Saturday, June 15, 2024

Links - 15th June 2024 (2 - Trans Mania)

Thread by @babybeginner on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Thread  Big news! A Southern California school district agreed to a settlement of $360,000 for firing a teacher who “hypothetically” refused to adhere to policies regarding gender ideology.  The word hypothetically was used in the lawsuit because  the situation never actually came up. The teacher, Jessica Tapia, just told district personnel that she would not use false pronouns nor would she allow someone to use the wrong the locker room and she wouldn’t withhold information from parents. She stated that to do so would violate her religious beliefs.  The Jurupa Unified School District did not admit any wrongdoing, but agreed to pay Tapia $285,000, and $75,000 in attorneys’ fees. Tapia’s attorney, Julianne Fleisher stated “We think it sends a strong message that there’s a price to pay when you ask a teacher to lie and withhold information.”  It does indeed. So why was the teacher fired if the situation never came up? She was fired because students found her social media posts and reported her.  I’ve written about children who use power to get adults fired. I call my piece The Lord of the Flies Theory of Millennials. Though my theory is more of a crossover of late Millennials and Gen Z.  I call these children Fly Lords. It’s my pinned thread if you’re curious. They are children who get together en masse to demand things. In this case the firing of the teacher. Well, listening to children’s demands just cost this school district $360,000.  If you’re wondering how to fight back against fly lords, this is how.  I wish this teacher had won just from saying she refused, and not on religious grounds. Refusing to lie should be enough."
California district to pay $360K to teacher fired for not following transgender policies

Thread by @buttonslives on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "NEW STUDY: When activist-researchers find that primarily white teenage girls with a gender dysphoria diagnosis are seeking medical interventions, they conclude that males, asian, black, and hispanic trans-identified youth need more “equitable” access to medical interventions. ๐Ÿงต... A 2023 study by the same authors on cooccurring gender dysphoria and autism, using PEDSnet data, found teenage girls overrepresented and came to a similar conclusion, advocating to "reduce disparities in access to care" for males and "youth of color.""
Since they cannot possibly conclude that white teenage girls are being wrongly overdiagnosed, this is the only possible conclusion

Hazel Appleyard on X - "Non-b!nary teenager gets pregnant, says it is her mother's 'duty' to raise the baby because she didn't put her on pub3rty blockers when she came out at 16. She expects her mother to raise her baby as if it is her sibling, not her actual child. Parents need to say NO to their children WAY more often."

