#also he said all this because I wanted a keffiyeh

[charles-le-sorcerer]

My dad keeps parroting love jihad bullshit every time I mention Palestine like “oh my friend’s daughter‘s roommate’s classmate’s boyfriend’s accountant met a Muslim guy through pro-Palestine activism and he gave her a burkha” or something like that. I am going so absolutely insane because no???? Like? There is no organized conspiracy to “seduce Hindu girls to convert them to Islam” the same way there’s no conspiracy for men of color to marry white women to “dilute the white race” but it’s also like “the moment the Muslim population in an area hits 20% they start making trouble”?????

I simply don’t get how he wholeheartedly believes this. And he says he knows it’s true because he grew up in India (hasn’t lived there in twenty-five years) and I’ve lived in America my whole life?????

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tom Slater

Published: May 1, 2024

The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next.

If you want to know what’s driving the Israelophobic protests and occupations at New York’s Columbia University – and many more elite campuses across America – get a load of this clip that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past 24 hours.

In it, one Johannah King-Slutzky – spokesperson for the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was forcibly ended by the New York City Police Department last night, with around 100 arrests – issues her and her comrades’ demands. On top of Columbia ‘divesting’ from Israel and such, King-Slutzky also demanded meals and water.

Apparently, Columbia was refusing to allow the students who were then breaking windows and barricading themselves inside Hamilton Hall to access their usual canteen grub. ‘We’re saying that [Columbia is] obligated to provide food to students who have paid for a meal plan here’, King-Slutzky told a sceptical press conference.

When pushed, she said they were only asking that supplies be allowed to be brought in:

‘Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?’

It’s all there. The whinging cadence, the ‘like’-strewn patter, the obligatory keffiyeh, the industrial-strength victimhood, the bloke in a crop top stood behind her… King-Slutzky and Co are the picture of trustafarians in revolt. Their anti-Israel bigotry is matched only by their profound sense of entitlement. How dare the university not provide adequate refreshments while we are smashing shit up?

There are plenty of people today likening the Columbia meal-planners to their Sixties forebears – in particular, to the Columbia radicals who mounted their own disruptive demos in 1968. Sadly, even some veterans of Sixties activism are flattering today’s privileged brats with the comparison.

But it’s bollocks. When Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall and other buildings in April 1968, they did so to oppose the Vietnam War and university plans to build a gymnasium in nearby Harlem, which students argued would effectively be segregated. After a week, police moved in and arrested 700 students.

Today, Columbia students and their off-campus heavies aren’t opposing war exactly. Yes, they oppose Israel’s assault on the genocidal lunatics of Hamas, following the Islamist terrorists’ vicious pogrom on 7 October. But they seem pretty relaxed about warfare against the state of Israel. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’, they chant. ‘Never forget 7 October… 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?’, screeched one racist cunt outside the gates.

Therein lies another crucial difference between ’68 and today. Today’s students aren’t fighting racism, they are luxuriating in it. Khymani James, a leader of the Columbia protests, posted a video to social media the other week saying ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. ‘I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill’, he said, fantasising about having a scrap with one of those awful Jews. (Given the vast, vast majority of Jews are Zionists, that’s really not overegging it.)

Elsewhere, we’ve seen protesters chant ‘Go back to Poland’ at Jewish Columbians and hold up homemade signs, stating ‘Al-Qasam’s [sic] next targets’, pointing to a group of Israeli-flag-waving students. The Al-Qassam Brigades being Hamas’s military wing. An Arab Israeli was also punched outside Columbia recently, by activists brandishing the pro-Hamas triangle symbol.

I’m willing to concede that some of this unvarnished, violent hatred is being carried out by off-campus antifa types, as is routinely alleged by the protesters’ apologists. Not least because King-Slutzky and yer man in his crop top look like they couldn’t fight their way out of a ball pit. But activists’ alarmingly high tolerance for virulent anti-Semitism, their total lack of condemnation of Hamas or its many campus fanboys, speaks volumes.

As does their expectation of water and spag bol and their apparent shock and horror when the police were called in. The Columbia protesters and their supporters are now trying to portray the clearance of Hamilton Hall as an affront to freedom of speech. Free speech is ‘supposed to be prized’ on campus, one student told Al Jazeera last night.

Being concerned about a heavy-handed response to these demos is one thing. The governor-ordered crackdown on protests at University of Texas at Austin, for example, has been nakedly authoritarian and censorious. But there is no inalienable right to break into and occupy university buildings. (Nor is there an inalienable right to constantly harass Jewish students as they try to move around campus.)

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, civil disobedience is not the same as expressing an opinion or engaging in peaceful protest. The whole point of it is to break the rules. Indeed, it ‘derives expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules’. That these students and junior academics are shocked to be handcuffed for breaking the law reveals a profound sense of entitlement among young ‘radicals’.

We shouldn’t be surprised. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has pointed to two dispiriting, parallel trends in American universities: a willingness to curtail free speech, all while giving a green light to violent, intolerant protests. At the University of California, Berkeley, where students rioted in 2017 because that tiresome weirdo Milo Yiannopoulous was speaking, the university ‘showed cowardice in its unwillingness to punish the rioters’, writes Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in a recent op-ed. We saw a similarly rank capitulation at Evergreen State that same year, where marauding students were effectively allowed to chase professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying off of campus. Since then, ‘shutdowns and shout-downs have become commonplace’, they write.

Some critics of campus cancel culture have been caught off guard by the pro-Hamas protests. Almost a decade ago, they observe, we were all gawping at the ‘Yale Snowflakes’, those absurd Ivy Leaguers who went into open, teary-eyed revolt because academic Erika Christakis sent them an email saying they should chill out about offensive Halloween costumes. How did babyish offence-taking give way to open support for anti-Semitic terrorists?

But it all makes a perverse kind of sense. Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech. Young radicals reared on a crude, conspiratorial racial identity politics have begun to apply it to geopolitics, with predictably anti-Semitic results. A new generation of elite youth, overprotected and indulged in equal measure, have come to think they can do no wrong.

So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.

At the same time, let’s not pretend that today’s revolting students just appeared, fully formed, from the womb. They are the products of an academic and upper-class culture that has kindled their prejudices and inflamed their intolerance. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats. And they’ve been pandered to for far too long.

==

Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech.

This is an important point. The people who insisted that "words are violence" and that "misgendering" someone is as good as murdering them, are busy trying to pretend that their violence and destruction is merely a form of protected free speech and opinion expression.

It's not. They're trying to gaslight society.

If you're too stupid or too ideologically compromised to stand up and go get a glass of water, you probably should remove yourself from the gene pool.

[mariacallous]

One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are enemies.”

[thisis-an-original-name]

Here is where I stand with the Global Conflict this week (no one asked lmao)

1. The top priority for me is stopping the genocide in Gaza, and, immediately after that, establishing a Palestinian state/two state solution.

2. Hamas isn’t going to peddle any kind of solution/compromise. Hamas essentially took their “We want to kill Jews” treatise and replaced “Jews” with “Zionists” but nothing has changed. If you can’t see that, you’re dangerous and probably stupid.

3. The hostages need to be freed (if they’re still alive, which let’s be realistic, they probably aren’t.) If Netanyahu actually cared about freeing the hostages, he would have done it by now, and a large number of Israelis recognize that.

4. Recognition of the hostages/ October 7th and recognition of the genocide/ deeply awful conduct of Israel can and SHOULD coexist.

5. Joe Biden is a useless little bitch. Having him as President again would still be better than four more years of Trump.

6. The Met Gala was not orchestrated by Big Zionism to distract from the invasion of Rafah and saying that it was is just blatant antisemitism. That being said, the Israeli military does frequently carry out large strikes on nights like the Met Gala and the Super Bowl when they know that the American news cycle will be focused on something else. Both things can be true. Also, the Met Gala is inherently a stupid thing to get excited about I’m sorry.

7. Student protestors do often fall into traps of antisemitism and say shit that could potentially harm Jews. What else is going to happen, when you gather a bunch of 19 year olds and tell them to yell as loud as humanly possible? That being said, I do have to believe that a vast majority of college protestors have good intentions AND, most of all, even if they don’t, censoring them and spraying pepper spray in their eyes is draconian behavior that the history books will not look kindly upon.

8. I’m so on the fence about boycotts, especially Eurovision. Because on one hand, banning Palestinian flags and keffiyeh’s from the performance is wrong. And I don’t think that Israel should be allowed to compete considering everything that the government is doing, like Russia was banned in 2021. That being said, it does make me sad that this 19 year old girl wrote a song about losing friends and family on October 7th and in response, she’s been booed and told to stay in her hotel room lest the angry mob tears her apart.

9. I do think that celebrities have some level of responsibility to use their platforms for good. That being said, this is such a complex issue that I almost don’t fault some people for not making a 250 character Twitter statement. I don’t think the dying children of Gaza care much if you block Zendaya or Olivia Rodrigo on Instagram. It also gets ridiculous when you go in the comments section of creators with like 100k followers and you see people posting Palestinian flags like yeah I’m sorry that blorbo from my shows isn’t personally flying to Gaza to punch Netanyahu in the face.

10. If you punctuate every single acknowledgement of the genocide with “but what about the hostages!!” or GOD FORBID “it’s sad that Hamas made Netanyahu do this” you have been propagandized by your local Hillel. No one made Netanyahu do this except Netanyahu. There’s no way you don’t know that by now. Wiping out Hamas: another thing that Netanyahu probably would have done by now if he genuinely wanted to.

11. Whenever I see lists of “here are the celebrities/professors/writers/guy on the street to block and throw rocks at because he’s a Mean Scary Zionist” I am reminded of the lists of synagogue goers that Nazis used to track down Jews and their families during the Holocaust. Seriously if you’re peddling lists of “Zionists” ripe for demonization you might want to ask yourself what you’re REALLY doing, and why.

12. Fun fact about me: I actually consider myself a Zionist. I do think, historically speaking, that Jews do need a safe place and a homeland to prevent us from being killed again like we seem to be every few centuries or so. I just don’t think that place has to be Israel, and I DEFINITELY don’t think Palestine should be subjugated for it to happen. But whenever I hear “Zionism = BAD” I just cringe a bit because… you keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means

[borealisthegreat]

The air was thick with New England humidity and I shifted uncomfortably, hands turning sticky against the cover of my book: Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein HaLevi. I had struck up a conversation with a protester in my town square, my own Palestinian neighbor, an elderly man with anxiety folded deep into his face. To him I was a sad and troubled youth, clinging to a myth woven by foremothers’ religious zeal and the colonial ambitions of my forefathers.

“You aren’t Israeli,” he reassured me. You aren’t the object of my fear.

