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mariacallous · 5 months ago

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The New York Times once dubbed the Princeton professor Robert George, who has guided Republican elites for decades, “the reigning brain of the Christian right.” Last year, he issued a stark warning to his ideological allies. “Each time we think the horrific virus of anti-Semitism has been extirpated, it reappears,” he wrote in May 2023. “A plea to my fellow Catholics—especially Catholic young people: Stay a million miles from this evil. Do not let it infect your thinking.” When I spoke with George that summer, he likened his sense of foreboding to that of Heinrich Heine, the 19th-century German poet who prophesied the rise of Nazism in 1834.

Some 15 months later, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson welcomed a man named Darryl Cooper onto his web-based show and introduced him to millions of followers as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” The two proceeded to discuss how Adolf Hitler might have gotten a bad rap and why British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War.”

Hitler tried “to broadcast a call for peace directly to the British people” and wanted to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” Cooper elaborated in a social-media post. “He was ignored.” Why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place—and what a satisfactory “solution” to their inconvenient existence might be—was not addressed.

Some Republican politicians spoke out against Carlson’s conversation with Cooper, and many historians, including conservative ones, debunked its Holocaust revisionism. But Carlson is no fringe figure. His show ranks as one of the top podcasts in the United States; videos of its episodes rack up millions of views. He has the ear of Donald Trump and spoke during prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention. His anti-Jewish provocations are not a personal idiosyncrasy but the latest expression of an insurgent force on the American right—one that began to swell when Trump first declared his candidacy for president and that has come to challenge the identity of the conservative movement itself.

Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political extremes, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican coalition during the Trump administration. At first, the prejudice took the guise of protest.

In 2019, hecklers pursued the Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw—a popular former Navy SEAL from Texas—across a tour of college campuses, posing leading questions to him about Jews and Israel, and insinuating that the Jewish state was behind the 9/11 attacks. The activists called themselves “Groypers” and were led by a young white supremacist named Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who had defended racial segregation, denied the Holocaust, and participated in the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

The slogan referred to a far-right fantasy known as the “Great Replacement,” according to which Jews are plotting to flood the country with Black and brown migrants in order to displace the white race. That belief animated Robert Bowers, who perpetrated the largest massacre of Jews on American soil at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 after sharing rants about the Great Replacement on social media. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the gunman wrote in his final post, “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Less than three years later, Carlson sanitized that same conspiracy theory on his top-rated cable-news show. “They’re trying to change the population of the United States,” the Fox host declared, “and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.” Like many before him, Carlson maintained plausible deniability by affirming an anti-Semitic accusation without explicitly naming Jews as culprits. He could rely on members of his audience to fill in the blanks.

Carlson and Fuentes weren’t the only ones who recognized the rising appeal of anti-Semitism on the right. On January 6, 2021, an influencer named Elijah Schaffer joined thousands of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol, posting live from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Eighteen months later, Schaffer publicly polled his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers: “Do you believe Jews disproportionately control the world institutions, banks, & are waging war on white, western society?” Social-media polls are not scientific, so the fact that more than 70 percent of respondents said some version of “yes” matters less than the fact that 94,000 people participated in the survey. Schaffer correctly gauged that this subject was something that his audience wanted to discuss, and certainly not something that would hurt his career.

With little fanfare, the tide had turned in favor of those advancing anti-Semitic arguments. In 2019, Fuentes and his faction were disrupting Republican politicians like Crenshaw. By 2022, Fuentes was shaking hands onstage with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In 2019, the Groyper activists were picketing events held by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by the activist Charlie Kirk. By 2024, Turning Point was employing—and periodically firing and denouncing—anti-Semitic influencers who appeared at conventions run by Fuentes. “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiles who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity,” one of the organization’s ambassadors posted before she was dismissed.

In 2020, Carlson’s lead writer, Blake Neff, was compelled to resign after he was exposed as a regular contributor to a racist internet forum. Today, he produces Kirk’s podcast and recently reported alongside him at the Republican National Convention. “Why does Turning Point USA keep pushing anti-Semitism?” asked Erick Erickson, the longtime conservative radio host and activist, last October. The answer: Because that’s what a growing portion of the audience wants.

“When I began my career in 2017,” Fuentes wrote in May 2023, “I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views … In 2023, on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.” Fuentes is a congenital liar, but a year after this triumphalist pronouncement, his basic point is hard to dispute. Little by little, the extreme has become mainstream—especially since October 7.

Last December, Tucker Carlson joined the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points to discuss the Gaza conflict and accused a prominent Jewish political personality of disloyalty to the nation. “They don’t care about the country at all,” he told the host, “but I do … because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn’t, obviously.”

