Return of the Vandals: since the start of the new intifada in September 2000, Israel implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian homes in Occupied Territory: destroyed 4170 homes. The policy of housing demolitions dated back to June 1967, justified as a form of punishment, an admin measure, & a military/security measure. As punishment: used against anyone suspected of any violent activity. All houses are built by & for a particular family: the house is a larger proportion of a family’s wealth than in countries not living under occupation: the land itself is often subject to confiscation: the only other country with such a policy was Saddam’s Iraq: this is an admin process carried out without trial: carried out against suspected offenders. This punishment is illegal under international humanitarian law: Dersh calls it a benign punishment, & collective punishment is a misnomer. 1997 B’Tselem study: Israel created a situation in the West Bank in which 1000s of Palestinians are unable to obtain a permit to build on their land: compelled to build without a permit. Thousands of trees were uprooted: destroyed entire livelihoods. 2004 HRW: the pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat. Israel had exaggerated claims of underground tunnels used to justify home demos: Caterpillar D9: HRW called on the company to suspend sales of these bulldozers. March 2003: Israel held more than 1000 Palestinians in administrative detention. Conclusion: a wide & diverse array of human rights orgs have closely monitored Israeli conduct in the Occupied Territories: the findings are remarkably consistent: Israel’s record is quite singular in many ways: what renders Israel’s abuses unique is the relentless efforts to justify what cannot be justified. It’s the only country where torture was legally sanctioned: HRW posited tens of thousands have been tortured or severely ill-treated over th…

Impurity of Arms: Numbers: in the early weeks of the Second Intifada — Sep 2000 — the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 20:1. The overwhelming majority of Palestinian deaths occurred when no IDF were in danger. September 2000 - November 2003: B’Tselem reports 3,650 Palestinians & 1,142 Israelis killed: Dersh took issue with these numbers: the 3:1 ratio doesn’t reflect the 1000s terrorists sought to kill. In the first few days of intifada the IDF fired about a million shells: Dersh’s claims are debunked. Motive: Dersh maintains the killings can’t be compared because Israeli killing of Palestinians lacked willful intent: he claimed they were unintended, inadvertent. Amnesty International: Israel has ample disposal to less violent options: the overwhelming majority of cases of unlawful killings & injuries in Israel & the Occupied Territories have been committed by the IDF employing excessive force: particularly US-supplied helicopters in punitive rocket attacks in areas that posed no imminent danger: they’ve used helicopter gunships for extrajudicial executions & to fire at targets, including children & other civilians: many of the parts are supplied by the US, UK & Canada. Dersh asserts full Palestinian culpability for the deaths of their children. Driven by Zionist conviction families have made the choice to enter a war zone in the Occupied Territories: the Israeli govt actively encourages the movement of families into this conflict zone for the express purpose of strengthening the Zionist claim over it. To achieve their political objectives, the govt & settlers knowingly & deliberately endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jewish kids. Dersh claimed Rachel Corrie threw herself in front of the bulldozer. Dersh lies about Palestinians being at fault for their lack of access to care. The IDF has exhibited a shocking proclivity for torturing minors & adults alike.

The Greatest Tale Ever Sold: Dershowitz: the defense attorney comes close to being a pure one-sided advocate for his generally guilty client. He published The Case for Israel in 2003: an immediate & influential national bestseller: orgs earmarked a copy for every Jewish high school graduate & distributed it widely on campus: he recruited a small army of research assistants, & claimed to have been working on it since 1967. In his view, Israel’s supporters have been too passive in the face of unwarranted attacks: the time has come for a proactive defense of Israel to be offered in the court of public opinion: he claims he doesn’t really on pro-Israel sources but on objective & even — at times — overtly anti-Israel sources. In truth, he has concocted a threadbare hoax. Amazon tended to bracket the book with Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial: published 1984, after Israel invaded Lebanon & suffered its first major PR debacle. Dershowitz’s book was released in 2003: after the second intifada, when Israel endured another PR disaster. Both books served the same basic purpose of shoring up morale among the Zionist faithful: their M.O. was likewise identical: in the guise of a scholarly tract, each grossly distorts the documentary record: Dersh very rarely adduced any evidence at all, Peters’s forte was mangling primary documents: Dersh is citing absurd sources or stitching claims out of whole cloth: he leans on academic pedigree to wow readers. In lieu of offering supportive evidence, he clinches arguments with rhetorical flourishes like this is a simple fact not subject to reasonable dispute: almost invariably signalling the assertion in general is total rubbish. The core of his book seeks to defend Israel’s human rights record. Since the late 70s, & even more since the beginning of the 1987-1993 uprising, Israel’s human rights record in Occupied Territories has been monitored by human rights orgs, some even based in Israel: also subject to UN & other agencies monitoring fo…

