Yaakov Friedman

[Rom Braslavski @RomBraslavski]

“וּכְתֹבֶת קַעֲקַע לֹא תִתְּנוּ בָּכֶם”

אבא תודה על הזכות להסיר את הקעקוע שעל גופי . אבא תודה על הזכות להיות חופשי ומאושר . אבא תודה על הזכות להיות יהודי . אבא תודה על הזכות • לא • להיות 🎗️ חטוף בעזה. 🎗️

תודה על הזכות לתקן .
לא אשכח בימים השחורים שלי בעזה, בשיא החום של חודש 8-9 , המחבל הכריח אותי ללבוש ז׳קט על מנת שלא יראו את הקעקוע שלי במידה ומישהו יצליח לחדור למקום שבו הוחזקתי, והכתובת קעקוע הזה היא מה שהסגיר אותי יהודי.

שזה אבסורד , כי ליהודי אמיתי לא אמור להיות קעקוע על גופו .

היום, בערך חצי שנה מהרגע שבו הקדוש ברוך הוא בניסים ונפלאותיו החליט לשחרר אותי מבית העבדים ולגאול אותי מיסוריי , אני מספיק חזק ויציב והחלטתי לקחת על עצמי להסיר את הקעקוע הזה בצריבת לייזר ישירות על הגוף , ולסבול - אך ורק במטרה אחת- לעבוד ולשעבד את קודש הקודשים, הקדוש הברוך הוא . לסבול על גופי , שוב ושוב ואני מוכן למות בייסורים למענו , אעשה הכל על מנת לרצות את אבא שלי שבשמיים, תמיד. אבא תודה 🙏🏽 על שבי בעזה ותודה על ייסורים שהיה , תודה על כל קושי שהכנסת לי לחיים.
ככה נראת יהדות. ✡️
״ שהחיינו וקיימנו והגיענו לזמן הזה ״ - הסרנו !

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@JAYChi_Hawks Go Hawks!

[Just Another Year Chicago: Blackhawks @JAYChi_Hawks]

🚨GIVEAWAY! 🚨

With the #Blackhawks entering the Olympic Break, we're giving away a black alternate Bedard jersey!

To enter;
-Like & RT this tweet
-Follow @JAYChi_Hawks
-Comment "Go Hawks!"
*Extra entries in thread

Winner announced 2/6
*Make sure it's us if you're selected*

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

Ben Johnson with the post game handshake #🐻⬇️

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@FantasyPros 33.5 from Rams D and Corum 🪦

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@DhananiZain Corum or Michael Carter?
Strange or Juwan Johnson?

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@PatBevPod @patbev21 Mazel Tov

[Amit Segal @AmitSegal]

Before October 7, Daniella Gilboa wrote a song titled “Maybe a Door Will Open” with her fellow soldiers Aviv Hajaj, 19, Shirel Mor, 19, and Yam Glass, 20.

Aviv, Shirel, and Yam were all murdered on October 7 at the Nahal Oz base, from which Daniella was kidnapped and held in Hamas captivity for 477 days.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, Daniella performed the song live on @GLZRadio alongside Karina Ariev—who was also kidnapped from Nahal Oz. Daniella’s mother Orly sat at the back of the studio, visibly emotional.

I’ve put English subtitles on the video so that you can follow along. The song’s lyrics are in the reply.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

This is terrorism. And the Israeli government's response needs to be everything we have learned to do with counterterrorism. And anything less is a desecration.

And I'm angry, and it has gone on for too fucking long, to the point that distraction or inattention or silence have become complicity, and all the fucking rest of it.

Those who think ignoring it will make it go away don't know this group that we allow to fester within us. That they do not now rot in prison means they are not the issue. Our country is failing us.

So no, no caveats for the world's consumption about them being few. And no kowtowing to any idiot foreigners who will now pretend an equivalence with Hamas. The foreigner's obsessive little morality play about us isn't the story. It doesn't matter.

All that matters here is us, and this will not be us.

