#Hezbollah supporters

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ashley Rindsberg

Published: Oct 25, 2024

a powerful group of editors is hijacking wikipedia, pushing pro-palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about hamas, and reshaping the narrative around israel with alarming influence

A coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack

Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas

The group also appeared to attempt to promote the interests of the Iranian government across a number of articles, including deleting “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Islamic Republic Party] officials”

A group called Tech For Palestine launched a separate but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia policies by coordinating to edit Israel-Palestine articles on the group 8,000 member Discord

Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel

On everything from American politics to corporate brands, Wikipedia plays host to a smoldering battle of ideas and values that occasionally erupts into white-hot, internecine edit wars. But no fire burns hotter than the Israel-Palestine topic area. The topic is such a flashpoint that the Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) designation is used synonymously with its own dispute resolution abbreviation — Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel Articles, known as ARBPIA in Wiki-speak.

While always contentious, over roughly the past four years, and intensifying since October 7, PIA has been subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict. Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.

A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.

These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”

The aggregate effect of these efforts is a wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online. As I reported in a previous Pirate Wires investigation, this is largely thanks to Google, which grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status with articles automatically given the first spot on any topic-related search result. If you Google “Zionism and settler colonialism,” for example, what you get is a Wikipedia article automatically anchored to the very top of the Google search results, with its own knowledge panel to the right. A fringe concept that would have only shown a smattering of unfocused articles just two years ago — before the article was created — now has its own primetime Internet stage.

“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” says someone familiar with the matter. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article's introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”

The kind of coordination carried out by these groups violates many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies, including one of its core content policies, Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that, “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them.” The practice also violates the Gaming the System guideline, which prohibits editors from “engineering ‘victory’ in a content dispute.” It runs afoul of the broader Wikipedia ethos discouraging Tag teaming, when “editors coordinate their actions to circumvent the normal process of consensus.” Most flagrantly, it violates a guideline called Canvassing, which prohibits secret coordination with the “intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”

To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.

One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.

Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.

To expand his reach, Iskandar also goes on editing rampages, or “speedruns.” Last August, he removed 22,000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that were critical of the organization, in one case wholesale deleting a 1,000-word long passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel. On the “History of Israel” article, Iskandar deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government; removed an account of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel; excised a mention of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler; and made dozens of similar edits — all in a matter of minutes.

Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated “swarm” tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale.

In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss (8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).

The 15,000 edits by Selfstudier and the 12,000 by Iskandar323 put those two users in the top 99.975% of editors by number of edits — solely for their PIA edits made in under three years. The other pro-Palestine group members’ PIA edits from this period place them among the top 99.9% of Wikipedia editors. All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.

It’s not just the raw number of edits that matters. The same analysis shows that fully 90% of total edits by Selfstudier in that period were made to Palestine-Israel articles. Other members of the group clock in at 90% (sean.hoyland), 86% (CarmenEsparzaAmoux), 82% (Makeandross), 64% (Nishidani), and 43% (Onceinawhile). After October 7 the intensity increased, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, while others got to 97%, 98% and even 100% of their total monthly edits dedicated to PIA.

To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.

A separate analysis shows the number of instances in which two members of the group edited the same article to be extraordinarily high. As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.

[ Incidences of co-edited articles amongst top 30 members of this group. Cells in purple indicate instances of two editors co-editing more than 150 articles. ]

One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.

In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent. To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4% of its content.

In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism. Pro-Palestine group member Onceinawhile created the article in July of last year, accompanied by a note arguing, “Early Zionists were the primary supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.”Together, Onceinawhile and Nishidani’s contributions account for nearly 90% of the article’s content. Onceinawhile would continue to push this view in numerous other articles, including the article on “Zionism.”

In March, a Wikipedia user submitted a case to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.” The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators.

According to the allegations, Iskandar323 (who has co-edited with Mhhossein nearly 400 times) worked with a separate editor to delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.” This included a claim about Iran’s post-revolution death commissions that executed thousands political prisoners; details showing executions were carried out by “high-ranking members of Iran’s current government”; mention of the Iranian government’s “unprecedented reign of terror” in the early 1980s; the sentencing of an Iranian official to life in prison in Sweden for his role in the executions; the targeting of an Iranian dissident group with “psychological warfare,” and dozens of others.

The charges are serious, and the evidence backing them up abundant. Nevertheless, seven months later the Arbcom case is still pending. The reason is systemic: in a lengthy request for arbitration on a separate PIA case, one of Wikipedia’s arbitrators noted that the final decision-making panel is staffed by 12 volunteers, only 10 of whom are active. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” the arbitrator wrote. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”

Electing more Arbcom members would require a massive overhaul of the site’s governing regulations, a task akin to the US government amending its constitution. And though Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has around $500 million in assets, because of the air-gap between Wikipedia and WMF and the volunteer ethos of Wikipedia’s mission not a penny can be used to hire people to oversee contentious topics.

