I'm curious.
How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?
( @mascula-sappho, your comments elsewhere inspired this question.)
I'd find that bar graph that shows the amount of Jewish Holocaust victims and next to it a barely visible, one pixel high bar of people imprisoned by the nazis for homosexuality.
If it's someone who seems willing to listen I'll explain how the nazi homophobia circles back to antisemitism. If not, maybe some derogatory comments about them and their close family.
Is it the "good" choice? No. But it gets me through the day a bit easier.
Looking for that graph, found these:
I’m curious.
How do y'all respond when you hear the “I’m gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn’t just about Jews and I don’t know why people think that yadda yadda yadda” patter?
( @mascula-sappho, your comments elsewhere inspired this question.)
Anonymous asked:
Your post does a great job breaking down the rhetorical devices used by mamdani. Have you considered turning that critical lens onto the rhetoric coming from the IDF? In the name of impartiality
unsolicited-opinions answered:
(Anon is talking about this post)
I’m game to try that, Anon. Please suggest a comparable example of rhetorical deception from an IDF spokesperson?
It's been a couple days, Anon. Hope you'll suggest an example soon.
It's been a week, Anon.
That's two weeks, Anon.
Three weeks, Anon...
Three months, Anon.
Four months.
Five months, Anon.
Six months.
Seven months.
Eight months.
Anonymous asked:
Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?
unsolicited-opinions answered:
(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)
TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn’t psychic.
In the 1890s, “colony” just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.
It was basically the Victorian word for “intentional community,” with absolutely no imperial baggage required.
The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn’t exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.
So a reader of the 21st century finds the word “colony” in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.
It’s a little like finding the word “trauma” in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.
Meanwhile, ‘settler colonialism’ as applied to Israel isn’t a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It’s a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism…and it still fails on its own stated terms.
Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.
That’s not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it’s the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.
There’s also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren’t arriving in a place with which they had no connection.
Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.
The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they’re so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)
So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?
They move the goalposts.
The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an “exception.”
The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.
The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.
So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn’t settle* any of this.
From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)
Much more in this post.
_______________
*(See what I did there?)
Okay, there's actually a lot of interesting history around this, so let's dig into it.
It's completely correct that the semiotics of "colony", "colonization", etc., have evolved over time, and that back in the late 19th Century when Herzl was writing the connotation was more neutral than it became in the 20th Century. (I also need to stress that that one "it is something colonial" quote-mine you see shared everywhere is from a letter that was never even sent, because Herzl realized it was a bad idea.)
But more to the point: the old guard Zionists were fully aware of accusations they were European colonizers - and they actively refuted those claims.
— Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Jacob Lassner, Ilan S. Troen, 2007)
— Hebrew Repatriation to Eretz Yisrael (Samuel Kruglikoff, 1930)
— Eliahu Eliachar, Testimony to UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Regarding Jews in Arab Countries (1947)
— Ber Borochov, Poalei Tziyon Peace Manifesto (1917)
— David Ben-Gurion, Statement to the Elected Assembly of Palestine Jewry (1947)
Zionists wrote copious volumes about the indigeneity of Judeans to Eretz Yisrael, and denying accusations that they were merely pawns of an imperialist agenda (initially it was claimed they were Russian agents, and then later British colonists) or seeking to conquer or to exploit the land or its people. Contrary to the popular claim that Zionists thought (or promoted the concept) the land was uninhabited, a very substantial amount was written about the Palestinians (particularly from the perspective of class analysis), and how the return and liberation of Judeans must go hand-in-hand with class solidarity and the liberation of Arab workers. In other words: the exact opposite of colonialism. What we today would call decolonization - and specifically decolonization via proletarian revolution.
The simplistic quote-mining about "colonization" used today is a hundred years outdated: all such arguments were debunked before the state was even founded.
Anonymous asked:
I think the “internet is forever” has made people much less willing to admit they are/were wrong. People bring receipts from 2012 to the argument now. Like “this you?” *screenshot of a tweet from a decade ago that seemingly contradicts what you’re saying in 2026*
It’s humiliation. Gotcha journalism. ‘Huh. That’s not what you said when you were 17’ “roll the tape”. Instead of democratizing, the internet has (in many ways) concretized peoples knowledge and opinions. Made them terrified of change, of seemingly like a hypocrite. But in order to change, people need to be able to admit their mistakes and OTHER PEOPLE need to let them move on from them. That’s how actual change happens. The internet, increasingly, doesn’t allow for that. People are too gleeful (full of self-righteousness) at pointing out “calling out” people’s past missteps and throwing them in their faces. Never letting things go doesn’t allow for change. But many online seem to believe never letting something go is in fact a sign of virtuous dedication to a cause. (And yet also talk constantly about how “real change” needs to happen.)
But “real change” can ONLY happen if you let certain things go. To ‘make change happen’ you have to allow for it. In yourself and in others. Or everyone stays stuck.
This Ask seems like a longer version of this post…?
If your views haven’t changed in ten years, that says less about your clarity than it says about your lack of reflection.
Stumbled across this:
@ZubyMusic: Politics can rot people's brains to the point that they'll oppose good ideas if they come from the 'wrong people' and support bad ideas if they come from the 'right people'
Tumblrino: I heard someone say the other day that most people's brains don't separate information into "true" and "false" but rather "us" and "them": will the people of my tribe approve of this? Then it's true. Will the people of my tribe disapprove and cast me out for expressing it? Then it's false.
This grabbed my attention because they're definitely referring to Dan M. Kahan's research on "Identity-Protective Cognition."
Most people think they update their beliefs based on evidence, but Kahan's research suggests otherwise and it's fascinating.
Identity-Protective Cognition is the tendency to selectively credit or dismiss evidence based on what your group believes, not what the evidence actually shows.
Among the ideas in this paper:
Being wrong is often the rational choice
If you change your mind on a "tribal" issue (climate change, gun control, vaccines, etc.) you risk social ostracism, family conflict, loss of status.
(Does that sound familiar?)
Being correct about a global scientific fact, meanwhile, has essentially zero effect on your personal life or the global outcome.
So your brain runs this calculation...and chooses the tribe.
Smart people are worse, not better
Kahan found that higher scientific literacy and reasoning ability actually increase polarization.
Smarter people, he says, are better at cherry-picking evidence and finding flaws in the other side's data. Their intelligence becomes a weapon for motivated reasoning, not a cure for it.
We don't just ignore inconvenient facts, we actively embrace misinformation that flatters us
Identity-affirming misinformation (stuff that makes your tribe look good) gets a free pass. Identity-threatening facts (stuff that makes your tribe look bad) get fought tooth and nail.
Kahan's proposed fix is information decoupling.
He says we need to separate the fact from the identity signal it carries.
Presenting correct information alone is useless and often counterproductive.
Kahan says you have to make the truth feel safe for someone's existing identity without implying they need to defect to the other side to believe it.
