USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
The best mosquito repellent for your patio costs $20 and runs on a wall outlet: a fan.
Mosquitoes are terrible fliers with a top speed of about 1-2 miles an hour, slower than you walk, and they struggle to make headway against even a gentle breeze. Point an oscillating fan at your outdoor seating area and they'll physically struggle to get to you.
It works on two levels too. A mosquito finds you by following the plume of carbon dioxide you exhale, plus the heat and scent rising off your skin. A fan scatters all of it and erases the trail that leads them in. So it knocks them out of the air and helps hide you from their senses at the same time.
This isn't folk wisdom. The CDC notes that fans reduce mosquito landings, and studies have found that using a fan can substantially reduce mosquito bites.
Citronella candles offer only modest protection and are generally much less effective than a fan or EPA-registered repellents. Plug in a fan, aim it at the table, and take your evening back.
America’s founders were obsessed with Jews.
This July 4th, America turns 250.
But there’s a Jewish side to that story that most have never heard.
James Madison studied Hebrew at Princeton.
Alexander Hamilton went to Hebrew school.
And Benjamin Franklin wanted Moses splitting the sea on the Great Seal of the United States.
But why?
“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.” - John Adams
Because the core principles that define the American identity were rooted in the biblical tradition and culture carried by one people:
The Jews.
Freedom. Equality. The inherent value of every individual. And education as a universal right.
These ideas weren’t born in Rome or Athens but at Sinai, and were preserved throughout history by the Jewish people.
The founders didn’t just look to “Western values.”
They looked to the Torah.
They saw ancient Israel and the Jewish people as the ultimate model of a free people bound not by force but by covenant. Governing themselves under a shared sacred law.
And America was their attempt to do it again.
“May the Deity . . . who delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors [and] planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States. . .”
@myJLI
Bro, let’s stop pretending.
Muslims make up about 25% of the entire world’s population — over 2 billion people across 50+ countries.
Japanese people? About 1.4% of the world. One single country.
Shinto exists only in Japan.
So when people say “Japan should prioritize minorities and be more accommodating to Islam,” who exactly are we talking about?
The global majority is coming to one of the world’s smallest ethnic and religious groups and demanding that Japan change its culture, food, and traditions for them.
That’s not “protecting minorities.” That’s the majority trying to colonize a tiny minority.
Japan has every right to protect its own people and culture first.
If Muslims want to live under Islamic rules, they already have dozens of countries where they can do that. They don’t need to come to Japan and turn it into another one.
This is inversion so callous it's hard to believe.
The Holocaust had a survival rate of about 30%. Millions of people disappeared from European cities and towns over several years. Everybody knew because it was happening all around them.
Gaza has a survival rate, despite the worst and most deadly and horrible periods of the war, of 97%.
All the dead Jews were noncombatants. A large percentage of the dead Gazans were combatants.
And the Jews of Europe, even as their millennia-old civilization was being systematically wiped out, wanted nothing from the societies that surrounded them except to be allowed to live in peace.
Gaza's leadership of religious fanatics, meanwhile, wants every last Israeli dead and gone, is willing to fight to the last Gazan to achieve that aim, has said so publicly and worked for decades to blow up every peace attempt -- and even now believes that Gaza's destruction would be a worthwhile sacrifice to lay on the altar of Israel's destruction, because their god told them so.
So Israelis can reasonably believe, given those features of the Gaza war that aren't true about any genocide ever, and were pretty much the opposite of what was happening in the Holocaust, that Gaza's suffering is a bad and painful war, but not remotely a genocide.
But the point of it all, of course, is not to analyze Gaza, but specifically to lump it together with the Holocaust -- to cast the Jews as the new Nazis.
The only reason this person would dare to make such an insanely ahistorical and immoral parallel is because this is the heart of the bigoted propaganda campaign in which he enthusiastically participates: The point of it all is to make the Jews into the Nazis.
A culture that obsessed about Jews being evil and was then shocked by the Holocaust into obsessing about dead Jews as the apotheosis of righteous victimhood is now obsessively engaged in knocking Jews off that moral pedestal they themselves put them on.
That's why they don't care one whit about Hamas massacres of Gazans, about genocidal wars in Syria or Yemen (even when they've funded and armed the sides), about flotilla activists currently held by the Libyans...literally nothing triggers a response except Jews.
They still, even after all these generations, no matter what else is happening in the world or in their own societies, can't stop thinking about Jews.
And as we Jews learned in the 1940s -- the actual, historical 1940s, not the weird fantasies conjured up by these bigots -- a whole society can be in the grip of a callous, destructive bigotry and still believe it is true and righteous.
Miami just proved again why it is the best city in America to be Jewish.
Mutra earning a Michelin star - the first kosher restaurant recognized at this level - is bigger than food. It’s a statement that Jewish culture and tradition are thriving openly and proudly in Miami.
A city where you can build world-class businesses, raise a family, walk into synagogue, and now dine at a Michelin-starred kosher restaurant all in the same day.
Mazal tov to Chef Raz Shabtai and the entire Mutra team. The future of Jewish life feels very bright in Miami.
