Special footage from the Rantisi hospital in Gaza - on the basement floor, a room was found with signs indicating hostages were held there, underground headquarters and a room full of weapons inside the hospital: pic.twitter.com/pDsyA1mT6T
— דובר צה״ל דניאל הגרי - Daniel Hagari (@IDFSpokesperson) November 13, 2023
It won't last, [if it doesn't last] here's the video.
In December 1920, the mayor of Jerusalem, Raghib al-Nashashibi, organized a large event in honor of British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. When he invited Prof. Abraham Shalom Yahuda to speak at the event, there was no need to say the lecture would be given in Arabic. For both of them, sons of distinguished Jerusalem families, one Arab-Muslim and the other Arab-Jewish, Arabic was the local language. It was the language in which members of all religions here wrote, spoke, traded and argued.
Arabic was viewed as the language of the land also among the Zionist movement, which acted to renew the Hebrew language. David Yellin and Yosef Meyouhas, two of the founders of the Hebrew Language Committee and Hebrew education in the land of Israel, could not have imagined that their project for the rebirth of Hebrew would serve one day as a tool to displace Arabic.
Some of the hostages held by Hamas have German citizenship, so when I asked a politician from Germany’s governing coalition what the government’s position was on those people, I was shocked when his response, in private, was: Das sind doch keine reinen Deutschen, which translates to: well, those aren’t pure Germans. He didn’t choose from a host of perfectly acceptable terms to refer to Germans with dual citizenship, he didn’t even use adjectives such as richtige or echte to refer to them not being full or proper Germans – instead, he used the old Nazi term to differentiate between Aryans and non-Aryans.
"Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you’re a Jew who criticises Israel"
Germany is not a good place to be Jewish. The piece is hard to read.
Whenever I told people I was of German descent, they would argue with me -- then upon discovering that I was Jewish, would say "Oh, so you're not German, you're Jewish" (strangely, I never heard anyone say to someone, upon discovering that they were Christian, "Oh, so you're not German, you're Christian").
Self-hatred runs deep. Feldman, Lipton, Stanley, Lipstadt, Corey Robin; the last two can at least look for evidence in the mirror. With the possible exception of Feldman, every one of them defends the existence of the Jewish state in conquered Palestine.
Feldman's latest book, Judenfetisch, isn't available in English.
Feldman in The Forward in 2015, returning to the scene of the crime.
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
In a truly jaw-dropping document revealed in full today by @yuval_abraham in @972mag, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry officially proposes the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents in the framework of the current war. https://t.co/mNM8VfjDqd
An Israeli "Intelligence Ministry" document explores the possibility of relocating all the Palestinians in Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula. This may not be the "official" policy, but for obvious reasons, that it is even being considered will greatly alarm the Palestinians and the Egyptians.
Some people tell you to separate the Israeli state from its actions now, or the Israeli people from the actions of the state, or Zionists here and elsewhere from the actions of Israelis, but they're all of a piece.
Most states are founded in conquest. Israel is the only state that demands liberals celebrate not the richness of its culture but the crimes that brought it about. And that's why the culture is so thin. It doesn't even have the richness of a dissident culture. Any real dissident just has to leave.
Israel is a society built on ideology, and the ideology will only fade after the state itself is gone.
Monday, October 23, 2023
Youssef is a comedian, speaking from experience as comedians do.
I'll ignore the claim that Hamas is dedicated to Israel's destruction.
Israel's response has been so extreme and its defenders so unhinged that they're losing support of people who've been reliable in the past. Liberal Zionists needed to be able to lie to themselves; Arab autocrats needed cover for normalization policy that was unpopular with their subjects. Israel has blown it all up.
Shadi Hamid
More than 1 million Palestinians displaced, 4000 killed, 10,000 injured, and 1000 children dead and yet people are still obsessing about far-left student groups signing letters. Let's save some of our anger for the actual people being killed as we speak.
What I've seen from any number of respectable, mainstream commentators these past two weeks has been surprising. When it comes to Palestinians, a lot of people really do have a massive blind spot. It's worth asking why and what can be done to address this.
"people really do have a massive blind spot." A new realization.
Nwanevu, another new realization and another really do
I really do think some of these people have been so corroded by their own propaganda that they're not capable of reason anymore, or at least not capable of grasping their own contradictions. It's plain who's being punished for wrongthink right now; the piece itself lays it out.
"The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power."
She was always in favor of censorship, but events have forced a change in consciousness in moderates who once needed to give her the benefit of the doubt. Events force a change in ideas: that's how it always works.
