Links - 24th December 2021 (2 - General Wokeness)

Texas Newspaper Refuses To Give Description Of Suspect In Mass Shooting Because Of ‘Stereotypes’ - "A newspaper in Texas said on Saturday that it is not publishing the description that local law enforcement gave of a man suspected of shooting 13 people on Friday night because it “could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes.”... The Austin American-Statesman reported that law enforcement had “zeroed in on two suspects” believed to have been involved in the shooting.  At the bottom of the Austin American-Statesman’s report, the newspaper explained that it was not going to give the description that law enforcement provided of one of the suspects"
Clearly it is more important to ban guns for everyone than to catch criminals

R.Meme - R.A.D. @Sensational_Dre: "So a person with a felony can't vote but they still counted on the census and if they manage to find a job they'll still have to pay taxes....didn't someone make a big fuss about taxation without representation one time or am I tripping?"
"Almost like this was done of purpose to keep certain groups of ppl from voting"
"When Black people say that racism is systemic this is what we mean. By being over policed we are in constant danger of being disenfranchised."
Presumably a sex offender register is a violation of privacy
Why do liberals equate criminals and black people?

Meme - "Mon mari avait autorité sur moi, parce que c'est écrit dans le coran, si je n'obéissait pas, il me battait"
"Dur, doucement sur l'islamophobie par contre"
"Pardon"

Meme - Jean Guerrero @jeanguerre: "Democratic outreach to Latino voters on the California recall election is not working. I've been speaking to young Latinxs and almost none of them have any idea what is going on. This is really, really bad."
President-Elect Sandwich @darkprince_56: "LaTiNx is just as retarded as saying Filipinx, Chicanx, etc Jean Guerrero ....a ver cuando se te quita lo pendejx"
The last seems to translate to "Let's see when the asshole is taken away from you"

Theatre takes fright at using 'spooky' this Hallowe'en over fears it could be racist - "The word 'spooky' has been censored at Hallowe'en by a major theatre company over fears the term could be seen as racist.  The National Theatre of Scotland said it would “always interrogate language choices” for “historically oppressive connotations”... Prof Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s most prominent black academic, claimed the publicly-funded charity was “doing more harm than good” and that he had never heard 'spooky' used as a racial slur.   A source told The Sunday Mail that while nobody had complained to the National Theatre of Scotland about the word, there were concerns that its continued use might cause problems in future. It was identified by the organisation as an offensive term... Prof Palmer, 81, who was installed as the new Chancellor of Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh at the weekend, described the arts body’s intervention as "an irrelevance" and claimed it had no right to interfere with our use of language... "if it is not a racial slur that is part of our culture, these people have just ensured that it becomes one. I think there are enough negative images around race without looking for more.”"
Self fulfilling prophecies!

Passengers did nothing during rape on Philadelphia train: cops - "A homeless man raped a woman this week on a commuter train in suburban Philadelphia in full view of other passengers –who cops said didn’t lift a finger to help, or even dial 911... They arrested Fiston Ngoy, 35"
The bystanders were smart. Why risk having your life ruined by being tarred as racist? And that's assuming he doesn't kill you first like in the 2017 Portland train attack

Philadelphia train rape suspect had been considered for deportation in 2018 but was given second chance - "The man accused of raping a woman in a moving train in Pennsylvania was previously considered for deportation... He has previously been held for multiple arrests and two misdemeanour convictions, including one count of sexual abuse and for controlled substances"
Luckily no one did anything or they'd be tarred as xenophobic and hating immgirants as well as being racist

Philadelphia passes bill barring cops from minor traffic stops - "Lawmakers in Philadelphia have passed legislation barring cops from making minor traffic stops that critics say unfairly target minorities — becoming the first major US city to do so...   The Philadelphia City Council voted 14-2 on Thursday to pass the Driving Equality Bill — designed to reduce “unequal police practices” against minority motorists, or what’s been called “driving while black,” for minor offenses such as busted tail lights or expired inspection stickers."

Stop Calling The Police On Black People - "A few years ago, police were called on a group of Black people after neighbors thought they were committing burglary on the AirBnb rental house they had been staying in... who could forget Teresa Klein, the White woman in Brooklyn, New York who called the police on a 9-year-old boy for allegedly grabbing her behind"
The author got her wish - if you think a black person is doing something wrong (even if it's sexual assault), don't call the police or you're racist

Poly throuple makes history: 3 dads on a birth certificate - "A gay, polyamorous California throuple made history in 2017 when they became the first family in the state to list three dads on a birth certificate.   Their reproductive journey and legal battle to become fathers to Piper, now 3, is detailed in “Three Dads and a Baby” (out March 9, Cleis Press), written by one of her dads, Dr. Ian Jenkins.   Jenkins and his partners, Jeremy Hodges and Dr. Alan Mayfield, don’t see their family — which now also includes their son, Parker, 1 — as unusual."
The "myth" of the "slippery slope" strikes again

Critical Spectator - Posts | Facebook - "OK everyone, public housing in Singapore is racist!  Apparently the double Ivy League educated former The *ECONOMIST* man is so blinded by looking for racism everywhere that he skipped the lessons of supply and demand and is unaware of the fact that the selling price for one person is another one's buying price. He decries the fact that Chinese-owned apartments may fetch higher prices, ignoring the fact that it also means that Chinese buyers have to pay more than minorities too. Is that not a "racist outcome" against the Chinese? Fortunately someone did call him out on this, what led him to post a hastily put together post-script where he quite poorly tries to defend his entire theory, without any evidence. If, as he claims, Chinese-owned apartments offered greater returns, then the gaps between them and minority-owned apartments would grow ad infinitum, producing much greater differences. We know that's not the case... this highlights the simple GENIUS of the HDB policy, which ensures that each ethnic group can purchase comparably affordable housing in relation to their incomes, through free market forces, which are, however, constrained by the ethnic quota, for the protection - not exploitation - of the most vulnerable. In a completely free market everybody would pay the same price - so Chinese and Indian residents, who are wealthier on average, would enjoy better housing options than the Malays. Quota policy prevents that from happening, fulfilling the goal of broadly equal access to the most fundamental need - i.e. having a roof over your head. Since the function of the HDB policy is to provide affordable housing to the local population, the lower acquisition price in the secondary market means an easier access and more options for the minorities. And since the property price appreciation is not demonstrably different, the intergenerational outcome isn't either... If you begin with an idea that Singapore is a racist country, you're going to try to find proof of that alleged racism everywhere you look, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. There are two sides to each coin but race hustlers always see only one."
When the conclusion (racism) is decided beforehand...
Ironically OP always only sees one side of the coin too (whatever makes Singapore look good)

Toronto panned as trashy for putting Pride flags on city garbage trucks
Grievance mongers will never run out of things to bitch about. Which is why virtue signalling is pointless
Why don't grievance mongers get upset at rainbow crosswalks? Stepping on the rainbow is homophobic after all

Jamie Oliver to stop using the term ‘Kaffir lime leaves’ in his recipes due to racist connotations - "Jamie Oliver is to drop the term “Kaffir lime leaves” in his recipes in favour of “lime leaves”.  His decision comes amid concerns that the term has historically been used as a racial slur in South Africa... In South Africa, “Kaffir” is a highly charged racial slur that refers to black Africans. It was used widely in the apartheid era and is now commonly referred to as the “K-word”."
I made a joke about this years ago (with regard to its ultimate origin in Arabic) but didn't expect the slippery slope would slip in my lifetime

Waitrose renames kaffir lime leaves after complaints about racist connotations - "Waitrose has now announced it is to abandon the term and rename its Cooks’ Ingredients lime leaves as Makrut Lime Leaves...   It is thought it became known as kaffir lime in reference to the Kaffirs ethnic group in Sri Lanka who traditionally smeared it on their legs and feet to ward off leeches.  However, the word kaffir also became a term for a non-Muslim, or disbeliever, in Arabic, which was in turn applied to sub-saharan Africans who did not practice Islam. From here it became a racist insult used by South African white people against the country’s indigenous population."
It's good to erase Sri Lankan culture to avoid offence against South Africans. Time to ban Buddhist swastikas too
When is Black Pudding going?

Florida Pride parade truck crash was an accident, officials say - "A member of a men's chorus group unintentionally hit his fellow members at a Pride parade in South Florida Saturday, killing one chorist of the group and seriously injuring another... The man killed, James Fahy, 75, was a member of the 25 strong Gay Men's Chorus Family. The two injuries were to 67-year-old chorus member Jerry Vreough, who was discharged from the hospital, police said, and Gary Keating, 69, who was treated for minor injuries."
I remember so many leftists ranting about how this was a horrible hate crime

Velma of 'Scooby-Doo' has a history of pushing identity boundaries. Not everyone is happy about it. - "Though some on Twitter made openly racist comments about Kaling’s new venture, some shared concerns that the portrayal of the nerdy Velma as an Asian American plays into the model minority myth that Asians are inherently hardworking and studious... Fans on Twitter also noted that not only should Velma be a person of color but she should also be queer... Yuen acknowledged how important the character of Velma is to fans, herself included, but encouraged fans to put the debate in perspective.  “It’s a fictional character,” she said. “Scooby-Doo and the gang — it was a talking dog. For someone to say, ‘That character is meant to be this,’ I mean, come on.”"
This is a kind of horseshoe theory. The age old liberal obsession with "stereotypes" and the puerile contrarianism of opposing them strikes again, with the new queerwashing
Of course whitewashing fictional characters is still wrong because liberal logic

VIDEO: Dad Says 'Why Didn't You Stay in Mexico' To Immigrant Parent Complaining About Racism - "“I remember when I went into his bedroom to say goodnight and he was crying because of the abuse he has endured in this school system,” Adrian Iraola says while standing with a microphone, presumably talking about his son. “Then why didn’t you stay in Mexico,” an unseen parent says, off-camera.   The camera then pans to the new speaker, who is seated a row back, as the room room collectively gasps in horror.  Iraola swings around, mouth agape, as if he has suffered a physical blow.  “That’s indicative of what our kids are experiencing,” another man yells, pointing a finger at the seated parent. “That’s indicative of what our kids are experiencing, comments like that. He’s sharing a story right now, and that’s indicative of what our kids are experiencing.”  The entire room eventually starts yelling at the seated parent.  “He asked me a question,” Iraola says. “He asked me a question, why didn’t I stay in Mexico. This is the greatest country in the world.” The crowd erupts into applause.  “But you’re complaining about being here,” the seated parent says."
The US is the most racist country in the world. Yet so many people are desperate to move there and stay there. But that doesn't mean that the countries they came from are shitholes, because that's racist

Woke Girl Scouts are about to spend $500,000 on movement-wide audit to ensure the organization is "antiracist"

Progressive Believer Ensures Survival Of Christianity By Denying Every Major Christian Doctrine | The Babylon Bee

Linda Sarsour on Twitter - ".@ReverendWarnock ’s church hosted Fidel Castro. He celebrated Jeremiah Wright & he’s funded by George Soros.  @ossoff  has embraced Bernie Sanders & has ties to Communist China.  Georgia — they are true radicals. We must defeat them."
"I think Kelly wins the award for most racist dog whistles in one tweet."
Comments: "I love it how pointing out radical politics of Democrats is synonymous with racist dog whistles to the left."
"Lmao so basically everything that isn't communist is racist."
"if you say or think anything the left doesn’t like, it’s racist."

