#until and including the last jew.

[researchgate]

Although I don't live in Israel, as a Persian Jew born and living in France I really appreciate your reblogs recently, it seems most of radblr is choosing to gaslight many Jewish users that NOBODY is attacking Jewish people and ONLY criticising Israeli government, while I and many other Jewish people I know are facing extreme antisemitism on the daily that only gets worse. I've had coworkers «joke» in various different ways basically that I should have my will written up for when Palestine reclaims their land because all «colonisers» [Israeli = Jewish as usual] deserve to be killed -- which is the mildest example. Seeing claims that no antisemitism is happening as a result of the pro-Hamas state of the internet and media is so ignorant and shows that most of these people are not Jewish nor do they know any Jewish people. Being Jewish is stressful on person and online and yet most responses are like «You people have only yourselves to blame» or calling us Zionists if we dare call out antisemitism, it's disgusting and as usual feels incredibly isolating. It makes me very relieved to have another Jewish woman on here like you who is so well-spoken! <3

Hi! Thank you so much for this, I'm so glad I could give you some relief.

I follow less than 40 blogs so I don't see most of the hate, but I surely believe this is the sentiment in general given how it is outside radblr, and what friends of mine told me happens on radblr itself. It's terrible and seeing some notes on posts is just... Despairing. It's clear none of them ever gave an actual damn about the conflict until they could celebrate the rape of Jewish women, and the slaughter of innocent Jewish civilians.

Antisemitism has always been a problem for diaspora Jews, regardless of the country, and it is undeniable it's gotten worse ever since Hamas has invaded Israel with the sole purpose of killing jews. People online are maliciously happy and proud of that, and as much as we like to call them "keyboard warriors" these are real people who not only espouse their opinions online, but live these opinions in real life too, thus posing a direct, active danger to Jews as possible offenders at worst, and at best, they'd be bystanders who film/encourage/watch silently attacks against Jews in real life.

These people never liked the idea of Jews existing, that much is clear. And when it comes to radblr, it seems they forget some important feminists were Jewish themselves. Instead they go full Judith Butler and call Hamas a liberation/resistance movement just because the latter is in their name (Harakat al muqawamah al Islamiyah — Islamic Resistance Movement), whereas they know to call out things like liberal feminism nit being feminism. It's honestly irritating at the very least.

The media and reaction to it is another interesting (and by interesting I mean very much predictable) case: when it's pto Hamas, no one bats an eye, people share al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, etc. articles without viewing them with even a little bit of critical thinking. But when a news source is clearly anti Hamas (not even pro Israel!), it's suddenly pro Israel and Zionist and the sentiment is terribly close to "Jews control the media." I'm not saying there weren't reports that were meant for just shock value (that's literally how news media work), but it was still very interesting to see people go back to antisemitic tropes. Predictable, too.

In the UK, security on Jewish schools has been strengthened in fear of violence against kids, but people would blame "Israel's treatment of the Palestinians" for that, which is full on victim blaming and antisemitism: they're jewish; Jewish = Israel; Israel = bad → jewish = bad like Israel → Israel deserves punishment → Jews deserve punishment.

The fact that the solution for Jews is to walk outside without anything that can mark them as Jewish is not too different to the idea that "she shouldn't have dressed in provocative outfit," which again, puts the blame and responsibility on the victim.

The fact that calling out any form of antisemitism is seen as Zionism is, however, not just the fault of antisemites in my opinion, because Token Jews allow themselves to ignore antisemitic notions within the movements which tokenize them, and allow people to think only Zionist (non-token) Jews care about antisemitism. It's vile, and just wrong. It's especially wring since Zionism isn't even what they think it is, they just think all Jews who protest or call out antisemitism is like that absolute scum Ben-Gvir (who is actually partially responsible for the situation right now, but I digress). It's so disheartening to see and even moreso to experience, of that I'm certain. The ""joke"" about the will for instance, is just absolutely vile and disgusting, although it accidentally acknowledges the fact Hamas wants total annihilation of Jews and not just the "Zionist Entity" as the 2017 revision of their charter suggests.

I'm sorry if I didn't address all of your points, your ask is very loaded, as is expected given the circumstances, and me being unfortunately not very well-dpoken means I probably couldn't treat it with all the due eloquence it deserves. For what it's worth, though, I did try my best.

Being Jewish, especially in the diaspora, is always stressful, but the current situation sure has made it worse ten-fold. Again, I'm glad I could offer some relief for at least the online experience. Myaskbox and DMs are always open if you want to share anything, or just need an ear for your frustrations. Given my situation, I cannot imagine yours but I can sympathize and offer my utmost patience and efforts to understand.

Thank you again for this meaningful ask, here's hoping for somewhat better, somewhat safer days to come as soon as possible. My thoughts are also with the diaspora Jews, at these truly trying times. 💙

Am Yisrael Chai, and we will outlive them.

[koushirouizumi]

(Because I'm still really happy about this discussion and I need to rewatch Fiddler on the Roof while cross-checking the full Yiddish script---)

For reference, there's Yiddish version of "Do You Love Me?" at that link (if slightly off sync), the English version of same song is here, and the full Yiddish script can be found here! (If the links die down the road, please check the script!)

The fundamental difference between Fiddler on the Roof and Fidler Afn Dakh:

English Tevye: Tradition!

Yiddish Tevye: Got iz a foter un heylik iz zayn toyre!

[discoursedumpster]

@puppypalice what do you think a Zionist is, though? Because this implies that there's some kind of Zionist organization or political party that people can join.

As far as I can tell, there are two different definitions people are using for "Zionist."

People who don't think Israel should be violently destroyed.

A specifically Jewish movement of people who love genocide in general, or genocide of Palestinians in particular.

But there's not an organization for either of those things.

You seem to be picturing the second definition? But like... what are they joining? The IDF?

I know they're not joining some evangelical megachurch that wants Israel to exist so that the End Times can come or whatever.

Because nobody is protesting those. They rarely even get mentioned.

I know they're not joining Hamas/PIJ/PFLP, despite the fact that Sinwar said he would fight until the last child in Gaza; despite Haniyeh demanding "the blood of Gaza's children, women, and elderly;" despite the fact that Gazans loathe Hamas for starting the war, routinely torturing and executing dissenters, and committing countless atrocities against them over the past 15 months.

Because at best, nobody gives a shit about Hamas. And at worst, they buy the propaganda that Hamas is "the Palestinian resistance." (Instead of the We Want To Live movement and the Gaza's Liberators movement.)

Are future historians going to be saying this about anyone who hates and opposes Hamas? Because that seems to be what usually gets Gazan activists, and Jews, denounced as Zionists.

If so, that now includes not only most of Gaza:

But also, the rest of Palestine:

That's from one of the co-organizers of the We Want To Live movement, who has twice been jailed and tortured by Hamas for organizing marches in Gaza.

He's only 24, and he's repeatedly put his life on the line for Gaza's freedom. And there is not one person in the pro-Palestine movement that will platform him, or anyone like him. Even Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib -- another Gazan activist, one who hates Israel significantly more than Howidy -- gets pre-emptively blocked.

Anyway, the context for the whole "they'll call them Zionists" thing was that the Hind Rajab Foundation filed 12 complaints against IDF soldiers.

Which does make it seem like that must be what everyone's going to be called Nazis for joining?

The Hind Rajab Foundation is chaired by a former Hezbollah member: Dyab Abou Jahah, a Belgian man from Lebanon who also:

founded a Holocaust denial group;

has repeatedly called for the violent destruction of Israel;

says Europe makes "the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion";

questioned the existence of the Nazi gas chambers;

and calls gay men “AIDS spreading faggots”...

...just to hit the highlights.

The article notes that there were no troops around when Hind Rajab was killed. Which is news to me, because I only learned about it on social media.

So basically, a guy who is at best a Nazi apologist started a group named after someone who wasn't killed by the IDF, but who he wants us to think was. And now that group is running "a campaign... to identify Israeli soldiers who have published videos to social media in which they commit, claim to have committed, or appear to endorse committing potential war crimes, and to file complaints against the soldiers on that basis."

@stoptheantisemitism blocked me after I said you can't just report people you assume must have committed a war crime. Because surely you can, since "they've posted themselves committing atrocities all over social media" or whatever.

But in fact, the article they posted literally says that the campaign includes people "who appear to endorse committing potential war crimes."

And no matter how despicable or disgusting that is, it's also absolutely fucking silly to be like, "Hey!! Sri Lanka!! SRI LANKA!! This guy who tweeted about wanting to burn Gaza City to the ground is in your country right now!!! Arrest him!!!!!!"

The fuck you want Sri Lanka to do about that??? He didn't commit a crime on their soil, and he's not a citizen of their country.

So I'm assuming you're talking about the IDF. But what's the point of saying that future historians will imply people were Nazis for joining the IDF even if they don't hate Palestinians? People are already calling them that today.

More to the point, it's not like there's a massive movement to move to Israel and get permission to join its military.

Is the point just to make sure we damn everyone in the IDF, whether they personally hate Palestinians or not, whether they were conscripted or not, etc?

Is the point just to call them Nazis?