The twist: “He” was not some far-left activist who had called America an irredeemably racist regime. Carlson was referring to Ben Shapiro, arguably the most visible Jewish conservative in America, and insinuating that despite his decades of paeans to American exceptionalism, Shapiro was a foreign implant secretly serving Israeli interests. The podcast host did not object to Carlson’s remarks.

The war in Gaza has placed Jews and their role in American politics under a microscope. Much has been written about how the conflict has divided the left and led to a spike in anti-Semitism in progressive spaces, but less attention has been paid to the similar shake-up on the right, where events in the Middle East have forced previously subterranean tensions to the surface. Today, the Republican Party’s establishment says that it stands with Israel and against anti-Semitism, but that stance is under attack by a new wave of insurgents with a very different agenda.

Since October 7, in addition to slurring Shapiro, Carlson has hosted a parade of anti-Jewish guests on his show. One was Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster known for her defenses of another anti-Jewish agitator, Kanye “Ye” West. Owens had already clashed with her employer—the conservative outlet The Daily Wire, co-founded by Shapiro—over her seeming indifference to anti-Semitism. But after the Hamas assault, she began making explicit what had previously been implicit—including liking a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood,” a reference to the medieval blood libel. The Daily Wire severed ties with her soon after. But this did not remotely curb her appeal.

Today, Owens can be found fulminating on her YouTube channel (2.4 million subscribers) or X feed (5.6 million followers) about how a devil-worshipping Jewish cult controls the world, and how Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and killed President John F. Kennedy. Owens has also jumped aboard the Reich-Rehabilitation Express. “What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” she asked in July. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’”

“Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote after Carlson’s Holocaust conversation came under fire. The post received 15,000 likes.

Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics intensified several forces that have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism on the American right. One was populism, which pits the common people against a corrupt elite. Populists play on discontents that reflect genuine failures of the establishment, but their approach also readily maps onto the ancient anti-Semitic canard that clandestine string-pulling Jews are the source of society’s problems. Once people become convinced that the world is oppressed by an invisible hand, they often conclude that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew.

Another such force is isolationism, or the desire to extricate the United States from foreign entanglements, following decades of debacles in the Middle East. But like the original America First Committee, which sought to keep the country out of World War II, today’s isolationists often conceive of Jews as either rootless cosmopolitans undermining national cohesion or dual loyalists subverting the national interest in service of their own. In this regard, the Tucker Carlsons of 2024 resemble the reactionary activists of the 1930s, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who infamously accused Jewish leaders of acting “for reasons which are not American,” and warned of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Populism and isolationism have legitimate expressions, but preventing them from descending into anti-Semitism requires leaders willing to restrain their movement’s worst instincts. Today’s right has fewer by the day. Trump fundamentally refuses to repudiate anyone who supports him, and by devolving power from traditional Republican elites and institutions to a diffuse array of online influencers, the former president has ensured that no one is in a position to corral the right’s excesses, even if someone wanted to.

As one conservative columnist put it to me in August 2023, “What you’re actually worried about is not Trump being Hitler. What you’re worried about is Trump incentivizing anti-Semites,” to the point where “a generation from now, you’ve got Karl Lueger,” the anti-Jewish mayor of Vienna who inspired Hitler, “and two generations from now, you do have something like that.” The accelerant that is social-media discourse, together with a war that brings Jews to the center of political attention, could shorten that timeline.

For now, the biggest obstacle to anti-Semitism’s ascent on the right is the Republican rank and file’s general commitment to Israel, which causes them to recoil when people like Owens rant about how the Jewish state is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Even conservatives like Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, a neo-isolationist who opposes foreign aid to Ukraine, are careful to affirm their continued support for Israel, in deference to the party base.

But this residual Zionism shields only Israeli Jews from abuse, not American ones—and it certainly does not protect the large majority of American Jews who vote for Democrats. This is why Trump suffers no consequences in his own coalition when he rails against “liberal Jews” who “voted to destroy America.” But such vilification won’t end there. As hard-core anti-Israel activists who have engaged in anti-Semitism against American Jews have demonstrated, most people who hate one swath of the world’s Jews eventually turn on the rest. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said last week, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

More than populism and isolationism, the force that unites the right’s anti-Semites and explains why they have been slowly winning the war for the future of conservatism is conspiracism. To see its power in practice, one need only examine the social-media posts of Elon Musk, which serve as a window into the mindset of the insurgent right and its receptivity to anti-Semitism.

