@The_Regal_Raven Barney & Rubble (Tasmanian forest ravens) hung out in my garden for 6yrs, brought their kids along every year. Sadly both died b4 Xmas last yr and are buried in the garden. Two new ravens moved in after a couple of weeks Pebbles & Bambam and I are getting along nicely 🐦⬛
@DKAstrology Had 2 ravens move into my garden Jan 2020, on “that” conjunction. Stayed for years, saw me thru both my parents dying. They both died at Xmas last year. 2 new ravens moved in this Feb again on “that” conjunction….birds are smart, they know things 🐦⬛
@ExplosiveMediaa From Australia and can confirm ❤️ 🫡
What has been fed to us for years and years by 🇺🇸 and our own media ~we don’t believe in your lies anymore~
@s_m_marandi Please know that there are many many Australians who do not support this, who are appalled at our government’s continued stance supporting these horrors. This is not who we are, not our “shared values”.
Sure plutocrats are killing our biosphere, but hey, at least they’re creating technology that lets you avoid the cognitive discomfort of writing your own words and thinking your own thoughts.
Sure the empire is butchering human beings at horrifying scale around the world, but on the bright side it’s creating refugees who will move to your country and bring you treats that you can order from an app on your phone.
Sure imperialist extraction is robbing the resources and exploiting the workers of the global south at extortionate fees, but on the other hand you get to wear a new outfit every day because the clothes you ordered online are dirt cheap thanks to transcontinental slave labor.
Sure our rulers are rapidly caging us in a digital surveillance network of ever-increasing intrusiveness and control, but golly gosh they just keep gifting us all these nifty free social media platforms that we simply cannot stop ourselves from scrolling through for some reason.
Sure capitalism is driving us toward collapse on multiple fronts while everyone gets sicker, poorer, dumber, crazier, and more miserable, but hey look, McDonald’s is bringing back the McRib.
Sure it’s only a matter of time until we find ourselves policed by armed robots and facial recognition murder drones and praying the government AI doesn’t shut off our digital money because our eyes lingered a bit too long on an anti-Israel meme, but at least we can have fun placing Polymarket bets on the next country the United States is going to bomb.
They take so very, very much, and we trade it away for so very, very little.
They steal our wealth, strangle our ecosystem and incinerate our future, and in return they give us bread and circuses that are just affordable enough to stop us from chopping off heads.
They exhaust us, abuse us, indoctrinate us, distract us, desensitize us, confuse us, overload us, misinform us and gaslight us, and in exchange we get a hundred overpriced streaming services to choose from and a thousand types of toothpaste.
They’re making our world worse and worse, and they’re making us worse as individuals, too. They’re poisoning our minds and darkening our hearts. Killing our conscience and amputating our empathy. It sucks to live in the shadow of the empire. There’s nothing natural or healthy about this dystopia.
And they’re getting it practically for free. A little propaganda, a sprinkling of mindless entertainment and a few treats, and we give them a whole planet to rape. They’re getting all the most vital parts of our world and all the most sacred parts of ourselves for a song.
We can’t keep letting them do this to us. We’ve got to wake up. Sometimes saying this feels as futile as imploring a loved one to leave their cult or break up with their abusive partner for the ten thousandth time. But that is what needs to happen.
And people do leave cults. People do exit abusive relationships. It only happens when they’re ready, and it’s got to come from them — but it does happen.
Here’s hoping we find some way to leave our abusive relationship with the empire before it’s too late.
Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal has published a handbook which unequivocally clarifies that her office exists not to protect Australian Jews from discrimination, but to stomp out criticism of the state of Israel.
However bad you’re imagining it is, it’s worse. The handbook, set to be formally launched later this week under the title “Understanding Antisemitism in Australia,” explicitly conflates antisemitism and antizionism with statements like “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews” and asserting that it is antisemitic to accuse Israel of “apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide.”
It is therefore unambiguously the official position of the Australian government’s appointed authority on antisemitism that it is hateful and abusive toward Jews and their religion to oppose the racist political ideology underpinning the modern state of Israel.
So when Australians hear Jillian Segal and government officials talking about how there’s been an increase in “antisemitism” in our country and saying extreme measures must be taken to stop it, it’s important to be clear that this is the “antisemitism” they are talking about. They are talking about criticism of Israel.
Let’s go through the handbook together and highlight some revealing excerpts, shall we?
