leaders under one pretense or another are less than worthless.Enough of the chest-thumpers. It’s time for public action.ZEV BAR EITAN Nof Ayalon UNReal UNRWA remarksRegarding “New UNRWA head to ‘Post’: No glorifying terrorists in our schools” (July 30), who does Phillippe Lazzarini, the incoming commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) think he is fooling? UNRWA schools are using PA textbooks. Even if a teacher doesn’t praise people like Dalal Mughrabi (who was involved in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel that killed 38 Israelis, 13 of them children) in the classroom, what is to stop the students from reading about them on their own?And if UNRWA obeys UN protocols, why has UNRWA abetted Arab nations in maintaining apartheid in the Middle East? I refer, of course, to the differentiation between people claiming descent from Arabs who fled Palestine generations ago and people who don’t make that claim. Members of the former group have been sitting in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the so-called West Bank for several generations. Although living among people with whom they share language, religion and ethnicity, they have not been given citizenship in the Arab countries and they will not be given citizenship in any (actual) Palestinian state that the leaders of the PA and/or Hamas may ever deign to establish.TOBY F. BLOCK Atlanta Accentuate the positiveIn “A Different Country” (August 3), Herb Keinon presents a positive side of our state of affairs. As a mother and grandmother of young men who have served in special military units, I was especially touched by the mention of the reservists celebrating the weddings of their two comrades. I was reminded of the wedding of our son 26 years ago who had served in the first “Duvdevan” unit. Dancing enthusiastically with him in a large circle were his army buddies. One could feel the closeness and love emanating from the group. Our son was the only one who had a kipah on his head. Till this day, the former soldiers of that unit have kept in contact with each other and never miss an opportunity to meet on momentous family occasions. How heartwarming it is to see the love between people who rise above their differences of faith, status, political affiliation and find a way to express respect and affection for each other. The media would do well to focus on another reality in Israel that is not permeated with overwhelming hate. TZILA RABINOWITZ Jerusalem So sayeth SethRegarding “Seth Rogen: Herzog misrepresented our conversation” (August 4), Seth Rogen should know that the more he says the worse he makes it. Now is the time to shut up. Like many other “liberal” Hollywood Democratic Jews, learning to say his lines does not give him any special knowledge or abilities in any other field, including Israel. To say that Israelis often joke about Israel doesn’t cut it either. In the pre-PC days, famous Jewish comedian Henny Youngman used to joke about his wife: “Take my wife – please” or “My wife said, ‘For our anniversary I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before.’ I said, “Try the kitchen.” That’s comedy – but if someone tries saying it about my wife, suddenly it’s not funny.Consequently, if Rogen, the player of many “stoner” roles, wants to redeem himself, then he should follow the example of both his parents and work unknown in a kibbutz in Israel for a few years – and then come and talk. But we all know that ain’t gonna happen.DAVID SMITH Ra’anana Arguing for ArmeniaAs a grandson to survivors of the Armenian Genocide, I read Herb Keinon’s piece (“How can Israel navigate the divide between Azerbaijan and Armenia?” July 30) with great interest. Keinon tries to explain Israel’s current dilemma in dealing with two allies who are in conflict through the lens of realpolitik, but what he fails to point out is that this goes beyond politics. Armenians and Jews share a common history sadly defined by persecution and genocide. That’s why it’s so surprising that Israel feels that it needs to be neutral while Azerbaijan tries to finish through their unprovoked aggression what Turkey tried to do to Armenia more than 100 years ago. Then again, it’s also incredible that Israel has yet to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Foreign relations and human rights should not be mutually exclusive. This shouldn’t be too complicated for Israel. They can stand with Armenia, a country and people that have been victims of oppression and who promote democracy, or be aligned with a country ruled by an authoritarian and be on the wrong side of history. Political expediency should play no role in this debate. Of all countries, Israel should know that all too well, given that it was founded in the wake of genocide. The choice is really simple. STEPHAN PECHDIMALDJI San Ramon, CA On targetRegarding “Iron Dome intercepts Gaza rocket fired towards southern Israel” (August 4), the Gazans have now fired nearly a hundred rockets at Israeli civilians so far this year (an average of one every other day) and thousands since 2000 – more than the total number of rockets the Nazis shot at Britain in all of World War II.Thank God for Iron Dome; the only damage this time was to vehicles from the shrapnel, but the Gazans still have thousands of missiles pointed at us and Hezbollah has even more. It amazes me that this ongoing evil war crime gets virtually no mention in the world press and no condemnation from civilized countries or from the UN.May God and/or the IDF continue to protect us – especially in light of the fact that “Israelis near borders still don’t have access to shelters” (August 4) – and punish the evildoers.I. COHEN Sderot Read original article here.

