#this one just happened to have been built by jewish people

[leroibobo]

some images from the cave homes of gharyan, libya. communities of jews who made their homes in underground caves have been known in the maghreb since before the 1st century. when spain invaded tripoli in 1510, tripolian jews, both toshavim and sephardic, fled to gharyan and dug out cave homes for themselves. the houses today are occupied by non-jewish libyans or rented out to tourists.

[marvelsmostwanted]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[fairuzfan]

I'm watching two documentaries of one of my familys' villages and Palestinian and 'Israeli' witness accounts from the Naksa and a Jewish tour guide comes to one of the villages (which were the 3 villages side by side, all of them affected) and points to a bathhouse with gravestones all around it. The area of all three villages is now completely demolished and the Jewish National Fund built the "Canada Park" (funded predominately by Canada! Through tax deductible donations!), as well as an Israeli settlement, on top of it. An Israeli woman sits, eating from the trees that my ancestors planted, and she says "this is war. I dont feel the pain from these places, the pain of the people. This is what happens in war." Can you imagine? She sits, eating from my ancestors trees and she says "it doesn't matter to me." The level of selfishness to be so confident in your theft!

In the documentary, a Palestinian elder from Yalo says, holding back tears, that her dream is to go back to Yalo and die and be buried in her home, where her husband died. That was my great grandmothers' dream that was never realized, just a few years ago in a village not far from Yalo.

They talk about how this was a war crime, a crime against humanity. Since '67 we have been having these discussions. Since '48 we have been talking about war crimes committed by Israelis! These are the same discussions we keep having! The same facts we keep repeating! Even Yitzhak Rabin says the same things, that this is war, this is what happens in a war! It's the same things over and over and it's happening in Gaza!

There are people still alive who participated in the ethnic cleansing of these villages. They participated in demolishing these villages. They participated in killing those village members. They participated in the generations of poverty that Palestinians experience. They're still alive and just walking around in Israeli society, encouraging the genocide in Gaza. How can I trust a society like that? Knowing that these people are lauded as heroes for erasing these villages. How can I trust them when barely anyone in this society acknowledges the violence done onto us? Abhorrent violence that they let happen so willingly!

Here are the documentaries. These three villages were ethnically cleansed in '67, and it's shocking to hear the same sort of stories we hear from Gaza today. The same playbook, the same places.

Villages: Yalo, 'Imwas, Bayt Nuba

[genderkoolaid]

expand on ur "mental asylum Marxism shit" thing about children & grief?? from what you've said im pretty sure i will relate from my own experiences as a grieving child. also it sounds interesting!!

so i was thinking about how weird it is that, when a child has to deal with the death of a loved one, they say something like "no child should have to go through this! no child should have to even think about death!" which strikes me as weird because i was a child who dealt with the deaths of multiple close family members, very close together. the first was my great-grandmother, who i lived with and who was my best friend. death was never foreign to me (my mom has always been very death-positive on top of all that). grief was just part of my life like everything else was.

but i realized that its because people think childhood should not have any flaws. you should be 100% happy and fulfilled all the time. any time a child experiences anything painful, its bad. not "children should have access to love and support," but "children should not have basic life experiences because the idea of childhood being anything other than fluffy purity scares me."

because children in society are fundamentally not people. especially in a society structured around christian beliefs in natural law theory, that what is natural = what is good, healthy, and Divinely commanded. so on top of children being the property of adults, they are also forced to be the symbols of Nature. whatever is the most useful to whoever needs them. which means we built up this idea of children as tabula rasas, pureness incarnate. like a magic mirror where if we look into it, we'll be able to catch a glimpse of the true face of humanity. every single thing children do can be scrutinized for some grand truth about humans as a whole. and then, the ways children are treated also reflect how we think humanity should interact with its own nature.

example: the idea of humanity as inherently sinful and wicked, with that urge needing to be suppressed through state violence (hello hobbes) = the idea that children are annoying and shitty on purpose and need to be forced via punishment into being Good Citizens.

this is also why children cannot be trans, even though all trans people must prove that we were trans children. being queer must be unnatural; and even if not, its inherently sexual, and sexuality is dirty and bad. so children can't be trans, and they also can't read books on puberty until their parents decide when and what exactly they are allowed to learn. child victims of sexual assault only matter to the extent that they can be used as a symbol of a cultural threat; calling Jewish or trans people pedophiles means saying that they are foreigners attacking basic human nature, and indirectly, Divine command. if you aren't the right kind of victim, or when you inevitably reveal yourself to be A Person with complicated experiences and opinions, you are no longer of use to the agenda.

it sucks that bad things happen to anyone. aspects of youth can exacerbate the pain sometimes, but sometimes it does the reverse: I wish I could have spent more time with the family members I lost, but I know other people who are glad they loss family members young, because they weren't really hurt by it. I think the main thing is that, even sometimes when we talk about our past selves, we project this cultural idea of Child As Purity and ignore the actual person having the experience. when we "empathize" with children by projecting Purity onto them, we aren't actually connecting with them.

[the-library-alcove]

Back during the first Trump years, there was an incredibly well-written article in The Atlantic regarding the egregious cruelty of the MAGA movement and Trump, titled, "The Cruelty Is The Point". The article made the extremely pointed note that bonding over being monstrous to other people is a part of human behavior, especially group-bonding behavior.

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile. Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

And it's very true, and we've seen it again and again from the right-wing MAGA types.

But that's not the only place we see that sort of cruelty in the modern zeitgeist.

It's also blatantly visible in the "Pro-Palestine" movement on the Left towards Jews. Celebrating the deaths and torture of Jews, harassment, egregious acts of cruelty towards Jews just existing... Examples abound in daily life for any Jewish person who doesn't loudly tokenize themselves as one of "the good ones."

But why? Why has the Left, which claims to be for human rights, social equality, and minority support, gone so deeply into a pattern of behavior that's a mirror of the Right they claim to hate and detest?

That question, I feel, has its own answer.

Because they are mirroring the Right.