What Kahan is really describing is that humans are social animals before they are rational ones.
We evolved to survive in groups, not to optimize for abstract truth (to varying degrees.)
So our brains aren't broken, they're just running software thousands of years old in a world they didn't evolve to cope with.
None of this means minds can't change - they change constantly - but Kahan's research suggests the mechanism of change isn't argument or evidence. It's identity shift.
People change their minds when they find a new tribe, a new role model, or a way of seeing themselves that makes the truth feel like theirs.
And that insight might explain why identity politics tend to backfire
If you organize persuasion around group identity, you deepen the very grooves that make minds hard to change. You grow only rigid ideologues engaged in purity tests who are good at chanting on rhythm. They won't be created, nuanced, pragmatic, diplomatic, or effective communicators.
Yascha Mounk's The Identity Trap makes this case from a different angle.
When well-intentioned people make identity "the all-encompassing dividing line of American life," they aren't dissolving tribal thinking, they're institutionalizing it.
The result, Mounk argues, is an ideology that denies that members of different groups can truly understand each other. It squashes liberal pluralism.
That's precisely the condition that makes Kahan's trap inescapable.
The alternative Mounk points toward is very much like Kahan's: universalism.
Mounk says we need identities large enough to contain disagreement without triggering tribal self-defense.
His argument is that universal values, not group solidarity, offer the surest path to justice, fairness, and enduring social peace.
The model he holds up as effective is the civil rights movement. It wasn't an appeal to Black identity alone, but to a shared American identity, shared moral values, and a vision of humanity big enough that even those outside the group could feel called to it, not accused by it.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't tell white Americans they were the enemy. He told them (and showed them) that they were falling short of their own ideals.
That's what a large identity looks like in practice. It isn't the erasure of difference, just a framework (built on words like citizen, neighbor, and human) where we aren't defined solely by the groups we were born into, but by what we can build together.
How Minds Change is a whole book about this, for anyone interested in learning more. 
Thanks for this, April - I'll check that one out!
This is super interesting. I’m finding myself interacting fairly regularly lately with MAGA type evangelicals, and whenever I try to nail them down on what’s *actually* wrong with homosexuality or transgender people, the reply I get is that you can’t pick and choose the rules of the Bible, *even if* you don’t know why one of them is the way it is. If the rule doesn’t make sense to you, your understanding is limited. It’s you, not an arbitrary rule. Some of them will even grudgingly admit they see why the “liberal” position seems kinder or to make more sense.
Which makes discussion impossible, because “accept a rule without any justification” isn’t something I can make sense of. The next step is “God made the world with a specific order, which includes reproduction,” but I can’t get much more out of them about how the order works, why the things in it fit together the way they do, how this improves things more than live and let live does, etc.
Some of that is just… they’re actually wrong. There *isn’t* evidence that the order they prefer is associated with better outcomes. I know this because I’ve seen how repressive governments affect LGBTQ people, and I’ve seen that cishets’ lives don’t actually improve because of it. No one is ACTUALLY the Omelas kid.
But it makes a lot of sense that they can’t even get to talking to me about outcomes if I am queer. Because that means (to them) I’m not actually rational. I’m just liking orgasms. So why listen to me, if all I want is more orgasms? I’m selfish and emotional.
Which makes me really intrigued by the “identity politics doesn’t work” thing. It makes sense. But how do we get from a leftism that grounds itself deeply in “we must work for specific marginalized groups, by looking specifically at the things that affect each of them” to a leftism that isn’t about identities?
“…the reply I get is that you can’t pick and choose the rules of the Bible, *even if* you don’t know why one of them is the way it is. If the rule doesn’t make sense to you, your understanding is limited. It’s you, not an arbitrary rule.”
Yet these hypocrites eat bacon, wear clothes made with more than one fiber, and turn things on/off during the sabbath.
Their objection has nothing at all to do with obeying the commandments of the Hebrew Bible.
“…Some of that is just… they’re actually wrong. There *isn’t* evidence that the order they prefer is associated with better outcomes….”
Evangelicals are not moved by evidence, logic, or reason. To them, this isn’t a flaw, it’s the foundational feature of their worldview.
“But how do we get from a leftism that grounds itself deeply in “we must work for specific marginalized groups, by looking specifically at the things that affect each of them” to a leftism that isn’t about identities?”
By recognizing that the left has been co-opted by an omnicause ideology that is virtually unrelated to the supposed bedrock of the left, Marxism.
Can you name the apartheid state?
A small state, established on the ruins of empire, that defines itself as the nation-state of one specific people. Its language, its symbols, its character are reserved by law for that people alone.
A quarter of its population belongs to a different ethnic group. Many of them were born there. Their parents were born there. And yet the state refuses them citizenship. Instead, it issues them a special passport marking them as something less. They cannot vote. They are barred from entire categories of employment. A permanent, legally defined underclass, sorted by ethnicity and by when their families arrived.
The state demands loyalty tests. Tens of thousands of members of this minority, elderly people among them, are ordered to prove their allegiance and their command of the ruling nation’s language. Those who fail receive letters: leave within 30 days or be removed by force. Grandmothers who have lived in the same apartment for fifty years are told to pack. Those who refuse can be held in detention centers while the state processes their expulsion.
The state didn’t stop there. It shut down the minority’s media outlets. It abolished education in their mother tongue, down to the last school. It demolished their monuments and memorials. It stopped admitting members of their ethnic group at the border. Officials openly describe all of this as protecting the demographic and cultural security of the majority nation.
How many UN resolutions has this country received? How many ICJ hearings? How many sanctions bills are moving through Western parliaments right now?
How many students are camped on university lawns for the grandmothers in detention? How many celebrities have posted the infographic? How many artists have cancelled their shows there? How many cities have voted to divest?
When did you last see a documentary about the stateless quarter of its population? A hashtag? A march? A single foreign minister expressing even mild concern?
The answer to every one of these questions is zero.
The country is Latvia. EU member. NATO member. Funded by Brussels, defended by Western armies, criticized by no one. Everything above is happening right now, in 2026, inside the European Union.
And now a few questions for the apartheid crowd. You. The ones with the word ready to go, the flags, the chants, the infographics. Where are you on this one? You didn’t know? Or you knew and it didn’t fit?
You scream about second-class citizens. Latvia has them by law, a quarter of the country. Where’s your tent?
You cry about people being expelled from their homes. Latvia is deporting pensioners over a language exam. Where’s your hashtag?
You say you’re against ethnostates. Here’s one, official, funded by the EU. Where’s your boycott list?
Someone handed you a word, told you where to point it, and you pointed. You didn’t check the facts then. You’re not checking them now.
ALTNatalie nailed this one.
Working Hypothesis: @jewish-hot-takes exists for non-Jewish cosplayers to launder their most nonsensical, baseless criticisms of #jumblr.