Trolls attack British Islamic organisation after it tweets misleading picture to announce marriage - "A Nottingham, England-based Islamic Da'wah Centre is being trolled on social media after it tweeted a misleading picture, accompanied by a confusing caption to announce the marriage of a couple.  In the photo shared by Nottingham Islam Information Point on their official Twitter account, two men could be seen standing next to each other and flashing a small smile at the camera.   "Mabrook, congratulations to John and Zulkiful for getting married earlier this evening. Alhamdulillah, we conducted their Nikah and issued the certificate.  May Allah accept their marriage and keep them united throughout their lives...ameen. Thank you for the wonderful food."  As Zulkiful appears to be a unisex name, social media users mistakenly presumed that the Centre had performed a same-sex marriage — something which is forbidden in Islam... the two men in the picture represent the groom and the Imam who performed the Nikah, as sharing women's pictures on social media is not appropriate. "Please note: Sister Zulkiful is not in the picture because we don't flaunt our women on social media. The Imam is on the right, congratulating the groom on his Nikah"
Homophobia is bad. Unless it's Islamic Homophobia. Then if you criticise it you're a Troll (and presumably Islamophobic too)

Nottingham Islam Slammed After Slandered Groom and Imam As Couple - "Clarifying Misconceptions: We do not conduct same-gender marriages as our beautiful religion does not teach us of doing such things. Some names can be neutral gender thus confusion can begin. Verification is crucial in Islam and that is the best way. O Allah save us from slander."

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Reparations as a Public Health Priority — A Strategy for Ending Black–White Health Disparities"
"New England Journal of Medicine recommending reparations while also saying they won't achieve their intended goal, meaning they're not enough. Such. a. grift. Every editor encouraging this should give away all they own or recuse over conflict of interest."

Woman caught driving without seatbelt says they are 'racist to fat people' - "The anonymous woman from New Zealand said she finds it difficult to strap herself in because she is overweight.  She tells others in the car: ‘I can’t fit it, so what’s the point in wearing it if I can’t fit it. If they’re going to give me a fine for not fitting my seatbelt, that’s just being racist, to the fat people.’... the driver insisted: ‘I could actually sue, like what if I crash, and something happens to me because the seatbelt couldn’t go around me.’"

Gad Saad - Posts | Facebook - "Dear Taxpayers: I'd like to pursue a degree in Queering Theology & Intersectional Architecture at @Wellesley. It will cost $80,000 per year and the job market is next to nil.  When I default on my loans, I'll expect you to pay for it.  If you disagree to this, you are right wing. It is my human right to pursue an education that is worthless and it's my human right that random strangers pay for it. I must now head off to study for my preparatory course titled Why Hitler Is Less Bad Than Trump.  Please work hard and save for my education, bigots."

The Black Woman’s Purple Pill 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "Clearly, Harvard has chosen to not mention certain things, like how some turn a blind eye to cheating in some Asian cultures. How can you ace the admissions process if you only speak 10 English words? Anyone can pay someone to write an essay."
The Black Woman’s Purple Pill 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "Asians represent approx. 5.6 of the U.S. population but think they’re entitled to dominate Harvard & other Ivy League schools? You guys were already given an advantage over other POC in America, although you did the least amount of fighting/protesting. Don’t rock the boat. 🤷‍♀️"
Of course, criticising anti-Asian racism by blacks is "anti-blackness"

Meme - "Muir Woods, Queer Woods
Muir Woods is highlighting queer ecology and the new perspectives it gives us in this forest!
Queer ecology isthe study of reimagining how people think about nature. It studies gender, sexuality, and behavior in the natural world. Queer ecology questions the way people categorize nature. Oftentimes, these boxes don't account for how diverse nature is. Things are rarely as simple as either 'A', 'B' or 'C'. Nature is more of a blend of them al! Some boxes queer ecology challenges are male/female, natural/unnatural, and human /nature.
As you explore the woods today, we hope you find new ways to view the world around you. When was a time you saw something in a new light?"
Nothing is safe

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "In the months following Donald Trump’s 2016 election fear that he would destroy American civil liberties the ACLU saw donations rise 30-fold and membership rise over 450-percent. With the sudden influx of money came an increase of nearly 70% more staff lawyers and a shift in the group’s culture. Since then statements from the organization indicate that they would no longer defend the civil liberties of those they found abhorrent — a break from their tradition of defending free speech and due process for unsympathetic clients such as the neo-Nazis in the famed Skokie decision.  Recently one of the ACLU’s more prominent attorneys called for the corporate and private censorship of a book critical of gender assignment surgeries and related hormone treatments for minors — one of the primary hot button topics in public policy discourse today.  We need the UCLU to remain a staunch advocate for free speech rights. When open dialog is stifled, advocates shift to coercion and violence to change public policy."

Bryan Leyva, MD⚕️ on Twitter - "Just FYI: we can tell if you’re homophobic, even if you never say or do anything explicitly homophobic. #gaymedtwitter"
"Just FYI: we can tell if you are racist even if you never say or do anything explicitly racist. We look at what you don’t do. Moreover, even if your clinic is #antirracist, healthcare is still racist bc it produces racist outcomes. Racism can be both interpersonal and systemic."

JLBarrow on Twitter - "How privileged is your life where wearing a mask is the most oppressed you’ve ever felt?"
#MarchMiniLessonsOnRace | Beyond Words Psychological Services - "I’d like to give you some personal examples of white privilege vs. disadvantages minorities face based upon my own life experiences. I was born in India, and adopted and raised in the U.S. I am fully aware that every time someone sees me for the first time, they see a woman with brown skin. This leads them to ask questions such as: -“Do you speak English?”"
Ironically the people who champion mask wearing usually get very upset when there're dress codes

Glenn Greenwald on Twitter - "White progressives training their fire on women and women of color who are under consideration to lead the nat sec departments makes me deeply uncomfortable about their allyship for those communities.  Especially when the nat sec community is dominated by white men."
"The more contempt there is for rancid, poisonous, manipulative discourse like this, the better. People have every right to scorn warmongers, imperialists & militarists regardless of their demographics. The neoliberal scam of exploiting identity politics to hide its evil is over"

Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups & Communities | Gateway to Health Communication | CDC - "Language in communication products should reflect and speak to the needs of people in the audience of focus. The following provides some preferred terms for select population groups; the terms to try to use represent an ongoing shift toward non-stigmatizing language...
Drug / Substance Use
Instead of this…
Drug-users/addicts/drug abusers
Alcoholics/abusers
Persons taking/prescribed medication assisted treatment (MAT)
Persons who relapsed
Smokers
Try this…
Persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs
Persons with substance use disorder
Persons with alcohol use disorder
Persons in recovery from substance use/alcohol disorder
Persons taking/prescribed medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)
Persons who returned to use
People who smoke
Healthcare Access & Access to Services and Resources
Instead of this…
Underserved people/communities/the underserved
Hard-to-reach populations
The uninsured
Try this…
People who are underserved by [specific service/resource]
People who are underserved by mental health/behavioral health resources
People who are medically underserved
People who are uninsured/people who are underinsured/people who do not have health insurance
Note: Underserved relates to limited access to services that are accessible, acceptable, and affordable, including healthcare. Do not use underserved when you really mean disproportionately affected...
People Who are at Increased / Higher Risk
Instead of this…
High-risk people
High-risk population
Vulnerable population
Priority populations
Try this…
People who are at increased/higher risk for [condition]
People who live/work in settings that put them at increased/higher risk of becoming infected or exposed to hazards...
Rural
Instead of this…
Rural people
Frontier people
Try this…
People who live in rural/sparsely populated areas
Residents/populations of rural areas
Rural communities...
Working Partners & Community Collaborators
Instead of this…
Stakeholder"
It never ends. The euphemism treadmill is relentless

White Wake Forest student cries racism, but liberal university refuses judicial case - "A conservative Wake Forest University student has accused the school of bias after it declined to pursue a "school judicial case" against fellow students who photoshopped his face onto a saltine cracker and handed him a box of the salty snacks after he spoke at a campus event 16 months ago."
Some races are more equal than others