The periodic brouhahas over the new anti-Semitism show continuities even in fine details: Forster & Epstein wrote about Jesus Christ. Superstar: they created an even more anti-Semitic film: Webber & Jewison were castigated for perpetuating the lie that the Jews — collectively — killed Christ. The assault on The Passion struck similar chords: both were accused of whitewashing Pilate’s culpability. Foxman was said to have been appalled at potential anti-Semitic fallout of Gibson's film: but the primary target audience of the film was exactly those Christian fundamentalists with whom ADL has been aligned for years. The crisis of Passion was a win-win situation: if Gibson caved, it would broadcast the message not to mess with Jews: & if he didn’t, it would prove the omnipresence of anti-Semitism. The real target of Forster & Epstein’s The New Anti-Semitism: criticism directed at Israel after the October 1973 war, when new pressures were exerted on Israel to withdraw from the Egyptian Sinai & to reach a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians. It was alleged this hostility against Israel was the heart of the new anti-Semitism: claimed it sprung from anti-Semitism & represented its ultimate form. The possibility that criticism of Israel might have sprung from Israel’s intransigence — its refusal to withdraw despite Arab offers of peace — was too absurd even to consider. In the US, the new anti-Semitism threat emanated — according to Forster & Epstein — from the Radical Left. It was also alleged segments of religious communities were ensnared: a liberal Protestant clergyman said now oppressed become oppressors: Arabs are deported & arrested without charge: calls for peace were conflated with anti-Jew bias. 1982: Perlmutter’s The Real Anti-Semitism in America: American Jewish elites had gravitated even further right: for the Perlmutters, the danger emanating from the left was much larger (left meaning anyone to the left of them). Domestically, as institutionalized anti…

To evade the obvious, another employed stratagem of the lobby is playing The Holocaust & new anti-Semitism (NAS) cards: the allegation is neither new nor about anti-Semitism. Whenever Israel comes under renewed international pressure to withdraw from occupied territories, its apologists mount yet another meticulously orchestrated media extravaganza alleging the world is awash in anti-Semitism. This shameless exploitation of anti-Semitism delegitimizes criticism of Israel, makes Jews rather than Palestinians the victims, & puts the onus on the Arab world to rid itself of anti-Semitism rather than on Israel to rid itself of the Occupied Territories. 3 typical components of what the Israel lobby considers to be anti-Semitism: 1) exaggeration & fabrication, 2) mislabeling legit criticism of Israeli policy, 3) the unjustified yet predictable spillover from criticism of Israel to Jews generally. Norm concludes: if all studies agree: current resentment of Jews has coincided with Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians, then the prudent & moral thing to do is end the occupation: a full withdrawal would also deny true anti-Semites exploiting Israeli policy as a pretext to demonize Jews of a dangerous weapon while also exposing their real agenda. A main reason so much controversy surrounds the conflict: the vast proliferation of sheer fraud masquerading as serious scholarship: for publications on this conflict, mechanisms of quality control barely function: a book can receive rave reviews & still be complete nonsense: the most recent example: Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel: among the most spectacular of frauds ever published on the conflict. Dershowitz appropriates large swaths from the Peters hoax: whereas Peters falsified real sources, Dershowitz cites absurd sources or stitches evidence out of whole cloth: he either distorts or conveys preposterous insights. The point is not that he’s a charlatan: it’s the systematic institutional bias that allows for books …

The injustice inflicted on Palestinians by Zionism was manifest & unanswerable: their right to self-determination & perhaps even to their homeland was being denied. Justifications supplied by Zionists: the historical rights claim: neither historical nor rooted in any concept of morality: it voided the 2 millenia of Jewish settlement outside of the region: it was not a right except in mystical, Romantic nationalist ideologies. Another justification conjured away the injustice inflicted on the indigenous population with the pretense that Palestine was mostly vacant before the Jews came: this argument has proven to be the most compelling proof of the injustice committed: a backhanded admission that — had Palestine been inhabited (which it plainly was) — the Zionist enterprise was morally indefensible. Those who acknowledge Palestinian existence: could only offer racist justification: in the great scheme of things, the fate of Jews was simply more important than that of Arabs. This is how the British rationalized the Balfour Declaration: we deliberately & rightfully decline to accept the principle of self-determinism for the present inhabitants of Palestine because: the question of the Jews outside Palestine is one of world importance. He asserted: Zionism was rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import than the desires & prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. Churchhill: no wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race…a more world-wise race has come in & taken their place. The Brits had no recourse except to racist justifications for denying the indigenous population its basic rights: became racists from circumstance: on no other grounds could so flagrant a denial be explained. The essence of the Zionist approach: if sufficient facts were created on the ground & sufficient time elapsed, hard reality could not be reversed. The conflict over rights emerging out of forcible Z…