Most people have no idea about the real history of Al-Aqsa Mosque, because they’ve only been fed the Islamic Palestinian propaganda version of events.
They believe that Al-Aqsa has always been Islam’s third holiest site, that it has belonged to Muslims since the dawn of time, and that Israel is the oppressor for merely existing near it.
None of that is true.
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was the holiest site in Judaism for over a thousand years before Islam even appeared in history. It housed the First and Second Jewish Temples, the center of Jewish worship and pilgrimage.
When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD, they built pagan shrines over it, but its Jewish identity never disappeared.
In the 7th century Islam emerges and expands through conquest, and begins hijacking Jewish and Christian sites, prophets, and narratives.
At first, Jerusalem had no major significance in Islam. Muhammad never set foot there. There was no mosque. There was no pilgrimage. There was no Islamic history tied to the city.
But that changed during the brutal power struggle between Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr.
By the late 7th century, Islam was deeply divided. Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr controlled Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. And Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the Umayyad Caliph, controlled the Levant.
But Abd al-Malik had a problem, he didn’t want the people of the Levant traveling to Mecca for pilgrimage, because that would give power to his rival.
Abd al-Malik declared the Temple Mount as Alaqsa mosque that was mentioned in the quran, and he made it an alternative place of pilgrimage.
He ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque to divert attention from Mecca.
And just like that, Islam manufactured a holy site for political gain.
The real Masjid Al-Aqsa referred to in the Quran was not in Jerusalem, it was between Mecca and Ta’if. There was no mosque in Jerusalem at the time. There was no Islamic presence there.
Yet, centuries later, after Islam had conquered the city, the Islamic narrative retroactively applied this Quranic verse to Jerusalem, again, for political convenience.
If Israel wanted to act like Islamic conquerors, it could have easily done to Al-Aqsa what Turkey did to the Hagia Sophia.
It could have converted the mosque into the Third Temple, banned Muslim prayer on the site, erased any trace of Islamic history, as Muslims did to Christian and Jewish sites throughout history.
But Israel didn’t do that. Israel allows Muslims to pray there freely. Israel protects Al-Aqsa, even as it is used to spread anti-Semitic propaganda and incite violence.
Yet, despite this, the world condemns Israel for merely existing in its own capital.
We uncovered something far bigger than I ever expected. After seeing coordinated false attacks against the Utah data center project, we brought in an advanced data science team to trace where the content was coming from and the results were shocking. What we found led back to organized networks, political activist groups, and funding trails tied to massive international entities. We dug through IRS 990 filings, tracked IP data from around the world, and uncovered what appears to be a coordinated campaign targeting energy and data center projects across multiple regions.
I shared 90 pages of evidence with federal law enforcement and raised concerns directly with contacts at the White House. This isn’t speculation. The filings, funding records, dates, and connections are documented. There’s a coordinated PR war happening around energy infrastructure and data centers, and we’re not going to ignore it.
Let me break this down for you
Last week @NickKristof wrote an article alleging that Israel was systematically raping Palestinians
The primary source was Euro-Med
Which was founded and is chaired by Ramy Abdu
Who is allegedly standing next to Ismail Haniyeh in this photo (Hamas' former leader)
Dear the @nytimes you have some explaining to do
And I hope @Israel goes forward with its lawsuit
The article was a blood libel
A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one not made publicly available, to protect the privacy of the victims.
The worst part of this video is not what it displays, but who is displaying it: the perpetrators themselves. Gleefully. Sadistically. Unabashedly. Most of the footage was filmed by Hamas terrorists on their GoPro bodycams, some also by ordinary Gazan civilians on their cellphones.
Even the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities, but Hamas brags about theirs for the entire world to see. The killers are euphoric throughout the massacre, and their relentless, ecstatic cries of "Allahu Akbar" (punctuated by the occasional "Kill the Jew!") are simply nauseating.
Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear — one with his eye socket hanging out of his face — asking his brother whether he thinks they're going to die, while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade in their saferoom helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.
Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another "Zionist colonizer" getting what he deserved, right?https://t.co/JvfJEtk8LA
Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy.
There is some evidence of sexual violence in the video — the charred corpse of a young woman with her legs splayed and her genitals exposed — but not much. Apparently even Hamas draws a line somewhere: they are not as proud of raping Jewish women as they are of murdering them. Or, more likely, they simply didn't want to embarrass the delicate sensibilities of their legions of useful idiots in the West.
But yes — there was rape. Not "rape" in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a new damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO. (video summary here: https://t.co/LTTjiO1s7E)
Across its 180 pages, the report describes "a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault."
And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like "take off your pants," "lie down," "spread your legs," and "don't make trouble." I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?
I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
https://t.co/PoKUfIHeXV
Here’s Dr Zelenko teaching us how to treat Hantavirus back in 2022. This will be the most enlightening 2 minutes and 47 seconds of your life. Please listen carefully.
Mob of Pro-Hezbollah / Hamas shitheads raging against law enforcement and terrorizing the NYC Jewish community near a synagogue and day care.
Where’s my party’s condemnation?