#Armenia #Armenians #Politics

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cksmart-world · 5 years ago

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The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

June 30, 2020

JESUS WAS A CAPRICORN

Listen to this: “Jesus was a person of color murdered by state sanctioned violence.” That was on a sign outside the Clackamus United Church of Christ in Milwaukie, Ore. How dare they, when everybody knows Jesus was blonde with blue eyes. We've seen the movies. And lookit, Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority, opened the whites-only Lynchburg Christian Academy. Jesus had to be white or else he couldn't get in. But seriously folks, we all know the Christian Right has for some time now been spewing hate at anyone who doesn't buy into their gun-toting, muslim-hating values. Lately, they've been bummed out because The Supremes ruled transgender and gay folks have rights, too. But Jesus of Nazareth wasn't like that — he was into Peace, Love and Rock 'n Roll. What would Jesus say about all those evangelical Christians worshiping Trump, the hater in chief. Even Wilson and the band think Jesus would be put off (not their exact language) by Trump. What would you call someone who preached hate on behalf of Christ the Redeemer. We won't say it out loud. And the truth is, Jesus was Palestinian.

THE ROAD TO PERDITION

The forced wearing of seatbelts has led us to this dangerous time in America when our freedoms are being eroded like a St. George riverbank in a pissing match. That's right, we're on the road to totalitarianism, not to mention perdition. Now THEY want us to wear face masks in direct violation of the charter of White Knights of Freedom. (And don't say nothin' about the KKK). Greg Hughes and Phil Lyman know this — great patriots they are. It all started back-when with fluoride and marijuana — two hideous chemicals snuck into our water supply and brownies by Marxist-Leninists in places like San Francisco and the Avenues. Then green-bellied scoundrels set in motion a scheme to rob white men of their liberty. It's as plain as day — what do you think environmentalism is? They say we can't idle our pick-ups at 7-11. Next, the'll pass laws against eating hot dogs, drinking Cherry Cokes and smoking Camels. This is how liberty is lost. And Heil Herbert is no exaggeration. The jack-booted thugs are coming for us, people. Lock and load. Give us liberty or bury us with our chaps on and our six-guns by our sides.

BILL BARR AND THE WORK OF THE LORD

And speaking of old time religion, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan says Attorney General Bill “Froggy” Barr isn't doing Donald Trump's bidding, he's doing the Lord's work. But somehow, Barr's alma mater, George Washington University Law School, and hundreds of former federal prosecutors are calling on Froggy to resign. But how could good ol' Jim “Up Yours” Jordan be wrong? Sure, Barr dropped the criminal case against Michael Flynn, who was Trump's national security advisor for 10 minutes. But all Flynn did was make secret deals with the Russians before the election and lie about it to the FBI. And that tiny thing with Trump's old pal and rat f- -ker Roger Stone wasn't all that bad. He was only convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction. All Froggy did was tell prosecutors they'd better dial back the sentencing recommendation, or else. And this latest thing with the Friday night “retirement” of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was just a misunderstanding. Just because Berman was investigating Trump's fixer Rudy Juliani and other dark corners of Trumpworld doesn't mean Froggy was doing anything nefarious. And anyway, come on — we know the law doesn't really apply to Donald Trump or his friends. Right Froggy?

