#I think this Holocaust survivor might be antisemitic

[nando161mando]

Guys, I think this Holocaust survivor might be antisemitic

[perfectlyvalid49]

Today is January 27th, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I'd like to get some stuff off my chest.

First, I'd like to take a minute to point out that it is not Yom HaShoah, which is the day Israel (and by extension large portions of the Jewish diaspora population) uses as Holocaust Remembrance day. Yom HaShoah is on the 27th of Nisan, a date that was selected to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, centering Jewish resistance in our own story. That date was selected nearly five decades before the UN picked January 27th, which was selected to center our white saviors who came to liberate Auschwitz. This is utter bullshit. And no excuses for not being able to handle a moving date on the Gregorian calendar - April 19th would be the Gregorian equivalent, and it was not selected.

Having said that, given how many infographics I've seen over the last four months about how people are increasingly denying or doubting the Holocaust, I figure any day that acknowledges it is a good thing, so yeah, let's take two days to remember. I think it's worth it.

So given that this is the Holocaust Remembrance Day that centers our goyishe friends, let's talk about how our goyishe friends should observe the day.

1. It is likely that you never learned a lot of details about the Holocaust. Holocaust education usually boils down to, "and the Nazis put Jews in camps in order to kill them, and a lot of Jews were killed in gas chambers, and about 6 million died in all." Go learn some details. Read or watch an account from a survivor.  Learn about the medical experiments, or the death marches. Learn some details about what the gas chambers were actually like. Try to understand the horror. Learn about the SS St. Louis or the Evian conference in 1938 where almost every country on Earth decided it was better to let the Jews die in Germany than to allow them into their own countries.

2. On that note, take the time to understand that anti-semitism neither began nor ended with the Nazis, and that even the "good guys" were incredibly antisemitic.Try to recognize that the antisemitism that was present where you live right now in the 1930s didn't just disappear, it just went into hiding. Think about where it might be hiding now.

Basically, because this is the Holocaust Remembrance Day for the goyim, I want to focus our remembrance of what happened on the goyim. What did they do? What could they have done to help? Why didn't they? We can come back in May for more Jewish focused learning, but the Holocaust could not have happened without A LOT of willing goyim, and I think we should spend the day remembering them and their actions.

And as a side note: if you happen to read this and you've chosen to spend the day engaging in Holocaust denial or Holocaust inversion, then know that my hope for you is that something happens in your life to teach you empathy and basic human decency. And I hope it isn't pleasant for you.

[nietp]

Thinking about how the past year of intense sionist discourse has profoundly transformed/revealed the political landscape in France to the point where it is clearly one of the causes of the rise of the far right and fascistic party and one of the reasons we might have a fascistic gouvernement in only a couple of weeks.

Thanks to right-wing+liberal+centrist+centre left parties spending months attacking the pro-palestine leftist party, calling them terrorists, islamist fundamentalists, and antisemites, while congratulating+patting on the back the fascistic far right party funded by former Nazis for going to a pro-Israel march "against antisemitism", and presenting them as the reasonable option against the pro-palestine left, we are now looking at the possibility of said far right party winning the next election, having a majority of seats in the national assembly when they used to have literally ZERO seats only 2 years ago. Obviously sionism is not the only reason but it polarised the political space in a matter of days. Because islamophobia is so prevalent in this country and sionism propaganda is doing its job so very well, we're literally looking at Holocaust survivors asking people to vote for the far-right party. I know extremely sionist Jewish french people who are about to vote far right because they're convinced that if the pro-palestine left wins in 2 weeks, they will get bombed in their Parisian apartments on election night for being Jewish. Meanwhile the far right party has already announced it wants to ban kosher meat and wearing kippas in public spaces. Meanwhile Palestinians are actually getting massacred and bombed as we speak. This is all so insane. This year has taught this country more than ever before that sionism is an excellent introduction to fascism.

[matan4il]

I have a query and I'm sorry that this question is going to upset you in advance. I see a post circling on here about Holocaust survivors apparently saying that Palestinians are exactly like them during attacks on Gaza. I just scroll past it because I have poor attention span that cannot stay focused more than one sentence but I wanted to know your opinion on this post or if you have seen it. Again, deep apologies that this ask is upsetting. Thank you for still being here and sharing with us.

Hi Nonnie!

Thank you for the kind way you approached this.

I have seen a post that might be the one you're referring to... It's a screenshot of a tweet:

The original tweet shows an interview with one Holocaust survivor. The response falsely expands this to survivors, in the plural, as if this one tweet shows a whole movement of Holocaust survivors, that people simply refuse to listen to.

The original tweet comes from an account that calls itself a "media company," but has no website (something I would expect from an actual media company), and is at least 80% tweets that are anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. I'll give you an example. We all know Elon Musk has allowed antisemitism to thrive on Twitter, all kinds of it, including the white supremacist type, and others that have nothing to do with Israel. In an attempt to educate him, he was invited to a tour of Auschwitz. But apparently, according to this "media company," that was just meant to stop anti-genocide speech on his social media platform:

Of the up to 20% of tweets this "media company" posts or shares, many are anti-democratic or in support of dictatorial regimes.

This account also amplified the words of Julius Malema, leader of the South African EFF party, as he justified the Oct 7 massacre, and demanded support for the (genocidal) Hamas and its "resistance."

Malema himself has repeatedly sang, "Kill the Boer," a song which many understand as a genocidal chant against the Boers, the South Africans of Dutch descent. This guy is a controversial figure at best, doesn't seem to have an issue with an actual genocide, and this "media company" upholds his words as if he is a role model.

But if this account tweets Israel hate, then I guess the Tumblr user who passed the tweet along has no issue with how questionable of a source this is.

I recognized the face of the survivor. This is what it looks like in the cut off screenshot in the Tumblr post I saw:

So how did I recognize him? Because the number of anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors is SO small (around 5), and I have seen every single one of them repeatedly tokenized by antisemites so much, that I'm familiar with the name and face of each. The man in this vid is Hajo Meyer, who died in 2014. He couldn't possibly make any comments about Hamas' massacre on Oct 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza since, unless this "media company" has managed to somehow contact the afterlife. Here's a screenshot from Google, showing a recent re-upload of this vid to IG:

And here's a very brief bio, mentioning his date of death:

I'm guessing that "media company" didn't name him, or specify the date out of the vid, because it didn't want people to know the guy was dead, and the views he expressed were pre-Hamas' massacre.

Hajo Meyer was, without a doubt, an anti-Zionist. But would he still be using this rhetoric after Oct 7, after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, after better understanding the kind of threat that Israel and Jews worldwide (since Hamas has tried to target Jews in European countries as well, including in the Netherlands, where Meyer lived) are facing from this genocidal terrorist organization ruling Gaza? IDK. I'd like to think he would be better than to continue distorting the Holocaust through this false comparison, but I can't say for sure, and I'm not about to claim that I do, putting words in his mouth just to exploit a dead Holocaust survivor. The fact that the anti-Israel crowd would continue to tokenize (meaning, exploit) a dead survivor like that, as if anyone could know for sure that Meyer would continue to toe the same line, just shows there really is no moral low they can't stoop to.