_____
“Jews aren’t white” is a claim about whether Jews sit safely inside the white category from the outside.
“There’s no racism in Jewish spaces” is a claim about prejudice inside Jewish communities that I’ve never seen or heard a Jew make.
Those are two different sentences about two different subjects, Anon.
Two things can be true at the same time:
1. Ashkenazim being racialized as white is recent, conditional, and gets revoked the second it’s convenient for attacking them.
AND
2. Some Jewish communities and some members of Jewish communities express real colorism, anti-Black racism, or shitty attitudes towards Mizrahim or Ethiopian Jews.
There’s no contradiction to expose here except the one Anon invented.
Anon clearly revealed the assumptions about race and Jews needed devise this strawman “contradiction”
The majority of Israel’s ~7 million Jews are not Ashkenaz. Anon actually conceded this in their first sentence, saying it’s “more complex than just white Jews,” and then spent every following sentence using “Jews” to mean “white Western Ashkenazim.”
Anon’s framing hides erases all the Jews who can’t be racialized as “white” (including Mizrahim, Sephardim, Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews, Indian Jews, Chinese Jews, and very olive-colored Ashkenaz like my mother) because the accusation only seems plausible to its intended bigoted audience if Anon quietly deletes them first.
Why does Anon need to delete them first?
Anon thinks white = guilty oppressor and non-white = innocent victim, so “Jews aren’t white” sounds to Anon like “Jews are claiming innocence.”
(Remarkably, Anon thinks their position opposes racism.)
Antisemitism, meanwhile, adapts. Right wing antisemites can call Jews non-white in contexts where whiteness is good, and antisemites like Anon can call Jews white in contexts where whiteness is bad. Either way, both approaches to Jew hatred almost always insist Jews are all-powerful, alien, supremacists, and secretly in charge.
Jews don’t fit the false binary of oppressor vs oppressed, and instead of asking questions about that blatantly absurd false binary, Anon finds it simpler to believe that Jews must be cheating.
Membership in a group identity (whether it not that group is persecuted) never comes with a fucking halo - and it is only the extremist ideologues on either end of the horseshoe who fail to grasp this fundamental truth:
There are bigots in all populations and in all spaces.*
“Jews aren’t white” ≠ “no Jew is ever racist”
Any person of any group identity can be racist.
Carpenters, Africans, Hindus, Socialists, and left-handed AuDHD transfemmes - all can be bigots. No group identity is an innoculation against the holding racist ideas. No group identity is a Get Out of Jail Free card excusing the expression of racist ideas.
Only ideological extremists on either end of the horseshoe believe their group association comes with a halo.
Nobody’s stated position is “racism doesn’t exist in Jewish spaces. ” Anon invented that strawman, then performatively slapped it around.
_____
I have listened to Mizrahim, Sephardim, Beta Israel, and Jews of many hues from all over the world who nobody would call “white.” I believe them when they talk about incidents of colorism among Ashkenazim, and I’m grateful they point out when they are erased in the assumption that “Jewish” = “Ashkenaz.”
That’s not what Anon did here.
Anon just sloppily fashioned a strawman from a non-existant contradiction and threw it, without any support, as an accusation against a community of Jews.
To @jewish-hot-takes, who posted this Ask with no comment or pushback:
We’re already overwhelmed by enormous amounts of spectacularly stupid antisemitism here. I’d be grateful if you implemented an editorial policy to prevent amplifying and validating even more of it. This isn’t “edgy” or “controversial,” it’s just fucking trash written by a non-Jewish cosplayer - and you post a lot of this sort of trash.
You’re not serving the Jewish community, you’re hurting it by validating stupid, bigoted remarks about Jews and allowing those who share them to do so anonymously behind the shield of pretending to be Jews.
I implore you to reconsider your choices.
______
* My own hypothesis is that ~30% of every population are irredeemable shitbags.
In 1861, the men who built the Confederacy were not coy about what it was for.
Mississippi’s secession declaration says it in the second sentence:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world”
The Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, told a Savannah crowd the new government’s cornerstone rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”
They were painfully explicit, saying exactly what the Confederacy was for.
Then they lost, and within a generation they revised history to replace the true cause with a lie.
They hadn’t fought for slavery, said the lie. Their cause now had always been a noble defense of states’ rights.
This is the Lost Cause narrative - a myth built to launder defeat into honor and shame into pride.
The Lost Cause fraud was built on three steps:
The real cause was slavery, but they pretended it had been about “states’ rights,” an abstraction nobody had to be ashamed of.
The side that chose a war and lost it becomes the side exclusively suffered as victims. The Confederacy that fired on Fort Sumter becomes a gallant underdog crushed by Northern aggression. Confederate decisions are edited out of remembering while grievances are amplified.
The story stopped being seen as history with facts and instead became a religion with saints (Lee as Christian knight), relics (monuments), and martyrs.
Once a claim is holy, any evidence against it can be dismissed without thinking as desecration. By making the facts unsayable, history is erased instead of being grappled with.
The biggest giveaway is self-revision. Stephens, who gave the Cornerstone Speech, spent his later years falsely claiming he’d been misquoted.
But the Confederacy and its descendants aren’t the only ones who have used these three steps. Let’s look at the Lost Cause of the Levant.
In 1937 the Peel Commission proposed partition, but the Arab Higher Committee rejected it.
In 1947 the UN proposed it again as Resolution 181; the Jewish Agency accepted, the Arab League rejected and went to war.
The founding cause was the refusal of any Jewish sovereignty, which the Arab Higher Committee stated as plainly in 1947 as the Confederacy stated slavery as their cause in 1861.
In the popular telling, that maximalist rejection is gone, replaced by the revisionist framing of occupation, settler colonialism, and resistance.
The dominant telling of the Nakba frames it as a crime against a blameless, helpless native population that was set upon by racist European invaders out to seize their land.
The attack on Israel by the armies of five Arab states disappears, and with it the fact that they launched it to destroy the Jewish state in its first days, and lost.
This keeps happening down the timeline. The rejection at Camp David, the Second Intifada’s campaign of suicide bombings, the rockets after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, October 7….each is absurdly described as something done to Palestinians instead of choices made by Palestinians.
The displacement followed from a choice, the same way Sherman’s march followed from secession.
They amplify the consequence, delete the decision, and make themselves exclusively powerless, blameless victims who can only have things done to them.
“From the river to the sea” is a creed, not a policy position.
Once the Nakba becomes a sacred origin, pointing to 1937 or 1947 no longer reads as discussing historical facts. It reads as an attack on a holy truth - and any discussion is rejected as heresy.
Same mechanism, different liturgy.
It also has the same giveaway of self-revision.
In 2008, Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas roughly 94 percent of the West Bank with land swaps, a corridor to Gaza, and a shared Jerusalem. Abbas refused it, and later admitted as much on Israeli television: “I rejected it out of hand”.
