HeadOfFun

Zionist (if that means anything, as Israel exists) that supports Palestinian sovereignty via a 2-state solution. Peace will arise from compromise on both sides.

[Corey Walker 🇺🇸 @CoreyWriting]

So when the World Cup was in Qatar, we were all told we had to conduct ourselves in accordance with Islamic society. Now that the World Cup is being held in the West, we are still being told we need to conduct ourselves in accordance with Islamic values.

Interesting...

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

I’m a broken record but it’s remarkable how little these DSA challengers talk about climate compared to AOC in 2018. The theory was that climate was both existential *and* had the potential to motivate a young, progressive, populist base. Israel has been slotted in there now.

[Orcbrand's Kojimaic Matters @kojimaicmatters]

Believing that "people wouldn't do crimes if their basic needs were met" while also believing that "greedy rich people are stealing from everyone" never registers to the people who say this shit as inherently contradictory.

[Joe Truzman @JoeTruzman]

BBC is right; he was a cameraman -- just one who was very likely a Hamas member employed by Al-Jazeera. Furthermore, this is not the first time Al-Jazeera has employed terrorists either.

[Mark Zlochin - מארק זלוצ'ין༝ @MarkZlochin]

As a sidenote, one of the more idiotic talking points @piersmorgan spat out, while talking over @HausdorffMedia, was his claim that “international journalists would find the bodies of thousands of children that Israel isn’t counting, but the journalists would.”

To borrow a phrase Piers so theatrically repeated throughout the “interview” - THIS IS BUlLSHIT!

First of all, most of those killed in this war - including children - were buried long ago. There aren't thousands of corpses just lying around, waiting to be “counted” by roaming scoop-hungry reporters.

Second, if the idea is that journalists could just stroll into Gaza and fact-check Hamas’s claims about civilian death toll on the spot - then that too is absolute BULLSHIT.

Verifying the true number of dead - both combatants and civilians - is a painstaking, years-long process that requires methodical cross-checking of hospital records, eyewitness testimony, burial data, and other independent sources, in order to confirm the identity and circumstances of each individual death.

And this process demands something most modern journalists sorely lack: attention to detail, investigative rigor and most importantly - patience.

So no - letting journalists into Gaza won’t magically illuminate the death toll. It may generate headlines, outrage, and photo ops, but contribute nothing of real value to determining how many children were actually killed in this horrific war.

But then again, we all know Piers is far more interested in the headlines and outrage part, than in anything resembling actual truth.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Welp, I think we're done here.

Trump himself is now saying he buckled under the pressure of Hormuz.

It's as bad as it could possibly be. He's saying aloud that Iran can have anything it wants because America can't afford the staring contest.

If this is his own explanation in his own words, then the fact that the sanctions relief is front-loaded...suddenly becomes important. The fact that the inspections regime that will verify compliance will be negotiated by an American side that has already admitted defeat, that needs this more than the opponent needs it...is now significant. And the fact that the proxy system is now recognized as legitimate by the United States -- is suddenly exactly the disaster you feared it might be.

And the fact that America has declared aloud that it's not actually capable of imposing its will even in the world's most vital energy chokepoints, causing its allies in the Gulf to already begin to seek a new accommodation with Iran -- makes all of this worse than Obama and worse than the JCPOA.

Remember: the great unfixable flaw of the JCPOA that none of its boosters ever had a good answer for was that it merely kicked the can down the road. It solved nothing.

Trump's deal, as of this moment, is not even close to accomplishing so much.

"Iran never won a war and never lost a negotiation," Trump famously said of Obama's deal (as a reporter reminded him at today's press conference). Ironic that the Iranians would win a negotiation most spectacularly against a man who styles himself the greatest negotiator to ever grace the White House.

So what does it all mean?

It means that in the coming years, nuclear programs will sprout like mushrooms after the rain throughout the Middle East. It means that many nations will now build out new and larger ballistic missile arsenals.

It means that the state system will give way before the march of the region's transnational ideological axes. Minorities will again be trampled, new wars will be fought by stronger states to dominate the power vacuums within weaker ones.

You're thinking of Israel in Lebanon -- but that's just a specific campaign against a specific enemy. Think Turkey, which right now occupies a region of Syria vastly larger than Israel's presence in Lebanon. Think heightened Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen and a new influx of money and guns to the different sides in Libya.