AITAH For Not Wanting To Raise My NB Daughter's Baby? : r/AITAH - " My daughter came to me at 16 and said she was non-binary, but only sometimes. Like, some days she would feel more male than female and somedays she would feel like neither. She wanted me to ask her every day what day it was and then refer to her as that pronoun of the day.  I told her that wasn’t going to fly (Growing up, I spent a lot of time on LJ during the ol’ ‘bun-self’ and ‘zen-self’ ‘zir-self’ days. People who think this is new to this generation are fooling themselves). I told her that I would call her the pro-noun she wanted, and do my best to remember it day to day, but she was going to have to tell me what she wanted for that day. I wasn’t going to play a daily guessing game.  This went on for about a week or two until she finally seemed to grow tired or bored and just said I could call her ‘her’. Though she still identifies as non-binary. Fine. (At least when it was going on she wanted ‘she, he, or they’ — I’m sorry but I couldn’t have done fox-self/fox-them with a straight face).  So that’s the pronoun story and looking back where I think things started to go off the handle. Here’s my real question.  My daughter is now 18, pregnant, and seems to have lost her god damned mind. Or I’m an asshole. You choose.  This year has been a struggle. She wanted to take a break year before she goes to community college, but can’t keep a job. Apparently, retail situations are too phobic against her non-binary state. (My child looks/acts/dresses exactly as a young adult female btw. When I ask how people are being phobic against her she gets as prickly as a cactus so I really don’t know the details.). She’s been through 4 or 5 jobs this year, quit all of them. She won’t consider call centers that aren’t face to face because she doesn’t like to talk on phones, and is apparently looking for a remote job without any luck.  She’s been unemployed since Thanksgiving (she quit her last job on Black Friday, in fact) and I was on the verge of laying down the law, telling her she either needs to go to school this upcoming semester full time or get a full time job or move out with her friends.  But now she’s come to me and she’s 5 months pregnant. She’s very angry at me, says it’s my fault because:
I didn’t put her on puberty-blocking hormones when she came to me 2 years ago.
She believes I am in fact trying to ‘feminize her’ by getting her birth control. (The pill.). She’s been throwing her prescription away.
This is where I might be the asshole. I called her a little idiot. We don’t use that sort of language in my house, and I never call people names—especially my own child— but at that moment I could just see red.  The hormone thing is a non-issue IMO because this is the first time I ever heard of her wanting hormones. What was I supposed to do? Go back in time?  As for the birth control! It’s also the first time I’m hearing anything about this! There are non-pill options that don’t have estrogen. If that was her want, all she had to do was ask and I would have driven her to the doctor myself! Or she could have taken the car she has and done it. She has her own medical card, even! Though to be fair, I don’t know how she would have managed the co-pay without a job. I know for a fact her old high school gave out free condoms like candy because her friends were always giggling over flavored sample packs and even blew a few of them up like balloons and left them around the house one time. She had all the birth control she could ever want and used none of it.  It gets worse.  We’re way past the date of abortion (again, I would have helped her if this had been her wish! We live in an abortion protected state and can afford it!). She’s known she was pregnant since about 2 months and has come to think of her baby like a sibling. She expects me to raise it like it was mine. That this is my duty, in fact, because she says it is my refusal to accept her non-binary state that led to her being pregnant. So she was going to get a brother or sister and I was going to have another child.  You can say my language grew… sterner. Versions of ‘get your head out of your ass’ and ‘congratulations, Mommy, you have some hard decisions to make’ and I said I would absolutely not raise her baby for her.  She also refused to say who the father was. Now that I’ve cooled down I’m really hoping she has a secret boyfriend. She does have some friends who were born male, but now also don’t identify that way. We didn’t even get there as I lost my mind when she said she thinks of her own baby as a sibling and wants me to raise it like my own child.  She’s locked herself in her room loudly wailing, I feel like crap warmed over. She’s been in there for 12 hours, and as she has an attached bathroom, probably won’t be coming out until she gets hungry. Considering it’s been half a day I think she has snacks stored.  I also don’t know where to go from here. Being pregnant sucks and messes with your head, so I’d like to blame that and the fear she must be feeling, but… I have the bad feeling I either raised a spoiled brat or someone with an emerging personality disorder.  So I need to know from people who aren’t emotionally involved, and maybe some people who are more in tune with this whole nonbinary thing than I am.  What do I do to help while also making her responsible for her own child? How can I help my daughter accept she must do basically the most feminine thing you can do (give birth and possibly breast-feed) while being sensitive that she’s non-binary? Am I just a big asshole here?  Typing all this out it feels like my daughter is lost in crazy town. I'm still not raising her baby but at what point do I drag a legal adult to the hospital?
Edit: You might disagree with my choices or wording, but I'm reporting people who call this bait. It's not.
Edit2: It's the middle of the night and she has decided to pack some of her clothes and stay with one of her friends. (One who I suspect is the baby daddy). Before she left she told me that she already called the police and let them know that she was 'leaving of her own free will and was not in danger'. Like I was going to report an 18 year old adult as a runaway or something? It was insulting.  I told her she needs to work out details if she wants to adopt with the father, and she was welcome back home when she had a plan in place.  It was short because I heard her on the way out. I think she just meant to leave without saying anything.  Thank you for your kind comments and advice, Reddit. I'm going to sleep."

Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Difference between a society where trans is real and they are actually effeminate gay men on some kind of gender spectrum and one where masculine bullies put on dresses and push people around for the lulz."
Ryan Dawson @RyLiberty: "America cant build anything anymore"
AMERICAN TRANS *Rachel Levine, Sam Brinton, Dylan Mulvaney*
ASIAN TRANS *?, ?, Treechada Petcharat*

Meme - Hazel Appleyard @HazelAppleyard_: "Man in a dress gets called a man in a dress and cries so hard he has a nose bleed and gets sent home from work.   ๐Ÿ˜ญ"
"Ouchy Ouchy Ouchy
I work with exclusively women. I'm an MTF trans woman, and I'm socially transitioned. I go to work as a woman. I work at a thrift store, I price all the clothes and accessories. I feel comradery with the other women at work- it's so special to me to have that. I really felt like one of the girls. We get two fifteens and a thirty at work. Two smokes and lunch. We all hang out on the stoop in the parking lot, it's so cute. Seven girls, being with each other. One of my coworkers- jenny- has a friend that occasionally drops in on our breaks. She works at the other thrift store down the road. In front of all the other girls she called me a man in a dress. She said a terrible amount of transphobic hateful crap, and none of my chicks said shit. It destroyed me. i cried so hard my nose bled and i feel so ashamed. I feel so small. It made me feel like they all think that way of me. My manager sent me home because I couldnt stop crying. Fuuuuuuck."