So the group’s pro-Iran efforts go unchecked. One of its most prominent members, Nableezy (over 6,000 PIA edits since 2022), has put considerable effort into sanding the hard edges off of Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah. Nableezy — who took the extraordinary step of including a userbox on his Talk page that links to a text that reads “This user supports Hezbollah.” — has worked to rebuff claims that Hezbollah is a terror organization. In one instance, Nableezy pushed back against another user characterizing a Hezbollah attack on Israeli population centers as a terror attack, arguing “An attack on military targets is not terrorism.” Last year, Nableezy, who appears to be an American, argued in the Talk page for the “Hezbollah” article that, “The US military is designated as a terror group by Iran, should we include that as an endnote everywhere the US army is mentioned?”

But Nableezy’s main area of focus is Israel. To this end, Nableezy’s editing has included subtle, ideologically consistent moves like removing a picture of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the “Israel” article (the image remains absent at time of publishing), pushing for the removal of the ancient history of Israel from the article, and altering a sentence on Zionism that described it as a call by its leaders for the “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”

This exchange embodies the rhetorical approach taken by the group: the shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream — an approach developed by the radical left, in concert with global Islamist movements, in the wake of 9/11, when the attacks put Islamism on the moral back foot. In response, the leftist-Islamist alliance launched two decades of ideological assault on the US, and the West more generally. The same post-9/11 dynamic took place after October 7, when the savagery of the Hamas attack opened a vulnerability as the broader public would recognize it as a barbaric attack on civilians.

In response, the ideological push-back on Wikipedia ramped up. In February, an explicitly coordinated effort was launched when leaders on a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) — launched in January by Paul Biggar, the Irish co-founder of software development platform CircleCI — opened a channel on their 8,000-strong Discord channel called “tfp-wikipedia-collaboration.” In the channel, two group leaders, Samira and Samer, coordinated with other members to mass edit a number of PIA articles. The effort included recruiting volunteers, processing them through formal orientation, troubleshooting issues, and holding remote office hours to problem solve and ideate. The channel’s welcome message posed a revealing question: “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource, and its content influences public perception.”

At the heart of TFP Wikipedia Collaboration was a veteran editor called Ïvana, who was tapped as the resident expert on the site, and whose Discord username featured the red triangle affiliated with Hamas’ targeting.

With Ïvana’s guidance, as well as her hands-on editing of articles, the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration group coordinated both on Discord and Wikipedia, where they created editing staging grounds on Talk pages that included elements like “Work in Progress Table,” “Investigate and Decide,” and a volunteer job board with detailed responsibilities. Off-wiki, the group created planning documentation with agendas, meeting notes, goal setting, role allocation, skills and breakdowns. Their activities ranged from editing celebrity articles by adding pro-Palestine statements they made to creating new articles out of whole cloth, like a proposed article called “Palestine: The Solution.” The group focused extensively on the article for German discount supermarket Lidl, adding a section in the “Criticism” section about products from Israel being incorrectly labeled as Moroccan. They also put special emphasis on articles concerning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, with Ïvana questioning the veracity of reports of rape from that day, while adding to other articles claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. (In March, a senior UN official who investigated sexual violence on October 7 concluded that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” The official wrote her investigation produced a “‘catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’ including sexual violence.”)

In its most audacious case, TFP members developed a project to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British Members of Parliament to change their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in advance of UK elections in July. The plan called for scraping data on visits by MPs to Israel and Israel-related donor information, to create a dedicated Wikipedia article using the data to (as the originator of the project put it) inform “voters to put pressure ahead of the next [parliamentary] elections.”

Within the TFP channel, there was always a background awareness that what they were doing was not in keeping with Wikipedia norms. Early in the channel’s existence, a user and veteran Wikipedia editor called shushugah wrote, “I’m a little confused what the goal is here. I’m an active Wikipedia editor, and for any Israel/Palestine topics you need a solid grasp of Wikipedia policy/culture, and have 500 edits/30 days of activity…no shortcuts.” Within minutes, another user, Heba, wrote “Let’s chat [hand wave emoji].” One of the channel’s power users, zei_squirrel, who runs an X account with 270,000 followers, noted “it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.”

The anxiety was not unwarranted. In September, a researcher discovered the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel and published a number of posts on a blog called Wikipediaflood. (A magazine called Jewish Insider also stumbled across the group, but mostly failed to appreciate its full significance.) These events sent the group into a panic, with Ïvana erasing all her chats in the channel, and deleting the Talk pages and Sandboxes staging pages she’d created. The group locked down the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel in September. At minimum, the group made revisions to at least 112 articles on celebrities, American cities, pro-Palestine organizations, and figures and events related to the Gaza war.

