David Graniewitz

My blog could be best described as a Victor Meldrewesque view of living in the Middle East.

[Ambassador Mike Huckabee @GovMikeHuckabee]

This is hilarious and very well done!

[TBC @TBC_on_X]

Do you suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome??

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

Arafat backed Saddam’s rape of Kuwait.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians paid for it in blood and exile.

The world never cared and has completely forgotten.

Arafat went to Baghdad and stood publicly with Saddam after the invasion. In January 1991, he rallied the mob: if the Americans want war, “then I say welcome, welcome, welcome to war… Iraq and Palestine… [will stand] together, side by side.”

When the Americans struck, Saddam fired Scuds at Tel Aviv while the United States forced Israel to absorb the attacks on its civilians without responding.

Under Iraqi occupation, Kuwaitis were systematically raped (thousands of women), tortured with electric drills and acid, hanged, beaten, and executed. The country was stripped bare.

Palestinians in Kuwait were widely viewed as collaborators. After liberation, Kuwait expelled them. A community of roughly 350,000–400,000 was reduced by about 90% within months. More than 300,000 were thrown out of the country.

And yet, there were no endless UN resolutions.
No academic industry of “Nakba” books.
No campus protests.
No media saturation calling it ethnic cleansing.

Arafat later claimed what Kuwait did was “worse than what Israel did.”
The world shrugged.

A massive, deliberate expulsion of Palestinians by an Arab state (carried out against the entire community regardless of any alleged collaboration) happened in full view of the modern world. The response was total silence.

The same people who turn every consequence of Arab-initiated wars against Jews into the eternal crime of the century treated this one as if it never happened.

That is the real hierarchy of refugee suffering.

That is the lie at the heart of eternal Palestinian victimhood.

It’s not about concern for Palestinian lives. It’s about demonizing and delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state.

[AP @Average_NY_Guy]

This is a crazy story about a photo that illustrates the depravity of Palestinism and captures the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians perfectly.

In 2008, Israeli superstar Idan Raichel, one of Israel’s most beloved artists, volunteered to perform for children from Gaza who had been brought to Israel by Save a Child’s Heart.

This organization saves children from all over the world, including Palestinians, and brings them to Israel for life-saving treatment.

After the show, Raichel took the time to pose for a photo with one of the children and his father, embracing a child Israel had given a second chance at life.

Years later, that photo resurfaced after it was found by the IDF in Gaza.

It turned out that the father was a Hamas operative, and the child Israel had saved, the one who was given a second chance at life, grew up to become a Hamas terrorist and was ultimately killed while fighting for Hamas.

Stories like this are why so many on the Israeli side believe the conflict is a lost cause. You can offer medicine, surgery, and compassion, but none of it matters if the next generation is raised to see murdering you as part of a generational campaign of revenge.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

Bill Clinton: "The Palestinians were offered a state. They refused because a state wasn't their goal; killing Jews was."

This must be shared every day...

[David Collier @mishtal]

In a matter of days, Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of people.

In three years, Israel could have wiped out Gaza’s population. Instead, it sent aid, warned civilians, and risked its own soldiers.

The claim that Gaza is a genocide is a deliberately vindictive libel.

[Josh Howie @joshxhowie]

Islamist wankers have spent the last 24 hours lying about Jews because an Arab football team lost a football match. They are utterly demented. But the real wankers are the media, politicians, and useful idiot twats who’ve spent the last three years repeating the same sources of Jew-hating bile as fact. You have been exposed. Now go fuck yourselves you fucking morons.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Palestinian Culture goes way back in history to the 1960s and brought us amazing traditions like suicide bombing, hijacking planes, and making up a false history to resist all but Islamic sovereignty over certain patches of land through self-induced pain.
https://t.co/lODL4PtPrU

[Mazelit Airaksinen 🎗🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @Mazelit_]

Vivian Silver (74) was a peace activist who drove sick Palestinian kids to Israeli hospitals to help them get medical treatment.

Hamas didn’t care.

They murdered her.

In her home in Be'eri, Israel.

