Iris Engelson

Radical Centrist. Terrorists to the left of me, MAGA to the right. Here I am: stuck in the middle with truth and decency.
עם ישראל חי

[Iris Engelson @irisengelson]

It was true after Jan 6 and it's true today. If you think it only applies to one side of the political spectrum, you haven't learned the heuristic yet. Go and learn. https://t.co/oXHXyCaB33

[Juliet Moses @JulietMosesNZ]

“There is an uncomfortable truth here. Much of this moral grandstanding is being carried out by C grade scholars whose political activism far exceeds their intellectual contribution. For some, public denunciation and ideological policing appear to have become a substitute for genuine scholarly achievement and engagement with ideas.” 🔥

[Adam Louis-Klein @adam_louis52328]

On campuses, Jewish students are barricaded and threatened. On the streets, Jewish businesses are vandalized and mobs chant for the expulsion of Jews. In the media and at the United Nations, unverified claims and antizionist libels are recycled as fact, echoing through institutions with moral authority.

What we are witnessing is not a scattered collection of prejudices, nor a spontaneous reaction to Israeli policy. It is the antizionist hate movement, a patterned, collective phenomenon unfolding across media, institutions, and public discourse. It is a digitally accelerated ritual of scapegoating, in which the Jew—now as "Zionist"—once again becomes the symbolic barrier to the redemption of the world.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

An investigation into the NHS' maternity and neonatal services found "explicit antisemitic attitudes" among staff.

One Jewish person reported that they were told “Jewish people are sneaky," and many laboring women actively hide their Jewish identity because they are afraid of mistreatment.

I shouldn't need to say this, but I will. A woman in the middle of giving birth should not be worried that her midwife will find out she's Jewish and make her and her baby suffer.

And this isn't paranoia. It's not just hateful words. Look up the latest report on the NHS' maternity care; it outlines a "lack of a consistent standard of care." Some women are getting better treatment than others.

Combine that with the antisemitism, and it's not hard to figure out why Jewish women in the UK are scared.

[StopAntisemitism @StopAntisemites]

More than 300 women’s rights leaders, rabbis, scholars, and activists are demanding the removal of UN official Reem Alsalem after she denied Hamas’ sexual atrocities on 10/7.

Signatories include Amb. Deborah Lipstadt and cite UN reports confirming the rapes and call Alsalem’s denial “outrageous” and harmful.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

Today we have called on the United Nations to waive all immunity for UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini—whose terms ends today—to allow his indictment for complicity in terrorism, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Lazzarini cannot claim he didn't know. We have all the receipts.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

At its peak, the Ottoman Empire was roughly the size of the Roman Empire. It ruled over dozens of ethnicities and cultures.

And it achieved that, history professor Erdogan tells us, with "no genocide, no massacres, no oppression and [obviously, how dare you suggest otherwise!] no colonialism."

It conquered everything in sight through concentrated friendliness. Everyone just succumbed to the raw charisma of Ottoman rulers.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

.@Wikipedia is literally erasing Jewish history and identity, systematically and maliciously. Everyone in the organization knows this is happening -- so none of it is an oversight or an accident.

Wikipedia is a major source on which LLMs are trained. College students are more likely to read the Wikipedia article than the textbook. This is how public knowledge is shaped.

[Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas]

Former hostage Rom Braslavski reacted to the news that the IDF eliminated one of his captors, Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Talal Abd al-Aal.

Rom: "This is the man who, while I was bound with ropes from head to toe and on the verge of death, forced me to open my mouth so he could spit into it. This is the man who, by his own hands and on his own orders, tortured me and nearly killed me several times. Enjoy hell, you piece of garbage."

[Jonathan Eric Lewis @LewisJonathanE]

We know — or at least we think we know — why some people become antizionists and gravitate toward that hate movement, one that seeks to manufacture consent for violence against Jews

I have a follow up question: what inoculates people from antizionism, especially those who live in communities where antizionism proliferates?

What personality traits to they have? What knowledge? What is it about antizionism that they don't like?

Consider a recent non-Jewish university graduate in Brooklyn. Non-Jewish. Works in a creative industry. But has no interest in antizionism. Why? Shouldn't we be asking these questions?

[Sam @itsSamantha32]

The UN was created to uphold human rights and demand accountability - not to encourage coordinated campaigns to silence its critics.

Calls for mass censorship reveal an institution more concerned with controlling the narrative than confronting serious allegations of misconduct and complicity involving UNRWA.

Institutions genuinely committed to accountability welcome scrutiny, answer difficult questions, and confront their failures.

They do not seek to marginalise their critics or shield themselves from public scrutiny in an effort to protect their reputation.

#UN #UNRWA #HumanRights #Accountability #Transparency #FreedomOfSpeech #FreeSpeech #Censorship #HumanRightsMatter #InstitutionalAccountability #InternationalLaw #CivilLiberties

[Iris Engelson @irisengelson]

@JillFilipovic @DanFriedman81 Yup, this is, in fact, the most likely explanation. The alternative, that Mamdani is just an economically illiterate idiot, isn't actually as plausible. https://t.co/9h0g49JTjH

[Israel in New York @IsraelinNewYork]

“I hope your kids die.”