Meme - "Being an ally to my local trans community
>be me based Igbt ally
>Live in very left wing college town
>Start flirting with a local cis straight girl I just met
>tell her "wow you pass really well you"
>looking hurt she says "what do you mean"
>Tell her I think she's really brave going out
>She tells me she's not trans
>I tell her I think she should be proud of who she is
>Girl starts screaming and shouting at me
>Tell her not to take her anger out on me because I'm a Igbt ally
Have done this dozens of times. Specifically target shitlib women because I enjoy the cognitive dissonance between them saying there's nothing wrong with being trans and them acting like I've just given them the greatest insult of their lives. I would never do this to an ugly woman though because that would be too cruel. Thoughts guys?"

Meme - Rachael Wong @RachaelWongAus: "You couldn’t make this insanity up if you tried.  Last week, Western Australia Labor Premier @RogerCookMLA  said, “No government is doing more than my Government in relation to family and domestic violence.”  This week, his @walabor  government is trying to pass a law that will allow men to change their legal sex to female, and self-identify into female-only spaces, like bathrooms and refuges.  Here is the Premier on the day the Bill was introduced, pictured with WA Attorney General John Quigley, alongside the bill’s poster boy, Dani (Dean) Laidley.  Laidley is a man who identifies as a woman, who pleaded guilty to stalking his ex-girlfriend and breaching a family violence order, and who reportedly called her a “slut” and a “c*nt” and threatened to run her down in his car.   They are literally using a man who terrorised a woman, to promote a law that will be exploited by predatory men, during a time where there is national outrage about violence against women in this country.   Well, where is the outrage now?  #NoToSelfID #SexMatters #WApol"
Roger Cook: "This week, we introduced legislation to WA Parliament to abolish the Gender Reassignment Board. I want to thank Dylan Green from TransFolk of WA, and Danielle Laidley, who joined me to announce this important piece of legislation."

Meme - "Mother transitions her child at 3 and a half years old. Anyone telling her to stop abusing her kid gets banned"
"Enby 10yo Hormone Questions
My kiddo transitioned to female at 3 5, but then realized they were non-binary at age 8. They still present as a tomboyish female, and have said they'd prefer female puberty, since they have to choose But they don't feel female, they feel very strongly non-binary, and very NOT male I'd appreciate any insight into post -blocker options for similar kids Is there an estrogen -light approach? Where can we learn more?"
[deleted] [deleted]
Squidia-anne MOD: "This is not r/conspiracytheories I think you may be lost"a>

Meme - Jesse Singal @jessesingal: "The Onion has been bad for awhile but it hit a real nadir when it literally just took Things People Were Screaming On Twitter and pretended they were funny. What percentage of the world would have any idea what this was even about?"
"It Is Journalism's Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible"

Meme - Hazel Appleyard @HazelAppleyard_: "OH DEAR LORD. ๐Ÿคฎ   Bloke shows up to his child’s daycare in a MINI SKIRT, flashes his gentleman vegetables, and throws a tantrum calling the director a b-got for not wanting a man in a miniskirt in their daycare.   They really will push and push and push every single social boundary to the point where it is d!sgusting."
"r/TransLater
genital scrutiny at my child's daycare
TRIGGER WARNING
 i'm kinda spinning out right now. i just received a message informing me that another parent at my child's daycare complained that i wore a miniskirt, bent over, and that my "goods" were hanging out.  thing is, i'm tiny, i tuck obsessively, and the skirt is a sports skirt with built in shorts that are the same length as the skirt, which is past mid-thigh. so there is zero chance anyone saw the hen or her eggs. but this message has me super triggered because it means that not only was a parent staring at my genitals, but imagining seeing them sufficiently to complain. and the director is catering to this repulsive fixation.  the message included a reference to a policy against daisy dukes, crop tops, and asks for knee length skirts. thing is, i had been changing into athletic wear after drop off because i thought there might be a modesty culture here. but after seeing at least 3 other women with shorter than knee length skirts, i stopped bothering.  so this "policy" is not being implemented universally and definitely feels targeted and i get the impression the director is pretty bigoted. i didn't have any issues at all with the daycare until i met her on like week 3. (short mom signed him up here)  anyway i am going to look for a better daycare, but i needed to vent i guess. thanks for reading."

Meme - Hazel Appleyard @HazelAppleyard_: "It’s funny how they have to draw these little cartoons because this would never ever happen in real life"
Hot guy: "Trap?! I don't care, you're still hot!"