The forward in the handbook stresses the importance of the Australian government’s endorsement of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been opposed around the world for its conflation of criticism of Israel with hateful actions toward Jews. Under the IHRA definition it is considered antisemitic to claim that Israel is a racist endeavor, or to compare Israel’s abuses to those of Nazi Germany — both of which are entirely legitimate criticisms which should be put forward far more often than they are. Much of the handbook follows from the premises of the IHRA definition.
Segal’s office states that the handbook “is intended as a practical resource for schools, universities, public servants, community organisations and anyone seeking to understand antisemitism today.”
Segal’s office says that antisemitism “morphs” over the ages, from the blood libels and “Christ-killer” accusations of the Middle Ages to the racism of Nazi Germany, and has now morphed so that “antisemitic tropes are conveyed and justified in the language of human rights and international legal arguments.”
“For example, sometimes Jews are labelled and libelled as ‘settler-colonialists’, ‘oppressors’, and a symbol of a global system of domination that ‘can seemingly accommodate even the murder of Jews as Jews’,” the envoy proclaims.
Do you see how the subject was moved to lump medieval superstitions about Jews in with entirely legitimate criticisms of the modern state of Israel? According to Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, criticising Israel using “language of human rights and international legal arguments” is not meaningfully different from saying that Jews drink the blood of Christian children.
This, clearly, is stark raving insanity.
“Legitimate criticism of Israel is not antisemitic,” the envoy concedes, then proceeds to completely negate this concession with everything that follows. “However, there are many examples of antisemitic imagery, tropes, conspiracy theories and propaganda (echoing medieval myths) that have found their way into anti-Israel discourse. It is also increasingly common for the word ‘Zionist’ (or iterations of it) to be us ed as cover or proxy for ‘Jew ’.”
This is completely made up. The claim that critics of Israel’s abuses use the word “Zionist” when they really mean “Jew” is just something Israel apologists started asserting with no substantiation whatsoever a few years ago. They have no evidence for this assertion apart from the frequency and forcefulness which with they assert it.
The envoy defines Zionism as “the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination within their ancestral homeland,” which is misleading at best. That’s not what Zionism is. Zionism is what we see before us today. The genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and nonstop war and abuse. That’s what Zionism is, as evidenced by material reality. The best definition of Zionism is its real-world manifestations. Zionism is what it looks like when you give the Zionists everything they want.
“A new variant of antisemitic atrocity denial emerged in the wake of the 7 October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks — the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust,” the envoy writes. “Disturbingly, these atrocities have been met by some with denial, minimisation, justification and distortion — echoing Holocaust denial, minimisation, and distortion.”
Segal’s office is here telling us that it is antisemitic to talk about the glaring plot holes in the narratives about mass rapes, beheaded babies and babies cooked in ovens on October 7, or to talk about the large number of Israelis who were killed by IDF fire under the Hannibal Directive, or to “justify” the attack by pointing out the monstrous Israeli abuses which gave rise to it.
The envoy writes of the importance of “Standing firm against antisemitism parading as ‘anti-racism’,” stressing the IHRA position that framing Israel as a racist endeavor is hateful toward Jews. A flyer saying “We don’t want your two states. We want all of 48” is labeled “antisemitic, because there is only one Jewish country.”
Segal’s office warns of the dangers of “Holocaust inversion,” which is when “Israel and Jews are portrayed as Nazi-like perpetrators of mass atrocities and genocide,” which is bad because it “serves to demonise and delegitimise Israel, Israelis and Jews.”
To be clear, every relevant humanitarian institution on earth has said that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. These groups include:
1. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory
2. The International Association of Genocide Scholars
3. B’Tselem (an Israeli organization)
4. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (another Israeli organization)
5. Amnesty International
6. Doctors Without Borders
7. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights
8. Human Rights Watch
9. The International Federation for Human Rights
10. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
The list of humanitarian institutions who say Israel is NOT committing genocide in Gaza includes:
1. Nobody
2. No one
3. Zero
4. Nothing
5. Nada
6. Zilch
7. Sweet damn all
8. A complete absence
9. Diddly squat
10. Bupkis
This is not some fringe conspiracy theory. It is a thoroughly established and entirely indisputable fact. Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism is saying that facts are antisemitic.