Over the past year, the world’s richest man has repeatedly shared anti-Jewish propaganda on X, only to walk it back following criticism from more traditional conservative quarters. In November, Musk affirmed the Great Replacement theory, replying to a white nationalist who expressed it with these words: “You have said the actual truth.” After a furious backlash, the magnate recanted, saying, “It might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” Musk subsequently met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accompanied Ben Shapiro on a trip to Auschwitz, but the lesson didn’t quite take. Earlier this month, he shared Carlson’s discussion of Holocaust revisionism with the approbation: “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Once again under fire, he deleted the tweet and apologized, saying he’d listened to only part of the interview.

But this lesson is also unlikely to stick, because like many on the new right, Musk is in thrall to a worldview that makes him particularly susceptible to anti-Jewish ideas. Last September, not long before Musk declared the “actual truth” of the Great Replacement, he participated in a public exchange with a group of rabbis, activists, and Jewish conservatives. The discussion was intended as an intervention to inoculate Musk against anti-Semitism, but early on, he said something that showed why the cause was likely lost before the conversation even began. “I think,” Musk cracked, “we’re running out of conspiracy theories that didn’t turn out to be true.”

The popularity of such sentiments among contemporary conservatives explains why the likes of Carlson and Owens have been gaining ground and old-guard conservatives such as Shapiro and Erickson have been losing it. Simply put, as Trump and his allies have coopted the conservative movement, it has become defined by a fundamental distrust of authority and institutions, and a concurrent embrace of conspiracy theories about elite cabals. And the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies of them all.

Conspiratorial thinking is neither new to American politics nor confined to one end of the ideological spectrum. But Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power, compelling Republicans to either sign on to his claims of 2020 fraud or be exiled to irrelevance.

The fundamental fault line in the conservative coalition became whether someone was willing to buy into ever more elaborate fantasies. The result was to elevate those with flexible approaches to facts, such as Carlson and Owens, who were predisposed to say and do anything—no matter how hypocritical or absurd—to obtain influence. Once opened, this conspiratorial box could not be closed. After all, a movement that legitimizes crackpot schemes about rigged voting machines and microchipped vaccines cannot simply turn around and draw the line at the Jews.

For mercenary opportunists like Carlson, this moment holds incredible promise. But for Republicans with principles—those who know who won the 2020 election, or who was the bad guy in World War II, and can’t bring themselves to say otherwise—it’s a time of profound peril. And for Jews, the targets of one of the world’s deadliest conspiracy theories, such developments are even more forboding.

“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure,” Jonathan Tobin, the pro-Trump conservative editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, wrote after Carlson’s World War II episode. “He must be put in his place, and condemned by Trump and Vance.”

Anti-Semitism’s ultimate victory in GOP politics is not assured. Musk did delete his tweets, Owens was fired, and some Republicans did condemn Carlson’s Holocaust segment. But beseeching Trump and his camp to intervene here mistakes the cause for the cure.

Three days after Carlson posted his Hitler apologetics, Vance shrugged off the controversy and recorded an interview with him, and this past Saturday, the two men yukked it up onstage at a political event in Pennsylvania before an audience of thousands. Such coziness should not surprise, given that Carlson was reportedly instrumental in securing the VP slot for the Ohio senator. Asked earlier if he took issue with Carlson’s decision to air the Holocaust revisionism, Vance retorted, “The fundamental idea here is Republicans believe not in censorship; we believe in free speech and debate.” He conveniently declined to use his own speech to debate Carlson’s.

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year ago

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Now, the United States appears happy to bypass the Palestinians in the discussion of how many of them should have to die. The State Department talks of dealing with a “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza without mentioning who has caused it. In American papers of record, Palestinians almost always seem to die from mysterious bombs that theoretically could have come from anywhere. CNN will report on the spread of disease and the treating of innocent children with deep wounds, but the initiators of their suffering are downplayed. NPR will play audio diaries of doctors working in emergency rooms without adequate staffing, equipment, or medicine, but fail to mention how Israel’s systematic targeting of hospitals brought about these horrors, in direct violation of international law no less. This type of talk comes so naturally that it is almost reflexive. Attributing blame, connecting dots, and reporting the full picture requires acknowledgement of the reality on the ground in Gaza. It would require going past easy-to-read IDF statements, jeopardizing Israeli contacts and imperiling press access to IDF-guided tours. It would require confronting the fact that a majority of Americans and Brits back a ceasefire in Gaza, and acknowledging that the actions undertaken by Israel would be unconscionable to anyone who has eyes and doesn’t have a heart like a cinder. Therefore, the tried and tested methods of denial return, diminishing returns be damned. To the American, war, when abetted by Americans, must always be draped in some sort of impenetrable fog. Bullets fly from unknown places, infections and starvation spread just because, and suffering is abstract and inevitable—up until an ally might be blamed. The only motives to be given prime time coverage are America’s: always moral, always undertaken to protect the international rules-based order.