And here I wanna emphasize how wrong this antisemitic practice is, tokenizing Jews. Because no marginalized group is immune to the hatred spread against it, there will ALWAYS be some of its members, who will internalize and embrace poison aimed at it. There were gay Nazis (the notorious Ernest Roehm was the highest ranking one) and we also have contemporary gay neo-Nazis. So, should we use them in order to pretend that Nazi ideology is not homophobic? That it didn't harm hundreds of thousands of gay people? No, we know that the overwhelming majority of gay people suffered due to it, and would insist that Nazism IS homophobic. So, using those few exceptions to ignore (and embolden) the homophbia of this ideology, ends up being homophobic in itself. Embracing the unrepresentative few over the representative, mainstream majority of a marginalized group in "exonerating" what the group says is hateful and harmful towards it, ends up being hateful and harmful in itself.

And that's what people who only listen to the few anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are doing. They're basically saying, "Listen to Holocaust survivors!" but they mean only the few who say what the anti-Israel movement does. All the other survivors they ignore, dismiss, silence or even erase.

They're ignoring the voices of the overwhelming majority of Holocaust survivors who WERE (and are) Zionist. Who do not agree with this distorted narrative. Yad Vashem estimates that two thirds of Holocaust survivors came to Israel at the end of WWII, and many more supported Israel even when they chose to settle elsewhere. Just recently, we had a group of 870 American survivors (along with their descendants, altogether 2,500 Jews) thank Biden for standing with Israel after the Hamas massacre. These anti-Israel haters are also erasing the survivors who were themselves targeted on Oct 7, whether threatened, kidnapped, injured or murdered (I've talked about several in my posts on this blog). This anti-Israel mob is exploiting Hajo Meyer even in ignoring that if he had been alive and present in Israel, even just to visit a friend or family member, he would have been targeted, too. These haters are ignoring survivors who said that what Hamas has done is similar to what the Nazis did (I've talked about several of them in my posts on this blog, too. All can be found in my Israel tag).

It is unconscionable, to treat most Holocaust survivors like they don't count, and only see a (literal) handful of anti-Zionist ones as if they do. And it certainly does NOT show the respect the anti-Israel haters imply survivors are owed, through the demand that we all defer to the opinion of the survivors, but ONLY the few anti-Zionist ones.

All that said, off the top of my head, here's a small number of HUGE differences between the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, and anyone ignoring them IS guilty of distorting the Holocaust.

-> The Holocaust did NOT start due to Jews repeatedly murdering Germans on German soil, in an attempt to keep Germans down and prevent them from establishing self rule in the German ancestral land. The Holocaust was completely unprovoked, unjustified and one-sided. Every oppressive measure taken by the Nazis against the Jews, was motivated by antisemitism, and was NOT a reaction to Jewish anti-German terrorism, that the Nazis had to protect their German citizens from. Speaking of unprovoked, unjustified and for a very long time one-sided, that describes the Arab anti-Jewish violence that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel by almost 100 years. But Jewish self-defense in this conflict, which only started about 50 years after said violence began, was provoked, was justified, was a response to what was done to the Jews first.

-> The Holocaust did NOT consist of Jews on German soil collaborating militarily with several Jewish countries surrounding Germany, with the goal of these combined Jewish armies invading and wiping it off the map, in order to prevent German self rule. Guess what the Arabs did to the Jews...

-> The Holocaust did NOT entail repeated German efforts to find a solution for how Jews and Germans could live together on the same land. In pre-state Israel, Jews did try repeatedly to reach an understanding that would allow Jews and Arabs to peacefully share (and co-exist in) the Jewish ancestral land.

-> When Jews finally started rebelling against the Nazis, they did NOT try to get as many Jewish civilians as possible killed. On the contrary, the outbreak of the most famous Jewish revolt, the one in the Warsaw Ghetto, was postponed until the Nazis entered, and the Jewish fighters believed this to be the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto (meaning, the deportation and extermination of the roughly 60,000 Jews still alive there). Only then did they fight back, because (in their own words), they did not want their decision to rebel to cost another Jew "even one hour of life." Compare that to how Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Or even to the Arab leadership back in 1948, which did not hesitate in risking or displacing the entire Arab population in the Land of Israel, in favor of fighting what they called "an extermination war" against the Jews.

-> The Holocaust did NOT see a single day where Germans worked en masse to try and alleviate the suffering of Jews, whether by providing them with humanitarian aid, or by moving them to areas where they would be safe from death. That's in direct contrast to Israel's efforts to make Palestinians' lives better, whether through humanitarian aid, work permits in Israel that guarantee a higher salary and better social rights, medical treatments, warnings when a terrorist target is about to be struck, etc.

-> The Holocaust was NOT supposed to end with even one Jew alive at the end of it. The Germans were going for total extermination of the Jewish people. All Jews who had German citizens were stripped of it in 1935, even before the most murderous parts of this genocide commenced. In contrast, Israel did NOT seek to kill all Arabs, there were many calls for Arabs not to flee Israel and the war which the Arab leadership had started, at the end of the war Israel gave citizenship to 150,000 Arabs who did not leave and did not take arms against Jews, and there was even an offer for tens of thousands of Arabs to return (Weitzmann presented it to the UN), if they do so peacefully. Just a few thousands accepted that offer, but those who did, got citizenship and land.

-> The Nazis were so eager to kill every Jew, that they came to the conclusion they HAD to industrialize their genocide of the Jewish people. That's why they built extermination camps with gas chambers at their core. Auschwitz alone could, on certain days, kill about 20,000 people. No Jew was meant to leave those camps alive. The crematoria were mass murder factories. ANY crime that you want to compare to the Holocaust specifically, you have to show that it includes this industrialization element. Currently, NO GENOCIDE, no matter how horrific, has. And God help us all, I hope it stays that way (this is one of the reasons why the Holocaust mustn't be distorted or minimized. We can't prevent something from happening, if we don't understand what HAS happened, and that we're trying to stop from being repeated). There is not a SINGLE thing in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict that comes CLOSE to being an industrialized form of massacre. Even the brutality of Hamas on Oct 7, the single bloodiest day in the history of this conflict for either side, doesn't come close.

-> While there are still Jews around, meaning the Holocaust as conceptualized by the Nazis failed, it was so deadly, that it DID lead to the murder of around 70-80% of the Jews living under the Nazi occupation over a short number of years. Even more than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews have not recovered demographically. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has increased by about 10 times since Israel's Independence War. But let's say people wanna claim that just this current war is comparable to the Holocaust. There are presently around 7 million Arabs in the territories of the Jewish ancestral land, of which about 2 million are Israeli citizens. I'm gonna go with the anti-Israel narrative for a second, which claims ALL of them are occupied and oppressed by Israel (even though they're not). In order for the ruin of Palestinians to be indeed on the same level, that would mean 70-80% of them would have to be murdered by Israel during the war. Let's go with the lower percent, so it's easier for the anti-Israel crowd to reach the number of deaths that would support their claim. To have killed 70% of 7 million, that would mean Israel would have to kill 4.9 million Arabs in this so-called "genocide." Even if we exclude Israeli Arabs, and only focus on the 5 million Palestinians living in areas where the Israeli army currently operates (imagine the German Nazis allowing Jews safety inside Germany, and only killing them outside it *eyeroll*), that would mean at least 3.5 million Palestinians killed. But after almost 5 months of this war, the number of Palestinian fatalities, as claimed by Hamas, is around 30,000 people (I'm putting aside the fact that at least 12,000 are Hamas terrorists). The gap between what is happening, and what people who make this false comparison are implying is happening, is incomprehensible.