Gardening, sewing and the politicisation of absolutely everything - "Is gardening racist? That’s the question British culture war Twitter was pondering at the weekend, after BBC Countryfile presenter and ethnobotanist James Wong said that ‘UK gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA’. Citing his own experiences in horticulture, Wong said requests for ‘wildflowers’ that are ‘more in keeping’ with a given area are ‘predicated on often unconscious ideas of what and who does and does not “belong” in the UK’...   That word, ‘exhausting’, comes up a lot in woke discourse. But it’s also a good description of how the vast majority of us feel when debates like this spiral out of nowhere every couple of days.  Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Countryfile has been dragged into the culture war. Back in June, a Countryfile segment explored whether the British countryside was a ‘white environment’, to much bemusement.At this point, it seems no area of life is safe from our incessant ‘is BLANK racist?’ discourse. In recent years everything from microwaveable rice to white people sporting cornrows has sparked days of absurd discussion. It’s like someone, somewhere, is just picking topics out of a hat...   Professional sport – one area of life many once thought impervious to identitarian wittering – has of course also been plunged into testy debates about knee-taking and the like in recent years, most recently in the UK with the now infamous Millwall incident.   This politicisation of absolutely everything is bad for politics and for culture.  So much of what passes for anti-racist politics these days is just inane arguments over language, cultural interpretation and offence. The idea that ‘decolonising’ horticulture will materially improve the lives of ethnic-minority people is, to put it politely, barmy – but that is apparently what many influential people believe these days. Meanwhile, as these rows afflict more and more areas of cultural, non-political life, the public is denied any reprieve from the kind of identitarian hectoring that has long played an outsized role in our politics.   Of course, politics, culture and sport have never been hermetically sealed off from one another. Art has always dealt in political ideas, and sporting events have often been stages for political statements and controversy.   The difference today is that versions of the same virtue-signalling ideas are just being repeated, ad nauseam, everywhere. And what is often presented as edgy and challenging is often just rigid and conformist.  What’s more, the undertone of it all is that people are bigoted and ignorant and must be ‘educated’ at every possible opportunity – whether it’s during a razor-blade advert or during Last Night at the Proms. The issue is not that art and culture are being politicised so much as they are being used to transmit what the identitarian elites deem to be the ‘correct’ message, in the ‘correct’ fashion, all the bleeding time, with practically no room for dissent.   The row over the Millwall fans is a case in point. That fans booed players taking the knee, but at the following match applauded players unfurling an anti-racist banner, would suggest they took umbrage with Black Lives Matter (the movement synonymous with knee-taking), rather than anti-racism itself.  Still, for failing to show fealty to the great and good’s new pet movement, they were reflexively smeared as a bunch of racists."
So invasive species aren't bad anymore?

Shitlords United - Posts | Facebook - "Tumblr teens became Twitter young adults and they’re even more rabid now. ~Svetlana"

Meme - "the tumbler teens are gonna continue to try to out woke each other until we build a totally segregated society."
"Reminder to put your race in your bio (especially if you're white)! /gen"
"Why?"
"BIPOC might not want to interact with white people"

Guardians of the Galaxy as Role Playing

i am an unstoppable force upon this earth

lyraeon: Upon second viewing, I have definitely concluded that Guardians of the Galaxy is even better when you imagine it as a tabletop campaign with an increasingly frustrated DM who’s sick of being interrupted.

patrickat: GM: “Roll 2d10.”
Peter: “Red high. Twelve.”
GM: “You have 12 percent of a plan.”

lyraeon: The entire prison break scene was just Rocket’s player rolling knowledge checks on every turn until something worked.

nidoranduran:

• When Drax’s player said, “I go into the phone booth and call Ronan to Knowhere”, the DM stared open-mouthed for a minute, then called break time. The rest of the party was speechless.
• Pretty much just in general, Drax’s player is one of those people who thinks Chaotic Neutral means “throws self at shit for the lulz” and is really fortunate he didn’t have many other opportunities to derail the campaign.
• Gamora’s player gets really exasperated by the entirety of the campaign. They rolled a character with a tragic backstory and clear hooks to the villain to expand on, and had no idea that everyone else was going to be so silly. It leads to begging the party to just once execute a normal plan because look at Gamora’s stealth bonus, this min/maxed assassin needs a chance to use her abilities, please.
• Rocket’s a skill monkey who, if not for Drax’s grand display of idiocy, would have gladly derailed the campaign with absurd plans.
• Groot was a joke idea someone came up with that people ended up liking too much.
• Ronan’s confusion when Star Lord began dancing was the DM’s confusion verbatim.
• The DM now vetoes Chaotic Neutral characters on principle.

Links - 24th December 2021 (1 - Covid-19)

We’ve been fooled – two jabs won’t buy you holiday freedom after all - "it was our only exit strategy from this vicious circle of lockdowns at home. But new evidence has thrown all this into doubt.  Anti-vaxxers will delight in this latest development: that being jabbed won’t stop you spreading the extra-infectious delta variant after all. It certainly protects you personally, to a high degree, from serious symptoms and death – but the vast majority of us weren’t at risk of that anyway.    What it won’t do, according to an increasing body of evidence, is prevent you from being a carrier and thus a danger to others. This somewhat defeats the whole point – and is certainly the only reason international travel has resumed of late...   Many will feel cheated by this. Certainly, the reason I rolled up my sleeve in the first place was not because I was afraid of Covid, but solely to get my freedoms back. I really did not want to get jabbed; for the same reason I’ve never got the flu shot, because personally I’d rather take my chances on catching the illness. Based on the Government’s own QCovid risk calculator tool, my risk – as a reasonably healthy 34-year-old – of being hospitalised with Covid-19 is 0.0218 per cent, and my risk of dying is 0.0007 per cent.   This should have been my gamble alone to take, but it has been a deeply unpopular and ‘selfish’ stance. Since the early days of the drive, it’s been rammed down our throats that in getting vaccinated, we were doing a public service to others. It was our only chance to reach ‘herd immunity’, we were urged – (a notion that has since been branded an unattainable ‘mythical’ goal by the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group).  Lo and behold, as data from the UK, the US and beyond is proving, the vaccines might well save you, but they won’t save everyone else. The messaging has thus changed...   The warning signs were there months ago, when the countries with the highest vaccination rates in the world were also recording enormous surges in case counts. Many of these, heavily reliant on tourism for their GDP, had rushed to inoculate their entire populations as a matter of urgency purely for this reason: to reopen for visitors. The Seychelles, for example, had by mid-May double-jabbed more than 80 per cent of its population, but regardless, its case count was 67 times higher than ours. According to Telegraph's live tracker, it has now vaccinated over 92 per cent of its citizens and its current infection rate is still a massive 336 per 100,000. Fat lot of good their drive did them, as the islands continue to languish on our red list... all those with a saviour complex who had their jabs in an evangelical quest to ‘protect others’ should dismount their high horse. And all those who did so purely in pursuit of an easier holiday have every right to feel grumpy."

Why I will refuse to quarantine after my amber list holiday - "The only way a nation can reliably prevent new cases from entering from abroad is to funnel every single arrival (not just from red-listed countries) into state-supervised quarantine hotels, and even that method isn’t watertight, as the Australians will tell you.  The amber list is a prop; there to indulge the fearful, paranoid echelon of society that Boris somewhat reluctantly helped to create with Sage’s relentless fearmongering. In truth, the vaccine drive has already worked, better in fact than anyone expected, and we’ve got more than enough evidence to prove it. The Indian variant, just like all the others, has not stopped the jabs from doing their job. There’s no evidence to suggest that other variants in amber-listed countries like Spain, Italy, Greece and France present a hazard to us... to do any damage, the strain would need to be capable of beating the jabs and hospitalising the vaccinated. No such variant has been found anywhere in the world, so for now at least, it doesn’t exist, and certainly not in Greece.Even if I did contract Covid on the shores of an island that has all but eradicated the disease, there would be less than a 1 per cent chance of me being infectious after testing negative before departure, according to a recent study conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute. Of the 600 travellers who underwent a pre-flight PCR test, only 1 per cent tested positive and therefore didn’t board, while just 0.4 per cent of the remaining passengers tested positive in the five days following. Positive, let’s not forget, for a virus that had a 99 per cent survival rate even before we vaccinated the vulnerable.The odds of me being dangerous to society by not self-isolating following this trip are minuscule. Imagine the lives we would lead if we approached every activity with this level of hyper-caution. We certainly wouldn’t be driving, never mind getting on planes."

John Robson: Hypocrites suddenly realize blockades are wrong when they disagree with the protest - "I’ve opposed illegal obstruction all my life. I’ve always said the right to protest is important but there’s no right to do it standing on someone else’s head, in their doorway or amid the smashed remains of their place of business. Which oddly makes me retrograde and uncivilized, because on Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, pipelines or Caledonia, the smart set are all, “Yay direct action!” Then when it’s something they don’t like they pivot without hint of shame to pomposities about the rule of law. No wonder people are mad... On COVID, as with so much in the modern world, virtually everyone seems to have lost their minds. On one side are those who smugly insist that every flip and flop in official advice is “following the science” and we must all do as we are told and never ask questions or count costs, and on the other are those apparently determined to prove that anyone who does ask questions is a dangerous lunatic."
If not for double standards, the left would have none

Meme - Sarah Reese Jones: "Trump is pushing for a "second opening of the economy." Just a reminder, Trump doesn't have the ability to reopen the economy. That power rests with the governors."
Sarah Reese Jones: "Biden calls Ron DeSantis a bully and vows to use his power as president to get Republican governors out of the way to protect students and teachers from COVID."