Hamas burned her house down.

In her last moments, she was on the phone with her son.

"Mom wrote me, ‘Terrorists inside the house, it’s time to stop joking and say goodbye.'”

Vivian was killed by the very people she sought to help the most.

May her legacy life on 💔

[Mazelit Airaksinen 🎗🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @Mazelit_]

On 10/7, to confuse Hamas, Shlomo Ron (85) took a seat in his living room and acted as if he lived alone.

He gambled that Hamas would kill him, but assume that he lived alone, and not advance futher into his home

He saved his wife, 2 daughters & grandson. He sacrificed himself

May this hero's memory be a blessing 🎗️

[Muzeum Auschwitz @MuzeumAuschwitz]

27 czerwca 1927 | Urodziła się czeska Żydówka Helena Pollaková.

Deportowa do #Auschwitz z getta w #Theresienstadt 23 stycznia 1943 r. Nie przeżyła.

[Ari Hoffman @thehoffather]

@DarializaforNY On Oct 8, 2023, while Jews were being massacred in the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, Darializa Avila Chevalier attended a rally for Hamas
in New York City on October 8, 2023 demanding not only an end to Israel, but also the US

[Geoffrey Charin @CharinGeoffrey]

If you are an Empire, then racism is endemic. You believe in your own superiority after all. Monty was a crowning example. 80 years ago @OTD, on 23 June, 1946, Field Marshall Montgomery, incensed by the attacks of 16-18 June, on the British in Palestine, wrote: ‘this means war with the illegal Jewish Army with all that implies. […] the Jew is clever and cunning […] the present position is exactly what we want. The Jews have flung the gauntlet in our face and asked for the ordeal of battle. They have made us dance to their tune for too long. We will now defeat them utterly and completely.’ Sounds a bit like Trump! To read what happens next
now available for UK pre-order: https://t.co/A946ReatOZ
. And in the USA: https://t.co/n5xffoFk4u
@podbattleground @drhelenfry
@OnThisDay

[Muzeum Auschwitz @MuzeumAuschwitz]

2 czerwca 1938 | Urodziła się węgierska Żydówka Ágnes Gruenberger.

W 1944 r. została deportowana do #Auschwitz i zamordowana w komorze gazowej.

[Dov Forman @DovForman]

There is a history lesson that the British Museum might usefully teach, were it still in the business of teaching history rather than surrendering it to the heckler���s veto.

It goes like this: when a society can no longer protect its Jews in the public square, cannot guarantee that a talk about ancient archaeology will not be shut down by a mob, it has already lost something foundational. The Jews are not the only ones who should be alarmed. They are simply the first.

Yesterday the British Museum, founded in 1753, repository of civilisation's deepest memory, cancelled a Jewish Culture Month event on the kingdoms of Ancient Israel and Judah. Not because the content was controversial. Not because the speaker, Dr Paul Collins, was provocative. But because a "significant number" of registered attendees had pre-planned to disrupt it. The bullies, in other words, didn't even need to show up. The threat alone was sufficient. The institution folded. A talk about archaeology, about pottery and inscriptions from a civilisation nearly three thousand years old, was considered too dangerous to host.

Let that sink in. This is Britain in 2026.

The museum's statement was a masterpiece of institutional euphemism. It spoke of its “responsibility to ensure that events hosted within the Museum can proceed safely.” It noted, with some delicacy, its commitment to "freedom of expression in a democratic society." What it did not say - what it could not quite bring itself to say - is that a group of activists committed to the erasure of any Jewish connection to the land of Israel decided that even academic archaeology was an affront, and that rather than face them down, Britain's foremost cultural institution chose to stand aside.

This is not a security decision. It is a political one. And it carries a clear message: that organised intimidation works.

Worse still, it is not even an isolated incident. Last year, the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth postponed an exhibition on Jewish life in the town, citing “security concerns” and what it called a “sensitive time.” The exhibition, funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, celebrating a century and a half of Jewish community life, was quietly shelved. It came after a Jewish man had been shot with an air rifle in Bournemouth's East Cliff neighbourhood and swastika graffiti had been painted on a local rabbi's home.