It means, in other words, that we will have a few more wars to fight, a few more technologies to invent to deal with this new age of cheap missiles and drones -- and also of supersonic Chinese missiles bearing nuclear warheads that Iran will eventually, inevitably, be capable of deploying against us.

And it didn't have to be this bad. (And maybe, when he's heard all the criticism, it won't be.) He could have left something, anything, to concede later. He could have kept the Iranians a little bit in the dark, just a smidgen, as to just how defeated America feels.

Israel's position in all this is simple, and more or less unchanged from last week. America gave us more than we had a right to ask for. But we may be going it alone from here out.

Dust off the nukes. Maybe test one somewhere far away from anywhere. Quadruple the interceptor production lines, double the size of the Mossad and the Air Force. And no, don't let Hezbollah breathe, not for a second.

It's the 1960s again. And Israel will have to defeat a couple more enemies before it can once again eke out a few decades of peace.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Pro tip: When you're covering for Islamic Jihad, do as Ryan does. Put lots and lots of shit in the mouth of the people you hate. What are they gonna do? If they try to dispute it, they only drive traffic to your lies.

But in this particular case, he's arguing with PIJ, not with me. According to the terror group, he wasn't "working for Palestine Today," as Ryan puts it. He was a نائب فصيل, a deputy platoon (or sometimes squad) commander, and a "mujahid," which I don't think needs translating. It's not just "shahid," which could be an honorific.

So it sure looks like Israel and Islamic Jihad both think he was a full-fledged member of PIJ's Khan Younis Brigade, and only Ryan disagrees.

Who you believe is up to you.

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

I sold barren land for a profit.

Then someone developed homes on that land and massively increased its value.

I have seller's remorse.

I am the victim and I have a right to massacre everyone who lives on that land and steal it.

My name is Palestine.

[Elizabeth Tsurkov @LizHurra]

في "الأربعاء الأسود" حينما قصفت إسرائيل 100 هدف في 10 دقائق، حاولت أن أفهم عبر البحث على فيسبوك وإنستغرام أي نسبة من الضحايا كانوا مدنيين، وأي نسبة كانوا من عناصر الحزب. فحصت لعدّة أيام صفحاتٍ مؤيدة للحزب بحثًا عن إعلانات الشهادة. منذ ذلك الحين، أصبحت خوارزميات فيسبوك متأكدة أنني لا أهتمّ بشيء غير إعلانات الشهادة، ولذلك أصبح الـ Feed الخاص بي سلسلة لا متناهية من هذه الإعلانات. هناك عشرات الإعلانات يوميًا. آلاف من شباب الحزب قد قُتلوا، ومن المؤكّد أن هناك مصابين أيضًا. غير تدمير المدن والقرى والأرزاق بيد إسرائيل، فإن موت كل هؤلاء الشباب هو نكبة بحدّ ذاتها للمجتمع الشيعي اللبناني.
هذه حرب عبثية. كل هذه التضحيات لم تُحقّق شيئًا يُذكر. عدد قتلى إسرائيل الإجمالي هو 34، أي ثلث قتيل في اليوم بشكل متوسط. إسرائيل مستمرة في تقدّمها وتدميرها.
كيف يمكن مشاهدة هذا التقتيل وعدم إيقافه�� لماذا تسترخص قيادة الحزب حياة أولئك الشباب؟
هذه خمس دقائق من الـ scrolling في الـ feed الخاص بي (هناك بعض البوستات الغير متعلقة بالحزب).

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

I appreciate this take.

Looking at Hezbollah fighters up close and seeing their humanity.

By laying waste to whole swaths of my country and vowing never to stop until we're all dead and gone, these men have forced me to choose between their deaths and the deaths of my own people, my own children. I choose their deaths, unapologetically and always.

And so we must kill any of them who attack us, or who are preparing to do so, or who don't surrender or disarm once we go on the offensive in response -- because they've been raised to a religious belief that my children and my entire people must be destroyed for the salvation of the world, and they've spent decades working toward that goal, always in the service of a foreign empire and at the expense of any other aspirations they might have had for Lebanon or their own community.

And still, you're not allowed to ignore the humanity even of your mortal enemy. We must not relent against them. And still this kind of post reminds us of the tragedy of it all, of the insane waste that their ideology represents to the Arab and Shia future.