Judge overturns order that banned unvaccinated mother from seeing son - "Judge James Shapiro is allegedly the first jurist to use non-vaccination as a punitive measure.  However, Judge Shapiro has now reversed his decision that banned an Illinois mother from seeing her 11-year-old son, after she claimed he had made the decision due to her not being vaccinated.  Rebecca Firlit, 39, said she was perplexed as a recent hearing was “just supposed to be about expenses and child support”... Ms Firlit explained that her decision not to take the vaccine was for medical reasons: “I’ve had adverse reactions to vaccines in the past and was advised not to get vaccinated by my doctor.”... This isn’t the first time Judge James Shapiro has been accused of bringing vaccination statuses into an unrelated case."
Unvaccinated parents with medical exemptions being prevented from seeing their kids is proof that all the people with concerns about the moral panic against the unvaccinated leading to grave human rights violations are paranoid far right conspiracy theorists,

As a Doctor, May I Refuse to See Unvaccinated Patients? - The New York Times
So much for the Hippocratic Oath

Little Faith In the Jab: NSW Premier Says She Wouldn't Want to Be Anywhere Near An Unvaccinated Person - " New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has seemingly admitted she has little confidence in the vaccine’s ability to protect double-jabbed people from COVID-19... “You have been warned,” Berejiklian threatened. “If you’re not vaccinated, come forward and get the vaccine, otherwise you won’t be able to participate in the many freedoms that people have at 70 percent vaccination.” The aim, according to the Premier, is to ensure only vaccinated people are allowed to interact with each other when the state partially re-opens in mid-October."
Apartheid is good

Randall Denley: Keeping the unvaccinated at bay won't aid the vaccinated - "There is a misguided idea that keeping the unvaccinated at bay is going to help the vaccinated. It’s difficult to see how that will happen. Fully vaccinated people have an exceptionally low risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19... what rational person would shut down the economy or close schools when 76 per cent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated, 83 per cent have one shot and the numbers are rising every day? Economic and school shutdowns were a blunt tool when no one was vaccinated. They would make no sense now...   If Ford was being completely frank, he would have admitted that it was just easier to give into growing pressure from hyper-cautious public health officials, political opponents and the significant portion of the public that reflexively endorses any public health measure that offers the illusion of safety. Let’s face it: People want to see the unvaccinated get a kick in the pants, and here it is in the form of excluding them from any activity that could be remotely described as fun.  The potential upside is that it might make the unvaccinated less likely to make each other sick if they stay home or get vaccinated. That’s far from a sure thing. It’s easy for people to get together and socialize, even with the new rules. If the fear of death from COVID hasn’t persuaded them to get vaccinated, this week’s new restrictions probably won’t either...  The vaccine certificate regime is likely to be with us for a long time to come, given Ontarians’ sensitivity to perceived risk. In the meantime, get used to not leaving home without your papers in order."

Direct your anger at the lockdown obsessives, not the unvaccinated few - "Interestingly, however, the Public Health Act 1984 – the statute used to underpin the lockdowns – specifically states that any legislative protections “may not include provision requiring a person to undergo medical treatment”, which includes vaccinations. So a measure used (wrongly, in the view of some eminent jurists) to stop healthy people leaving their homes or visiting relatives cannot be the basis for compulsory vaccination. That would require another Act of Parliament and the Government does not want to go there."

More anti-vaxxer hospital protests cause a scene on Toronto's University Avenue
Being against forced / mandatory vaccination and/or coerced vaccinations / vaccination coercion means you are an "anti-vaxxer" now"

Wake Up, Singapore - Posts | Facebook - "Anti-Vaxxers are now plotting to harass  @hossanleong . They are also, unsurprisingly, homophobic bigots. Hossan Leong should file a police report and the police should investigate each and every one of these people who threatened him.  The authorities should do more to monitor such groups and, where necessary, clamp down. Especially when they do things like run sponsored ads, use incendiary language or conspire to harass and doxx others. Despicable."
Apparently you are not allowed to criticise covid hysteria. But of course covid hystericists can run sponsored ads and use incendiary language all they like

Meme - Biden eating ice cream to masked NPC: "I'm taking all of your rights away until you do what say
Masked NPC to normal person: "Why are you taking all my rights away?"
Keywords: my freedoms, why are you taking away

One Third Of Vaccinated Americans Have Cut Ties With The Unvaccinated, Poll Finds - "33% of vaccinated respondents had in some way “cut ties or ended relationships with” at least some unvaccinated people in their lives. Of those, 8% said they “do not intend on socializing with them again,” 11% said they’ve cut ties but would see them again if they get the shot and 14% still speak to the unvaccinated person, but will not see them in person.  A further 27% said they haven’t cut ties but it “upsets” them that the unvaccinated person won’t get the shot, while 39% haven’t cut ties and believe it’s a “personal choice.”... The most prominent person so far to say she’s cut unvaccinated people out of her life is actor Jennifer Aniston, who said in an August interview with InStyle magazine she had “lost a few people in my weekly routine who have refused or did not disclose” their vaccination status."
Did covid hysteria turn them into twisted hateful people or were they already strong liberals before covid came along?
It seems many covid hystericists don't believe their vaccines work

Chris Rock on Twitter - "Hey guys I just found out I have COVID, trust me you don’t want this. Get vaccinated."
Why doesn't he believe the vaccine works?

Dr Adam Aneevit on Twitter - "It is not the responsibility of the Unvaccinated to protect the Vaccinated. That's the Vaccines job."

Brian Bird: It feels a lot like the early days of the pandemic again. But should it? - The Hub - "Something strange happened this summer. Almost overnight, it felt like we were transported back to the early days of the pandemic — to that month of March we will never forget... Many of us seem as anxious today as we were at the start, if not more so... colleagues of mine have voiced a significant degree of anxiety over being back on campus and in the classroom again.  I have every reason to believe these colleagues are vaccinated. Almost all the students we teach are vaccinated. We know the vaccines are superb at preventing severe illness and hospitalization. With these facts in hand, I was not particularly anxious about returning to campus. So why are my colleagues worried?  Fear of COVID-19 appears to have resurged during the Delta chapter. Contrary to what one might expect, this fear does not neatly align with vaccination status. I suspect we all know vaccinated persons who remain very afraid of the virus. The Delta variant poses unique challenges, but we have pulled too many fire alarms in too many places. We need to take a breath and regain our bearings, or else — in a certain respect — this pandemic will last far longer than it should.  Over the past 18 months, many of us have embraced an unrealistic and even utopian expectation of safety from COVID-19... The pursuit of near absolute safety from COVID-19 has steadily intensified over the course of the pandemic in part because questioning this pursuit, even mildly, is often considered politically incorrect. It seems fair to say that being publicly and scrupulously cautious of COVID-19 — opting to go above and beyond on this front — has become, to some extent and at some level, a marker of being enlightened and progressive. As a result, in pandemic parlance, it often seems like there are only two types of people in the world: the COVID-conscious on the one hand and the dangerous denialists on the other. Framing the discourse on COVID-19 in this way has likely impeded our ability to tackle this pandemic as thoughtfully as we otherwise could have. To our detriment, little space has been made for the moderate middle."

Vaccinated Man Just Wishes There Was Something That Could Protect Him From COVID | The Babylon Bee - "“I took my vaccine to show I’m one of the group,” said Kyle Howard, who had the Pfizer vaccine, “but I’m out there alone, with COVID still lurking about. The government needs to take measures to protect me and my precious vaccinated blood from the virus.”  There have been pushes to put masks on “dirty, grubby, unvaccinated children” to help protect all the essential vaccinated adults, but some worry masks simply won’t be enough.  “The government needs to round up all those deranged, unvaccinated lunatics and take them far away from us,” said Benjamin Reed, who had the Moderna vaccine. “They have the COVID and could give it to us. I spend all my waking hours worrying about us elite vaccinated people being tainted by the COVID.” It’s generally agreed that the unruly unvaccinated must be isolated from vaccinated society to protect the vaccinated and the science-blessed vaccine from the virus."

Half Of Vaccinated Americans Might Not Spend The Holidays With Unvaccinated Family And Friends, Poll Finds

Vaccine hesitancy: Obituary of Candace Ayers blames unvaccinated people for woman’s death - "Ayers’s family said she caught Covid in July when she went to visit an unvaccinated friend, whose husband had died from Covid."
This is getting richer and richer. Even professional contact tracers can't always be certain how someone got infected, much less rank amateurs faced with an environment with many cases. Not to mention how they are ignorant about the science on vaccination not stopping transmission
At least stoking hatred and division fulfils their need for tribalism

Pingdemic ‘threatens food supplies’ amid warnings app is ‘losing social consent’ - "Concerns have been raised that the increasing number of pings sent by the NHS Test and Trace app could potentially cause food shortages as workers are forced into self-isolation... Due to shortages of staff, trains have been cancelled, and councils across the country have warned residents that garden waste and recycling bins would not be emptied for weeks to prioritise the collection of normal household rubbish... Fomer health secretary Jeremy Hunt said on Saturday that there is a risk that the app could “lose social consent”, and suggested that the government should “make it less sensitive or move to a system where you have to get a test when you are pinged”.He added: “The risk is that if people are deleting the app then you can’t even ping them to ask them to have a test.”" Better for everyone to starve to death than less than 1% die due to covid

Martin Kulldorff: Vaccine mandates are unnecessary and will sow distrust - The Hub - "A huge problem with mandates, however, is that we have many people who have had COVID. They have immunity. We have known for over a year that if you’ve had COVID you have strong lasting immunity to this disease. And we now know more recently that the immunity from having had COVID is stronger and more durable than the immunity you get from vaccines.  It’s also an issue of global public health, because we are now forcefully vaccinating a lot of people who don’t need the vaccines, while there are many people in the developing world, in South America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in South Asia and so on, who are desperate to get the vaccine because they haven’t gotten it. They are old people, and they are higher risk.  Mandating vaccinations in the rich countries to people who don’t need it results in a situation where there is less supply in the developing world. When you mandate vaccines to people who don’t need it in one place, then unfortunately, that means that there’s less supply for poor people in Brazil, in India, in Pakistan, in Iran, in Nigeria, and so on. So it’s a very unethical, immoral, and selfish thing for us in the United States to give it to people who don’t need it when there are a lot of people around the world who do need it and who are not getting it. Mandating people who have had COVID to get vaccinated makes zero sense from a scientific point of view, and it makes zero sense from a public health point of view, but it’s worse than that. It actually creates problems because when people see that they are forced to take a vaccine when they don’t need to, it creates a lot of distrust in public health.  And we have seen during this last year and a half that all the hard work we’ve done over many decades to build trust in the vaccines are now disappearing because we are introducing mandates that makes no sense from a scientific or public health perspective."

Meme - ""I DRANK WATER AND STAYED HYDRATED LAST WEEK"
CNN: JOE ROGAN DRINKS DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE, A SOLVENT USED TO COOL NUCLEAR REACTORS!"