#israel #palestine #yemen #red sea #houthis

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 6 days ago

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by Lorin Bell-Cross

The National Holocaust Museum (NHM) has been denied permission to run an exhibition in Westminster Hall on the grounds that it was too political.

In correspondence seen by the JC, authorities told NHM, who wished to set up the display for Holocaust Memorial Day, that “Westminster Hall is a politically neutral space and activity which could be perceived as campaigning/lobbying or trying to influence political opinions would not be permitted”.

They were instead offered to apply for a space in the Upper Waiting Hall, a much less central location in the Palace of Westminster.

The exhibition tells the story of the Jewish communities in Berlin, Baghdad, Kielce (Poland), Aden (Yemen) and southern Israel and the pogroms that led to their ethnic cleansing in 1938, 1941, 1946, 1947 and 2023 respectively.

Titlted The Vicious Circle organisers also have plans to for international showcases in Tallinn, Berlin and the European Parliament in Brussels.

However, despite the claims of political neutrality, the JC understands that the controversial Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) was allowed to display the Palestinian flag in Westminster Hall as they organised supportive activists to lobby MPs.

NHM Director Marc Cave told the JC: “On Holocaust Memorial Day, Britain’s remembrance of the only industrialised, multi-country genocide ever known was extremely moving. Its support for our community of Holocaust survivors was heart-warming.

"Why does our desire to highlight the delusion that drives all murder of Jews so unsettle the Westminster Hall committee? The Holocaust is not finished business. It has been reopened by haters welcomed into Parliament — a group who play their part in driving the next turn of the Vicious Circle against Jews.”

He added: “A Parliament which does not therefore welcome an exhibition which presents an alternative view, based on hard facts and zero ‘lobbying’ content — is not the democratic institution I believed it was.

"It is only fair that Westminster Hall accords us the same democratic opportunity it has granted to monomaniacs who absurdly pin all the world’s problems on 0.2 per cent of its population.”

However, Parliamentary authorities insisted that the signs which the PSC were allowed to display in Westminster Hall were temporary and solely for the purpose of directing guests during their mass lobby event.

A mass lobby is when a large number of people contact their MPs in advance and all arrange to meet with them at Parliament on the same day to discuss a particular cause.

Both the Trades Union Congress and The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association were also allowed to display signage for the purposes of directing activists during their mass lobbies of parliament, and authorities said that these weren’t comparable to an exhibition.

A parliamentary spokesperson told the JC: "Requests for exhibitions in Westminster Hall are taken on a case-by-case basis, and many requests are made throughout the year. These are completely different to mass lobbies – signage is considered on a case-by-case basis for the sole purposes of directing individuals during a mass lobby."

Meanwhile, ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, an exhibition put on by the Holocaust Educational Trust was on display in another prominent location in Westminster.

Testimony 360: People and Places of the Holocaust, located in Portcullis House – the newer part of the parliamentary estate where many MPs have their offices and routinely meet guests – features cutting-edge AI and virtual reality technology that allows MPs and visitors to Westminster to ask questions to a digital version of Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg BEM, and virtually explore the sites from his testimony.

Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who toured the exhibition with survivors featured in it, also hosted a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in Portcullis House.

Last year, Westminster Hall featured a Chanukah reception and speeches by representatives of all three major political parties and Jewish communal leaders.

Lord Mann, the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, said that the occasion was the second time in the 800-year history of Westminster Hall that a Chanukah reception had been hosted there, and he confirmed it would now be “an annual event in Parliament”.

#national holocaust museum #westminster hall #sir lindsay hoyle #holocaust memorial day #the vicious circle

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holylandprivatetours · 3 months ago

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matan4il · 8 months ago

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The other day, I went with my rl bff to the Jerusalem branch of the Museum of Tolerance for an exhibition on the Hamas massacre.

This is the sight that greeted us. "Esthers of the world, rise up!"

It's a poster celebrating two women whose families had lived in Iran, one is Jewish, the other is Muslim, and both women ended up being murdered due to the Islamic regime of that country, even though the Jewish woman's family had escaped Iran and fled to Israel after the Islamic revolution. The face of each girl is actually a composite, made from many smaller pictures of her people who have lost their lives because of the Islamist regime of Iran.