Is the point to minimize the Nazis by deemphasizing what they did?

Because it seems important that Hitler not only industrialized mass murder and killed a peak of 500,000 people a month, but also:

declared a state of emergency,

seized dictatorial powers,

stripped Jews of their citizenship,

made relationships and sex with them illegal,

pressured white people to boycott all Jewish businesses,

and banned them from leaving the country without turning their property and money over to the Nazis,

none of which Israel has ever done to either the Palestinalsians, or its own Arab citizens.

like, I would assume that nobody is making a conscious attempt to minimize what the Nazis did. But it minimizes what they did either way.

[adiradirim]

Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki in their traditional costumes, in the city’s old cemetery, before the war // a contemporary photo that shows where the destroyed cemetery once was, which is now Greece's largest university, built partially on top of and with land and materials (particularly tombstones) stolen from the razed site.

Thessaloniki or Salonika, once referred to as “the Jerusalem of the Balkans” due to its Ladino-speaking Jewish majority, saw roughly 96% of its Jewish population murdered during the Holocaust. This mass destruction extended to the city's Jewish cemetery, which had been the country's largest, established in the 15th century and housing hundreds of thousands of Jewish graves until its razing by city authorities who had long desired to repurpose the land and resented the inconvenience of Jewish presence. Despite its large-scale destruction during German occupation in 1942, which was initiated and carried out primarily by Thessaloniki authorities with Nazi consent and arrangement, some parts of the cemetery survived intact as late as 1947. Many tombstones were subsequently appropriated and used by city authorities and the Greek Orthodox Church. After the war, people were still carrying away Jewish gravestones each day and regularly looting the cemetery in search of valuables. The city's officials, led by their mayor, completed the cemetery's destruction and sold the tombstones to contractors for use as building materials in various projects; as such many were and are still found in various walls, roads, structures, and churches around the city. A 1992 commemorative book pictures Greek schoolgirls playing Hamlet with skulls and other bones they found in the cemetery.

“[T]he ‘rape’ of the cemetery escalated, marble flooded the market, and its price plummeted. Jewish tombstones were stacked up in mason’s yards and, with the permission of the director of antiquities of Macedonia and overseen by the metropolitan bishop and the municipality, used to pave roads, line latrines, and extend the sea walls; to construct pathways, patios, and walls in private and public spaces though out the city, in suburbs such as Panorama and Ampelokipi, and more than sixty kilometers away in beach towns in Halkidiki, where they decorated playgrounds, bars, and restaurants in hotels; to build a swimming pool – with Hebrew-letter inscription visible; to repair the St. Demetrius Church and other buildings...” Devin Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece

Most of the efforts to return found tombstones throughout the city are led by Jews, particularly Jacky Benmayor, the curator of the Jewish Museum and last Ladino speaker in Greece, who has personally recovered hundreds of tombstones including his own family's. Surviving Greek Jews never received compensation for the confiscation of the land under the destroyed cemetery, upon which now partially rests Greece's largest university, Aristotle University, which also used Jewish gravestones as building material for its long-coveted expansion finally made possible by the dispossession and annihilation of the city's Jews. In 2014, 72 years after the cemetery's destruction and appropriation, a small memorial was established on campus grounds to acknowledge the Jewish cemetery the school is built on and with; the ceremony just 10 years ago involved the first-ever acknowledgement of the atrocities and apology from a Thessaloniki mayor. The memorial has been vandalised multiple times since its establishment.

[girlactionfigure]

SEPTEMBER 4, 2024

Many anti-Israel protestors claim that the terrorist groups they support are merely anti-Zionist, not antisemitic.

The evidence shows otherwise.

Let’s take a look.

THIS IS A HAMAS FLAG...

…in the middle of New York City. Some Hamas apologists will tell you that Hamas no longer intends to exterminate all Jews, because in 2017, they “replaced their [openly genocidal] charter.” Well, lucky for you, Hamas is here to set the record straight. See, after releasing their “new” charter, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar assured the media that the 2017 document did not replace their original 1988 charter. 

Since 2017, Hamas has made openly genocidal calls toward Jews. In 2018, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV media channel predicted “the cleansing of Palestine of the filth of the Jews.”

In 2019, Hamas Political Bureau member Fathi Hammad said, “You seven million Palestinians abroad, enough warming up! There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on planet Earth –- we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help.” In 2021, Hammad called, via Al-Aqsa TV, for the Palestinians in Jerusalem to “cut off the heads of the Jews.”

BTW, THIS IS ONE OF THE MANY THINGS THAT THE ORIGINAL HAMAS CHARTER SAYS...

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)."

(Article 7)

Pretty explicitly antisemitic, wouldn’t you agree?

THIS IS A HEZBOLLAH FLAG (AND A HAMAS HEADBAND)..

…in the middle of New York City. Like Hamas, the entire purpose of Hezbollah’s existence is the destruction of the State of Israel. Unlike Hamas, however, Hezbollah, for decades, has carried out violent terrorist attacks against Jews not just in Israel, but also in the Diaspora.

Hezbollah’s most notorious attack was the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), the largest Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The attack took 85 innocent lives. Before October 7, the AMIA bombing was the single largest antisemitic massacre since the end of the Holocaust.

Given Hezbollah targets (non-Israeli) Jews worldwide, could it be that their problem is with Jews, not just with Zionism?

THIS, AGAIN, IS THE HEZBOLLAH FLAG...

...at the Princeton University encampment. If you’re still on the fence about Hezbollah’s true antisemitic intentions, fear not: Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah is here to clarify them for you.

“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli,” Nasrallah stated. Just anti-Zionism, huh?

Then there’s his infamous threat: “If [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” 

We get the message loud and clear.

THIS IS "JEWISH" VOICE FOR PEACE, GLORIFYING THE HOUTHIS...

...using a photo that very clearly showcases the Houthi banner, which states, “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

“A Curse Upon the Jews” is pretty straightforward antisemitism, don’t you think? 

The Houthis are also personally responsible for ethnically cleansing the last Jews out of Yemen. Just anti-Zionism, eh?

THIS IS A PALESTINIAN FLAG WITH VARIOUS PORTRAITS, INCLUDING THAT OF YAHYA SINWAR...

…in the middle of New York City. If orchestrating the October 7 massacre, the biggest antisemitic massacre since the end of the Holocaust, is not evidence enough for you, there are other indications that Sinwar is not exactly a friend of the Jews.

In May of 2021, for example, Sinwar led a rally, in which the crowd was encouraged to chant, "We will trample on the heads of the Jews in front of everyone..."

There is also, of course, his infamous threat: “October 7 was just a rehearsal.”

Sinwar is the head of Hamas, which we’ve already established doesn’t really like Jews.

THIS IS A PFLP FLAG (AND A HEZBOLLAH FLAG AND A HAMAS HEADBAND)...

…in the middle of New York City. See that red flag? Yeah, that’s the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. PFLP flags are all the rage at pro-Palestine protests. Marxist Jihad. Super fun.

Yet, while the PFLP claims to advocate for a secular, democratic Palestine, the reality is much darker. When, for example, the PFLP, with the aid of West German terrorists, hijacked Air France Flight 139, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, they infamously separated the Jewish from the non-Jewish passengers.Yes, you read that right: they separated the Jewish from the non-Jewish passengers. Not the Israeli passengers from the non-Israeli passengers. The Jewish from the non-Jewish passengers.

The non-Jewish passengers were let go. The Jews were kept hostage. That’s a pretty clear message.

THIS IS A PFLP FLAG...

…at the University of Pennsylvania encampment. If you’re still not convinced this is antisemitic, the founder of the PFLP, George Habash, quickly was there to set the record straight: “Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle,because it attracts more attention.”

You read that? He said “Jew.” Not Israeli. Not Zionist. “Jew.”

The PFLP live-streamed the October 7 massacre, and, as of several months ago, Israeli intelligence estimated that the PFLP was holding the youngest hostage, one-year-old Kfir Bibas, and his five-year-old brother, Ariel Bibas, hostage.

THIS IS A PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC JIHAD FLAG (AND A PFLP FLAG AND A HAMAS FLAG)...

…in the middle of New York City. Palestinian Islamic Jihad participated in the October 7 massacre. More than that, however, their entire ideology is antisemitic to the core.

See, Palestinian Islamic Jihad believes that a proper reading of the Quran indicates that Muslims are in an eternal struggle with their forever enemies, the Jews, and that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians exists because of this eternal struggle. 

To recap: Palestine or no Palestine, Islamic Jihad’s ideology dictates that Jews are the eternal enemies of the Muslims.

Sounds antisemitic to me, but what do I know?

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

somehow we’ve normalized weekly antisemitic hate marches in broad daylight

[jewish-vents]

Just experienced antisemitism in public for the very first time in my life. I saw a post about a girl testifying against antisemitism and wanted to share mine, especially since i'm a French Jew too. This country is a nightmare for Jews and for the first time, I'm seriously considering moving out after I was verbally assaulted at my workplace yesterday. This past year I've been reading tons of posts and tweets about antisemitism and how much it impacts Jewish lives and I was horrified. But somehow I always was reassuring myself that nothing would be happening to me for some reason. I'm going trough it right now and I'm anxious, it made me question my whole opinion about Muslims/Arabs not gonna lie.