There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue. Wikipedia is simply too powerful a tool — and one too easy to manipulate — for actors like the pro-Palestine group and TFP activists to stay away from. But Wikipedia is coming to a crossroads. The ask-and-answer modality of generative AI will eat away at the value of the site’s privileged position within the Google information ecosystem. Groups less savvy than pro-Palestine will also learn to exploit the site, to much more public effect. As with so many of our once-cherished institutions, trust will be lost, and credibility will soon follow.

One of the hallmarks of an institution in crisis is that, far from preparing for the future, it is barely capable of managing the present. With Arbcom grinding to a halt and edit wars erupting in all corners — all while Wikimedia Foundation, fiddling to the baroque tunes of DEI, has turned its attention to funding progressive activism — it seems Wikipedia is facing exactly this challenge. In most cases, calling a crisis existential is overblown. While Wikipedia may not be there just yet, it’s clear that moment is not far off.

==

This is what online jihad looks like.

If you've donated to Wikipedia, stop. For anything even marginally political, Wikipedia has been successfully ideologically penetrated and compromised by coordinated activist attacks.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

[pat-lechem]

(source)

[noaluvs]

[deadpoetmagda]

I just listened to a released conversation between a father in Gaza and an Israeli Arab soldier, and the gazan man is so stressed asking for solutions, apparently they've been trying to evacuate their homes after receiving a warning from the idf, yet everytime they attempt to leave hamas members outside start throwing rocks at them and shooting in the air telling them to get back inside, an old gazan woman was cut off by aljazeera after she started saying hamas take all the aid to themselves while the reporter kept telling her you must be mistaken, gazans posted dozens of videos showing hamas militant taking over the aid trucks before the civilians can reach it since all of you keep screaming the ones israel published are fake, but sure baby keep on clapping for hamas but don't you fucking dare say you care about the people in Gaza, we know you're all liars by now, just speak up your mind that you want israel and the jews to be destroyed and to fulfill the prophecy of your religion and you don't give a fuck how many innocent palestinians are sacrificed against their will for this, so stop being a coward and say the truth.

[proudzionist]

[just-an-aussie-fandom-hermit]

Peter Dutton comparing the protestors in Melbourne holding up images of Hassan Nasrallah to people “idolizing Adolf Hitler or Osama Bin Laden” is iust further evidence that this man knows nothing and will say anything no matter how inflammatory to get votes and score political favour with conservative media outlets and donors.

And then having the gall to direct police to seize Hezbollah flags and images of Nasrallah. He knows he can’t do that. He knows he has no legal leg to stand on to authorise him to do that even if that were possible.

What a fucking joke of a politician. And what a fucking joke of a constituency to take what this man says at face value

[jloisse]

🇱🇧 🇵🇸 🔥 Le conflit résumé en 2 images

[palestinegenocide]

The Biden administration must stop Israel before it escalates in Lebanon

There are dangerous signs Israel intends to escalate attacks on Lebanon and raise the stakes with Hezbollah. If it does, the risk of a regional war grows enormously. The only way out is to end the fighting in Gaza.

[link]

[eretzyisrael]

Source

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Hannah E. Meyers

Published; Jan 2, 2025

In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran from Houston, plowed his rented truck through revelers on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street. Then he jumped out and initiated the shootout that ended his life, wounding two police officers. Police found an ISIS flag, weapons, and an improvised explosive device in Jabbar’s pick-up truck, along with two more IEDs in the area. Jabbar’s attack left at least 14 dead and dozens more hurt.

The FBI now believes that Jabbar probably acted alone. And officials have found no link between his attack and the suicidal explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas hours later—an attack also apparently committed by a military veteran. In a video posted to social media before the attack, Jabbar expressed a “desire to kill” and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. He originally considered inviting his entire family to a “celebration” and massacring them before choosing to attack strangers in New Orleans instead.

In many ways, Jabbar fits the decades-old mold of a homegrown extremist. His life wasn’t going great: two divorces and a failing business left him cash-strapped and sounding desperate in correspondence with lawyers. One of his exes stopped allowing him to see their shared daughters. Jabbar’s religious observance became increasingly “radical,” and he kept largely to himself. It’s a familiar portrait.

What these incidents suggest is a growing lack of awareness and care by American citizens and institutions. We have lost much of the “see something, say something” mentality of the early post-9/11 era. This obliviousness is evident not only in our response to jihadi threats but also in our ignoring many criminal and anti-Semitic threats.

As I know from a decade spent studying, teaching, and working in counterterrorism, identifying and combating radicalization is frustrating and difficult work. The world is full of unstable individuals and brimming with jihadi rhetoric and literature.

We have yet to learn whether authorities missed any crucial signals leading up to Jabbar’s attack. But in our current relaxed milieu, it’s easy to imagine. We have convinced ourselves that vigilance is just another symptom of our Western privilege. This was evident in June, when we allowed pro-Hamas “protesters” to block gay pride marches from Boston to Philadelphia to Denver.