Post scrip — Well groupers and groupettes, we're sailing into the Fourth of July and the celebration of the greatest country ever. We know this is true because we learned it in school and on Fox News. That doesn't mean we don't have problems: Middle-class workers have been getting screwed for the last 40 years (Reaganomics), but we can fix that. A lot of people can't afford health care, but we can fix that. Higher education has become out of reach for many people, but we can fix that. The homeless population keeps growing, but we can fix that. Big money has corrupted our political system, but we can fix that. And police keep shooting black people, but we can fix that. These problems are more than unsettling. But here's a reality check — until the post World War II period, there never was a strong, vibrant middle class in this country; the wealth was mostly at the top. Well, welcome back to the good ol' USA. We shouldn't forget that any privileges we enjoy today weren't given as gifts by the powers that be, but seized only through the blood, sweat and tears of the organized labor movement. That, of course, does not include women's rights or civil rights. Any gains in those areas haven't come easy and clearly those fights aren't over. If you want something in this country, you've got to fight for it and fight to keep it or they'll take it right back. Happy Independence Day.

Alright Wilson, tell the guys to put down the bong and give us some religion:

Jesus was a Capricorn He ate organic food He believed in love and peace And never wore no shoes...

Some folks hate the Whites Who hate the Blacks who hate the Klan Most of us hate anything that We don't understand

(Jesus Was A Capricorn — Kris Kristofferson)

PPS — During this difficult time for newspapers please make a donation to our very important local alternative news source Salt Lake City Weekly at PressBackers.com, a nonprofit dedicated to help fund local journalism. Thank you.

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antoine-roquentin · 7 years ago

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Translation is not an exact science. Words are like prisms, refracting different shades of meaning. A good translation is one that captures the right hue.

Elkasrawy’s prayers were first translated on CIJ News, a website founded and edited by Jonathan Dahoah Halevi.

Halevi describes himself as a retired lieutenant-colonel and intelligence officer with the Israel Defense Forces, who now researches the Middle East and radical Islam. He learned Arabic in school and university, he once explained to an interviewer.

He has also been a go-to pundit for the now-defunct Sun News Network and its offshoot Rebel News, a right-wing media website that has drawn controversy for its anti-Muslim coverage.

Halevi’s writings and statements suggest that he sees himself as a soldier in the information wars — particularly when it comes to allegations against Israel, which he challenges by using “continuous, intensive and thorough” research, according to a profile on the Economic Club of Canada’s website.

This work includes counting “Gaza fatalities in his free time,” according to a 2009 NPR article that described his “macabre hobby.” During the first Gaza war, NPR wrote, Halevi suspected Palestinians of exaggerating their civilian fatalities and spent six months scrutinizing 1,400 deaths listed by a human rights group — checking each name against a terrorist database he personally compiled and “whatever he finds on the internet.”

Halevi has also written extensively about Islam and Muslim Canadians on CIJ News, where his Arabic translations have drawn praise from the “anti-Islamist” blog Point de Bascule. “His knowledge of the Arabic language gives him an advantage when it comes to understanding the ambitions of the enemy,” the Quebec-based blog wrote last year.

On Feb. 18, CIJ News published a story about Masjid Toronto, which included his translation of Elkasrawy’s controversial prayers.

Halevi later told the Toronto Sun that he was prompted to dig up the material after reading media coverage of a rally outside the mosque.

The rally was ostensibly to protest the federal Islamophobia motion, but demonstrators brought signs that read “Say no to Islam” and “Muslims are terrorists.” The protest was roundly criticized, including by local politicians who denounced it as an Islamophobic “display of ignorance and hate.”

But in his interview with the Sun, Halevi suggested the real hate was happening inside the mosque. “The double standard and hypocrisy was appalling,” he said.

After the story broke, Masjid Toronto took all its videos offline but it was too late; a new, edited clip was posted on YouTube, crediting Halevi with its translation and referencing an extreme anti-Muslim ideology known as “counter-jihad.” The account hosting the clip also mentions “Vlad Tepes Blog” in its video description.

The “counter-jihad” is described by researchers as a loose network of people and groups united by the belief that Muslims are plotting to take over the West. A recent National Post investigation described Rebel News as a “global platform” for the counter-jihad, and linked Vlad Tepes Blog — regarded as a key website in the movement — to a frequent Rebel News contributor.

Rebel jumped on the story about Elkasrawy’s prayers, which it credited “our friend Jonathan Halevi” with breaking. In a video segment, “Rebel commander” Ezra Levant plays the YouTube clip while imploring his viewers to “look at what the folks inside the mosque were saying.”