One wonderfully pithy comment about modern conservativism, by Frank Wilhoit, is "Conservativism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

I personally believe that there are three propositions of Conservatism. The one above is the first, but the other two are that, "There are a finite number of legitimate ways to live your life," and "people exist to perpetuate and be consumed by the system."

And what has happened is that the Left, rather than come up with their own Left-wing propositions (say, for example, "Everyone should be equally bound by and protected by the law," "We must tolerate and encourage diversity of life experiences and outlooks", and "social systems exist to support human beings") they've merely taken the Conservative propositions and turned them on their heads. So if, in the USA, the Right says that White People are the In-group protected but not bound by law, and People of Color are the ones bound but not protected? Okay, then on the Left, it's the other way around. There's still an out-group and an in-group, just flipped. The basic structure hasn't changed. The same goes for the other propositions--if you're not part of their particular ideology, you're an enemy, and you exist to perpetuate their system if you're part of their ideology.

And because of that mirroring, we see the same behavior from the Left that we see on the Right.

[weemietime]

I've been percolating this for a while. One of the hardest things about being Jewish is how nowadays, even commonly accepted historical facts are now seen as debatable when it comes to Jews. Our very history itself is being actively rewritten in front of our eyes. Bad actors continually vandalize Jewish articles on Wikipedia to co-opt our intracommunal terms and bastardize them against us.

Just look at the difference from 2021 to 2024 in the Zionism article. You can see where they've left shit alone in other places that contradicts this, such as clearly defining Palestinians as Arabs and then clearly defining Arabs as native to Paran/Saudi Arabia. To this day people push the false narrative that Jews are settler colonialists in our own homeland, ignoring that the Ottomans, which most Palestinians are descended from (the Arab migration during the Ottoman Empire, not Turks), were living on stolen land.

They stole it. They (Arabs) built Al-Aqsa over our most precious religious site. And if you say this, people turn around and call you Islamophobic. It'd be like if Americans accused Native Americans of being European and decided that actually, they are the indigenous population, and if you have a problem with that you're Christophobic.

31% of the total Israeli population is Ashkenazi and out of that number there are a good deal more who escaped active pogroms and persecutions in places like Russia and Poland. The Kielce pogrom happened after WW2. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi at 61%. So the narrative as it is now looks like the following:

- Yemeni Jews are entirely expunged and ethnically cleansed from Yemen. The last remaining Jew is jailed.

- Yemen deports these Jews to Israel.

- The Houthis release a statement saying that Israel must be destroyed.

- Everyone accuses the Yemeni Jews of Israel of being genocidal colonizers in their own homeland which they were expunged from.

There is such an overwhelmingly massive campaign emerging from the Islamic Republic in particular as well as Hamas to rewrite history and erase Jewish indigeneity in Israel altogether even though again, Ashkenazim (who they claim are European, but again, are indigenous to the Levant) are a minority in Israel.

We all just ignore that Arabs cannot even pronounce the word Palestine, yet they want to claim that Palestinians have been Palestinians for thousands of years in Israel.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Received this question just now. Posting my response sans askers' username per their request:

Hi, as you are a holocaust historian, and as you mentioned in a recent post, words mean things, I was sort of wondering what you thought about people saying that what’s happening in Palestine isn’t genocide because the holocaust was genocide/6 million Jews was genocide. I’ve seen a couple people saying stuff along the lines of ‘if what’s happening in Palestine is genocide, we need another word for the holocaust’. I’m not worried about you knowing it’s me asking (like asking on anon) because I think you talk to people pretty reasonably but if you could answer it in private or without my name on the ask I would appreciate it, people seeing it could get… unpleasant, talking about this stuff and I try to stay out of the line of fire to the best of my ability. Totally fine if you don’t want to answer, I don’t want you hounded about Palestine either, it just seemed like you might have an interesting take with your studies

Anyone is capable of genocide, of following orders to commit human rights abuses, of attacking civilians, etc. No identity groups’ past—however violent and traumatic—makes them incapable of committing war crimes. Referring to what’s happening in Gaza as genocide doesn’t invalidate Jewish communal thought regarding the Holocaust. Moreover, the fact that the State of Israel has built Holocaust memory into its nation-building doesn’t mean that that country is inherently incapable of crimes against humanity. There is a cohort of primarily 65+ Jews who hold a trauma-induced belief that Israel could never be capable of these crimes because everything Israel does is in the interest of protecting the Jewish people. It’s a pretty thought, and one I used to hold, but it’s not reality. Many as well would argue that, because the October 7 attack was inherently genocidal, Israel was moral and just doing what it needed to do to bring the hostages home and stamp out Hamas cells. Indeed, these hypothetical individuals would continue, the fact that Hamas has built itself into the civilian architecture of Gaza means that Hamas is using Palestinian civilians as human shields; not that Israel is committing genocide. I personally think that’s wishful thinking. Hamas 800% bases itself near structures like hospitals and kindergartens so Israel will look bad when it attacks those places,* thus willfully allowing the people it governs to exist as human shields. HOWEVER, I don’t believe for one minute that the Israeli military doesn’t have the technology needed to seek out evidence of heat, heartbeats, etc, in hidden subterranean areas. Their counter-attack was always going to happen, but the way it’s been fought? Naw man it’s indefensible.

You know I don't do comparisons or Holocaust inversion, but I do have feelings and emotional responses which don't care about my Serious Intellectual Historian views on comparisons and Holocaust inversion. And, there's a very disturbing moment in one of my primary sources for my book where a woman describes a Nazi attack on a hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto. She describes the screaming and the panic and the civilians begging to be euthanized. Similar readings and sources exist for hospitals in Warsaw during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising when the Germans were destroying the city. I suspect similar descriptions exist of any hospital of a densely populated civilian area under siege. And, even if I was still bullheadedly in my Zionist era, I wouldn't have been able to simultaneously do the work I do, watch Israeli soldiers attacking hospitals, and emerge completely fine with everything. All of that doesn’t erase the simultaneous facts that: 1) the Holocaust happened and was a traumatic moment in Jewish History, the memory of which will endure throughout the millennia; and 2) the October 7 attacks were carried out by Hamas with genocidal intent.