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@88PKane Come back for real 🐐

[Seth Frantzman @sfrantzman]

“Diary of an Israeli sniper: War, routine and the human cost
For 5 months in Gaza, Givati sniper Staff Sgt. Tomer eliminated 27 terrorists, often from a long distance; 'They dropped one after the other,' he recalls; now back home, he’s facing the moral weight and psychological toll of life behind the scope.”

https://t.co/RqDUkUHOTm

[Eli Kowaz - איליי קואז @elikowaz]

"Ilana, do you know what it means to open the fridge?"

Chilling testimony from released hostage Eli Sharabi on the starvation in Hamas captivity.

[Eli Lebowicz @EliLebowicz]

This completely wrecked me.

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

Eulogy by Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of Ariel and Kfir:

"Mi Amor"

I remember the first time I said "mi amor" to you. It was at the very beginning of our relationship. You told me to only call you that if I was certain I loved you, not to say it carelessly. I didn't say it then because I didn't want you to think I was rushing to say "I love you." Shiri, I'll confess to you now that I already loved you back then when I said "mi amor."

Shiri, I love you and will always love you!
Shiri, you are everything to me!
You are the best wife and mother there could be.
Shiri, you are my best friend.

Mishmish, who will help me make decisions now? How am I supposed to make decisions without you?
Do you remember our last decision together?
In the safe room, I asked if we should "fight or surrender." You said fight, so I fought.
Shiri, I'm sorry I couldn't protect you all. If only I had known what would happen, I wouldn't have fired.

I think about everything we went through together—there are so many beautiful memories.
I remember Ariel and Kfir's births. I remember the days we would sit at home or in a café, just the two of us, talking for hours about everything under the sun. It was wonderful. I miss those times deeply.
Your presence is profoundly missed.

I want to tell you about everything that's happening in the world and here in Israel.
Shiri, everyone knows and loves us—you can't imagine how surreal all this madness is.
Shiri, people tell me they'll always be by my side, but they're not you. So please stay close to me and don't go far!
Shiri, this is the closest I've been to you since October 7th, and I can't kiss or hug you, and it's breaking me!

Shiri, please watch over me...
Protect me from bad decisions. Shield me from harmful things and protect me from myself. Guard me so I don't sink into darkness.
Mishmish, I love you!

Chuki, Ariel,
You made me a father. You transformed us into a family.
You taught me what truly matters in life and about responsibility.
The day you were born, I matured instantly because of you. You taught me so much about myself, and I want to thank you.
So thank you, my beloved.

Ariel, I hope you're not angry with me for failing to protect you properly and for not being there for you. I hope you know I thought about you every day, every minute.
I hope you're enjoying paradise. I'm sure you're making all the angels laugh with your silly jokes and impressions. I hope there are plenty of butterflies for you to watch, just like you did during our picnics.
Chuki, be careful when you climb down from your cloud not to step on Toni...
Teach Kfir all your impressions and make everyone laugh up there.
Ariel, I love you "the most in the world, always in the world," just as you used to tell us.

Poopik, Kfir,
I didn't think our family could be more perfect, and then you came and made it even more perfect...
I remember your birth. I remember during the delivery when the midwife suddenly stopped everything—we were frightened and thought something was wrong—but it was just to tell us we had another redhead. Mom and I laughed and rejoiced.
You brought more light and happiness to our little home. You came with your sweet, captivating laugh and smile, and I was instantly hooked!
It was impossible not to nibble on you all the time.

Kfir, I'm sorry I didn't protect you better, but I need you to know that I love you deeply and miss you terribly!
I miss nibbling on you and hearing your laughter.
I miss our morning games when mom would ask me to watch you before I went to work. I cherished those little moments so much, and I miss them now more than ever!
Kfir, I love you the most in the world, always in the world!

I have so many more things to tell you all, but I'll save them for when we're alone.

[Jimmy Wong @jfwong]

Had a dream where I was majorly stressed out because I had to give away a Gaea’s Cradle.

Let’s give one away in real life instead. Japanese Gaea’s Cradle, up for grabs. I’ll choose one random person who replies to this tweet, retweets it, and follows me by end of today.

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@jfwong What’s your favorite non-magic game?