Opinion | American psychiatrists turn a blind eye to science on trans kids - The Washington Post (aka "Psychiatrists learned the wrong lesson from the gay rights movement") - "In 1974, the science lined up neatly with the demands of gay rights activists. But today, the science of pediatric gender medicine is uncertain, so it doesn’t back the cause the of groups leading the contemporary LGBTQ civil rights movement in the United States. GLAAD has gone so far as to insist that “the science is settled” regarding pediatric gender transition. It is not. In fact, the field of pediatric gender medicine is woefully compromised by a critical lack of quality research. Evidence-based-medicine experts insist that we simply do not know whether gender-transition treatment is safe and effective for minors. Understandably, APA leaders — and other empathetic everyday people — are wary of repeating the mistakes of the past and are inclined to stand with LGBTQ advocates, particularly as conservative groups fight for all manner of restrictive laws that target kids who identify as transgender... It is not a betrayal of gender-distressed young people’s complex needs to demand the highest possible quality of evidence to determine whether prescribing them medications that could rob them of their fertility and sexual function are in their best interest. It is the APA’s responsibility, free from ideology or politics, to make such demands — which are, in fact, in service of these young people’s well-being... The APA has been notably silent on a landmark report published last month that was commissioned by the British National Health Service. Called the Cass Review, it concluded that pediatric gender-transition treatment is based on “remarkably weak evidence.” The report is supported by seven independently conducted systematic literature reviews — the gold standard of scientific evidence. Their findings were in line with those of six previous such reviews, conducted by European and North American investigators and published since 2019. The program for the 2024 APA annual meeting lists only one panel that touches on pediatric gender-transition treatment, titled “Channeling Your Passion and ‘Inner Outrage’ by Promoting Public Policy for Evidence-Based Transgender Care.” The panel notably includes Jack Turban, a University of California at San Francisco child psychiatrist and a vocal supporter of broad access to gender-transition treatment. This week, he lashed out at the Cass Review on X and asserted that the associated literature reviews “scored some of the studies incorrectly.” Turban didn’t mention the reviews deemed a few of his own widely referenced papers to be low quality. The APA’s meeting has a proud history of transforming open debate over LGBTQ-related research and care and should do the same for trans-identifying kids. This should include asking themselves whether LGBTQ activism that once enhanced the understanding of science about this population is now clouding it... I asked APA President Petros Levounis, who like me is a gay man, if the organization was taking into consideration the recent review papers on pediatric gender medicine. “We do look very closely to international research,” Levounis, a psychiatrist, told me. “But this is something that has to also come through U.S. channels before we finalize our opinion.”"
On Twitter he said (now deleted) that he got a lot of ad hominem attacks, which were the lowest rung on the hierarchy of disagreement
Clearly Science works differently in the US. So European research on other things like climate change, trans fats and astronomy must be ignored since the laws of nature work differently in the US

Meme - Moti Gorin @GorinMoti: "I've opposed legislative bans on pediatric medical transition. I think the approach can be counterproductive, for one. However, when I read what leading US clinicians in positions of real power say, I start to second guess myself. This article provides many examples. Here's one:"
"Carl Streed, the research lead for the GenderCare Center at Boston Medical Center and president of the US Professional Association for Transgender Health, clarifies that just because a study is classified as "low-quality" in the report does not mean the data is not robust or rigorous. "It doesn't actually mean the evidence itself is not to be trusted," he explains. "It is just that you have to understand the nuance of the methods to understand the context of the results.""
"Low- quality (or low- certainty) does in fact mean that you cannot trust the results very much. The whole point of grading studies is to determine how confident we can be that they show what they purport to show. The assessment of the methods and the context is part of the grading. As a person of the left it genuinely pains me to see blatant misinformation published in Mother Jones. These doctors are either ignorant of the basics of evidence-based medicine or they have judged that the value of their ends justifies dissembling."
"From motherjones.com: The UK's new study on gender affirming care misses the mark in so many ways"
"I mean look at this. The point of the Cass review and the systematic reviews on which it was largely based was to establish whether or not the interventions in question are "medically necessary evidence-based care." This response just glaringly, painfully begs the question."
"More broadly, Keuroghlian and McNamara both argue that Cass' conclusions undermining the observational studies is itself a form of bias. "The review's conclusions are discriminatory," says Keuroghlian. "It's an intentional misapplication of science to deny a minoritized group access to medically necessary evidence-based care." "Any deviation from basic principles of evidence- based medicine suggests bias," says McNamara."
"What is McNamara talking about? Surely she's aware of the EBM evidence pyramid, with systematic reviews at the top? But here she seems to be claiming that the conclusions of these reviews "deviate" from EBM? Here's an idea: conduct a decent study showing the results you claim."