abridged excerpts from Norm Finkelstein's "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History"

freshman year of college i emerged from 6 years of all-male prep school & met a girl who was friendly. we became close. over Christmas break, she returned to Indiana. she messaged me that she was listening to Frank Ocean. she said "i love thinkin bout you" & i replied "i love thinking about you too"

internalized anti-cracker proclivities

to cat-sit predator

Deuce is taller than me atp

the u.s. is uniquely solipsistic, so it makes sense that many ppl would rather centralize & accentuate their own grievances & suffering, but i feel that this comes at a terrible cost; ppl learn to detect for dehumanizing language, but often only for that which applies to the identities they occupy

a state felt emboldened to sexually assault greta thunberg et al on a globally-followed aid mission after years of systematically using Palestinian boys and men as objects of perversion, desecration and unspeakable indignity largely in the shadows of cowardly silence. the depravity is unconscionable

militant u.s. atheists who claim to despise the "unique evils" of religion are telling you not only that they find the world's 2 billion Muslims to be antiquated & helpless brutes, but that they consider their faith itself to be an intrinsic desecration of the planet that must be uprooted entirely

I’m deeply disturbed by the fact that Molly was driven away from here, but even more so by the fact that so many are evidently wildly jubilant in her absence. Another last-gasp act of quiet desperation cruelly stripped away from the hands of those left in utter torment at the mercy of a wholly uncaring empire, & so many find it reflexive to rejoice upon realizing that more misery still has been ensured due to their heartless hall-monitor tendencies.

Americans will spend more time ruminating over the salad days of Scholastic Book fairs gone by than they ever will thinking about an ongoing scholasticide

many make the calamitous mistake of thinking that the Serenity Prayer is meant to be an admission of solipsistic acquiescence

freshman year of college i emerged from 6 years of all-male prep school & met a girl who was friendly. we became close. over Christmas break, she returned to Indiana. she messaged me that she was listening to Frank Ocean. she said "i love thinkin bout you" & i replied "i love thinking about you too"

Marcello Hernandez telling Jaime Foxx he wants to be a movie star and that ppl like Jaime Foxx can serve as his pro coach after his collegiate reps at 30 Rockefeller. Jaime tells him he's a star already lighting the world up; his jumpshot already perfectly formed

the broader world of SNL's shameless & simpleminded starfuckery is among the most nauseating elements of show business i know of

I’m deeply disturbed by the fact that Molly was driven away from here, but even more so by the fact that so many are evidently wildly jubilant in her absence. Another last-gasp act of quiet desperation cruelly stripped away from the hands of those left in utter torment at the mercy of a wholly uncaring empire, & so many find it reflexive to rejoice upon realizing that more misery still has been ensured due to their heartless hall-monitor tendencies.

Arnie Grape in Mama Grape's embrace: I COULDA DROWNDED!

bluemaga when confronted with a minor hurdle for the first time in their life

law professors are sentient Office™️ gifs

Amazing. Liberals cannot engage with what’s in front of their noses; they just block and hope all the victims of their favorite Democrat(s) just—fingers crossed—fade from public consciousness.

the cynicism is breathless & unspeakable

if Beyonce had curb-stomped Hind Rajab bluemaga would've found a way to justify & yassify that atrocity

Arnie Grape in Mama Grape's embrace: I COULDA DROWNDED!

bluemaga when confronted with a minor hurdle for the first time in their life

militant u.s. atheists who claim to despise the "unique evils" of religion are telling you not only that they find the world's 2 billion Muslims to be antiquated & helpless brutes, but that they consider their faith itself to be an intrinsic desecration of the planet that must be uprooted entirely

i was 5 when i saw helicopter footage of a Columbine student being forcibly pulled through a shattered school window pane on a local newscast & that same day i saw a guy from down the block carted away on a stretcher badly burned from a lighter fluid attack; this nation has a wicked sickness to it

Water wars game draws police warnings as Michigan seniors compete for cash

yeah ok man