“Look at the translation written on the screen,” Levant says in the video, which has now drawn more than 35,000 views. “Here they are talking about Jews — there’s a lot of Jews in Toronto — and how they need to be killed one by one.”

But such stories contained a glaring oversight: this was not at all what Elkasrawy said.

This is the consensus that emerged from five Arabic experts who independently analyzed Elkasrawy’s prayers at the Star’s request. The experts — from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom — are Arabic translators, linguists and university professors with published book chapters, academic papers and textbooks. None of them knows Elkasrawy.

The experts found that the imam’s prayers were not without fault, and many clarified that they do not condone or excuse some of the language he used.

But they also described the initial, widely circulated translation as “mistranslated,” “decontextualized” and “disingenuous.” One said it had the hallmarks of a “propaganda translation.”

The YouTube clip was particularly troubling for Arabic sociolinguist and dialectologist Atiqa Hachimi, an associate professor at the University of Toronto.

This is because the clip was digitally manipulated: the first two seconds were cut and pasted from a different prayer Elkasrawy had made two minutes earlier. A slanted translation then transformed this Quranic verse from “Thou art our Protector. Help us against those who stand against faith” to “Give us victory over the disbelieving people.”

“It changed their meaning in such a way as to promote the dangerous myths that violent extremism and hate are inherent to Islam,” Hachimi said.

Elkasrawy also was not referring to Jewish people when he said “slay them one by one,” a line from the Hadith that is often invoked as a cry for divine justice. This line was misunderstood as being part of his prayer about Al-Aqsa mosque; in fact, it was the closing line in a previous supplication that he made on behalf of suffering Muslims around the world, Hachimi said.

As for “Purify the Al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews,” a more accurate translation is “Cleanse Al-Aqsa mosque from the Jews’ desecration of it,” according to Nazir Harb Michel, an Arabic sociolinguist and Islamophobia researcher at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The crucial word here is danas. Arabic-English dictionaries list several possible definitions — among them “besmirch,” “defile,” and spiritual “impurity” or “filth” — so context is key in determining the appropriate translation. Harb Michel said “no translator worth two cents” would choose the “filth” definition in the context of Elkasrawy’s prayer.

When danas is used in reference to a holy place — like Al-Aqsa — the common definition is “desecration,” the experts agreed. “He does not say ‘the filth of the Jews,’” said Jonathan Featherstone, a senior teaching fellow at the University of Edinburgh and former Arabic lecturer with the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

But what did Elkasrawy mean by “desecration”? Again, context is instructive. Days before his prayers, he and his congregants were reading reports of Israeli police deploying tear gas and rubber-tipped bullets inside Al-Aqsa mosque — actions many Muslims would consider to be a desecration of the site, especially during the 10 holiest days of Ramadan.

Elkasrawy now realizes how wrong it was to mention “the Jews,” especially since his intention was to pray for the mosque, not against people.

“If I could say it in a more clear way,” he says, “it would be ‘O Allah, protect the Al-Aqsa mosque from occupation. Or preserve the sacredness of the Al-Aqsa mosque from violation.’”

He said “Jews” is widely used in the Arabic-speaking world to mean “Israeli forces” or “Israeli occupiers,” not as a sweeping reference to all ethnic and religious Jews. But he acknowledges this common usage is problematic. And, he asks, “How is it perceived in my (current) community? It’s something I didn’t take into account.”

“I have never thought of anything against people of Jewish faith,” he says. “In Islam, we believe that no one should be forced into any religion. We cannot hate any people, any group, because of their ethnicity or their religion.”

Halevi declined requests for a phone interview but, in emailed responses, he stood by his original translation of Elkasrawy’s prayers. He did not answer specific questions, including why he chose the “filth” definition, but sent links to various websites and Arabic-English dictionaries.

He also did not answer questions about the source of the digitally manipulated clip, saying only that the original video was available on his website until the mosque deleted its YouTube channel.

But Halevi provided context that he considered important: excerpts from Islamic books that promote praying against disbelievers; translations of violent, aggressive or anti-Semitic statements made by other Muslims; links to CIJ News, which Halevi took down shortly after being contacted by the Star.

“Canadian imams deny any rights of the Jews over the Temple Mount or in (the) Land of Israel/Palestine,” Halevi wrote.

