Heiko Stang

''I'm climbin' this ladder/
My head in the clouds/
I hope that it matters/
I'm havin' my doubts.''

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

This.

[Ritchie Torres @RitchieTorres]

Some on the far left react viscerally against any acknowledgment of America’s historical virtues.

Some on the far right react viscerally against any acknowledgment of America’s historical vices.

For a liberal patriot, a history of America in all its triumphs and tragedies is far more inspiring than either hagiography or demonology.

[Neera Tanden🌻 @neeratanden]

People who create Israel conspiracies around a Maine Senate race are no different in their antisemitism than Republicans who blame Jewish space lasers for the weather.

[Aaron Bandler @bandlersbanter]

.@lsanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, was banned from the site indefinitely on Monday for promoting an initiative that, among other things, aims to prevent the site from being biased against “currently disfavored views and groups,” including Jewish and pro-Israel views, he told @JNS_org.

“Wikipedia has become more of a mob-rule anarchy than ever,” Sanger said. “In the kangaroo court in which a mob ousted me, Wikipedia’s administrators showed that they are above trivial details like formal charges, a designated prosecutor, basic decorum, distinction between prosecution and judge, dispassionate adjudication and so forth.”

My latest on Wiki for JNS: 🧵

[Pamela Paresky 🟦 (Habits of a Free Mind) @PamelaParesky]

@adam_louis52328 Actually, the genocide accusation started decades ago. But gullible people who weren’t aware of the decades of false accusations of genocide (while the population was growing) assumed it was about the Gaza war. It never did. That was just a convenient way to spin the accusation.

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

The flood of genocide accusations directed at Israel in the aftermath of October 7 functioned not as independent moral judgment but as a mechanism of concealment: displacing recognition of the genocide that had just occurred by saturating the global informational space with accusations against its victims.

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

The victory of the three DSA candidates who won in New York City last night confirms what I wrote in @theFP after Mamdani's election. Antizionism is now a foundational dividing line of political sentiment, and anti-Jewish libels—and the mobilization around them—are an organized political force. We have not seen anything like this since the original emergence of Wilhelm Marr's "antisemitic" movement and the agitation surrounding the Dreyfus Affair in the late nineteenth century.

Crucially, all three candidates promoted the genocide libel and gained moral credibility in the eyes of their constituents through their performative insistence on saying "genocide." It is simply impossible to fight anti-Jewish discrimination and violence today without recognizing that antizionism is both systemic in institutions and a popular movement on the ground.

Tracking 'antisemitic incidents,' calling for more security, or expressing outrage at swastikas will not suffice. We are in a completely different era. Fighting antizionism as a political force means mobilizing as a political force and being as forceful in intervening in the public discourse as antizionists are themselves.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

.@Wikipedia has been transformed into a blunt instrument of propaganda in the deliberate effort to erase a nation and its history.

Read this thread before shouting at me that it ain't so.

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

@EliLake @Leahgreenb @mehdirhasan And the Bosnia thing is also concerning. As is working in a hospital that was undoubtedly used by Hamas and under which Mohammed Sinwar was killed - but he saw nothing.

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

This is where the progressive movement goes to die.
It's not "Islamophobic" to question a candidate's alliances and ideology. From what I have read, there are several red flags. This is no smear campaign.

[Leah Greenberg says NO KINGS ❌👑 @Leahgreenb]

Vile, shameful, utterly disgusting Islamophobic garbage. Hamawy is an American hero and this is the lowest possible smear campaign.

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

Who would have thought...

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

I'm starting to think that SS tattoo might have been a red flag.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

100% there is no genocide in Gaza. No eradication project. People confused about what the word means is culturally appalling and dangerous for the future of western society. The confusion has indeed been engineered by people know what they are doing. No genocide does not mean simply too much death and destruction in war. It is about intent and action to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Sam Harris @MakingSenseHQ is spot on.

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

I 100% agree with Representative Torres.

[Ritchie Torres @RitchieTorres]

Calling for the internment of Americans — including Americans who identify with Israel — is as deeply un-American as Maureen Galindo herself.