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An Israeli woman who survived the Hamas assault on settlements near the Gaza boundary on 7 October says Israeli civilians were “undoubtedly” killed by their own security forces.
It happened when Israeli forces engaged in fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters in Kibbutz Be’eri and fired indiscriminately at both the fighters and their Israeli prisoners.
“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she told Israeli radio. “There was very, very heavy crossfire” and even tank shelling.
The woman, 44-year-old mother of three Yasmin Porat, said that prior to that, she and other civilians had been held by the Palestinians for several hours and treated “humanely.” She had fled the nearby “Nova” rave.
A recording of her interview, from the radio program Haboker Hazeh (“This Morning”) hosted by Aryeh Golan on state broadcaster Kan, has been circulating on social media.
The interview has been translated by The Electronic Intifada. You can listen to it with English subtitles in this video and a transcript is at the end of this article.
One of first videos Hamas released showed fighters with children in the kibbutz, one of them tying a toddler's shoelaces, another rocking a cradle, and a statement that they don't kill kids. The IDF showed an edited version with the statement removed.
How do you square this with Israel's description of slaughter? I don't know. Israel has a long history of lying, but Hamas can be stupid, and their teenage fighters can go off on their own.
Their have been multiple assessments, Al Jazeera, Forensic Architecture [the packaging as art is offensive—a subject for another day], Channel 4, Middle East Monitor, that contradict the Israeli claims about the al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing, and others have confirmed it, including the AP
The US isn't interested in a full investigation.
A spokesperson of the U.S. government says the Biden administration doesn’t think it is “appropriate” for there to be an international investigation into the destruction of the hospital in Gaza.
Why would the U.S. oppose such an investigation if it believes Israel didn’t do it? pic.twitter.com/lfUPpLurT3
At a press conference of the patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem the day after the bombing, Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum said the hospital had received three warnings from Israel to evacuate after the hospital had been hit twice, days before.
Source for the edit here. Decensored News is on Rumble and Gab
Israeli leaders, Bennett, Herzog, Ben-Gvir, Feiglin, are calling for genocide. State dept. veterans are signing in-house letters against US policy; peers in the EU are doing the same.
Ads for my book were pulled from @NPR & the @BBC . I told @guardian : "I’m quite sure that a book advocating for Israel would not have had its advertisements pulled...There's an atmosphere that is wholly intolerant of any expression of sympathy for Palestinians under occupation."
via Mark Ames on twitter, if you click to follow Palestine Action US @Pal_ActionUS, and reload the page it's been cancelled.
(August 13) Times of Israel: "Ex-IDF general likens military control of West Bank to Nazi Germany"
(Sept. 6) AP, "A former Mossad chief says Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank"
This second one been passed around a lot. A pleasant surprise. I found the first one today.
Twitter may die so it's good to have a record
Saturday, October 07, 2023
The rubber is meeting the road: pretensions to commitment.
Wednesday, October 04, 2023
I had a call with @presidentaz Ilham Aliyev and thanked him for Azerbaijan’s significant humanitarian assistance, particularly in the energy sector as winter approaches.
We reaffirmed our commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.
We also…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 4, 2023
Monday, October 02, 2023
I think I've said before; someday someone will do a book and an exhibit of these things. The two below are far from the best, but they reminded me. I hate the word "memes". If you want to be determinist then Dennett's arguments and their popularity are as determined as the Taylor Swift's songwriting. In the past I've said Lady Gaga. I'm offended mostly by the sense of superiority of Dennett and Dawkins, Remove that and you get Skinner, who offends more people because he seems so innocent.
NFTs are the perverse inverse: the meaningless but one-of-a-kind as a market substitute for things rich with meaning and/because infinitely reproducible. Paul Pfeiffer began with something similar—working off it, not inventing it; the art world imperative derailed him. Banksy is better.
But "memes" are the equivalent of children's games, or slang. We know the origins of some but know them mostly as things passed around, less as things made than things chosen for survival, which is why the name of course. MoMA should do the show, but they won't. Paris would be good.
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
"You quite literally wrote a book on ethnic cleansing... Are you ready to say that's what this is?"
No.
"First question goes to Politico" That was funny
---
sort of amazing
My 1st stop after landing in Yerevan was to the Armenian Genocide Memorial. A beautiful and poignant tribute to all those who were killed, and to the survivors and families & friends who have so inspired me in their relentless pursuit of truth & justice for their loved ones. pic.twitter.com/2nenu89rQF
WaPo: Judge blocks California law meant to increase online safety for kids
U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a request Monday by the tech trade group NetChoice for a preliminary injunction against the measure, writing that the law probably violates the First Amendment and does “not pass constitutional muster.”