He told me that he had been displaced from Jerusalem and asked if I thought that was right. I said simply, “No”, and at his jolted expression wondered how many times he had heard a different answer. I didn’t intend to lay singular claim to our land, or to create in my neighbor a token, waving the flag of his torment as if to say, “You see? He believes us! We aren’t so bad after all.” I sought, and still seek, an understanding; if not with him, then of him. In turn, I offered whatever I could of myself and those I hope to represent.

“Do you know what the word ‘Jew’ means?” I asked, and he challenged me in turn.

“Do you know what ‘Palestinian’ means?”

I remembered looking down from the Old City’s rooftops at rows of colorful stalls, rich scents and ancient tongues filling the air. My cousins and I had wanted to explore, but our bubbe refused.

“That’s the Palestinian Shuk,” she said. My cousins, Jewesses of the most orthodox variety, nodded and turned away. Their histories are in Hebrew. They know this land by its holiness, its interim inhabitants by their etymological root, plishtim: literally, “invaders”.

I wasn’t raised on reverence, and my parents, with whom I once had a screaming debate about the Renaissance, don’t smooth over history for my easy comprehension. I know where the Palestinian Arabs’ name comes from, and I know where they come from. I know the same of my fellow Americans. I live on native Naumkeag land, but I wouldn’t forcibly uproot Mr. Payne next door to “liberate” it. I wouldn’t tear down this society in place of another.

My neighbor rejected my etymology, and I allowed him to, even if it did challenge my historical understanding, because my very existence challenged his.

I asked him again about my people’s name.

“I know what a Jew is,” he said, and I shook my head.

The word “Jew” comes from the Hebrew Yehudi, which became the Ancient Greek Ἰουδαῖος, then Latin Iudaeus, then French Giu. In Arabic we are Yahud—a slur. Etymologically, all mean “Judean”.

Again, my words went unheard as my neighbor reformed them in his image. Us, pretenders; I, an indoctrinated figure of tragedy.

“To solve our conflict, we must recognize not only each other’s right to self-determination but also each side’s right to self-definition.” These are Klein HaLevi’s words, words I held close to my heart as I stood before a man suddenly deaf. I’m trying, I wanted to scream.

Months earlier, I had spoken at my town’s ceasefire resolution. My father’s address was met with silence, but a few hijabis clapped as I scrambled, heart pounding, to my seat. When the resolution was passed, as we knew it would be, and I stood adamantly between a room of cold faces and the waterfalls of my frustration, one of them came to me. 

“You are so brave,” She smiled, glassy-eyed. Her keffiyeh was a color I had never seen before, green like the Jordan, and I could feel its waters and the weight of her understanding choking me as she tangled our fingers.

Looking upon my Palestinian neighbor in the center of our shared town, my silver tongue withered. I’m trying. Please understand. Let me understand.

I’m sure he misread my tears.

[papirouge]

I just had a conversation with a self titled conservative who firmly believes that anyone liberal is a sheep and that electing any republican means their guns are protected. He was pro life too so I asked why he cares about guns over kids lives at schools if he’s also pro life but he just kept repeating that more guns in schools would stop violence and that kids don’t deserve anything once they’re born. They just had to be born because birth rates.

I asked him if he considered school shootings super late term abortions. It’s still killing a child after all. He got frustrated and said he didn’t care about school shootings because liberals are dictators who want to take away all guns and put us under communism. I mean… I wouldn’t mind if all guns were destroyed if that meant kids can safely go to schools.. but really, it felt like talking to a wall because he would never critically think k about what he’s saying. It was all the same thing. So I guess this scrote of a man doesn’t really care about babies or kids.

He also firmly believes in Israel should nuke Palestine because all of Palestine is hamas and anyone protesting for Palestinians should be arrested. I bought a black keffiyeh from a Palestinian store to show support and wore it in my hair but I guess he didn’t notice that either.

These people feel like empty husks honestly when talking to them. Repeating what they hear, get angry about nothing to feel anger then shut down when confronted. It’s like those people aren’t really connected to anything? Or maybe that was a demon in disguise? Idk. There are a lot of those spiritual awakening people online talking about how the spiritual veil is thinning fast

It's so funny to see conservative seethe against "Christian sheep" when then turn around and act like Trump or Musk were the Messiah and doing the most ridiculous hoops to defend their dumb stunts. If Musk was actually smart he would create a cult bc there's so much potential in all those blue checkmarks who complained about not being fairly paid yet still simping for him SMH

And TBH every pro gun conservative should shut the fuck up after what happened to Trump lmao None of them been able to stop that assassination with their guns, yet they're really trying to make us believe that more guns in school will make a change. They're so delusional...

I think pro gun nutcases and abortionists have in common that they'd rather address the symptoms rather than the cause.

"We need more abortion" > why don't we establish a system where women don't need to resort to abortions?

"we need more guns (in schools)" > Why don't you address the causes that pushteens to shoot up entire schools? By making guns access easier, it also means more instable/mentally ill people will access to them and do the worst use of them. That's the snake biting its own tail.

I can't be the only one to have noticed how uncomfortable anti woke conservative pro guns get whenever the shooter is "identified" as liberal (trans, etc.). They cope by literally admitting there's a need for gun control (only for liberals though) OR will blame mental illness. But like I just said, by easying the access to guns for everyone unchecked, more mentally ill people will access to them. They're so full of shit LOL

I genuinely believe all the people who worship Trump or Musk are spiritually blind. It's like they got struck by a curse vanishing their discernment. I get such weird vibes from Musk.... it's crazy how the same people who worship him were seething against Bill Gates... for the very same things!! (transhumanist agenda, population control because yes, campaigning somd push for more babies is ALSO a spectrum of population control, etc). Dude had the potential to be the ace rocket space billionaire guy but fumbled the sympathy bag when he started accusing divers (sent to save kids stuck in that cave in south Asia) of being pedophile - unprovoked.

No comment on Trump. I believe the woman who said God let him win because Hillary was worse, but that this time around, Harris will win because America didn't learn her lesson, is more sinful than ever, and because Trump is basically a POS. Harris will hurt America (Obama is pulling the string behind the curtains btw) but God basically said that's what this country deserved lol

I don't particularly like Harris, but NGL I can't wait to see the meltdown of Conservatives once Trump loses and start sperging coping conspiracies lol nah, God is done with yall. End of the story.

[edenfenixblogs]

You’re amazing. I’ve seen stuff like this and it always terrifies me to much to even begin to address.

It strikes me very much like Nazis forcing camp victims to smile in photos so that the Nazis could claim they treated us well when we were fully exterminated.

There is something indescribably horrific about trying to rewrite the history of my people while we are still here protesting it. It’s like people don’t care what we have to say about anything, because they’re assuming they’ll be able to control the entire narrative when we are gone. Which of course then assumes that we will be gone.

This initial video isn’t even an attack on Israel or israeli people. It’s an attack on Jews. It’s an attack on the Jews who were forced to settle in a variety of places outside of Israel and who thusly managed to find even the slightest bit of comfort in the food or such of their new, temporary homes.

It’s an attack on the Jewish religion to which Solomon adhered. You know? Solomon. The extremely famously Jewish biblical figure?????? Trying to deny the Magen David as a Jewish symbol of Jewish origin is absurd and hateful. The idea that it originated in any way within Muslim culture is supersessionist bullshit. I’m not here to judge how or why the symbol figures into Muslim culture. I don’t particularly care and I’m not interested in critiquing Islamic use of these symbols. It’s not my place. I don’t know enough about how or why the Magen David figures into Muslim tradition.

That said, it didn’t originate there. If you want to talk about origin: It is a Jewish symbol first and foremost. It is THE Jewish symbol. Period. We didn’t fucking steal it from anywhere.

Idk about the Israeli musician and even if I did and even if I did believe that the music was stolen by the Israeli artist (again, I have no opinion on whether or not it was stolen. There are bigger problems for me to look into right now that I’m not gonna waste my time on an issue of copyright infringment) I hardly think that any singular musician being shitty is something to even bring up when it comes to the scale of devastation that Palestinians are currently facing. Copyright claims can be decided by courts and don’t actually indicate anything about a nation’s character or the morality of most of its citizens. In fact, copyright law is an expansive topic of legal expertise because people from everywhere do it. Not really sure why it’s important to demonize the whole of Israel for it. It turns out that crimes that happen everywhere also happen in Israel. So if that’s indeed what this is, this is just…weird to bring up in relation to the scale of death and strife that is ongoing in the region.

The keffiyeh was interesting to me, because I hadn’t really learned much about it until recently. What I’ve learned is that there’s a pretty dark history involved in how anti-Israeli extremists have used the keffiyeh while committing or endorsing acts of violence against Israelis and Jews. That said, the keffiyeh in general is just a common middle eastern article of clothing. I haven’t made any posts on my blog explicitly condemning or claiming or endorsing the keffiyeh in general and I don’t plan to. It’s not my area of expertise.

However, I have learned enough to say that the image pictured on the left is indeed a keffiyeh, but it is not a Palestinian keffiyeh. A keffiyeh is just a common, traditional middle eastern head covering for men. The Palestinian keffiyeh is exclusively black and white and is associated with Palestinian nationalism.

Unless you are talking specifically about Palestinian Marxists in which case there is a red and white keffiyeh.

(All images taken from the text of the pages I’ve linked above)

If you’re going to call red and white keffiyeh exclusively Palestinian and dating back hundreds of years, I’m going to have to call bullshit here. For many reasons, but mostly on the grounds that Marxism isn’t hundreds of years old. Marx wasn’t even born until 1818 and he certainly didn’t shoot out of the womb writing and popularizing political philosophy.

In fact, if you want to get technical, Marx was from a non-religious Jewish background whose family converted to Christianity and who was baptized as Lutheran. While I’m very anti capitalist myself, I am no particular fan of Marx and the antisemitism he propagated. That said, Marx was a German man who died in the late 1800s. Regardless of his political philosophies, he would absolutely have been rounded up and slated for death just like any other German with Jewish ancestry had he been born a few decades later. His own grandfather was a rabbi. And I think it is foolish to assume that witnessing and, potentially, living through the Holocaust (although to be very clear, he likely would not have even if he had been born late enough to endure it), would have no affect on his personal philosophy. He would not have even been eligible for the German Blood Certificate.

So, basically, the red and white keffiyeh has existed for much longer than the Palestinian Marxist philosophy that uses it.

Additionally, the Palestinian keffiyeh has been used by American Jews on college campuses who condemn Israel. It’s also been used by at least one Palestinian extremists who hijacked planes. The history of the keffiyeh is complex and layered.

I’m not particularly interested in policing how or why Palestinians wear keffiyeh.

All I will say is that, because I personally (again, this is not a condemnation of all keffiyeh) have witnessed and experienced people wearing Palestinian keffiyeh in Jewish spaces during times of heightened political discourse regarding the I/P conflict, I am personally on guard for my own safety when I see people wearing a keffiyeh. That said, I believe it has become a symbol of Palestinian culture and believe that Palestinians should be able to wear their keffiyeh without shame or fear or abuse.