I just got a job in an airport and my company wants me to do some training and do some classes for the job. Everything was doing well, until the teacher asked each of us which countries we visited the past years. And since I've been to Israel and Dubai last year, I said it. I never meant to provoke or hurt anyone in the class. Immediately, a NorthAfrican/Arab guy in my class said "Israel is not a country, it's Palestine and it's occupied" I was like "??????" So I said gently and respectfully "No it's not, Israel is a beautiful country btw" and immediately this Arab guy said in a threatening manner, pointing his finger up "Be very careful of what you say, don't speak about Palestine. You're a Jew living in France this is not your land. Do you know supporting genocide and racism against Arabs is illegal in this country" (I live in PARIS btw) and I was like what on earth is going on... I was in shock this was pure antisemitism thrown in my face. I've never been racist against anyone, and I would never harm an Arab or a Muslim person just because they are. The f!ck.

I felt uneasy and not well, but the class went on, and the teacher was showing some pictures of products that are prohibited on plane and stuff. And the picture of a AK-47 showed up and the same Arab guy said "it's what the Palestinians used on october 7 al Hamdoulilah" I knew he was trying to provoke me and it worked. I gasped and told him "are you serious ?" Quickly, the teacher intervened to defend him saying "Palestinians are only using rocks, poor quality slingshots, they're defending themselves, he's right". I was boiling inside but I answered politely "They kidnapped and killed innocent people, it's not okay to defend a terror!st group in my opinion". And this Arab guy shouted so loud in the class saying "Stop trying to play the victim because you're Jewish!! there's no innocents in Israel! They tried to get their freedom back, they have an October 7 everyday!" - I was in shock. Not only he felt comfortable pointing out I was Jewish in a very negative manner ("playing the victim") but he was expressing freely his antisemitism in the class in front of everyone and the teacher included, justifying a terror act and no one opened their mouths. In fact some girls in the class were enjoying the "drama" and laughing.

It didn't stopped. Later in the class, the teacher was explaining how to help passengers in an airport, etc, and another one (Muslim guy) said "I don't care. If I meet French passengers trying to go to Israel in the airport, I will give them false informations, I will do everything in my power to stress them out and make them miss their flight, I hate THEM so much". When he said "THEM", I immediately understood he meant Jews, French Jews. And the teacher didn't said a thing, instead smiled. Just a bunch of people in the class simply admitting being ready to discriminate/threatens any average Israeli citizen/Jewish life, because of antisemitism. So scary. The situation was out of control. All because I said I visited Israel to answer the tutor questions regarding traveling. I realized how much you can be in danger just by mentioning Israel and I admit I regretted saying it. Would they have reacted the same if I told them I had visited Iran who makes women lives a living hell ? Or Afghanistan ? Or Syria ? Of course not.

I realized at that moment how much the pro-Palestine propaganda brainwashed them to the point they can no longer hide their antisemitism it in real life and think it's completely normal. How much can they hate a country they never visited ? People they never met ?

I couldn't wait until the class was finished. I was so angry at myself for not standing up more for Israel and exposing their antisemitism but I was scared for myself at the end, I don't want any problems. I just hate those classes right now and can't imagine having to support these coworkers, I get so much anxiety. I'm sorry but I just hate Arab/Muslims antisemitism. They are the first to point out islamophobia (rightfully) but then be vicious antisemites. Besides, the muslim men in the class made me uneasy. They felt superior to me because I was a Jewish AND a girl, and imposing their views on everyone. I'm even thinking of stopping the classes.. Just disgusting. I hate this feeling and I don't wanna feel like this forever. Why does it had to happen to me, I've never been hateful to anyone :(

I'm so sorry this happened to you Anon. I'd have been terrified too. You should reach out to HR or whatever similar entity you have there. I hope you stay safe, sending you so much love

-🐺

[space-station-nursery]

◜ 🕎𓂃 Happy Hanukkah! ‧ ✡️◞

⁺　　◍ 　 . 　 ⁺　　☆　　⁺ 　 . 　 ◍　　⁺

Happy early Hanukkah to all my Jewish followers !! Whist me and my family are not Jewish, its still fun to learn about other holidays, especially one that feels under talked about [to me at least 🤭]

⁺　　◍ 　 . 　 ⁺　　☆　　⁺ 　 . 　 ◍　　⁺

★﹒┊What is Hanukkah? ⁔⁔

Hanukkah is a Jewish festival celebrated on Kislev 25 in December, reaffirming Judaism's ideals and commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Despite not being mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, Hanukkah remains a popular religious observance and reaffirms the Second Temple's significance.

⁺　　◍ 　 . 　 ⁺　　☆　　⁺ 　 . 　 ◍　　⁺

★﹒┊What does it originate from? ⁔⁔

In 175 B.C., King Antiochus prohibited Jews from practicing Judaism in his ancient kingdom which included Judea. He replaced the Temple of Jerusalem with an altar dedicated to Zeus, the Greek god. The Jews, led by Judah the Maccabee, rebelled and fought for three years to establish an independent region. In 164 B.C., the Maccabees defeated Antiochus and his troops. Upon return to their ransacked temple, they found only one jar of oil—just enough to light the temple’s candles for one day. The Talmud miraculously burned oil for eight days, allowing the Maccabees to find more oil for their sacred candles. The conflict continued for over 22 years, culminating in a peace treaty in 142 B.C., forming the Jews' own independent region.

⁺　　◍ 　 . 　 ⁺　　☆　　⁺ 　 . 　 ◍　　⁺

★﹒┊How is it celebrated? ⁔⁔

Jews celebrate Hanukkah by lighting a menorah, which holds 8 candles each, plus a shamash candle in the center used to light the other candles. The menorah is lit for eight nights, with one candle added and lit on the first night and so on until all 8 candles are lit. People recite blessings, pray, sing songs, and exchange gifts to celebrate the miracle in the temple over 2,000 years ago.

⁺　　◍ 　 . 　 ⁺　　☆　　⁺ 　 . 　 ◍　　⁺

★﹒┊Hanukkah Fun ⁔⁔

Before finishing up, i would like to give you guys some Hanukkah worksheets !

⁺　　◍ 　 . 　 ⁺　　☆　　⁺ 　 . 　 ◍　　⁺

18+ blogs // DD!LG, AB!DL and variants [even "SFW"] // 27 and older // DNI

Fact OTD: Hanukkah traditions feature deep-fried jelly donuts called sufganiyot and potato pancakes called latkes, both fried and symbolizing the long-lasting lamp oil.

[nimrochan]

I don’t think that my few handfuls of followers on various social media accounts realize that I’m an American-Israeli. I’ve been watching things unfold and staying silent for the most part. I know it’s very easy to have an opinion from the comfort and safety of my home, but too many people are also echoing online opinions without enough information or thought behind them. Although it’s fair to say that I’m biased, I think it’s important to view conflicts from multiple perspectives. Including and especially from someone from the actual region/culture that everyone outside of it suddenly has an opinion on. And I think I’m ready to say what I wanted to say:

Why aren’t people more angry with Hamas?

I’ve spent some childhood years in Israel. Every week on the news was another incident - a bus b*mbing, a car b*mbing, a s*icide b*mber… I remember being terrified of getting on buses, or going to public places. I remember soldiers standing at the entrance of every mall, and I remember hearing how one soldier died while stopping a s*icide b*mber at a mall entrance - both were women in their early 20’s. Until today my father tells me to avoid crowded places, and to always stand in a corner with my back on the wall to observe my surroundings.

When I moved to America I had moved on from these memories and didn’t really think about them. But the attacks never stopped. For DECADES. And over the last few years I did notice that very few non-Jewish Americans were aware of what life is like in Israel - having a barrage of rockets rain on you every once in a while. Having alerts to warn you to head to the nearest shelter. Israel has the protection of the Iron Dome. But it’s not perfect, and some rockets do hit their targets. Also, you know, maybe people shouldn’t be firing rockets unprovoked into another country?? (Don’t even get me started on Hezbollah, too.) No one bats an eye if other countries randomly shoot rockets into Israel, but as soon as Israel retaliates to try destroying the area where rockets come from, everyone comes out of the woodwork to condemn them.

Some of my American family members have an app that dings every time rockets are fired into Israel. I could never bring myself to download it. The number of dings drives me crazy.

In fact, if you ever wanted to buy a piece of jewelry or sculpture made of Hamas rockets, there are businesses upcycling them.

If you’re not from Israel, I just want you to imagine the number of rockets that regularly have to come into your country for any rockets-to-products businesses to even exist. For reasons beyond my comprehension, a lot of political parties in America want to defund the Iron Dome, a system designed solely for defense. But I digress.

Gazans never had an Iron Dome and yet Hamas gives no regard to the lives of their own people when they fire openly from homes, schools, hospitals. When they hide hostages and weapons in heavily populated areas.