Then there was Edinburgh. Last summer, two Jewish comedians had their shows cancelled from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe after staff members raised "safety concerns". One of them, Philip Simon, said afterwards: "I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish."

This is a story that Jews in this country have grown sickeningly familiar with. The language changes slightly each time - "security concerns," "sensitive period," "logistical challenges" - but the outcome is always the same: Jewish culture retreats and the mob advances.

And now the British Museum. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the incremental, bureaucratically managed exclusion of Jews from British public life - achieved not through legislation, not through violence, but through the quiet, cowardly calculation that accommodating the mob is less trouble than standing with the minority it targets.

"London is for everyone" - except, it appears, for Jewish Londoners who wish to attend a talk about ancient history without requiring a security cordon and police guard. "Antisemitism has no place here" - except, it seems, at public galleries, comedy and theatre venues, university campuses across London, and now the British Museum. When a city's most celebrated cultural institution cannot guarantee the safety of a lecture on ancient pottery, the mayor's solemn pledges ring not as reassurance but as insult.

The British Museum's statement said the decision was taken "to protect the event, not to diminish it." This is precisely the kind of sentence that tells you everything while appearing to say nothing. What the museum was actually protecting was not the event - which it cancelled - but itself: its staff, its management, its desire not to be in the newspapers for the wrong reasons. The result, of course, is that it is in the newspapers for the worst possible reason. The protesters won without stepping through the door. And the institution that holds the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, that has survived the Blitz and two world wars and three centuries of global upheaval, has demonstrated that it cannot survive a vocal mob with bad intentions.

Public money flows generously to these institutions. If they cannot maintain a basic standard of intellectual courage in exchange for it - if they will cancel Jewish history at the first whiff of organised hostility - then serious questions about that compact are not only legitimate but urgent.

What is needed is not sympathy but spine. The British Museum should have taken the measures necessary - whatever they were - to allow the event to go ahead on the planned date. If it lacked the resources, it should have asked for them. If it lacked the legal tools, the Government should long since have provided them. The Director should have stood at the door, personally if necessary, and said: this institution does not negotiate with intimidation. Instead, it issued a statement of regret, rescheduled to a date yet to be confirmed and hoped the story would blow over.

My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. She spent the remainder of her long life trying to understand how a continent of supposedly civilised nations - with their museums, their universities, their cultural institutions - had permitted the systematic exclusion, humiliation, and ultimately murder of its Jews: one bureaucratic decision at a time, each supposedly reasonable in isolation, each contributing to a logic that ended in catastrophe. She did not ask future generations to simply remember. She asked them to act.

The British Museum will, no doubt, host the talk eventually. It will be rescheduled for a quieter moment, with more security, with fewer registered protestors, with a smaller Jewish audience too. It will be, in all the ways that matter, a diminished thing. And the people who believe that Jewish culture has no place in British public life will note that their tactics worked. And they will use them again.

[David Graniewitz @Davidgranny]

https://t.co/K3rcvIsVii

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

But Ihab, this is literally Hamas's view of the war. They genuinely believe that Gaza -- indeed, the entire Palestinian future -- is a worthy sacrifice to lay on the altar of the larger cause of Islamic restoration. Hamas are tyrants; none of this is about freedom.

This is muqawama. And it's the dominant political lens for talking about Israel among a great many Muslim elites.

It's the thing everyone pretends not to see, but that Israelis will never again unsee.

It's a doctrine that needs war to survive, like Nazism before it. A martyrdom cult that looms immense to Israelis and explains why they think they're right even when the whole world tells them they're wrong.

It is why Hezbollah will yet drag Lebanon into the abyss while pretending to "defend" it. It is why Iran is a gutted, broken nation with the nominal GDP per capita of Haiti despite sitting on some of the world's biggest energy reserves. All must be sacrificed on the altar of muqawama.

And this ideology will only go away when it is soundly and decisively defeated. Only then will there be a chance for the kind of rebuilding and future that people like you and me want for Palestinians.