Simonk

[Aizenberg @Aizenberg55]

🧵TWO more fake "journalists" killed in Gaza were confirmed today by Hamas—not Israel—as combatants. That is FIVE in the last week and over 100 fake Gaza journalists in total. Bahaa Akasha was not a photojournalist but a Qassam fighter seen in a Hamas video. See more below: 1/

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@BestOfBowler @triggerpod @MrWinMarshall @francisjfoster @KonstantinKisin @Tom_Slater_ I suppose you have a creative way to reframe “study engineering to produce weaponry for jihad”? I mean how much more explicit could she be?

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@BestOfBowler @triggerpod @MrWinMarshall @francisjfoster @KonstantinKisin @Tom_Slater_ Yes, I’m sure that’s how she meant it. Congratulations, you’re the perfect useful idiot.

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@BestOfBowler @triggerpod @MrWinMarshall @francisjfoster @KonstantinKisin @Tom_Slater_ I see. And in what way is engineering relevant to this type of jihad?

[TRIGGERnometry @triggerpod]

What the hell is going on at Cambridge University?

In this clip from Off The Fence, @MrWinMarshall, @francisjfoster, @KonstantinKisin, and @Tom_Slater_ discuss the university hiring an assistant research professor whose past writings claimed Muslims should study engineering for "jihad."

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@Lee060791260783 @EnarialP @HeidiBachram You fucking moron. Anyone can set up the equivalent of Hazolah. Brain rot like you, seriously…

[Aizenberg @Aizenberg55]

"Famine in Gaza" defenders like @JeremyKonyndyk keep ignoring the statistic that matters most: actual malnutrition-related deaths. According to Hamas, not Israel, there were 461. A genuine famine would have necessarily meant tens of thousands.

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

In January 2024, the world’s leading famine expert gave Gaza two weeks until catastrophic mass starvation.

Alex de Waal wrote the standard textbook on famine, runs the World Peace Foundation, and helped write starvation crimes into international law. When the media says ‘famine experts warn,’ this is who they mean.

In January 2024, he did an interview with Owen Jones and made a series of predictions/declarations about starvation in Gaza.

0:00 “I’ve not seen anything like this before” in 40 years
0:21 Famine “probably by early February [2024],” nothing like it in 75 years
1:29 Even a ceasefire cannot stop the deaths, “those deaths are on Israel”
2:33 Starvation deaths “will soon exceed those directly from violence”
2:50 “A catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen in my lifetime”

—

What actually happened:

The IPC’s own Famine Review Committee, June 2024: the famine claims were “not plausible,” and “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring.”
https://t.co/f85dKsV6gV

Gaza’s recorded malnutrition death rate in 2025 (74 deaths through late July, per the WHO) works out to roughly the same per-capita rate as the United States, where the CDC counted over 20,000 malnutrition deaths in 2022.
https://t.co/ZEmvKh0axK

After the October 2025 ceasefire, a UNICEF-led survey found 0.5 percent acute child malnutrition in Gaza, one of the lowest rates in the region.
https://t.co/BfWvPDIyiR

—

Every single declaration was false at the time.

Every single prediction didn’t happen.

The only thing that collapsed in February 2024 was Alex de Waal’s credibility.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

A special report released this month shows that Palestinian schools in the West Bank openly celebrated October 7th and implemented that celebration into their curriculums.

Math questions about how many Israelis were killed or how many children in Gaza will become martyrs paint a horrific picture of these children's futures.

Murder is not something children should be happy about. Being killed in war is not something children should look forward to.

These children, who were born as innocent as any other, are being taught to hate and that the greatest thing they can do in their lives is die in the name of that hatred.

It's a tragedy, and it's disgusting to think that the adults in these children's' lives are doing it on purpose.

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

🇸🇩 Sudan suffering:
150,000 killed
15,000,000 displaced
25,000,000 hungry

🇺🇳 U.N. General Assembly reaction:
0 resolutions
0 referrals to ICJ
0 emergency sessions

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

The speech the U.N. would rather forget: Kofi Annan on Israel and double standards

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@Hamza_a96 You are quite literally a liar.

[ShipofTheseus @JewishSpaceLazr]

This went down the memory hole too fast. Military law profs in US and Germany said the @IDF precautions to avoid civilian casualties sets "an unreasonable precedent for...fighting in asymmetric wars against brutal non-state actors who abuse these laws."
https://t.co/ECbjqxDru8

[Olivia Reingold @Olivia_Reingold]

Almost exactly a year ago to the day, I uncovered that a dozen of the most viral images presented as evidence of famine in Gaza in fact showed children with unrelated medical issues, including cystic fibrosis and autoimmune conditions.

The investigation earned me death threats, calls for me to be tried at The Hague, and jabs by a high-profile comedian on national TV—despite the fact that we’ve had to issue exactly zero corrections on our story.

Our point was simply to tell readers that if there was a famine in Gaza, photographs of these children were not evidence of it.

What is indisputable today is that there is currently no famine in Gaza.

That is the major finding from a UNICEF-led team that recently produced the most comprehensive and robust nutrition survey of Gaza since the war began.

The survey found that less than a year after a famine was declared in Gaza, the territory has one of the lowest malnutrition rates in the region. A recovery that swift is not just “miraculous,” in the words of a malnutrition researcher I spoke with—it raises questions in and of itself. Questions like: How can a war-torn territory go from famine to showing some of the lowest rates of child malnutrition in the region in less than a year? 

In my report today for @TheFP, I investigate that question, its implications, and what it means for the debate over the official decision to classify a famine in Gaza still raging 12 months on.