Sorry for the length, but I hope this is helpful!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[fairuzfan]

I’m a genocide historian and I do think comparisons between the Holocaust and the genocide in Palestine are unproductive because A) the Holocaust is pretty distinct from Palestinian genocide not in its exceptionalism but in its method - the “shipping” of victims from 20+ countries by international rail to a handful of centralized killing sites; 15000 people being gassed in Auschwitz daily (a single gas chamber had standing capacity for 2,000 people) and their stolen hair sold in bales for use as maritime rope and cushion stuffing - and forcing Holocaust parallels obfuscates the terrible and very unique methods of genocide being used by Israel against Palestinians. B) People often invoke the Holocaust as an emotional appeal regarding the moral culpability of all Jews (“how could you do what was done to your ancestors!”) when the same responsibility to end the genocide in Palestine exists regardless of one’s background or religion.

What Israel is doing in Palestine is 100% a genocide. Whether or not it is similar to the Holocaust (or any previous atrocity) does not make this any more or less true.

The thing that doesn't make sense to me with this point is that no one is saying that the Holocaust and Palestinian genocide are a 1:1 comparison. Like most people acknowledge the terrible genocide that occurred in the Holocaust against all its victims. But when they're talking about comparing genocides, there are tell tale signs that repeat throughout history that are precursers to larger events. Like when people compare the Warsaw ghetto to Gaza. I'd say those are quite similar in practice and intention. When we "compare" genocides (not a 1:1 but more of a drawing parellels by disecting the inteion and reasoning behind certain events that werent necessarily actively violent but passively violent) its to show "hey this is going to get really bad really soon because something like this happened before." Masha Gessen has an article about this that I reblogged.

People should care about fighting injustice everywhere I agree. But that doesn't change the fact that parallel drawing is an act separate from emotional invocation. When genocide scholars and survivors talk about "Hey this was like xyz that happened to me/in history" it's to show that there is precedent for this thinking and a terrible methodology happening when genocides occur. They dont just get really bad out of nowhere, you need to examine the precursors to prevent the large event from happening. How that large event happens differs from place to place, I agree. But to say that because things happen differently against different people means you can't examine the underlying reasons behind those actions is kind of reductive. By this definition you can never compare any genocide ever and all the terrible things that happen just happen naturally without any political or social influence.

Arnesa talks about how the Bosnian genocide precursors mirror the Palestinian genocide. She also talks about how Lula specifically should have mentioned other genocides (like Rwanda, Bosnia, etc) in his statement because there are parallels there too. I'd argue that's the real intention behind genocide studies, in that you notice trends and patterns to analyze how certain events might turn out.

I do want to mention because this is where im coming from a little bit, it is a pretty big zionist talking point (by especially American dems) saying you can't compare the holocaust to what's happening to Palestinians because it's antisemitic, which is not a real talking point and actually kind of rude in that it assumes that Palestinians can't call out parallels between their treatment and the treatment of those in the Holocaust because they're fundamentally doing it from a point of antisemitism and not a plea for recognition that the events are mirroring each other.

[sunbeamedskies]

I've seen a lot of troubling antisemitism in the Our Flag Means Death fandom lately regarding Taika Waititi. Please hear me out.

A lot of people want everyone to comment about the Israel/Palestine war. It's understandable. What Palestinian civilians are going through in Gaza is a nightmare that no one deserves. They are overwhelmingly paying the price for Hamas' actions- a group they have no control over and are also harmed by. Thousands have been killed.

After October 7th, Taika signed a letter asking for the Israeli hostages to be released. It did not endorse any specific actions taken by the Israeli government- it was simply in support of the hostages.

But you know what he was immediately accused of?

Supporting genocide. Even though what he signed was about Israeli civilians- including the elderly, disabled, and children- who were being held captive by Hamas.

On October 7th, Jews died in a single day in numbers that hadn't been since the Holocaust. Israel contains half the world's entire Jewish population. The majority of its population are descendants of Jews from middle eastern and north African countries who were forcibly kicked out in violent pogroms and had nowhere else to go. Many are descendants of Holocaust survivors as well.

I think most non-Jews would be astounded at how much the majority of the worldwide Jewish community is still mourning and reeling from October 7th. It triggered a lot of intergenerational trauma in many of us, yet I hear barely any non-Jews talk about it.

And yet you immediately accused Taika, a Jewish man, of supporting genocide just because he didn't support hostages being taken and random civilians being murdered. Do you really think he trusts people not to twist his words if he attempts to talk about Palestine too, when you turned a moment of legitimate pain for members of one of the persecuted groups he's apart of into accusing him of being a genocide-supporting monster?

We Jews not only have to deal with the memory of October 7th, but also with people conflating any support for the hostages with support for the Israeli government. When we say that criticism of Israel can at times get antisemitic, this is the kind of thing we're talking about.

Many of us are simultaneously mourning for Palestine and horrified that a right-wing fascist government that has little care for Palestinian lives has taken over Israel. Innocent lives taken shouldn't justify the killing of other innocent lives, and we are watching it happen, feeling powerless.

And it gets worse, because targeting Taika specifically because he's a person of multiple marginalized identities, when you don't attack white members of the crew nearly as much, is ironically racist.

Unintentional antisemitism and unintentional racism is still antisemitism and racism.

Take a deep breath and please reflect on how you have no idea what it's like to be Jewish right now, and how some of your own antisemitic criticism about his signature has likely contributed to his silence about Palestine. If no matter what he says his words and actions are twisted by so many of his "fans", he might think there's nothing he can say that will do any good.

[anyoldfandom]

I think what needs to be addressed with Israel and Jewish supporters too that I haven't really seen discussed much is...y'all know we are subject to a lot of propaganda too, right? Like, obviously, that doesn't excuse excusing genocide. But like, a lot of Jewish kids aren't gonna know about this. A lot of Jews who don't go online aren't gonna know about this. It's just kind of weird to see that lack of understanding that a lot of us were raised on propaganda and our communities and the news, too, have plenty of handy lies.

I grew up being told Israel was full of no one but Jews. I grew up being told I had a literal birthright to be there - not just because it was holy, but because it was safe. That our people had faced attempted genocide over and over and over again. I grew up listening to Holocaust survivors, being forced to attend museums when I had already firsthand listened to the horrors from the mouths of those who lived it, being told over and over again by the world that at any moment, this could happen again. And by no means am I saying listening to survivors or visiting museums was propaganda - but you get how that scares a kid, right? You get that then, when you have a scared kid and then you tell them there is only one place on earth they'll be safe and no one's living there really, that you have a divine right to this safety, that they're going to latch onto that idea.

Again, none of this excuses the actions of adults, I guess it's just...idk, also weird to me? That that aspect isn't discussed, that that might contribute to why there are so many Jewish zionists. And more importantly, how that can be a way to fight against Zionism in Jewish spaces, especially since there's been a lot of acknowledgement of antisemitism in leftist spaces but...I'm not seeing as much discussion on how to fight it. On how that alienates Jews. It's just weird to me how so much more attention and interest will go to discussing why Christians might be Zionists, and trying to open the doors to goy and being more gentle with your discussions to them and dismissing Jewish Zionists as all evil when we (Jews, not Zionists) have been fed propaganda all our lives.