But no matter your opinion on keffiyeh, there is simply no basis for considering it exclusively Palestinian in origin.

I know that at least one Israeli designer tried to sell keffiyeh or at least the keffiyeh print, but was called out for cultural appropriation. To my knowledge there has not been a widespread adoption of the keffiyeh as an Israeli symbol.

My Israeli followers are welcome to contradict me here, as I definitely do not claim to be an expert on Israeli fashion OR keffiyehs. But I haven’t found anything that indicates widespread usage of keffiyeh in Israeli culture that is unique to Israelis or Israeli identity.

Finally, the “Israeli proverb” is so blatantly antisemitic and draws shamelessly on the idea of a greedy, thieving Jew straight out of Nazi propaganda.

This post is blatant antisemitism. It does nothing to help Palestinians and only serves to demonize Jews everywhere—in Israel and in diaspora. OP should be ashamed.

"If I don't steal, someone else will."

- An Israeli proverb.

[residentialhomeowner]

"I truly believe we will achieve justice and be free to live in dignity and peace. However, while the genocide in Gaza and the 75 years of dispossession and oppression continue, I find it so difficult to think of work. That said, I am constantly reminded that we are supporting dozens of artisans at this moment in their efforts to generate income in Palestine under incredibly challenging circumstances.

I want to share with you all what to expect moving forward. You all, who have really just been so incredible in supporting our work and sending love and encouragement and solidarity. I started talking to my husband about my Handmade Palestine family. Really you all are more encouraging than you can ever know--to me, to our artisans, to Palestine.

Today I opened a new notebook and as I did last year, I wrote on the inside cover:

You Will Succeed

for yourself

for your family

for your artisans

for the land

for Palestine"

"Throughout the year, I always return to that page and remind myself why I do this work, even when it feels grief-ridden, exhausting, or hopeless. I also remember Dalal who makes the brass jewelry and embroidered keffiyehs. Dalal oversees up to 10 women embroidering and so we have become a source of income for 10 families who have no other options. Twice over the holidays I called artisans with last-second surprise orders and listened to joyful, unbelieving laughter as people rejoiced at getting more work through us.

We celebrate together the impact you all are having on the Palestinian creative economy."

"What we are working on in 2024:

Massive restructuring to more effectively handle support and solidarity

We are so grateful for your support, truly. Your patience and understanding have been much appreciated. We've reorganized our crafts and artisans so we can respond to your needs better. Artisans are also really excited to have clear lists from us so they can be prepared and keep up.

Updating fulfillment space

Our volunteer has been such a rockstar. As you all know we ship in bulk to Portland, Oregon, where our 2023 volunteer who is officially hired in 2024 as a part-time fulfillment manager, processes orders. This enables us to overcome restrictions and closures from Israeli occupation and folks in the US to get more affordable shipping. It also means we sometimes don't realize our inventory is off until he gets to the order. He spent days reorganizing the warehouse so we can work efficiently and that means slower fulfillment times (if you remember, pre-October we fulfilled orders same day, but you have blessed us with your support and we're still catching up).

Full restocking end of January

We've reorganized our site and have been working with our artisans since the end of December to make new crafts. The artisans are blown away by your continued support and thrilled to bring you new designs as well as your favorites from this last year. We are grateful also for your patience as we struggle to work through the very unique challenges as creatives under occupation. It looks like we won't be getting keffiyehs from Hirbawi for this restocking but we'll keep calling until they have some for you all!

International shipping

As many of you already understand, we ship in bulk to a fulfillment space we've built in Portland, Oregon, because shipping direct to you from Palestine is outrageously expensive and unreliable, as we are forced to depend on Israel's national post. We consider US and Canada domestic shipping, and the rest of the world requires an international carrier to deliver. UPS was losing packages and extorting fees from customers while claiming it was customs. Even after customers paid, UPS would return packages. We've been working to set up a DHL account and shipping system and we're so close! By the end of January, we'll be able to bring beautiful Palestinian crafts to you, wherever you are.

4 New Artisans

In addition to these two groups, we have been working for the last month to bring 4 new artisan groups to the Handmade family, so you'll see their collections and learn more about their craft-making and designs in the coming month. We are sure you'll love these gorgeous crafts and makers as much as we do! Stay tuned for more on them. We also have formed two women's groups for tatreez in addition to the 4 new artisans. In the coming months, we'll launch the embroidery designs of Manjel ma Qoud, which is our original work to support 10 women artisans in the West Bank in generating income.

Tatreez Projects, including Gaza women!

We also have the most amazing opportunity to support women generate income who fled Gaza to Cairo. We've arranged food, clothes, and blankets for them via our friend Manal Olama at the Egyptian Clothing Bank, AND are now working with her sustainable fashion brand, Almah, to give these women materials, machines, and the work space to create embroidery to sustain themselves in Cairo. We literally were able to make this happen in a matter of days so that the women in need could find hope and support their families in dignity.

If we do not exist for such moments as this, when someone whatsapps me saying "how can you help my sister in Cairo?" then let's just close shop now! Seriously, I feel that 8 years of this labor of love is worth it just to be able to arrive at this moment.

THANK YOU FOR BEING ON THIS JOURNEY WITH US!"

Shop Handmade Palestine.

Donate.

Adopt an olive tree.

[bodhirook1138]

The Problems with Aladdin: Orientalism, Casting, and Ramadan

Originally posted on Medium.

Edward Said and Jack G. Shaheen did not do the work they did so that movies like Aladdin would still get made.

I say this as someone who has had a complicated relationship with the 1992 Aladdin animated feature. I loved it when I was a kid. For a long time, it was my favorite Disney cartoon. I remember proudly telling white friends and classmates in third grade that Aladdin was “about my people.” Although nothing is said in the movie about Aladdin’s religion, I read him as Muslim.

When I grew older, I read Jack G. Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, which analyzes about 1,000 American films that vilify and stereotype Arabs and Muslims. Among these films is Aladdin, which Shaheen reportedly walked out of. Shaheen spoke out against lyrics in the film’s opening song: “I come from a land from a far-away place/Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face/It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Although he convinced Disney to remove the lyrics for the home video release, the final verse was still there: “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” As a 1993 op-ed in The New York Timeswrote, “It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney.”

In Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism (1978), he described orientalism as a process in which the West constructs Eastern societies as exotic, backwards, and inferior. According to Said, orientalism’s otherization of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam provided justification for European colonialism and Western intervention in the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries, often under the pretext of rescuing the people — especially Muslim women — from themselves. In addition to orientalism’s practices of constructing the “Orient” as the West’s “Other,” Said asserted that another major facet of orientalism involves a “western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the ‘Orient.’” In other words, it is not the Arab or Muslim who gets to define themselves, but rather the West does.

There are plenty of excellent and detailed critiques out there about how the original Aladdin is filled with racist, sexist, and orientalist tropes, so there’s very little, if anything, to say that already hasn’t been said. In her extensive report, “Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes And How to Transform Them,” Dr. Maytha Alhassen argues that Hollywood’s legacy of depicting Arabs and Muslims as offensive caricatures is continued in Aladdin, where the main characters like Aladdin and Jasmine are “whitewashed, with anglicized versions of Arabic names and Western European (though brown-skinned) facial features” and speak with white American accents. Alhassen notes the contrast with the “villains, Jafar, and the palace guards” who are depicted as “darker, swarthy, with undereye circles, hooked noses, black beards, and pronounced Arabic and British accents.” In another article, “The Problem with ‘Aladdin,’” Aditi Natasha Kini asserts that Aladdin is “a misogynist, xenophobic white fantasy,” in which Jasmine is sexualized and subjected to tropes of “white feminism as written by white dudes.” Not only does Jasmine have limited agency in the film, Kini writes, but her role in the film is “entirely dependent on the men around her.”

When Disney announced plans to produce a live-action remake of Aladdin, I learned through conversations that the Aladdin story is not even in the original text for Alf Layla wa Layla, or One Thousand and One Nights. It was later added by an 18th century French translator, Antoine Galland, who heard the story from a Syrian Maronite storyteller, Hanna Diyab. Galland did not even give credit to Diyab in his translation. Beyond the counter-argument that “the original Aladdin took place in China,” I am left wondering, how much of the original tale do we really know? How much did Galland change? It’s possible that Galland changed the story so significantly that everything we know about Aladdin is mostly a western, orientalist fabrication. For a more detailed account about the origins of the Aladdin tale, I recommend reading Arafat A. Razzaque’s article, “Who ‘wrote’ Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller.”

Disney has been boasting about how the live-action Aladdin is one of the “most diverse” movies in Hollywood, but this is an attempt to hide the fact that the casting of this film relied on racist logic: “All brown people are the same.” It’s great that an Egyptian-Canadian actor, Mena Massoud, was cast in the lead role, but there’s inconsistency elsewhere: Jasmine is played by British actress Naomi Scott, who is half Indian and half white; Jafar is played by Dutch-Tunisian actor Marwan Kenzari; and Jasmine’s father and a new character, Dalia, are played by Iranian-American actors Navid Negahban and Nasim Pedrad, respectively. The casting demonstrates that the filmmakers don’t know the differences between Arabs, Iranians, and South Asians. We are all conflated as “one and the same,” as usual.

Then there’s the casting of Will Smith as the genie. Whether deliberate or not, reinforced here is the Magical Negro trope. According to blogger Modern Hermeneut, this term was popularized by Spike Lee in 2011 and refers to “a spiritually attuned black character who is eager to help fulfill the destiny of a white protagonist.” Moreover, the author writes that Lee saw the Magical Negro as “a cleaned up version of the ‘happy slave’ stereotype, with black actors cast as simpleminded angels and saints.” Examples of the Magical Negro can be found in films like What Dreams May Come, City of Angels, Kazaam (which also features a Black genie), The Green Mile, The Adjustment Bureau, and The Legend of Bagger Vance. In the case of Aladdin, the genie’s purpose is to serve the protagonist’s dreams and ambitions. While Aladdin is Arab, not white, the racial dynamic is still problematic as the Magical Negro trope can be perpetuated by non-Black people of color as well.