There is no such thing as a ‘trans lesbian’ - "Now the United Nations is gaslighting lesbians. This week, the UN’s gender-equality organisation, UN Women, seized upon International Lesbian Day to admonish us. ‘Remember’, it declared in a post on X (formerly Twitter), ‘trans lesbians are lesbians, too’... We recently learned that a third of the UK population think that ‘transgender women’ were born female, rather than male. Or at least, they aren’t sure whether transwomen were born male or female.   To be clear, the ‘trans lesbians’ the UN refers to are men who self-identify as women and who are attracted to women. In other words, they are heterosexual men. The vast majority of them remain physically intact as males. For a supposed women’s organisation to declare that these men can be lesbians really is gaslighting on a grand scale. Back in the 1970s, when I told people I was a lesbian, men would often smirk and say they ‘felt like a lesbian inside’. It was a crude, unfunny joke. Today, the men who say this are no longer joking. They are laying claim to an experience that is not theirs. Some even go as far as to invade female-only spaces and prey on lesbians, as happened earlier this year with Jenny Watson. Jenny had been running a highly successful lesbian speed-dating event at a central London pub. The event was a fixture in the local lesbian calendar. It had resulted in countless dates, at least two marriages and an enormous amount of fun.   Men had occasionally attended these events and, since Jenny is a progressive person with lots of trans friends, she didn’t make a fuss about it. It was only after two male attendees behaved in a predatory fashion that Jenny made it explicit that the event is for females only. That prompted activists to complain and led the pub’s new manager to ban the events for not being ‘inclusive’. Thankfully, Jenny managed to fight back with the support of LGB Alliance, of which I am a co-founder. Jenny went all the way to the top and told the pub’s owners that the manager was in breach of the UK’s Equality Act 2010. What many people don’t understand is that the Equality Act explicitly allows for the exclusion of people according to their sex, as long as it’s a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. Excluding men from a lesbian dating event might well be the archetypal legitimate exclusion.   When proper boundaries are not enforced, we see women’s spaces being assaulted, women’s sport being undermined, female prisoners being exposed to danger, and the dignity and agency of women and girls being placed under threat. All of this is happening under the guise of ‘trans inclusion’.  The rest of society will eventually realise what many of us lesbians did decades ago – namely, that lesbians represent the ultimate insult to male vanity. The whole point of lesbianism is that we gain our sexual and emotional pleasure from, and forge our deepest bonds with, other women. Some of us are old dykes, invisible and happily uninteresting to the male gaze. But young lesbians bear the brunt of men’s frustration and aggression at being excluded from their sex lives. That helps explain some of the hideous threats that Jenny has received.   Yet this is not just about men’s sexual frustrations. Those spreading the false doctrine of gender identity are currently in positions of power."

No, United Nations. 'Trans lesbians' are not lesbians - "This last decade in particular has seen a growth in totally made up identities that allow the most boring of individuals to be included in the queer rainbow flag. Somebody who is questioning their sexuality for example; or a person who decides they don’t have any romantic feelings towards another, who is now an ‘aromantic’, or ‘asexual’. These are now included on the ever-growing acronym LGBTQQIA2S+++ which currently more resembles an unbreakable WiFi code than a ‘community’. I was still at school when I was outed as a lesbian and was bullied relentlessly and called the worst of names. I was told I was a freak, asked if I ‘fancied’ all the girls in my class, and was excluded from babysitting in case I ‘infected’ the kids with my perversion.  In the late 1970s, when I left home and was living with a girlfriend, I was physically attacked, my front door graffitied, and sacked from my job, all because of prejudice towards lesbians.   I have been asked a number of times by male passers-by when walking home from a night out with a girlfriend if I would be happy to put on a lesbian sex show for their benefit.  Those that attack, abuse and threaten are, of course, straight men. But now some appear to believe that they can opt into a lesbian identity, despite the fact that they retain all of their male privilege and genitalia.  For these men, lesbians are nothing but a fantasy and a sex toy. The fact that they have now been legitimised by UN Women is sickening."

Meme - Jonathan Kay: "Ontario court system"
"Ontario Court of Justice. Notice to the Profession and Public. Pronouns for Lawyers and Parties. At the beginning of any in-person, virtual or hybrid hearings, when lawyers are introducing themselves, their client, a witness or another individual, they should provide the judge or justice of the peace with each person's name, title (e.g. Mr., Mrs., Mx., Counsel "X") and pronouns to be used in the hearing. If counsel does not provide this information in their introduction, they may be invited by a court clerk to provide this information. At the beginning of each court session, court clerks have been asked by Court Services Division to announce that parties appearing before the court are invited to provide their title and pronouns to the court.
Sharon Nicklas
Chief Justice
Ontario Court of Justice"
Ontario Court of Justice @OntarioOn: "The Ontario Court of Justice has issued a notice to the profession and the public regarding pronouns for lawyers and parties. Read more:"

Meme - "Drag Performance and Panel Discussion. May 17 at 7:30 pm - 9:30 .pm Drag as Decolonial and Anti-Racist Resistance. Join us for a drag performance and academic panel held off-campus at the historic Laurel Packinghouse in the entertainment district in Kelowna. Highlighting the importance of drag as an underexplored site of decolonial and anti-racist resistance and creativity in late capitalism, the event will showcase the contributions of queer of colour performers who are mobilizing the aesthetic dimensions of drag to critique white settler racism and colonialism."