I remember frantically texting and calling people on 10/07 to see if any of my family members were harmed or killed in the attack. All while anti-Zionists already rallied on social media to offer no sympathy and blame the attack on the Jews on, the Jews. Right. Luckily, whatever close family I had in the area was far away enough from the attack that they were spared, and they soon evacuated. My second cousin and her kids were only spared because they happened to be away, but their home was in ashes and their friends and neighbors were dead.

Israel is a small and close-knit country. I don't have words to describe how we grieved. 1200 innocent civilians sl*ughtered for no reason. That number is just a little under half of the number of deaths on 9/11, and it was done without the help of airplanes, just men running around killing people. The youngest one was 14 hours old. This is the largest m*rder of Jews since the Holocaust. I won’t even go into detail about how some of their bodies were mutilated because it’s too horrific for me to want to type it out. In fact I left the most disturbing footage out of this post. I had been avoiding seeing the footage of Shani Louk, but it was shown at the exhibit too and I’ll never be able to forget it for as long as I live. It made me sick to my stomach.

Look at the pictures. Look at all those shoes. The last time I felt such powerful emotion staring at shoes was at a Holocaust museum. A lot of item displays included their owners’ smart phones showing their final videos on a loop. The people who attend the Nova festival tend to be laid-back, free spirits. They show up covered in glitter and wearing fairy-wings, waving rainbow flags. They lived next to Gaza because they felt safe there, and they often supported Palestinians. Listen to the unhindered joy in the voice of the man calling his father to tell him he had m*rdered ten Jews. One of the most disgusting parts of this is the fact that people protested outside this exhibit as well.

When I brought myself to browse social media again, over and over I saw posts about how “they deserved it” and “they had it coming.” The same people, the same self-proclaimed “feminists” who would shared the #MeToo and #YesAllWomen hashtags, people with immensely large followings, were now having no sympathy for the Israeli women who were r*ped, basically saying “she asked for it.” People defending and excusing Hamas because they “weren’t created in a vacuum.” When did we start excusing r*pe and t*rrorism for ANY reason? On that note, don’t you think Israel’s aggressive defense of itself also stems from a historical reason, shaped by outside forces?

And then there are many voices still expressing plain denial! This was the most well-documented t*rrorist attack in history, because the attackers filmed it with pride, and yet over and over I also saw people posting about how “it never happened,” “they would never do that,” and how these t*rrorists were just “resistance fighters” with propaganda crafted to “make them look bad.”

In my home state of New York, I saw people marching wearing same types of scarves that these “resistance fighters” wore to commit crimes against humanity so recently, tearing down posters of Israeli hostages instead of hanging their own posters on innocent killed Gazans and sharing in the grief.

I see people over and over calling Israelis “white colonists,” when in fact MOST OF THEM ARE BROWN, dark-skinned just like their neighbors (if I showed you photos of my family in Israel, you'd be surprised to learn they aren't Arabic). We are an ethnic minority on this planet and in every country except Israel, but antisemites love to flip the script and paint us as majority white colonizer oppressors. When the majority of Americans calling for the abolishment of Israel are themselves actually living on colonized land (I mean, really?) When most of North Africa has been colonized by Arab populations, yet everyone seems to conveniently forget that. Most alarmingly, I see people marching the streets and praising Hamas and the actual 10/07 attacks.

These same people probably could never spot Gaza on a map before 10/07. Where were they for the Chinese Uyghurs? Where were they for the mass murdered Syrians? For Afghans left at the mercy of the Taliban? For Iraqis killed after 9/11? For Darfur? Because no news unless Jews, right? How can you say you care about Muslims and then praise Hamas? How can you be Pro-Palestine and Pro-Hamas at the same time?! There is a huge, sick problem in America when college students here are applauded by overseas t*rrorist leaders on goddamn Twitter.

And these “Queers for Palestine”- where is the support for the gayest, most feminist, and most liberal country in the Middle East? (Go ahead and look up which country in the Middle East holds annual Pride Parades.) Where is the support for the millions of Arab-Israelis and other non-Jews who call Israel their home? Where is the support for the Arabs and non-Jews also killed on 10/07? Where are the feminists using their voices to demand Hamas return the hostages that are very likely being r*ped as I type this?

I feel like I’m going crazy telling people that there is a lot of fake news and propaganda being spread by Hamas and eaten up by the West. I am not the kind of person to use the phrase “fake news.” But when I see some extreme footage allegedly showing the IDF doing something especially horrible, I count the hours or days before the news is silently retracted because it turned out to be incorrect. Propaganda against Jews has seeped so far into gentile culture over the decades that people don't even realize it. It’s become sickeningly casual and normalized in all kinds of circles. Hell, I don’t even know who to vote for or who secretly wants me dead - the left side with the pro-Hamas crowd or the right side with their white supermacists .

No, I am not denying that a lot of innocent Gazans are dying horrific deaths. When I see footage of injured Palestinian children, I don’t look away and pretend it doesn’t happen, because it does. But what about Hamas dressing up as civilians, firing weapons among civilians, and continuing to hide the hostages??? What about the 15-17 year old brainwashed children marching with guns? When is enough enough? You know which army doesn’t hide in civilian clothing, or recruit children, or parade naked dead women around after they’ve killed them?? Take a guess.

War is fucking awful. And I'm not trying to justify it, just trying to articulate why this is such a clusterfuck of a situation. Someone please name any other country that wouldn’t retaliate and demand their hostages back after such an ugly, unprovoked attack. Someone please explain to me why the hatred is so intense and out of proportion. Again, DECADES of attacks. Someone please tell me what should be done - because if you do nothing, then 10/07 happens over and over and over again. Israelis are all living, breathing people with families just like Gazan civilians are. Stop dehumanizing us.

Why is it that after the Ukraine-Russia war started, when most westerners were on Ukraine’s side (including myself so don’t jump down my throat), that individual Russians living in western countries did not feel threatened the way individual Jews are being threatened? That war actually seems a way more black-and-white situation to me. Why did the Israeli singer for Eurovision need presidential-level protection from the mob gathered outside her hotel? Why did the other contestants continually insult her? You think every single Jew on the planet has a say in what happens in Israel?

Why am I going on social media to dumb down, only to see posts like “Reblog to increase IDF soldier s*icides” and “Like to # CeaseFire” and “From the river to the sea” (that expression basically means to promote the killing of all Israelis, I don’t care how you look at it). Why are you trying to call a cease fire with t*rrorists who are known to constantly break ceasefire, then make a surprised Pikachu face when they do it again?

Anti-Zionism is a clever cover for anti-semitism. The very definition of Zionism is the pursuit of an independent Jewish state (of which there is currently only ONE - for comparison, there are 57 Muslim countries). A lot of people don’t even know what Zionism is when they call themselves Anti-Zionist. And if you do? Most Jews are Zionist. You can’t separate semitism from Zionism to make yourself feel better. Israel is such a tiny country, it takes 6 hours to drive end-to-end across the longest part. While all over the world, synagogues are being threatened, Jewish graveyards are being vandalized, and Jews are being attacked, you are absolutely telling me and my people that we don’t deserve a safe space. And yes, Jews are indigenous to the Middle East just like Arabs are.

How do people rally against discrimination, but in the same breath act like discrimination towards Jews doesn’t count? You can’t reason your way out of it. You do not get to tell me what is and isn’t antisemitic.

Hamas does NOT give a damn about the actual land that Jews are living on. Hamas’s ultimate goal is to kill all Jews (it's LITERALLY spelled out in their government charter), is that what people want?? And even if you deny it, you think you could theoretically move all 8 million Jews out of Israel to where exactly?

You think other countries want to welcome a mass migration of 8 million Jews? (Remember why Jews left in the first place?) You want literal t*rrorists to have a stronger foothold in the Middle East?

Why do the surrounding countries condemn Israel, yet not step up to help Gazans either? Why won’t they open up their borders?

I’m sick and tired of people who have zero stake in the Middle East and very little knowledge just jumping on the bandwagon and virtue-signaling like it’s some clear black-and-white situation when it’s not. And then having the nerve to lecture ME. I’m angry and I’m frustrated.

Bring them the fuck home.

[destiel-news-channel]

Today is the 80 year anniversary of the freeing of auschwitz

We can’t forget the holocaust and we can’t let it happen again

Here is the official website of the Auschwitz memorial and museum. Today, 27th January 2025, marks not only the 80th anniversary of the freeing of about 7 thousand prisoners from the camp but also the International Holocaust Remembrance Day as declared by the UN in 2005.

I have copied an excerpt from the website about the number of victims below but would also urge everyone to read up more about the history of Auschwitz and the atrocities committed there. I have seen a horrifying amount of Holocaust inversion and denial in the last few months especially and the one of the first things we can do to combat this antisemitism is to inform ourselves and others about the Holocaust. Never again is now.

"The number of victims

Until the end of its existence, the Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. In other camps, the death rate was lowered from 1943 in an effort to conserve the labor force. In Auschwitz, however, where new transports, mostly of Jews, arrived continuously and kept the camp supplied with laborers, human life never had any great significance.

Historians estimate that around 1,1 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. The second most numerous group, some 70 thousand, was the Poles, and the third most numerous, about 21 thousand, the Roma and Sinti. About 15 thousand Soviet POWs and some 12 thousand prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds (including Czechs, Belorussians, Yugoslavians, French, Germans, and Austrians) also died there.