I knew this right away, because I have shared a piece that was done about the poster and how it came to be almost 2 months ago.

"You don't understand!" my bff (who works as a teacher) said, all emotional, "She," my friend points to the Jewish girl on the left side of the poster, Shirel Haim Pour, "is the cousin of one of my students."

There is zero distance in Israel between us and the Oct 7 atrocities.

We go in and join the tour of the exhibition. The guide tells us it was built jointly with Malki Shem Tov, who is a well known name in Israel, if you work at a museum. Malki founded a "creative visual solutions" company with his brother Assaf, through which among other things, they helped build many Israeli exhibitions over the years. "His son..." the tour guide starts to say and I don't need more than that for something to click in my head. I know so many of the names, faces and stories of the hostages, and so Omer Shem Tov pops right away into my mind. I didn't make the connection before, but now I can only imagine what it meant for this father to work on an exhibition that recounts, among other stories, how his son was victimized and robbed of his freedom during this massacre.

There is zero distance in Israel between us and the Oct 7 atrocities.

The opening wall has a huge time stamp, 6:29 in the morning.

The tour guide doesn't have to explain this number to Israelis, or why it's designed to look like an alarm clock display. We were all woken up on that fateful Saturday morning by the alarm clock of Hamas' rockets. And it doesn't matter what we thought or believed the day before, as the full scale and horror of the attack were starting to become known along Oct 7, we were all woken up.

There is zero distance in Israel between us and those atrocities. I know this, and still it strikes me, again and again.

There's an area dedicated to the pictures of one photographer who went to the south soon after the massacre. I knew some of them already, like the pic showing the bodies of 13 elderly Israelis, who were on their way to a tour of the Israeli south on that Saturday.

Some are new, like the pic of the door handle in one bomb shelter. I stop for a second, because now that I've moved into my new place, it hits me that the bomb shelter door was made by the same company. Suddenly, I feel like I'm inside the picture in a reality where the terrorists took a slightly different route on Oct 7. The door was photographed from inside the bomb shelter, and the bullets that pierced it, they had to have hit the personal holding it shut. The handle has blood stains on it, and it's broken off. I can only imagine how many hours this person held, and how much force they had to use, for that to happen. I know one thing, even without knowing exactly who this bomb shelter belonged to... If this person was on their own, they would have probably ended up surrendering rather than keep fighting to hold on to the handle this desperately. This was likely someone trying to keep their family safe.

One note retrieved from the body of a terrorist is on display. It says everything about the motivation of the monsters who committed these atrocities, and every word is purely motivated by antisemitism and religious zeal. The note is actually not in Arabic, as it may first appear, it's in Farsi, the language spoken in Iran, hinting at the source, the Islamist regime there, which doesn't care about the liberation of anyone, it aspires to create a global network of fanatic terrorism.

The translation: "You must sharpen the blades of your swords and be pure in your intentions before Allah. Know that the enemy is a disease that has no cure, except beheading and uprooting the hearts and livers. Attack them!"

There is a section dedicated to women's stories. The exhibition visitors spread out to watch the testimonies, each on a separate screen. It's a not like a forest, you can't really see it for the trees, and it's another moment of feeling overwhelmed because we can't truly get it. It's just not comprehensible, facing so many stories about intentional, face to face cruelty, brutality, sadism and joy in it. Mali Shoshana tells the story of how she tried to play dead while lying shot in a pool of her own blood, but her body wouldn't stop shaking, so she somehow turned on her side to the wall and knocked her injured knee against it, causing herself to pass out from the pain. It saved her life. Ricarda Louk tells the story of the last message they got from her daughter Shani, trusting she was right and there was nothing for them to worry about. Then Ricarda's son started screaming and crying, because he saw the same vid many of came across on that day, of his sister being dragged into Gaza stripped down, mutilated, abused, molested and humiliated, while Gazan civilians were celebrating the public degradation of her body. And there's more and more and more. "You can come back and continue to listen," the guide promises as he moves us to the next segment, but the truth is no matter how many stories I've listened to and absorbed, it still doesn't feel like enough.

There is a wall with the head shots of the victims in Israel who lost their lives due to this war, whether they were murdered on Oct 7 or since, but it's only been updated up until Mar 27 of this year. Even so, no matter what angle I tried, I couldn't fit in all of the pictures.

Interactive screens allow a geographic telling of the massacre's story. They show maps of Israel's south, with dots on them, red for the murdered, dark blue for hostages, bright blue for hostages who have been returned, grey for the injured. You can tap a dot and read a story. Or you can zoom out and try to comprehend how is it possible for there to be that many dots on the maps.