B’nai Brith Canada said two Arabic experts independently verified the original translation before the group urged Ryerson to fire Elkasrawy. B’nai Brith said it also reached out to the imam on Facebook but did not get a response. (Elkasrawy deleted his account shortly after the story broke.)

“Statements like this have been made in many parts of the world and it’s actually been used directly as incitement,” said B’nai Brith CEO Michael Mostyn. “Jewish people have lost their lives over statements like this.”

Mostyn rejects the linguistic opinions obtained by the Star, in one case accusing an expert of having an anti-Israel bias. But he would not identify his own translators, citing concerns over their safety. The Star’s request to interview them anonymously was also declined.

In response to the Star’s questions, B’nai Brith solicited a third opinion from Mordechai Kedar, an assistant professor with the Arabic department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.

In a phone interview, Kedar did not remember being asked to evaluate Elkasrawy’s entire supplications, just the phrase that referred to “Jews” and danas. But he said he didn’t need any context to interpret Elkasrawy’s prayers because “when it comes to what Israel is doing, it is the worst meaning of the word.”

“Nobody should give them the benefit of the doubt that they mean something else, because they don’t,” he said. “(They want) to make the mainstream media in the free world believe them that they are the targets, when they are the problem in the whole world.”

Like Halevi, Kedar is a former Israeli intelligence officer and media pundit. His views have also drawn controversy, and Kedar once served on the advisory board for Stop Islamization of Nations — an organization co-founded by the anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a U.S.-based civil rights watchdog.

Kedar argued Elkasrawy’s language was “meant to create a religiously charged rage and anger against the Jews.”

“Reacting violently against (Jewish people) in revenge for their deed is almost a required reaction,” he wrote in an email. “You can call it, in one word, terrorism.”

B’nai Brith Canada has not gone so far as to allege verbal terrorism, and said it is glad Elkasrawy has undergone cultural training, but its position remains unmoved: “Mr. Elkasrawy’s message at the mosque was irrefutably offensive and anti-Semitic.”

Farber feels differently. He says Elkasrawy chose his language poorly, especially when he referred to “the Jews,” and failed to understand the harmful impact of his words.

But he now believes Elkasrawy’s prayers were misrepresented to the public. Like many people, Farber accepted the initial translation unquestioningly, but now says “if people were going to take that and ruin lives, we should have been a lot more careful.”

“He said something that’s highly charged and highly political and could be anti-Zionist — but it’s not anti-Semitic,” Farber says. “And that changes the flavour of this.”

In the rush to condemn Elkasrawy’s prayers, Muslim organizations were among the first in line.

“Unacceptable” and “inappropriate,” his mosque said in a statement. “Appalling and reprehensible,” wrote the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the country’s largest Muslim advocacy group.

There was much to disapprove of, in addition to the mention of “Jews.” Many Muslim Canadians disagree with praying negatively and feel frustrated when religious leaders speak in ways that reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Prayers like “slay them one by one” also have no place inside a Canadian mosque, says Mohammad Aboghodda, a lecturer with the Understanding Islam Academy, an educational charity in Mississauga. Aboghodda was one of the Arabic translators consulted by the Star.

This quote from the Hadith has a specific reference to ancient Islamic struggles but is sometimes used in prayers for divine justice; Elkasrawy says he invoked it on behalf of Syrian people killed and tortured by the government regime or by Daesh (ISIS) terrorists.

But Aboghodda finds this language inappropriate, even if well intentioned — it would be like a priest delivering a Sunday sermon and quoting Bible verses that say “wrongdoers will be completely destroyed.”

“That’s a very common old prayer, but it implies violence that we don’t need,” he says. “I think many young and novice imams go to the old books and just copy these from it.”

These were some of the concerns Muslim groups had in mind when they denounced Elkasrawy’s prayers — public statements that many took as an implicit acceptance of the initial translation. But those statements did not reveal whether the Muslim community thought the translation was accurate, or whether they understood Elkasrawy’s words at all.

How many Canadian Muslims speak Arabic? Contrary to assumption, only about 20 per cent of the world’s Muslims are native Arabic speakers; according to the latest census, 1.2 per cent of Canadians cite Arabic as their mother tongue. Quranic Arabic, which Elkasrawy used in his prayers, is also notoriously complex and difficult to deconstruct.