I need to pause for a moment to explain that I don’t believe an Aladdin movie should only consist of Arab actors. Yes, Agrabah is a fictional Arab country, but it would be perfectly fine to have non-Arabs like Iranians, South Asians, and Africans in the movie as well. That’s not the issue I have with the casting, and this is not about identity politics. My problem is that the filmmakers saw Middle Eastern and South Asian people as interchangeable rather than setting out to explore complex racial, ethnic, and power dynamics that would arise from having ethnically diverse characters existing within an Arab-majority society. Evelyn Alsultany, an Associate Professor who was consulted for the film, states in her post that one of the ways Disney tried to justify casting a non-Arab actress for Jasmine was by mentioning that her mother was born “in another land.” However, this seems to have been Disney doing damage control after they received some backlash about Jasmine’s casting. The result is convenient erasure of an Arab woman character. Moreover, the change in Jasmine’s ethnicity does little, if anything, to reduce the film’s problematic amalgamation of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. Alsultany writes that “audiences today will be as hard pressed as those in 1992 — or 1922, for that matter — to identify any distinct Middle Eastern cultures beyond that of an overgeneralized ‘East,’” where “belly dancing and Bollywood dancing, turbans and keffiyehs, Iranian and Arab accents all appear in the film interchangeably.”

Other examples of how the film conflates various Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures is highlighted in Roxana Hadadi’s review: “Terms like ‘Sultan’ and ‘Vizier’ can be traced to the Ottoman Empire, but the movie also uses the term ‘Shah,’ which is Iranian monarchy.” Referring to the dance scenes and clothing, she writes they are “mostly influenced by Indian designs and Bollywood styles” while “the military armor looks like leftovers from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven.” An intersectional approach to the diverse ethnic communities represented in the film would have made for a more nuanced narrative, but this would have required a better director.

Speaking of the director, it is amazing that, of all people, Disney hired Guy Ritchie. Because if there is any director out there who understands the importance of representation and knows how to author a nuanced narrative about Middle Eastern characters living in a fictitious Arab country, it’s… Guy Ritchie? Despite all of the issues regarding the origin of the Aladdin story, I still believed the narrative could have been reclaimed in a really empowering way, but that could not happen with someone like Guy Ritchie. It’s textbook orientalism to have a white man control the narrative. I would have preferred socially and politically conscious Middle Eastern and Muslim writers/directors to make this narrative their own. Instead, we are left with an orientalist fantasy that looks like an exoticized fusion of how a white man perceives South Asia and the Middle East.

Lastly, I have to comment on how this movie was released during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. In fact, the film’s release date, May 24th, was just one day before the last ten days of Ramadan, which are considered to be the most important in the month. During Ramadan, Muslims around the world fast — if they are able to — from dawn to sunset every day for 30 days. The time when we break our fast, iftar, typically involves dinner and prayer with family, friends, and/or the community. But Ramadan is more than just about fasting, it’s a time of self-reflection, compassion, and strengthening our connection with Allah, our loved ones, and community. I don’t believe Disney released Aladdin during Ramadan intentionally. If anything, I think the film’s release date is reflective of how clueless and ignorant Disney is. It’s so ridiculous that it’s laughable.

I don’t want to give the impression that Muslims don’t go out to the movies during Ramadan. Of course there are Muslims who do. I just know a lot who don’t— some for religious reasons and some, like myself, for no other reason than simply not having enough time between iftar and the pre-dawn meal, sehri (I mean, I could go during the day, but who wants to watch a movie hungry, right?). Even Islamophobic Bollywood knows to release blockbuster movies on Eid, not towards the end of Ramadan.

But this isn’t about judging Muslim religiosity during the holy month. No one is “less” of a Muslim if they are going to the movie theater or anywhere else on Ramadan. My point is that Disney has not shown any consideration for the Muslim community with this movie. They did not even consider how releasing the film during Ramadan would isolate some of the Muslim audience. It’s clear that Disney did not make efforts to engage the Muslim community. Of course, there is nothing surprising about this. But you cannot brag about diversity when you’re not even engaging a group of people that represents the majority of the population you claim to be celebrating! In response to Shaheen’s critiques of the original Aladdin cartoon, a Disney distribution president at the time said Aladdin is “not just for Arabs, but for everybody.” But this is a typical dismissive tactic used to gloss over the real issues. No doubt Disney will follow the same script when people criticize the latest film.

I don’t have any interest in this movie because it failed to learn anything from the criticism it received back in 1992. The fact that a 1993 op-ed piece titled, “It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney” is still relevant to the live-action version of a film that came out 27 years ago is both upsetting and sad at the same time. As I said earlier, Edward Said and Jack Shaheen did not exhaustively speak out against orientalism, exoticism, and vilification to only see them reproduced over and over again. Of course Disney refused to educate themselves and listen to people like Shaheen— their Aladdin story was never meant for us.

[keramalusundeep]

THE SUICIDE OF HELL

He sets out with a prayer on his lips. Wired and beefed with bombs from head to the bone on his hips. There is no going back. The clock ticks on. He doesn’t need his specs on. Because by five, from one, two, three, and four, he’d be gone along with you in the vacation of your yawn.

He is not crippled by disease, society, upbringing, or education. He is just him. Sacked and hacked under a radical whim. Time is precious. The last moments are vicious. Biologically his ticker is alive. Spiritually he is dead. Because, only the dead can kill. And only the killed can be dead.

He is happy. The heaven is mapped in his favour. With the odour of the most beautiful untouched, virgin angels.

He has reached the destination. The nation from where he officially departs. The reaction in which his victims are casually censored in the aftermath graphic footage clip arts. Bodies are assembled in a scramble like broken eggs in a challenging scrabble. The curse is blessed.

THE LEGACY OF SUICIDE BOMBING

War is poetry for geopolitics. Most often it is a mystery who the poet is. It is always “poets”. War encourages the most collaborative commerce.

People are always unhappy with the existing government. Change becomes the staple food of the bourgeois. Their manifesto is smeared with the throbbing young blood of promise. Vibrant and striking. One that appears and feels better than that is today. It has to be. But if you just unwrap their juicy roll of delicious hope, all you’d see is an old fry dipped in new oil. Revolutions are baptised as the ‘Morning Sun’. Martyrs are autopsied as the ‘Memorial Sons’.

In 1869, the famous anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, and Sergi Nechayev, both Russians, published a book called ‘Catechism of a Revolutionist’. A passage from the book reads, “The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.”

The book had a great impact around its epicentre. From the aftershocks, seven years later, in 1876, a group was created. It was called Land and Liberty. In this group, a considerable chunk voted for the system of state to go to the dogs. Then, hand over the land of Russia to its peasants. A reality that Mikhail Bakunin had been counting his beads for.

Three years from the inception of Land and Liberty, the group broke into two factions. One that had a sweet tooth for terror. The other that was diabetic to terror. The terror group went on to become The People’s Will, the Russian left-wing revolutionary organisation.

So the group built some muscle. And in 1881, Ignacy Hryniewiecki from The People’s Will was appointed to assassinate Alexander II. Not just in any manner. But with a human touch. When Hryniewiecki flung the bomb at the Tsar, he was too close to the explosion himself. The effect of the bomb along with tearing the Tsar apart, injures, wounds, and kills Hryniewiecki. Right this moment, the bomb conceives a new testosterone. It scribbles a ripple in the mystical ocean of its renaissance, spelling an endless and relentless wave of suicide bombing in an orgy of trance.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH

Before World War 2 was born, the Chinese and the Japanese had a warm up in 1938, with their Battle of Taierzhuang. Here, the Chinese soldiers strapped with grenades and explosives, dove under the Japanese tanks and blew what they could with the girth of their bombs.

When it was time for the Japanese to exploit the suicide hashtag, they soared high and cornered the market. Literally. During World War 2, Kamikaze pilots were engineered to fly planes into the navel of the Allied Forces’ naval fleet. Their planes were not built to deploy bombs as they were “the bombs”. From torpedoes to missiles to bubbling fuel tanks to aircraft, the Kamikaze pilots had only one role. To use the instrument they were in or on and take it straight to the flesh of the enemy’s ships, making them bleed hard, to grief.

To the Japanese, the philosophy of death was far more supreme and coveted than defeat. According to the principles laid out in their Samurai and Bushido code, everything else came second to loyalty and honour.

The Land of the Morning Sun, South Korea, who, cradled by the U.S.A, after the split of Korea in World War 2 was not all sunshine and rainbows when it came to the roster on suicide poll. Among the developed nations, South Korea ranks #1 in suicide rate. 14,160 people committed suicide in 2012.

As South Korea was still licking its wounds from World War 2 and the Korean bifurcation, North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. As part of a strategic military tactic, South Korean soldiers wrapped bombs around their bodies and attacked North Korean tanks.

North Korea was not shy either. Using satchel charges, North Korean suicide squads attacked American tanks in the same Korean War.

When the suicide bombing ball rolled over to Asia, LTTE grappled it hard with its jaw like a mastiff on cocaine.

LTTE didn’t spare the government, civilians, Prime Minister or their own President. They were Tigers. Wild. All they knew was to hunt and eat. In their case, detonate and inspire for a cause. Between 1980 and 2000, LTTE rocked the stage of the suicide bombing concerts.

Once the middle east understood that it was beyond just snaking exotic bellies for the connoisseurs and cheering ships of oils with the west and the rest of the velvet states, it knew it could roll the dice on its golden plate of religion.

“Jihad” becomes the dictator. Everyone else obliged to press the Quran against their foreheads out of proclaimed duty and acclaimed piety, does as the Jihad commands. As we have come to see, with so many organisations and diverse mottos – LeT, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and of course, ISIS, Jihad is just one person. But he comes with many tongues. Or could it be said, Jihad has many flavours, but the main ingredient remains the same?

It used to be a man’s game. But as the world is hell-bent on giving its word to extending the quality of equality, the men behind the keffiyeh, the convenient and fashionable facial burka for the man, he started inviting women. And children. To take part in the exploding arguments for their bereaved cause.

A 2011 intelligence analyst report in the U.S. army said, “Although women make up roughly 15% of the suicide bombers within groups which utilize females, they were responsible for 65% of assassinations; 20% of women who committed a suicide attack did so with the purpose of assassinating a specific individual, compared with 4% of male attackers.” The report also maintained that most of the women suicide bombers were, “grieving the loss of family members [and] seeking revenge against those they feel are responsible for the loss, unable to produce children, [and/or] dishonoured through sexual indiscretion.”

With the children it is easier. Unlike their older counterparts who are to be lured with vengeance that is turbo-charged with the tartness of political, regional, religious, and sectarian propaganda, and the promise of relentless whoring in the afterlife, all that the juvenile needs to be told is that “they” are the bad men.”

A child suicide bomber is like the icing on the cake. They are agile, effortless, and very smooth.

Invasions take up our personal space. Demanding us to change our face and base. Our surrender will include both the genders, including the one that is tender. In agreement, you are an ally to one. In disagreement, you become an enemy to another. In neutrality, you are “a threat” to world peace.

There is no such thing as the world’s most famous suicide bomber. A suicide bomber’s kid won’t come out and scream on the edge of rooftops, “I want to be like my father.” The world is not going to sing songs for suicide bombers. No successful suicide bomber will go on to tell his tale. There won’t be any fodder from the “horse’s mouth”. Just a handful who were able to target the renowned are worshipped. In their own circuits. However, they are just messengers who are impotent to issue commandments, as they are not sure what it means to be right, and what it means to be left out.