Meme - Lisa's Presentation: Remember, you can't use reason and logic with people that don't know the difference between a boy and a girl."

UFO sightings: an otherworldly history

UFO sightings: an otherworldly history | HistoryExtra

"‘Am I right in saying this is an example historically speaking of culture influencing the way in which political agencies operated?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. Bo doubt about. it I mean UFOs were created out of the Cold War, out of the Cold War tensions. The the UFO idea that we currently have in our minds, that's not to say that odd things hadn't been seen in the sky before um the Second World War, because they certainly had. If we go back to just before the First World War for instance, if you look at any English newspaper or British newspaper, um just before the outbreak of the First World War, don't don't look for flying saucers and UFOs, but you will see story after story about people seeing strange lights in the sky, beams of light coming down to the ground, long elongated objects moving around around that they were convinced were zeppelins sent by the Germans to spy on the British Isles. This is in 1909, 1913, and lots of people are absolutely convinced that this was going on but if you look at the the descriptions, the they're UFOs. And they are the same things that people are now reporting as UFOs. And they are things like stars, meteors, there were no space junk back then but there were certainly balloons and other meteorological things that people because they had, they were worked up and they were anxious and they knew there was a war coming, and they'd been told yeah when the war comes the Germans will be sending their airships over to drop bombs on us, and they were seeing all kinds of odd things in the sky and I think there's a similar situation going on now that, we are all primed to see UFOs. You cannot escape from the subject... 

It's only about 15 years ago, the newspapers were full of stories about alien fleets that had been seen over all the main, major cities of the UK. What did they turn out to be? Formations of Chinese lanterns... People in the UFO community have this odd sort of cognitive dissonance in that A), they say that they don't trust anything, that the government say on the subject, that it's all part of cover up to hide the truth, i.e that the you know aliens have been here and crashed and it's all being kept secret from us, but then again you get someone from the military or from the politician side who who sort of chimes up and says you know I believe that UFOs as alien craft exist and that we should be taking it seriously and those people then are elevated to this sort of special status that because they work for the government therefore they must be telling the truth... 

Lord Mountbatten… he was hugely influential and back in 1950 he spoke anonymously to one of Britain's Sunday newspapers… ‘I believe in flying saucers’ and it was like one of the most important people in the British government has said that um these things are real. And he he described them as like you know they're like the Shackletons coming from Mars to explore Earth. And he really really believed in this for a few years and eventually he went on to become the chief of Defense staff, i.e. the most senior military official in the British government. But I've sort of gone through all his personal papers and you can see the change as he becomes more and more aware of the facts and he talks to some of the military um people who've, who've dealt with reports that have been made to the RAF and the Royal Navy and he becomes more and more skeptical so that by, sort of the early 1960s there's there's a little memo from him to um the chief scientist at that time saying should we open a study of UFOs and flying saucers? And this Chief scientist comes back to him and says um well what would be gained from it? It would be almost like opening a study of whether the Loch Ness monster exists. And you know, we know that there isn't a Loch Ness monster and even if we drained Loch Ness completely and there was no monster at the bottom of it, um they'd say that it had nipped out for a few minutes while we were doing the draining and it's now back in...

‘There's absolutely clear correlation between films and TV programs about UFOs and alien life, and sudden spikes in the number of reports that have been passed on to the authorities. I mean it's it's a very crude metric. You can't say it's like cause and effect, because there's this continual drip drip drip now. Be very difficult to make any correlation now, but certainly looking at those earlier decades, as I mentioned 1977, 1978 with the release of Close Encounters, I mean the Ministry of Defense, the number of reports that they received I think literally tripled. It went from sort of an average of a couple of hundred per year to you know heading for a thousand and there was even, I remember seeing reports in there saying, you know I saw an object in the sky over London that looked exactly like the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind... 

There is this correlation and also it's not just with films and pop culture because the,  the last statistic we had from the Ministry of Defense files was 2008 to 2009, that sort of period. And that's when they decided that it was costing an awful lot of money to keep tabs on this subject and this is during the first period of um the financial crash of that time when Gordon Brown was prime minister… then people make Freedom of Information requests to see this stuff and it's costing an awful lot of money, so they just pulled the plug. But 2008 to 9 again was the most massive spike of all, even taking into account the 1970s with the film, the late 1990s with the X-Files, Independence Day. A massive increase in in numbers then. But 2008 to 9 there wasn't any big film but what there was was all the publicity about the release of the files at the National Archives...

The whistleblower… I just read this. And I just thought here we go again. Because this is nothing unique if we go back to 1989 there was a guy called Bob Lazar that came forward. Very similar to the current whistleblower who said that he'd worked to Area 51, his security clearance was so high that um no one could check his credentials and he'd actually seen these grounded flying sources that the American government were secretly back engineering etc etc. So so he, this current person that's come forward is just the latest in a long line of so-called whistleblowers, the story that the American government has got secretly hidden away in a hanger somewhere in the desert or in Area 51 is now preferred isn't a new story. It it first surfaced in 1950. 

