Andrew

On a journey. One foot in Alaska. The other in Southern California. Rode down the Pacific Coast on a vintage bicycle a few years ago.

[Andrew @Altered999]

Farewell dear friend...

[Factory Media Centre @FactoryMediaArt]

Join us next #artcrawl Friday, Aug 10, 2018 from 7-10pm for the Josephine Massarella: Retrospective. This show features all of Josephine’s beautiful films, a series of speakers, photos, and writings reflecting on her life and career.

For more info, visit:
https://t.co/KXG25y5ce0

[Andrew @Altered999]

@Mylovanov 💔

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

The death toll from Russia's strike on Kyiv has risen to 25. Over 100 people injured. There might still be people under the debris.

These are not just numbers, statistics that international organizations will later put into reports to state that Russian attacks killed more civilians in Ukraine this year than ever before.

Behind each number is a person, someone's world. An irreplaceable loss, a scar on all of us.

It is so painful to see these numbers mounting up, growing, spreading because Russia is still able to continue attacking us. Russia must be stopped, by force.

📷: Ivan Antypenko / Alina Smutko / Sasha Maslov / Radio Liberty / Libkos / Roman Pilipey / SESU / Reuters / Marian Kushnir / Julia Kochetova

[Fred Wellman @FPWellman]

It’s rare that a decision by the Secretary of Defense can be traced directly to the death of a service member but in the insanity this week you may have missed what happened. Airman 1st Class Keon McDaniel, a 25-year-old trainee at JB San Antonio-Lackland, died June 16 following a severe influenza outbreak that infected nearly 300 trainees after Pete Hegseth made the flu vaccine optional. https://t.co/suwsL0Dbe7

[The Kyiv Independent @KyivIndependent]

⚡️Ukraine urgently appeals to nearly 40 allies for Patriot interceptors.

Ukraine says Patriot missiles are already available in partner countries' stockpiles and urged nearly 40 countries to transfer them in July after one of Russia's largest attacks on Kyiv. https://t.co/oFC7uR87Ne

[Ashley Duffany 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @NAFOteacher]

Pure evil! russia is a terrorist state!

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

.@antonioguterres You promised to cooperate in the criminal prosecution of UN employees involved in terror. We are now asking you exactly that: waive the immunity of Philippe Lazzarini so he can be prosecuted for complicity in terrorism, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

[Deborah Corso @ViadelCorso2266]

There exists a very long list of Arab nationalist leaders who openly and repeatedly  stated Palestinian identity was manufactured  only as a means to attack and destroy the state of Israel.

This is by no means a complete list:

●Awni Abd al-Hadi (1937): Testifying before the British Peel Commission, this prominent Palestinian politician and nationalist stated, "There is no such country as Palestine.

●Zuheir Mohsen, Senior PLO leader, 1977 stated: "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”

• Feisal Husseini (2001): The PLO's top official in Jerusalem famously described the Oslo peace process in an interview with Al-Arabi as a sham and a ruse to destroy Israel. He literally  called Oslo a"Trojan Horse," suggesting the provisional statehood steps were strategic mechanisms meant to eventually liberate all of mandatory Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

●Yasser Arafat (1994): Shortly after signing the Oslo Accords, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat gave a speech in a Johannesburg mosque where he compared the peace treaty to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah—a historical ten-year truce signed by the Prophet Muhammad that was broken when the Muslim forces grew strong enough to conquer Mecca. This  evidences  viewing statehood negotiations and manufactured Palestinian  identity as a purely tactical maneuver.

• King Abdullah of Jordan: Throughout the 1948 and 1950 period, following Jordan's military entry and subsequent annexation of the West Bank, the Hashemite leadership actively absorbed the region. King Abdullah proclaimed himself the ruler of Palestine and promoted the integration of the local Arab population, firmly opposing the idea of an independent, distinct Palestinian state.

• King Hussein of Jordan: In the early years of the Palestinian national movement, Jordan's King Hussein firmly opposed the notion of a separate "Palestinian entity." In January 1960, he convened a conference of Hashemite loyalists to denounce the "despicable innovation" of establishing a distinct Palestinian state, as Jordan sought to solidify a broader, united Jordanian national identity following its governance of the West Bank.

• Azzam Pasha: As the Secretary-General of the Arab League during the period surrounding the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he viewed the Arabs in the region as an extension of a broader Arab nation. Historically, Mandate-era Arab leaders in the region often defined themselves culturally and religiously as part of the broader Ottoman system or as part of a "Greater Syria," rather than as a separate, distinct Palestinian nationality.

●Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar in the 1990s, rejected manufactured Palestinian identity for a broader pan-Islamic one, being that as more conducive  to oan-Arabism than over localized nation-states.

●'Palestinian' historian Muhammad Y. Muslih, stated- during the entire 400 year period of Ottoman rule (1517-1918), before the British set up the 30-year-long Palestine Mandate, “There was no political unit known as Palestine.”