What you’re seeing is people within our community dealing with cognitive dissonance. And honestly the experience of watching people lash out is stage 1 of that process (or as I call it, the Cognitive Dissonance Temper Tantrum). It’s no fun to witness, but can be positive if the person doing the temper tantrum chooses to learn from it. 

ETA: When I discuss things I felt/believed in my "Zionist Era," I'm discussing stuff from when I was like, under 21 years old. For reference I am currently 35.

No one has my permission to use my words to silence other Jewish people. You have no obligation to stick around for people having cognitive dissonance freakouts or saying shitty things about Palestinians, but I see part of my...duty as being available to work with Jewish individuals who want to deal productively with their cognitive dissonance once the freakout period dies down, if they want help.

*Here my Unnamed I/P Reader notes that it’s quite a bit more complicated than stated here in part due to Gaza’s pre-Oct. 7 2023 population density.

[togglesbloggle]

Self-Harm

One of my most shameful memories surrounds a guy I’ll call S.T. It was one of those lamentably common situations in grade school- a somewhat odd kid who got picked on for years.

I’m sure there were specific bullies coming after him in particular, though I never saw who it was. But there was a much wider circle of gawking, othering, and exclusion; as far as I know, he never really managed to close that gap with his peers before graduation, if he even wanted to.

There’s a particular moment that stands out in memory. It wasn’t a climax or anything, just unusually clear in some of the particulars. The classroom was emptying out, and S.T. was seated in the front row, one of the only people still in their desk. I and a few other people were standing near the door, talking between ourselves.

The thing you need to know about this room was that it had those chair-desk combo things; plastic chairs with metal supports to one side, for a small desk space projecting forward and around where the presumptive student is meant to sit. Each was a separate unit, not bolted to one another or to the floor, but in pretty compact rows so that the desk-space of one was usually in physical contact with the back of the chair in front of it. In other words, lines of force could move from chair to chair- one student in the back row could often give a bit of a kick to someone several chairs in front of them.

S.T. being S.T., this was something he’d been on the receiving end of, many times before. So that day, when he felt someone give a sharp kick against his back, he didn’t encourage the bullying by looking backwards or making a fuss. He just shoved his own desk back in retort, jolting the desks behind him, and went back to packing up his bag. He got another kick, he retaliated again, and he and the bully went back and forth like that in a petty little cycle of quasi-violence.

Except, nobody was behind him at all.

The first kick happened as an accident; he’d shoved his own desk backwards by a few inches while he was leaning down to grab some notebook or other, and the desks behind him absorbed the shock all the way back to the rear wall of the classroom. A couple of the desks buckled, and built up force, until it sprung back against his own desk in the front row again. He interpreted that as some willful act by a bully, kicked back on purpose- compressing the entire row of desks like a spring that inevitable sprung back against him.

Retaliation followed retaliation, and I and my friends watched on in silent astonishment as S.T. bullied himself. It’s pretty hard to play back that particular memory in my head, realizing with an adult’s hindsight what kind of accumulated pain that moment must have represented, and how easy it would have been to intervene and make a positive difference.

There’s a story that’s making the rounds today, about a shootout between a Jewish man and two Israeli tourists:

According to arrest documents, at 9.30pm on Saturday surveillance video appeared to show Mordechai Brafman, 27, getting out of his truck and opening fire with a semiautomatic handgun at a vehicle as it passed. Brafman allegedly fired 17 times, striking one victim in the left shoulder and grazing the other’s left forearm.

While in custody, Brafman spontaneously told detectives that while he was driving his truck, “he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both”, arrest documents said.

Further complicating the incident, one of the injured men reportedly posted “death to the Arabs” in a message on social media after the shooting. “My father and I went through a murder attempt against anti-Semitic background,” he wrote.

There are some clinical ways to talk about this; an extreme case of “trapped priors”, in which the fear of violence and the racial bigotry combine to create a perception of risk that literally cannot be anchored in reality, a fear that justifies itself with its own senseless convulsions of violence.

But in the end it’s not something that needs a specialized vocabulary. Pain just makes us so goddamn stupid. And here I am again, watching from the doorway, doing nothing. I’m not even sure what ‘doing something’ would even mean in this case, at least from the perspective of a bystander who doesn’t know either the perpetrator or his victims.

Any theory of the world really needs to reckon with this as one of the deep animating forces of history, I think. It’s not a fully sufficient theodicy, but I’m guessing it comes a lot closer than one might naively assume; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in some grand accounting, this kind of self-harm contributes to as much human misery than the more direct forms of interpersonal violence and antagonism which precipitate it.

How much of the broader Israeli-Palestine conflict is driven by the very same paroxysms of self-delusion that drove this shooting in Miami Beach? How about the war in Ukraine? How about the crackdown on trans rights in the United States? How about- ?

Interpersonal harm can originate in any number of ways: competition for scarce resources, recklessness, actual malice, and often just sheer ignorance. That harm begets itself through retaliatory cycles and escalation. And then, at a certain point, cycles of violence between us become cycles of violence within us, and we start building that suffering in to the fabric of the world as we construct it.

But in a peculiar way, I think there’s some optimism in that. Competition for scarce resources is to some degree intractable, but this kind of delusional self-harm can sometimes pop like a bubble. It will always be vulnerable to being broken by contact with reality, and the chaotic mess of the world as it actually is.

Some days, I dare to hope that the world was always this stupid. That the great wars of our ancestors were just as groundless as ours, and their bigotries just as preposterous. That the narrative of history that we weave is just the robe of Shem and Japheth writ large, covering our father’s nakedness. Because if it was always this stupid, then this subjective feeling of rising nonsense and absurdity— that feeling means that we are getting better, that we are slowly but surely expanding the scope of our awareness. Feeling somewhat foolish is the necessary price of becoming less foolish, however you slice it.