In view of the role that it played in the realization of the Nazi extermination plans, Auschwitz is known around the world as a symbol of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany, and especially of the destruction of the Jews."

- Auschwitz Memorial and Museum

[mariacallous]

Eva Szepesi, 92, is traveling this week to the Nazi concentration camp she narrowly survived, where her mother and brother were both murdered.

Szepesi, who grew up in Slovakia and now lives in Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the last survivors of Auschwitz alive today. Just 50 of them are expected to be present on Monday at the camp in Poland for a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation — down from 300 a decade ago and 1,000 a decade before that.

The ceremony comes amid widespread anxiety over whether knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing as the number of Jews who survived it dwindles. For Szepesi, however, the history has lost none of its power.

“Auschwitz will stay with me until the last day, the last moment,” she said.

For the first time, this year’s milestone ceremony will not feature any speeches by politicians. In addition to the survivors who speak, the only other addresses will come from World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder, representing major donors to the memorial site, and historian Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Five years ago, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda was the only politician to speak. This year, he is facing criticism over Poland’s pledge not to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant over the Gaza war, in the unlikely event that Netanyahu visits for the ceremony.

“A lot of people are tired of these speeches by officials, functionaries, politicians,” said Yves Kugelmann, the Switzerland-based editor in chief of Aufbau, a magazine started by German-speaking Jewish emigres in 1934. Its newest edition is dedicated to the subject of Auschwitz and memory, and includes contributions by survivors.

“It is important that we have the witnesses talking about what they experienced,” Kugelmann said.

When Soviet troops entered the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, they found 7,000 survivors whom the fleeing SS had left behind.

Twenty years ago, about 1,000 of them attended commemoration ceremonies at the site, in bitter cold. Now, that is the total number of Auschwitz survivors alive worldwide, according to an estimate by the Claims Conference, which negotiates restitution for survivors and recently launched a campaign featuring messages from 80 of them. (The group found last year that there were fewer than 250,000 survivors alive globally.) Most are in their 90s, and relatively few are able to make the trip.

This year’s event is “the last where we will have a visible group of survivors with us,” said Paweł Sawicki, deputy spokesman for the Auschwitz Memorial. “And this is why it is so important to put the entire spotlight on the survivors.”

“They will give the main addresses, and we will not have any politicians giving speeches,” he said, adding, “We do not want to assault this memory by [its] being politically instrumentalized.”

State representatives “will be present, but they will be listening to the voices of survivors,” Sawicki said, noting that it was survivors who in the early postwar years came up with the idea of having a memorial at the site.

Thousands of people are expected to be on hand for the ceremony, which marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (A Jewish and Israeli memorial day for the Holocaust, Yom Hashoah, falls in April.) A heated tent has been set up for participants around the infamous gate to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, historians say, of the estimated 1.3 million people deported to the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1940 to 1945, 1.1 million were murdered there; around 1 million of them were Jews.

For decades, their stories have been told by the few survivors. In the videos shared by the Claims Conference, one survivor, Alfred Sobotka, shares a photo from his bar mitzvah, and points to his father and brother, both gassed on arrival at Auschwitz.

Another, Alice Ginsburg, recalls “the heart-wrenching experience of being separated from my family” forever.

In just a few words, each of them paints a universe lost.

Szepesi, who also appears in a video, was the only survivor from her immediate family. She was only 12 when she was deported to Auschwitz in November 1944, several months after her family had sent her alone into hiding with relatives in Slovakia.

Very few children arriving at Auschwitz survived. She was selected for work, cleaning ammunition. She clung to the hope of being reunited with her family. Liberation came; she later returned to Budapest, where she met her husband, a fellow survivor named Andor Szepesi. They married in 1951, started a family and eventually applied for asylum in what was then West Germany, moving there in 1954.

Eva Szepesi first went back to the site for the commemoration in 1995, convinced by her daughters Judith and Anita. After the ceremony she spoke with students for the first time; they sat cross-legged on the floor in her hotel and listened, rapt.

“I just started and it all bubbled up,” she recalled. Since that time, she has spoken with numerous school groups, particularly in Germany.

“I start with my happy childhood, which was very short” but had a lasting impact, she said. “I received a lot of love.”

She tells them “that when they experience injustice, they should stand up and not remain silent; they should get informed, not believe everything straight away. And you have to be careful that something like that never happens again,” she said, adding that listeners “always tell me, we will be the witnesses of the survivors when they are no longer here; we will pass it on.”

In 2016, she finally learned the fates of her parents and brother. Her granddaughter researched at the Auschwitz archive and found Szepesi’s mother, Valeria Diamant, on a list of murdered Jews.

“I was so scared,” recalled Szepesi, who had accompanied her granddaughter to the archive. As if in a dream, “I saw my mother’s name with my own eyes.” She scanned the list and found her brother’s name, Tamás Diamant, as well.

She had waited 70 years, hoping her mother would come for her. It turned out she had been murdered shortly before Eva arrived at the camp.

“It’s always a terrible thought for me, that she saw from above that her little daughter marched in, into Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau,” she said.

All Eva Szepesi has from her childhood, aside from memories, is a handful of photos that a neighbor had hidden and handed to her uncle, wrapped in a newspaper, after the war. Szepesi looks at them every day, and even sometimes speaks with them.

The shattering knowledge about what happened to her family brought some closure. But she still asks herself: “My little brother was four years younger, and he was murdered. Why am I allowed to live, and he had to die? But I don’t get an answer.”

Educators and Jewish organizations have been working to devise strategies for teaching about the Holocaust when the last survivors with memory of the Holocaust can no longer tell their stories — a prospect that grows nearer by the day. Virtual and augmented reality is increasingly playing a role, as are the children and grandchildren of survivors.

On Monday, Szepesi will be a guest of the World Jewish Congress, accompanied by her younger daughter, Anita Schwarz.

The return to Auschwitz is “like going to visit my grandmother. That is where I actually felt her presence for the first time,” Schwarz said.

“There are so many young people today who don’t know what Auschwitz is, who can’t relate to it at all,” Schwarz added. “Only when you really come to terms with history, and actually with your own family history, can you understand what it means and that you really have to do something, so it doesn’t happen again.”

[unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240]

To follow up on my Hosanna poll, I think before things go any further, it'd be good to actually explain and define it. I was initially going to wait until the end of the poll, but it seems that google is giving people a lot of bad and/or conflicting answers and I'd rather people walk away with the correct information.

So! Hosanna is an anglicized version of the Hebrew words "hosha na" [הושע נא or as a contraction הושענא]. Hosha na is a little enigmatic and hard to translate, but the simplest translation is probably "save us, please." It's traditionally used as an exclamation to G-d to rescue us, but it also has shades of being a triumphant shout (the implication being confidence that G-d will save us.)

Jews say "hoshanot" (the plural of hosha na) as part of our traditional Sukkot liturgy, and is something we do still today.

For us, the multi-faceted meaning of the root word allows us to have multiple layers of meaning. During Sukkot, we start praying for rain in its proper season and amounts, and we shake the lulav and etrog as part of these processions and liturgy. On Hoshana Rabba [the "great hoshana"], the last day of Sukkot, we process around the bimah (front lectern) seven times as a completion of our season of repentance and our starting of the new year with abundant blessings.

My siddur (prayer book) Lev Shalem has this as an explanation and translation:

[Image ID is of the Lev Shalem siddur, pages 382 & 383 - I tried hard to find a pdf of this that would be readable using a screen reader, but the versions I'm finding cut off at pg. 376 at the latest. If anyone has bandwidth to type this up, I would greatly appreciate it]

For the curious, here is a recording of the Hoshanot liturgy and procession:

Christians mostly know the word from the gospels and hymns.

Here is what Wikipedia says about its use in Christianity:

Historical meaning

Since those welcoming Jesus were Jewish, as of course Jesus himself was, some would interpret the cry of "Hosanna" on the entry of Jesus in its proper meaning, as a cry by the people for salvation and rescue.

Christian reinterpretation

"Hosanna" many interpret as a shout of praise or adoration made in recognition of the messiahship of Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem

It is applied in numerous verses of the New Testament, including "Hosanna! blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lᴏʀᴅ!" (Matthew 21:9,15; Mark 11:9–10; John 12:13), which forms part of the Sanctus prayer; "hosanna in the highest" (Mark 11.10); and "hosanna to the Son of David" (Matt 21:9). These quotations, however, are of words in the Jewish Psalm 118. Although not used in the book of Luke, the testimony of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is recorded in Luke 19.

In church music

The "Hosanna Anthem", based on the phrase Hosanna, is a traditional Moravian Church anthem written by Bishop Christian Gregor of Herrnhut sung on Palm Sunday and the first Sunday of Advent. It is antiphonal, i.e. a call-and-response song; traditionally, it is sung between the children and adult congregation, though it is not unheard of for it to be done in other ways, such as between choir and congregation, or played between trombone choirs.