Galindo is a moral disgrace who has no business running for—let alone holding—elected office. I hope the voters of TX-35 resoundingly reject the deep rot of antisemitism and anti-Americanism at the core of her candidacy.

[Josh @_j0sh_a_]

😂 This “Nakba Survivor” is literally a “European settler”

In the late 19th century, Muslim Bosnians (including Inea’s grandparents), fled Bosnia to Ottoman Syria, after Austria-Hungary took control of Bosnia.

They feared that now, the Christians will seek revenge after years of mistreatment.

Inea’s father’s family lived in Tulkaram, but he himself lived in Jerusalem where Inea was born.

In the 1930’s, Inea’s father had a Job in England, he returned to Mandatory Palestine after a few years, but in 1948 they decided to move back to England.

They were not expelled, and no one forced them to move to England. As a matter of fact, Tulkaram, and the old city of Jerusalem remained under Jordanian Arab control. Not a single Zionist to bee seen there.

So in summary, this is a European with no strong roots in the land of Israel, whose family made the decision to immigrate back to the continent of their grandparents instead of remaining under Arab control.

(And the “visit Palestine” poster on her wall is a Zionist poster by Franz Kraus to encourage Zionist tourism to the holy land. It’s not even the original poster, but a replica of the poster, with an additional Hebrew description mentioning his name 🤦‍♂️)

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

Really good news. Still some progress ahead of us.

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

In 1940, nearly every European country practiced capital punishment.

Today, it has nearly disappeared: Belarus is the only European country that still carries out executions, while Russia retains the death penalty in law but has observed a moratorium for decades.

Across a continent of 700 million people, state execution nearly vanished within a single lifetime.

[Dan Senor @dansenor]

The @nytopinion piece by @NickKristof successfully buried the coverage of the thorough Civil Commission report.

[Heiko Stang @StangHeiko]

Strange, but suddenly something reminds me of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact...

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

The way @AOC rejected @FmrRepMTG's help yesterday on Israel and the war really bothered me. @AnaKasparian and I took a chance, we asked our independent and right-wing brothers to show up to the battle on these critical issues. And they did!

@TuckerCarlson @RepThomasMassie @megynkelly @TimJDillon @ComicDaveSmith @TheoVon @ShawnRyan762, Marjorie Taylor Green and so many others, from all parts of the political spectrum showed up to stand up to Israel, to fight against the war and to reclaim American sovereignty. And they brought millions of our fellow Americans with them!

They did this despite the fact that their side is in charge. That took courage. They would say that they were standing on principles they already had. Well, apparently they were right. They just proved that they meant what they said with their actions!

The left has always been for peace. We dreamed of the day the right-wing would join us in opposing wars and opposing the powerful who have rigged the rules against all of us. That day is here. Not for all of them, but for a lot of them! For God's sake, welcome them in.

If you make this about partisanship, you hurt the movement. Shawn Ryan put it best - our house is on fire, we'll go back to fighting on all the other issues after we put out the fire!

We only win if we're united. The establishment has a vice grip on power, if we help them divide us, we'll have no chance.

When the cavalry shows up in the middle of the fight, the correct answer is, "Good to see you, brothers and sisters!!"

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

I'm so sick of this.

The Jews keep coming up with lucrative new ideas for world domination, and I'm. Never. Fucking. Included.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

“Arab here.”

It’s like self-parody.

She’s right, of course. It’s those bastard Jews and, erm, all those pesky assailants targeting Jews throughout the West who — there’s no easy way to say this — are having trouble understanding her perspective. That’s no reflection on her, who’s definitely still right.

No, Hend, “globalize the intifada” isn’t just political opposition or a call to activism. If it was, you’d all be looking for a more thrilling term. You deliberately use a term that romanticizes a specific and brutal history of violence. Including mass waves of suicide bombings targeting children.

That’s why you do it: To sanitize and heroicize, to justify and vindicate. And the longer you tell people like Katie that this isn’t true, that it’s just a peaceful call to political action, the more they will find themselves trying to square that circle with each new expression of intifada.