"From darkness to light," reads the exhibition title. That's the perception of time in Judaism. We always move from darkness to light. And there's a section for the light, for stories of resilience, of bravery, of rehabilitation, of mutual support and caring. Filmed interviews that do their best to summarize an incomprehensible amount of good we've seen in response to an incomprehensible amount of evil. It features people from every demographic in Israel, and in that way also serves as a reminder of just how diverse we are as a society.

This part, I think to myself, was included for visitors from abroad. We Israelis, we know.

There's one story I know already. Tomer Greenberg, an Israeli officer, rescued on Oct 7 baby twins from the carnage. He was later killed fighting in Gaza. Like a puzzle, I've heard this story from several angles, including from Tomer before he died. This movie features an interview I hadn't heard yet, with the volunteer paramedic that Tomer handed the twins to. Shalom, this medic, talks about how they clung to him desperately as they got to be fed and feel safe and cared for again for the first time in what's estimated to have been 14 hours. I'm sitting there, thinking of those babies crying, not understanding why their parents aren't coming to feed them, and I don't know how to deal with this.

Shalom shares that the experiences of Oct 7 have inspired him to try and become a combative soldier, something that wasn't on the cards for him before that. I wonder again at people who can act like subjecting an entire (already traumatized) society to a sadistic massacre can liberate anyone.

And I understand Shalom fully. When your family is in the pits of hell, there's nowhere you want to be other than there, with them, doing what you can, rather than sit and watch helpless from afar. Most people would say he did a lot on that day. Shalom must have felt like that still wasn't enough.

At the very end, visitors are invited to add their own little piece of light, through neon notes and pens on which they'd share their thoughts. Nothing feels like it can sum everything I'm thinking and feeling up, but not writing anything feels worse, so my bff and I add a few of our words to the notes.

I don't have any profound conclusions for this post anymore than I did for my note. I just know that this still hurts, that we're still losing people daily, that we can't begin to heal, because we're still in the middle of the wound being inflicted. But I also know that we WILL heal, that even if the wound can't be closed yet, our collective immune system kicked into action on Oct 7 already, that we will continue to share the pain and the comfort and the care, and this massacre and war will probably never stop hurting, that we'll never be the same, but eventually we will be alright. Where people choose to care, there's just no other option.

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

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 1 year ago

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In Brazil’s favelas, activists find common ground with Palestinians in Gaza

Residents of Brazil’s poorest neighbourhoods say they see their struggles reflected in Israel’s treatment of Gaza.

Cosme Felippsen’s nephew was 17 years old when he was killed by Brazil’s military police in a Rio de Janeiro alley nicknamed the Gaza Strip.

“Almost every favela in Rio has an area residents call Gaza,” Felippsen said, pointing to the bullet holes along the alley walls. Residents have used the name for at least 15 years, he added. “It designates the area where most of the gunfire is concentrated at any given time.”

The neighbourhood where Felippsen’s nephew, José Vieira, died in 2017 is called Morro da Providência. It is one of hundreds of impoverished communities — or favelas — strewn across the city.

Activists and residents say the violence they have seen in the favelas has given them unique insight into the urban warfare currently unfolding in Gaza, a Palestinian territory under Israeli siege. And the parallels they perceive are motivating them to take action.

“Militarisation, armed groups executing inhabitants — many things that happen in Palestine also happen in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro,” said Felippsen, a local politician and tour guide who specialises in Black history.

#brazil #palestine #israel #politics #antiracism #gaza #favelas #brazilian politics #police brutality #police #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 29 days ago

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By: John Spencer

Published: Jan 31, 2024

No military fighting an entrenched enemy in dense urban terrain in an area barely twice the size of Washington D.C. can avoid all civilian casualties. Reports of over 25,000 Palestinians killed, be they civilians or Hamas, have made headlines. But Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that's fought an urban war.

In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I say this not to put Israel on a pedestal or to diminish the human suffering of Gazans but rather to correct a number of misperceptions when it comes to urban warfare.

First is the use of precision guided munitions (PGMs). This term was introduced to nonmilitary audiences during the Gulf War, when the U.S. fired 250,000 individual bombs and missiles in just 43 days. Only a very small fraction of those would fit the definition of PGMs, even though common perceptions of that war, and its comparatively low civilian casualty rate, was that it was a war of precision.

