Rielle Capler

research, policy, advocacy, equity, harm reduction, access to health care. cannabis. psychedelics. MHA, PhD. Earthling. Opinions are my own. RTs ≠ endorsement

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

In June 1941, a mob in Baghdad killed almost 200 Jews in two days.

My grandmother hid in the back of a café while a man shot a mother’s seven children in front of her.

In 1948, Iraq made Zionism a crime punishable by death.

In 1950, it let Jews leave only if they gave up their citizenship.

In 1951, it froze their bank accounts and took their homes. My grandparents arrived in Israel that year with nothing.

In 1969, Iraq hanged nine Jews in a public square and invited crowds to celebrate.

A 2,500-year-old Jewish community didn’t just “disappear.”

It was ethnically cleansed.

Why can’t CNN acknowledge that?

[Ted S @ClearReason]

There are more Arab doctors in Israel than Jews in the entire Arab world.

Not more Arabs. More Arab doctors.

And Israel gets the lectures on coexistence.

[Kosher Chutzpah @KosherChutzpah]

Kuwait expelled 300,000 Palestinians in 1991.

No UN emergency sessions. No protests. No global outrage.

It was never about Palestinians.
It was always about hating Jews.

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

People act like the UN is a council of philosopher-kings delivering sacred moral truth. Its actually a club of 198 governments, full of dictatorships, brutal monarchies, military juntas and kleptocratic lunatics with no morality whatsoever. 74% of the world's pop are not free.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

Israel handed Egypt more than 23,000 sq miles of land for a peace treaty. Israel today is about 10,000 sq miles. But sure, Israel is "expansionist."

This day (Nov 11) in 1977, Menachem Begin invited Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem. He accepted and addressed the Knesset. After real negotiations, Israel gave up the entire Sinai (oil fields, settlements, strategic depth, literally everything).

An Arab state willing to sign a peace treaty with Israel got territory larger than Israel itself. Almost all others brought only decades of rejection, terrorism, and chants of "from the river to the sea."

The "Greater Israel" narrative is just nonsense inversion. The side that keeps demanding more land, more "right of return," and the elimination of Jewish sovereignty is not the one that already gave up a peninsula more than twice its size.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

.@MarkJCarney If only 39 countries at the United Nations today opposed the election of the Iranian regime to a key committee that addresses women’s rights and counterterrorism, then how did your government live up to this promise? Why did you join in nominating Iran on April 8?

[Yisrael official 🕎 @YisraelOfficial]

No other country is told to negotiate with the people who filmed themselves murdering its children.

[Reza Pahlavi @PahlaviReza]

Visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau was a harrowing experience.

My wife Yasmine and I viewed the possessions left behind by the victims and visited the barracks, gas chambers, and crematoria. Every shoe and suitcase was a reminder of a human being who had a name, a family and a life.

The crimes of the Holocaust against the Jewish people are incomparable in the combination of its industrial scale of slaughter and the bureaucratic efficiency with which it was planned and organized. Auschwitz and Birkenau lay that plain.

My thoughts turned to the people of Iran, and to a regime that denies the Holocaust while attempting to erase the massacre of our compatriots from the world’s memory through internet blackouts, censorship and hidden executions.

But the Islamic Republic does not represent Iran. The heirs of Cyrus stand with the Jewish people. And while the regime seeks death and destruction, the Iranian nation is fighting for life and liberty.

We placed a wreath bearing the Lion and Sun on behalf of the Iranian people at the memorial to the victims. We will never forget and we will not allow the regime occupying Iran to turn our nation’s name and history into instruments of hatred.

A free Iran will once again stand for peace, life and human dignity.

Light will prevail over darkness.

@AuschwitzMuseum @EJAssociation

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

SHAME: The U.N. General Assembly just elected the murderous Islamic Republic of Iran to its Committee for Program and Coordination, the main body shaping the world organization’s priorities on Women’s Rights, Human Rights, Disarmament and Counter-Terrorism. 144 voted for Iran. 🧵

[Senator Leo Housakos @SenatorHousakos]

It is not enough to merely say that Canada doesn’t support this. @HillelNeuer is absolutely right. Minister @AnitaAnandMP is in a position to take concrete action to stop it. It’s time for more than words. Full stop.

[Jamie Metzl @JamieMetzl]

Last week, NPR put Hasan Piker on Morning Edition to weigh in on the midterms. Piker had previously said “America deserved 9/11,” called Orthodox Jews “inbred,” and expressed his support for Hamas. NPR told listeners he was a progressive campaign surrogate and left out any mention of his anti-American bigotry.

Imagine NPR bringing on a Klansman or a neo-Nazi to size up an election and introducing them simply as a campaign advocate. The editorial failure would be obvious.

The editor who approved this segment should be fired.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

BREAKING: Egypt places 35 Europe-linked Islamist organizations on its terror list.
(Source: Egypt Today | link below)

[Adam Milstein @AdamMilstein]

“I remember what that hatred looked and felt like.”

Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson says antisemitism in Philadelphia reminds him of the racism he faced in the segregated South. He’s calling on local leaders to speak out.

https://t.co/vcyMgQbpt0

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

Since 10/7, I am reminded constantly that I spent the early 2020s surrounded by lunatic antisemitic extremists.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: The Philly Bike Boycott has reportedly ended early because of the overwhelming number of counterprotestors who showed up.

Notice which side is fully masked to hide their identities.