The most radicalizing thing to me, by the way, the thing that made me realize the propaganda was just that, was that they killed children. Adults could be justified and excused as Hamas, but children? There was no excuse. The stories from Palestinians came next, and they shocked me to my core. To hear the voices of people who have lost their loved ones - though we've also seen some nasty propaganda and false stories from Israel, too. I don't know if it'll work for everyone, but the reminder that children are dying worked for me.

[beardedmrbean]

Wait wait wait, people said Jewish people should go back to Poland?

Wasn’t there a certain camp that basically the only one that you think of when talking about the Holocaust due to the arm numbering?

Oh right

AUSCHWITZ, YOU WANT JEWISH PEOPLE GO BACK TO THE CENTERPIECE OF THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST?!

In 6th grade, I read The Devil's Arithmetic, and before the girl went back to the past. One of Jewish elders said it was miracle one of family members was born in America

Yes despite our rampant antisemitism (though now it cause by pro Palestine people now) several Jewish people would prefer living in America vs in the old world

AAAAAH, A FUCKING 2012 UBISOFT GAME SHOULD’NT GIVE ME A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF COLONIAL AND 20 CENTURY IMMIGRATION TO THE NEW WORLD THAN COLLEGES

Ugh, but anyways, the game pointed out a lot of persecuted people in the old world were FLEEING to the Americas for a better life and the hell it was

Theory of mine, I think the creation of modern Israel as part of the aftermath of the Holocaust is left out in our education system not to piss off arab nations who fund it.

(Probably Arabs love leaving out that a lot of Nazis went to their countries to escape persecution as well)

For about nine years this fall, I was called a Nazi apologist for preferring an evil space wizard.

Yet as I type, I for some reason understand the plight of descendants of Holocaust survivors more despite working at a Amazon warehouse and have a HS diploma only

What the fuck is going on?

Wait wait wait, people said Jewish people should go back to Poland? AUSCHWITZ, YOU WANT JEWISH PEOPLE GO BACK TO THE CENTERPIECE OF THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST?!

Before WWII there were 3.3 million Jews living in Poland, after the dust settled there was 380,000. Nearly 90% of the Jews in Poland died as a result of WWII, and some of them weren't welcome back home after they'd been freed from the camps, all kinds of reasons for that but it's not like Poland was terribly welcoming.

Communism thing to deal with too, behind the iron curtain wasn't super safe for Jewish folks either. Double bad given the Antisemitism baked directly into communism.

In 6th grade, I read The Devil's Arithmetic, and before the girl went back to the past. One of Jewish elders said it was miracle one of family members was born in America Yes despite our rampant antisemitism (though now it cause by pro Palestine people now) several Jewish people would prefer living in America vs in the old world

We've done better here in the US than lots of places on that, or I'd thought we had till all this started up, did get a preview of what was in store a few years back after Israel kicked some squatters out of a home that had been purchased while the place was a province of the Ottoman Empire.

AAAAAH, A FUCKING 2012 UBISOFT GAME SHOULD’NT GIVE ME A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF COLONIAL AND 20 CENTURY IMMIGRATION TO THE NEW WORLD THAN COLLEGES

They have to break down complicated things into simple easy to understand bits of knowledge, it's handy and a good jumping off point since it's not overly complicated usually.

Ugh, but anyways, the game pointed out a lot of persecuted people in the old world were FLEEING to the Americas for a better life and the hell it was

That was one of the reasons several of the colonies and settlements happened starting at the begining

Theory of mine, I think the creation of modern Israel as part of the aftermath of the Holocaust is left out in our education system not to piss off arab nations who fund it.

there wasn't a lot about it when I was in school and the anti Israel sentiment hadn't gotten anywhere near where it is now then, but there might be something to that.

Also only so much time to teach, so that gets in the way too.

For about nine years this fall, I was called a Nazi apologist for preferring an evil space wizard. Yet as I type, I for some reason understand the plight of descendants of Holocaust survivors more despite working at a Amazon warehouse and have a HS diploma only

We did the whole thing with Louis Armstrong and the family that kinda took him in and taught him a bunch of different Jewish Lithuanian songs, made enough of a impact on him that he wore a Star of David on a necklace his whole life.

'Met these nice white people and it confused me that they were treated the same way black people were by their fellow white people'

You'd think there would be some kind of solidarity there from the two groups, and there was for a good long while here.

What the fuck is going on?

That would be this for lots of people

Chuggin that flavor aid

[odinsblog]

This stinks to high heaven, or Jannah, or Valhalla, or whatever makes you happy

My big sister is gay. I was the first person she came out to when we were kids, not quite 20 yet. I care deeply about her. And as I matured + unlearned much of my ingrained adolescent homophobia, with my sister’s help, I have come to care deeply about the LGBTQ community. Even the white ones, and all the other non-Black ones too

I’m trying really hard to imagine hearing about something like the Pulse nightclub shooting and somehow not caring about some of the non-Black victims because they might not have shared my exact political beliefs. I can’t. I can’t imagine not caring. Not caring because of something so trivial by comparison of being murdered by a crazy person in cold blood.

Look, I guess at some point either you care about people or you don’t. And if you’re able to turn off who you feel sorrow for based on their race, religion or ideology, then I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how to relate to you.

I’ve been trying not to post too TOO much about some specifics of what’s happening in Palestine and Israel, but I’m sorry: I feel bad for the innocent children and civilians who were murdered in cold blood in Israel. I know that the “any means” tankies crowd wants everyone to ignore their deaths (or worse celebrate their deaths), but I guess I’m not built that way.

Some of those people murdered at the concert, for example, were not only innocent civilians, but they were also pro-Palestinian activists who spent their time working for peace. I shed tears hearing their family members talking about them. Hamas murdered Holocaust survivors, ffs.

I absolutely can understand Jewish people feeling uneasy right now. They lost a ton of noncombatant civilians —not to mention children. And oh yeah, antisemitism has been at an all time high, unfortunately, just like Islamophobia is about to be. Again.

I might be wrong, but I honestly just do not think that Hamas did Palestinians any favors.

Yes, yes, I dO understand that violence is always a necessary part of freedom and decolonization.

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” —Assata Shakur

So I’m a big podcast listener (helps occupy my mind whenever I’m working on long tedious projects), and I was listening to one where they interviewed a Jewish soldier who was recently activated, but he was out of Israel and had to fly back. He said something like, “If they had only attacked military targets, then I would get it. We got caught with our pants down, and all is fair in love and war, right? But the mass slaughter of civilian families, women and children is the reason I’m going back.”

I wanted to reach through my phone and ask him about Israel preparing to do exactly the same thing to Palestinians in retaliation, but alas I guess I just sounded like a crazy person yelling to himself in my office.

And yeah, before you read too much further, please understand that I dO support the fuck outta Palestine. Let me be unequivocal here: Israel is in the wrong. Israel has oppressed Palestinians for decades. For actual generations.