Photo by Christopher Farrugia

[afrojonathan]

Day 24: Fes and Chefchaouen, Morocco

Another big day here, even if it was bifurcated into a Fes morning and a Chefchaouen evening.

I got moving early to take some photos of side streets in the Fes medina that I absolutely loved, but didn’t look as resplendent (nod to Brett Cluff) at night. I also went to the oldest library (attached to that Mosque I errantly entered yesterday) to see if I could get myself in today. There was a different guard, but seemed very dismissive (I couldn’t tell if it was closed or he just didn’t want to let me in - I’m presuming the latter. The internets were unclear whether I would be able to make it in or not, so, worth a try). A local heard my fruitless conversation, and took me to a nearby medersa (old university) that I thought was going to be that library (but perhaps a different entrance). It wasn’t, but I don’t think he was hustling me, I think he thought I was looking for this. I gave him 10 dirhams, admired the architecture in this tiny place, and then headed back to the riad for the comically large breakfast. I even tried to tell them to bring me less, to no avail.

The manager of the riad was nice enough to come help me flag a cab to the bus station, as well as get me a great price (2 bucks, as opposed to 3). He went to give me a kiss on each cheek, which I roundly botched, but we kind of made it happen. (Also, my brother says the Swiss do 3, [which just seems to fit his need for affection and is unclear if true] so I had that in my head during the whole exchange).

The bus station was as unpleasant as any bus station, no more no less. The ride was bumpy and kind of nauseating, but otherwise uneventful.

As we pulled in to Chefchaouen, I saw the mountainous blue-splashed landscape, and knew this place was going to be special. Upon checking in (entirely in Spanish), I realized my apartment was on a pretty iconic street here. Note the steps with the colored pots below. I’m sure I ruined more than a few photos popping out of the apartment, as there was always a line of folks taking photos here.

Intent on making the most of the remaining few hours of sunlight, I walked through the very manageable medina. Things are are pretty relaxed comparatively, which is a welcome change.

I had dinner on the roof terrace of the Clock Cafe, where there was someone playing a guitar-like instrument, and someone singing. It would have been awesome, except 3 teens sitting near me were playing music on their phone and generally being super annoying. Apparently my frosty looks whenever they played music weren’t being recognized. I debated between couscous and a camel burger, and went with couscous. I should have gone with the camel burger. THAT’S IT THIS TRIP IS A BUST.

After meandering around quite a bunch more, I saw a shop that was only lit with candles, and the light was wonderfully reflected with the shop’s many geodes. I walked by it twice, and something finally compelled me to go in. I sure am glad I did.

I perused the geodes and shells that were on display, in this small, cavernous and sexy space. It was definitely the coolest shop I had seen in all the medinas. As Spanish is spoken fairly prevalently here, I spoke mostly in Spanish with Ibrahim, the owner. There was an older French woman Carole in the shop as well, and though I eventually asked, I never really understood their dynamic (and they gave a coy answer about the world being a small place). I eventually bought something there, and as I was out the door, I popped back in to take one more photo. Ibrahim invited me to sit with him and Carole to have some slightly hallucinogenic kif, which is smoked out of a long, thin pipe (I believe it is legal here, based on my readings). I originally declined and went to leave, and then my brain just said “why wouldn’t you embrace this foreign experience, Jonathan?”

The three of us passed it around and chatted in Spanish, English and a wee bit of French. We talked about travel, humanity, kindness, our homes, etc. Ibrahim even brought me some delicious COLD tea (finally! Something other than scalding hot tea in these hot Moroccan days!) I think the cold tea maaaay have gotten me sick, but more on that later. This was one of those moments (and I told them this) that you dream of as a solo traveler. Off the beaten path, chatting with locals, partaking in local customs. Eventually a younger French woman Claire joined us, though I wasn’t clear on her connection to the others.

At one point, I heard lots of car horns and general cacophony, and asked what they thought it was. A wedding, I was told. I joked about American weddings (and how I’m so popular at them 💁‍♀️), and I talked about how I can’t imagine a wedding without alcohol. “How do the weird uncles get on the dance floor then?” I mused, to their enjoyment. After feeling I had stayed a good amount of time (and being mindful to not overstay), I politely excused myself and walked back into the main part of the medina in a bit of a haze.

I somehow ended up right in the thick of the cacophony from before, as it seemed half the Town was marching and celebrating this wedding. I stopped at a corner right as the groom (presumably) walked by carrying a...actually I don’t know the word...a covered throne thing? I assumed the bride was in it. I marched along with the wedding for awhile, and no one seemed to mind (I’m giving credit to the keffiyeh!) They were chanting the same things, and quietly joined in. I walked with them for about 5 minutes, but I had another goal in mind.

I took off deep into the Moroccan night, following a rumor towards a bar. All I wanted these last few days was an ice cold crispy boy.

Wandering the darkened streets of Chefchaouen, I eventually came across a waterfall. I decided I’d come back and check it out in the day, especially because there seemed to be some people lurking in the shadows. After going to the completely wrong place and asking for a beer (of which I think I offended greatly), I found my way towards the (actual) bar OumRabie. On the way, I wound up again amongst the wedding, this time a line of endless cars with people hanging out the sides, cheering, honking, etc. I danced along to the music as I made my way to the bar. I also thought how weird it was that everyone was driving post-wedding, and then remembered that no one would have been drinking there.

The bar: what a site to behold. It was similar to the worst dive bars in NY (Holland Bar near Port Authority comes to mind), plus people were just ripping butts. It felt like nothing had changed in here since the late 80’s. I sat at the bar and chatted with the server in Spanish, all the while a Yanni YouTube playlist was being broadcast. The other grizzled patrons were in RAPT attention with the Yanni, and truth be told, so was I. I had a Casabalanca, a Flag Special and a Stork. They were damn fine beers on a sweaty summer night. Around 1am I decided I had smelled enough smoke and wasn’t really looking to get dinged up, so I walked the 20 minutes back through the quiet and slightly spooky medina, reveling in the experiences of the day.

[epistolizer]

Hit & Run Commentary #124

Joe Biden insists that the only thing making his history of tactile constituent interactions wrong now yet appropriate at the time are changing social norms.  So what he is saying is that such behavior and even much worse will be perfectly acceptable when America falls to Islamist radicals because of the failure to crack down at the border because of similar multiculturalist drivel.  If one wants to hold that Biden’s actions are always wrong, one can only appeal to an absolute and transcendent morality, the only legitimate of which is found in traditional Christianity.  

Pundit Matt Bai warns in a column titled “Stephen Miller Stokes Trump’s Nationalist Vision”. So would he prefer an internationalist alternative? That would mean America’s future would not necessarily be determined by those holding to traditionalist conceptions of human freedom and constitutional liberty.  Rather, just as much say would be granted to those that value perpetuation of the regulatory bureaucracy at the expense of the individual and even to some thinking that those not holding to particular conceptions of God or even notions of dress deemed acceptable by anyone with a lick of common sense should be eliminated in the most brutal ways imaginable.  

Did those now tossing a fit that Turning Point USA  functionary Candace Owens allegedly glossed over Hitler’s atrocities get similarly jacked out of shape over a Chairman Mao ornament adorning a White House Christmas tree during the Obama regime?  Unlike anyone connected with the decoration of that particular sprig of Yuletide foliage, Candace Owens is a private citizen. Mao killed more than Hitler. Or are Chinese lives not as valuable as Jewish ones? Do those outraged at Candace Owens get as worked up when they see youth inspired to advance the cause of world Bolshevism often at the behest of their tenured pedagogues wear Che Guevara shirts?  For that particular figure was quite explicit in regards to his disgust for Black people.  

If migrants from beyond America’s borders only enhance the nation and, contrary to what President Trump insists, are not criminals but only truly remarkable people of robust health, why are the advocates of open borders and sanctuary cities less than enthusiastic about the opportunity the President is allowing these jurisdictions to add this diversity to their own regional distinctiveness? Interesting how when it is the backyards of radical multiculturalists on the line that they become as territorial as any member of the Tea Party or Minuteman movements. 

If the undocumenteds are not wanted in sanctuary cities, isn't that proof these jurisdictions are not in a warped fashion about the well being of the migrants but rather about the virtue signalling of the subversives undermining border security in this fashion?  

Did any of those now bellyaching how criticism of Lady Mao  (aka Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) leads to an uptick in death threats ever come out with as much righteous indignation in opposition to the Antifia insurgents that insinuated bodily harm to the wife of Tucker Carlson while pounding on the family’s door?  

President Trump is reportedly not too pleased that Fox News held a town hall with Bernie Sanders.  Though the President is allied with a number of pundits on the network, he does not deserve so much influence over that particular media outlet so as to determine programming content.  If anything, Fox News and Senator Sanders are to be commended for sharing a willingness to appear in the same venue despite profound ideological differences.  

In detailing the origins of the Islamist front group CAIR, Representative Ilhan Omar said the organization “was founded after 9/11 because they recognized some people did something, and that all us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” To remind people exactly what that something was, the New York Post graciously published an edition with a cover photo of the jetliner flying into one of the World Trade Center towers. For this act of responsible and accurate journalism, the newspaper has been accused of “dangerous incitement”. So if it is now unacceptable to reference documented events for fear that such might instigate hatred against Muslims, does that mean Black History Month should be similarly downplayed since a significant reason for that commemoration is to agitate animosity against Whites?  

If a medication for excessive underarm perspiration is advertised as also causing urinary retention, inability to regulate body temperature, and blurred vision, I think I’ll just settle for the sweaty armpits.  

If Donald Trump legitimately wrote off nearly a billion dollars in losses, isn’t this an instance of “Don’t hate the player, hate the game”? Shouldn’t even greater ire be directed towards the legislators and regulators that set up such system in the first place?  

Too bad PETA is not as concerned about lowering the euthanasia rates in their shelters as they are about expunging the English language of phrases such as “opening a can of worms” or “letting the cat out of the bag”.  

One can understand conservatives standing against transgenders infiltrating women’s sports. But how are these Fox News pundits jacked out of shape over these types getting business set asides intended for women much different than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson begging for Affirmative Action and assorted handouts for minorities? If true to their convictions, shouldn’t they oppose someone being granted a beneficence for an occupation where it does not matter whether you’re   reproductive orifice is an outie or an innie? By insisting that women should be the beneficiaries of these sorts of programs, isn’t that an admission that women are not as good at business as men? If the response is that private corporations should be allowed to lavish benefits upon whomever they please, do these voices then intend to advocate similar set asides be lavished solely upon men or at that point do they intend to rampage in the street?  