An offer was made and a state was refused. The narrative now told pretends neither happened and that Israel hasn’t repeatedly offered enormous concessions of land in exchange for peace. A state has been repeatedly offered. It was declined each time.
The Lost Cause of the Confederacy was built on slavery and said so out loud - it was the cornerstone of the whole edifice.
The Lost Cause of Palestine also has a cornerstone on which all else is built , just as openly stated.
No Jewish state between the river and the sea. The end of Jewish sovereignty by whatever means available.
This has meant the slaughter of Jews from 1937 to October 7.
The Confederate Lost Cause held for a century because the grief was sincere, myths are comforting, and nobody wants to believe their cause chose its own catastrophe over an objectively dehumanizing position against a specific ethnicity.
The Levant version survives for the same reason.
Yes, @brainscrems. Let’s be honest.
The only reason jumblr is going after Mamdani so hard for his antisemitism is because he’s a Muslim man.
The only reason? It couldn’t be related to the naked antemitism you yourself readily acknowledged?
I’m not denying he’s antisemitic, but so is everyone fucking else in US politics. So is basically every fuckin goy in the world.
1. You’ve acknowledged he’s antisemitic, then suggest the ONLY reason Jews might dislike him is because he’s a Muslim.
2. The assertion that everyone in US politics and (checks notes) “every fucking goy in the world” is antisemitic is obviously false on its face.
Your argument: Because others are also antisemitic, Mamdani should somehow be beyond criticism because he’s a Muslim…despite the fact that you’ve explicitly acknowledged his hatred of Jews.
Repeating something is a conscious choice, child. Supporting a status quo is a position one decides to hold.
Neither one is the unconscious, absorbed bias you spent the first half of the Ask describing.
You want to file his record under “stuff everyone passively soaks up from a goyish society” while also admitting he actively repeats and actively supports these things.
Those are what fans of reason call contradicting claims.
The bias you’re describing in paragraph one is real. People raised around Jews-as-abstraction absorb garbage they never consciously agreed to, and a lot of it never gets named because it’s wallpaper. Fine. That’s a thing. It’s also not the thing anyone is talking about with Mamdani.
Here’s what they’re actually talking about:
Absorbed bias is the stray assumption you make without noticing. None of the above was made without noticing. Each one was a decision.
You don’t accidentally sign an executive order. The gap between “internalized a stereotype” and “used municipal authority to strip a protection his Jewish constituents asked for” isn’t a matter of degree.
You built a theory of why antisemitism slides past everyone, and then used it to argue this one should slide past too. The premise calls for vigilance, but you used it to ask for a pass and to call Jews bigots for objecting to antisemitism.
Think about what that requires you to believe. Every item on that list is something he did to Jews. None of it is about him being Muslim.
So to land your theory you have to throw out the entire actual content of the complaint and substitute a motive you assigned to people.
That’s telling hundreds of Jews that their reaction to antisemitism aimed at them is really just their own bigotry leaking out.
Listen to me very carefully: Jews noticing antisemitism is not evidence of anything except antisemitism being there to notice.
The “be honest with yourselves” at the end is revealing. It’s built so that any disagreement becomes proof of the bigotry you already assigned.
Criticize Mamdani and you’ve confirmed you’re Islamophobic, which means the criticism was never allowed to be about what he did.
Y'all are NOT calling out white democrat christians (cultural or otherwise) w this same fervor
For fuck’s sake. Way to tell us you don’t actually read Jumblr without telling us you don’t read Jumblr.
Your whole thesis is that if Jews complain about what you admit is antisemitism in Mamdani, they’re Islamophobes.
Ima call bullshit.
@jewish-hot-takes, you post a lot that isn’t edgy or controversial, it’s just antisemitic and wasn’t written by Jews.
You’re amplifying Judenhass, you should be ashamed of yourself for doing it, and you need to find a way to gain a smidgen of discretion and self-respect. If you can’t manage that, how about just not amplifying hatred against other Jews?
Anonymous asked:
Okay so I really don't understand why IHRA is considered to have a good definition of antisemitism specifically because of the phrasing of "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews" a phrase which is as such followed by examples but does not include any actual outlines for what the term would be covering. A "certain perception" could mean quite literally anything and the fact that the "certain perception" is not defined within the initial definition is a glaring issue that people who wish Jews harm may use to do the "you're the real antisemite" bullshit that they have always done.
On the contrary the IHRA does infact have one of the best definitions for antisemitic discrimination being "Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others and is illegal in many countries."
I'm just confused by what the given definition is supposed to even convey due to it being so vague and universal to literally all instances ever.
a phrase which is as such followed by examples but does not include any actual outlines for what the term would be covering
You’re holding those two sentences to the standard of a closed legal definition, but that’s not what they are.
The IHRA text is an explicitly non-binding working definition, and the real content was always meant to live in the eleven examples attached to it.
The header is broad on purpose, so faulting it for not standing on its own is sort of silly. It was never meant to stand on its own. It was meant to lead to the eleven examples.
A “certain perception” could mean quite literally anything
You also quoted it incompletely. The full first sentence of the definition is:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.
“A certain perception” on its own could be any perception, so the second half of the sentence narrows it.
“…which may be expressed as hatred” tells you which kind.I don’t think that’s vacuous.
the IHRA does infact have one of the best definitions for antisemitic discrimination being “Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others”
You’re comparing a behavior to a state of mind. The discrimination line reads cleaner because denying someone opportunities or services is a behavior, and behaviors can be seen and checked.
A perception can’t, so it’s never going to be as clear.
The two define different things for different reasons.
The discrimination line is precise because it only covers one thing - discrimination.
The broader definition of antisemitism could be that precise too, but only by picking a single form and ignoring all the others (the speech, the vandalism, the violence). That wouldn’t work here, because antisemitism isn’t one behavior, it’s a whole bunch of them, and the definition is trying to name what they all have in common.
The only thing they share is the attitude behind them, which is why it reaches for “perception” instead of naming an act. The vagueness you’re objecting to is the cost of covering the whole array rather than just one example of it.
a glaring issue that people who wish Jews harm may use to do the “you’re the real antisemite” bullshit
You believe that the “vagueness” in the first half of the first sentence is something antisemites can use to deflect, the “yOu’Re ThE rEaL aNtIsEmItE” move - but that half-sentence doesn’t give that move any traction.
The first sentence names a perception, and your objection is that “a certain perception” is too vague to mean anything, right?
Again, the real content is in the examples, and that’s what anyone making an accusation under IHRA actually points to.
So even if you want to insist that half-sentence is vague, it gives a bad actor nothing to use, because it does not, by itself, identify any antisemitism at all.
Your problem, Anon, is that you took half of the first sentence out of its context…and judged it alone, completely divorced from everything that followed.
For the last day of Pride Month, here's Sheikh Mohammed Saleem Ali giving the Friday sermon, streamed live on YouTube from Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem on July 1, 2022.
