@Loster@nuttyscot@simon_schama He literally flew to Israel and volunteered to fight in the yom Kippur war. They told him they needed his music more than his blood. He said 'my music isn't really known for its morale boosting properties' and then toured around singing for soldiers
@TheUCS473 There's a grain of truth in it. He burned Irwins to the ground and posed for a photo on the roof before clearing off. Better known for his attempted assassination of John Taylor.
This one actually shocked me.
Sky News, who are not exactly known for being pro-Israel, did a solid segment debunking some of the worst fake videos that racked up tens of millions of views since October 7.
They showed a video of fires in a city that people claimed was Gaza or Israel under attack. It was actually football celebrations in Algeria. Another old unrelated clip of a man with a child was falsely labeled as a Hamas terrorist kidnapping a Jewish baby. And video game footage from Arma 3 was passed off as Hamas shooting down an Israeli helicopter.
These clips got millions of likes and tens of millions of views before the truth caught up.
The crazy part is Sky News calling out how slow the platforms, including X, were to deal with it. Even when community notes eventually appear, the damage is already done. And certain accounts pumping out this stuff, like repeat offenders who never seem to get suspended… cough cough… Jvnior, Sulaiman, Jackson Hinkle, Mohamed Safa, and so many more… keep getting boosted.
The propaganda machine continues working in real time. Fake content spreads faster than the truth, and it was ready before the bodies were even cold.
*WHEN A FLY FALLS INTO A CUP OF COFFEE . . .*
*The Italian –* throws the cup, breaks it, and walks away in a fit of rage.
*The German –* carefully washes the cup, sterilizes it and makes a new cup of coffee.
*The Frenchman –* takes out the fly, and drinks the coffee.
*The Chinese –* eats the fly and throws away the coffee.
*The Russian –* Drinks the coffee with the fly, since it was extra with no charge.
*The Israeli –* sells the coffee to the Frenchman, sells the fly to the Chinese, sells the cup to the Italian, drinks a cup of tea, and uses the extra money to invent a device that prevents flies from falling into coffee.
*The Palestinian –* blames the Israeli for the fly falling into his coffee, protests the act of aggression to the UN, takes a loan from the European Union to buy a new cup of coffee, uses the money to purchase explosives and then blows up the coffee house where the Italian, the Frenchman, the Chinese, the German and the Russian are all trying to explain to the Israeli that he should give away his cup of coffee to the Palestinian so there will be peace.
Ireland garnered much soft power in recent years from people celebrating our music, culture, literature and hospitality. Our sense of neutrality and fair play was also valued. This will be soon lost if the current wave of incessant unthinking virtue signalling continues.
@irish_news A " total disinterest in " is constantly being put forward as either hate or fear. The Republic doesn't have the military firepower to frighten unionism , because in the final analysis that's what would be neccessary, successful referendum or not.
@OBrienSheehan@ProfRayKinsella@MaryKenny4@sistervpaul_ Why , with a war against Hamas and Hezbollah to be fought and with over 1000 of its soldiers killed thousands more injured, would Israel waste men and materiel killing " innocent civilians indiscriminately" ?
This is inversion so callous it's hard to believe.
The Holocaust had a survival rate of about 30%. Millions of people disappeared from European cities and towns over several years. Everybody knew because it was happening all around them.
Gaza has a survival rate, despite the worst and most deadly and horrible periods of the war, of 97%.
All the dead Jews were noncombatants. A large percentage of the dead Gazans were combatants.
And the Jews of Europe, even as their millennia-old civilization was being systematically wiped out, wanted nothing from the societies that surrounded them except to be allowed to live in peace.
Gaza's leadership of religious fanatics, meanwhile, wants every last Israeli dead and gone, is willing to fight to the last Gazan to achieve that aim, has said so publicly and worked for decades to blow up every peace attempt -- and even now believes that Gaza's destruction would be a worthwhile sacrifice to lay on the altar of Israel's destruction, because their god told them so.
So Israelis can reasonably believe, given those features of the Gaza war that aren't true about any genocide ever, and were pretty much the opposite of what was happening in the Holocaust, that Gaza's suffering is a bad and painful war, but not remotely a genocide.
But the point of it all, of course, is not to analyze Gaza, but specifically to lump it together with the Holocaust -- to cast the Jews as the new Nazis.
The only reason this person would dare to make such an insanely ahistorical and immoral parallel is because this is the heart of the bigoted propaganda campaign in which he enthusiastically participates: The point of it all is to make the Jews into the Nazis.
A culture that obsessed about Jews being evil and was then shocked by the Holocaust into obsessing about dead Jews as the apotheosis of righteous victimhood is now obsessively engaged in knocking Jews off that moral pedestal they themselves put them on.
That's why they don't care one whit about Hamas massacres of Gazans, about genocidal wars in Syria or Yemen (even when they've funded and armed the sides), about flotilla activists currently held by the Libyans...literally nothing triggers a response except Jews.
They still, even after all these generations, no matter what else is happening in the world or in their own societies, can't stop thinking about Jews.
And as we Jews learned in the 1940s -- the actual, historical 1940s, not the weird fantasies conjured up by these bigots -- a whole society can be in the grip of a callous, destructive bigotry and still believe it is true and righteous.
Ok I want to chime in here and clarify a few things.
1. Aughinish Alumina was originally developed by the Canadian company Alcan. It was later acquired by the commodities trader Glencore in 1999. In 2007, Glencore sold Aughinish to Rusal, the Russian aluminium giant founded and controlled by Oleg Deripaska. The sale was a commercial deal between private companies. Ireland did not yet have the foreign direct investment screening mechanisms that many European countries use today to scrutinize strategic acquisitions. Ireland was operating under EU single-market and foreign-investment rules, there was no special Irish government approval process for a transaction like this at the time.
2. Ireland cannot unilaterally ban most exports to Russia. Foreign trade (including sanctions against Russia) is an EU competence, not a purely national one. That means, Ireland cannot independently impose a general ban on exporting alumina to Russia if the EU has not sanctioned it. Companies in Ireland must comply primarily with EU sanctions regulations, which are directly binding law across all member states. So if alumina is not on the EU sanctions list, the Irish government cannot simply decide “stop exporting this to Russia” without an EU-wide measure.
3. To stop exports to Russia in a legally robust way, one of these would be required:
EU-wide sanctions explicitly covering alumina or related aluminium inputs!
Or a specific EU decision restricting trade with entities like Rusal-linked supply chains!
Or evidence-based designation of end-use for military purposes triggering tighter export controls!
4. Apply pressure to the EU, not to Ireland. Slagging off the Irish won't work even if it is entertaining to watch. We're thick skinned and slag the living fuck out of each other for fun. Insults are a form of flattery here. So thank you all for that!
5. This is the last I will have to say on the matter. I wish the #Alumina21 the best of luck but I gave up activism a long time ago so I could direct all my energies at fundraising for groups involved in deleting orcs, their equipment or otherwise supporting the Ukrainian military. I hope you will join me in this endeavour. As always I recommend @Y_Chornomorets for sniper groups that get results, @wilendhornets for Sting interceptors for air defence, @69thSB for trucks for Ukrainian military units and Irish lad @Hannuska2109 does great work supporting Rugby Team drone unit (part of Phoenix Group) with whatever they need!
@globalhlthtwit Gideon Levy and Amira Hass have been on the same stump for around 30 years and Israelis stubbornly refuse to commit collective suicide. What's that remark about doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different outcome.