Mr. Snrub on Twitter - "Remember when Kristi Noem didn’t want to ban mandates in her state because she was afraid it would invite Biden to overstep in his power? Lolol"

The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "First they came for the unvaccinated, and I did not speak out— because no one is coming for the unvaccinated, you whiny paranoid performative-nonsense crybabies. just get the shot and you'll be fine." - The Other 98%
"Now that we have a vaccine mandate, where's the website for me to start collecting my bounties?" - The Other 98%
"4 hours apart! (Not to mention the first meme contradicts itself) They’re not really hiding their views at this point."

Leana Wen, M.D. on Twitter - "No one should tell you what to do with your body. Planned Parenthood is fighting against these bans on abortion care with everything we have — because everyone has the right to make decisions about their own bodies. #BansOffMyBody"
Leana Wen, M.D. on Twitter - "What I wished the new Biden #covid19 strategy would contain: Vaccine requirements for interstate travel, mandates for schools (as we do for other immunizations), and a national proof of vaccination system. Cajoling isn’t working. It’s time for drastic action."

Mikel Jollett on Twitter - "Being against a vaccine that is rushed to market WITHOUT ADEQUATE TESTING isn't being anti-vax, it's being pro-science. There's a reason it takes a long time. The reason is: improperly vetted vaccines KILL people."
Mikel Jollett on Twitter - "Just so we’re clear: Republicans believe it’s perfectly constitutional to require vaccinations for polio, small pox, chicken pox, rubella, the measles, diptheria, tetanus and hepatitis b, but it’s FASCIST to require a vaccination for covid."

Opinion: Mandated Vaccinations — Who is responsible for their risks? - "If I am mandated to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in order to keep my job, and subsequently experience an adverse event, who is responsible? Who is responsible if I have neurological complications, a heart attack, or a stroke and am never able to work again.  Who is responsible if I die?... Correlation does not equal causation, they say. But when you are counted as a COVID-19 death, correlation ALWAYS equals causation... for each doctor, government official, and layperson to claim that these vaccines are safe, the risk of death needs to be zero. The risk of an adverse event needs to be zero. If that is not the truth, then the truth needs to be spelled out in black and white. Where is it? Informed consent. Where is it?  I’ve heard the following argument for getting the vaccination a nauseating amount of times. The argument is that the deaths and risks from the vaccine pale in comparison to the deaths from COVID-19. If you knew ahead of time that you or your child were going to die from this vaccine would your heart be comforted by the fact that “so many more people died from the virus?” This debate is illogical on a personal level. This is a decision that should be based on each and every one of our own personal risk and benefit analyses. Speaking of children, in the 2017-2018 flu season 643 children died. To date, 332 children have died from COVID-19. Mass vaccinating children with an experimental product, who are at little-to-no risk of harm from this virus, is in my opinion, grossly negligent... Another argument is that the unvaccinated are getting sick more often and taking up hospital bed space. I’ve heard the opposite as well. The truth is elusive. To this I say, 78 percent of those who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 are overweight or obese. As many as 95 percent of those who die are obese. So before we blame the unvaccinated for hogging up all of the hospital bed space, let’s first blame the obese. But that’s not appropriate to mention.  It’s much more acceptable to call those that are concerned about the side effects of the vaccine, selfish and deserving of death... For some reason natural immunity through infection is all of a sudden questioned. You aren’t being forced to get the vaccine, they say. You just can’t have a job they say. Well if that’s not medical coercion, then please tell me what is. Most people need to make money to eat."

The Saturday Debate: Are passport mandates the best way out of the pandemic? | The Star - "convenience is a significant driver of behaviour, and as social psychologists have known for 65 years, people will readily change their attitudes to match their voluntary actions, even when this behaviour is externally induced.  How can we use this knowledge to protect schoolchildren, LTC residents, and hospital patients? Every employee could be given the choice of vaccination or reassignment to a drab cubicle farm, populated by masked, unvaxxed colleagues doing less stimulating administrative work than they were trained to do. This would keep them away from those who need protecting, and away from the job that most would likely prefer. I expect we’d lose some of our front-line staff this way, but we’d gain positive commitment alongside compliance in the vast majority.  Our growing embrace of mandatory vaccination and the rise of mobs protesting at hospitals and throwing stones at politicians is not a coincidence. We place ourselves in great social peril when we underestimate how many will turn to violence when they perceive a loss of agency coupled with a perception of injustice.  Wars on terror produce more terrorists, and forcible vaccination produces more hardened anti-vaxxers. Vaccination policies, deftly based in nudging, could solve three problems at once: our children and elders would be safe, our vaccination rates would be high, and the anti-vax mob would dwindle. “Nudge” was aimed at influencing libertarian Americans, but Canada has a far-right wing too: “Nudge” should be required reading for anybody working on public COVID-19 vaccination policy."

Notorious-celt on Twitter - "2 weeks to flatten the curve is now 3 jabs to feed your family.."

Eva_IRL on Twitter - "NEW - Kamala Harris: "The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is not negotiable. The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is their decision, it is their body.""
"Cool. And I’ve made a decision about my body to not get the jab. Glad that debate is settled."

Jesse Kelly on Twitter - "Oh I discriminate. If I was an employer with over 100 employees I’d fire every single person who voted for Biden today. Discrimination must go both ways now."

Meme - Caitin Johnstone: "We're a few months out from seeing American libertarians angrily sharing around a video of police beating an unvaccinated Black person for noncompliance with some new authoritarian law and seeing liberals in the comments cheering on the police."

The Masks Were Working All Along - The Atlantic
Mask fetishists are very happy with this study, but in reality if they read it they'd realise it's proof of how useless they are. The fact that a journalist swallows the spin wholesale and even spreads fake news about the study is shocking: "For cloth masks, we find an imprecise zero [for relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence]". Plus, the effect of surgical masks on symptomatic seroprevalence by age group was statistically insignificant for everyone younger 50 and below. The fact that there is only an effect for older people suggests that some other mechanism might be at play: for example, mask use is not double blinded (others can see that you're wearing a mask), so perhaps seeing more people wearing masks makes older people more cautious

Wuhan Lockdown Started A Year Ago: Residents Look Back With Pride, Anger, Pain - "Her 39-year-old son died from the coronavirus in Wuhan last year.  Her son, an elementary school teacher, came down with a fever in early February. But the severity of the lockdown meant no one could drive him to any of Wuhan's strained hospitals to look for care.  Eventually, her son hitched a ride on the back of an open truck in freezing rain looking for an open hospital bed. He finally found an open hospital spot, but no one attended to him for two days. He texted desperate messages for help to his wife before he died several days later...   Zhong asked that only her last name be used because authorities have arrested people who documented how local governments struggled to provide care in the onset of the pandemic.  Others who spoke out about what have been imprisoned. Zhang Zhan, a lawyer-turned-blogger, was sentenced to four years in prison last month for "fabricating lies." Until her arrest in May, Zhang walked around the city and uploaded videos to YouTube about the desperation of Wuhan's residents throughout the lockdown.  Now behind bars, Zhang is on a hunger strike to protest against her sentence, according to one of her lawyers who requested anonymity as his law license would be revoked for speaking to foreign media. Ren Quanniu, another lawyer who represented Zhang, had his license revoked this week for taking on politically sensitive cases, including Zhang's... "The lockdown created a run on medical resources and a sense of panic. Many people with conditions other than the coronavirus could not get care as a result and died during lockdown.""

Black Texas women filmed 'attacking NYC restaurant hostess' say they were racially profiled
Which will win? Covid hysteria or anti racism?

BLM is "putting NYC on notice" over its vax passport mandate that unequally discriminates against black citizens

Offspring Drummer Booted From Tour for Not Getting Vaccinated, He Says - "Pete Parada, the drummer for the Offspring, has found out the hard way that some businesses — and even bands — are drawing a hard line on requiring vaccinations to come back to work. He posted on his social media Tuesday that he’s been ousted from the group because he won’t agree to get the COVID vaccine.  Beyond being replaced on an upcoming tour, Parada says he’s been told not to show up at the studio, either, even though he claims to have a legitimate medical reason for not getting the jab."
Weird. We were told that there would be medical exemptions

Links - 23rd December 2021 (2 - Palestine/Middle East Peace)

Dutch soccer fans chant ‘Hamas, Jews to the gas’ before match against Ajax
More harmless anti-Zionism

Media adopts canard Israel denies vaccine to Palestinians - "Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have been spreading the libel that Israel, the world leader in vaccinating its population against COVID-19, is intentionally leaving the Palestinians to languish in the middle of a pandemic. But that’s Twitter; anyone with an opinion can express it, even if it’s not based on facts.Yet, in recent days, supposedly respectable news sites that are supposed to check facts and be accountable to the truth are spreading the same bile as Iranian Holocaust-denial cartoon contest runner-up Carlos Latuff in that example from the ADL article.“As Israel leads in COVID-19 vaccines per capita, Palestinians still await shots,” the NPR headline reads, implying some kind of correlation... You have to get halfway through the Guardian story before you reach the following: “Despite the delay, the [Palestinian] Authority has not officially asked for help from Israel. Coordination between the two sides halted last year after the Palestinian president cut off security ties for several months.”In other words, the Palestinian leadership refused to even talk to Israel when the latter was ordering vaccine doses, let alone coordinate a complex rollout operation. Before that, the UN’s official news site published an article titled: “COVID-19: UN envoy hails strong Israel-Palestine cooperation.”... Israel had been willing to help before the Palestinians cut ties... As Khaled Abu Toameh reported in this paper two weeks ago, “The Palestinians do not expect Israel to sell them, or purchase on their behalf, the vaccine from any country... the Palestinians will soon receive nearly four million Russian-made vaccines against COVID-19. The PA, with the help of the World Health Organization, has managed to secure the vaccine from other sources.” The PA’s current assessment is that they will begin to receive doses of the Sputnik V and AstraZeneca vaccines in February. This is comparable with neighboring countries in the region, including those with major Palestinian populations such as Lebanon and Jordan, which have not rolled out vaccination operations, and with many other poor countries participating in the WHO vaccine aid program. HERE ARE some other pertinent facts: The Oslo Accords, though a group of interim agreements and not a final-status peace treaty, are widely considered an international legally binding agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. They stipulate that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for healthcare, including vaccinations, for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and Gaza... Israel is actually already vaccinating Palestinians – the ones in east Jerusalem. They are not citizens of Israel, just residents, but their healthcare is under Israel’s purview per the Oslo Accords, and those who are 60 or older or have a chronic condition can be vaccinated in Israeli HMOs in their neighborhoods. Israel plans to vaccinate even more Palestinians who are in Israeli prisons.More facts: Israel’s vaccine operation has run in predominately Arab areas in Israel from day one. Out of a concern that not enough eligible Israeli Arabs have been showing up at the vaccination sites, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited two Arab cities in recent days. (Admittedly, this dovetails with his political strategy of trying to attract Arab votes to Likud.)In other words, there isn’t some kind of policy of ethno-religious discrimination. The opposite is true: The government is actively trying to encourage the minority population, Arab-Israelis, to get vaccinated."
It's ironic: all those who claim Israel must provide the Palestinians with vaccines just want them to be dependent on Israel, perhaps forever. This will help with their agenda as it will give them yet another angle of attack