[ckret2]

Conspiracy theories are an important part of the series' identity, what's wrong with them? Some have nasty implications if you really overthink it, but they're generally fun

I didn't say I'm not gonna include conspiracy theories in the story altogether. I said I'm not validating any REAL WORLD conspiracy theories, and I'm not talking about antisemitic & racist conspiracy theories. I'm happy to crack jokes debunking or mocking real world conspiracy theories. I'm happy to create new conspiracy theories for the fic that are totally divorced from any existing conspiracy theories.

But when I'm talking about the ones I'm not playing with, I ain't talking about "Elvis is still alive" conspiracies here. With a lot of the most oft-referenced goofy-sounding high profile conspiracy theories, they're not nasty "if you really overthink it." These theories are, in their very origins, vehicles for hatred toward minority groups. Browse for a while. Notice how many of the conspiracies that have ridiculous traits that make them seem fun on the surface are past the antisemitic point of no return.

Secret reptilian overlords disguised as humans? A deliberate effort to disguise centuries-old antisemitic conspiracies. "Jews secretly control the world," "Jews help others of their bloodline gain & maintain power," "Jews drink the blood of Christian children"—blood libel is a thing that real people believe and have believed for centuries and has historically been used to justify killing whole Jewish communities—and the exact rhetoric used in these obviously antisemitic claims was reskinned for the "reptilian overlords" conspiracy. And which real people do you think believers in the conspiracy disproportionately accuse of secretly being cold-blooded inhuman monsters trying to disguise themselves amongst normal humans? Reptilian overlords is a popular one to make jokes about because "the president's a lizard in disguise" sounds funny when stripped of context—and typically the people making jokes either don't know where it came from or don't care.

Hell, the entire "a cabal of Jewish people sorry we meant 'global elites' secretly rules the world" is one of the oldest, most versatile, and most popular of antisemetic conspiracy theories.

And check out some of the more ridiculous-sounding ones that pop culture likes making jokes about.

Hollow Earth? That one's "inside the earth is a paradise populated by Vikings (the manliest white people!) and Nazis. Yay Nazis!" A whole bunch of secret continent/secret moon colony/hidden geography conspiracies are very "yay Nazis". The Illuminati secretly control everything? For approximately a century, "Jews + Freemasons + Illuminati control the world" has been an extremely prominent conspiracy theory that's branched off into countless other conspiracy theories still believed today (it fed into the reptilian overlord conspiracy, for instance). Adrenochrome? Hollywood (and other "global elites") are trafficking children to harvest a chemical from their blood that they can inject? This is literally just blood libel again. Satanic Panic, the idea that there are real Satanic cults sacrificing children left and right, and the goofy things resulting from the panic like Chick Tracts claiming D&D will damn you? Innocent people were sent to jail for murder because they were gothy enough to be accused of Satanism. People (including the right's favorite targets: immigrants and queer people!) spent decades in jail over accusations that they were ritualistically sexually abusing children—crimes that never even happened. Even less directly harmful shit like "aliens built the pyramids" is only possible if you begin from a position of assuming it's more likely ALIENS built the pyramids than that ancient African people were capable of doing it and then ignore the fact that we do know how the damn things were built.

I don't think it's entertaining for a fictional story to go "hey, you know this conspiracy that was created to promote prejudice against minorities and has been used to hurt and kill people? Wouldn't it be sooo silly if there were a world where it's actually TRUE?? Wouldn't it be so funny if the antisemites and racists and homophobes and fascists were right about everything?"

So no. I'm not gonna use a fictional setting to validate any real world conspiracies; and I'm not gonna bring a whiff of antisemitic & racist conspiracies into a goofy comedy setting.

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[jewish-vents]

I’m Jewish through my dad but I wasn’t raised in the community(i learned what Purim was two weeks ago, i was fully not in it), so when I got to college last august I decided to really dive in and it’s been a beautiful sort of homecoming for me. I joined SAEPi and got into Chabbad leadership at my campus, and I’m almost at the point where I can do the Chabbad Shabbat prayers before and after dinner without stumbling over my words. Gonna surprise my grandma if I see her in the summer. Anyways.

When October 7th happened it was a shock to my system, because I was a baby Jew barely getting my feet. My parents never mentioned antisemitism to me as something that could affect me in the future, it was always a thing of the past. But I was right there standing in the doorway between jew-ish and Jewish, and it pushed me over the edge. I had many friends with family in Israel. I had a couple friends whose friends died in the attack. Everyone in that group was my family. It felt personal.

When the march in dc happened I went with one of my friends, and it was sad, but amazing to see in person how strong we are. In the plane terminal on the way home he and I got cornered and called baby killers, among other things, because he was wearing a kippa and his Israeli first responder coat. That was my first time experiencing antisemitism and it was terrifying, even though I didn’t get hurt. It was terrifying even though my friend was built like a tank and would’ve protected me. It was terrifying just to sit in the train car with him and watch a woman stare at him with wide eyes like he was some kind of criminal. I stepped closer to him as if to remind her he’s human. I stared back at her with just as much fear and watched her snap out of it, confused.

Last week was holocaust awareness week at my college, and one of the things I did was spend a couple hours in the plaza reading the names of people that died. I found 34 Feldmans and Fotts. I found family names, Chana and Fayge and Jeshua and Sophia Feldman one after the other, and still am wondering if that was part of my family that didn’t make it to the US in time.

I called my grandma and asked for everything she could remember about her family lineage and how we got here, everything she had from that part of her life. I thought that there would be plenty to lean into, family recipes and heirlooms and stories, but there was barely anything. She has a Star of David necklace and a ton of repressed memories, next to nothing else. The recipes I could find were through my great aunt, some short instructions from my great grandmother on the back of a letter she sent to the aunt about what to ask for from a kosher butcher.

My family made it here in 1915 and 1921, they escaped before the holocaust, but they still weren’t untouched because of the ways they were ostracized and othered when they got here. My grandmother will barely admit she’s Jewish because none of her kids passed it on, it’s easier for her to let it go. I didn’t understand this until I realized that one couldn’t be hurt by the grief and pain of a family they aren’t part of.

