lisa young

Mosaic artist and disgusted American (she/her)

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@BookerGWash Thank you. We still and will always stand with you.

[Meg Keene @MegKeene]

The report Silenced No More opens with these words from @CochavElkayam:

“There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood. October 7, 2023 was such a moment.”

In the week after that black Shabbat, my Rabbi described what happened as a spiritual violence. The atrocities were so unbearable that it was hard to wrap words around them. They were so profound that they required a re-ordering of our understanding of the world. Having spent hours with this report, I can attest that they profoundly change the soul of anyone who bears witness. One of the witnesses of the gang rapes, tortures, and murders at the Nova Music Festival said he heard:

“Women screaming. Screams that pierced the heavens, and cut the soul to pieces.”

The report describes evidence as “materials [that] are almost unbearable in their brutality,” and “their cruelty and magnitude … rendered them impossible to comprehend and harder to believe.”

The scale and horror of the atrocities was the point. In committing crimes that defied our very humanity, in celebrating them, live streaming them, and then getting much of the world to deny them almost instantly, to blame the Jewish state, to blame Jews as a whole, Hamas accomplished their goals. They turned the worst evil imaginable into a carnival of hate the West was happy to justify, to endorse, to at the very least dismiss as ‘part of something complex and nuanced.’

As if the sheer scale of evil could ever be nuanced.

When you fully realize what happened that day, you know the cost of denial was our souls.

In advance of writing this, I spent hours reading the report. After getting through every page of testimony on the Nova Festival before I had to stop, take a break, breathe, try not to vomit.

I visited the Nova site this summer. I looked at photos of the young people that died. And they were so young, so hopeful, so full of joy. To read about how they died was to kill something inside me. Because what I read was beyond comprehension.

There was gang rape, of men and women. Women were stabbed while they were being raped, raped after they died. Women were shot with their rapists still inside them, and then their corpse was passed to another man to rape, while the men around joked and laughed and praised God.

Women were bound and tortured. They were shot in their genitals. Their uteruses were ripped out. They were raped and tortured in front of their partners, who were forced to watch and then murdered.

A witness said, of hearing multiple gang rapes and executions, that when the woman was killed, “you say: ok, it’s over at least, she’s done with it. The moment they were killed, I said, ‘Oh my God, finally it’s over.’” And indeed, women being raped begged for death.
Women were found split in half, beheaded, exploded by what was placed inside their vaginas. Men were found with their genitals shoved into their mouths. In some cases bodies were found staged, a woman holding a man's severed penis. People were doused in gasoline and burned alive. Nail guns were used to drive nails into women’s groins. Spikes were driven into their vaginas. Knives, axes, screwdrivers, tools, were all driven into a single woman’s body. Women were gang raped, and after surviving they burned alive.

Children were killed in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of children.

Dead bodies were taken, along with hostages and paraded down the streets of Gaza to cheering crowds.

Hostages were subjected to sexual torture and slavery. The torture was so extreme that a new form of violence had to be defined for this report: Kinocide.

“In documented cases, victims were abused in front of relatives. In at least one case, family members were coerced into acts of sexual violence against one another. The Commission defines this as kinocidal sexual violence, violence deliberately designed to destroy family structures by weaponizing familial bonds.”

All of this violence was documented, streamed live to the world. We knew. We always knew, because they wanted us to know.

They didn’t hide it. In fact, the perpetrators cheered it, celebrated it, called home to their families to boast of how many Jews they had killed. Gazan civilians followed after the initial invasion, joining in the orgy of violence. Women’s dead and broken bodies were paraded through the streets of Gaza, while crowds cheered and the women were spit on. Hostages, women and children, were also paraded, jeered and mocked, before descending into their own hell of sexual torture.

On October 9th, 2023, I had to get on a group call for my coaching program.

There was no war yet. Or there was a war, and it was still taking place on the streets of Southern Israel. The IDF was still fighting terrorists on the ground, trying to clear the area.