Sorry. Should have prefaced all that with “Jew here.”

Or perhaps, “Jew who misses friends who were murdered in your last peaceful intifada.”

[Kian Tajbakhsh @k_tajbakhsh]

Your references to “fundamentally different data sets” and “parallel reality” @StrickerNonpro are precisely what prompts me to reply.

I think you are overstating the clarity of the case. The JCPOA was never the magic solution some now suggest. It had benefits, but also serious risks, sunset clauses, and strategic consequences that unfolded over time. Even Obama acknowledged the sunset problem: once advanced centrifuges came into play, "in year 13, 14, 15...breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero" (NPR April 2015). That alone should make us more modest about claiming that one side saw reality while the other lived in fantasy.

The deeper flaw in much pro-JCPOA analysis is that it is static. It judges the deal as if its consequences were frozen in 2015. They were not. Over the next eight years — and especially after October 7 — the costs became clearer: the nuclear file had been artificially separated from the regime’s broader system of coercion: missiles, drones, proxies, hostage-taking, maritime threats, regional intimidation, and domestic repression. As I argued in Iran Crisis Notebook #2: The Layered Roots of the Current War, https://t.co/WF1BEBqfp2 this war did not begin with the United States or Israel. It began in 1979, when the Islamic Republic launched its revolutionary war against America, Israel, the liberal West, and its own people. The current confrontation is not a war Washington or Jerusalem started; it is their effort to finish a war the regime began and has sustained for 47 years.

And on “parallel reality”: I lived and worked in Iran for more than a decade, then spent more than a year in Evin prison, including eight months in IRGC solitary confinement, as a political prisoner and U.S. hostage. I was interrogated for years by senior IRGC officers. I know what a parallel reality looks like. It is the worldview of the Islamic Republic itself: every deal is treated as a tactical instrument in a zero-sum struggle to preserve revolutionary power, in which it is the entire rest of the world that is driving the wrong direction on the highway (to use a Persian joke).

The idea that remaining in the JCPOA would have strengthened “pragmatic elements” and pushed Iran in a more moderate direction is, in my view, the real illusion. After the Green Movement was crushed in 2009, genuine reformist politics inside Iran was systematically destroyed. Leaders were imprisoned or exiled. Reformist parties were banned. Newspapers were shut down. I was in prison with some of those people.

So yes, data sets matter. But assumptions matter more. And the assumption that the Islamic Republic was gradually moderating is one I simply do not recognize — not from lived experience, not from research, and not from the regime’s own conduct.

If there is a parallel reality here, it is the belief that a revolutionary regime built on hostage-taking, repression, proxy warfare, and anti-Western struggle was quietly evolving toward moderation because of a nuclear bargain.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Every time they condemn antisemitism while adding a qualifier — “remember there’s also Islamophobia,” or “Israel causes this,” or any other little mitigating excuse — they’re not actually coming out against hatred of Jews. They’re doing the opposite. They’re trying to redirect the critique in order to clear a space for it in the culture.

Mehdi’s problem is that he knows that his community is saturated with anti-Jewish bigotry, that it’s in mosques, in homes, in every day conversations. There are polls on this and they all agree on the shape and scale of the problem. And Mehdi knows it.

But instead of dragging the problem into the cleansing light of day, he chooses to carve out little spaces in the culture where it is minimized to the point of legitimation — where it is allowed to continue.

Israel didn’t cause this any more than all the vast crimes committed by Muslims in the name of Islam could be reasonably deemed the cause of a wave of racist violence against British Muslims. Just saying that out loud clarifies the stupidity and bigotry of the argument. But until you shift the frame away from Jews, the Mehdis of the world can’t see it.

In his defense, he may believe British Muslims can’t change, so he’s forced to defend them as they are. If that is his view, he’s wrong. Culture can change. The same polls that show us the scale of the problem also suggest that better integration into British society — which as recently as 2014 was polling as one of the least antisemitic countries on Earth — reduces anti-Jewish sentiment among British Muslims.

In other words, this problem is susceptible to good policy.

But to bring about that change, you first have to admit there’s a problem.