Terrorists bereaving terrorists! Most of Hamas’s senior Politburo leadership surfaced in Tehran for the state funeral of the Islamic Republic’s slain Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; a spectacle of extremists paying homage to extremists. Among them was Basem Naim, the same vile terror leader who recently incited against me and dispatched his online operatives, including individuals within the Gaza government and even Al Jazeera Arabic, to attack, threaten, and smear me as “suspicious” for advocating the relocation of Palestinian civilians across the “Yellow Line.”
Why are the leaders of an internationally designated terrorist organization responsible for killing and kidnapping dozens of Americans on October 7, and for decades of brutality against Palestinians and Israelis alike, still flying around the world with impunity? I do not accept the notion that the United States or Israel are somehow incapable of apprehending them. The far more plausible explanation is that a cynical geopolitical calculation is being made.
This is all the more indefensible given that Israeli hostages are home, and Hamas is openly violating the October 2025 ceasefire terms it signed, including disarmament and the relinquishment of power in Gaza. Enough is enough. Hamas must be dismantled on every front: political, military, financial, and social. The era of indulging one of the world’s most notorious terror organizations, masquerading as a nationalist “resistance,” has to end.
A riddle for Shabbat -
Name the country:
In the aftermath of World War I, as the great empires collapsed and the principle of national self-determination emerged to replace them, the defeated Ottoman Empire was to be divided into nation states for its different peoples.
One newly designated country rejected this international settlement, went to war to overturn it, emerged with roughly twice the territory envisioned for its new state, carried out a documented genocide against one indigenous people, expelled and displaced others, and ended up controlling most of the historic homeland of a people that had been promised a state. Another people promised self-determination never received a state at all. To this day, they remain the world’s largest stateless nation, and in have long faced restrictions on the expression of their national identity and barriers to political representation.
Who is this state?
The answer is Turkey.
Changing the name to Türkiye does not change this history.
The post-Ottoman settlement initially envisioned a much smaller Turkish state under the proposed Treaty of Sèvres. It also envisioned independent Armenian and Kurdish states, alongside Arab self-determination and Jewish self determination in the already recognized Jewish ancestral homeland.
The Turkish national movement violently rejected that settlement and through the Armenian Genocide, the destruction and expulsion of Armenian communities from much of their historic homeland, and the disappearance of the promised Kurdish state, was able to lay claim to a much enlarged Turkish state.
Armenia exists today, but largely as a post Soviet-era republic established east of the historic Armenian heartland, while much of historic Armenia remains within Turkey. The Kurds, meanwhile, remain divided among several states and without a sovereign homeland of their own.
So let’s hear it for Turkey, a country actually born of genocide, ethnic cleansing, land grab and ongoing political suppression of minorities. @HakanFidan
P.S. The Arabs attempted something similar against Jewish self determination, but unlike the Armenians and the Kurds, the Jews ultimately succeeded in preserving and defending their national self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland (and had Jews received their fair territorial share of the Ottoman Empire lands based on their population, Israel would be much larger).
@anonbuthuman@BriannaWu I deleted my comment. I don’t think understood the issue that well. I do still think the lynchpin generally is the genocide lie.
The blackmail begins.
After a humiliating strategic failure, the US is now preparing to release $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds, because Iran is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz.
This is what “winning” looks like.
Paying ransom to the regime you just failed to defeat.
The humiliation is complete.
They didn’t just leak the operation.
They threw the Kurds under the bus.
While Kurdish fighters are still being bombed by the IRGC right now, they were deliberately excluded from the ceasefire and left completely exposed.
This is not a mistake.
This is a shameful betrayal of the only real allies America had on the ground.
According to the Jerusalem Post, a major plan to topple the Iranian regime using Kurdish forces, backed by Israeli air support was ready.
Trump vetoed it at the last minute.
Israeli sources accuse JD Vance of leaking the entire operation to Erdogan.
A 41-year-old Vice President with zero experience in the region decided he knew better than seasoned strategists who have fought the Islamic Republic for decades.
This is not a policy disagreement.
This is a serious betrayal.
.@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.
Israel conducted a lawful strike against a combatant.
But the disinformation machine has been selling you fables about targeting civilians.
Mehdi said confidently Amnesty had found “no evidence” of military targets in the area.
Look harder.
The anti-Israel propaganda campaign unleashed after October 7 doesn’t spread because it’s persuasive. It spreads because moral righteousness is intoxicating. It lets ordinary people feel morally extraordinary without doing anything morally extraordinary.
“You lost your queer label the moment you started supporting Israel.”
Yesterday, that was shouted at California State Senator Scott Wiener during San Francisco’s Trans March.
Earlier this year, Scott Wiener publicly accused Israel of committing genocide. To most people, that would put him on the far left of the debate. It still wasn’t enough. He was called a “piece of shit,” stripped of his “queer label,” and denounced because he wasn’t anti-Israel enough.
Most of us carry around regrets. We’ve hurt people. We’ve been selfish. Some of us have been cruel or violent.
Now imagine you’ve become convinced that Israel is committing the greatest evil imaginable. Genocide. Deliberately murdering children. Starving an entire population.
You don’t have to become a better person. You don’t have to repair the people you’ve hurt. You simply condemn someone you’ve been taught is worse. In an instant, you’ve morally catapulted yourself above them.
The more monstrous the accusation, the higher the moral catapult. Every repetition gives you another chance to experience yourself as morally righteous.
Then something remarkable happens. Ordinary people become propaganda superspreaders. They repeat the accusations because every repetition reinforces the story they most want to believe about themselves: that they are standing on the side of absolute good.
The bar keeps rising. Yesterday’s ally becomes today’s traitor. Scott Wiener learned that the hard way.
Hamas propaganda succeeds because it gives ordinary people a shortcut to feeling morally extraordinary.
“Rather than try to find out how many pounds of flesh it would take to make the bullies go away, the only effective response is to resist them with confidence. It’s hard to bully a proud people; it’s impossible to bully a people who know they have nothing to be ashamed of, and who don’t need or seek anyone else’s approval in the first place. The only response to anti-Zionism, in other words, is Zionism.”