Like every other Jew, I was shattered. I could look at my screen of 100 women and pick out the other three Jews by their dead eyes and fractured faces.

The lead coach asked to lead a prayer. And who she prayed for was not Israelis, not Jews, not survivors of the attack. She prayed for us and our perpetrators in equal measure. I hit mute. I stared at the wall. I tried not to throw up. And I realized this was a sign of what was to come.

In the moments after October 7th, Jews were already being asked to commiserate with the people that committed, supported, and cheered on, these crimes that break the boundary of what it means to be human. We were asked to rise above the devastation of the soul. And then we were asked to put what happened aside. To leave our hostages to the depraved sex and torture tunnels of Hamas. To move on. To be the bigger people.

When you look at the facts, the details, the truth of what actually happened, you realize how impossible that request always was.

Because society was unwilling to face what happened, it chose denial. That was it’s drug of choice, it’s way to survive the horrors. Just like in the Holocaust, the women and men who suffered these demonic fates were re-framed as sub-human. The victims were not imagined as the people. For society to justify looking away, the victims could not be young adults that went to a music festival, or families slowly waking up on a Sunday morning, kids watching cartoons, women going for a run, families ready to enjoy the holiday.

Instead, the atrocities were framed almost immediately as something that would never happen to us, something deserved.

To justify and erase crimes of this magnitude, society has to make the Jewish state somehow so monstrous that they deserve this. We have to make up lies. Dog rape. Organ stealing. Child murder. Genocide. And since no state, and no people, could ever deserve this, no matter what their purported crimes, the other choice is to deny that it ever happened, to look away.

My latest in full on Substack: https://t.co/hJrwGBP939

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

The @nytimes owes Israel and every Jew around the world an apology. A public apology. Utterly despicable & utterly antisemitic what they did. Fuck the NY Times for what they did.

[Madelaine Hanson @MadelaineLucyH]

If a country was overtaken by a violent female militia who brutally banned all men from public spaces or work, shot little boys for trying to attend school, forbade them medical care, and traded them as young as nine as sex slaves and husbands, how many hours would it be before the world intervened

[goma @soigomaa]

Out of ten men, one makes a sexual joke at a woman, two laugh, three fake a chuckle to fit in, and four stay silent. None of them speak up. Later, nine of them still believe they're the "good guys." But from the woman's perspective, the laughter, the silence, the looking away, it all creates the same environment. So when women say"most men are the same," this is what they mean: not that every man harasses women, but that most men help protect the system that does.

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

such a gathering of wretched mediocrities, fawning lickspittles, and pustulent carbuncles on the body of the constitution they care so little for, that they will let the dime store dictator snuff it out

[Restricted Daily @RestrictedDaily]

I’m genuinely confused. We’re dumping Epstein files, parading names, laying out rape and pedophilia like it’s a damn spreadsheet, and then… nothing. No arrests. No perp walks. No accountability. So what’s the plan here exactly? Are we just supposed to stare at this filth, rage-scroll, and pretend exposure equals justice? Because right now it feels like the system is saying, here’s the proof, here’s the monsters, now go back to work and shut up. If this isn’t followed by real consequences, then all this “truth” isn’t a reckoning — it’s just another sick reminder that there are two sets of rules, and the worst people somehow never play by either

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@SouthwestAir @jimmychickey I hope you fix this. I'm hearing many accounts of people paying for a premium seat upfront on the aisle, and having to put their bag farther back because people in back have taken front bin space. People like me will pay for an upgraded ticket or seat, but not if this happens.

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

This. Do this.

[Cheri Jacobus @CheriJacobus]

They need to be shunned. Don’t welcome into your establishment. Cut them off socially. That is something every one of us can do. We are not powerless.

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

I'm a journalist and attorney, not an activist, so I've no answers on what Americans should do right now.

I only know this: Donald Trump is attempting to incite a civil war so he can cancel all future elections, and he will keep executing citizens until that outcome is achieved.

[Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek]

Nobody wins every swing state, especially when five of the senate races in those states go for the other party.

