Ryan Feldt @ryanfeldt

@russ_brian Chef’s kiss 😚

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Stanford student @juliaonatroika explains with great clarity why antisemitism on campus is not a surprise. @TheFP

The Free Press @TheFP

3 years ago

“A lot of people have expressed their shock about what’s happened on college campuses… but I wasn’t shocked. And I want to tell you why.” Watch Free Press intern @juliaonatroika’s testimony in front of Congress this morning on the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.

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Pro-Palestinian protesters honor Veterans Day in New York:

A clear articulation of the Israeli perspective. What does he get wrong?

Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 @MarinaMedvin

3 years ago

This video. Watch it.

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This is the best interview I have EVER seen. Ever; ever; ever; nothing comes close. Douglas Murrey has a heart – and mind – of gold. And what unfolds in this seven-minute clip is something you need to watch for yourself. (Once you see it halfway through, you’ll know exactly what I’m referring to.) But he articulates something which I have been trying to share for the past month: The Nazis, as fundamentally evil as they were, believed that they were engaging in a necessary evil for an ultimate good; they still had a spark of humanity at their core; thus, their main flaw was that they believed the ends justified the means; even though they fully believed in the “result” of a world without Jews, they were still fundamentally opposed to the “actions” they were taking. This is what motivated the Nazis to find ways of circumventing the existential moral decay they were entering, and allowed them to get creative by using the gas chambers, mass shootings (in the BACK of the head – to avoid direct facial contact), and other passive forms of mass annihilation, while also having as few Nazis as possible actually involved in these acts of murder; they then encouraged those individuals who were involved in this atrocity of mass murder to get drunk every night in order to wash away the person they started seeing in the mirror. Thus, the existential decay of these individual Nazis actively involved in the mass murder of the Jewish People was simply seen as another layer of “the ends justify the means.” They were the epitome of “Western” evil. Hamas is the exact opposite. This IS their value system. They prize death, murder, rape, suicide missions, and everything that opposes the very foundation of values and truth to begin with. The events of October 7th was not an end to a means… there is no future goal… this IS the goal. They are the epitome of an evil the likes of which we have never before seen. Please – I know this is social media and some people only watch 60-second soundbites; but please, please, please watch this brilliant interview. Douglas Murray – you are a credit to everything worth being credited.

A Brief Disagreement by Steve Cutts is a brilliant animated short depicting a visual journey into mankind's favourite pastime throughout the ages. Meaning — humanity's inclination to fight each other. t.co/S45iUB4m19

Our account has lost over 6,100 followers in October. That's why we continue to ask for your engagement. You create this incredible community and help us all remember. Support @AuschwitzMuseum.

