O'Riain Arts

Art, photography, film, music, writing, decades of sneaking up behind people to covertly push them up their ladders while they're not looking. All works ours.

[O'Riain Arts @ArtsRiain]

There's this still small remnant among the Irish diaspora who know the truth, see clearly and are not afraid to speak out against the plague of racist bigotry that is destroying the nation/s

[Boy George @BoyGeorge]

#Shalom

[נועה מגיד | Noa magid @NoaMagid]

Shir Hana Georgy was only 22 when she was brutally murdered by Hamas while fleeing the music festival on October 7.

Don’t forget her.

[David Draiman 🟦🇺🇸🇮🇱✡️☮️ @davidmdraiman]

Please sign and share.

Why was @BoyGeorge’s song #WeWillDanceAgain taken down @Bandcamp ?

This hate driven censorship must be corrected immediately.

https://t.co/kCDN59XnPr

[Boy George @BoyGeorge]

We are back. New location. Spread the word. Check out my latest product: https://t.co/CK38GWbj1A

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

At this point if you still claim Israel is committing genocide in Gaza you are either stupid and ignorant or antisemitic.

The antisemitic version usually means applying a double standard on the definition of genocide and the laws of war just to delegitimize Israel’s existence or right to pursue legitimate goals in a war it did not start or/and dehumanize every IDF soldier as a monster.

I have tried to argue basic definitions. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part. The evidence does not show that intent toward the people in Gaza. What it shows is the opposite. Israel has taken extraordinary steps, often at real cost and risk, to prevent civilian harm while fighting an enemy that hides among them, uses hospitals and schools as bases, and treats its own people as props in an evil grand political strategy of martyrdom to eliminate all jews on the planet.

In the middle of the fighting Israel has let in huge amounts of food, hundreds of thousands of tons, sometimes more than the world food specialists said was needed. Water lines from Israel have stayed open, three of them supplying tens of thousands of cubic meters a day. They have coordinated repairs, kept desalination plants running by sending fuel and even electricity to key ones, and allowed generators so water systems, hospitals and bakeries can keep working. Medical supplies and equipment have poured in by the tens of thousands of tons. Field hospitals coordinated. Patients have been evacuated for treatment outside. When polio showed up for the first time in decades Israel halted fighting every day and worked with WHO and UNICEF on a mass vaccination campaigns. Over a million doses given. That is not how you try to wipe out a people.

Then look at the misinformation machine. Almost every big claim about Israel deliberately targeting journalists or medical staff or children falls apart, and a lot of the time it falls apart because of what Hamas itself admits, sometimes before anyone even finishes basic fact checking. The “journalists” killed for example. Plenty of the names on those lists later show up in Hamas or Islamic Jihad martyr posts as actual operatives or commanders. Dual roles are common in Gaza’s information space. Same with medical workers. People mourned as nurses or doctors get claimed later by the terror groups as fighters. Hospitals have been used as command centers and weapons storage over and over. Hamas officials have even said it out loud at times. Manuals found on how to use the hospitals as Hamas military sites.

The casualty numbers and the “they are targeting children” stories. The Hamas health ministry figures get treated like gospel, yet their own underlying data and later admissions undercut every trending statistic. Combatants get left out or reclassified. Claims of IDF snipers or drones hunting kids usually fail basic reality of sci-fi sniper drones that don’t exist or injury patterns coming out of the same hospitals.

These stories do not need years of investigation to collapse. Often Hamas’s own words or the available evidence do the job within days or weeks. But the first maximalist version is what spreads and sticks and then gets used to accuse the whole country of Israel and its army of genocidal intent.

It is not illegal or wrong to target and destroy your enemy in a war, especially one that started with a massacre, held hostages, and fights from inside the civilian population it claims to protect. Gaza is an awful war with awful conditions, conditions shaped heavily by Hamas’s tactics. That does not make it genocide. The aid that kept flowing, the vaccination campaigns, the water and power facilitation, and the way the propaganda claims kept falling apart all point the other direction. If you ignore all of that and still yell genocide the explanations left are ignorance or a double standard aimed only at Israel. But this entire stupid campaign every war in history is a genocide.