The initial ruling deals a massive blow to state lawmakers, who passed the law with broad bipartisan support last year, and to children’s safety advocates, who touted the measure as one of the strongest children’s online safety laws in the United States. Lawmakers in several other states have since pushed to replicate the standards, modeled after regulations in the United Kingdom.
NetChoice, which counts Amazon, Meta and Google as members, sued to block the law in December, arguing that tech companies have a right under the Constitution to make “editorial decisions” about what content they host or take down and that the law would turn platforms into “roving censors of speech on the Internet.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim Post chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)
“We look forward to seeing the law permanently struck down and online speech and privacy fully protected,” Chris Marchese, who leads NetChoice’s litigation efforts, said in a statement.
Monday’s ruling is the latest in a string of recent defeats for children’s safety advocates in the courts. Last month, two federal judges temporarily blocked laws in Arkansas and Texas that would require some online service providers to verify users’ ages and to get parent consent to access social media platforms or adult content.
1—arguing that tech companies have a right under the Constitution to make “editorial decisions”
Publishers face liability
2—the law would turn platforms into “roving censors of speech on the Internet.”
"the First Amendment should adjust to the new challenges of the platform era."
"tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world."
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Bibi has made it official: Jews in Iran are now safer and have more rights than Palestinians in Israel.
Maybe Modi is right about Canada: Golinkin in The Forward again.
"Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-year-old veteran who fought with Nazis"
In posts to the blog dated 2011 and 2010, Hunka describes 1941 to 1943 as the happiest years of his life and compares the veterans of his unit, who were scattered across the world, to Jews.
Golinkin, previously. Vladislav Davidzon is a character out of central casting.
Nagorno-Karabakh is not Ukraine, or Kosovo, never mind Libya, Iraq, Syria...
This is almost fun.
09/22 🇨🇦&🇺🇦 leadership at @OurCommons cheered a member of Waffen-SS Galizien, notorious #UA military formation of #WW2 responsible for murdering thousands of Poles & Jews.
🇵🇱 best ally 🇺🇦 has, will never agree on whitewashing such villains! As 🇵🇱 Amb. to 🇨🇦 I expect an apology. pic.twitter.com/j6EkVWGg1d
The latest statement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz violates the principles of the sovereign equality of states, which is the foundation of good neighbourly relations and friendly cooperation with Poland, as declared by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany in the…
Jäger really is a model high-brow leftist dandy faggot; so attracted to abstract ideas and abstract violence as a kind of pleasure: the violence and melodrama of the avant-garde.
His conflicted relationship to America and American vulgarity; the slumming of a European in LA. the man who fell to earth.
Jäger on Baudrillard
Anti-Americanism might be a moral imperative for Europeans. It certainly is satisfying. But a disinterest in the US is hard to justify politically, let alone strategically expedient. As Nick Burns noted in a reflection on America, Baudrillard’s real message is that “we have to perform American experiments on ourselves”
The first image below reminded me of D2. "I, in fact, don’t think that there are “tragic dilemmas”"
I hadn't thought about that for a while.
The scab could be an immigrant, legal or illegal. His wife or one of his children could be sick, or hungry; they could all be homeless. Solidarity is a double-edged sword, or it's pointless. Dead finks don't talk.
Modernity and avant-garde, to you, are two separate things? JW: We can’t confuse them anymore.
I use modernity and modern-ism, but the references are the same. Jäger is still a modernist; everything he writes—everything he prefers—documents his emotional attachment to a fantasy.
Art and politics are inseparable because language and politics are inseparable: sensibilities are made manifest in form.
and new: It's all so obvious. Academia circling the wagons. I wonder what her girlfriend says.
Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Wendy Brown gave at Yale in 2019. As she acknowledges, Weber is, on the face of it, a surprising choice of ally for a radical political thinker who has done so much to scrutinise and oppose political orthodoxies. Weber is typically dismissed on the left as a conservative defender of bourgeois liberalism and a critic of socialism. In recent years, Brown has been best known for her critical analysis of neoliberal rationality and the way it has weakened resources for political action; recent scholarship, meanwhile, has highlighted significant continuities between Weber’s thought and that of early neoliberals such as Ludwig von Mises. Brown isn’t a sociologist, but her work is unquestionably animated by what C. Wright Mills called the ‘sociological imagination’, which connects ‘private troubles’ to ‘public issues’. Although Weber was one of the founding fathers of sociology, he has become unfashionable among sociologists because of his insistence on a rigid distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘values’, and his refusal to let politics or ethical reasoning intrude into scholarship.