I am pro-Palestinian. Some might be surprised by this due to my recent advocacy on @X for Israel, but you shouldn’t be. I am anti-terrorist, not anti-Palestinian. It is not inconsistent to be pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. And my pro-Palestinian viewpoint is not a new one. My pro-Palestinian perspective began more than 30 years ago when I was introduced to the Palestinian community and their plight in the early 1990s. I have invested millions in helping promote Palestinian economic development and peaceful coexistence. We would do a lot more if we could be confident that the funds would be used productively. The crisis in Gaza is largely due to a failure of leadership. The Palestinians elected Hamas in 2006 after Israel withdrew and evicted 9,000 of its own citizens from their Gazan homes. Israel withdrew from Gaza for peace. It was a small scale test of a two-state solution. Rather than building the Singapore of the Middle East over the last 18 years, Hamas diverted funding to build tunnels, rockets and munitions to wage terror and war in an effort to eliminate Israel and kill Jews. Like the Israelis, the vast majority of Palestinians want peace. They want opportunities for employment so they can earn a living wage to support and educate their families so the next generation can build a better life. They want peace, beauty, happiness, health and prosperity as we all do. All of that would have been possible with Gazan leadership which focused on economic development rather than terrorism. Israel and (most of) the world wanted the Gazan experiment to succeed. Israel simply wanted peace. Israel built a fence and created checkpoints to protect its citizens from suicide bombers and other forms of terror. The Egyptians built a concrete wall at their border with Gaza for the same reasons. The need for a fence and checkpoints is made self-evident by the catastrophic impact on Israel when the fence was breached on Oct. 7th. Hamas is in the business of terrorism. Hamas makes money with grift, corruption, and funding from Israel’s enemies who support Hamas to achieve their own anti-Israel objectives. Hamas and those that support it don’t care about the Palestinians. The Palestinians are simply a tool to implement their anti-Israel and/or anti-Jew objectives. Like other businesses, Hamas has a corporate hierarchy where those at the top make thousands of times more than the ‘workers’ at the bottom. Hamas’ leaders have put aside hundreds of millions and even billions for themselves. Hamas uses their ‘culture’ of terrorism, cash, and other incentives to motivate young, brainwashed —often from youth—, radicalised militants to implement death, torture and destruction. Their ‘success’ at terrorism attracts more funding, amplifies Israel’s response, and the cycle continues. Hamas does not care about the Palestinian people. Hamas knew with certainty how Israel would respond to the torture, rape, beheading, and slaughter of Israeli women, children, seniors and infants on Oct. 7th. Hamas’ plan was to hide out in their tunnels and headquarters built under major hospitals, limit evacuations so that Palestinian citizens are exposed to the inevitable Israeli military response, and then rally the world against Israel in a globally coordinated response as innocent civilians die. Israel has no choice but to destroy Hamas. It cannot allow its survival, as Hamas’ existence remains an existential threat. If ISIS invaded our southern border, we would do the same. We would warn civilians to evacuate and then we would go in and destroy the terrorists. We wouldn’t cease fire until they were obliterated. The whole situation is an incredible tragedy. While I have always hoped for a viable and peaceful two-state solution, the Gaza experiment has been an abject failure. Future efforts for statehood for the Palestinians must learn from this catastrophe. As always, I welcome your input, critiques and rebuttal. What did I get wrong?

In under 3 minutes this Arab Israeli completely dismantles this student’s academic brainwashing on Israel - just withering.

One of the best and most powerful speeches I have ever heard. Whatever side you are on right now, this message will help us all.

As Arabs, our message to the world cannot be restricted to eliciting global sympathy for the children of Gaza. We cannot depict ourselves as helpless children, behind whom we hide our failure to control our Hamas thugs who massacred 1300 non-combatant Israelis. This is a moral failure that the world sees but that we try to hide behind the “rights of the Palestinian people,” rights that none of us are willing to articulate. Free Palestine can mean anything, from an Arab Palestinian state living in peace next to Jewish Israel to an Arab Palestinian state instead of Jewish Israel. For Arab Israeli peace to happen, and since Palestinians are either children, or Hamas thugs, or useless corrupt Mahmud Silicon-Face Abbas, non-Palestinian Arabs should step up to save the Palestinians from themselves and save the region ongoing sorrow. We, Arabs, have to show the world that we are at peace with the idea of a Jewish state, that we are willing to concede what we believe – rightly or wrongly -- is ours (1948 territory), that we genuinely want bygones to be bygones, without secretly holding grudges and passing them to our children. We must seek a better future for ourselves and our kids, as well as for Israelis and their kids. The Palestine disaster (nakba) is not a disaster of land loss or military defeat. It is a disaster of absence of leadership that can articulate the Arab alternative to war and death. We ask the world to stop the Israeli war on Hamas, but what do we offer as an alternative to stopping the war? Just let those Hamas thugs who massacred 1300 Israelis get away with their crime (because there is a history of dispute)? Ask Israel to go back to October 6? Knowing that Hamas can break out of the Gaza fence and repeat its massacre any minute? Hamas must go. We Arabs must help get rid of it, and most importantly, we must show that we have a plan for the day after Hamas. Let’s learn from the mistake of Iraq and Arab Spring countries, that once what we have is gone, what comes next looks worse. Let’s preempt the worse by offering the better. As long as we, the Arabs, do not have answers to all these questions, the world will manage things without us. It does not matter if all of us, 1.3 billion Muslims, think that Israel is at fault. What matters is global perception, which clearly thinks that Islamist terrorism is the problem, not Israelis dancing at a music festival. And we, the Arabs, are not even talking to the world. We are talking to each other, patting ourselves on the back for being utopian and principled on Palestine, while we are in fact idiotically out of touch with reality. We insist on our backward message, then act surprised why many of our states are failing and why we are migrating in droves. Please stop treating Palestine like religion, like we have to stick to our principles to win credit in the afterlife and to garner social acceptance among each other (Arabs and/or Muslims). Please think of Palestine like a problem that requires troubleshooting, compromise, pragmatism, and most importantly, looking toward the future, not the past.