Hachimi pointed out that several Arabic-language newspapers also clearly relied on English reports of the incident, because when they back-translated the word “filth,” they chose a different Arabic word — najas — from the one Elkasrawy used in his prayers.

And who bothered to check the original video? The translation was not verified by the National Council of Canadian Muslims, executive director Ihsaan Gardee confirmed in an emailed statement.

He said the organization is now “deeply troubled” to learn that the widely circulated clip of Elkasrawy’s prayers was manipulated and the translations called into question. But in the fast-moving aftermath of the scandal, he said, the organization “could only respond to what was being reported” — in other words, it reacted to the CIJ News translation.

“Unfortunately, we are living in a time where the very worst is believed about Canadian Muslims — contrary to the reality that the vast majority are contributing positively,” Gardee wrote. “So when a story like this emerges that contains the words of religious leaders speaking in a way that is understood — rightly or wrongly — to be promoting hatred against anyone, it is critical that human rights advocates be quick to condemn such language.”

Officials from the Muslim Association of Canada said their first priority was to reach out to the Jewish community and apologize for their employee’s inappropriate language, which violated the mosque’s stated policies.

But that doesn’t mean they considered the translation to be accurate — they didn’t. “We avoided this detail because a clear position was required so that there will be no confusion of our stand on this,” spokesperson Abdussalam Nakua wrote in an email.

Elkasrawy’s prayers exploded into view at a particularly fraught time.

Only weeks had passed since a gunman stormed into a Quebec City mosque and massacred six Muslim worshippers. The United States had just inaugurated a new president who campaigned on a Muslim travel ban. The acrimonious debate around the Canadian Islamophobia motion had reached a fever pitch, with Liberal MP Iqra Khalid even receiving death threats.

Elkasrawy’s prayers were quickly taken up by politicians. A month after they emerged, MP Steven Blaney — who was then running for the federal Conservative party leadership — cited Elkasrawy in a campaign email seeking donations to “stand against violence and radicalization.” (“Should Allah kill all the Jews? I don’t think so but frighteningly, some do.”)

Right-wing groups also latched on to the story and Elkasrawy’s picture was used on a poster at a rally against M-103. A hate crimes complaint was filed by the Jewish Defense League, which has been active in anti-Islamic protests. (A local JDL member is himself facing possible hate crime charges in the U.S. in connection with an alleged assault on a Palestinian-American man in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.)

“We’re dealing with a community in fear,” Farber says of Muslim Canadians. “Even if the community itself might feel that ‘Well no, this translation isn’t exactly right … we don’t want to make people more angry.’ In the end, I’m not particularly surprised that the mosque and others involved said, ‘Let’s shut this down and apologize.’”

Elkasrawy said his first priority after the story broke in February was to apologize to the Jewish community. He worried, too, about further inflaming the situation. “I feared for the people inside the mosque, that they might be attacked because of this.”

He decided to let things calm down before attempting to explain himself. But within days, posters were plastered around Ryerson’s campus, where Elkasrawy had been a teaching assistant on and off since 2008, a job that partially funds his graduate studies.

The posters had a picture of his face and the words “Fire him now” — a demand that was echoed by B’nai Brith Canada. The student who led the postering campaign, Aedan O’Connor, recently announced on Facebook that she is now working with Rebel Media.

Ryerson and its new president, Mohamed Lachemi, were already under pressure to respond to previous reports of anti-Semitism on campus. A meeting was quickly called between Elkasrawy and the dean of Ryerson’s engineering department.

Elkasrawy attended the meeting and brought a more accurate translation of his prayers, assuming this would be a first step in the university’s investigation. According to Elkasrawy, his translation was disregarded and Ryerson officials deliberated for about 15 minutes before handing him a two-page termination letter.

Ryerson declined to be interviewed for this story, stating that it does not discuss human resources matters.

For Elkasrawy, this was the moment that killed any hope he had of eventually explaining his side of the story. The YouTube clips, the media coverage, the public statements, his suspension, the police investigation, the termination — it all braided together into a knot that felt impossible to unravel. It all happened in 10 days.

Elkasrawy says he agreed to speak with the Star because “I have nothing to hide.” He has contemplated leaving Toronto or changing careers, but for now, he wants to move forward.