Excerpts via screen captures:
Israel deliberately rotates which baby formula it lets into Gaza, banning each type right after infants become dependent on it, specifically to cause malabsorption.
Truthout, June 2026, quoting Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, head of pediatrics at Nasser Hospital.
This is a strategy of Israel to systematically “torture and kill Palestinian babies.”
“Jews deliberately poison or torture children’s bodies as policy” is one of the oldest blood libel templates in existence, going back to medieval host desecration and well-poisoning accusations.
This post is built on that template and reskinned with the vocabulary of supply chains and pediatric malabsorption to disguise it as humanitarian reporting instead of the racist libel it is.
Al-Farra is a real doctor describing a real shortage.
So what is Truthout, and what did it do with al-Farra’s words?
Truthout is a nonprofit advocacy outlet that has run pieces attacking other publications for treating “Israel’s right to exist” as a legitimate editorial value, framing that position itself as disqualifying.
This is an outlet with an explicit institutional position that acknowledging Israel’s right to exist is a problem…reporting on Israel.
This isn’t journalism and it isn’t social justice activism.
Where did Truthout get al-Farra’s words?
In April, the New Arab quoted the same doctor on the same situation:
“the types available change constantly. One type lasts no more than two weeks before it runs out and is replaced by another, which negatively affects children’s health”
That’s describing chaos. Formula shows up inconsistently, brands run out, whatever’s available gets swapped in. No intent, no plan, and no attack on babies.
The New Arab is owned by Fadaat Media, a Qatari company. Qatar has spent two decades bankrolling Hamas’s government.
An outlet funded by Hamas’s primary patron covering Hamas’s war isn’t neutral either - but it’s less egregious than what Truthout did.
In June, Truthout turned the same observation into “one of the Israeli strategies,” turning a shortage into a malicious plan to attack babies.
They invented the idea that Israel maliciously executed a plan to let one brand in until babies depend on it, then ban it on purpose to cause malabsorption issues in infants.
The medical explanation is recycled almost word for word from April. The verb does all the dishonest work. “Runs out and gets replaced” became “is allowed in, then banned.”
Nobody found a new fact. Truthout invented a motive, bolted it onto an old quote, and kept the doctor’s name on it so it would appear to be damning testimony.
This isn’t bias, this is a lie - and this is how a blood libel gets laundered in 2026.
Writing “Jews poison children” might make someone hesitate. Instead, a real shortage gets a manufactured motive, attributed to a real doctor, published by an outlet that’s told you it considers Israel’s legitimacy itself the problem, and run through a wire from an outlet funded by the regime bankrolling the other side of the war.
Each layer gives the next one a laundered source to point at. By the time it’s a Tumblr infographic, suckers like @closet-keys feel confident saying it’s “confirmed repeatedly” without ONCE having actually examined the unconfirmed claims.
Who would actually run a “ban a formula brand every two weeks” policy?
COGAT, Israel’s aid office, has publicly denied restricting formula at all, ever - but Truthout doesn’t mention this. A journalist investigating an atrocity allegation talks to the accused. Truthout skipped that because engaging with it means admitting “strategy” is their word, not their source’s.
Meanwhile, Hamas was repeatedly documented stealing baby formula from UNICEF trucks, creating or worsening the supply issue.
The shortage is real.
What’s invented is the accusation that Jews are running a calibrated infant-torture program. This accusation is disguised in the language of pediatrics and laundered through two outlets that each have a direct stake in the war they’re “covering.”
——————————
For more short lessons in media literacy, check out #Signal > Noise
Have you noticed that a lot of people on social media don't ever feel compelled to explain themselves?
You've seen this, right?
The folks who proclaim a strong moral view on a controversial topic...then use any excuse to avoid supporting it when they get any polite pushback or questions? The way personal feelings are elevated above objective facts or reasoning? The way they avoid or shut down any meaningful discussion?
I think this is caused by a set of related ideas and biases which are in ascendence and I think younger generations are more vulnerable to being manipulated by bad actors who capitalize on them.
Before we get into that, let's look at some of the ways this phenomenon manifests on social media...and the sorts of biases/concepts at play.
___
"I’m just speaking my truth."
Translation: "Challenging the conclusions I draw from my emotional experience is immoral."
This converts subjective perception into absolute truth, which not only discourages fact-checking, counterpoints, or curiosity, but labels them as oppressive.
Bias/Concept: Emotional Reasoning, Subjective Validation
___
"I don't have the emotional labor for this."
Translation: "I don't want be feel challenged, only validated."
This frames disengagement as a righteous act of self-care, rather than avoidance of intellectual discomfort.
Bias/Concept: Therapeutic Culture
___
"I feel attacked."
Translation: "You’ve introduced an idea that unsettles me."
This reframes an intellectual disagreement as personal harm, making the speaker immune to critique.
Bias/Concept: Emotional Reasoning
___
"That’s problematic"
Too often, this means "This topic made me feel bad, conflicted, or uncertain - and I don’t want to examine why."
It shuts down discussion without defining terms or explaining logic. It implies moral failure without needing to explain the moral reasoning.
Bias/Concept: Concept Creep, Virtue Signaling
___
"Centering [X] is violence."
Translation: "I disagree with your priorities and framing that as harm makes me morally right."
This uses inflated, exaggerated, hyperbolic language to shut down any competing narratives or uncomfortable truths.
Bias/Concept: Concept Creep, Emotional Reasoning
___
"It's not my job to educate you."
Translation: "I don’t want to explain, defend, or support my belief. That would risk them being challenged on their merits. I just want my feelings validated and for my community to affirm I have expressed the correct views."
This avoids meaningful dialogue by asserting moral high ground and demanding deference...without reciprocity.
Bias/Concept: Virtue Signaling, Social Identity Theory
___
"As a [victim identity], I shouldn’t have to…"
Translation: "My group affiliation makes my views untouchable, questioning them makes you a bigot."
This uses identity to shield ideas from scrutiny. Lived experience becomes a veto power over disagreement.
Bias/Concept: Social Identity Theory, Motte and Bailey
___
"This is trauma-informed."
Translation: "You can’t question this without being insensitive"
This weaponizes therapeutic language to preempt dissent. (My therapist HATES this one.)
Bias/Concept: Concept Creep, Therapeutic Culture
___
"That’s giving [insert negative vibe or label]"
Translation: "Your argument feels like something I’ve been told to distrust"
This uses emotional associations instead of logic to delegitimize a person or point.
Bias/Concept: Emotional Reasoning, Subjective Validation
___
Do you see it?
Facts which conflict with feelings aren’t debated - they’re deemed hostile, even violent.
What all of these have in common is the primacy of emotion over reason.
Emotion isn’t the start of a thought for the people who make a habit of these behaviors - it's a substitute for thinking.
