personal account
of elected water official
mom, lawyer, partner, friend
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cruelty-free & vegan
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@RebeccaEisenbe4
Here we see @valleywater stealing my podium and lying that they care about the San Francisquito Creek JPA and flood protection project. (Their official line is "there is no project" and they marked their financial support as "discretionary."). Actions speak louder than words.
The ones at Nova included many teenage girls, not women like described here. Also, they were at a religious celebration for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. Finally, even if they had weapons -- and many likely did because both men and women are required to serve in the IDF -- to think they could use them to defend against 1000 Hamas and collaborator Palestinian men who attacked them by surprise with **machine guns and tanks** is crazy.
Most of all this comment is devoid of understanding that women have always served in combat positions in the military. The IDF is the most gender-diverse and religion-diverse military force on earth. Not only is Israel one of the most feminist countries in the world, but also Israel realize that its enemies so badly outnumber and out-arm it, that it must have all hands on deck in its defense.
Am Yisrael Chai
The BBC is running a story trying to pull at our heartstrings for starving fathers in Afghanistan who are ready to sell their young daughters just to buy food.
One man weeps while holding his seven-year-old twins, saying he'll sell one to feed the rest. Another already sold his five-year-old.
I don't care how hungry I get I would never do this. Not in a million years.
These beautiful, innocent little girls are being treated like goods to be traded by the very men who are supposed to protect them.
Instead, they're guarded by monsters.
Poverty and hunger are horrific, but selling your own child isn't an "impossible choice" it's a moral failure.
The BBC can frame it as tragic desperation all they want, but we should be disgusted and outraged for the daughters, not feeling sorry for the fathers willing to do this.
These children deserve real protectors, not men who see them as a survival asset.
Absolutely sickening
@InnaVernikov@NYCMayor It's pedophilia, sexual harassment, illegal intimidation of minors, and verbal assault. Where is the DA? This is not in the gray area. It is illegal.
I think we have known for at least decades that the Mayan, Aztec and especially Inca civilizations were far more advanced than European. All three had energy technology we still have not begun to fathom, especially solar. It's such a monumental lost opportunity and disaster for our human civilization that the European settlers refused to consider that they were not the center of the universe and that other peoples may be far more advanced in science and engineering. Wiping them out - intentionally or negligently- was a far-too-common success of ego over excellence. We desperately need those energy technologies now more than ever.
A baby Iberian Lynx - one of the rarest cats in the wild
Once reduced to fewer than 100 in the wild, the Iberian Lynx has slowly made a comeback thanks to conservation efforts in Spain and Portugal. Known for their spotted fur and black ear tufts, these rare cats mainly survive on rabbits.
At @valleywater's Board Budget Workshop, the CFO has refused to share the budget in spreadsheet form. This is a state special district with almost $1 billion in revenue from ratepayers and taxpayers, with a capital improvement program budget of $5-$10 billion.The public deserves details. @RebeccaEisenbe4
He does believe in Israel's right to exist, but he is waging war against the IRGC because the Islamic Republic of Iran fuels and funds terror worldwide, including the terrorists who murdered Americans on American soil on 9/11. Taking out the IRGC is necessary for the US and the whole world.
Once again @valleywater kicked me out of a Board Meeting. They did not allow me to speak on an agenda item where they all voted to spend more money on investigating yet another anonymous complaint against me, without ever telling me the nature of the complaint. When I tried to tell them that I may be happy to accommodate the demands of the complaint if I actually would be told what the complaints are. @RebeccaEisenbe4 Happy Birthday to me!
I lost count. This might be my 20th visit to Israel since October 7.
Not to Lebanon, where I grew up, where an economy survives on the support of visitors.
Not to crumbling Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, which offered me nothing but harassment and a birthplace on my passport.
But to Israel, during the worst war since its establishment.
Because I am a traitor.
I betrayed my friends and family, my educators, and the mainstream in Lebanon, Syria, across the Arab and Muslim worlds, in Europe, and in America.
Unlike the masses who have never set foot in Israel, I know that Israelis are not monsters. They do not seek war, nor do they wage it to conquer land. The accusations of genocide, the blood libels, the conspiracy theories—they are not rooted in reality. They are born of ignorance, and too often, of something darker.
At best, hostile opinions stem from a profound misunderstanding: of this war, of the history of this conflict, of political Islam and its ambitions, of Judaism, and certainly of Zionism.
But how could the average person not be confused?
A relentless campaign of misinformation defames Israel while elevating the Palestinian narrative into a simplistic story of pure victimhood. It is emotionally compelling. It is easy. It requires no deeper inquiry.
And so the question is never asked:
What happens the day after?
Would a Palestinian state focus on building a thriving society, contributing to the region and to the world?
Or would it continue a war against Israel?
History does not leave much room for doubt.
Every attempt at compromise has been met by rejection or violence. And yet, the pressure is always placed on Israel—to concede, to risk, to appease.
Why?
To satisfy crowds who chant slogans they barely understand?
To align with a cause that thrives not on building, but on perpetuating conflict?
Real genocides unfold across the world and are met with indifference. Millions of Kurds still seek a state. Others fight for self-determination without commanding global obsession.