The sight of anyone flying the flag of a designated terror group in American streets warrants calling in a lead to law enforcement. There is no such thing as benign terror support. And while most of the deluded, ignorant anti-Zionist protesters who have waved Hamas or Hezbollah flags won’t go on to drive trucks into crowds, there is no way to find out who will without investigating.

Government officials have let down their guard. Last June, the Department of Homeland Security belatedly identified more than 400 migrants smuggled into the U.S. by an ISIS-affiliated network. Record-breaking illegal border crossings in recent years demonstrate a collapse of institutional vigilance.

We’ve also stopped responding to leads when it comes to ordinary criminal violence. Just two weeks before Darrell Brooks killed six people by driving through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 2021, he threatened, punched, and drove over his then-girlfriend. In 2020, Brooks had been charged with three felonies—including shooting at his own nephew—but was ultimately released on a cash bond of just $500. And this followed more than two decades of convictions, for which Brooks served minimal prison time and frequently received early release.

When the criminal-justice system ignores so many signs that someone is dangerous, it’s no wonder that citizens drop their guard, too. Recent weeks have seen several horrific New York City subway attacks by disturbed individuals. But New Yorkers have become so accustomed to erratic behavior underground—from fare evasion to drug use to physical assault—that most of these red flags also go unreported.

We have also stopped “saying something” when we “see something” anti-Semitic. Students at elite universities and high schools across the country have been subjected to hundreds of incidents of harassment over the past year just for the sin of being Jewish. Too many of us write off these incidents as mere “anti-Zionism.” And when such incidents do get reported, too many institutions—like the City University of New York—lack official policies recognizing them as anti-Semitism.

We’ve yet to learn the full story about the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks. There may be good reasons for why these individuals slipped through the cracks. Still, the evidence of our indifference, public and institutional, to dangerous threats is too abundant to ignore. It is a recipe for more carnage in the future.

==

One of the other obstacles in the way is that many institutions, including government and academia have been captured by intersectional ideology and are in full-blown denial.

[seethesound]

I am not Jewish, but I view the world through an unfiltered lens. Mosab Hassan Yousef’s father is one of the co-founders of Hamas. Yet he views the world through the same unfiltered lens💙🇮🇱

[noaluvs]

Hezbollah still murdering and blaming Israel for their crimes !

[secular-jew]

If the most modern, educated, English-speaking, people of Ramallah think this, can you imagine what the more traditional less educated Arabic-only population believes?

[appleisrael]

BREAKING: Hezbollah Drones THREATEN Israel; Hamas Pivots To GUERILLA WAR...

[canichangemyblogname]

Israel ignoring Egypt's warnings, Israel's chaotic "recovery" (a.k.a. their explicit non-recovery and bombing of hostages), and the IOF's chaotic engagement with Hamas fighters on Oct. 7th and 8th that caught hostages and civilians in crossfire should be proof enough that Israel cannot and will consistently fail to provide for the security and welfare of Jewish people. It should also be proof enough that Netanyahu's government doesn't give a shit about Israeli lives unless they can be weaponized to serve his political and regional goals.

The argument that the only way for Jewish people to have safety and comfort is through a Jewish ethnostate ignores how the violence necessary to establish an ethnostate breeds extremism and a cycle of violence. It ignores how Israel consistently fails to protect and provide for its citizens, how vulnerable the Israeli state would be without US support, and how politically and numerically insecure settler-colonial populations are without ethnic and genocidal violence to reproduce their position in the social hierarchy. This argument also allows countries in the Global North to wipe their hands of their own country's antisemitism. For them, Israel is the solution to their country's "Jewish Question."

Some of Zionism's basic assumptions about Jewish people and the need for a Jewish state come from antisemitic assumptions. Advocates for a Jewish state frequently invoke antisemitic stereotypes to make their case. Like... literal fucking fascists in the US support Zionism because they want to empty their country of Jewish people and then watch them die in Israel.

The largest group of Zionists in the US are Evangelical Christians. Not just in sheer numbers, but as a percentage of their population. And you know what they believe? They believe that all Jews need to return to the Holy Land to be massacred and raptured so Jesus can return. The majority of Zionists in the US are Zonists because they're antisemitic. Their antisemitism informs their support for Zionism, and their belief in Zionism informs their antisemitism.

It boggles me how the US government, literal fascists, and Evangelicals have so many of you legitimately believing that critiquing a man and a government that throws their lot in with Holocaust deniers is antisemitic.

There are experts out there who attest that Zionism encourages and spreads antisemitism around the globe and that it is a contributing factor to increases in antisemitism in the Global North. Some have gone so far as to say it is a literal threat to the well-being of Jews worldwide and a roadblock in the fight against antisemitism.