Remember when Israel literally bulldozed over a woman to build more houses in Gaza?

Yeah, seriously heinous shit, right?

And we don’t actually have a solid count for all the innocent murdered Palestinian civilians who were living in apartment buildings that Israel has been bombing to smithereens for the past few days. I understand that Israel and the West would have us believe that everyone in Gaza is a terrorist and nobody is an innocent civilian, but hopefully, if you’re reading this, YOU know better than that.

But that said ….. I cannot get with tankies—who, safe and sound in their homes, not being perpetually bombed—want to sound “hard” on social media, and make no distinctions with the people who were just minding their own fucking business at a goddamn concert. I think about all of the mass shootings in America (movie theaters, grocery stores, night clubs, concerts, schools, office buildings, etc) and I just cannot imagine justifying or excusing ANY of them because of the shooter’s “ideology.” I know it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s close enough.

“If they were on colonized land then they deserved to die” is one hell of a fucked up take. The slippery slope is that if any of our loved ones are gunned down by “freedom fighters,” then we should just be happy for “the cause” and not shed any tears, because ALL of us deserve to die in America and other Western countries, because we’re all living on colonized land.

I cannot even begin to explain how flawed and fucked up that so-called reasoning is.

You have to have some fucking lines and boundaries.

We don’t just do a shoulder shrug when children are murdered in cold blood—and no, I’m not talking about the 40 babies allegedly beheaded, I’m just talking about the little toddlers who were shot through walls and died, and the elderly and disabled who were shown being dragged away. Yeah, I feel sorry for them too. And I won’t apologize for that.

Rape is wrong. All the time. Under all circumstances. Even when it’s happening to people who you don’t like.

Murdering children is wrong. All the time. Under all circumstances. Even when it’s the children of people who you don’t like.

Do I really need to spell this shit out? JFC.

If you don’t care about any of this because you’re “down for the cause,” then you. are. lost. Like really and truly lost. You aren’t a radical. You’re a fanatic. And hopefully you won’t be in a position to ever receive the fanatical Karma that you’re asking for.

Anyway…

I am on the side of Palestine in all of this. They never deserved to be oppressed by Israel or anyone.

Innocent Palestinian women and children are dying as you’re reading this. I’m shedding tears for them too. They’ve been going through this for way too long. That fact alone is beyond being a tragedy.

Palestine has already suffered and will suffer 10 times more than all of the civilians and noncombatants who were tragically murdered in Kfar Aza.

As always, my usual reminders:

The Holocaust happened

Antisemitism is real

Hamas ≠ Palestine

Israel is an apartheid state

Collective punishment is a war crime

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal

You can support Palestine without being antisemitic

Free Palestine 🇵🇸

[ace7librarian]

A little late for Holocaust memorial day, but I think I want to share my family story here. It's pretty long, but I'll appreciate it if my goy mutuals could give it a look. Maybe it will help some goyim understand how ingrained the trauma is in the Jewish brain.

Little backstory about my family: I was born from a sperm donation, so my family has only one side- my mother's. If I had two parents, it would be double the amount of grandparents. Now I have just my grandpa and grandma, my mother's parents, and both of their parents are holocaust survivors. Just a heads up: I might be wrong about some stuff.

I'll start with my grandpa, because his parents didn't talk much about the Holocaust, since they were too traumatised. They were called Israel and Lea. Israel was born in Poland, and all we know about his history is that he had about seven sisters who were all murdered. Only he and two of his siblings survived. He blamed himself for the death of his family, and according to my mother, the only reason he didn't commit suicide was his religion. Lea was born in Germany, probably in Berlin, to a rich family. Her father was a very respected rabbi. when the war started, her brother Izzy escaped with all their money, leaving lea to watch her siblings get murdered. Lea, her father and her fiance (?) Were held in a concentration camp in Siberia (?), where lea left her fiance, who didn't want to take care of her father. Lea and Israel met there, and Israel did try to help Lea's father, but he still died, because he was a rabbi wbd that's the Holocaust. Israel and Lea survived and got married for comfort reasons, and decided to move to Israel, because Lea's brother izzy was there. Izzy did not give his sister any money or help, but she stayed close to him, because he was all the family she had. They managed to make a living, but they were never happy. Not even with their family. they didn't even have the strength to pretend, for their kids. They were kind and loving, but they were both shells of themselves.

My grandma's parents had it rough as well, of course, but they expressed it differently. Maybe it's because they were younger while it happened, maybe it's just a personality difference. Their names were Yehuda and Sarah, abd they talked a lot about their experiences. They had a small book made for the family with their stories, and Sarah was regularly going to schools and other events to teach about the Holocaust. Yehuda was born in Hungary, and since he was 3 he carried weapons to protect himself against antisemites in the streets. He was very lucky - only his father was burned alive, his mother and sister survived in a ghetto the whole holocaust, and he snuck into a train and escaped. It did leave him fairly traumatised. My grandma jokes that her father escaped, so he was afraid of everything ever since (got my anxiety from him), and her mother didn't, so she was afraid of nothing. Sarah was born in Slovakia, and I know about her the most, since she passed away just a few years ago. Her father didn't have Hungarian citizenship, so he was taken by the Nazis first. So when Jews who escaped Poland came to hide in their house, Sarah's mother believed the horrors they told about, since she hasn't heard from her husband in months. Eventually, the nazis found them as well. Sarah was pushed to the group of the older kids by her mother, who was murdered later that day in the gas chambers with the two youngest siblings, who were 12 and 7. Sarah and her 3 siblings who survived were moved from camp to camp. They have many stories about those horrible years- from having women they knew from town as their prison guards, to getting a comfortable position as the toilet cleaner, to Sarah's brother showing his ass to a nazi and getting out alive, and getting experimented on by Mengele. Eventually they were freed by the British, but Sarah's sister Golda got terminally ill at a death march and died just after being free at last, at age 19. The three surviving siblings moved to Israel (not before getting arrested and spending some time in a camp in Cyprus), where Sarah and Yehuda met. After the war, Yehuda's mother remarried, which gave him a step sibling. His step brother married and had a child, but he gave his daughter Maya to Yehuda, since his wife was sick. I only recently learned that the sickness was trauma and depression, and Maya's mother killed herself when maya was just a child. Now Sarah and Yehuda had two children, my grandma and Maya. Despite everything, they were very positive and determined to make the most out of life, for their family and friends who couldn't.

I remember grandma Sarah always says, that her biggest revenge on the Nazis was surviving and making a family. I miss her. She was an excellent cook. She never threw away a scrap- in the Holocaust she and her siblings survived on a single loaf of bread, so who is going to dare wasting food? I used to love tracing the number tattooed on her arm with my finger when I was a child. I don't remember a time not knowing how it got there. I don't remember a time not knowing my grandparents didn't have grandparents. I do remember my first time seeing a picture of Hitler though- it was in class. I heard so much about this monster, I felt pretty disappointed seeing him. Like he should have horns or something.