The bottom line:

Jews and Christians have different connections, associations, and meanings attached to this word as expressions of our different theologies and texts. The word is derived from a Hebrew word and was created by Jews and is still used by us today. (Like literally today - we are currently in the middle of the Sukkot festival.) Christians changed the meaning to fit within their own context, and pronunciation of the word evolved with linguistic drift over time. In the same way that there's not a reason to pitch a fit over saying Jesus rather than Yeshua, there's no compelling reason to change hosanna back to hosha na; if anything, the distinction helps make it clear that it's effectively a different word and concept from ours.

On the other hand, I do think Christians ought to know the original meaning of the word if they're going to use it. To only ever know their version when it was derived from ours is yet another small way of playing into supercessionism by erasing and replacing the Jewish context of things that were originated in Judaism that Christians have embedded in Christianity. While the Christians of today cannot unwind the supercessionism of Christian history, they *can* choose to understand their present Christianity in ways that do not play into supercessionism and that respect the Jewish community of today.

I hope this was helpful and gives folks a new perspective on an obscure Hebrew word!

[creature-wizard]

A brief introduction to New Age spirituality (and some of the things wrong with it)

New Age can be summed up as spiritual movement that believes our planet is on the cusp of a new cosmic cycle (hence the term New Age) where humanity enters the next phase of its evolution. Its mythology incorporates a number of fringe beliefs and conspiracy theories, including Atlantis, Lemuria, ancient astronaut theory, and numerous conspiracy theories.

It was heavily influenced by the teachings of Helena Blavatsky, one of the main founders of Theosophy. Influenced by Victorian-age misconceptions about the nature of evolution, Blavatsky taught that we would soon enter the Age of Aquarius, where we would begin to see a new "race" of people who naturally had more powerful spiritual abilities, and then:

Then, as they increase, and their numbers become with every age greater, one day they will awake to find themselves in a majority. It is the present men who will then begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until these die out in their turn in civilised lands ; surviving only in small groups on islands—the mountain peaks of to-day—where they will vegetate, degenerate, and finally die out, perhaps millions of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam-Nyam and the dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. (The Secret Doctrine, Volume II, page 445.)

You can see the influence of eugenics here - she's basically saying that when "superior" people arrive on the scene, then it's just the natural order for the "inferior" ones to die out.

New Age is rife with ideas informed by eugenics, including the belief that you literally have to "upgrade" your DNA to spiritually grow and the belief that humans are destined to become the most powerful beings in the galaxy because we were engineered from the best DNA each alien race had to offer. There are supposedly alien beings who are incapable of genuine kindness because it's just not in their genetic code, and these beings are said to walk among us. There are allegedly alien beings and even some people who cannot connect to the divine because it's not in their DNA.

I want to emphasize here that saying some people are just genetically incapable of kindness or experiencing God is the kind of thing people do when there's a bunch of people they really, really want to die. This is the rhetoric of genocide.

In fact, the evil aliens in New Age mythology, the reptilians, are based on antisemitic conspiracy theories. Depending on who you listen to, they're said to drink human blood and eat human flesh, or just feed on their life force or mental anguish. (Blood libel.) They're claimed to be behind everything described in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. They supposedly disguise themselves as humans so they can exploit us. (Not all Jews are supposedly reptilians, and not all people accused of being reptilians are Jews, but Jews make up a disproportionate number of people claimed to be reptilians.)

David Icke, who is behind the reptilian alien conspiracy theory most people know today, wrote in his book The Biggest Secret (page 212):

The so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion were discovered in the last century and tell in incredible detail the events and methods of manipulation we have seen manifest in the 20th century. These documents were very much the creation of the Rothschilds and the reptilian-Aryans. But they are not really the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they are, in truth, the Protocols of SION, the Sun, and the Priory of Sion. So much disinformation and aggression has been hurled at the Protocols and anyone who has mentioned them - including me - because the Brotherhood are desperate to discredit their contents. It is far too close to home. Hitler used the Protocols in part to justify the oppression of Jews, but he was given the Protocols by a Rothschild agent of Khazar decent called Alfred Rosenberg. I don’t accept that the Protocols are ‘Jewish’ in the way people have come to understand that term. They are the work of the reptile-Aryans and made to appear ‘Jewish’ so that we lose the plot.

Icke is also invoking a discredited hypothesis that proposed Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a group of Khazars who converted to Judaism. No one takes it seriously anymore, except for some people who try and use it to claim that Ashkenazi Jews aren't actually real Jews. It's a very ridiculous conspiracy theory because even if Ashkenazi Jews were descended from Khazars, they would still be 100% real Jews. The only people who think your "real" culture or ethnicity determined solely by your genetics are eugenicists. (Go look up blood quantum and the Mischling test.)

Moreover, the "Brotherhood" Icke refers to is a variation on Alexander Hislop's conspiracy theory that the Catholic Church is secretly a Babylonian mystery cult. Hislop was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who claimed in his book The Two Babylons that Babylonians were behind every religion that wasn't good, wholesome Protestant Christianity. He asserted, for example, that "Easter" was derived from "Ishtar" on the simple basis that they sound kind of similar. He also claimed that nearly every pagan god and goddess was actually based on Semiramis, Nimrod, and their son Tammuz (who was regarded as a reincarnation of Nimrod). Hislop's assertions also rely on a literal interpretation of the stories of the Flood and the Tower of Babel. There is of course to evidence to support any of these claims. This article briefly explains just how bad Hislop's methodology is. (By the way, each and every conspiracy theory that claims a Babylonian mystery cult is behind everything is derived from Hislop's work!)

The rest of the alien mythology New Age incorporates also has racist origins. The existence of large and sophisticated stonework like the Great Pyramids challenged the belief that Europeans were inherently superior to the non-white people they considered primitive. So people began to propose that others had built these structures for them. (Ignatius L. Donnelly, for example, proposed that they'd been built by Atlanteans.)

One of the first people to propose aliens was Erich von Daniken. In his 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?, he tried to spin various Sumerian myths and Biblical stories as historical accounts of alien beings. He listed a number of sites as likely to have been built by aliens, such as various pyramids and the moai of Easter Island. Most of today's ancient astronaut conspiracy theories are influenced by this book in some way.

Now here's the thing: the main methodology of ancient astronaut theorists is to look at an ancient structure and say, "Well, I can't figure out how humans could have built it, so it must have been aliens." And then from there, twist and distort local legends and myths - if the story talks about beings from the sky, then they must have been aliens. If a divine being had any kind of vehicle or craft, then it must have been a spaceship. Etc. Cultural and historical contexts are ignored and archaeological evidence is cherry picked.

Oh, by the way, before writing this book, von Daniken spent time in prison for embezzlement, forgery, and fraud:

A court in his native Switzerland found Von Daniken guilty of embezzlement, forgery, and fraud, sentencing him to three and a half years in prison. While operating a Swiss hotel. it seems he fraudulently obtained money by misrepresenting his financial assets, this experience in deception later proving invaluable in his literary career.

In any case, Jason Colavito noticed that von Daniken's narrative looked more like HP Lovecraft than real ancient mythology. Specifically, The Call of Cthulhu proposed that ancient gods came from space:

There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

Meanwhile, The Call of Cthulhu was essentially Lovecraft's own response to Theosophy. Once you compare The Call of Cthulhu with Theosophy's teachings, it's pretty hard to miss that he was straight-up telling Theosophy where to shove it.

Another influence on New Age mythology was Zechariah Sitchin, who also claimed that Sumerian myths actually described alien encounters. It was he who spun the yarn that they engineered humanity to mine gold for them, and he published these ideas in his 1976 book, The 12th Planet. Dr. Michael Heiser's website sitchiniswrong.com explains how Sitchin distorted myths and language to support his narrative.

To try and give you an idea of what these people are doing, I want you to imagine someone coming up and telling you that JRR Tolkien was actually an alien contactee, and that the elves in Lord of the Rings represent an alien species he actually met. Even if you knew absolutely nothing about Tolkien or Lord of the Rings, you could research who he was as a person and it wouldn't take very long to work out that it wasn't alien visitations who inspired him, and you could easily read his books and see that the narratives just don't really suggest anything about alien visitors. So it is with the ancient cultures and texts ancient astronaut proponents plunder. Once you really get in and do the research, it's obvious that these people are cherry picking what they want to hear and projecting what they want to see.

Various ancient astronaut theorists have done this with all kinds of traditions from around the world, and it's become so prevalent that numerous people just take it for granted that these stories were actually all about aliens and somebody just covered it up. If you're one of those people, I encourage you to start chasing down the sources. Start searching for - and start demanding - citations and sources. I promise you, it's all going to go back to some racist white asshat or other. If somebody cites a holy text or legend or something, read it for yourself, and I promise you it won't actually say what you've been told it says. (You'll find that somebody just saw something talking about divine beings from the sky and projected aliens onto it, or otherwise pretend it says something that's just not actually in there.)