Palestinians give first vaccines after Israel shares supply - "The Palestinian Health Ministry announced the start of the campaign in a statement, saying Health Minister Mai al-Kaila received a first dose along with several front-line medical workers. The statement did not acknowledge that Israel provided the vaccines."
Israel haters can continue to pretend that Israel didn't give the Palestinians any vaccines, even though it's not their responsibility, then

Thread by @ShMMor on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In a time of heightened anxiety, it's natural for all us to seek comfort in things that make us feel most safe, most at home, most ourselves.  For the @guardian, that means running a piece of gross antisemitism masquerading as progressive anti-racism...
This is a sub-genre that the @guardian particularly excels at: the false story of Israeli medical malpractice which is supposed to prove the innate moral rot of the Jewish state. It always has the same three elements:
1) Crazy Jewish doctors doing something fishy
2) Broad hints that their motivations are racist supremacy
3) Heroic humanitarians bravely standing up to the nefarious Jewish plot.
Previous examples include 2009 "Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs" (for which they ran a very dodgy & partial correction), 2013 lies on "forced contraception" of Ethiopian women by Israeli doctors, 2014 on "confirmed targeting" of hospitals in Gaza...2010 reporting on Jenny Tonge's lies about an Israeli rescue team harvesting body parts of Haitian earthquake victims that never clarified she was lying but makes sure we know she is not antisemitic.
Even by those standards, this is a remarkably dishonest article. The headline makes it sound like Israeli authorities are out distributing vaccines but actively "excluding" Palestinians, presumably blocking them at the schoolhouse door or something like that...  This piece of “journalism” doesn’t just fail to report on the Israeli side; it fails to report on the Palestinian side too. The Palestinians are just props for a projection of anxieties and racist fantasies about Jews. In fact, there is very little to report on the Covid story in the Palestinian territories, so this story reports on a nothing added to a nothing on top of a nothing.  The covid situation in the West Bank & Gaza is far from crisis proportions. In terms of both infections and fatalities, the situation is significantly worse in Israel, and much worse in the UK (also slightly worse in Lebanon & Jordan). Many reasons for this, but one is that the Palestinians have one of the better health systems in the region. That’s the 1st nothing. The 2nd nothing is the vaccinations. Not many have occurred yet, but this is equally true in almost every single country in the world, including many in western Europe...  There’s a third nothing: Israel’s role. Israel has not impeded in any way deliveries of vaccines to the West Bank or Gaza. It has facilitated them throughout the autonomy years and before, even in the peak periods of conflict. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that Israel will fall short of its obligations once covid vaccines start arriving. Nothing. Not a hint. Moreoever, Israel has offered to help the PA on this issue, but these offers have been (publicly at least) rejected, as the @guardian story gets around to pointing out somewhere also near the bottom...  What obstacles do exist in the Palestinian Territories are of a more prosaic sort, not unique to the Palestinians at all, and have nothing to do with Israel, so they simply merit no attention. These include a Palestinian decision to not work with the Pfizer vaccine, because of concerns about the cold storage requirements, and a high rate of vaccine skepticism in Palestinian public opinion (something which surely wouldn’t be helped if it was Israelis making the injections).  The legal obligation of the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, for administering health & vaccinations is mentioned in a briefly dismissive way referencing “1990’s-era interim agreements.” These would be the international accords that are the entire basis for the existence of a Palestinian government. A bit like saying the House of Commons legislations is based on “an early 18th century act of union.”  In typically revisionist style, the article continues, “those deals envisioned a fuller peace agreement within five years, an event that never occurred,” without mentioning that this is because the Palestinian side rejected multiple peace offers & preferred to pursue suicidal terrorism instead, throughout which it had the unwavering support and understanding of the Guardian’s reporters & editors... So what is the story here exactly? Not something happening in the Palestinian territories. Not something Israel has done. It’s a moral outrage at something Israel has not done, which is bizarre, because nearly everyone in the world has not done the exact same thing...  What Israel didn’t do was implement a vaccination program in the West Bank and Gaza similar to the one that its domestic health care system allowed it to administer at home. It did not send its army into Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, occupy clinics, commandeer private medical records, and gather Palestinian citizens and inject them them one-by-one with needles that are said by Israeli authorities to contain a vaccine. It is surely a comment on what the “Palestinian cause” does and means for its western adherents that the hue and cry on this was bubbling on social media all week not from Palestinians or their officials but from assorted activists and bigots in the west suffering under the intense stress of watching Israel do something good and not knowing how to reconcile that with the burning theological commitment they have to the proposition that everything Israeli is touched by sin. Inevitably the Palestinian leadership will come around and adopt this approach for propaganda purposes, but it is still interesting to see what they were saying before, like this from a month ago. "

EnGardeAgain! (@EnGardeAgain) - "Frankly your comparison is abject. Gaza has a goddam open border with Egypt and an open sea access. If Gaza was a prison or as you 🤮put it a “concentration camp” then how did the inmates get their stockpile of missiles miss congeniality? #dumbasarock #AmYsraelChai"

Queers for Palestine? - "Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely “Queers for Palestine” ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco–based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.  What makes QUIT oxymoronic is that their affinity for Palestine isn’t reciprocated. There may be queers for Palestine, but Palestine certainly isn’t for queers, either in the livable or empathetic sense. Like all Islamic polities, the Palestinian Authority systematically harasses gay people. Under the cloak of rooting out Israeli “collaborators,” P.A. officials extort, imprison, and torture gays. But Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn’t merely a matter of state policy, it’s one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews. Last October, a gay Palestinian man with an Israeli lover petitioned Israel’s high court of justice for asylum, claiming that his family threatened to kill him if he did not “reform.”...  And that’s only in the relatively benign West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which has stagnated under the heel of Hamas’s Islamofascist rule since 2007, is an even more dangerous place for gays, “a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,” in the words of a senior Hamas leader. As in Iran, Hamas’s patron and the chief sponsor of international terrorism, even the mere suspicion of homosexuality will get one killed in Gaza, being hurled from the roof of a tall building the method of choice.  It’s these facts that make the notion of “Queers for Palestine” so bizarre. Contrary to what some gay activists might have you believe, there really are not that many political subjects where one’s sexuality ought influence an opinion. Aside from the obvious issues related to civic equality (recognition of partnerships, open service in the military, etc.), how does homosexuality imply a particular viewpoint on complicated matters like Social Security Reform, health care policy, or the war in Iraq?  The answer, at least for some of those on the left side of the spectrum, is one found in the early rhetoric of the Gay Liberation Front, the leading gay rights organization to emerge after the Stonewall riots. The GLF was, in the words of historian Paul Berman, the “gay wing of the revolutionary alliance” that in the 1970s challenged the liberal consensus and came to be known as the “New Left.”  GLF leaders, for instance, played an instrumental role in the creation of the Venceremos Brigade, which dispatched starry-eyed American radicals to pick sugar cane in Cuba as a show of solidarity with the regime of Fidel Castro. (Like the Palestinian Authority, Communist Cuba didn’t exactly return the kindness of its gay sympathizers; for decades it interned gays and HIV-positive individuals in prison labor camps). The GLF allied itself with a whole host of radical organizations (like the murderous Black Panthers) whose role in the struggle for gay equality was tenuous at best. And the very name of the GLF was adopted from the National Liberation Front, the moniker of the Vietnamese Communists.  Why does this history matter now? Although you will find few out-and-out Marxists in the leadership of gay organizations today, most gay activists still view the world with the same sort of “oppression” complex epitomized by the early radicals who led the GLF. They believe gay people to be “oppressed,” and hold that any other group claiming the same victim status should earn the support of gays.  It’s for this reason that every major gay organization was so hesitant to talk about the overwhelming support among African-Americans to ban gay marriage in California, and why the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force went so far as to commission a bogus study ostensibly refuting that disturbing statistic itself. In the estimation of the gay rights establishment, African-Americans, like gays, are “oppressed,” and there is no room for enemies on the left.   But gays will never get anywhere as long as they view the world in this constrictive and counterproductive way. Indeed, if one wanted to construe a “gay” position on the Arab-Israeli conflict -- that is, examine the issue purely through the prism of the welfare of gay people -- the inescapable stance is nothing less than partiality for Israel. Israel, after all, is the only state in the Middle East that legally enshrines the rights of gay people. Gays serve openly in the military and occupy high-profile positions in business and public life, and Tel Aviv is an international gay mecca. As clichéd as it may sound, Israel is an oasis of liberal tolerance in a reactionary religious backwater, and if gay people want to stand with the “oppressed” of the region, it is the Palestinians seeking a peaceful, two-state solution, not the murderers of Hamas or their backers in Tehran, who merit support."

Hamas Commander, Accused of Theft and Gay Sex, Is Killed by His Own - The New York Times
Damn Zionists!