I don’t believe this shift is driven by malice or conscious dishonesty. Most people haven’t stopped caring about truth - they’ve simply come to discern what truth is through emotional resonance instead of through evidence or reasoning.
"Truth" now arrives on screens dressed in vibes and aesthetic cues tailored for their existing biases, bypassing critical thought and offering the dopamine-releasing comfort of certainty without the messy, time-consuming burden of understanding.
When Emotion Becomes Authority
Here's a recent example which is getting some deserved mockery in the last day or so:
I know, I know. listening to Theo Von talk about war is like listening a possum try to to sell you on cryptocurrency.
Scratch that - Theo Von is what we'd expect to see if a pair of Truck Nutz were to gain sentience in a laboratory accident.
Theo couldn't speak for his generation any more than a broken Roomba could speak for Artificial General Intelligence, but he's doing something here which is alarmingly and increasingly common for his generation of media personalities. He's using his feelings as a replacement for thinking.
...it feels to me...it just feels to me like it's a genocide that's happening...
Theo doesn’t check facts, definitions, sources, or context because he doesn’t have to. He just invokes a vibe, a moral mood. "It feels like genocide." That’s enough.
Theo has 3.9 million subscribers on YouTube. Estimates suggest his total reach is about 16.2 million people.
In 2025, truth is not discerned though evidence or reasoning, but through emotional resonance.
Feelings are like the new science, but they're peer-reviewed only by your immediate social circle and validated by the count of reshares.
This is NOT a crotchety right-wing Fox News viewer shaking his fist at clouds and ranting about "kids these days."
This isn't even a critique of liberalism or leftism (because I'm a lifelong left-leaning liberal who grew up in a liberal/socialist family).
It's an examination of what has become a common strategy for mass manipulation which is alarmingly effective, especially with younger generations.
The Water We Swim In
Political operatives and influlence campaigns from every perspective are capitalizing on it, too. Influence campaigns from Russia, Iran, and Qatar; PACs; lobbyist firms...everybody - and we don't really notice these maipulations any longer. Why don't we notice them?
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?
-David Foster Wallace
We don't notice because we're swimming in them.
Every day, we see provocative social media posts which prioritize shock value and emotional impact, aiming to capture attention and convey political stances through intense feelings rather than through facts or reasoned arguments.
Appeals to emotion have been used to bypass logic and reasoning for millennia.
You're probably familiar with these:
So appeals to emotion aren't new and aren't always dishonest.
What's new is the increasing, overwhelming spread of this way of reaching conclusions in our public discourse replacing other modes of communication, other means of persuasion, and other ways of "knowing" anything.
What's new is that our post-truth, postmodern academic models validate this.
What's new is how this is being weaponized against us, especially younger generations.
How We Turned "I Feel" Into the New "I Know"
This shift didn’t happen overnight. It’s the product of decades of cultural, technological, and psychological changes converging to create a perfect storm where feelings have become a replacement for thinking.
First, there’s the growing cultural emphasis on authenticity and personal experience as the highest forms of truth. This began as a perfectly reasonable corrective to rigid institutional authority and exclusionary narratives but has morphed into a worldview where subjective emotion is treated as inherently more valid than objective evidence.
At the same time, therapeutic culture expanded its reach beyond therapy offices into everyday life, encouraging people to view disagreements as trauma, debates as emotional violence, and intellectual challenge as psychological harm. The result of this is a protective reflex to avoid uncomfortable facts or nuanced arguments that might trigger emotional distress.
If this sounds familiar, note that it's something I've touched on before. The people doing this habitually don't take their positions based on moral principles, facts, context, nuance or reasoning because what motivates them is emotional comfort.
(Experiment: Keep this idea in mind while you're scrolling online and see it that rings true when people will not or cannot support their assertions.)
Social media platforms are engineered to maximize engagement, right? The fastest way to do that is by appealing directly to emotion—especially outrage, fear, and identity affirmation. Algorithms reward the most emotionally charged content because it keeps users scrolling, sharing, and commenting. Nuance, complexity, or even honest uncertainty rarely go viral; they don’t light up dopamine circuits the same way.
That's bad enough for our mental health, our intellects, and our public discourse, but the greatest danger is in how these emotional shortcuts to baseless conclusions create fertile ground for bad actors who want to manipulate public opinion en masse.
Your Feels, Their Power: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Played
Whether it’s state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, political operatives, or interest groups, these manipulators know exactly how to weaponize the primacy of emotion.
Russian Interference in the 2024 U.S. Elections
In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. elections, Russian state actors engaged in disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Democratic candidates and bolstering Republican ones. These efforts included spreading false narratives about candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, such as fabricated stories of personal misconduct. The campaigns utilized social media platforms to disseminate emotionally charged content that resonated with specific voter demographics.
Operation Overload Targeting USAID
A Russian disinformation campaign known as "Operation Overload" targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) by producing AI-generated fake news videos. One such video falsely claimed that USAID paid Hollywood celebrities to promote Ukrainian President Zelensky. This content gained significant traction after being shared by high-profile individuals on social media, illustrating how emotional manipulation can amplify disinformation.
Far-Right Exploitation of Social Media Platforms
Far-right groups have effectively used platforms like Instagram and TikTok to disseminate emotionally charged content targeting young audiences. By leveraging visually engaging media and exploiting platform algorithms, these groups spread divisive messages that often go unchecked due to inadequate content moderation.
Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in Anti-Vaccine Campaign
During the COVID-19 pandemic, coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) networks spread anti-vaccine misinformation across social media platforms. These networks used fake and duplicate accounts to amplify emotionally charged narratives, undermining public health efforts and exploiting fears related to the pandemic.
Bad actors craft messages designed not to inform or persuade through reason but to resonate emotionally - often through fear, anger, or identity-based grievance.
These messages bypass critical thinking by activating deeply held feelings or tribal loyalties.
Younger generations, raised in a world flooded with emotional messaging and taught to prioritize feelings as a moral compass, are especially vulnerable.
Social media doesn’t just deliver content, it delivers community validation. Likes, shares, and emojis, no shit, reinforce emotional responses as truths.
This isn’t just an accidental byproduct. It’s a deliberate strategy and it's been developed to an art form.
The result is a feedback loop. Emotional responses breed more emotional content, which breeds more disengagement from facts, nuance, or evidence...and the cycle repeats.
So what can we do about it?
We’re definitely not going to get the platofrms to change their algorithms.
We’re not going to manage to out-meme every bit of authoritarian / antisemitic / bigoted propaganda.
We can't stop people from replacing thinking with feeling.
Maybe, though, we can push back in meaningful ways by starting with how we think, speak, and engage.
Feelings Are Real - But They’re Not Facts
Start with yourself. Recognize that emotions matter, but they don’t get the final word. Treat your emotional reactions as data, not conclusions.
Ask: Why am I reacting this way? Is there more to the story? Your habitual curiosity can interrupt the feedback loop.