New Age mythology also incorporates a number of benevolent alien races. Most of them aren't too remarkable; they're mostly your one-note Planet of Hats aliens, not so much offensive as they are uninspired, bland, and even a little twee. They embody a very average western person's idea of what enlightened or advanced beings would look like. In channeled messages they often dole out generic platitudes couched in New Age jargon. Their advice is probably enough to satiate the middle class white people who make up most of their audience, but it's almost useless - if not insulting - if you have any genuinely difficult problems. Through their channelers, they deliver messages of miraculous wonders and changes ahead - always just a few years around the corner. Of course these promises never manifest, and of course the channelers keep on repeating them.

To be clear, the benevolent aliens were supposed to reveal themselves to humanity dozens of times by now. We were supposed to have miraculous quantum healing technology available everywhere by now. We were supposed to have a new economic system that would end poverty by now. The history of New Age is a history of failed prophecies and broken promises.

There is one genre of "benevolent" alien we have to talk about in specific, however - specifically, the Nordic type, so named because they are supposedly tall, pale, and blond. One might also say they look… Aryan. They pop up quite a lot. One notable alien of this type of Commander Ashtar, a high-ranking leader in the Galactic Federation of Light. Through the many people who purport to channel him, Ashtar has assured us that the evil reptilian aliens have already been defeated, and that a time of great peace and prosperity is just about to arrive.

Commander Ashtar, by the way, was first channeled by George van Tassel in the early 1950's. He published his sessions in his book, I Rode The Flying Saucer. Here are a couple of interesting quotes:

On July 18, 1952, Ashtar seemingly told us that we had to stop building hydrogen bombs or else they'd make us stop:

When they explode the hydrogen atom, they shall extinguish life on this planet. They are tinkering with a formula they do not comprehend. They are destroying a life-giving element of the Creative Intelligence. Our message to you is this: You shall advance to your government all information we have transmitted to you. You shall request that your government shall immediately contact all other earth nations regardless of political feelings … Your materialists will disagree with our attempt to warn mankind. Rest assured they shall cease to explore life giving atoms, or we shall eliminate all projects connected with such.

On August 22, 1952, Ashtar seemingly told Van Tassel to start preparing for disaster that never came:

You are constructed to work together without personal regard for individual property. You are instructed further to consolidate your unity to build structures possible to prepare for food storage due to rapid changes now affecting the financial, military and political conjunction. We advance you this information in the light of true love.

Obviously, nothing ever happened to justify any kind of prepping, and aliens never intervened to stop anybody from building nuclear bombs, which just goes to show that alien channelers have been setting us up for disappointment as far back as when boomers were babies.

Another aspect of the New Age movement that has to be talked about are starseeds. This is basically the idea that alien beings are incarnating into human bodies for essentially the purpose of spreading New Age beliefs to help the planet ascend to 5D. There are many issues with this whole concept. For one, there is a strong current of ableism - when you read any list of starseed traits, you'll inevitably see a list of characteristics more typically associated with ADHD, autism, and even just low-grade social trauma. Some proponents even go so far as to claim that autism and ADHD don't actually exist at all, but were made up to hide the reality of starseeds from the populace. Young children who are believed to be starseeds are expected to show advanced spiritual powers and wisdom, and I should think it's pretty obvious how placing these kinds of expectations on a young child - especially one who is probably struggling with neurodivergence-related issues already - could cause some psychological damage.

Moreover, the whole starseed myth is rooted in white colonialism; specifically, the idea that "primitive" cultures need to be taught true spirituality by more advanced or enlightened peoples. It's the whole "we need to send missionaries out to bring those poor unenlightened Natives to Christ" mentality in a new hat. The aforementioned distortions of cultural beliefs serves a purpose here, too; if they can just convince people that their own traditions are actually about aliens, then they'll have to convert. This is also out of the Christian playbook; for example, Christians would try and project Jesus into Kabbalah to convince Jews to convert. (Dr. Justin Sledge talks about this in his online lecture, The Dark Side of Perennialism.)

I don't think many New Agers (if any) are particularly conscious of the colonialism happening here. As far as they understand it, they are simply spreading the truth which will help usher in this new era of enlightenment and prosperity. But that's what makes it to insidious - this glittering truth they've actually fallen in love with is actually a pack of lies.

Also, many practices and beliefs within the New Age movement make it incredibly easy to manipulate people. Teaching people that information contrary to their own teachings is all the work of an evil conspiracy stifles critical thinking. Teaching them that they can always use their feelings and intuition to tell what's true or false makes them vulnerable to emotional manipulation.

Many New Agers also practice various techniques to try and learn about their past lives, including hypnosis and similar forms of trancework. There is no evidence that these exercises can help anyone remember really remember much of anything; in fact, people mostly seem to confabulate things based on what they expect to see and what they've been generally exposed to. A number of people "remember" encountering the reptilian aliens described by David Icke - the ones we've established are based on the conspiracy theories promoted in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and The Two Babylons, and recycle the old blood libel canard. (If you'd like some examples, you can see them over here and over here.) Interestingly, there is some research that suggests people who believe they have past life memories actually have a poor ability to recall where they learned information, which further suggests that these people are just confabulating from things they've seen or heard in this life - they just forgot where they encountered it.

Also, the pseudohistory and conspiracy theories in New Age mythology are often used to promote a lot of medical quackery. Vaccines are often claimed to be mind control technology or meant to poison us (another conspiracy theory with antisemitic roots), while treatments with little to no evidence to support their efficacy are promoted instead, such as homeopathy, colloidal silver, or whatever this week's alleged panacea is.

Now to be clear, not each and everything New Agers do is inherently bad. Many practices associated with New Age can have psychological benefits, provided they don't become spiritual bypassing. We know that meditation is good for you, and I personally find that speaking "light languages" is cathartic. There's even evidence to suggest that energy healing promotes relaxation, if nothing else. If somebody's practice is helping them in any way (even if it's just helping them relax and focus) and it's not hurting anyone else, then I think they should keep doing it. We need all the tools we can get right now.

The problems lie with the conspiratorial and pseudohistorical narratives the belief system pushes, and the uncritical acceptance that mystical or spiritual experiences that seem to confirm them should be taken at face value. These things to justify the oppression of minorities and the erasure of their cultures, justify colonialist attitudes and behaviors in general, and promote dangerous medical quackery. It's these things specifically that must be challenged and fought.

[matan4il]

IDK how to write today's update post. There were so many things I meant to include info about, but now everything pales in the face of the terrible news we got this morning.

At least 24 Israeli soldiers were killed in the last 24 hours in Gaza.

Here are the faces of some of them:

The terrorists responsible for most of these deaths, attacked in a spot just 600 meters (0.37 miles, with the border breached on Oct 7 in the middle) from a southern Israeli community, Kissufim.

[this paragraph is for the people spewing hate, on and off anon : if you read the news and smiled to yourself, or felt any kind of joy, I want you to know that's vile. It's devoid of any morality or humanity. You can tell yourself and others that you're for human rights all you want, but if you feel joy at the death of human beings, human beings who had the right to live (and would have lived, had it not been for the terrible massacre Hamas carried out on Oct 7, which the terrorists promised to recreate repeatedly, targeting Israelis and Jews alike), then you're not for human rights. It's just an excuse you use to be able to publicly celebrate the death of Jews, and of non-Jewish citizens of the Jewish state who defend their fellow Jews. It's just the same, age old antisemitism under a new guise]

IDK how to explain what that number does to me, as an Israeli, as a Jew, as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

I still remember the morning of Oct 7, as the news started pouring in. First, just talking about the rockets, they had no confirmation of casualties yet. Then, we got the news of one elderly woman, killed by a rocket as she left her home to open the communal bomb shelter for others to use. Then suddenly it was 5 dead, then 10, then 22, along with the news that Palestinian terrorists from Gaza have invaded Israel's south.

And I knew then that the number is going to be higher. The way it normally goes with news of terrorist attack, is you first get a big number, those killed immediately or shortly after the attack, and then there are a few more wounded who don't make it. Basically, there's a big number, and then a small adjustment. Something like... first hearing about the 10 immedaite casualties of an attack, then the number is adjusted to 12 or 13 in the following hours, or days. But here, the jump in the number of dead from 10 to 22 told me we're not in the "small adjustment phase" yet. We're still in the "counting the initial big number phase."

That was so hard, because 22 was already hard to deal with. Up until Oct 7, if I remember correctly, we had lost 38 people in 2023 to Palestinian terrorism. That was already considered the bloodiest year in terms of terrorism victims since the second intifada. People were already grieving, asking questions about what was going on, talking about how the renewal of certain (American) funding to Palestinians (such as the Palestinian Authority's Pay for Slay program) was causing this surge in murderous activity, and what can be done to change the situation. To lose 22 people in one day meant that the number of 2023 terrorism victims was almost doubled already... and we were not yet done counting our dead. The grief and loss of almost 9 months and change almost doubled in a day... and it was likely about to grow.

The number of dead kept rising. We jumped from 22 to 50. From 50 to 100. Then 200. Still no sign of getting to the "small adjustment phase" and it was hard to breathe with every new update. We got to 300, and it was almost unbearable. Then 450. A jump of 150 dead. There was no way to process it, no way to really comprehend it, and the worst was always that the jumps in numbers between updates meant we're still in the "counting the initial big number phase." Somewhere after 600 and before the next update, I realized from an interview (nothing official, just the implication of what one person, who was in the know, said) that it was not going to be less than 1,000 people killed. And I no longer felt like I could contain any of it. The horror, the grief, the shock, the struggle to comprehend that this is real, and not the worst nightmare I've ever had.