Who has a fair claim on the region of Israel and Palestine? It's time to go deep to understand: • History • Geography • Religion • Legal claims • Morality • And more:

People ask me all the time if I am "pro-Israel" because I am a Jew who has lived in Israel, and my answer is that being "pro-Israel" or being "pro-Palestine" or being a "Zionist" does not properly capture the nuance of thought most people do or should have about this issue. It certainly doesn't capture mine. I have a lot to say. I’ve spent the last 72 hours writing, texting, and talking to Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and Palestinians. Much of my reaction is going to piss off people on "both sides," but I am exhausted and hurting and I do not think there is any way to discuss this situation without being radically honest about my views. So I'm going to try to say what I believe to be true the best I can. Let me start with this: It could have been me. That's a hard thought to shake when watching the videos out of Israel — the concert goers fleeing across an empty expanse, the hostages being paraded through the streets, the people shot in the head at bus stops or in their cars. I went to those parties in the desert, I rubbed shoulders with Israelis and Arabs and Jews and Muslims, I could have easily accepted an invitation to some concert near Sderot and gone without a care, only to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Or, perhaps worse, taken hostage and tortured. I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They're doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They're doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood — an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic — it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it. It’s not possible to recap the entire 5,000 year history of people fighting over this strip of land in one newsletter. There are plenty of easily accessible places you can learn about it if you want to (and, by the way, many of you should — far too many people speak on this issue with an obscene amount of ignorance, loads of arrogance, and a narrow historical lens focused on the last few decades). But I'll briefly highlight a few things that are important to me. In my opinion, the Jewish people have a legitimate historical claim to the land of Israel. Jews had already been expelled and returned and expelled again a half dozen times before the rise of the Muslim and Arab rule of the Ottoman Empire. Of course it’s messy because we Jews and Arabs and Muslims are all cousins and descendents of the same Canaanites. But Arabs won the land centuries ago the same way Israel and Jews won it in the 20th century: Through conflict and war. The British defeated the Ottoman Empire and then came the Balfour Declaration, which amounted to the British granting the area to the Jewish people, a promise they’d later try to renege on — all before the wars that have defined the region since 1948. That historical moment in the late 1940s was unique. After World War II, with many Arab and Muslim states already in existence, and after six million Jews were slaughtered, the global community felt it was important to grant the Jewish people a homeland. In a more logical or just world that homeland would have been in Europe as a kind of reparation for what the Nazis and others before them had done to the Jews, or perhaps in the Americas — like Alaska — or somewhere else. But the Jews wanted Israel, the British had taken to the Zionist movement, the British had conquered the Ottoman Empire which handed them control of the land, and America and Europe didn’t want the Jews. As a result, we got Israel. The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans. Many of us would probably react the same way. So, just as humans have done forever, they fought. The many existing Arab states turned against the burgeoning new Jewish state. One side won and one side lost. This is the brutal and broken and violent world we live in, but it is what created the global world order we have now. Are Israelis and British people "colonizers" because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it. You can’t speak about this issue in a vacuum. You can't pretend that it wasn't just 60 years ago when Israel was surrounded on all sides by Arab states who wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. Despite the balance of power shifting this century, that threat is still a reality. And you can't talk about that without remembering the only reason the Jews were in Israel in the first place was that they'd spent the previous centuries fleeing a bunch of Europeans who also wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. And then Hitler showed up. American partisans have a narrow view of this history, and an Americentric lens that is infuriating to witness. As Lee Fang perfectly put it, "Hamas would absolutely execute the ACAB lefties cheering on horrific violence against Israelis if they lived in Gaza & U.S. right-wingers blindly cheering on Israeli subjugation of Palestinians would rebel twice as violently if Americans were subjected to similar occupation." And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza. Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this. I'm sorry to say that while the blood on the ground is fresh. The Israelis who were killed in this attack largely have nothing to do with those conditions other than being born at a time when Israel and Jews have the upper hand in this conflict. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists. This is why we describe them as “innocent” and why Hamas has only reaffirmed that they are a brutal terror organization with this attack — an organization that I hope is quickly toppled, for the sake of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis. But as someone with a deep love for Israel, with friends in danger and people I know still missing, it breaks my heart to say it but I'm saying it again because it remains perhaps the most salient point of context in a tangled mess full of centuries of context: You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace. You can't. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising. And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle: 1) Israel has already responded with a vengeance, and they will continue to. Their desire for violence is not unlike Hamas’s — it’s just as much about blood for blood as any legitimate security measure. Israel will “have every right to respond with force." Toppling Hamas — a group, by the way, Israel erred in supporting — will now be the objective, and civilian death will be seen as necessary collateral damage. But Israel will also do a bunch of things they don't have a right to. They will flatten apartment buildings and kill civilians and children and many in the global community will probably cheer them on while they do it. They have already stopped the flow of water, electricity, and food to two million people, and killed dozens of civilians in their retaliatory bombings. We should never accept this, never lose sight that this horror is being inflicted on human beings. As the group B’Tselem said, “There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” I mourn for the innocents of Palestine just as I do for the innocents in Israel. As of late, many, many more have died on their side than Israel's. And many more Palestinians are likely to die in this spate of violence, too. Unfortunately, most people in the West only pay attention to this story when Hamas or a Palestinian in Gaza or the West Bank commits an act of violence. Palestinian citizens die regularly at the hands of the Israeli military and their plight goes largely unnoticed until they respond with violence of their own. Israel had already killed an estimated 250 Palestinians, including 47 children, this year alone. And that is just in the West Bank. 2) Every single time Israel kills someone in the name of self-defense they create a handful of new radicalized extremists who will feel justified in wanting to take an Israeli life in retribution sometime in the future. Half of Gaza’s two million people are under the age of 19 — they know little besides Hamas rule (since 2006), Israeli occupation, blockades, and rockets falling from the sky. The suffering of these innocent children born into this reality is incomprehensible to me. They will suffer more now because of Hamas’s actions and Israel’s response, all through no fault of their own. There is no way out of this pattern until one side exercises restraint or leaders on both sides find a new solution. Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this. So, why did this happen now? I'm not sure how to answer that question except to say it was bound to happen eventually. It was a massive policy and intelligence failure and Netanyahu should pay the price politically — he is a failed leader. Iran probably helped organize the attack and the money freed up by the Biden administration's prisoner swap probably didn't help the situation, either. Israel's increasingly extremist government and settlers provoking Palestinians certainly didn't help. Nor has going to the Al-Aqsa mosque and desecrating it. Nor do blockades and bombings and indiscriminate subjugation of a whole people. Nor does refusing to talk to non-terrorist leaders in Palestine. Nor does illegally continuing to expand and steal what is left of Palestinian land, as many Jews and Israelis have been doing in the 21st century despite cries from the global community to stop. A violent response was predictable — in fact, plenty of people did predict it. Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources. But if you want to blame Israeli leaders for continuing to expand and settle land that does not belong to them (as I do), then you should also spare some blame for Palestinian leaders for repeatedly not accepting a partitioned Israel during the 20th century that could have led to peace (as I do). Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn't Hamas. Will some Palestinians cheer and clap at the dead, or spit on them as they are paraded through Gaza? Yes they will. And they have. Many will also mourn because they loathe Hamas and know this will only make things worse. This is no different than how some Americans cheer at the dead in every single war we've ever fought. It's no different than the Israelis who set up lawn chairs to watch their government bomb Palestine and cheer them on, too. This doesn't mean Palestinians or Israelis or Americans are evil — it means some of them are giving in to their violent impulses, and their zealous feelings of righteous vengeance. Solutions, you ask? I can’t say I have any. If you came here for that, I’m sorry. The two-state solution looks dead to me. A three-state solution makes some sense but feels out of the view of all the people who matter and could make it happen. I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence. Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea. I'm pro-not-killing-civilians. I'm pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons. I'm pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head. I'm pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes. I'm pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages. I'm pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process. I'm pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore. Whatever this is, I want none of it.

Ten years ago today, the largest cleanup in history officially began.

This video cannot be shared enough

@russ_brian This where we start buying?

Crazy thought but… what if the world is roughly as sane/mad as it’s always been, but we’ve sleepwalked into an AI-driven attention economy that artificially amplifies the craziest opinions on Earth and feeds them to us 24/7, utterly skewing our perception of reality? Huh.