Let's compare that war, which did not ignite anywhere near the same level of outrage internationally, to Israel's current war in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Force has used many types of PGMs to avoid civilian harm, including the use of munitions like small diameter bombs (SDBs), as well as technologies and tactics that increase the accuracy of non-PGMs. Israel has also employed a tactic when a military has air supremacy called dive bombing, as well as gathering pre-strike intelligence on the presence of civilians from satellite imagery, scans of cell phone presence, and other target observation techniques. All of this is to do more pinpoint targeted to avoid civilian deaths. In other words, the simplistic notion that a military must use more PGMs versus non-PGMs in a war is false.

A second misperception is a military's choice of munitions and how they apply the proportionality principle required by the laws of armed conflict. Here there is an assessment of the value of the military target to be gained from an act that is weighted against the expected collateral damage estimate caused by said act. An external viewer with no access to all information cannot say such things as a 500-pound bomb would achieve the military mission of a 2,000-pound bomb with no mention of the context of the value of the military target or the context of the strike—like the target being in a deep tunnel that would require great penetration.

Third, one of the best ways to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare is to provide warning and evacuate urban areas before the full combined air and ground attack commences. This tactic is unpopular for obvious reasons: It alerts the enemy defender and provides them the military advantage to prepare for the attack. The United States did not do this ahead of its initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, which involved major urban battles to include in Baghdad. It did not do this before its April 2004 Battle of Fallujah (though it did send civilian warnings before the Second Battle of Fallujah six months later).

By contrast, Israel provided days and then weeks of warnings, as well as time for civilians to evacuate multiple cities in northern Gaza before starting the main air-ground attack of urban areas. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) employed their practice of calling and texting ahead of an air strike as well as roof-knocking, where they drop small munitions on the roof of a building notifying everyone to evacuate the building before a strike.

No military has ever implemented any of these practices in war before.

The IDF has also air-dropped flyers to give civilians instructions on when and how to evacuate, including with safe corridors. (The U.S. implemented these tactics in its second battle of Fallujah and 2016-2017 operation against ISIS in Mosul.) Israel has dropped over 520,000 pamphlets, and broadcast over radio and through social media messages to provide instruction for civilians to leave combat areas.

Israel's use of real phone calls to civilians in combat areas (19,734), SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to provide instructions on evacuations is also unprecedented.

The IDF also conducted daily four-hour pauses over multiple consecutive days of the war to allow civilians to leave active combat areas. While pauses for civilian evacuations after a war or battle has started is not completely new, the frequency and predictability of these in Gaza have been historic.

Another historical first in war measures to prevent civilian causalities was Israel's distribution of IDF military maps and urban warfare graphics to assist civilians with day to day evacuations and alerting them to where the IDF will be operating. No military in history has ever done this.

In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, the Iraqi government initially told civilians not to evacuate and to shelter in place during the battle of both the city's eastern and western districts, but later directed civilians to leave using "safe" corridors. But the Islamic State (ISIS) mined the corridors and shot at anyone using them to escape. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were trapped inside the combat areas for months as the battle progressed.

The reality is that when it comes to avoiding civilian harm, there is no modern comparison to Israel's war against Hamas. Israel is not fighting a battle like Fallujah, Mosul, or Raqqa; it is fighting a war involving synchronous major urban battles. No military in modern history has faced over 30,000 urban defenders in more than seven cities using human shields and hiding in hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites, while holding hundreds of hostages.

Despite the unique challenges Israel faces in its war against Hamas, it has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.

Some have argued that Israel should have waited longer to start its war, should have used different munitions and tactics, or should not have conducted the war at all. These calls are understandable, but they fail to acknowledge the context of Israel's war against Hamas, from the hundreds of Israeli hostages to the daily rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza to the tunnels, and the real existential threat of Hamas poses Israel and its citizens, who live within walking distance of the warzone.

To be clear, I am outraged by the civilian casualties in Gaza. But it's crucial to direct that outrage at the right target. And that target is Hamas.

It is outrageous that Hamas spent decades and billions of dollars building tunnels under civilian homes and protected areas for the sole purpose of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. It is outrageous that Hamas does not allow civilians in their tunnels, that Hamas says and takes actions to create as many civilian deaths as possible—both its own and Israeli. The atrocities committed on Oct. 7 are outrageous. That Hamas fights in civilian clothes, intermixed within civilians, and launches rockets at Israeli civilians from Palestinian civilian areas is outrageous.

The sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas. For Israel's part, it's taken more care to prevent them than any other army in human history.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI's Urban Warfare Project and host of the "Urban Warfare Project Podcast." He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War and co-author of Understanding Urban Warfare. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

Let's do some maths:

Oct 8, 2023-Jan 31, 2024: 25,000 casualties (according to Hamas, unverified).

