a teacher on the last day of school had all her senior students sit on the floor for one final story time. she said, “you start kindergarten sitting on a rug… so i thought you should finish the same way.”
then she sat in a chair and read them Oh, the Places You’ll Go.
and i just kept thinking about how beautiful it is when endings are handled with that much intention.
There is a repeated pattern of medics and first responders in Lebanon being targeted as they attend the aftermath of Israeli attacks - documented by @MaucourantNada and the National, multiple other orgs like @hrw and us at @SkyNews See our latest report on Sky News YouTube https://t.co/RvO7gLxb6C
Government ministers cannot watch on, wringing their hands, whilst Netanyahu blatantly forces the Palestinians off their land, destroying any hope of a Palestinian state. Total sanctions are the least this government could do & coordinate with other states https://t.co/Y4GJHeo9ks
Awkward moment on #BBCQT
Computer Science graduate who applied to over 150 jobs and still has no success
Is say next to a guy whose company is using AI to reduce jobs
Yet more Israeli war crimes
"Israel’s defence minister says large-scale Palestinian migration from Gaza will go ahead. Human rights groups and lawyers say policy amounts to ethnic cleansing"
https://t.co/eY5RTO4y33
Yesterday Israel ordered the inhabitants of Nabiteh to leave (population of 100,000) They then ordered the inhabitants of Tyre to leave (pop of 200,000). Now they've ordered the entire south to leave - up to 300 towns & villages.
@AlexCrawfordSky reporting from Lebanon today
Urgent calls for restraint as the ancient city of Tyre is hit by multiple Israeli airstrikes following orders to leave from the Israeli military. The Israeli military has now declared the entire south of Lebanon a combat zone - covering 250-300 towns and villages. ‘We urge you to act now to stop this escalation’ - UN Peace ambassador appeals to global leaders @ambdanialachkar
“My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.
And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.
A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people - more than 800 of them civilians - were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage.
But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide.
But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.
It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words.
But there does need to be a clear intent.
And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders - including the prime minister and the minister of defence - and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there.
A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here.
Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership.
Lemkin - that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ - described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.
And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.
But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.
But reality cannot be denied.
So yes, it is a genocide.
And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.”
- Statement to Led By Donkeys, December 2024
- Photo: Parliament Square, London, 8.40am, 4th December 2024
@elonmusk@SciGuySpace I think that Space X assisted previously in facilitating the monitoring of methane emissions? ( methane SAT?) and wonder where the data is stored and if open to the public ? Appreciate the original project may have stalled and wondered if it’s to be recontinued?