The difference is not the cause.
The difference is the JEW.
The particular fixation on Israel cannot be separated from a much older story—one of projection, distortion, and hatred uniquely reserved for Jews.
I consider myself privileged.
Privileged to have seen through the lies I was taught—the lies you are told.
Privileged to have encountered the reality of a people who built, defended, and sustained a state against relentless hostility.
As a seeker of truth, I was met with warmth, love, and respect.
I have come to admire Israel and the Jewish people to such a degree that the noise—the accusations, the mob, the cowardice—has become irrelevant.
Yes, I am a traitor.
A traitor to narratives built on falsehood.
A traitor to expectations that demand loyalty to lies.
A traitor to a cause that demands endless sacrifice and conformity.
A traitor to a cause to which I owe nothing. On the contrary, it owes me.
I believe not what I was told, but what I see.
I choose truth over belonging because I am free.
If that makes me a traitor, so be it.
I stand, firmly and proudly, with Israel.
Am Yisrael Chai.
#Israel #palestine #October7
TIL that @valleywater is investigating me AGAIN (they won't say what for) and I thought it was an April Fool's Day Joke! Nope, it is serious, which is obvious because they always torture me on the most important Jewish Holidays, and tonight is the First Seder of Passover. Chag Pesach Sameach, chaverim v'mispuchah! xox @RebeccaEisenbe4
@miatalias The memory of Joan Rivers blesses us always. Please continue to repost this and all other Joan Rivers clips! We all lost a brilliant mind and voice 12 years ago when we lost Joan Rivers. Miss her so much!
So far, five Iranian female soccer players are being death-marched back to Iran after their family members were disappeared by the regime.
Weird, I didn’t see any Hollywood pins at the Oscars for them.
There used to be a time when I would sit down and explain to Joy Reid why comparing the situation of women in America to women in Iran, and even implying women have it better in Iran, is an insult to Iranian women and a bald-faced lie.
But after the latest verified report of two nurses who were tortured and raped by regime security forces for the “crime” of treating wounded protesters, raped so brutally with foreign objects that one had to have her uterus removed and both now live with colostomy bags, I’m done explaining.
For Joy Reid and every idiot pushing that lie, I have only two words and I would like to ask you to deliver it to her:
FUCK YOU.
"Some were suicidal. Others could barely speak"
Dr. Orli Peter @orlipeter, psychologist who is helping Nova survivors, in an open letter to Mamdani's wife:
"Dear Ms. Rama Duwaji, You publicly liked social media posts describing the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas as “collective liberation.” You also placed a heart next to an Instagram post claiming that the reports of mass rapes on Oct. 7 were a “hoax.”
For the past two and a half years, I have been treating survivors of October 7, helping them slowly rebuild shattered lives and broken nervous systems. Some were suicidal. Others could barely speak.
Some of the people sitting across from me in therapy had witnessed rapes and executions so brutal that their nervous systems simply shut down. Words stopped working.
These people did not simply survive war. They survived mass and socially sanctioned sadism. Subsequent investigations by journalists, forensic teams and international bodies documented widespread sexual violence that day.
Families were burned alive.
Festival goers hunted down, raped and then executed.
Hamas terrorists documented much of the violence themselves: one attacker used a victim’s phone to call his parents and brag that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands; and you surely saw the footage of Shani Louk, whose body Hamas fighters paraded through Gaza in the back of a truck while crowds spat and celebrated.
Survivors of the Nova festival have also described militants laughing as they hunted festivalgoers hiding in the fields.
These were not acts carried out in secrecy. They were recorded, boasted about and, in some cases, carried out with visible pleasure.
These were not only acts of murder. They were staged performances of cruelty. This was not violence used as a means to an end. It was violence relished for its own sake.
That is the socially sanctioned mass sadism my patients are still haunted by, superimposed on everything they see.
Once that sadism becomes undeniable, the narrative has a problem. Mass murder can still be reframed as resistance. Rape cannot. It exposes the cruelty too clearly, so it has to be denied.
That denial carries consequences not only for the survivors I treat but for Palestinians as well.
Refusing to confront the mass sadism of Oct. 7 keeps Palestinians trapped under the same violent movement that terrorizes them.
Hamas has long brutalized its own population. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented torture, arbitrary detention, and killings of Palestinians accused of dissent or collaboration, and journalists have reported Hamas beating and arresting Gazans who protest its rule.
This is what authoritarian movements do. Cruelty outward. Repression inward.
As New York City’s first lady, you are in a public position to inspire a movement for Palestinian rights and safety.
The survivors I treat are still trying to rebuild their lives after what they witnessed. Palestinians deserve to be free from the same sadistic movement that terrorizes them as well.
Public gestures matter. When someone in a position of influence treats atrocity as liberation, the signal travels far beyond a social media post.
The evidence is clear.
Admit that you were wrong and withdraw your support for the lie.
Some of us spend our days helping survivors rebuild the lives that Hamas shattered.
The least the rest of the world can do is stop sanitizing mass sadism and tell the truth about what was done to the victims of Hamas’ cruelty. ".