[Matthew Feinberg @thewebbie]

The Missing 19 Years

The strangest part of the “Israel prevented a Palestinian state” argument is that it comes with a 19-year loading screen nobody wants to discuss.

From 1948 to 1967, Egypt controlled Gaza. Jordan controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem, formally annexing the West Bank in 1950.

Israel controlled neither territory.

No Israeli settlements.
No Israeli checkpoints.
No Israeli military administration.

These were the territories we are now told were desperately waiting to become the Palestinian state Israel refused to allow.

Except Israel was not there.

And no Palestinian state emerged.

There was an attempt to create an All-Palestine Government in Gaza in 1948, under Egyptian auspices. It was moved to Cairo within months and never became an independent sovereign state. Jordan went in the opposite direction, annexing the West Bank and extending Jordanian citizenship to its Palestinian population.

That history matters because it reveals something much more complicated than the modern story of “Palestinians wanted a state and Israel prevented them from having one.”

For 19 years, Arab governments controlled the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Creating an independent Palestinian state in those territories somehow never became the great moral emergency we are told it always was.

Then something even more revealing happened.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. Not 1967. 1964.

Three years before Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza.

And the original Palestinian National Charter did something rather extraordinary. It declared the establishment of Israel null and void while explicitly disclaiming PLO territorial sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, which were still controlled by Jordan and Egypt.

The organization created to “liberate Palestine” was founded while Israel did not control the West Bank or Gaza, and its charter was aimed at undoing Israel while specifically not claiming sovereignty over those territories.

That is a fairly inconvenient detail if your entire understanding of the conflict begins with “occupation” in 1967.

Apparently the liberation problem was not primarily that Palestinians lacked sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza.

The problem was that Jews had sovereignty next door.

Then came 1967.

Israel survived another war and took control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Suddenly the territories that had spent 19 years under Arab rule without becoming an independent Palestinian state became the center of an international crusade for Palestinian self-determination.

Mazel Tov! Very moving. Remarkable timing.

There had been no comparable international movement demanding that Egypt “Free Gaza” or that Jordan surrender the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state. Once Jews controlled those territories, however, Palestinian sovereignty acquired an urgency it somehow never possessed under Arab rule.

Funny how that works.

This does not mean Palestinian identity did not exist. It means the neat historical story we are constantly sold is backwards.

The conflict was never simply about Palestinians wanting sovereignty and Israel refusing to give it to them.

For much of the Arab world and the Palestinian national movement, the struggle was also about preventing or reversing Jewish sovereignty.

That distinction changes the entire conversation.

Because “Palestinians should have a state” and “Jews should not have a state” are not the same proposition.

The first is an argument about Palestinian self-determination.

The second is an argument against Jewish self-determination.

And for decades, the two have been conveniently packaged together as though nobody should notice the difference.

Pretending the Arab world spent 1948 to 1967 patiently waiting to construct Palestine until Israel arrived and ruined everything is not history.

It is fan fiction with footnotes.

Jordan had the West Bank. No independent Palestinian state.

Egypt had Gaza. No independent Palestinian state.

The PLO appeared in 1964 and directed its liberation project toward the territory where the Jewish state already existed, while disclaiming sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza.

Then Israel took those territories in 1967, and suddenly the world discovered an almost theological devotion to Palestinian sovereignty there.

Baruch Hashem for timing.

Because geography was never the entire issue.

Jewish sovereignty was.

And somehow, after 3,000 years of Jewish history, exile, return, prayer, archaeology, language, memory, and blood, the Jewish people are still expected to stand before the world and justify why we are entitled to exist as a sovereign people in our ancestral homeland.

No.

We are not guests in our own story.

We are not squatters in our ancestral home.

And we are not going to apologize because Palestinian statehood became infinitely more urgent to the world once it could be wielded against Jewish statehood.

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@AtaaOkai @Dinsey6 @helen_spirit1 “Poor referencing” is obviously a euphemism. Poor referencing would mean something like referencing the incorrect source or citing an incorrect publication date for a source. This is fundamentally different to lack of referencing.

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@AtaaOkai @Dinsey6 @helen_spirit1 Yes. Poor referencing, ie the failure to cite a source for something you’ve written thereby trying to pass it off as your own, is plagiarism.

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@yawasuah @agravematter @profFeeterol @DrewPavlou Critical race theory is racist. That’s the whole point of it.

[Rabbi Poupko @RabbiPoupko]

PLEASE HELP MAKE THIS YOUNG MAN FAMOUS

Yotam Budnik is a 12th-grade student from Rehovot 🇮🇱 just won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in Uzbekistan but was not allowed to compete under the Israeli flag.

When Yotam was awarded his medal 🏅 stepped onto the podium, pulled an Israeli flag out of his pocket and wore it in defiance of the Anti-Semitic discrimination.

While the medal 🏅 was revoked from him for his courage, he has no regrets

"The law that prevents me from waving the flag is based only on politics, and I thought there was no place for that in a scientific competition", he said.

The organizers demanded that he return his medal.

Yotam said no.

Organizers took away his certificate and removed his ranking from the website.

Please help make sure the world knows the name Yotam Budnik and that he is not only a world class computer science genius, but also a man of courage and pride of the Jewish people 💙

[Simonk @Simonk97807882]

@AtaaOkai @Dinsey6 @helen_spirit1 We are talking about a PhD. A degree that qualifies you as a researcher. Originality of your research is a key criterion for success. If, at this level, you have not learned how to use citations properly, how can you be considered fit to hold this title?