If you actually want to engage in the debate of "intent" or actions in Gaza, see earlier writings:

"I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza," https://t.co/G7Iy9Ki3g5

"Israel Is Not Committing Genocide: Exposing the Distortion of Law and Truth," with @Ostrov_A
https://t.co/0RWFtOUd8H

"Israel's Aid to Gaza Is Historically Unprecedented," https://t.co/QMLuWDGDDs

[Boy George @BoyGeorge]

I'm afraid this is not a new conversation. I grew up in the 70s and I felt it then as I feel it now. #CultureClub

[Stop The Hate UK @StopTheHate_UK]

Statement from Stop The Hate UK
Bandcamp has removed Boy George’s latest track, “We Will Dance Again,” after he endured a vicious campaign of abuse for standing with Israel and with the Jewish people.

Bandcamp now has one choice: explain itself or restore the song.

If the track breached a genuine technical rule, publish the rule, the evidence and the record of consistent enforcement. Show that other comparable releases have been treated in exactly the same way.

If Bandcamp cannot do that, then this looks like what it is: ideological censorship dressed up as moderation.
Boy George has been targeted because he refused to bend the knee. He honoured the victims of Nova. He stood with Jews when much of the cultural establishment chose cowardice, silence or open hostility. Now a platform that boasts of defending independent artists has apparently decided that solidarity with Jews is one form of independence it cannot tolerate.

That is disgraceful.

Bandcamp cannot host endless anti-Israel propaganda, indulge the language of “resistance” and then suddenly discover its principles when an artist mourns murdered Jews. Selective enforcement is not neutrality. It is discrimination.

Stop The Hate UK demands:
1-the immediate publication of the full reason for the track’s removal;
2-evidence that Bandcamp’s rules are applied consistently;
3-restoration of the song unless a clear and legitimate breach can be proved;
4-a public assurance that artists will not be punished for supporting Israel or standing against antisemitism.

Boy George has shown more courage than the platform attempting to silence him.
Bandcamp should restore the track, answer the public and stop hiding behind corporate evasions.
Until it does, its claim to support independent music is worthless.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

The Holocaust is singular. Nothing in history equals it.

A modern, industrialized European state decided that every single Jew on earth (man, woman, infant, elderly, disabled, convert, atheist, even war heroes) must be hunted down and murdered for the sole crime of existing.

Not for land.
Not for resources.
Not for political control.
Not as a byproduct of war.

The annihilation of the Jews was the point.

Even while the Germans were being crushed on the Eastern Front and the Allies pushed in from the West, the Nazis kept diverting trains, fuel, manpower, and industrial capacity away from the battlefield just to keep the gas chambers running.

Mere traces of Jewish ancestry were enough for a death sentence. Conversion didn't save you. Assimilation didn't save you. Intermarriage or loyalty to Germany didn't save you. Jewish blood itself was treated as a permanent, irreversible stain.

This extermination of Europe’s Jews was planned and carried out by university professors, engineers, architects, chemists, and bureaucrats. Ordinary, educated citizens of one of the most advanced societies on earth. They clocked in, murdered with industrial efficiency all day, then went home to listen to Beethoven and read Goethe.

No other atrocity combined all of these elements at once: (1) total biological targeting of an entire people with no exemptions; (2) industrial-scale factory killing; (3) continent-wide reach; and (4) a sophisticated modern state treating murder of a people as a war aim equal to military victory.

The crime was so unprecedented that Raphael Lemkin had to invent a new word for it: genocide.

That word has since been stretched, emptied, and turned into a political weapon against the very people who actually experienced it.

The Holocaust stands alone.

[Dan 🇮🇪 ✡️ @danielthemate]

Imma start shamelessly spreading @havivrettiggur videos because Ireland needs more common sense when it comes to the middle east.

Israel existing was never a choice. It was necessity. Zionism for Jews was never a choice, it was survival.