●Azmi Bishara, founding leader of the nationalist Balad Party (with seats in the Israeli parliament since 1999). In a statement he made in 2002 he said: “My Palestinian identity never precedes my Arab identity…. I don’t think there is a Palestinian nation, there is [only] an Arab nation.

[Nate Mook @natemook]

Friends in Kyiv were watching rescuers search for survivors in a building after the initial drones and missiles hit. Then Russia double-tapped them with another strike. It's pure murderous evil.

[David Hazony @davidhazony]

Here’s a simple fact.
According to Hamas health ministry stats showing deaths by age and sex, deaths of children are roughly equal male vs female until about age 12, when males start dying more, a discrepancy that increases dramatically at around age 14. By 18, male deaths totally dominate the charts.
There are only two possible explanations:
1) Hamas was putting teenage boys into combat in very large numbers
2) Israel’s “indiscriminate” killing of Gaza children somehow managed to randomly take out over-12 boys much more than girls.
Which is more likely?
Any discussion of underage deaths that doesn’t cover this is lying to you.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

For more than two years, Western legacy media have relentlessly repeated the claims that "Israel deliberately kills journalists," that "Gaza is the deadliest place on earth for journalists," and that a "record-breaking number of journalists" have been killed.

From the very beginning, Israel argued that many Hamas and PIJ operatives masquerade as journalists—wearing press vests, carrying press credentials, and embedding themselves among genuine reporters—making it extraordinarily difficult to distinguish legitimate journalists from combatants. Israel has consistently maintained that it targets only militants, while acknowledging that genuine journalists have sometimes been tragically killed as collateral damage.

Now we have incontrovertible evidence that Hamas and PIJ themselves are celebrating many of these supposed "journalists" as mujahideen and martyrs. Even the Committee to Protect Journalists has removed a whole list of these supposedly slain "journalists" from its records, and they are now conducting a full review of their database (https://t.co/k9FdiACysZ). Below is a compilation, complete with screenshots, of 97 alleged "journalists" who were in fact Hamas or PIJ terrorists.

Do you understand what this means? For two years, the media gullibly amplified Hamas propaganda. Now that the narrative has fallen apart, they fall completely silent.

It's the same pattern we saw with the infamous "70% women and children" casualty figure, endlessly cited as proof of "genocide" by virtually every major news outlet, until Hamas's own data revisions exposed it as bullshit (casualties are overwhelmingly male and of fighting age). And then... tumbleweeds.

No retractions. No accountability. No admission of error. Just a collective shrug—"Who cares anymore?"—before everyone moves on to the next calumny: "Israel is deliberately hunting little children with drones!"

I've tried for a long time to preserve at least some semblance of trust in the legacy media. But I find this utterly revolting. These institutions have been completely captured by ideology, nowhere more so than in Europe.

So please, spare us the lectures about right-wing "disinformation" and "fake news". After this performance, you've forfeited any claim to moral authority on the subject.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

The list of Russia's targets during its latest massive attack on Ukraine includes:

- ​Apartment buildings that they decided to collapse onto sleeping families in Kyiv
- ​Houses and a farm in Kharkiv region
- ​A swimming pool in Zaporizhzhia
- ​A printing house
- ​Yet another Nova Poshta delivery service facility
- ​A meat processing plant in Zaporizhzhia

​They are striking civilians and businesses with what would be a shocking randomness if it hadn't already lasted for years and wasn't their usual pattern. But it's a good time to remember that Ukraine is fighting absolute terrorists!

[Jennifer Sey @JenniferSey]

Every bit of mainstream media is entirely focused on the poor boys who are supposedly banned from sports (They aren't.)

Let's hear from the girls who compete in the 23 states that don't have protected women's sports.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

"This means that almost all Western media outlets have unflinchingly disseminated Hamas propaganda to their tens of millions of viewers, while disregarding Israeli figures almost entirely. The world’s journalists have taken the word of jihadi butchers above the evidence-based testimony of a friendly democracy and shared this narrative with the world.
It is no exaggeration to say that this comprises one of the gravest failures of journalistic scepticism in modern times. The uncomfortable truth is that we have been living through the most intense age of propaganda since Soviet times, made only more appalling by the fact that it has been spread voluntarily within supposedly free societies."
https://t.co/J3Lme482HL

[CG Idit Shamir 🇨🇦🇮🇱 @ShamirIdit]

Congratulations to @BBCArabic on its remarkable consistency. Its journalists managed to publish stories about Gaza requiring 215 corrections in two years. Twice a week, every week, the errors somehow ran in the same direction.

That suggests a newsroom working under very difficult conditions. Chief among them, apparently, the facts.

At that volume the corrections column becomes the most reliable section of the service. Readers seeking accuracy are advised to start there.

[UNITED24 Media @United24media]

🤬 Russian strike destroyed approximately 800,000 books belonging to the Ukrainian publishing house BookChef.

The central warehouse of Denka Logistics, the logistics partner of the publishing house, was targeted.

[Hananya Naftali @HananyaNaftali]

For years, the media called Israel paranoid.

But today, UNRWA just quietly fired 70 of its employees in Gaza because they were linked to terror organizations.