He has returned to his mosque, which conducted its own internal probe into the incident. He has applied, unsuccessfully, for new teaching jobs at Ryerson. And while the hate crime complaint against him remains active, Elkasrawy says he has yet to be contacted by police.

When asked what this experience has been like, Elkasrawy sighs heavily, his eyes drifting to the floor of his modest downtown apartment. He explains in a wavering voice that he has tried to take an Islamic point of view.

“People go through difficult times, hard times, in which they have to be patient and have some forbearance,” he says. “You have to listen to people and learn from this experience.”

He is holding tight to the lessons he’s learned, including those from the Mosaic Institute. Chief among them: when you speak, your meaning has to be clear — not just in your own head or to the people in front of you, but to Canadians of all backgrounds.

“Once the word comes out, even if the person who was hurt later understands your meaning, it will leave something in his heart,” Elkasrawy says. “It will not be the same as before.”

this is also why a lot of the stuff you see on MEMRI (also founded by a former israeli colonel) sounds so wild. they cherrypick, then do shoddy translations based on the most violent meaning they can think of

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thewebofslime · 5 years ago

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he U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said. The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use. The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful. Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols. POLITICO reported in May 2018 that the president often used an insufficiently secured cellphone to communicate with friends and confidants. The New York Times subsequently reported in October 2018 that “Chinese spies are often listening” to Trump’s cellphone calls, prompting the president to slam the story as “so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it.” (A former official said Trump has had his cellphone hardened against intrusion.) By then, as part of tests by the federal government, officials at the Department of Homeland Security had already discovered evidence of the surveillance devices around the nation’s capital, but weren’t able to attribute the devices to specific entities. The officials shared their findings with relevant federal agencies, according to a letter a top Department of Homeland Security official, Christopher Krebs, wrote in May 2018 to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics EmailSign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Based on a detailed forensic analysis, the FBI and other agencies working on the case felt confident that Israeli agents had placed the devices, according to the former officials, several of whom served in top intelligence and national security posts. That analysis, one of the former officials said, is typically led by the FBI’s counterintelligence division and involves examining the devices so that they “tell you a little about their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them, and that will help get you to what the origins are.” For these types of investigations, the bureau often leans on the National Security Agency and sometimes the CIA (DHS and the Secret Service played a supporting role in this specific investigation). “It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible,” said a former senior intelligence official. An Israeli Embassy spokesperson, Elad Strohmayer, denied that Israel placed the devices and said: “These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period.” A senior Trump administration official said the administration doesn’t “comment on matters related to security or intelligence.” The FBI declined to comment, while DHS and the Secret Service didn’t respond to requests for comment. After this story was published, Trump told reporters that he would find it "hard to believe" that the Israelis had placed the devices. "I don't think the Israelis were spying on us," Trump said. "My relationship with Israel has been great...Anything is possible but I don't believe it." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also denied after publication that Israel was behind the devices. "We have a directive, I have a directive: No intelligence work in the United States, no spies," he said in a gaggle with reporters. "And it's vigorously implemented, without any exception. It [the report] is a complete fabrication, a complete fabrication." But former officials with deep experience dealing with intelligence matters scoff at the Israeli claim — a pro forma denial Israeli officials are also known to make in private to skeptical U.S. counterparts. One former senior intelligence official noted that after the FBI and other agencies concluded that the Israelis were most likely responsible for the devices, the Trump administration took no action to punish or even privately scold the Israeli government. “The reaction ... was very different than it would have been in the last administration,” this person said. “With the current administration, there are a different set of calculations in regard to addressing this.” The former senior intelligence official criticized how the administration handled the matter, remarking on the striking difference from past administrations, which likely would have at a very minimum issued a démarche, or formal diplomatic reprimand, to the foreign government condemning its actions. “I’m not aware of any accountability at all,” the former official said. Beyond trying to intercept the private conversations of top officials — prized information for any intelligence service — foreign countries often will try to surveil their close associates as well. With the president, the former senior Trump administration official noted, that could include trying to listen in on the devices of the people he regularly communicates with, such as Steve Wynn, Sean Hannity and Rudy Giuliani. “The people in that circle are heavily targeted,” the former Trump official said. Another circle of surveillance targets includes people who regularly talk to Trump’s friends and informal advisers. Information obtained from any of these people “would be so valuable in a town that is like three degrees of separation like Kevin Bacon,” the former official added. That’s true even for a close U.S. ally like Israel, which often seeks an edge in its diplomatic maneuvering with the United States. “The Israelis are pretty aggressive” in their intelligence gathering operations, said a former senior intelligence official. “They’re all about protecting the security of the Israeli state and they do whatever they feel they have to to achieve that objective.