Remember Hatzolah? The Jewish volunteer EMS?
A follower reached out to me after his 19 year old brother was hit by an unmarked Hatzolah "emergency vehicle" smart-car speeding through Brooklyn without sirens, launching him 30 feet into the air.
Over 1 year later, after suffering a massive head injury his brother is still in a coma...
I could barely find any media coverage of this story, and I wanted to share it further.
DM me if you or anyone else you know has had any experiences similar to this with either Hatzolah (Jewish volunteer EMS), or Shomrim (Jewish volunteer 'civilian patrol squad').
According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.
How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.
Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.
An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.
For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.
It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.
By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.
So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.
How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.
At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.
It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.
Whether you call it New York City, Nueva Yol, or PueblaYork, Hispanic and Latino New Yorkers are at the heart of the city we love.
From the labor activism of Luisa Moreno, to the marches of the Young Lords in the South Bronx in 1969.
From Juan Rodriguez, a free, mixed-race Dominican sailor who became the first non-indigenous resident of Manhattan in 1613, to Jose Alvarado, NYCHA's very own Knicks Champion.
From the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side, to Toñita's in Williamsburg, New York City would not be New York City without its Hispanic Heritage.
And yet, more than three-quarters of Latino New Yorkers struggle to afford living in New York City. As we mark Hispanic Heritage Month, we remember that Hispanic and Latino families must be at the heart of our affordability agenda.
I said it at the time (and before!), but I truly believe that American voters electing Donald Trump for a second term in 2024 was the dumbest and most self-harming choice made by an electorate in the history of humanity
Americans are finding out they’ve been lied about Lindsay Clancy and no longer support her
“Like, b*tch, she was rich. I'm finding out more and more about this b*tch every day:
- I didn't know this was a rich b*tch that we were speaking on, on behalf of
- I didn't know her husband made 40K a month and the b*tch didn't have to work
- I didn't know she had a maid
- I didn't know she had a housekeeper
- I didn't know she had a nanny
- I didn't know her kids went to school 3 days out the week
- I didn't know she had both sets of grandparents helping her
- I didn't know her husband worked from home
I didn't know a lot of things about this b*tch. If privilege was a f*cking person”
“I can understand a poor mom doing this. Like, "Oh, my kids, we don't even have food.” — a poor person, I can kinda see where they're coming from. But this b*tch was balling out of control”
“Like, b*tch, and even then, I should've known they said she jumped from a second-story window. I'm like, "B*tch, who got 2 stories in the house? This b*tch got money"”
I went through and fact checked this it’s all true
- Glassdoor estimates her husband’s income at $480,000 per year
- She did work, quit and didn’t have to work because her husbands income have
- They had nanny/ housekeeping help
- Lived in a very nice home
- Their family was in the “upper middle class” category
- Grandparents helped, kids went to school and husband worked at home all true
This is not someone who deserves anyone’s sympathy. This is someone who had all the resources possibly available at her disposal