The final nail in Palestinian-Arab relations? - "Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz’s criticism of Palestinian leaders this week did not surprise those who have been following the deterioration of relations between the Palestinians and some Arab countries in the past few months. What is also not surprising is that the Palestinian leadership does not appear to have an idea how to stop the rapid deterioration. Palestinian officials admitted this week that they have never been forced to deal with such a barrage of criticism from Arabs... “The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful. There is something that successive Palestinian leadership historically share in common: they always bet on the losing side, and that comes at a price.”... “The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful. There is something that successive Palestinian leadership historically share in common: they always bet on the losing side, and that comes at a price.” Palestinian leaders are being accused of “trafficking” in the Palestinian cause; depriving their people of international aid; financial corruption; and acting against the interests of their own people. The Palestinian people are being accused of being “ungrateful” toward Arab countries that made many sacrifices on their behalf, gave them hundreds of millions of dollars and jobs. Popular hashtags trending on social media denounce Palestinian leaders as “merchants of the Palestinian cause” and “mercenaries” and declare that “the Palestinian cause is not my cause.” Thousands of social media users, especially from the Gulf countries, have been using these hashtags to hurl abuse at the Palestinians. To add insult to injury, the Gulf Arabs have also been voicing support for Israel by posting pictures of Israeli flags and video clips of Arabs praising the peace agreements with Israel and greeting Israelis on Jewish holidays... “Many of those who offended the Palestinian cause are the Palestinians themselves, especially their leaders, some of them out of ignorance and stupidity,” wrote Kuwaiti political analyst Abdul Mohsen Hamadeh. “Some of the Palestinian leaders have exploited the Palestinian cause to become wealthy. They caused great damage to the Palestinian people.” Hamadeh took the Palestinians to task for rejecting the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states in Mandatory Palestine and for rejecting several peace initiatives since then. He also pointed out that Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and chose to align itself with Iran and Turkey... Hamadeh’s criticism of the Palestinian leadership, echoed by a large number of Gulf Arabs, sounds as though it had been taken directly from the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. This is the main reason some Palestinian officials, including PLO secretary-general Saeb Erekat, have begun labeling their critics as “Zionist Arabs.” A Palestinian official in Ramallah, who spoke to The Jerusalem Post on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that many Arabs who are currently bad-mouthing the Palestinians “appear to have been brainwashed by Israeli and Zionist propaganda."
Apparently Arabs are simple minded and easily brainwashed

Critical Spectator - Posts | Facebook - "There is no better evidence of how disastrously incompetent Obama's administration was in the foreign policy arena - and how much Trump's administration has accomplished within a single term - than the series of agreements signed between the Arab states and Israel.On Friday Donald Trump announced the third one, this time involving Sudan, which earlier agreed to also pay $335 million in reparations to victims of decades-long terrorism supported by Khartoum, in exchange for a removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and normalization of relations with the US.This is the third such agreement signed in a span of two months, following Abraham Accords involving UAE and Bahrain - something deemed impossible just four years ago.That's when John Kerry (repeatedly) confidently stated the following:"There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world"... When Donald Trump became the first president to actually act on his promise of moving US embassy to Jerusalem, foreign policy "experts" and political opponents predicted it would lead to greater instability and could cause new conflicts to break out.3 years later not only no such thing has happened but new chapters of peace in the Middle East are being written.Agreement with Sudan has an even greater symbolic meaning, as it was in Khartoum on September 1st 1967, in the aftermath of the Six Day War earlier that year, that the Arab League states issued a resolution, which included the three NOs:
- No peace with Israel
- No recognition of Israel
- No negotiations with it
Today the Khartoum Resolution was undone."

Vittorio Arrigoni - Wikipedia - "Vittorio Arrigoni (Italian pronunciation: [vitˌtɔːrjo arriˈɡoːni]; 4 February 1975 – 15 April 2011) was an Italian reporter, writer, pacifist and activist. Arrigoni worked with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the Gaza Strip, from 2008 until his death. Arrigoni maintained a website, Guerrilla Radio, and published a book of his experiences in Gaza during the 2008–09 Gaza War between Hamas and Israel. Arrigoni was the first foreigner kidnapped in Gaza since BBC journalist Alan Johnston's abduction in 2007. He was subsequently killed by Palestinian Salafists. His murder was condemned by various Palestinian groups."
Damn Israel, damn Zionists who murdered him!

Opinion | When Anti-Zionism Tunnels Under Your House - The New York Times - "In 2002, Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, was said to have given a speech noting that the creation of the state of Israel had spared his followers the trouble of hunting down Jews at “the ends of the world.” The Lebanese terrorist group has prominent apologists in the West, and some of them rushed to claim that Nasrallah had uttered no such thing.Except he had. Tony Badran of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tracked down the original recording of the speech... Israelis experience anti-Zionism in a different way than, say, readers of The New York Review of Books: not as a bold sally in the world of ideas, but as a looming menace to their earthly existence, held at bay only through force of arms. It’s somewhat like the difference between discussing the effects of Marxism-Leninism in an undergraduate seminar at Reed College, circa 2018 — and experiencing them at closer range in West Berlin, circa 1961.Actually, it’s worse than that, since the Soviets merely wanted to dominate or conquer their enemies and seize their property, not wipe them off the map and end their lives. Anti-Zionism might have been a respectable point of view before 1948, when the question of Israel’s existence was in the future and up for debate. Today, anti-Zionism is a call for the elimination of a state — details to follow regarding the fate befalling those who currently live in it. Note the distinction: Anti-Zionists are not advocating the reform of a state, as Japan was reformed after 1945. Nor are they calling for the adjustment of a state’s borders, as Canada’s border with the United States was periodically adjusted in the 19th century. They’re not talking about the birth of a separate state, either, as South Sudan was born out of Sudan in 2011. And they’re certainly not championing the partition of a multiethnic state into ethnically homogenous components, as Yugoslavia was partitioned after 1991. Anti-Zionism is ideologically unique in insisting that one state, and one state only, doesn’t just have to change. It has to go. By a coincidence that its adherents insist is entirely innocent, this happens to be the Jewish state, making anti-Zionists either the most disingenuous of ideologues or the most obtuse. When then-CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill called last month for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” and later claimed to be ignorant of what the slogan really meant, it was hard to tell in which category he fell... What’s worse: To be denied membership in a country club because you’re Jewish, or driven from your ancestral homeland and sovereign state for the same reason? If anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are meaningfully distinct (I think they are not), the human consequences of the latter are direr.The good news is that the conversation about anti-Zionism remains mostly academic because Israelis haven’t succumbed to the fatal illusion that, if only they behaved better, their enemies would hate them less. To the extent that Israeli parents ever sleep soundly, it’s because they know what they are up against. And, to borrow Kipling’s line, they never make mock of uniforms that guard them while they sleep. The same can’t be said for that class of scolds who excel in making excuses for the wicked and finding fault with the good. When you find yourself on the same side as Hassan Nasrallah, Louis Farrakhan and David Duke on the question of a country’s right to exist, it’s time to re-examine every opinion you hold."

Barack Obama Offers a Primer for Hating Israel - "Obama portrays Britain and then Israel as occupying powers in Palestine, without ever explaining who actually owned the land they were and are supposedly occupying. He makes no mention of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. As The Palestinian Delusion explains in detail, the Mandate directed the British to encourage “close settlement by Jews on the land” for “the establishment of the Jewish national home.” What gave the League the right to do such a thing? The dying Ottoman Empire had ceded Palestine to the League in 1918. Jews had lived in that land from time immemorial, and it was otherwise sparsely populated. It was a perfect place for the Jews who faced discrimination, harassment and worse in Europe and elsewhere to settle.Thus the common assumption, which Obama fosters, that the Israelis are illegitimate occupiers of a land that belongs rightly to the Palestinians, founders on the facts. There never was a Palestinian state. No Palestinian king, or emperor, or president. There never was a Palestinian nationality or ethnicity distinct from the nationality and ethnicity of the Arabs of the region. Palestine, like Staten Island or Georgetown, was always the name of a region, not a nation-state or ethnonational home. Obama also claims that the Jews “organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements,” without mentioning that in 1919, a Muslim leader, Amin al-Husseini, a member of a prominent Arab clan in Jerusalem, orchestrated a series of attacks on Jews all over Palestine. The following year, he instigated riots in Jerusalem during Passover. Amid mass looting and rapes, six Jews were murdered and over two hundred more injured. A court of inquiry found that “the Jews were the victims of a peculiarly brutal and cowardly attack, the majority of the casualties being old men, women and children.”This violence was ongoing. In August 1929 in Jerusalem, rioting Arabs murdered 133 Jews and injured over two hundred more, many in their homes. In Hebron, they murdered another sixty-seven Jews, and in Safed, twenty more. The British government-appointed Shaw Commission found that the riots “took the form, in the most part, of a vicious attack by Arabs on Jews accompanied by wanton destruction of Jewish property.” Obama mentions none of this. His description of the birth of the State of Israel is no more fair or accurate: “As Britain withdrew, the two sides quickly fell into war. And with Jewish militias claiming victory in 1948, the state of Israel was officially born.”The “two sides” were actually tiny Israel against the giant massed forces of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. They didn’t “fall into war”; the Arab League declared war immediately after Israel declared its independence. Obama’s use of the term “militias” to describe the Israel Defense Forces is doubtless chosen for its resonance with the right-wing, racist, white supremacist militias that American Leftists hysterically imagine to be stalking the land. Even worse, Obama claims that “for the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors.” One would get no hint from his account of the fact that Israel “would engage” in all these conflicts not out of some imperialist or supremacist impulse, but because each and every time, Arab forces carried out an unprovoked attack against the Jewish state. But Obama appears determined to portray Israel as the aggressor, trusting in the general ignorance of his readership.Obama’s animus toward Israel is so great that he even calls the Temple Mount “one of Islam’s holiest sites,” without ever mentioning its central importance in Judaism. Obama’s animus toward Israel is so great that he even calls the Temple Mount “one of Islam’s holiest sites,” without ever mentioning its central importance in Judaism.A Promised Land thus includes a concise primer for Leftists to remind them of why they must hate Israel. As Obama’s dotty old puppet prepares to enter the Oval Office, this is not a good sign for America’s alliance with Israel, or for peace in the Middle East."