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with President Donald Trump. | Michael Reynolds/Getty Images So even though Trump has formed a warm relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and made numerous policy moves favorable to the Israeli government — such as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, ripping up the Iran nuclear deal and heavily targeting Iran with sanctions — Israel became a prime suspect in planting the devices. While the Chinese, who have been regularly caught doing intelligence operations in the U.S., were also seen as potential suspects, they were determined as unlikely to have placed the devices based on a close analysis of the devices. “You can often, depending upon the tradecraft of the people who put them in place, figure out who’s been accessing them to pull the data off the devices,” another former senior U.S. intelligence official explained. Washington is awash in surveillance, and efforts of foreign entities to try to spy on administration officials and other top political figures are fairly common. But not many countries have the capability — or the budget — to plant the devices found in this most recent incident, which is another reason suspicion fell on Israel. IMSI-catchers, which are often used by local police agencies to surveil criminals, can also be made by sophisticated hobbyists or by the Harris Corp., the manufacturer of StingRays, which cost more than $150,000 each, according to Vice News. “The costs involved are really significant,” according to a former senior Trump administration official. “This is not an easy or ubiquitous practice.” Morning Cybersecurity A daily briefing on politics and cybersecurity — weekday mornings, in your inbox. EmailSign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Among professionals, the Israeli intelligence services have an especially fearsome reputation. But they do sometimes make mistakes and are “not 10 feet tall like you see in the movies,” a former senior intelligence official noted. In 2010, the secret covers of a Mossad hit team, some of whom had been posing as tennis players, were blown after almost 30 minutes of surveillance video was posted online of them going through a luxury Dubai hotel where they killed a top Hamas terrorist in his room. Still, U.S. officials sometimes have been taken aback by Israel’s brazen spying. One former U.S. government official recalled his frequent concern that Israel knew about internal U.S. policy deliberations that were meant to be kept private. “There were suspicions that they were listening in,” the former official said, based on his Israeli counterparts flaunting a level of detailed knowledge “that was hard to explain otherwise.” “Sometimes it was sort of knowledge of our thinking. Occasionally there were some turns of phrase like language that as far as we knew had only appeared in drafts of speeches and never been actually used publicly, and then some Israeli official would repeat it back to us and say, ‘This would be really problematic if you were to say X,’” said the former official. Back when the Obama administration was trying to jump-start negotiations with the Palestinians, for example, the Israelis were eager to get advance knowledge of the language being debated that would describe the terms of reference of the talks. “They would have had interest in what language [President Barack] Obama or [Secretary of State John] Kerry or someone else was going to use and might indeed try to find a way to lobby for language they liked or against language that they didn’t like and so having knowledge of that could be advantageous for them,” the former official said. “The Israelis are aggressive intelligence collectors, but they have sworn off spying on the U.S. at various points and it’s not surprising that such efforts continue,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former coordinator of counterterrorism at the Obama State Department and now director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth. Benjamin, who emphasized that he was not aware of the FBI's investigation into the cell-phone spoofing, recalled once meeting with a former head of Mossad, the premier Israeli intelligence agency, when he was out of office. The first thing the former Mossad official told Benjamin was that Israel didn’t spy on the U.S. “I just told him our conversation was over if he had such a low estimate of my intelligence,” Benjamin said. Israeli officials often note in conversations with their American counterparts — correctly — that the U.S. regularly gathers intelligence on Israeli leaders. As for Israel’s recent surveillance of the White House, one of the former senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged it raised security concerns but joked, “On the other hand, guess what we do in Tel Aviv?" This article has been updated to clarify that Daniel Benjamin had no knowledge of the alleged Israeli spying, and that the Israeli official he was speaking with was a former official at the time of their conversation.

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