The Holocaust is not just a historical event for me. It's in every recipe my mother learned from Sarah, in every joke my uncle learned from Sarah's brother, in the necklace my grandma got from Lea, every time Maya visits. I wasn't surprised to find out other Jews have nightmares about the Holocaust. I was surprised when I realised goyim don't have that- they weren't born with thousands of years of being chased inside of them. They don't have the fear of their ancestors running in their veins. Honestly, what are they even talking about with their friends? Because in my case, it always comes back to our Jewish trauma. Many Jews weren't in the Holocaust, and they are still burdened by insane trauma. Even if some aren't aware of it, I think that our generational trauma effects everything we do. No matter where I go or what I do, I'll still imagine good places to hide. I'll still have a nightmare about Nazis every once in a while. I'll wonder if the goy being so nice to me would hide me if I was in danger.

Never again.

[eddieydewr]

I’m glad Noah is removing himself from social media for his own peace of mind. It sucks but social media is toxic and he’s still so young and naive enough that he is prone to over sharing and putting himself in positions where people can be nasty or take advantage of him. It’s sucks to say this is an exercise in growing up the hard way but he does need to protect himself more and not everyone deserves a piece of him or his time. I just hope he’s ok mentally and has a lot of love and support around him now.

Also the zionist thing re the stickers. Wasn’t that his friends stickers and he was just showing them to Noah? That’s what I remember. Ppl be acting like Noah made them and was posting them around the town which he did not. And as for calling everyone a zionist, I think a lot of people don’t even know what zionism is at the most basic level—is just that jews think israel should be allowed to exist/they should be allowed to self determinate in their indigenous homeland. That’s it! How is that evil or bad unless you are an antisemitic piece of shit or you’re so misinformed that you buy the falsehood that israelis are all white european colonizers? Bffr. That’s literally what zionism is, no matter what these zoomers are hearing online or how some people might be twisting it into something far from what it actually means, that’s what being a zionist means in its simplest form. Just that Isreal should be allowed to exist. And that to me is not problematic unless you think jews don’t deserve to have a place in their homeland that expelled them. And do ppl think a jewish boy whose has ties to Israel is going to believe that Israel should not exist and all the millions of jews there should just… what exactly? disappear? relocate where? be killed? what’s the solution again? the fact that cheering for hamas and houthis literally terrorists who kill their own people and shove gays off rooftops and oppress woman and train child soldiers is ok and cool but believing innocent israelis who were murdered should be spared no sympathy and all those jews should not be allowed to have a home is not… just shows what a fucked up world we live in.

I think these people think that zionism = jews thinking they are the best thing ever and all the palestinians need to die but like… no? also like 90 percent or something of jews around the world consider themselves zionists so…. I’m sorry at this point all I am seeing is a lot of people who simply hate jews or aren’t educated about the situation and are putting western US racial politics overtop this middle east issue and they don’t overlap. at all. this has become the most disgusting display from a generation I have ever seen and so worry about this country. But I’ve said to my friends is give it time, as soon as their terrorist buddies decide to attack here again they might finally catch a clue that these “freedom fighters” aren’t their friends or to be cheered on

anyways if believing jews should be allowed to have a homeland and live there peacefully makes me a zionist? then call me a zionist. i would rather support that then cheer hamas

exactly, yeah. all this. they think noah recording his friends and smiling makes him evil and he was happy about people dying in gaza. 😭

they also think zionism and israel itself are based on the destruction of another land (palestine); ethnic cleansing and genocide. even some jews and holocaust survivors believe it (for many different reasons; some of them are actually non zionists instead) but their opinions are used by antisemites to bolster their ~anti zionist claims and israel’s right to exist. they’re also against a two-state solution and think israel should cease to be. israelis simply can use their dual passports (because all of them are dual citizens apparently) and go to brooklyn or poland 🤪 or just stay and become palestinian citizens. somehow i can’t see that going well for jews, especially if “from the river to the sea” palestine is under hamas’ control. so people are either stupid and don’t realise what they’re saying or some of them are actually honest with their intention; to push the jews into the sea.

[shivroyscunt]

^^^ just saw this post and i needed to like. put in words why this can be true but still does not accurately capture the historical and geopolitical context surrounding the entire situation.

nobody is saying that hamas themselves are enacting #progressive revolution. theres no such thing as “progressive” when it comes to revolution, there is only desperation and anger and the need to overthrow an oppressive regime. they are retaliating against years of occupation, oppression, and boiling tensions, and they are retaliating with just as much violence and horrific atrocities as the israeli state has enacted upon the people and land they occupy. it is easy for whataboutisms when we dont feel that violence and terror directed towards us — i personally will never know what it feels like to have my food/water supply cut off, my home raided, my life disrupted by daily violence and surveillance. you cannot expect occupied people (colonized) to not feel hatred for their oppressors (colonizers), and you cannot expect them (especially not the most radical groups) to react reasonably and peacefully after enduring decades of occupation and dehumanization (and when they do attempt peaceful resistance it is met with violence).

i dont want to get into zionist talking points about the holy land / ancestry / divine rights — this isnt about that. the modern day israeli-palestinian conflict is a direct result of colonial interference, and an issue of settler-colonialism, not a religious conflict. this is about the fact that since 1948, the western world (ie. britain and the US, colonial/imperial powers) has played a direct role in supporting and establishing the (secular) israeli military state both financially and politically. global powers have every reason to be in cahoots, america has every reason to push imperial/colonial propoganda rooted in racism, and their support has allowed israel to continue subjugating palestinians.

and to respond to this persons point about how hamas has given netanyahu the excuse he’s been waiting for to commit genocide — that is not the salient point you think you’re making. if the israeli government (on top of the ethnic cleansing and terror inflicted on palestinians over the past 50 years, the illegal and inhumane blockade on gaza for the past 15) decides to lean even more into genocide, that absolutely cannot be solely attributed to hamas’ recent act of (what western media has deemed) terrorism. sure, this might be a catalyst in the sense that archduke franz ferdinand’s assassination was a catalyst for ww1, but its obvious that, like with ww1, theres a lot more at play here.

also i just want to point out how baffling it is that the israeli government, which has one of the most well-funded and cohesive military operations in the world, was unable to predict or prepare for an attack like this (it feels fishy to me but i dont wanna get into conspiracy theories, so). i get that it was a “surprise” attack, but the israeli gov took it as an opportunity to declare war (as they have done throughout the last 75 years to occupy more land and displace more people from their homes). the fact that the israeli state is so ready to — as this person put it — commit genocide should be a deeply deeply troubling notion. we should not be defending/advocating for a police state, we should be condemning it.

i want to add that i am aware israel was a safe haven for jewish refugees during and after the world wars and the holocaust, and that there are now multiple generations of people/survivors who have experienced repeated historical trauma and oppression. these ppl deserve a place where they can feel safe — but the israeli state, the way it was built and the way it has evolved, is not a place of safety. antisemites have always and will continue to use this conflict as an excuse to hate jews, which is disgusting and reprehensible. those who use palestinian liberation as an excuse to call for the extinction of jewish ppl are not for true liberation.

i dont know what a solution to the conflict looks like, but i do know that the israeli state has driven the ppl of palestine to retaliate, and that liberation is not a pure simple or easy endeavor. people cannot afford moral purity when their lives and futures are in constant flux, when their basic human rights are on the line. this is a tragedy, no one is disputing that. it is devastating that innocent civilians suffer most in times of war, violence, and conflict. but that is the price of nationalism, the price of power and humanity at its worst, and what we are seeing today is the culmination of decades of oppression, decades of tragedies, small and large.