Seek Discomfort (The Good Kind)
If everything you read confirms what you already believe, you’re not learning, you’re marinating. Deliberately engage with credible voices you disagree with. Not to convert, but to understand. Intellectual discomfort isn't harm, it’s a way to grow.
Don’t Outsource Your Thinking
If your arguments are mostly reshares and TikTok duets, you might be mistaking social validation for understanding. Read full articles. Watch entire interviews. When an assertion really appeals to you, ask yourself: "What evidence is this based on?" Then fact-check the evidence.
Value Nuance - Even When It’s Boring
Nuance doesn’t trend. It’s slow, hard, and less emotionally satisfying than hot takes.
It's’s also where truth lives. Learn to sit with complexity. Practice saying things like "It’s complicated," "I’m not sure yet," or "Both things can be true.
Stop Feeding the Rage Machine
Every time you rage-share a headline without reading it, or dunk on someone for clout, you are feeding the same system you claim to hate. Don’t give your attention to people or platforms that reward outrage over insight. (I need to work on this.)
Reward Substance Over Vibes
Like, comment on, and share posts that show integrity, humility, and reasoned thinking - even if they’re not flashy. That’s how we might tilt the algorithm. Influence is a numbers game. Elevate voices that model real thought.
Normalize Saying "I Don’t Know"
Admitting uncertainty isn't weakness, it’s maturity. It’s how real conversations happen. When someone asks for your take, it’s okay to say, "I’m still figuring it out" or "I want to learn more first." You're not required to have a take on everything.
Ask Better Questions
When someone makes an emotional claim, don’t attack - ask. Not "How could you believe that?" but "What led you to that view?"
Good faith questions can defuse bad faith conversations.
Protect Conversations Like They Matter (Because They Do)
Modeling intellectual honesty and emotional maturity in your own circles has a ripple effect. Be the one who brings it back to evidence, back to reason, back to shared humanity. Conversations are culture-shaping.
Remember That Culture Is a Team Sport
We got into this mess together, and we’ll get out the same way. Culture is just the cumulative effect of individual choices repeated at scale. Choose better. Think better. Talk better.
You don’t have to be louder than the noise.
You just have to be saner.
Anonymous asked:
Genuine question: I've seen multiple people, including Jews and leftists who refer to what's going on between Israel and Palestine as a genocide, call the current war between Russia and Ukraine a genocide. Is that in any way accurate? I know about the Holodomor, which was horrific, but I haven't seen any evidence of current genocide or even genocidal intentions (in the sense of intentions+plans to wholesale murder Ukrainians for being Ukrainian); the most I can name is the displacement of Ukrainian children to Russian familiea, which is horrific, but not what I understand to be sufficient to define the conflict as a genocide. Thanks in advance.
Genocide is a legal term with a fixed definition.
It got that definition in 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which exists largely because Raphael Lemkin (the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word in 1944, and who lost most of his family in the Holocaust) spent years pushing the world into writing it down.
The whole thing is short and readable - you can read it yourself here.
Article II lists five acts, any one of which is genocide when it’s done “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Notice that only (a) is the mass murder you’re picturing.
Russia hauling Ukrainian kids to Russian families, issuing them Russian passports, changing their names, and raising them as Russians is item (e), the literal fifth entry.
The drafters put child transfer on the list because you can erase a people without a single mass grave if you take their next generation and raise them as someone else.
Put another way, stealing the future is a recognized way to destroy a people.
The genuinely hard question always seems to sit in that intent clause every time the ICJ seeks to determine if genocide has taken place..
Can one prove the transfers were carried out “with intent to destroy” Ukrainians as a group, rather than the cynical nonsense Russia actually claims (that it’s a “humanitarian evacuation”)?
(“Humanitarian evacuation” is a strange label for shipping children to military-patriotic camps to be deprogrammed of their Ukrainian-ness. If it was humanitarian, Russia would return these children to their families.)
Proving that special intent is the hard part of every genocide case ever tried, which is why these things crawl through courts for years.
Your Holodomor reflex is telling, Anon.
You’ve anchored on an extreme case (millions deliberately starved) and quietly turned that into the minimum bar. Mass death shows up in almost every genocide, so it’s easy to mistake it for the requirement - but the Convention doesn’t require it.
No court has yet ruled that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.
The ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and Putin’s children’s-rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023, built specifically on the child deportations/abductions and charged as war crimes. This past March, the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded the deportations amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The people calling it genocide aren’t reaching past the definition, they’re pointing at one of the acts that’s sitting inside it. Whether it will eventually earn the formal label will come down to intent, and the fight to define/determine that intent is ongoing.
Personally, I have no problem believing that Putin’s intent is to erase Ukraine and Ukrainians. Putin called Ukraine a fake country.
“I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine… to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy.”
Putin claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” and that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”
For what it’s worth, Anon, asking instead of assuming is everything and a sign of healthy thinking.
You’re asking good questions - the next step is to habitually ask yourself if you actually understand the definitions of the words you’re using. Genocide is a word with a well-established and firm meaning.
Words mean things. Specific things. That’s what words are for.
Because “genocide” has a firm definition and because the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine has not been litigated, we must be careful about using that word carelessly. There’s nothing wrong with discussing the question, but we can’t slap that label on Russia’s actions yet.
To any Ukrainians who may be reading:
This was a legal question, not a moral one.
Just so I’m clear about my moral positions:
Putin is, in my view, a war criminal and a monster.
It is my sincere hope that Putin will die alone and in pain before his name is erased.
Ukrainians should rule themselves and be very proud of how they’ve fought repeatedly for democratic self-rule.
I know you didn’t choose this war, but your courageous fight against a monstrous aggressor benefits the entire civilized world - and it takes a special kind of malice or stupidity to support Russia in this war.
🇺🇦 💛 💙
Anonymous asked:
Love your work.
I’ve been arguing with someone regarding the latest rumours that the IDF is rigging toys with explosives.
They keep bringing up the 1974 Nabetiah camp, but a preliminary google showed that reporting said the toys were clean and intact rather than dirty like the area they were in.
I’m just curious if you know the history of this claim?
They’re conflating two claims and got both of them wrong.
On May 15, 1974, three DFLP terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon, murdered a family in Ma'alot, then seized a school and took 115 hostages, most of them teenagers. 22 students were killed.
In response, Israel bombed 7 DFLP bases, including the one at Nabatieh.
An estimated 27 people were killed and over 100 were injured.
That’s the entire 1974 Nabatieh story. Terrorists attacked a school, Israel bombed the bases the attack was launched from. There are no toys in it. Nobody in 1974 alleged toys. The word “toy” appears in no contemporaneous account of that raid.
In 1998, Lebanon’s permanent mission to the UN sent the Secretary-General a letter alleging Israel had dropped thousands of booby-trapped toys on Lebanese towns, and it named Nabatieh as one of them. That, in 1998, 24 years later, is where “toys” and “Nabatieh” first show up together as an allegation.