At least 1,200 people were murdered during Hamas' massacre. It's been over 3 months, and when I write that I didn't know how to contain everything I was feeling back then, I still don't. So you might think, what's 24 people in comparison to 1,200 dead? But that's not how it works. The death of one person does not pale in comparison with the death of the many.

When I work on Holocaust research, and I work on the testimony of one Jewish girl, who had to watch her father being beaten in front of her eyes by Nazi-collaborating Italian fascist soldiers in a concentration camp in Libya, in northern Africa, when I try to process what the murder of just one parent, just one person means to her, I know it's the destruction of her whole world. It doesn't lessen the pain, that the number of Jewish Holocaust victims outside of Europe is "just" in the thousands, while in Europe it's in the millions. One death can in itself be impossible to bear.

And here's the thing. Those deaths and their impact accumulate. We didn't just learn today that we lost 24 soldiers. We lost 24 worlds (because as the Jewish saying goes, "He who kills one person, it's as if he killed the entire world, and he who saves one person, it's as if he saved the whole world," Mishna Sanhedrin 4.5) and we lost them as a part of now over 220 soldiers we lost in this war (see below a map of Israel with a red dot for every place where at least one soldier was killed), which was forced upon us with the murder and destruction of over 1,200 worlds, which comes after 75 years of a conflict we didn't want, in which we lost 28,000 worlds, and that followed a genocide in which we lost at least 6,000,000 worlds, and that in itself is the peak of almost two thousand years of persecution, during which the full and total number of Jews lost, of worlds destroyed just because of antisemitism, will never be known. All I know is that the Jews we know today, we're not the Jewish people. We are what's left of the Jewish people. And we will live. Am Yisrael Chai. Always. In the face of countless attempts at our destruction, we're still here. But we remember them all. Every single soul lost. Every world destroyed. Every child that had been murdered, every child that will never get to be born. We have lost 24 worlds today, and the fact that we have lost so many before, only makes the loss worse.

And we would not have lost a single person in the fighting in Gaza if we had actually been guilty of the crimes they accuse us of. We could have wiped out all of Gaza from the air, without risking the life of a single soldier on the ground. Every one of the Israeli soldiers killed, died to protect Israelis, as well as to save Palestinian civilians.

The way I feel right now, I think about the words of one member of Kissufim who I heard today: "We are broken, but strong."

May the memory of those lost be a blessing, every single one of them, every Jewish person, and non-Jew killed for standing with Jews, in every generation.

You're all still with me, I carry all of you in my heart, always.

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

[xclowniex]

Okay I need peoples opinions in this.

There is a tik tok creator and author who has a series on tik tok they're trying to turn into a book called Cafae Latte.

It is this very queer and diverse series. All characters are played by one woman, the creator who is white.

She has 2 jewish characters, both are dragons who shape shifted into humans. One wears a magen david and the other is orthodox and wears a tichel. The creator wears them when portraying the respective characters

Now I have an issue with this for a few reasons which all fall under the big glaring thing of, they didn't consult any jews or do any research past the surface!

First issue of business is the tichel. I do find it incredibly disrespectful for a non jew to wear a tichel when you're portraying a Jewish character and you can't even get tzniut correctly. It wasn't until they finally got a tichel, that they learnt thay they needed to cover their collar bone and elbows. Especially when you also don't call it a tichel and just call it a "jewish head covering". If you're trying to make a Jewish character who keeps tzniut, these are basic things you should know if you did any research!

Second order of business, the magen david. I do find this disrespectful as it's not really for non jews to wear???? Like it's not like you commit this great atrocity by wearing it. But considering their poor rep with the character above, I doubt they know anything meaning behind it and why its important to jews. Plus it's pretty much literally just used to signify that the character is Jewish and that's it.

Thirdly order of business, idk how else to start this besides, they unjewished hebrew??????

Like they were creating a family crest for one of their jewish characters and had this design with the tree of life and some hebrew and wanted help on getting the hebrew correct and said "hebrew speakers and that probably include jews, I think. I need your help with this hebrew".

Like excuse me what. Not all jews speak hebrew and not all hebrew speakers are jewish, but the majority of hebrew speakers are jewish. Adding jews as this after thought which may technically be included is awful.

Last order of business. This time, not about the jewish characters but the arab and muslim one.

Therre is this character they play who is a Muslim arab amercian and they said in their intro post for this character "I'm not sure which arab country specifically she is from as I'm not educated enough". Like excuse me what. There are cultural differences between different arab countries, not in a way which they're completely different from each other but it is a thing.

And to make matters worse, she has a YouTube video giving tips on writing diversity well.

And idk it just really irks me as they are a published writer, who is all about good diversity representation yet can't even do it properly. Consulting jews, not even jews actually, hebrew speakers to use their words, is not enough to give good rep. You need to talk to rabbis, jewish community leaders in general.

[girlactionfigure]

My father died in 2016. I didn't attend his funeral or burial in Cairo. I felt awful, so I asked my family for some belongings to remind me of him. I was given quite a few things, including a book that bought us in 2000 and often read for me and my brother.

The book is called "stories of animals in the Quran". The publisher is based in downtown Cairo and the book can be found anywhere.

Today, I will share some of the quotes from this book (cover page attached in this post and other photos in first comment).    

- The Golden Calf: the house of Israel are idol worshippers who are not true to faith. 

- Elephant: there was once a man who was king in Yemen, his name was "Zu Nawas", he was a tyrant. Two Jewish men lured him to embrace Judaism and to leave Christianity and force Judaism on the people, but the people didn't abandon Christianity. So, they [the men] suggested that he dig a deep pit and fill it with fire and offer the people an ultimatum, embrace Judaism or be thrown in the fire. 

- Donkey: better than Jews who were burdened with the Torah and rather than keep it, they forged it and altered it. 

- Apes: the ape Saturday people, Allah never transfigured a nation to the most degenerate animal as he did to the house of Israel. Allah obliged them to Friday, they deviated from it and accepted Saturday. 

I was 10 in 2000, my brother was 7. This is what we were told about Jews. This is what kids are taught in Muslim countries. 

But, of course, go ahead. Tell yourself that Israel is to blame. Scream, "free Palestine", and fall for the lie that the antisemitism we see on our streets has nothing to do with MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM and a campaign of GLOBAL JIHAD waged by millions of Muslims across the world. 

Go on, fall for the lies. Be a useful idiot. But, don't you ever dare gaslight me and tell me that what I was taught and experienced, and that the evidence I show you TODAY, is not true!!!

I will speak out against Muslim antisemitism until the last day of my life. I have a favour to ask: please share this with all the loud Muslim activists who argue there's no antisemitism within Muslim communities, especially Mehdi Hasan who blocked me, and the loud broadcasters involved in this conflict, such as Piers Morgan!

"the book is called "stories of animals in the Quran"

[beardedmrbean]

Far-left, pro-Palestine Councilmember Shahana Hanif is suddenly bending over backwards to show support for the Chosen People — now that she’s in a tight challenge against a Jewish primary opponent.

Until just four months ago, Hanif, 33, who reps the 39th district — which includes parts of Brownstone Brooklyn, including liberal bastion Park Slope, but also heavily Orthodox Jewish Borough Park — has almost never bashed Hamas or spoken up for Israel.

But when the Israeli restaurant Miriam was vandalized last week in Park Slope, the councilwoman fired off a statement to condemn the vandalism

“This hateful act threatens the safety of our community,” she wrote on X.

On the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Hanif released a statement of support calling out the terrorist bloodbath — something she rarely does.

Hanif was singing a far different tune before a primary threat emerged in August from Maya Kornberg, a Jewish Democrat who works at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice.

In April 2023, Hanif was one of just two council members to vote against an ‘End Jew Hatred Day’ resolution — calling it a “far right” idea.

In the days after Hamas’ attack Hanif insisted in a since-deleted post on X “the root cause of this war is the illegal, immoral, and unjust occupation of the Palestinian people,” and that “no peace” should be expected.

At a “Cease Fire Now Rally for Gaza” in Bryant Park  where Hanif was arrested, hundreds of protestors shouted the anti-Israel chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Another since-deleted X post from Hanif demanded a “ceasefire” just five days after the slaughter in an effort to shut down any military response from Israel.

So far, Hanif, elected in 2022, has raised about $68,000 for the June 24 primary contest, while Kornberg is nipping at her heels with almost $63,000 in the bank, according to campaign finance data.

Rabbi Andy Bachman, a former senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, said Hanif called him to offer support in August after a bookstore in her district canceled a talk from him because he was a “Zionist” — but described her recent outreach “too little and too late.”

“My perspective is as a lifelong proud Democrat, any politician who is unwilling to . . . condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization is simply not fit to lead,” he said.

In a statement Team Hanif said she would “always work to keep all New Yorkers safe by addressing the root causes of violence” and insisted that she had “repeatedly and categorically condemned Hamas.”

They refused to send any past example of her doing so.