Some examples cited in the handbook of glaring instances of the antisemitic crime of “Holocaust inversion”:
— Placards of ‘ Well done Hitler would be proud’ and ‘Same shit Different asshole’, the latter with images of Hitler and Netanyahu, both placards making Nazi analogies to Israel
— Three banners of Hitler removing his mask , revealing the face of Netanyahu, making an analogy between Nazism and Israel, on major roads.
— Graffiti of a Star of David, equal sign, and Nazi swastika , and another graffiti of ‘End the Genocide’ on a main road.
We’re meant to believe it should be a hate crime to say the state that’s waging multiple wars of aggression while mass murdering people because of their ethnicity bears some resemblance to another state which did these things. I don’t know about you, but I find that silly.
Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” claims it is antisemitic to say the IHRA definition of antisemitism silences criticism of Israel, arguing that “claims that the leading global definition of antisemitism — which reflects the lived experience of Jewish people worldwide — is designed to intentionally silence criticism echoes antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and control.”
That’s right kids: you can’t criticise Israel because that’s antisemitic, and if you complain that your speech is being suppressed, that’s antisemitic too.
The handbook includes a hypothetical office group chat which includes a coworker making the statement “But what about the genocidal, racist Zionist project that has oppressed the Palestinians? Zionism is a supremacist ideology invented by Theodore Herzl. They’ve done this through apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”
“This is antisemitic,” the handbook argues, dismissing the entirely accurate statement as “Soviet-era antizionist propaganda” and saying it “was antisemitic because it included statements that accused Israel of apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide.”
Saying it’s antisemitic to accuse Israel of apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide is as clear an admission that Segal’s goal is to stomp out all criticism of Israel as you could possibly ask for.
If that wasn’t clear enough for you, the handbook concludes with the assertion that it is impossible to separate antizionism from antisemitism:
“Trying to separate ‘antisemitism’ from ‘antizionism’ ignores the history of misinformation, disinformation and antisemitic propaganda that has shaped narratives about Israel and Zionism,” the envoy asserts. “It also ignores the lived and practical reality that wherever these antizionist narratives have been propagated, it has resulted in discrimination, harassment , vilification, hate and harm towards Jews. For example, Poland’s 1968 antizionist campaign resulted in expulsions and forced emigration of thousands of Jewish Poles.”
“Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews,” the handbook concludes.
So there you have it. That settles that.
Throughout the handbook, the feelings of Australian Jews are cited over and over again as supremely important and of far more urgent a concern than genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and wars of immense geopolitical consequence.
“Feel more isolated… I feel like I am living the life of a Jew from history, rather than the Jew I was 2 years ago,” reads a quote from an unnamed Jewish person.
“I just feel so sad that I need to educate my children in how to respond if they are screamed at in the street,” reads another.
“The silence from friends I have known almost all my life, the constant posting of antisemitic slurs and the public broadcasts of factually incorrect reports has been devastating and makes me fearful of what might happen next. Since October 7, when I speak to someone who hasn’t offered any support, I often ask myself ‘would they hide me’ which is a terribly sad situation in our beautiful country where I have always felt safe,” reads another.
“A tutor in my university class made antisemitic comments very casually which made me feel extremely uncomfortable and unsafe. I am now nervous when entering a uni class,” reads another.
“Being confronted again and again with blind hate towards my people and the place I come from was very painful. It impacted my mood, the way I perceived my community and my place in it, and my daily function,” reads another.
Virtually nothing is said about the real victims. The murdered, displaced and terrorized targets of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran. The war orphans. The child amputees and burn victims who were operated on without anesthesia. The people who will carry the physical and psychological wounds from their holocaust with them for the rest of their lives.
They are not regarded as important by Jillian Segal. The real crisis, in her mind, is people talking about these things and making Jewish Australians feel upset.
Absolutely psychotic. We cannot allow our country to continue to be dragged in this direction.
@cmdibley yes! Daily ads boasting that if I take this supplement I will stop being grumpy, wrinkly, bloated and difficult to get along with. Nah, all good 😂
We’re sick of the US endless illegal wars, the slaughter, the destruction, the vile misery it inflicts on millions - sick to death of you.
And we despise Israel’s genocide, & its inhuman slaughter & its baby murder & its belief that Jews matter more than any other life on earth.
And we are gasping for relief from both regimes, for peace, for safety, for growth instead of destruction.
WE ARE SICK OF YOU INSANE MURDERERS
SICK OF YOU