Israel was right all along. Why is the world still funding an agency that employs terrorists? It is time to defund UNRWA permanently.

[Robert Spencer @jihadwatchRS]

It’s Long Past Time to Give Up the ‘Moderate Muslim’ Fantasies

A failed notion, false hope, and cynical deception should at last be discarded.

They’ve enjoyed media adulation and the uncritical admiration of hopeful non-Muslims for over a quarter of a century now. Yet self-styled “moderate Muslims” and “Muslim reformers” have not delivered on their promises or substantiated their vision of Islam, and it’s time that Americans recognized the entire “moderate Muslim” endeavor for what it really is: an effort to lull them into complacency and indifference regarding the advancing jihad threat.

These mediagenic moderates offered the glittering promise of an Islam that was not violent, oppressive, or the least bit incompatible with Western secular pluralism. Relying on the total ignorance of most Americans regarding Islam, and their eagerness to be reassured that the U.S. wasn’t facing the prospect of a war that would engulf the entire world, particularly after 9/11, these smooth-talking moderates, always gentle, soft-spoken, and polished before the cameras, assured the jittery public that properly understood, Islam was peaceful.

And peace was only one manifestation of Islam’s glory. The moderates told us that Islam had a glorious past, a Golden Age, in which it pioneered societal tolerance and multiculturalism, as well as respect for intellectual inquiry and scientific exploration. Today, they told us, a handful of terrorists had twisted and hijacked its teachings, but the true Islam would soon reassert itself, overwhelm, shame, and crowd out the terrorists, and revitalize our society, which had strayed so far from its Judeo-Christian foundations, with its unique virtues.

Innumerable people, including prominent talk show hosts, opinion makers, policymakers, legislators and philanthropists bought into this, and gave the moderate Muslims massive platforms upon which to proclaim the reassuring message that the vast majority of Muslims abhorred and repudiated terrorism, and soon, very soon, would rise up en masse to put a stop to it.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, we’re still waiting. The moderates are still out there, still enjoying their bully pulpits on major networks and even increasing their activities in the political sphere, but none of what they promised has come true. In fact, at this point, it can be stated definitively: the promise that “moderate Muslims” made of a “moderate Islam” was false and hollow. There never was a moderate Islam, or a vast majority of peaceful Muslims that would rise up and put a stop to Islamic terrorist activity.

This is not to say that there aren’t Muslims who are not terrorists. Obviously there are, and there are many. But these are simply Muslims who, either for lack of will, or because the time isn’t right, or simply because they aren’t really all that devout and have other interests and priorities, are not waging jihad. Some of these, in fact, although non-Muslims complacently assume that they’re moderate, are actually waging jihad of the pen, jihad of the tongue, or jihad of the pocketbook, rather than violent jihad. Others, for a variety of reasons, just aren’t interested and can’t be bothered.

Their indifference to what the Qur’an states is their Islamic obligation (see, for example, 4:95) does not remove that obligation. Secular or Westernized Muslims, and Muslims in general who aren’t waging jihad against the West, do not have their own sect of Islam, or their own interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunnah. They simply aren’t following some of their religion’s commands, like Christians who don’t love their enemies or turn the other cheek. In fact, they’re always vulnerable to recruitment at the hands of jihadis who guilt-trip them with the observation that they aren’t living as good Muslims.

If what the moderates and reformers have been telling us about their enlightened, peaceful Islam were true, we would expect that by now, they themselves would have massive followings among Muslims. None of them do. All of them are much more popular and respected among non-Muslims than they are among Muslims.

We would also expect to see numerous Islamic authorities repudiate jihad terrorism (not just an undifferentiated “terrorism” that turns out to be talking about the U.S. and Israel) and shown how it was a misuse of and misunderstanding of Islam. We should see classes in mosques all over the U.S., and, indeed, all over the world, teaching young Muslims why they should reject the Islam of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and how they can resist the jihadi appeal. We should see “Muslims Against Terrorism” organizations with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of members.

Read more at the link in the next post.

[Mosab Hassan Yousef @MosabHasanYOSEF]

The word “genocide” is being thrown around so casually and dishonestly that it has lost all meaning.

Genocide requires intent.

On October 7th, Palestinians showed clear intent to kill as many Jews as possible. They wiped out entire Jewish communities, and they remain determined to finish the job.

Accusing Israel of genocide while defending those who tried to commit one, and still seek to repeat it, is not just absurd.

IT IS COMPLICITY.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

"Scapegoating of Jews happens in failed societies"

Jacob Auchincloss is a Representative from Massachusetts. He is Jewish and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Here he is calling out antisemitism in BOTH parties.

He also calls out one of the most important drivers: the lack of regulation that allows social media companies to profit from hate.

The DSA want you to believe they have conquered the Democrats, but they are actually a fringe. We need more voices like Auchincloss, not just refusing to participate in the antisemitism-as-electoral strategy, but actively calling it out.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Douglas Murray: "Not one hostage I spoke with found any Gazan Palestinian who showed even the slightest human kindness. It was all celebration."

Not one Gazan saved the hostages.