The muqawama consumes its own.

[Cal 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @CalMEurofan]

This is my favorite argument.

In Hiroshima, roughly 140k people died due to the nuclear bomb out of 350k. That’s 40% of the city.

In Nagasaki, 80k people died out of 263k. That’s 30% of the city.

In Gaza, 73k people have died (according to GHM) out of 2.3 million. That’s about 3% of the population. A substantial percentage of that are terrorists.

So Israel has dropped an amount of bombs on Gaza that exceeds the power of the nuclear bombs we dropped on Japan and yet the death toll is far lower both proportionally and on a raw numbers basis.

How is that possible if Israel is committing genocide? Maybe it’s because they’re not.

[Matti Friedman @MattiFriedman]

Many journalists were concerned, understandably, about the reported deaths of "journalists" in Gaza. It's striking how uninterested they are in the unraveling of many of those stories. We're all lucky to have @Aizenberg55 doing the work the press should be doing:

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

What if beneath all the righteous pretensions and endless indignation, the Greens are just literally at war with Jews? No, Polansky wouldn't be the first Jew to lead a political crusade against Jews qua Jews.

Separately, since this anti-circumcision crusade is justified by the argument that kids can't consent, what's the Greens' view nowadays on gender-affirming care for minors?

[AG @AGHamilton29]

New video reports that Hamas has again turned Gaza Hospitals and schools into torture chambers for Palestinian dissidents.

Gazans Describe Horrific Interrogations, Beatings.

Notice the silence about this from many in the “pro-Palestinian” crowd.

https://t.co/jip8RQOXFr

[Samuel J. Hyde סמואל ג'י הייד @SamuelJHyde11]

When you understand that settler-colonial theory was invented by Fayez Sayegh in 1965, and that he had served as a senior figure in the SSNP — the Arab movement openly modeled on Nazism — the entire nativist fetish that settler-colonial theorists possess begins to look rather different. Suddenly, the obsession with soil, authenticity, roots, and the distinction between the native and the foreigner (who should be expelled), appears less like a language that passes for leftist liberation and sounds far closer to Nazi theory than its adherents would ever care to admit. Should we still then be expected to believe that is a mere accident that “Zionist colonialism” is the center piece of
settler colonial thought?

[Aizenberg @Aizenberg55]

In case you missed it:
Ramy Abdu of Euro-Med Monitor, who was the originator of the @NickKristof @nytimes "rape dog" story, has twice personally vouched that IDF-killed military commanders were innocent civilians. In both cases, PIJ itself later admitted they were commanders.

[Israel Foreign Ministry @IsraelMFA]

For months, Hamas operatives were presented to the world as "journalists" and used to inflate accusations against Israel.

Now CPJ is quietly admitting that some of those individuals participated in combat.

How many more terrorists are still hiding behind a press vest?

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

I didn't call any of you "shit hires". I referred to the outlet as "excreteo" - & before I knew who had decided to join it.

You linking this to skin colour is a deeply pathetic reach - indicating the sort of "journalism" your "independent media" outlet will no doubt produce 🙄

[Israel Foreign Ministry @IsraelMFA]

We appreciate the concern of the distinguished governments about the humanitarian access in Gaza, despite the fact that the concerns and claims in the statement are completely unfounded and detached from reality.

There are immense amounts of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip. Since the ceasefire, more than 1.6 million tons of food have entered the Gaza Strip, with an average of 600 humanitarian aid trucks entering the Strip each day.

There are dozens of international aid organizations operating in the Strip that handle the aforementioned humanitarian aid. The registration process for these international organizations is designed to ensure that their activities are not exploited to promote terrorism, as was the case with UNRWA. In this regard, we refer governments to the USAID report published less than a week ago concerning more than 100 UNRWA employees found to have links to Hamas.

The registration process for international organizations, including the need to ensure that their activities are not exploited for terrorism, was reviewed and approved by Israel's Supreme Court, whose independence democratic nations are expected to respect.

🔗https://t.co/d1YIuWiS69

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Peter Beinart, who apologized publicly for speaking in Tel Aviv and doesn't think the Jews should have a state, is lecturing Sam Harris about self-righteous certainty.

The irony: Beinart does in that piece exactly what Sam says they always do. He ignores the great big thing.