Even those that survive are not left unscarred.

How could this not be personal? How could it not be generationally affective when it’s pushed so many to minimize their Jewishness out of self preservation? Raise their kids thinking they aren’t Jewish and hope their names never end up on a list of living or dead Jews? People still don’t see us as human. the antisemites still want to scar us. They want us to forget who we are.

It’s unreal to me when goyim act like American Jews in the current day are unaffected by the past and safe from antisemitism. I’ve been here less than a year and have been screamed at in an airport, have uncovered serious intergenerational trauma, and realized that of my Jewish family I have nothing to hold on to but a torn in half piece of paper with a sentence long tangent about brisket.

We are strong and we will outlive them, but god are we still fucking fighting for our lives.

.

[germiyahu]

Here's an uncomfortable truth too: all modern nation states engage with little white lies about their history and founding. Israel has certainly done it, and yes there is an element of mythologizing of the past. It just sounds good, even legitimate, to claim an unbroken descent from 4,000 years ago. It's not entirely literally true on the face of it. Yeah, the ancient Israelites would probably have no idea what a modern Jew is talking about when it comes to worship and law and even holidays. It's clear these aren't the exact same carbon copies of each other. The Jewish People have evolved and changed, been influenced, consciously reorganized their culture and religion at times... disagreed with each other.

But why is Israel, or more broadly why is the Jewish People, the only nation held to some kind of standard like this? Why is it a proud tradition to pull the rug out from under them and say "Haha your foundational beliefs about the origins of your People aren't literal! Wow how pathetic, you think you have a right to this land because people you claim were your ancestors lived there a bajillion years ago? YAWN!"

Egypt proudly commodifies the cultural artifacts and practices of the Ancient Egyptian dynasties, even though the culture that built the pyramids has, iirc, has been dead longer than it was ever alive at this point. Even though the different Kingdom Periods were staunchly different from each other and had little continuity with each other. Greece claims a legacy from all sorts of myths and heroes and especially Alexander the Great (so does Northern Macedonia lmao). But Greek Nationhood was achieved in 1820, and Greeks as a modern ethnic group have a medley of cultural influences from the Romans and Slavs and Turks and many others. They considered themselves Roman Citizens well into the Ottoman Period. They are not the same People as the people who recited the Odyssey and wrote the Hymn to Demeter. I could go on.

Both modern Egyptians and modern Greeks have a better claim to their respective cultural legacies than any other extant group to be sure (largely because they built their nations in the same approximate lands as these ancient civilizations), but that reinforces my point.

The issue when it comes to Jews is that there are pretenders who were eager to swoop in and claim the legacy of the ancient Israelites (and later the Kingdom of Judea) for their own. There were people living on that specific land who weren't keen to just give it up, even though any amount of Jewish people immigrating through every legal channel was seen as an existential invasion (funny that).

Christian peoples did it eagerly and often, Muslims less so, but still did it happily. This ultimately culminates in a certain brand of Palestinian nationalism that claims (deludedly) that Palestinian Arabs are responsible for all those ancient site and cities, that they built a Temple, they were the specific nation that engaged in all those stories from the Bible. Jesus was a Palestinian (not really appropriating Jewish history with that one to be fair, but it's adjacent). All simply because they happened to live on that land. Jewish immigration was not just an economic threat (which had a lot of credibility), but a nation-building threat for that reason.

I think it's a lot harder for Jews to claim their own National Legacy because so many other groups of people want it for themselves. As I've always observed, a foundational cornerstone of antisemitism is envy and resentment. So many other peoples envy Jews their apparent "chosen status," and their continued success even after suffering tragedy upon tragedy. They resent Jews for still being here and still having a credible claim on the cultural legacy they want for themselves.

Many people are mad that Jews simply didn't die out like so many other ancient civilizations. Or they're mad that Jews simply didn't assimilate into whatever power structure is relevant, Empire, Church, Ummah, Nation-State, what have you. That Jews continued to exist and eventually got the chance to repatriate millions of themselves in their historic homeland so they could engage in the same process of nation-state building that every other country has engaged in pisses them off so much. That's not something inferior people should be allowed to do!

I think that's why many Palestinians still largely refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. They refuse to contend with the fact that a huge percentage of their ancestors were recent immigrants to the region just like the Jews. Tens of thousands immigrated from Egypt and Syria for economic opportunity at the turn of the century, largely thanks to Jewish capital being invested in the land. They refuse to recognize that previous Jewish states have always had large non-Jewish minorities who had explicit legal rights (try reading the Talmud for real instead of just plucking out square quotes about "they think goyim are animals!")

I think peace and coexistence are achievable. But it's a two-way street. There are Jewish supremacists who are overly literal about the legacy of the Jewish People and think they have exclusive eternal right to the land and anyone who gets in their way should be violently removed. But there are also still Arab supremacists who refuse to accept any semblance of Jewish Nationhood. The reality is that contemporary Jewish Nationhood has been here for over a century, maybe more. It can't be ignored or wished away, and violence has still not worked.

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: BEN SHIMONI

Full English text of this sign about Ben at the bottom of the page

Ben Shimoni, 31, was celebrating peace at the Nova music festival in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 when the event came under massive terrorist attack by a barbaric well-armed horde of killers and rapists. Amid carnage and chaos, Ben dodged bullets to reach his car and then picked up four strangers. He maneuvered their way out of the festival site and drove thirty minutes to Beersheba, where his passengers got out of the car. To their shock, Ben said he was going back to rescue more people. They tried desperately to change his mind but Ben turned the car around and headed back to hell. 

Ben was very familiar with the roads around the festival area because he spent his childhood in Gaza. Ben lived in Gush Katif, a tight-knit, warm community of Jews. In 2005, when Ben was only 13, his idyllic life was hideously disrupted when his family and all the other Jews in Gush Katif were forcibly ejected by their own government in a tragically misguided attempt to conciliate the Palestinians. Families who’d harvested land and built businesses over a lifetime had to hand it all over to their enemies. The Palestinians immediately destroyed the farms and factories, elected Hamas and began building terror tunnels to kill Jews. Now 18 years later, paragliding terrorists on a mission of destruction were at the Nova music festival and Ben was on a mission of his own: to rescue as many people as possible. 