[coffeeinthelibrary]

okay okay i am NOT justifying any of the violence in israel or palestine but just a PSA for those of you who don’t know: Jews have only been regarded as “white” for MAYBE the past 50 or so years. a large percentage of Jews in Israel are BY NO MEANS white - most are the Arab refugees who were kicked out of every single middle eastern country in 1948 (and the jews who stayed died). there’s a large group of Ethiopian Jews who were saved in (i think) the 1960s by the IDF and now live in Israel (because they faced genocide in Ethiopia). Yemeni Jews, Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Indian Jews, Jordanian Jews, Egyptian Jews are all major groups within Israel. the history of Jews in the Arabic-Islamic world is probably MORE extensive than the history of Jews in Europe. The main reason why people in the West think of Jews as “white” is because a lot of Eastern European and Western European Jews (Ashkenazi Jews) live in England and the US, and the Jews we most often see on TV are these Ashkenazi Jews.

Also, Jews historically have never been seen as white (even the white-passing ones). The whole fucking reason Jews have been persecuted was because they weren’t white.

I fully support calling out the Israeli government and holding them to account, but when someone calls Israelis “white settlers” it erases the entire history of persecution that Jews faced. The majority of Israelis I know moved to Israel after being forcibly kicked out of the surrounding middle eastern countries, and the white-passing Israelis I know are all descendants of Holocaust survivors - if you asked any of my family who were killed in the Holocaust if they thought of themselves as white they would have laughed.

Again, this doesn’t justify the violence against Palestinians being committed by the Israeli government. But calling Jewish Israelis “white settlers” is just factually wrong (and I won’t even go into how Jews are indigenous to Israel). Considering I have been approached in clubs and asked “are you jewish” (and then harassed when I said yes), considering that every time I have been a victim of antisemitism I have not been wearing anything that would mark me as Jewish (other than my ethnically Jewish features, which I can’t exactly change) i don’t feel white-passing. it might be less obvious than other ethnic groups, but my Jewishness is certainly obvious to antisemites.

[horizon-verizon]

If people accept the Zionist line, then all Palestinians are terrorists and/or terror-sympathisers, and by extension, all Muslims are as well. This is indistinguishable from islamophobia. I think we need to be clear on the implications here.

Zionist weaponisation of islamophobia has consequences for Jewish safety. Why ? Because islamophobia and antisemitism are conjoined. They are two faces of the same evil. A dear Jewish mate told me recently: “they hate you in the immediate and they hate us in the ultimate.”

Zionist-led efforts to normalise islamophobia and anti-Arab racism might sustain Israel for a time. But what then ? You’ve normalised racism. You’ve empowered neo-Nazis and white supremacists. That, not the Palestinian fight for liberation, is a threat to Jewish safety.

Yes, yes, yes! This is also why Christo-facsists (the Bible-thumping evangelicals, yes, but any Christian white supremacist or racist) support Israel. Their goal is complete domination over every body (person and the actual physical body) of anyone who is not a male white cishet Christian with some money and those without money pray for an Apocalyptic end to the current global state so they themselves can get vindicated into a world where they have mich more power (taking care of richer persons' interests or hoping to become richer/influential themselves) than they have now. Promised by those richer folk as the white planters promised or indicated more privileges for the poor white people who had more economically & materially in common with both freed and enslaved black people than the planters.

Christo-facsists see in Israel the chance to eradicate at least one "rival" religion for the "Holy Land". I truly think that many feel that if Islam (as they think Islam = Arab & Palestinian, too) is removed from the Holy Land nit only are they closer to claiming that land through religion for that sort of claim and not only for the oil & gas to further enrich themselves BUT gaining a stronger foothold on the Mid East brings them closer to the farther East (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) to spread their domination. I really think that this is a dream for them, and either Israel itself will for through first forced conversions to just then eventually be "cleansed" or expelled of Jews just as Isabella-Ferdinand did with the Alhambra Decree of 1492 OR it will also cease to exist altogether in the name of said expansion. Because fascism does not allow for multiculturalism nor pluralism and Christian extremists look towards complete Christianity/religion-pretexted dominance and hegemony just as Zionism does with Judaism.

I mean, Zionism already is not really about Jewish safety, and not every Zionist leader has the deluded belief that it's about religion. Some absolutely know it's about themselves and having power. But this is more for those who deluded themselves into thinning that they have sincerely only looked for Jewish interests through Zionism while seeing and witnessing other Zionists in their communities call Holocaust survivors "weak", seeing the beat Orthodox Jews, and not taking the time to think about the why.

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

There's not a lot of details yet, because this happened less than an hour ago, but it's being reported that a terrorist shooting attack took place today, at least two people are said to have been wounded and taken to the hospital, and the terrorist has been neutralized.

A little over a week ago, I wrote that Marwan Issa, Hamas' 3rd top leader in Gaza, might have been killed in an IDF strike, but there's no final confirmation yet. Since then, no one has been able to contact Issa, and the Israeli assessment is that his body is buried under the rubble. Now, there's been private conversations where Hamas has said the same thing, though officially they're still saying they don't know. Hamas has motivation to present Issa as alive, and thus Israel as having failed, but at the same time, if he actually hasn't been killed, just wounded in the strike, then Hamas has reason to want Israel to falsely believe he's dead. In other words, I wouldn't take Hamas' double position as confirming anything, and from what I know, that's the general thinking in Israel. If Marwan Issa is dead, one of the sides will get to his body sooner or later, and then we might know (if it's Israel, or if it's Hamas, but for whatever reason, they decide it serves them better to confirm his death). That said, it's kind of funny, how the US doesn't seem to get the complexity of Hamas' contradicting motives here, and takes their word as final confirmation that Issa is indeed dead. The concept of "terrorists lie if it benefits them, in this case they just seem currently unsure if it does" shouldn't be that hard to grasp. Like yes, we all are inclined to think Issa's dead, but there's a reason why no Israeli official has yet come out and publicly said it as a fact. This vid reports how Hamas both confirms and rejects the claim that Issa's dead, and the way it's subtitled with both positions says it all IMO:

Also amusing is how the international press doesn't not the ranking within Hamas Gaza. Marwan Issa is NOT Hamas' #2 in Gaza, he's #3. I saw headlines saying Israel might have killed Hamas' second top senior in Gaza, which is Mohammed Deif, and was disappointed to learn that nope, the media is just confused. Quick reminder: Yahya sinwar is Hamas Gaza's leader and #1, Mohammed Deif is the military leader and #2, Marwan Issa is Deif's right hand man and #3, while international media is way too clueless on some very basic stuff regarding this conflict.

Here's the international press giving Issa a postmortem promotion:

For comparison, here are those who correctly referred to him as Hamas' #3:

The operation at the Shifa hospital, which I wrote about yesterday, continues. The number of terrorists killed there has risen to 50, and 180 suspects were arrested. Another soldier has been killed during this recent operation, 51 years old Sebastian Haion, after we already lost one during it. Just a small reminder, that if there had been only unarmed civilians at this hospital, there would have been no dead Israeli soldiers in this raid.