Um as long ago as that, that's 73 years ago when a guy called Frank Scully published a book called Behind the Flying Saucers and he said that he'd heard from two top secret  scientists who worked on the project that the Americans had retrieved I think it was six or seven crashed discs that had come down in the Arizona desert, that they were covered in hieroglyphs, the American um army had secretly removed them, and that triggered off whole similar series of questions and statements as like what we're seeing today, and this was three years after Roswell. And that story is a good story. It's effectively an urban legend. That's what it is, it's been classified as an urban legend by Professor Jan Brunvand who is the inventor of you know the phrase urban legend. It's called the landed martians. And and the legend is that the American government have secretly relieved this crash. So this guy that's come forward is is repeating a very well-known urban legend that has been circulating for at least 70 years. And the fact is he, if you actually pare down what he's saying, where's the evidence? Has he seen the evidence? And when you actually look carefully at what he said, no. He's heard from someone else that this is the case. He hasn't actually seen any of this. 

So basically he's spreading a friend of a friend story. It's a classic urban legend, it's like alligators in sewers and phantom hitchikers etc etc. And the and this simple idea that because he used to work in US intelligence, therefore he must be telling the truth. I find that bizarre. So why should we believe this hoary old tale that's been regurgitated every few years and that dates back to 1950? But because there's this sort of bandwagon rolling and people are stressed out, they're anxious because of the cost of living crisis, the aftermath of Covid. Isn't it nice to think that somewhere hidden away in the hangers there are these fantastic spaceships of aliens that have ridden across the universe like the seventh cavalry to, to rescue us? It, it's too good to be true’...

'All you've got to do is apply common sense to it. I mean just think. If all these spacecraft had come here and crashed, why have they all crashed in the United States? For instance why have none crashed in North Korea or Venezuela? And there is not a single subject that all the governments of the world agree on. You only have to go and listen to the meetings of the United Nations to see this. So are you telling me that all the countries of the entire world got together and agreed on one subject to hide the fact we're being visiting by aliens from the general public. It just does not make sense, there's got to be a more common sense explanation'"

Links - 15th June 2024 (1 - History Extra Quoting)

History Extra podcast: The Mongols: everything you wanted to know on Apple Podcasts - "'The Mongols are not the only civilization in the world at this time who rear their children to shoot, to shoot bows or other ranged weapons. Most societies will raise their children to shoot some kind of ranged weapon, whether it's a slingshot or a light bow or a long bow or other, other such weapons. And so many agricultural societies were capable of offering, returning fire, shooting back when the Mongols shot at them. And the Mongol seem to have been particularly, several sources said the Mongols were fairly nervous fighting large formations of crossbows. In fact when a Papal legate went to visit the Mongols, partly to conduct diplomacy, although of course he was also, tried to sort of work out how their war machine worked and therefore how to break it, he came back, one of his top tips for any commander in future marching to fight the Mongols was to equip themselves with crossbows. Because something that armies, particularly armies such as in the Crusader states were very good at, was to equip themselves with very very large shields. The size of a good sized table in modern day um parlance as it were. And they had lined these these these um huge shields up and the crossbow then shoot through the gaps. It's a very hard formation for the Mongols to break. And crossbows have a long range. The disadvantage of the crossbow of course is that you can only shoot maybe one or two bolts a minute and it'll be less than that if you're maneuvering at the same time whereas the Mongols, even if they are maneuvering can loose five, six, seven possibly more arrows in a minute. So the Mongols have a very faster rate when it comes to shooting arrows, whereas crossbows on the other hand have very strong penetrative power. There's no armor around in this era that can stop a crossbow bolt and that would also go some way to explaining why the Mongols were nervous of soldiers armed with crossbows...
There was a relative of Chinggis Khan among the Mongol besiegers and that relative was killed as part of the fighting. Now resisting the Mongols and refusing to submit to them was seem to be a very serious crime, a very serious problem by the Mongols. Killing a member of Chinggis Khan's family, that is a much bigger deal, even so. And the Mongols are famous for, famously decreed that because of that not only would the garrison and everyone inside the walls of that stronghold be killed, but every living thing, down to the last bird would be killed in the surrounding area, just to make the point that, this community had not merely resisted the Mongols and their perceived rights to rule the world, but they had dared to harm a member of Chinggis Khan's family and so the consequences are that much higher...
People have wondered why the Mongol invasion stopped where they did. And in many areas it's not, it's not um armies that are stopping them. It's the landscape. The Mongols are a nomadic people. They need vast areas of grazing and I mean even an army of say 10,000 troops, by Mongol standards isn't particularly large. It will still have vast herds of of sheep and goats and horses. Not to mention all the wagons they um bring with them. And these animals all need grazing. And in some parts of what is today Eastern Europe there is such grazing and that's possible. But once you get into, get, the further you get West, you start to hit hit thick areas of deciduous forest and mountain, and it's much less conducive to those vast area, those vast areas of grazing required by Mongol armies. So historians have speculated that even if the Mongols did invade Western Christendom, they may not have been successful. Not because their armies would have been stopped in battle necessarily, but simply because their way of life couldn't continue in that region and people have made similar argu, arguments for Southeast Asia, because jungle regions, and again thick forest, it's just not suitable for a nomadic way of life'"