Nancy Pelosi is outraged that President Trump believes merit should play a key role in immigration decisions. The Speaker countered that, throughout American history, most immigrants did not arrive with merit. But neither were they lavished with extravagant government handouts and benefits for simply arriving here. Many were even denied entrance for failing to comply with explicit health guidelines.  

Lady Mao, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, laments that the Alabama abortion law forces a woman to be pregnant against her consent. How is that different than child support laws which make men pay against their consent?  

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pitched a fit that Game Of Thrones was obviously written by men because the ultimate victor apparently wasn’t a women. Interesting you heard no complaints from her about the gratuitous unnecessary sex scenes for which the drama is infamous that do not likely comply with MeToo rigors regarding consent and disparities of gender power or assorted related drivel.  

Regarding those that do not want the women that get abortions punished. Do they intend to similarly coddle fathers delinquent in meeting their child support obligations?  At least those neglected kids are still alive.  

Given that the debt is on the verge of surpassing the entire worth of the U.S. economy, irrespective of party, where exactly are the funds for infrastructure investment supposed to come from?

Migrant hordes are being released by literal busloads into American cities. That’s certainly a much more effective policy upholding national security than a wall built around the border.  

It was said in a sermon that perhaps an individual does not have wealth because God cannot trust you with it.  This means wealth might cause an individual to fall into sin. Relatedly, could it also be said that God does not want certain churches to increase in terms of attendance numbers because such could similarly go to the head of a particular pastor or congregation?

In manipulative propaganda disguised as a razor blade commercial, a transgendered is admonished that shaving is about confidence.  Actually, shaving is nothing more than the removal of facial hair to comply with grooming standards imposed as social norms either by employers and members of the opposite sex or preferences of individual appearance and comfort.  

Regarding steak and cheese Hot Pockets advertised as "high protein" as if the customer is being done a favor. Aren't steak and cheese high protein to begin with?  

If humor is to be devoid of racial reference as epitomized by the tolerancemonger outrage now directed towards the cinematic classic “Blazing Saddles”, where is the sustained ongoing protest against the Comedy Central series “The New Negroes”?  

Regarding the presidential contenders jacked out of shape about Biden working with segregationists in the past.  Are they as outraged over their supporters that wear Che apparel or Representative Omar’s links to radical jihadists?  

In Taylor Swift’s propaganda video in favor of the Equality Act, those opposing her endorsement of wanton licentiousness are depicted as unenlightened hayseeds and trailer park trash.  Islamists take an even harderline stance against the acts of carnality depicted in the video. An activist number go far beyond touting protest signs to commit what Westerns would consider unconventional forms of capital punishment such as the tossing of the accused off multistory buildings .  As such, does this naive minstrel intend to produce a video ridiculing those of this additional religious persuasion that wear distinctive apparel such as burkas, hijabs or keffiyehs?  

By Frederick Meekins

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/war-gaming-the-persian-gulf-conflict/

War Gaming the Persian Gulf Conflict: Have you forgotten that you provided adult diapers for your soldiers in tanks, Iranian General replies Trump

By Blake Archer Williams for Ooduarere via The Saker Blog

Greetings from Tehran, the “Capital of the free world” (E. Michael Jones).

A few days ago, Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, had a brief post on Colonel Patrick Lang’s weblog, Sic Semper Tyrannis. Here’s the link:

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/07/will-donald-trump-kill-his-presidency-over-iran-by-larry-c-johnson.html#comments

He gave four possible options, and invited the commenters to add others of their own. The whole post and the comments which followed were absolutely pathetic in terms of the depth of analysis, including this mind-blowing comment by the Turcopolier himself: “The strait would not stay closed long, but there would be considerable economic damage while it is.”

I mean, are these people nuts?? Let me put it this way:

The [sand] niggers have burned down the plantation, OK? The plantation is no more. It is an ex-Plantation.

And the niggers have built their own supersonic Noor ground to sea and ground to ground missiles; we have built ballistic missiles with ranges of up to 2000 km and winged cruise missiles with a range of 2500, all with high precision (low CEP) impacts. Our latest generation of drones are on the leading edge of the technology. Trust me. (We are always in the 90+ percentile if not actually winning the medals in the Olympics for mathematics, physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, information technology, etc.) If the first ballistic missile or Noor cruise missile fails to take out the control tower of the Abraham Lincoln (and fail they won’t), we will use the multiple warhead option on the ballistic missiles, and “carpet bomb” the runway so that it will be useless. Just a rubber duck sitting in our pond, with its 5,000+ sailors constantly under fire until they raise the white flag of surrender and wait to be taken hostage.

The niggers have exercised strategic patience for a very long time (four decades). It would be nice to have a few more years just to be sure, but we are ready. We are thirsting for relief from the false new worldly order (novus ordo seclorum falsus) as declared in the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in 1965 and in the Centesimus Annus encyclical issued by Pope John Paul II in 1991, which emphasized the surrender to usury (“capitalism, properly understood”).

Let us game this. Trumpf is talking about the use of nuclear weapons. He is itching for it. But only after he gets re-elected. What are Iran’s options? The Iranian “Samson Option” is simple: Fire a few Noor missiles at the deep-water supertanker docking ports of Ra’s Tanura (Saudi Arabia), Fujairah, and Dubai’s Jebel Ali port, “the largest man-made deep-water harbor in the world that is also the U.S. Navy’s busiest port of call outside of America.” It would take at least six months to rebuild the ruins, IF the sand-niggers allow the reconstruction to take place, during which time no supertankers will be able to dock anywhere in the Persian Gulf to fill their huge bellies with that yummy crude. What that would do to the world economy, you would have to ask my friend, Pepe Escobar, who knows a thing or two about derivatives and over-extension more generally. What is Trumpf going to do now that he has crashed Wall Street worse than 1929? I.e. the final crash which Pax Americana (as wagged by the Pax Judaica tail, of course) will not recover from. I.e. finally putting the Crash of September 2008 precipitated by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy out of its misery. Take a dive from the top of Trumpf Tower, that’s what. The American equivalent of Seppuku, not having the “guts” for the real thing, or not being able to “make the cut” – you decide.

The pathetic talk on Sic Semper Tyrannis is that we would be able to hit some of the Saudi oil and tank infrastructure. For example, one of the commenters (Jack) says, “The real question is how badly could they damage Gulf oil production infrastructure and how long would it take to rebuild?” Why would we want to destroy what is [ultimately] ours?? Why not provide machine guns to the 2 million oppressed Shi’a in Qatif; you know, the niggers who run the Ra’s Tanura refinery and port… Roll in a couple of armored Divisions, given them the Uzi and Kalashnikov high copies (and maybe some magic Houthi sandals with which to wage war), and leave the tanks there for them to defend Qatīf with. (We would have their backs on the Persian Gulf side). Why not take as many of the 10,000 soldiers at the un-defendable Bagram base in Afghanistan hostage, as well as the 5,000 or so sailors of the Fifth Fleet stationed in Bahrain? (With the fall of Qatīf, Bahrain would also fall back into Iranian suzerainty.) Why not bomb the control centers and runways of all the airfields the US would want to use to take out our radar installations out in the first few weeks (so that they can then send in their Depends™ -wearing pilots to take out our nuclear sites). And for what? Like that is going to achieve anything other than bring about further national unity and cohesion. But like I said, there would be no “few weeks” once Iran implements the first three days of its gameplan.

Why not take out Dimona and the Haifa Port Chemical Terminal and the Ben-Gurion Airport control tower? Why not make Israel a no-fly zone, so that the dual passport holders can make their way back to Europe and New York, which is where they came from in the first place? Not for the military aircraft, but for commercial aircraft: Anything taking off or landing in Ben-Gurion will be shot down by domestic analogues of the S-300’s; you know, the same good fireworks brought to you by the same folk who destroyed the so-called “stealth” Triton drone at four o’clock in the morning. (Help me out here… we’re just gaming this, ok?). And as for the Persian Gulf (not “the Gulf”, stupid); someone rightly characterized it as the Hotel California for whatever martial vessel which dares enter it. And for those who are not old enough to know: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

So these are the options as we see them. First the Emirates (half of whose keffiyeh wearing “sheiks” are ethnically Iranian and Persian speaking anyway), and Qatīf (and of course Jīzān and the southern parts of Asīr back to the Yemenese, where they have always belonged historically). And then on to the Hejaz and the haramayn: Mecca and Medina, driving the Wahhabeast heretics back under the rocks of Najrān, from under which they crawled with the aid of British arms and financing back in the middle of the 18th century. Yes, Russia isn’t too happy about the possibility of Iranian control over such a large geopolitical jugular vein, but hey, it’s geographical determinism; they’ll get used to it. They will be getting Germany and France and the European sub-continent’s integration into the Eurasia “world continent” (McKinder?). And better the oil in the hands of the rational Shi’a than the crazy-as-a-loon American cowboys. And the ‘Sea Power’ pirates, Perfidious Albion and Uncle $cam will have to scamper back home with their rat-tails between their rat legs, followed by all their takfiri scum “rats” (Ghaddāfī), who will be deported to London and New York, God grant!

The phase of strategic patience is over. We are now in the phase of Eye for an Eye Escalation. But do not think that this phase will have the longevity of the last one. It is on a high-sprung spring-loaded trigger, after which all bets are off. This is the way we see it. How do you see it, Pray tell? Do you see it as we see it? As Colonel Lang sees it? Or somewhere in between? I eagerly await to see your perspectives in your comments.

Blake Archer Williams has asked me to add this article under his analysis because it illustrates the points he just made.  He also added the following important caveat to this translation:

The translation of the subtitles is not the best. Particularly, General Soleimani’s very first sentence, which is very important, has not been rendered well. Where it says, “There is no need for armed forces, I am your foe, the Qods Force is your foe.” It should read as follows:

“There is no need for the [regular] Iranian Armed Forces [to get involved in order to resolve the conflict between us]; I am [a sufficient] adversary for you; the Qods Force is [sufficient enough] of a foe for [the likes of] you.”

Also, at 1:37, where the good general says, “You start this war, but the end of it, we will decide.” Should read:

“You [may] start this war, but [know that in such an event], it is we who will draw (tarsīm) [the political map] of how it will end [literally: “of its end”)].

And as you know, my friend, General Soleimani is not given to hyperbole and lies, as is the unfortunate habit of US politicians and now generals too.

——-Here is the article in question:

PressTV reports

Major General Soleimani sharply reacts to Trump’s recent military threat

Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani has sharply reacted to the recent “cabaret owner-style” military threat by US President Donald Trump against the Islamic Republic, saying he takes the position to respond “as a soldier” since it is beneath the dignity of Iran’s president to do so.

Addressing Trump, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said, “You threaten us with an action that is ‘unprecedented’ in the world. This is cabaret-style rhetoric. Only a cabaret owner talks to the world this way.”