[(((Rep.Alma Hernandez))) @almaforarizona]

Today I walked through the Anne Frank exhibit in Chicago. I saw this & immediately thought of the pics & videos I saw online of useful idiots taking to the streets to harass & intimidate Jewish-owned businesses. We will NOT go back. We know how this started. NOT NOW, NOT EVER.

[Matthew Feinberg @thewebbie]

What's the difference between masked bike riders targeting Jewish businesses and the KKK marching through a neighborhood to intimidate people they hate?

The bicycles?

[Nervana Mahmoud @Nervana_1]

Top Democrat strategist Van Jones,
One of Obama’s former aides during his presidency
Released this message to #Michigan on #AbdulElSayed

#Midterms

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Joe Rogan just passes on any ol' lie he finds in the deepest holes of the internet, even when the lie is raw hate from beginning to end.

Israel allows genetic testing. Almost all clinical tests and prenatal tests are actually covered under our national health insurance.

And you absolutely can get ancestry testing in Israel. 23AndMe specifically, which Joe mentions as outlawed in Israel, ships to Israel. Go to their international website and try it before you spread this dumb, mean lie. Also FamilyTreeDNA and some others.

And once you get your raw DNA information through 23AndMe and others, you can upload it to every other ancestry website for analysis.

In fact, Ashkenazi Jews, including Israeli Ashkenazim, are some of the most genetically studied populations on the fucking planet, you racist dolts. (Oops, just realized I'm kinda pissed.)

There are even Israeli studies by Israeli researchers of Israeli Jewish genetics. Nature has published studies using Israeli genetics databases. Here, for example: https://t.co/OtOl0XiD30

So what does Israel actually restrict, and why is it so severe about it?

Two words: Parentage and obsessive privacy rules.

Parentage tests are as tightly controlled as heroin.

The reason is peculiar to our tradition and may be hard for outsiders to understand. In Jewish religious law, a "mamzer," someone born of the mother's adultery or from incest, lives a restricted life in some ways, including limits on who they can marry under traditional laws. And their religious status is heritable. These are ancient laws, but they matter in a basically conservative and religious society.

To protect children from ever becoming saddled with this status, parentage tests require a family court order, even if both parents consent to the test. Because the child has to be protected. Rabbinical courts have often forbidden testing almost across the board, including in divorce cases. In one case I once read about, the rabbinical court quashed the father's genetic test and demanded that he adopt the child to avoid any doubt. This was to protect the child in that particular case. The court refused to release the father from responsibility for the child and refused to examine evidence into the child's actual parentage.

Is this a weird cultural artifact born from a specific feature of the Jewish tradition? Yes. Feel free to make fun of it over in the secular West. I make fun of it myself over here. But inasmuch as old traditional rules are an unavoidable part of our big-family, tightly-knit society, I'll take this weirdness, and the never-ending effort to cleverly circumvent the damaging parts of the old traditions, over what's happening in your neck of the woods.

Is it all an attempt to hide the 2000 years we spent in Europe? No, you dolt. What the hell is wrong with you?

And then there's privacy. Pay attention to this one, because you'll wish you had some of our rules in your own country.

This is the only real limit on ancestry kits.

Your genetic information is totally, utterly private. Your employer and your insurance company can never discriminate against you based on your genetics. Even just attempting to get their hands on your genetic information is a felony. Labs and genetic counselors are closely regulated.

In the age of AI, even just the leaking of a *relative's* genetic information can hurt your employability and your insurance premiums. And it's not some crazy fear. Ancestry kit companies are bought and sold by commercial investors all the time, and they're the owners of customers' data. A data breach of 23AndMe in 2023 put the genetic information of millions on the internet. You're telling me insurance companies didn't scoop it up? Israelis are more protected from that dystopian new reality than most of the rest of you.

And importantly, the law's prohibitions are on the commercial companies, not on the customer. Giving someone your own genetic information isn't a crime. The company buying and selling it commercially within the jurisdiction of Israeli law is committing the crime.

That's why the one company that's actually hampered in any meaningful way from testing Israelis is MyHeritage, which is Israeli. To bypass Israeli jurisdiction and that massive privacy regime, Israelis just order a kit from a company in Texas.

So why do literally hundreds of millions of people believe the lie that Israel has a blanket restriction on genetic testing to avoid anyone ever finding out that Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe?

At its core, at its most basic: because they want to create the permission structure to destroy Israel. They want to declare Israel a colonialist, imperialist interloper doomed to be felled by the noble indigenous Arab of the land.

So they declare that Israel is hiding this great, terrible secret that nobody has ever hidden and nobody could ever hide -- that it doesn't actually belong here.

Never mind the fact that every study of Ashkenazi Jews shows that they have origins in the Levant -- isn't it a bit odd that this argument never grapples with the millions of Israeli Jews who spent the past 1,800 years in places like Iraq and Yemen, Jews who were expelled and fled to the last man, woman and child to Israel, and who make up half of Israeli society today?

You'd think if this was actually about Israeli "genetics," that would be part of this conversation. But it isn't about any kind of reality, it's a bigoted, genocidal fantasy. So the millions of Jews who don't even come from Europe magically disappear from this conversation.

I don't think Joe Rogan dreams of our annihilation. I think Joe picks up garbage floating in the juices at the bottom of the internet's deepest garbage bins and launders it happily for clicks.

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

And people thought I was joking 😂