Like a firefighter rushing into a burning building, Ben drove into a field that was still under massive attack. He immediately filled his car with five more terrified strangers, and drove them to safety in Beersheba. This group, too, was shocked because once again, after reaching safety, Ben chose to go back to the festival site. He’d already saved nine lives but made one more desperate and valiant attempt. He picked up three frantic girls and almost got away until they were stopped at a checkpoint manned by heavily armed soldiers. Ben’s girlfriend Jessica Elter was on the phone with him and heard what happened next. Jessica told the Jewish Chronicle: “Suddenly I heard Ben asking, confused but not afraid, if some people in the road were Hamas terrorists or Israeli police. I heard the girls in the back screaming and pleading with Ben at the top of their lungs to ‘Drive, drive, drive.’ I heard a lot of yelling in Arabic and a big crash, some shooting and, after a minute of quiet the phone just hung up.”

Ben’s car was later found riddled with bullets but empty and he was initially classified as missing. However after five days Ben’s family was notified that his body had been identified, some distance from the car. Nearby was the body of the girl who’d been in the passenger seat. They had both been shot. The two girls who were in the back of the car have never been found and are presumed to be hostages in Gaza. Jessica is praying for their rescue and hoping to learn more from them about Ben’s final minutes.

Jessica says that Ben’s heroic self-sacrifice to save at least nine other people was completely in character. “He was shy, loyal, very honest with every person he met, and never said no to someone in need. He always put others before himself, truly. He had the best heart ever. And the thing he did that morning testifies to the person he was.” Jessica and Ben had attended several previous Nova festivals. Jessica would have been at that one too, except that she had recently grown more religious and stayed home to observe Shabbat.

Ben was a successful businessman who worked in the restaurant industry and appreciated the Israeli night life scene. His brother Avinoam remembers that Ben “loved life. Loved cars, traveling and parties. Always puts himself last and wants to help, so it’s not surprising that the last action he did in his life was trying to rescue his friends from hell.” 

Israeli band Synergia released a song based on a poem written about Ben Shimoni. It begins, “Who is the person who goes back into hell, a moment after he escaped?”

At the Nova festival site, Ben’s loved ones put up a sign about Ben’s life and his heroic actions on October 7, 2023. May his memory always be for a blessing and may his soul have a great elevation!

Full text about Ben (from the blue sign in the image above) at the memorial site, written by his family:

Ben Binyamin Shimon was the first born son to parents Pnina and Rafi Shimoni after many efforts to bring children into the world. Ben has younger twin brothers, Avinoam and Chai, and Chai has special needs. The three of them grew up in Dugit of Gush Katif near the sea. Following the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, Ben’s parents Pnina and Rafi divorced. Ben moved to the north with his father, and two years later, his brother Avinoam joined him, spending their teenage years there together. After completing his military service, both Ben and his father decided to leave the north and move to Modiin to start a business together, which led Ben into the world of business and back to the south. In recent years, Ben moved back to live with his mother and brother Chai in their home in Ashkelon. Later on, his partner Jessica also joined them. Ben always loved extreme sports, cars, and motorcycle racing. His friends and close-knit family were his whole world.

He was always ready to help, even when not asked. Ben loved to celebrate life and live in the moment; nightlife and parties were an integral part of his life. He owned several businesses related to food and nightlife.

In the last few months of his life, he decided to leave these businesses and began working as a sous- chef with his good friend Matan Zafrir at the Pitmaster restaurant in Petah Tikva, with a bright future ahead in the industry. His coworkers recount that they had never met a more professional, caring, and dedicated person than him. 

That Saturday, Ben decided to stay home for the second holiday of Sukkot, a decision that, as it turned out later, saved his mother and brother Chai from traveling to celebrate at the home of their friend from Dugit, Tova Goren, who lived in Kfar Aza and was murdered in her home along with her daughter Eran.

On October 7th, in the early morning hours, Ben left for the Nova festival, where he met up with his friends Tom Peretz and Michal Ohana. His partner Jessica, who was inseparable from him, surprisingly decided to stay home that evening with his mother and brother Chai. When the attack began, Ben immediately called his mother to inform her that there were rockets and to wake up Jessicaand take everyone to the safe room (bomb shelter).

Ben wasn’t afraid of the rockets; he got in his car and started to flee. He knew the area well, having grown up there and served there during his military service. Ben was an experienced driver and knew how to navigate the roads of the Gaza envelope. At the beginning of the journey, he picked up four passengers he didn’t know; Jude Kotler, Amit Shalit, Mashi Lindner, and Tal Gozal. From their testimonies, we understand that Ben quickly grasped the situation and did everything to calm them down and bring them to safety.

He rescued them to Be’er Sheva. On his way there, he contacted his father, who lives in Be’er Sheva, and asked if he could bring them to his house.

His father was at work in Omer (another city in the South) and told Ben to come and get the key. Ben realized this would delay him and decided to drop them off at a house he didn’t know at the entrance to Be’er Sheva. There, they begged him to stay with them and not return to the festival area, but he was determined to save his friends who were still there. That morning, during the rescues, Ben managed to speak with his friends and family. Everyone had the chance to talk to him; his father Rafi, his mother Pnina, his brother Avinoam, and his girlfriend Jessica.

They were all proud of him for saving people, and asked him to come home and not return to the area of the festival. However, Ben was determined to save his friends. He returned and managed to save another eight people he didn’t know to the Netivot area. Only ten months later we were connected with these people and learned that they were physically healthy but not mentally. Afterward, he returned to the festival area for a second time in hopes of finding his friends Tom and Michal, even though they told him not to come.