He was reacting to Trump’s all-caps tweet addressed to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in which he threatened the Islamic Republic with actions “the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before.”

The tweet came after President Rouhani warned the US against its hostile approach against Iran, saying Washington should know that peace with Iran will be the mother of all peace while war with the country will be the mother of all wars.

“It is beneath the dignity of our president to respond to you. I, as a soldier, respond to you,” Soleimani further said.

You already did all you could!

The senior general further reminded the United States of its failures in its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What was it that you could do over the past 20 years but you didn’t? You came to Afghanistan with scores of tanks and personnel carriers and hundreds of advanced helicopters and committed crimes there. What the hell could you do between 2001 and 2018 with 110,000 troops? You are today begging Taliban for talks,” Major General Soleimani said.

The Iranian commander added, “Afghanistan was a poor country, what the hell could you do in this country that you are currently threatening us?”

“You arrogantly attacked Iraq with 160,000 troops and multiple times [military equipment] compared to what you used in Afghanistan, but what happened? Ask your then commander who was the person that he sent to me and asked ‘Is it possible for you to give us time [and] use your influence so that our soldiers would not be attacked by the Iraqi fighters in these few months  until we exit this country?’ Have you forgotten that you provided adult diapers for your soldiers in tanks? Despite that you are currently threatening the great country of Iran? With what background do you threaten [us]?”

“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine. We are the nation of martyrdom, we are the nation of Imam Hossein, you better ask. Come; we are ready. We are the man of this arena. You know that this war would mean annihilation of all your means. You may begin the war, but it is us who will end it,” he said.

In Yemen, Soleimani said, the US-backed coalition of Saudi Arabia and its allies has been incapable of making any gains against the country’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, which is both running state affairs and defending the nation against the Riyadh-led aggression.

“A mere organization is standing against you in Yemen, but it has emerged victorious in the face of the most advanced of your military equipment. What have you achieved over the past four years? You stripped the Red Sea – which used to be a safe sea – of security. You brought under fire Saudi Arabia and [its capital] Riyadh – which had not seen a single rocket fired at them for 100 years.”

The senior general further warned Trump against insulting the Iranian nation and president.

“Trump! You must not threaten our nation and must not insult our president… You must know what you are talking about; ask your predecessors and take advantage of their experiences,” General Soleimani emphasized.

The senior military official also censured the US for supporting the most hated anti-Iran terror group, called the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), saying Washington failed to achieve anything by doing so.

The commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force said, “the US had some grandeur in the past [and] when its fleet moved out, a nation fell apart. Have you now become attached to the Monafeqeen, who have been thrown in the trash bin of Iran’s history? You have become attached to a vagrant woman, and show her in all [your news] networks; is your hope pinned on this? Is this all your power? You are aware of our power in the region and capability for [launching] asymmetrical war?”

[worldtopnewsoftheday]

After being accused of endangering one of the city’s US representatives, the president visited Minneapolis. Activists were there to meet himProtesters support Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, outside an event attended by Donald Trump this week. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty ImagesAs she stood in a crowd of protesters, helping hold a long “Stand with Ilhan” sign outside the trucking company in Burnsville where Donald Trump was about to speak, Habon Abdulle could not help but be swept up in the contradictory emotions of the moment.As a hijab-wearing Muslim woman who speaks with a slight Somali accent, and as executive director of Women Organizing Women (Wow) Network, a not-for-profit group dedicated to training and supporting East African immigrants who run for office, Abdulle had more than a passing familiarity with the some of the views reflected in signs and chants among a crowd of Trump supporters lined up across the street.There was the idea that Muslims were as a whole responsible for 9/11, and that the congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her supporters were affiliated with terrorist groups. There was another oldie-but-goodie: that the city of Minneapolis, like many urban centers dealing with an affordable housing shortage driven by an influx of new residents, is filled with crime-ridden “no go” zones governed by sharia law, where police supposedly fear to tread.> We thought we passed the collective blaming, the ‘punish the whole for the actions of a few'> > Habon AbdulleAbdulle was still a little surprised to see such arguments expressed so brazenly, out in the open, just as she had been a few days earlier when Trump retweeted a video meant to show Omar did not respect the tragedy of 9/11.“There are conversations in my community,” Abdulle told the Guardian. “We thought we passed the collective blaming, the ‘punish the whole for the actions of a few’. Those were things that we experienced right after the 9/11 attack. And many of us actually thought we were done with that. But lately, it actually feels that it’s back. It’s really weird, like: what’s going on?”> On the pro-Ilhan side of the protests, two Muslim women, @nausheena and Asma Mohammed of @RISEsisterhood led many of the chants. > > Here, @HabonDaud explains why she thought it was important that Muslim women stand in the front. pic.twitter.com/83keO83kFU> > — Jared Goyette (@JaredGoyette) April 20, 2019She also saw reasons for optimism. A young Muslim woman walked in front of the pro-Omar group, wearing a black hijab and a keffiyeh scarf, holding a bullhorn and leading a chant. Abdulle watched as the crowd responded, many white and older Minnesotans included. That, she thought, was something she could work with.“If we don’t stand up for ourselves,” she asked, “who will? We have to stand up for ourselves and they felt someone who looks like them was attacked. And we were all of us out there saying, ‘No.’ We are not going to accept. We have rights. It isn’t fair that someone always has to other us. So, we went there because that was the right place to be that day.”In the same moment, from the other side of the street, a tall man with a gray scraggly beard could be overheard cracking a joke.“Hey, is that Omar? They all look the same to me.”He might have been on to something, but not in the way he intended. The young Muslim women in the crowd did see themselves in Omar. That was why they were out in force.> I came here to support my sister Ilhan. She’s been under attack and she’s been facing death threats> > Ama Mohammed“I came here to support my sister Ilhan,” the keffiyeh-wearing woman, Asma Mohammed, 26, told the Guardian. “She’s been under attack and she’s been facing death threats consistently, but even more so after Trump tweeted things about her that make her seem like she was sympathizing with terrorists.”Mohammed said Omar was more than just a political figure: “She is my sister, as Minnesotans; she is my sister as another woman of faith; as another woman who wears a hijab and faces that kind of hate on the daily.”Such a mix of outrage, disappointment and incredulousness, along with a growing sense of empowerment, was common among activists the Guardian spoke to in Minneapolis in the week after Trump’s tweet.Omar’s office was quieter than usual, declining media requests and not issuing statements, leaving Trump to deal with the fallout from the Mueller report without his favorite new foil to spar with.But if there is one thing Trump has been consistent about in his political career, it has been the targeting of migrants and Muslims in moves meant to appeal to his base. Many observers believe he will redouble such efforts as 2020 draws near.> She’s anti-American. She’s anti-Jews …Everyone knew the Muslims took down those buildings in New York> > Melody BlackOmar and Trump have become intrinsically linked, and not just on Trump’s terms. Omar was elected to the House of Representatives in November as part of an anti-Trump blue wave that included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Before that, she made national news when she became the first Somali American in statewide office, on the night Trump was elected president. Her victory party at a Marriott in downtown Minneapolis was a rollercoaster, tears and dancing underscored by a sense of girding for a fight.“It’s going to be very tough,” Omar said then. “We have to figure out how to organize the community to prepare for what’s to come. We have to amplify our voices of love against the rhetoric of hate.”That fight has now come, though in a more direct way than many supporters thought possible. As Trump uses Omar to galvanize his base, he will inevitably rally hers. Last Monday’s rival protests outside Trump’s Tax Day event signalled such battles to come.> In this clip, @nausheena and Asma Mohammed of @RISEsisterhood explain why they came to the standwithilhan protest in Burnsville on Monday. pic.twitter.com/XQFVu8sxkz> > — Jared Goyette (@JaredGoyette) April 20, 2019“Omar really needs to go,” said Melody Black, a Trump supporter from Red Wing, Minnesota, as a man behind her held a “Making America Great Again” sign.“She’s anti-American. She’s anti-Jews. She’s anti-Minnesotan. And everyone knew that the Muslims took down those buildings in New York. All of us watched it. And now they’re saying that we’re racist because we say it. But it’s the truth.“Omar came from Somalia and her father taught her exactly how to do what she’s doing – including getting into government. They’re trying to take over our government, the Muslims are.”Trump supporters hoist a flag and give the thumbs-up. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty ImagesOmar has indeed inspired other Muslim women to enter politics.“Many women within the Somali community who never thought to run for office changed their mind,” Abdulle said. The Minnesota state house now has its second female Somali American legislator, Hodan Hassan.Across the street from Black, Nausheena Hussain, a 42-year-old in a dark purple headscarf who directs a female-led Muslim not-for-profit organization, took her turn leading a round of chants. She said Trump’s attacks on Omar had encouraged others.“What I’m hearing, specially my community, is that she cannot be alone,” Hussain said. “They are asking everybody to run for office that has those same progressive values, so she is not bearing the brunt of the responsibility by herself.“And so I feel like 2020, you are going to see more people of color running for office, more Muslims or Muslim women, because not only do we not want her to be the only one there, but we have seen that she’s able to fight and still get things done. More people need to back her up and to be part of that.”Abdulle welcomed such words.“That’s how we are going to end the polarization,” she said. “That’s how we’re going to end the hatred. That’s how we’re going to end the narrative that we are not American.“I’m going to repeat the whole day long: we are American.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2VgLvwo

[medicalmarijuana-news]

Washington DC’s Cannabis Scene Braces for the Trump Era

It’s a cold January night and I’m trying to find a cannabis speakeasy in the nation’s capital. It isn’t easy. I’m in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, just north of U Street. I’ve been given an address, but from the outside it looks like an Indian or Thai restaurant. This must be the place. I descend a set of steps to an underground entrance, and walk into a dark and hazy room.

Inside, through an exhale of smoke, I can see many of the regulars in the DC cannabis scene. The guys from Funky Piece are offering dabs behind a table, the DC Scroger is here sporting his signature mirrored shades, and I recognize Charles from the Reschedule 420 event, explaining “terps” to a newbie. There’s product aplenty. Among the familiar faces, I see sheets of rosin, prepackaged edibles, and a half-dozen dab rigs. A young woman holds a cannabis clone in a red Solo cup. In her backpack are small bottles of home-infused juices. Corey C-Dub, known as the Mayor of DC, booms out to me over the crowd noise. “Ayeeeee!” he says. “Welcome to the Hash Bash.”

This is the cannabis scene in Washington, D.C., as the Obama administration leaves town and the Drumpf administration arrives: Small, robust, semi-legal, and still largely underground.

More than two years after the citizens of the District voted to legalize adult-use cannabis, the city remains caught in a local-federal limbo. District officials want to roll out regulations to allow possession, use, and sale. Federal officials, who continue to deny local citizens the dignity of home rule, refuse to allow any legal regulation to proceed.