He called the 2020 election stolen so we would be afraid to say anything when he stole the 2024 election.

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

I will absolutely be ordering this book. I've loved all of your work.

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

I'm facing a serious threat and had to cancel my 'open to the public' appearances. I've never done that. I hated doing it.

I hope you will consider ordering my new book The Final Score today. It comes out Tuesday.

30% off below.

Click to order here: https://t.co/GqjCrQyrXl

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

I, however, do exactly believe this.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

So this is the darkest worry of my brain. I don’t exactly believe this, you understand, but I can’t quite shake it off. It’s cynical and depressing and probably more than a little paranoid, but it also makes uncomfortable sense of a lot of the things that don’t make sense otherwise.

I worry that the wealthy and the powerful are fully aware of the impending collapse of Western democracy, and are preparing for it by turning all of us against each other, and by setting women up to become property again.

They’re doing this, I can’t help thinking, because they want to maintain their comfortable existence, and they think that if we turn on each other, they can ride it out in luxury.

Their big ace in the hole, though, is returning women to the status of chattel. History - and other, more modern societies - have shown that men will put up with a lot of oppression if there’s a woman at home they can lord it over.

The idea that men are superior to women has kept the average male citizen in line for most of human history: any feelings of inadequacy caused by a low social position and lack of political power were mollified by the fact that they were the rulers of their households, and in some societies even had the power of life and death over their wives and children.

A man might be nothing but a lowly peasant with a one-room hut to live in that his family shared with the cow, but he was the ruler of that hut, by God, and everyone in it, and he could vent his spleen on his unfortunate family in whatever form he chose — which gave him enough power to satisfy him, and keep him from getting restless in his poverty.

“You will have nothing, and you will be happy.”

Our leaders - on both sides - aren’t as stupid as they seem, or they wouldn’t be able to dress themselves. They know what’s coming. We can feel it even down here, but from where they sit they have a much better view — and they know that what’s coming is as inevitable as the sunrise.

They know it’s going to get ugly — and they’re setting us up to take it out on one another while they ride out the violence untouched in their mansions and penthouses.

Once the worst spasms have passed, women will be stripped of whatever rights we may have left and turned back into property, to give men personal power as a replacement for the loss of political power.

See, I don’t think there are separate sides at the very top, not really. Our leaders have far more in common with each other than they do with us. They party together, get rich together, eat at the same restaurants, send their kids to the same schools, and maintain an illusion of disagreement as a way to keep the country divided.

Why?

Because that division not only keeps them in power, it keeps the public’s anger and focus aimed at one another, instead of wondering how a civil servant who makes 100k a year ended up with an $82,000,000 bank balance, for example, or how much money the President is charging taxpayers for his visits to his own resorts. When the collapse hits — and we know it will — these people will know in advance and position themselves to end up right back on top, and with a much firmer grip on society’s throat.

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@_sorrengailll Buying makeup costs hard-earned money and putting it on costs precious time. Wearing makeup reinforces the idea for girls and women, and also for boys and men, that the way women actually look is not good enough.
Why would I want to do any of that?

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

Last March I gave a lecture at Sydney University on anti-semitism and spent time with a deeply worried community. Two synagogues in Melbourne had been firebombed; children arriving at their Jewish school in Sydney saw its walls covered in swastikas. I tried to reassure the people I spoke to that there was a future for Jews in Australia but they were right, even then, to be distressed. Globalise the intifada just means kill Jews wherever and whenever you can. So I don't want to hear anyone telling me the weekly hate marches are just anti-Zionist, not murderous race hatred against Jews.

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@birdmoder Black vulture, great blue heron, white ibis, roseate spoonbill

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@birdmoder

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@BriannaWu Cute pup!

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@HilzFuld Amen.

[lisa young @llilyyoung]

@dave_hegan @still_boneless Believe it, it happened to me too. A1 on a Southwest flight from Chicago to Florida and the first open seat that wasn't a middle seat was in row 21. Because of pre-boards. Who all walked off the flight upon landing.