Oct 8, 2023-May 8, 2924: 34,844 casualties (according to Hamas, unverified).

Oct 8, 2023-Dec 24, 2024: 45,338 casualties (according to Hamas, unverified).

So, what we're saying is that as this war has escalated, the "genocide" has become less efficient, including the time Israel had an opportunity to murder 950,000 civilians and instead... *checks notes*... evacuated them safely out of Rafah, including providing them with food, water and medical aid.

🤔🤨

Riiiiiiiight.

This is "the moon landing was a hoax"-level delusion.

#israel #Israel Defense Forces #gaza #gaza strip #hamas #hamas terrorism #palestine #exterminate hamas #hostages #release the hostages #hamas propaganda #genocide #imaginary genocide #gaza genocide #palestine genocide #war #religion is a mental illness

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icedsodapop · 5 months ago

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By pausing time on October 7th and excluding its aftermath, the tours reinforce that myopia, consolidating a focus on Jewish victimhood and a refusal to see Israel as the perpetrator of Palestinian suffering. In the process, they succeed in bolstering American Jews’ sense of identification with Israel. As one rabbi who participated in a Federation mission from San Diego wrote upon her return home: “I saw the result of evil. I feel more committed to Israel and its future than I have felt in a long time.

(...)

Scholars have explored the ways in which visiting sites of atrocities, however disturbing, can also be “a means to affirm and reproduce particular identities,” in the words of Duncan Light, a professor of tourism studies. Visiting the 9/11 memorial—which drew 37 million people between its opening in 2011 and 2018—can bolster Americans’ sense of patriotism, even in the face of the long and deadly wars that followed; visiting the beaches of Normandy can inspire pride not only in the Allies’s World War II victory, but in the US-led world order it produced.

(...)

Death camp tours “make the victim so much the object of identification that one comes to see oneself as if one is at the gates of the crematorium, instead of [Israel] being a country with nuclear capacity,” Feldman told me in an interview. “It becomes impossible to identify with anyone other than the victim, and the victim is me, and this is our eternal condition.”

(...)

Not unlike prior forms of Jewish “dark tourism,” the trips I joined seemed intended to reassure participants that they could support Israel while retaining the moral clarity of the victim. For example, at the end of the Kfar Azza tour, Shpak, the kibbutz member, explained that the community had once been invested in peace and co-existence efforts, “but everything was broken and trampled in our children’s blood.” Shpak told our group that in the past, he had found it painful to witness the suffering of the other side. “I admit and confess that not this time. I have no sympathy for what’s happening on the other side,” he said. Other leaders on the trips I witnessed frequently glorified the war effort. In one case, a group’s Israeli driver boasted about having driven bulldozers bigger than our large bus into buildings in Khan Younis. Various guides echoed well-worn pro-Israel talking points arguing that Palestinians are not a people, or that the Nakba—the mass dispossession of Palestinians in 1948—was not a case of ethnic cleansing. This messaging has clearly affected participants. “There aren’t a lot of ‘innocent’ Gazans,” one member of a rabbinic trip wrote in a blog post. “After hearing the stories from those who were there, I am truly sad to say that this is the reality.” Greg Harris, a rabbi from Bethesda, Maryland, who led a trip for his congregation, told me that while, in the US, “it is perceived that Israel is retaliating against the Palestinian people,” in fact “that is not what is happening”—a truth that participants grasped “just by being there in Israel.”

(...)

As I walked through the festival grounds, the earth was literally shaking beneath me. The artillery fire and explosions from Gaza were the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life, and everyone, myself included, instinctively jumped at each blast. Just two words into the kaddish that one tourist recited for the festival victims—yitgadal veyitkadash—an explosion sounded so closely and powerfully that I felt the vibrations in my spine. And yet, aside from their reflexive flinching, the tour guides did their best to ignore the din.

When trip leaders did acknowledge the sight of Gaza on the horizon, it was usually to emphasize how close danger lies to the Gaza Envelope communities. Standing at a lookout point over the enclave, Ehrlich, the tour guide, gestured back at the Israeli city of Sderot behind us, saying, “See the beautiful houses being built despite years of attacks?” And when trip leaders made note of the sounds of death all around us, it was only to assure us that we were safe. “Don’t worry too much about the booms. They’re our booms. They’re not coming in on this end,” one group I followed was told. And, later: “You’re going to hear a lot of booms. There’s currently something going on in Khan Younis, literally across the border here. It might shake you up a little bit, but don’t worry, it’s us, not them.”

(Emphasis mine)

#free palestine #anti zionism #genocide #propaganda #zionist propaganda #palestine #israeli propaganda

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