That’s what a stranger said to Rami Feinstein and his family in broad daylight in New York.

Not online. Not anonymously. In the middle of a New York street.

This is what antisemitism looks like when hatred becomes acceptable, normalized, and ignored.

No one should have to live in fear because of who they are.

📷: Rami Feinstein

[Alex Gandler @AlexGandler]

Reem Alsalem has become, in my view, an embodiment of the failures of the UN system. An elitist dogmatic view, that lacks all ethics.

A person tasked with addressing human suffering should never appear indifferent to it. For three years, survivors like Ilana waited to be heard, only to face excuses instead of empathy. Rather than unequivocally condemning the atrocities committed against them, Alsalem has repeatedly shifted blame onto victims, casting doubt on their experiences, and adding to their trauma.

What stands out most is the sense of moral certainty. The confidence that comes with holding a UN position has crashed against the basic need of ethical judgment, or compassion. Instead of demonstrating impartiality, she has projected dogmatism and deep bias.

Alsalem together with many of her rapporteur colleagues and the whole of the UN system have failed deeply, a reckoning of the system has to happen after a very much needed change of guard.

[Zach זק @ZachLewis3187]

How Palestinian activism works:
- Make an egregious unprovable claim
- Get social media bots to push that claim
- Have NGOs “verify” the claim
- Use the UN to cite the NGOs in making the claim “official,” albeit it lacks any and all evidence
- Media outlets then report the claim
- Social media pushes the media narrative creating a closed verification and reinforcement loop

Eventually, when the claim topples and falls apart with evidence, as seen below, the narrative is too far gone.

It happens every single time.

[Jonathan Conricus @jconricus]

Astonishing that it takes official obituaries from terror organizations and dogged work by some REAL journalists and researchers (like @EFischberger and @Aizenberg55 ) to trigger what should be obvious: a revision of the number of alleged media workers killed in Gaza after Hamas’ attack on Israel.

[Reza Chowdhury @RezaC1]

And the three worst landlords in NYC with OPEN Class C violations are all taxpayer funded:

1. NYC Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)
2. Neighborhood Renewal Housing Development Fund Corp (taxpayer funded non profit)
3. NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA)

Class C violations designate "immediately hazardous". These issues pose a danger to life, health, and safety. Landlords are legally required to begin correcting them within 24 hours.

[Iris Engelson @irisengelson]

@UNSRVAW

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

The Times of London calls out the bigotry and injustice of UN special rapporteur Reem Al-Salem.

[Tomer Persico @TomerPersico]

People who want to deny the Jews a state claim that they are not a nation, just as people who want to deny the Palestinians a state claim that they are not a nation. In the Jewish case, there’s an assertion, like Mamdani’s, that Judaism is a religion. Religions don’t have a right to self-determination, case closed.

But Judaism was never merely, or even originally, a religion in the modern sense, but a people. Even according to our own cultural/mythical narrative we were a nation first – coming out of Egypt – and only then, seven weeks later, entered into a covenant with God.

Historically Jews were always a separate ethnic group, which, of course, had it’s own way of worship – just like any ethnic group before the modern era. In that sense Jews were and are no different from any other minority ethnic group, whether the Druze, the Navajo, the Yezidis, the Swahili or the Alawites. All are endogamous, culturally distinctive ethnic groups with their own kinship structures, collective memory, and, naturally, religious beliefs and practices.

Broadly speaking, there are two genres of religion: the universal, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism (and Hinduism, if we insist that mosaic of faiths and rituals is one religion); and the ethnic, of which there are numerous. Judaism is just one of the latter, simply more famous and more hated.

In fact, the very understanding of “religion” as the separate, confessional, ritualistic “part” of life is a modern, Protestant conception, while for most peoples around the globe even universal religions take on a local character, and involve local allegiances and power struggles (think Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Copts).

This doesn’t settle the question of Israel’s borders, policies, minorities, occupation, or the relation between Jewish self-determination and equal citizenship. These are real and serious questions, and they must be confronted honestly. But it does mean that the facile reduction of Jewish peoplehood to “religion” is false.

I suspect Mamdani’s denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state stems more from his animosity towards it than from a principled rejection of religion based states. His formulation sounds liberal because it invokes equality, but it manipulates the facts in order to avoid saying that Jews not are entitled to the same national status routinely granted to other peoples. Putting it mildly, that’s not very liberal.

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

.@MaarivOnline cover story on Fawzia Amin Sido. She was kidnapped by ISIS and held as a sex slave for 10 years in Syria & Gaza. She was freed by the IDF.

We brought her to testify at the United Nations:

“I returned from the depths of death to be a living witness to the truth.”

[The Free Press @TheFP]

"The world’s largest encyclopedia was overrun by bias and censorship—and pushed me out when I tried to fix it."