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Here's a take on Trump's plan to "take over" Gaza that's so utterly obvious and ordinary that no one seems to be talking about it.

Leave aside for the moment great questions of war and peace. Take the conflict off the table for a second.

What had Hamas made of Gaza, its society and economy, before the war? A land with so much natural beauty and potential, and recently discovered offshore gas - and what did Hamas build there?

Even under the Israeli and Egyptian blockades, the GDP per capita in Gaza was higher than Morocco's before October 7. Its potential was always enormous.

And here's the thing: That potential remains.

But not with Hamas. Because Hamas doesn't see that potential, and if someone points it out to them, they don't care.

They chose the catastrophic war that began on October 7. They built a vast tunnel system for 17 years whose only purpose was to force the enemy to cut through cities to get to them when that war came. And given what they think of Israelis, they actually expected Gaza's destruction to be even worse than it is.

One powerful signal that they always intended this destruction: That tunnel system is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built, and Hamas built nothing else in Gaza in all their years of ruling it.

Our enemies, in their stupidity, are convinced Israeli strength is about weapons systems and infantry regiments. They do not grasp what real strength is. They do not plan, they do not build, they do not invest. They do not free their people, especially their women, politically and economically.

They expect wealth and military strength and geopolitical power to land on them deus-ex-machina because of their great piety and willingness to sacrifice and destroy everything for their religion. And they genuinely do not understand why it never works.

Hamas's supporters, the self-styled "pro-Palestinian" activists in the West, are worse than immoral. They're stupid. Even if you justify Hamas's cataclysmic war on Israel - cataclysmic for Palestine, not Israel - how do you justify Hamas's utter neglect of every other facet of Palestinian life? Of the economy, education, of the happiness of each and every Gazan?

You can hate Israel for the blockade, but it was Hamas, not Israel, that dragged Gaza into the Egyptian civil war in 2013 and led to the *Egyptian* side of that blockade. They just don't care about Gazans.

Gaza's education system routinely - even now - produces videos of children dancing to military odes and singing of the coming victory. It does not produce mathematicians or coders or marine biologists. Even the Israel of the 1950s and '60s, when it had what was basically a third-world economy, when it was poorer than the Gaza of October 6, was hard at work educating great scientists and engineers.

Hamas is Gaza's inner cultural weakness made flesh and sent to walk the world. Hamas is everything wrong with Gaza, and not just Gaza; these are the very weaknesses eating away at Egyptian society, the weaknesses that shattered Syria and Iraq, the weaknesses that hold back the Arab world generally.

Could America reverse that weakness? No, of course not.

Could a serious Palestinian leadership, the sort not now visible on any horizon and hardly imaginable in the foreseeable future, do so? Absolutely. It wouldn't even be that hard. Any economist who isn't actually illiterate or utterly ideological could tell you how to do it. One of the few advantages of being at rock bottom is that it's not that hard to rise dramatically.

If you find Trump's proposal horrifying, if you find Gaza's destruction heartbreaking, if you don't want Gaza's present to be its future -- find that leadership, back it to the hilt, and be crystal clear about what brought Gaza to its current state.

And if Palestine's supporters weren't a bunch of daft, narcissistic windbags, they'd grasp that hating Israel isn't enough. Every word of the above is true even if Israel really is the bad guy.

[Israel ישראל @Israel]

Shiri, Ariel Kfir 🟧🟧🟧

Say their names.

[Honestly with Bari Weiss @thehonestlypod]

Today on Honestly, @HavivRettigGur confronts the argument of “anti-Zionists” head-on:

“An anti-Zionist is someone who thinks Israel should never have been founded...That’s a really interesting argument because every other Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere is dead.

Is the argument that the Jews who couldn’t get into the West—as the pressure was building in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the Arab world—due to immigration quotas and laws against them, should have been able to enter the West? That they should have had other choices besides becoming Israeli? If so, I agree with that...

Or is the argument that those Jews should just have died?... Well, then you’re a genocidal asshole.”
https://t.co/Y7BONoCtE4

[Yaakov Friedman @yfriedman4]

@JAYChi_Bears Bear Down 🐻⬇️