[Prof. Math & CS @Zeev81309559]

Friends, a major pro-Zionist account with 125k followers has been permanently shadowbanned.
His content was always original and focused on exposing propaganda.
Here’s his video showing how Palestinian textbooks take images of Jewish Holocaust victims and falsely present them as Jews massacring Palestinians.

Please share & follow his backup: @GAZAWOOD2

[Dana Loesch @DLoesch]

I visited the site where the October 7th attack happened.

[Saul Sadka @Saul_Sadka]

Live scene at a beach bar in Tel Aviv, where an American tourist passed out. Within 3 minutes, Muslim and Orthodox Jewish paramedics from United Hatzalah had arrived on donated medically equipped scooters and were attending to her.

This is whatever the opposite of apartheid is.

[Mazelit Airaksinen 🎗🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @Mazelit_]

Noam would be celebrating her 22nd birthday today.

But she was killed by anti-Jewish terrorism.

Noam 🩵

We can’t forget.

Her family posted this tribute video of her today to Instagram just a few hours ago.

We will remember you, Noam 🎗️

[OurFightUk @OurFightUk]

This evening the Green Party voted to begin the process of de-twinning Hackney from the Israeli town of Haifa.

The significance of this is striking. Haifa is widely regarded as one of the most integrated of Israeli towns, with Arab and Jewish restaurants jostling for customers, representation of all religions, and world-leading universities that are completely multicultural.

As for the relationship between Haifa and Hackney, it has lasted nearly 60 years, and a core part of it is the important medical ties between Hackney's Homerton Hospital and the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa.

Yet the Greens—and the radical left that has thrown its weight behind them—are so desperate to break any connection with Israel that they are happy to destroy this positive relationship. Their act of destruction demonstrates that those who call themselves 'progressive' are not interested in peace or building connections; they are interested only in isolating Israel and whitewashing Hamas.

We knew the Green Party majority would carry the vote, and having been attacked on previous protests in Hackney, we also knew we risked physical attack by being outside the Town Hall.

But still a small group of Our Fight supporters went.

We went to celebrate Haifa, we went to show that there are non-Jews who stand against the drive to isolate Israel, and we went to prove that we will not be scared away from the public square.

Tonight the vote was lost and the new Brownshirts have begun the process of breaking an important link. But we must continue to push back agaisnt the isolation campaign, wherever we can.

[Kosher @koshercockney]

A beautiful soul.
This is Liron Barda 💔 🕯️

She was brutally murdered by Palestinian terrorists on October 7th while she saved others’ lives.

While Palestinians were raping and slaughtering.

There were some Israelis who stayed.
Liron was one of them.

Amidst all the chaos she did everything to try and save lives, unfortunately when overwhelmed, she couldn’t save her own life.

Liron is a hero. She is the complete opposite of those who murdered her.

While they sanctify death, she sanctified life.

May her memory be a blessing 🕯️

[FactsForPeace @Facts_For_Peace]

"Never again" only has meaning if we recognize the warning signs when they emerge.

The warning signs are here.

Never Again Is Now.

[נועה מגיד | Noa magid @NoaMagid]

Dana Pertrenko was only 24 when she was brutally murdered by Hamas while fleeing the music festival on October 7.

Don’t forget her.

[Shawn Eni @ShawnEni]

🚨 BREAKING: A Jewish man raised both hands and repeatedly shouted “Baruch Hashem” on a crowded street in Queens this morning.

Witnesses at the scene say nothing happened.

[H.E.T. @HolocaustUK]

Today, on Holocaust survivor Steven Frank BEM's 91st birthday, listen to him explain why he decided to share his powerful testimony with students across the country.

[O'Riain Arts @ArtsRiain]

@Mike_Kiwanuka @afalkhatib @australian The in depth legal history https://t.co/8Z4PUdEfiO

[O'Riain Arts @ArtsRiain]

@Mike_Kiwanuka @afalkhatib @australian The San Remo agreement ( lobbied for by Arab leaders of the day) gave specific rights to Jews to 'reconstitute their national homeland' in law and is still fully legally binding in Int law as are all the post WW1 mandates -Syria, Iraq, Cameroon etc its a foundation the UN sits on