Look closely at what that document is, because the people making the allegation never do. It is a Lebanese government submission that got assigned a UN document number, A/53/677, not a UN investigation, finding, or verification of anything. Getting circulated as a General Assembly document means someone filed it. That is the entire bar.
Consequently, the claim gets laundered downstream into “even the UN confirmed it.”
The UN confirmed that Lebanon mailed them a letter. The letter also says the toys were dropped by fighter planes, which contradicts the 1990s field reporting that said helicopters. The allegation can’t keep its own delivery method straight and dropping toys from jets is aerodynamically impossible.
Someone later took the location from the 1998 libel, stapled it to the date of the real 1974 raid, and out comes the meme your friend is quoting: booby-trapped toys, Nabatieh, 1974. Two unrelated things fused into one fake citation. The 1974 raid had no toys and the 1998 toy claim had no 1974.
The 1998 allegation never had any evidence at all.
In September 2000, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent the Foreign Affairs Committee a memorandum on landmines in South Lebanon, which the committee then published. Among real hazards like cluster bombs and shells, it lists “even booby trapped toys, allegedly dropped by the Israeli airforce.”
The word “allegedly” is the FCO’s own hedge. They were not asserting it, just logging an unverified category in passing, in the same memo that elsewhere insists Israel’s minefield data still needed independent verification.
Later writers deleted “allegedly” and promoted a hedged line in a government department’s memo into a verified British intelligence finding. It was the opposite of verified. Note that this is not even a Foreign Affairs Committee conclusion, which is the way it gets cited. It’s a government department answering the committee’s mail.
Now your own observation, Anon, which is the sharpest thing in this whole exchange. The toys in the photos and videos making the allegations look clean and intact, not weathered like the bombed ground around them, and the images themselves carry no date, no photographer, and no source.
Set those clean toys against what the allegation actually claims, that aircraft dropped these toys onto Lebanese and Gazan towns.
Objects dropped from a plane or a helicopter onto rubble and left outdoors do not photograph shelf-fresh.
So the claim has to choose - either the toys were dropped, and the pristine ones are props, or the toys are pristine because a hand placed them there, and nothing was dropped from anything. The reply your friend reaches for, that this is just what a planted lure looks like, doesn’t save the allegation. It concedes the toys were set down by hand, which means no aircraft dropped anything, which was the entire claim. Clean toys can only decide here which half of this story is the lie - it’s one or the other.
(Kudos, by the way - you clocked the forensic problem much faster than the people circulating the images ever did.)
A shred of truth: South Lebanon was/is genuinely saturated with unexploded ordnance that children can mistake for toys.
Cluster bomblets the size of a tennis ball, scattered by the hundreds of thousands, have killed and maimed kids who picked them up. That is real, documented, and a separate tragedy from the claim on the table - because the libel is not “unexploded munitions are dangerous to children.” The libel is “Israel manufactures bombs shaped like Snoopy dolls and golden eggs and drops them to lure children to their deaths.”
That specific claim, purpose-built toys deployed to target children, has never been forensically verified by a single independent body. Not UNMAS, not the demining NGOs working those exact hills, not Human Rights Watch, not Amnesty.
Even the alleged mechanics don’t survive contact. The 1990s versions said the toys were dropped by helicopter, and a UNIFIL officer told AFP the objects could look like a toy “or have the shape of an ordinary stone,” but no independent investigator has ever recovered, defused, and documented one of these purpose-built toy-bombs. Hezbollah showed local media a rigged Snoopy doll and some golden eggs. Nobody neutral was ever allowed to examine them.
Palestinian Media Watch says this libel runs on a schedule: poisoned candy, then exploding pens, then toys. Same accusation every season, that Jews engineer products to kill children - and these claims come straight from Fatah and the PLO.
The 2025 Gaza version is the same template. A Facebook post from a Gaza health official, sourced to unnamed police, no photographic evidence, and a viral image that traces back to a 2018 video from Yemen.
A real 1974 airstrike with no toys + a 1998 toy libel with no verification + a meme that grafts the date of one onto the lie of the other = modern blood libel.
You don’t need anyone to deny this for it to fall apart:
If you want to push back, ask which it is: 1974 or 1998, planes or helicopters, and where is a single dated, sourced photograph of one of these toys.
They won’t have an answer, because the claim was never built to survive questions. It was built to be forwarded, retweeted, and reposted without thinking.
That, Anon, is an important difference between you and the person you’re arguing with - you can think - and you asked questions.
I have a friend who denies The Guardian has a bias about all things Israel.
Let’s look at just one article: https://archive.is/krfW4
It omits that the report comes specifically from a 3-person commission created by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), an entity with a wildly disproportionate and undeniable structural focus on Israel.
The UNHRC has a permanent 10-item agenda for its regular sessions. Under this framework, Israel is the only country in the world with a dedicated, permanent agenda item (“Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”). Human rights situations in all other 192 UN member states (including notorious human rights violators like North Korea, Syria, Iran, and South Sudan) are grouped together and debated under a single, general category, Agenda Item 4. As of recent counts, the UNHRC has passed over 110 condemnatory resolutions against Israel.
For context, this is more than double the number passed against Syria (the second-most condemned country at around 45), and vastly outnumbers resolutions targeting Iran, Russia, or North Korea.
The article fails to mention that this specific commission operates under an unprecedented, permanent, open-ended mandate. The founding resolution for this inquiry omitted any mention of Hamas or its terrorism.
The article names the chair, Srinivasan Muralidhar, but omits the names (and thereby the partisan backgrounds) of panel members like Chris Sidoti. Sidoti has a history of pro-Palestinian advocacy and previously accused Jewish organizations of “throwing around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding,” breaching UN requirements for strict impartiality.
The article uses judicial language (“independent inquiry,” “findings”) to dishonestly frame a deeply contested, political document as an undisputed judicial truth while framing the Israeli rebuttal as a simple, defensive dismissal.
The “report” relies on loose images of bullet fragments as definitive proof of IDF responsibility without providing anything like a documented chain of custody or independent forensic verification.
The report routinely uses medical doctors and hospital staff as expert witnesses on military tactics, ballistics, and weapon systems - subjects completely outside their medical training.
The commission relies on family members to determine the tactical intent of a military strike, asking civilians to verify whether an attack was “deliberately targeted” against a child.
The report erases Hamas’s 17-year history of embedding military infrastructure inside civilian areas. Further, it fails to investigate or account for the documented deployment of minors as active combatants by Palestinian armed groups.
The report invents its own interpretation of international law, claiming that if a military executes a strike knowing civilians are present, the attack is automatically an intentional war crime. This completely erases the standard legal doctrine of military proportionality.
This isn’t bias, this is deliberate deception by both the UNHRC and the Guardian - neither of which are hated anywhere near sufficiently.