Haniyeh: Hamas rejected $15 billion in return for economic projects - "Hamas turned down an offer for carrying out various economic projects in the Gaza Strip in return for dismantling its armed wing and changing its policy toward Israel
When you're clearly not interested in peace

(1) The Truth - Posts - "The Palestinian Story:
(By Imam Tawhidi)
Once upon a time, it’s our land, it’s everyone’s land, it’s Muslim land, it’s both Muslim and Jewish land, the Temple is Jewish, Solomon was Muslim so the Temple is ours, Okay, the Temple is not Muslim but the building on top is a Mosque, the Prophet ascended to heaven from here, no he didn’t, yes he did, no he didn’t, why? Because the Mosque was built after his death, so what? Are you denying Israeli oppression? What about Islamic Terrorists killing Jews? What about the occupation? What occupation? Prove Palestine exists! We can’t. Okay? So make peace? No. Why? Because we want our own country. Okay, make peace and have a country. No. Why? Because we don’t want Jewish neighbours. So where will they go? Back to Europe! Well that’s not going to Happen. But Gaza is an open air prison! Here take a look at their luxurious lifestyle. Maybe stop throwing rockets? Stop being racist! Make a peace agreement! No. Okay, Arabs got tired, they made peace with Israel. They’re traitors. No they’re not. Yes they are. So what’s the solution? From the river to the sea Palestine will be free! What’s the name of the river and sea? None of your business.
The end."

8-Month-Old Infant Dies in Gaza after PA Denies Him Exit for Heart Surgery in Israel - "Omar Yaghi, an eight-month-old infant from the Gaza Strip with a cardiac condition, died on Thursday following a one-month postponement of his scheduled operation at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, Israel."
Damn Zionists!

‘Jews are our dogs’: Anti-Semitic chant at Mississauga rally being investigated by police - "An incident at anti-Israel rally over the weekend in Mississauga is the subject of a hate-crimes complaint under investigation by Peel Regional Police.Video from the rally appears to show a protester chanting an anti-Semitic slogan in Arabic, “Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs,” and others could be heard repeating it back."
More of that "anti-Zionism"

David Collier on Twitter - "Israel is a tiny democratic nation surrounded by despots and radical Islamic terror groups Yet #Ireland are actually talking about boycotting #Israel They don't boycott China They don't boycott Pakistan They don't care about other conflicts They just want to boycott the Jews"

Missile hits human rights office in Gaza. Here's why you never heard about it - "a missile hit the fifth floor of the Al-Harara office building in Gaza City, which is across from the Palestinian Legislative Council building. It’s a missile that went astray on its launchers, almost certainly members of Islamic Jihad.Ironically, it scored a direct hit on the office of Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, which scrutinizes the Palestinian authorities and reports on their violations of human rights, civil rights and the rule of law in the enclaves of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israeli sources told Haaretz that the missile wasn’t Israeli. But one could have concluded that it was a local missile just from the silence that Palestinian media outlets imposed on themselves"

Outrage after Ash Sarkar features in Rise of the Nazis BBC Two documentary - "The BBC has come under fire today for allowing a woman to feature on a documentary about the Nazis after she defended anti-Israel graffiti on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto.Ash Sarkar notoriously sent her 'solidarity' to Ewa Jasiewicz after she sprayed 'Free Gaza and Palestine' on the walls of the largest Jewish World War Two ghetto in 2010.Ms Sarkar is due to appear on a new BBC Two documentary called The Rise of the Nazis, sparking outrage among the Jewish community.The decision has lead to a backlash from outraged celebrities and historians who branded it 'appalling' and 'deeply distributing.'"

Ash Sarkar is not an expert on Nazism. And the BBC should not treat her as one - "Sarkar doesn’t know anything worth knowing about Nazism or German Communism. Her contribution to last night’s episode consisted of a handful of ten or fifteen-second soundbites which managed to be both unilluminating and annoying. She described the leader of the KPD as “definitely a charismatic guy” and “red as Hell”. The scale of the Nazi attack on the KPD, she said, was “insane”. Not one soundbite was longer than fifteen seconds... apparently, Sarkar was chosen because she’s a “contemporary figure” or a “current public figure”. This is completely vacuous. And what makes Sarkar, a Left-wing self-publicist, “a contemporary figure”? The BBC, in a moment of panic that they are not watched by enough young people, have started filling up many of their current affairs programmes with Left-wing activists in their 20s. And that makes her a “contemporary figure”, who can be interviewed in a BBC2 historical documentary programme alongside Professor Sir Richard Evans, author of almost thirty history books, including a 2000-page trilogy on the history of Nazism. No one at the BBC has come up with a remotely plausible argument for her inclusion."

From Congress to classrooms: reframing the Israel narrative - "In Britain, the pro-Israel investigative blogger David Collier wrote this week about a textbook, The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change, 1917-2012, that is used in schools as part of the history curriculum for the 16-and-over public-education exam. It was made available to him by the Zionist Federation.On reading this textbook, Collier found a systematic loading of the narrative to sanitize the Arab war against Israel, disproportionately mention violent Zionist responses and obscure the overwhelming legal, historical and moral Jewish claim to the land.The book is said to muffle the fact that the Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, instead calling the ancient Israelites “settlers” and thus implying that they just happened to live there.Since the West’s animus against Israel is founded upon the chronologically absurd and factually wrong belief that the Palestinian Arabs were the indigenous people of the land displaced by Jewish invaders or “settlers,” this itself programs children to believe the big lie that fuels murderous hatred against Israel and the Jews. But the book warps the narrative much further.For example, it terms Jewish attacks on the British during the Palestine Mandate period “Zionist terrorism,” even though the intended targets were military; and yet it calls the deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians during the so-called “Second Intifada,” when they were being blown to smithereens on buses and in cafes, merely “Palestinian attacks.”It refers to “angry clashes” in Mandate Palestine between Jews and Arabs without explaining that the Jews of Palestine were being subjected to repeated Arab pogroms against which they tried to defend themselves.It even describes as “Arab-Jew clashes” the 1929 Arab massacres of Jews in Hebron, Tzfat and Jerusalem, when dozens of Jews were hacked to death.More astoundingly still, it makes no mention of Hitler’s ally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who did more than anyone else to incite the Arab mobs against the Jews. And so on.America is seeing a similar attempt to indoctrinate schoolchildren into anti-Israel falsehoods and, worse yet, into outright hatred."

Looking back, Gaza pullout was a mistake - "On paper, it seemed like the right solution—the beginning of a process to end the occupation. That’s how it was presented by Sharon too. But immediately after Israel pulled out of there, it turned out the strip wouldn’t be like Singapore—but rather like Benghazi. The Hamas militias had no interest in an organized transfer of the production and real estate assets Israel had left behind. They preferred to build training camps in greenhouses than grow tomatoes there... The economic, social and security situation in Gaza has deteriorated in the years that have passed since the disengagement: Thousands of Gazans have been killed in three wars against Israel, tens of thousands have been wounded, and an unknown number have died due to lack of water, electricity and basic medical services. On the Israeli side, many soldiers and civilians have been killed, communities have been damaged and billions have been invested in fortification and in protecting the border.Our siege worsened the crisis in the strip but didn’t create it. It was created by the fact that the Gazans’ fate was placed—or rather deserted—in the hands of a cruel, violent, illegal and incompetent Islamic terror organization, which was unprepared to rule as a responsible government... Had Israel remained in Gaza, the economic gap between the Palestinians in the strip and the Palestinians in the West Bank would have been narrowed, and a solution would have been found for the transfer of goods and people between Gaza and Hebron. The PA would have maintained its rule—and would have even grown stronger. Tens of thousands of Gazans would be working in Israel, as they did in the past, and the level of violence would have dropped... as long as Israel continues the siege, as long as Hamas continues the terror regime, as long as Egypt remains indifferent and the PA keeps enjoying the bloodshed, no one will be willing to invest the billions of dollars needed to reconstruct Gaza—critical investments which will open a window of hope for the strip’s residents, slightly ease their despair and cool the boiling atmosphere. The vicious circle of bloodshed won’t stop turning on its own. On the contrary, its rounds will only hasten and become more frequent—and more disastrous"

Lucas Lynch - "It was really during the last war in Gaza that I began to examine this conflict on my own. I still don't like Netanyahu and I still think a full withdrawal from the West Bank is necessary and important. But the more I started to dig into the evidence and quiet the slogans all around me, I began to realize more and more just what a completely rotten pack of Russian propaganda lies I had been fed my entire life. And just how much these lies were completely incompatible with anyone that truly cared about helping the oppressed.People appalled by trumps immigration policies should note that in the 1930s it was the Palestinians wearing MAGA hats, literally rioting to stop all immigration of Jews fleeing persecution. Many of them spoke openly about fears of "replacement" – doesn't that sound familiar? It was the Palestinians chanting "Jews will not replace us" long before Nazis yelled it in Charlottesville.If not for this there may have not even been the necessity of two separate nations at all. Being an American I favor multi ethnic democracy is based on common citizenship, not ethnic lineage or religious tribalism. Palestinians could have made different choices and made this a reality, for whom they would have been the primary benefactors of a new nation bringing all of the advanced scientific and technological and ethical progress that instead came to a separate Israel.The unfortunate truth is that Palestinians and most of the Middle East didn't want Jews there, peaceful immigration or no. My childhood wish that one state encompassing everyone really was possible has been destroyed by a hard look at reality, the reality being that there is a non-trivial portion of people in the region for whom any Jewish presence is unacceptable under any circumstances, and this strain of thinking was far more pronounced in the 1930s. Even after the UN decided to create two separate states, the issue could have been stopped there if the Arab nations had decided to recognize the borders drawn. Instead they refused to recognize them, and tried to invade multiple times and destroy the country, in the course of which Israel made territorial gains primarily in completely defensive wars. It is rather odd that these nations did not recognize the authority of the UN on the matter, given that it is the UN resolutions against the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank  - resolutions that I disagree with on some of the specifics, but in intent I basically agree - that they constantly point to as signs of legitimate authority. If the border is drawn by the United Nations were not legitimate, why would these resolutions be gospel? It is either all one or the other."