This tweet was too long to fit in one screenshot, but here's the essence of it. The IDF's spokesman in Arabic has published on Twitter evidence that just like Hamas, Hezbollah along with fellow Lebanese terrorist organization Amal are also misusing medical ambulances and organizations for terrorist activities.

I've written about a British Jewish director who, at the Oscars, hijacked the Holocaust to denounce hijacking the Holocaust for political positions he does not agree with, based on a false and ignorant narrative, which is harmful to Jews. I also mentioned that the biggest organization fighting against antisemitism, the ADL, as well as an organization of Holocaust survivors has come out to denounce this director. I've been seeing even more denouncements. Here's a short recap. I just wanna clarify, this isn't about him personally. This is a reminder that people like him don't get to erase the voices of the majority of Jews, while using his own Jewish identity to do so, without us speaking up, too. The sad thing is none of these voices will be heard as loudly or be as applauded as he was, for throwing most Jews (and Holocaust victims) under the bus, in favor of what's trendy to say these days.

I'll start with another Jewish director, László Nemes, who had also won an Oscar for a Holocaust movie, Son of Saul (I have to admit, Holocaust movies will never be truly able to capture the full horror and brutality of the Nazi camps, but of all the ones I've seen, and I've watched way too many, Son of Saul comes closest, probably aided by the fact that it's based on testimonies of the survivors who had seen the worst of the worst with their own eyes). Nemes said: "[The] director should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust. Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth. It is especially troubling in an age where we are reaching pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Jewish hatred – this time, in a trendy, ‘progressive’ way."

Another Jewish creator, Richard Trank, wrote a whole op-ed about how offensive he found the speech. Trank is a producer who won an Oscar for Holocaust documentary The Long Way Home (a movie that follows the struggle of the majority of survivors to get to Israel at the end of WWII, despite British opposition and Arab violence). Trank wrote, among other things: "Upon hearing [the speech], I thought about the assistant camera operator who has worked on three of my films, and whose 79-year-old father was kidnapped. This man had been spending his retirement years volunteering to drive Gazans needing medical care into Israel, care which Hamas could not provide for them despite billions in aid that has been sent to the area since the terrorist organization took control of it in 2006. I thought about the young people I have met in the last few weeks who survived the massacre at the Nova music festival. And then I reflected on this incredibly arrogant man who equated Israeli Jews to Nazis, and then left the Dolby Theatre with his statue when the awards show ended to party the night away."

And then, it turned out that the man who denounced hijacking the Holocaust for political causes, had not only hijacked the Holocaust itself with his little stunt, he also hijacked the Holocaust movie he had directed, from fellow Jewish co-creators who disagree deeply with his speech. Among them is Danny Cohen, an executive producer of this Oscar winning Holocaust film, and the article about his objection mentions that another Jewish producer of the movie, Len Blavatnik, who was standing on stage during the speech and was specifically referred to as if he agreed with it, did not sign off on it. Cohen made his position clear: "My support for Israel is unwavering. The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization, which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, and which doesn’t use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza, but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that. And any discussion of the war without saying that lacks the proper context that any discussion should have."

Now, there's an open letter condemning the director's speech, with the signatures of over 450 Jewish Hollywood creators, from different fields in the film industry. The letter says: "We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination. Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic. Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas. The moment Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders, is the moment this heartbreaking war ends. This has been true since the Hamas attacks of October 7th. The use of words like “occupation” to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.  The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust." Here's a link to the full letter, and list of signatories, which includes 4 rabbis. Please don't let all of these voices go unheard and lost.

This is 19 years old Oz Daniel.

I was listening to a TV interview with the family of Oz Daniel yesterday. For many months, he was thought to be kidnapped when wounded (they found traces of blood), but not dead. The main reason for the latter assumption, was that Hamas had uploaded on Oct 7 a video of him where Oz is seen being taken away while alive. I wrote about him in one of my daily update post when it was published that the army had enough to determine he had actually been murdered during the massacre, and it's his body that's being held hostage in Gaza. His parents mentioned yesterday, that as the IDF is fighting Hamas in Gaza, it also gets to a lot of their computers. And on one of them, they found the original, unedited footage of Oz being kidnapped. It shows the part they'd seen before, where he's being taken away still alive, but then it continues to show him fighting back, and the Hamas terrorists murder him. That means that they took the time to go over the footage before they uploaded it, and edit it in the cruelest way, to give Oz's family false hope. For months, the Daniel family waited for any sign of life from their child, without knowing there will never be one. It is heartless and abusive, it is torture to put people through the ordeal of thinking that they have a chance of seeing their son alive, knowing it's a deliberate lie. I don't know if I can think of any worse form of torment.

This is (on the left) 40 years old Shlomi Ziv, with his wife Miren.

Shlomi finished his interior design studies a month before Hamas' massacre, and on occasion, he worked in security. On Oct 7, he worked at the Nova music festival as a guard, together with Aviv, who's Miren's cousin, and a friend of Slomi and Miren, Jack. Shlomi saw both of his friends murdered, while he himself was kidnapped. Miren shared that they had wanted kids, and tried fertility treatments, but after years of repeated attempts, she had to give up, and how rare and incredible it was, that Shlomi understood and accepted her decision, and stood by her. "We only have each other," she said, "we're each other's world. Please bring him back to me." In the last phone call that Shlomi had with her, he was running away from the terrorists, and could barely speak. Since then, Miren hasn't had any sign of life from her husband.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[widthofmytongue]

The other day on the picket line, I saw a former lecturer of mine, and we got to talking. I mentioned that when I was doing my BA I encountered more than a little antisemitism, xenophobia, LGBTphobia etc. He, a middle class British cishet Jew, seemed shocked, even disbelieving. I didn’t really wanna give him examples, but I mentioned that in one of his seminars on Holocaust literature, several English goyische students started debating the veracity of Primo Levi’s seminal account of Auschwitz If This Is A Man. Now no one in this debate said ‘the Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy’ or even ‘the numbers of victims can’t possibly be that high’, but I mentioned that I think calling into question the veracity of a survivor’s lived experience is the first step on a scale of Holocaust denial. He, in faux-exasperation, exploded ‘It’s not even 0.1 on the scale of Holocaust denial!’

Now a couple things seem to become illuminated here: one is that he probably doesn’t want to acknowledge his complicity in anything so virulent as I was attempting to discuss; another is that, as a staunch liberal, he views the act of debating as solely a means of social progress, rather than an arena in which hegemonic consent can be manufactured to real harm; and crucially, he ignored that his position of power as a lecturer provided a safety net which I (the only other Jew in the room I believe) was not afforded, especially already facing marginalisation as a queer, working class immigrant.

He faced no antisemitism, in his eyes, therefore no antisemitism occurred. He threw out Althusser’s name, citing the idea that one cannot be free from ideology, and I thought of mentioning Agamben, and the idea that one cannot accurately identify one’s own hegemony from within, only others from without. But he had already lost my trust. He was not the sympathetic Jewish elder I’d hoped he might be, but an assimilated mimic (recalling Bhabha, if I need to cite academic sources). The conversation, that liberal ideal of social progress, faltered, and my lived experience was called into question. The first step on the scale is not outright antisemitism, perhaps, nor even nine people sitting down with a nazi. All it takes to infect the whole is that virulent doubt seeping into the liberal’s open wound. And who then bleeds?