Nevertheless, he drove to the last location they sent him. But when he arrived at the location, Tom and Michal were no longer there (probably because their phone battery died, and they had already moved to their next hiding place). Today Tom and Michal are safe and sound. At that time, Ben knew that Gaya Halifa (Z”L), who worked with him at the Pitmaster, was also at the festival, so he contacted her and understood she was in danger. He asked her to send him her location. Gaya was with her friend Romi Gonen; they were hiding from the terrorists’ gunfire in a small bush near the Re’im parking lot.

Gaya sent Ben the location, and along with it, she wrote, “Don’t come; there are gunshots.” Despite this, Ben chose to look for them. He found them and got them into his car. In addition to them, Ben saw Ofir Tzarfati (Z’L) and offered him to join them in the car. Ofir had just made sure that his friends and girlfriend were rescued into another car and there was no space for him to go with them, so he joined Ben’s car.The four of them began driving towards Ashkelon on Road 232. Gaya managed to speak with her father, Avi and tell him that Ben rescued them and they were on their way out, asking him to pick her up from Ashdod. Romi texted her friends and family that a friend of Gaya’s from work (Ben) came to rescue them and that they were on their way out. After a short drive of a few kilometers at a crazy speed, during which Ben was on the phone with Jessica, he told her that he saw figures ahead and asked, “Are they terrorists? Arabs?” Immediately after, Jessica heard gunfire and screams. At 10:12 AM, at the Alumim Junction, they encountered an ambush by terrorists who slaughtered them.

The car stopped, and Ben and Gaya were murdered on the spot. Ofir and Romi were injured and half an hour later, kidnapped to Gaza. All this was recorded on a phone call between Romi and her mother, Mirav. After 54 days, we learned that Ofir was murdered in captivity at Shifa Hospital, and his body was found and returned for burial in Israel. As of today (ten months after October 7th, at the time of this writing), Romi is still held captive by Hamas, and we all pray for her safe return to her family, healthy in body and soul. Ben and Gaya were declared missing for five days. After extensive searches and understanding that something terrible had happened, we hoped that perhaps they were injured or even kidnapped, but the bitter news came. Ben planned to continue living life to the fullest and build his life his way, but fate chose for him to die a hero. Ben left behind a grieving family, friends, and a girlfriend who miss him, are proud of him, and love him deeply.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Michael Livschitz

"Israel was attacked on #October7th in the most brutally barbaric way in modern history.

Hamas, which had terrorized the civilian population of Israel for decades, drowned the holy land in blood in its quest to destroy the Jewish people.

Hamas knew no pity, and its insane acts still shudder anyone who recalls that terrible day.

For most Israelis who have lost family members, relatives, and friends, this nightmare does not end.

Why should Israel have to justify itself to the world community, to the leaders of major powers, and account for its every move while it is fighting a just war for its existence against the most ruthless and implacable enemy?

Israel took extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of the people of Gaza, most of whom supported the events of October 7 and continue to support Hamas.

Has any other nation cared so much about the population of their enemy?

Calls for a unilateral ceasefire are ridiculous because Hamas is not required to do so.

No one is calling on Hamas to release the Israeli hostages and lay down their arms.

No one is addressing the fact that Hamas uses its people as human shields and welcomes more casualties to put pressure on the sympathetic masses.

The mainstream media quotes Hamas statements and presents the figures and data it provides as immutable facts.

Marches with slogans “from the river to the sea,” in which lost people who have suddenly found meaning in life participate, justify Hamas’s methods as “just resistance,” completely unaware that if they had been at the NOVA festival on that terrible day, the terrorists would not hesitate to do the same to them as to all the innocent souls who celebrated the festival of life there.

Many are clamoring for a “free Palestine.”

If we abstract from the fact that such a state never existed, Gaza has been completely on its own since 2005.

What do you think they did with the several billion dollars a year in donations and aid?

Those resources were not used to build a prosperous society or to develop the economy but to dig hundreds of kilometers of multi-level tunnels, buy missiles, explosives, machine guns, and ammunition of all kinds, and train terrorists ready to kill without blinking an eye.

The freedom they were given was used to prepare for war.

They were building the future they dreamed of.

Should Israel then make excuses for having to defend itself and for wanting to bring the war that Hamas started to its logical conclusion and release the hostages?

Why should Israel stop and leave in power a ruthless terrorist organization that values death over life and has never sought peace and for whom the needs of its people do not matter?

Has anyone else lived under endless rocket attacks, continued to work, taken their children to daycare, and yet built a prosperous state, as every resident of Israel does?

More than two million Arabs have Israeli citizenship and the same rights as all Israelis and live with Jews, Christians, and other religions in peace and harmony.

What prevented the people of Gaza from choosing the same path? Absolutely nothing.

It was their choice that led to what happened.

War is a last resort, and it is not the Olympics.

Israel did not start this war and yet it has taken unprecedented measures to minimize enemy civilian casualties and has paid a very high price for its humanitarianism.

However, that is not enough for the world.

Israel has every right to defend itself, has every right to release the hostages, has every right to defeat the enemy and liberate Gaza from Hamas.

No state in Israel’s place would stop one step away from eliminating a mortal threat.

So why should Israel?

The Palestinians had their chance to prove their ability to govern themselves after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but they rejected a peaceful resolution and never abandoned the goal of one day destroying Israel and seizing all the land “from the river to the sea.”

They spent decades preparing before launching their attack on October 7, 2023, ultimately shattering any lingering illusions about a two-state solution. In the foreseeable future, this solution is off the table.

Moreover, they have learned nothing from the war Hamas ignited with their unprecedented support.

They have no regrets and no intention of changing course.''

[jewishvitya]

i’m not too knowledgeable of current israeli thoughts regarding this, but wanted to ask anyways - back last year, i remember seeing some israelis i knew vehemently refer to the attack on october 10 as a pogrom. wall street journal echoed that last year but i haven’t heard much about it since. is this a common sentiment held among israelis, regardless of their political beliefs? while i do not diminish the pains caused by hamas’s attack, i wonder if it will ever be officially recognized to the extreme of being a pogrom. just something lingering in my mind for whatever reason.

thank you for all you post, it’s been a wonderful resource for me and i’m sure many others. god bless!

