Joel R Finkel

Jewish Voice for Peace, Solidarity, Marxist, Anti-Fascist, Woodworker, Software engineer (PHP, C#, DEC), Motorcycles, Opera, Wagner, Strauss, Grateful Dead.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
-- Rabbi Hillel
https://t.co/c4UBOXmfLO

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@garybembridge @HALcruises Gary, I will be on that cruise with some friends. I hope to have a chance to meet you.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@ggreenwald Pointless war, you say? Tell that to Ukrainians who are fighting for their lives.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@donalddhoffman I heard you reference experiments w/ rats and mazes that indicated that when rats learned the maze, other rats in other labs learned the same maze faster. Can you please provide citations or corrections to my understanding of what you said. Thanks.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@Joekhan35 @clashreport Would have been funnier if he had said "A chazer!" (Yiddish for "[you are] a pig.")

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@aaronjmate You are one reason I seldom log in to Twitter.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@JohnAvlon https://t.co/MmJTOuKcZ8

And honest man would apologize for this willful mischaracterization of Bernie Sander's positions.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@foodwishes Awesome Blossom Onion Bites with GoChefJohn sauce. Tasty (I cooked them in lard), but next time (if I survive) I'll make them smaller.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@aaronjmate If Yevgeny Prigozhin were still alive, he'd have a good laugh at you.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@SarahLongwell25 You recently gave a beautiful speech about the responsibility of people to speak out and not remain silent in the face of evil. I would like you to consider those words in the face of Israel's genocide of Palestinians that is facilitated by our tax dollars.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

Grand Opera.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@NeoRightGBP @realDonaldTrump I want some of what YOU'RE smoking

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@emandelbaum @ninaturner You seem to have no knowledge of the Zionists' ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make such an ignorant statement.

[Rania @umyaznemo]

"Netanyahu is an obnoxious, narcissistic, Jewish supremacist and in that respect he's the perfect mirror of Israeli society. When they see Netanyahu, they see themselves, and that's why they vote for him".

Norman Finkelstein again nails it!

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@resistancy23 @TorahJudaism Most Zionists are not Jews, and most Jews are not Zionists.

[Joel R Finkel @Joel_Finkel]

@TorahJudaism Zionism is the greatest self-inflicted wound we Jews have suffered since the Bar Kokhba revolt. But that wound pales in comparison to the wound it has inflicted on Palestinians.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra deserves nothing but our contempt. Cancelling a renowned pianist for dedicating a piece to fallen journalists in Gaza has made the MSO complicit in genocide. Shame on its spineless directors. https://t.co/zoqj2FWZ9g

[Adam @AdameMedia]

What do you think these Israeli civilians are protesting for?

Nope, not to end the bloodshed.

They’re protesting for the right to r*pe.

Rotten society.
https://t.co/ltv5C8hHSx

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Israel asks people to leave Khan Yunis to Rafah and then strikes Rafah. Then asks people to leave Rafah to Khan Yunis and then strikes Khan Yunis. ~2 million innocent civilians are looking for shelter anywhere, but nowhere, and no one is safe.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Extraordinary text by Israeli historian Omer Bartov, a former IDF soldier who's now the world's leading scholar on genocide and the Holocaust: https://t.co/BCjj3HNeUC

He directly compares the ideology in today's Israel to that of Nazi Germany, says Israel is committing genocide and that it might be headed towards "self-annihilation".

Some extracts:

"[Israel has adopted a] logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis...

I told [some Zionist students] the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany’s internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 1930 to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them...

By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”."