So why Weber? The texts Brown focuses on are the two famous lectures given in Munich in 1917 and 1919, ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’, which Nihilistic Times reads in reverse order. Here Brown finds Weber responding to ‘crises of political and academic life bearing certain parallels to our own, including a crisis of liberalism’. In a time of war, demagoguery and bureaucratisation, and when the ‘death of God’ had become a given, Weber sought to reorient politics and scholarship through a dogged commitment to what distinguished each of them. As Brown admits, some of this made for dry and disappointing reading (‘Science as a Vocation’ is ‘one long depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions’). But what she finds most valuable in Weber’s ethos, not least in its implications both for the left and for the academy, is the willingness to face uncomfortable truths without lapsing into wishful thinking or despair.
Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’ through which individuals commit to their life course. The tragedy of modernity, as recognised most acutely by Nietzsche, is that modern knowledge can tell us a great deal about how the world works (facts), but nothing whatever about what we should do about it (values). This, Weber argued, is just the way it is, and to deny the split between facts and values (in the form of mysticism, say, or Marxism) only makes things worse. Modern society is therefore suffused by nihilism, in the sense that values no longer have any stable or consensual foundation, while scholars have nothing helpful to say about them, other than to study them sociologically.
In these circumstances, both science and politics carry a heavy burden. Once values come to be regarded as non-objective cultural artefacts, politics becomes a never-ending battle to assert one set of values over others. In spite of this, or because of it, values must be defended to keep nihilism at bay, and the responsibility for doing this falls especially to politicians, and political leaders in particular. Weber’s central injunction to scholars, meanwhile, is to stay in their lane and avoid the temptation to issue edicts on morality or politics. Both scientists and politicians must take ‘responsibility’ for their own sphere of activity, and ensure that there remains, as Brown puts it, a ‘moat between academic and political life’.
recently on Weber, and the political origins of value free science.
Haaretz live commentary: "Israel's Supreme Court Hears Petitions Against First Netanyahu Law Attacking Judiciary"
The chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, Simcha Rothman slammed the Supreme Court saying that the very existence of the hearing is a failure of the court. "Why is a judicial process or ruling which will harm the core values of democracy needed? What is the justification for taking away from the State of Israel its basic characteristic as a democratic state?" Rothman asked.
Addressing what the judicial overhaul supporters consider a gradual encroachment on the Knesset's authority, Rothman said: "For many years, through a gradual process of legally sound arguments, the Israeli Supreme Court has taken upon itself powers unparalleled anywhere in the world." He further claimed that "the public's trust in the court has eroded due to the court's extensive involvement in social, economic and political matters."
Rothman stated that the Knesset is authorized to legislate on any Basic Law, subject to the will of the people.
Justice Anat Baron responded, 'What if there were a law that denied Arabs the right to vote or postpones elections by ten years, then what?' Rothman replied, 'If the elected parliament fails in its role, a remedy won't be found in the hands of a group of individuals authorized to annul the elected representatives without being accountable to the public through elections.'
tagged: Judicial Review, for Americans who don't get the joke.
NYT: Maitland Jones Jr., a respected professor, defended his standards. But students started a petition, and the university dismissed him.
Dr. Jones, 84, is known for changing the way the subject is taught. In addition to writing the 1,300-page textbook “Organic Chemistry,” now in its fifth edition, he pioneered a new method of instruction that relied less on rote memorization and more on problem solving.
After retiring from Princeton in 2007, he taught organic chemistry at N.Y.U. on a series of yearly contracts. About a decade ago, he said in an interview, he noticed a loss of focus among the students, even as more of them enrolled in his class, hoping to pursue medical careers.
“Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate,” he wrote in a grievance to the university, protesting his termination. Grades fell even as he reduced the difficulty of his exams.
The problem was exacerbated by the pandemic, he said. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” he wrote. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.”
After several years of Covid learning loss, the students not only didn’t study, they didn’t seem to know how to study, Dr. Jones said.
repeats
We head back to the dorm. Double-parking, we step out of the car, and Johnny hugs and kisses his dad, then embraces me in a strong, strapping-young-man hug, burying his head in my neck; this is the exact position we found ourselves in while I walked the floors with him in my arms during his colicky phase, and as he did then, he is crying into my neck.
This shocks me. I haven’t seen him cry like this since I told him that his father and I were separating. I had imagined I might say, “Ta ta for now,” Tigger’s optimistic sign-off, but I can manage only, “I love you, sweet baby.” Reeling back to the car after he walks into his new life, I turn to my ex and say, “That was a lot harder than I thought it would be.” I plant my forehead on the steering wheel. I sob.
A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.
"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is."