Thank you so much!! I'm glad I can be helpful.

Yeah, Israelis regard October 7 as a pogrom, but almost more than that. There's a kind of 9/11-like thing forming around this, I don't know how to explain it.

On the morning of October 7, I was in range of the rockets, which is rare. Most don't reach as far as where I live. It was the first barrage of that scale that I experienced in this city, I was panicking. And the news of everything going on around Gaza was like nothing else we experienced. I told a friend I'm scared of what our retaliation will look like. I was terrified for the people of Gaza. I didn't imagine this, but I knew it would be bad.

The perception is that before the holocaust, pogroms were something almost inevitable we had to weather. Zionism was a movement before the holocaust, and antisemitic violence had a part in that. After the holocaust, it picked up in popularity, we said, "that's it, no more victimizing us without us fighting back. We'll have our own state with our own army and we'll never be defenseless again."

And in this context, I can tell you that October 7 is the most deaths in one attack that Jewish people experienced since the holocaust.

We do a lot of suppressing Palestinians. In response to the exploding busses on the second intifada, the wall around the West Bank was built and their movement was severely limited (I don't know how bad it was before the second intifada, I just know it got worse). In response to the attacks from Gaza on 2005, we took firm control of the borders there too. We essentially imprison them in fragments of their lands in order to hold them back from hurting us. And we hate our government, but we trust and almost idealize our military. Knowing our military is keeping them in check is how we feel safe.

On October 7, the illusion of safety and control we had was shattered. I heard several people I know talking about how nothing can be the same, something changed, something broke. Israelis feel restless and scared. Even some people I knew as leftists repeated the "but what else can we do? Hamas already said they'll repeat October 7, we can't let that happen."

So. Pogrom doesn't really cover it? It's almost its own thing. But also, yes, a pogrom.

[abyssalzones]

C-PTSD as a diagnosis makes so much sense for Ford because he really does fit almost all of the criteria, ESPECIALLY if you take the stuff in J3 into account in conjunction with his traumatic childhood (bullying, bad dad, etc.). It just makes sense in regards to his motivations and his issues with interpersonal relationships (like with Stan). Also buring yourself in your work (like he does) is a very common 'flight' coping mechanism to trauma in adults

I'm smiling like this right now

ford's whole.... mental health deal is extremely interesting to examine because Oh my god this man is the textbook image for "reacting to ongoing, continuous trauma". intentional or otherwise (I'm inclined to believe it's both).

like. okay hang on I'm about to get very in depth with it

I feel like there's no way this entire guy's life and in some ways his lasting identity haven't been defined by and constructed around various forms of trauma, maybe the most obvious and true-to-canon-intent being peer abuse/bullying from childhood. a lot of people downplay the impact of this type of abuse but it's... responsible for a lot of social ills in shocking ways. (if you're more interested in this topic here is an article my friend mer linked me a while back, it gets into it very deeply)

(a lot of this is going to be sourced from the wikipedia page for CPTSD [and my own experience Living with it] which I realize isn't very professional of me but Whatever this is tumblr)

one of the core tenets of ford's personality is that he's Different. he owns it, sure- his six fingers become a point of pride rather than something to be ashamed of- but they make it extremely clear that from a young age he associated being different with being a social pariah. ford's generation was characterized by notoriously cruel bullying, and anything that remotely made you stand out rendered you a target. ford could've been bullied for being nerdy and jewish (and failing to perform socially, ie dating) alone, having such an obvious mutation definitely was not winning him any points.

so it's honestly no surprise, when from childhood ford feels like he has One person in the world to trust and confide in, that he would go on to form very unhealthy attachment patterns typical of CPTSD. as you elaborated on regarding AvPD (which I know far less about but seems to have comorbidity with CPTSD): if you're hard-wired to believe socializing with others results in failure or betrayal, then you're not going to make an effort. but what does end up happening is that you're going to pour all of your trust and dependency into one person at a time, one person who is "safe".

previously, that was his brother. and it's not really hard to draw the conclusion from there that fiddleford was a subject of ford's attachment style, considering he was his One friend from college, and... one of Maybe two people ford is friends with at all who he isn't related to. he cites him as the only person he can possibly trust to work on the portal project alongside him, and he still can't bring himself to tell him the full truth, because he's terrified of losing him. I love their dynamic (I do think they were mutual best friends, and there was no small amount of trust reciprocated between them. "fiddleford was weird as hell too" is something I keep coming back to) and I don't think it's built on entirely unhealthy terms, but that kind of pressure is... setting things up to crash and burn.

enter bill stage left. back to "continuous yearning to be liked and accepted"- this guy knew that and made every effort to prey on ford's insecurities to reel him in as close as possible. this is what really pisses me off about the idea that bill was just "inflating ford's ego", because it's way, way more insidious than that. throughout the entirety of journal 3 we see ford reintroduce someone to his life he has a very positive relationship with (fiddleford) and how that trust gets gradually broken down by bill's influence "winning out" over their friendship. I think it's safe to say ford was already vulnerable: from the start, he'd been isolated in his research for six years (and it's unclear for how long he'd known bill by 1982), and bill proved time and time again to be someone who wouldn't judge him, someone who would praise him for his hard work, and perhaps most critically, make him feel like being different was something special.

like that's... that's really not good!!!! and that kind of thing works wonders on someone who has already settled with the idea that they're inclined to be alone just by design.

trying to put a cap on this. in relationships like the one he's had with his brother or fiddleford it doesn't even necessarily have to be ""toxic"" (vague term anyway) or outwardly bad to be built on unhealthy attachment patterns, and considering for a good chunk of ford's life his attachment to others can be characterized as "I can only trust ONE person at a time" it feels essential to any discussion of his CPTSD or canon trust issues. That is something that happens a lot in Real cases of CPTSD (hi) and only further snowballs into More trauma by leaving you vulnerable to manipulation and abuse (see: bill.)

I've been going on for way too long now and I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the thing I wanted to elaborate on sorry. that post traumatic stress disorder can complex