The rules, as they’ve evolved over the past two years, remain hazy and ever-shifting. DC residents are permitted to grow their own cannabis, and to give it away, but are prohibited from buying or selling it in any amount. For those wanting to establish their own legal cannabis companies, there are scant rules, no regulations, and no protection from federal law enforcement. For consumers, there are no stores and zero quality assurance.

But there is one strange upside to all this legal confusion. Washington D.C.’s cannabis community has grown into one of the nation’s tightest groups of activists and consumers. The DC cannabis community is incredibly tight-knit. Everyone knows everyone, which I’ll later learn can be both a blessing and a curse. But on a wintery night at the end of the Obama era, in a secret speakeasy below the D.C. street, everyone’s sharing and no one’s caring and it’s all very, very good.

DC’s 4,200 Joint Protest

DC pot activist Adam Eidinger sports a keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and a Liberty Cap, outside his home in northwest DC on Sunday, January 15, 2017. The portable jail cell is a prop Eidinger says will be on display during a protest on Inauguration Day. (Greg Kendall-Ball for Leafly)

I lived in this city once upon a time, working behind the scenes as a Congressional staffer. With the Drumpf inauguration looming, I returned to my former homebase to meet with its cannabis leaders and get a sense for how they’re surviving and thriving during the transition—and what they expect to come down on January 20.

One thing that’s coming down: A lot of free joints.

Adam Eidinger, leader of the local activist group DCMJ, has for weeks been promising a great joint giveaway in the middle of Drumpf’s inauguration. DCMJ organizers want to hand out 4,200 free joints—an act that’s technically legal within the District, as long as they’re not on federal land. In a city that’s checkerboarded with dozens of federal law enforcement jurisdictions, that can be more challenging than it sounds. The group is encouraging their 4,200 joint recipients to spark up exactly four minutes and 20 seconds into Drumpf’s inaugural address.

To carry out the plan, though, first they’ve got to roll 4,200 joints.

On a snowy afternoon, I dropped by Eidinger’s house, known as “Embassy Weedonia,” on Embassy Row. A handmade “prohibition cage,” with a sign that says “Jail is Not a Drug Policy,” sits in his yard, buried in snow.

Inside, several DCMJ volunteers sat near a cozy fire, rolling joints for the big event. I took a seat around the table and joined the rolling crew.

Eidinger explained that he wanted each joint to contain three different strains of home grown cannabis. Three large bags of cannabis sat out, labeled “DC Inaugural Weed.” One contained fairly high quality homegrown buds, while the other two were filled with shake.

“I had about a pound and a half that I could give away,” Eidinger told us, referring to dried flower from his homegrown plants. He pointed to the table. “These two bags were donated – all DC. I know all the growers, I saw the plants being grown. We’ve all been growing here for two years and we’ve been loving it.”

Elizabeth Croydon, a DC comedienne and former candidate for Congress in Maryland’s Eighth District, talked about how long she’d been involved with the group. “I’ve been protesting with Adam for seventeen years,” she said as she passed a freshly-rolled joint around the circle. “Nothing can stop me from railing to see this economy take off. It’s time for civil disobedience.”

“We would like to call this demonstration off,” said Eidinger,“because it is going to be disruptive.” But the show would go on, he said, unless President-elect Drumpf assures the American public “that no one who lives in a marijuana-liberated state is going to have the government breaking down their door.”

As we spoke, I rolled my best cone joint. Eidinger looked over and critiqued my work. “That’s a nice-looking joint,” he said.

Meanwhile, reporters and photographers from media outlets around the world wandered in and out, taking photos, shooting video, and asking questions. Eidinger frequently stepped out of the room to answer phone calls from other reporters. Weeks before the event, DCMJ was already reaping worldwide attention for its cause.

The Only Constant is Change

Rico Valderrama, also known as “Phone Homie” is a pot activist and podcast host in Washington, DC. (Greg Kendall-Ball for Leafly)

A lot can change in a few months.

I visited DC in April 2016 to cover the Reschedule 420 event. Back then I found a community filled with joy, love, and camaraderie. Upon my return eight months later, I discovered there’d been a shift in attitude within the subculture. Money had become a contentious force. Without a legal means to buy or sell cannabis, it’s nearly impossible to establish a legally operating cannabis business. That’s led to frustration, tension and conflict.

I discussed the change with Christine V. Edmond, Copy Editor and Content Manager at Cannabis Business Executive. “When you came here last time, everyone was all love and ‘kumbaya,’” she said. “Now people fight all the time, mostly about money.”

The 2014 legalization vote was initially praised as a moment of great progress. But after more than two years of obstruction from Congress, would-be entrepreneurs are struggling to get by. People are creating their own loopholes in the law—some real, some imagined—to stay afloat.

“People are creating their own market,” Edmond told me knowingly.

The community here is so close-knit that it can be both a blessing and a curse. There are friends who squabble over who owes who what. There is still an undercurrent of unease, an unwillingness to share secrets. And, as is the case in some other cities–most notably Toronto and Vancouver–there’s tension between the District’s few licensed medical cannabis dispensaries and those who have no way to enter the industry legally.

As Rico Valderrama, a local activist and podcast host, puts it: “We are all players in a very small backyard.”

A Fine Line of Legality

Davis Kiyo, founder of Myster, at his home in northwest Washington, D.C. (Greg Kendall-Ball for Leafly)

658,000 residents live within the boundaries of the District of Columbia. They’re surrounded on all sides by states that maintain wildly varying cannabis laws. It’s a short drive from downtown DC to Northern Virginia, but cannabis possession on one side of the bridge will result in a $25 ticket. On the other side, it’s 30 days in jail. In another direction, across the border in Maryland, the state technically has a medical marijuana law in place. But due to numerous delays, there’s still no access to medical cannabis there.

It can be tricky—and hazardous to one’s legal freedom—to provide any sort of cannabis product outside the District.

Take the case of Davis Clayton Kiyo. Kiyo, the entrepreneur behind the popular Myster brand of accessories, first became involved in 2013 after recognizing an opportunity to elevate cannabis accessories above, in his words, “plastic baggies taken out of a shoebox.”

A few months after establishing his product line, Kiyo opened a Myster storefront in Bethesda, Maryland. Not long after, he opened a second outlet on Georgia Avenue in DC proper.

Business went well. After legalization hit DC in late 2014, Kiyo’s storefront became a site for the District’s famed seed giveaways. “We’ve held multiple giveaways,” he told me. “We had three last year. What we’re trying to do is spread our genetics through DC.” The genetics he is referring to are two hybridized cannabis strains specific to the District – Mumbo Sauce and Crystal City Kush.

As Kiyo continued to expand his business, one of the products his Myster shops began carrying was a line of CBD vaporization cartridges. The CBD was extracted from hemp. At the time, the cartridges were assumed to be legal under federal law, so long as the oil contained less than 0.3 percent THC.

Law enforcement officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, thought otherwise. In January 2016, undercover officers visited the Bethesda shop to purchase the CBD oil, which was then tested and found to contain 2.9 percent THC. Under the Controlled Dangerous Substances Act of Maryland, Kiyo was arrested and charged with two felonies, including possession of cannabis with intent to distribute. He also had his personal bank account seized. Officials raided his parents’ house (where the business was registered), arrested two of his employees, and seized $53,000 worth of inventory.

Kiyo and his company, Myster, spent most of 2016 tied up in court. “It put the company at a standstill, in scramble mode so we could continue to operate.” Kiyo said.“They tried to put us out of business.”

But Myster survived, in part because of the support of the community. “We did a couple of different fundraisers with a huge turnout, like four or five hundred people. Luckily, our customers and our community have really come together to help us get past this slump. We’re going to be okay,” Kiyo smiled. “They’re going to have to do a lot worse to stop us from doing what we’re doing.”

Although the Bethesda location remains closed, the Myster shop on Georgia Avenue is still open for business and hosting cannabis seed giveaways. The company’s sleek StashTray saw a spike in sales after being featured by NowThis as a gift idea during the holidays.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Rico Valderrama, also known as “Phone Homie” is a cannabis activist and podcast host in Washington, DC. (Greg Kendall-Ball for Leafly)

On my last night in DC, I sat in on the live studio broadcast of The Slab Hour, DC’s popular weekly cannabis-focused podcast. The host, Phone Homie (nee Rico Valderrama) is one of the District’s most vocal and outspoken cannabis advocates. At the Reschedule 420 event last year, he was the first to light up at 4:20. Most recently he joined DCMJ, along with Philadelphia cannabis advocate N.A. Poe, to visit with Sen. Jeff Sessions’ staff members.

The meeting caused quite a disturbance among Sessions’ staff, who were convinced the group had every intention of lighting up in the congressional office. “I proceeded to roll up a joint and they repeatedly said ‘Don’t you dare!’ While I assured them that I would not, that I would never,” Valderrama informs us of the meeting. In order to sneak cannabis past the front door, Poe had cannabis hidden in his sock, while Valderrama kept a cannabis bud hidden in plain sight on his suit’s lapel.

The broadcast originates in a recording studio that boasts two giant speakers out front broadcasting throughout DC’s Columbia Heights neighborhood.  A lazy river of smoke drifts through the room at eye level. Sporadic coughs pepper the background noise, amid the click-hiss of propane torching glass dab rigs.

In between pre-recorded segments from local news, past cannabis events, and clips from Reefer Madness-style propaganda videos, the hour-long segment features Phone Homie and sidekick, ConRon, discussing the latest in political and pop culture news while “terpin’ it up” with hot dabs.

This particular segment discussed the upcoming plans for handing out joints during the inauguration, as well as the latest political news. ConRon took the initiative to explain the importance of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, just reauthorized until April of 2017, and how it protects cannabis-legal states from action from the DEA, while Phone Homie discussed the flack he received from the online community, particularly Reddit, after bringing cannabis into Sessions’office.

He ends the show with the same line every time, “That’s one small dab for man, one giant slab for mankind.”

After the broadcast, Valderrama sat down with me to discuss the changes in the community within the past eight months.

“It’s been interesting, I think people have definitely been sitting around trying to figure out how to market their work,” he said. “People are trying to find different creative ways to stay afloat and stay alive.” There seem to be more cannabis-related events than ever, he said, but legally “there’s nothing cemented that says, ‘This is okay.’”

“And now the biggest question is about the transition of power and [attorney general nominee Jeff] Sessions coming into office” he added. “Do we stand to lose everything? Will we have to go back into the shadows again?”

Lisa Rough

Lisa is an associate editor at Leafly, specializing in politics and advocacy.

The post Washington DC’s Cannabis Scene Braces for the Trump Era appeared first on Leafly.

from Medical Marijuana News http://ift.tt/2j9sl5a via https://www.potbox.com/

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Theo Baker

Published: Mar 26, 2024

One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Yes.”

“Then we are enemies.”