The triumph of Joan of Arc | HistoryExtra - "'What Joan of Arc did was to persuade the French that they could win. Napoleon once said uh that morale is three quarters of a war. Only the other quarter is numbers, tactics, and the rest. And that is quite an interesting statement by a great master of the Art of War and it's very much borne out by the story of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc did not command armies, she did not, except in one important case which I'll come to, she did not determine strategy. That was done by professional uh soldiers who found her rather uh interfering and a bit of a nuisance and tried to form their strategies when she was asleep or somewhere else. She didn't even fight herself. She told her judges at her trial that she had never ever killed a man. She said that she carried her standard in her hand so that she wouldn't be able to use her sword arm. So although she wore a sword she never drew it in anger...
The English had never succeeded in getting a foothold in French occupied territory in France, except under cover of a French Civil War… in the 1450s. Of course England was just beginning its own Civil War and that really put an end to any hope of recovery... It was very difficult for the English to imagine how an army that had achieved these extraordinary things and occupied much of northern France could possibly be defeated without treachery or gross incapacity. There wasn't much treachery. There was clearly gross incapacity. But the English would have lost out in any event… the English did not like paying taxes in the 15th century any more than they like paying taxes now. They therefore persistently refused to vote the taxes that were necessary to defeat the French/ It's arguable that England simply didn't have the economic capacity uh to raise taxes on the scale that would have defeated the French, but they were never prepared uh to even make an attempt at it. They took the view, and Parliament definitely took this view from the later years of the reign of Henry V onwards, they took the view that the conquest of France was a personal affair of the, of the English kings. Uh they claimed to be kings of France. This was a French Civil War. It was nothing to do with the English... that was an attitude which they maintained right up to the end of the 1420s and there were traces of it well beyond'"

Great Reputations: Oliver Cromwell | HistoryExtra - "‘It's not too far to call him a Puritan Jihadi if only because I've actually done it myself. You can use that kind of expression because first Cromwell divides the world into the friends of God and the enemies of God. And he does that right from the beginning after his conversion. And that means that the enemies of God deserve no mercy. He harries royalists mercilessly even before the Civil War breaks out. And once it breaks out he really enjoys killing. His very very first uh armed engagement which involves shots or blows being exchanged is almost a year into the Civil War in Lincolnshire. And he describes exultantly how he and his men chase the defeated royalists on horseback for six miles, doing execution on them. And that kind of attitude and that phrase runs through his entire career. He likes killing enemies, and his enemies are God's enemies. And I can't come up with a neater definition of Jihadi than that'"

Great Reputations: Cleopatra | HistoryExtra - "'Arab Scholars who don't have this very Western tradition, the Roman tradition. And they tend to see her as much more of as an intelligent woman, she's an author. She makes much more calculated decisions. Whereas we, because we've been influenced by Plutarch and then on by Shakespeare, we tend to see her as an emotional person who's guided by her heart and not her head. But actually I, I've always think that… the two alliances she makes with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony are very sensible political decisions. She couldn’t have known that Julius Caesar was going to be assassinated and she picked the wrong side with Mark Anthony but you probably would do. On paper he was the better, the better choice I think and she went for the better choice. It just happened to be wrong. So we've just got into the habit of thinking of her as as not a particularly intelligent person but a person driven by emotion rather than a brain but I suspect that she was really clever. She wouldn't have stayed on the throne as long as she did if she wasn't really clever... Artists have been inspired by the story of Cleopatra from quite early on but they've always tended to depict her as a sort of contemporary beauty because this assumption again that she's beautiful, that we're nowhere told that she's beautiful. We're told that she has a lovely voice but we're not told that she's beautiful and she's obviously massively charismatic I think but artists have depicted her with their own ideas of beauty because they can't imagine that she would have been able to attract these men unless she was beautiful, slightly forgetting the fact that she's also ruling a potentially very very wealthy country. So she had her different attractions... It just seems to happen quite often doesn't it with female rulers, that they attract attention and not necessarily for their own achievements, but for the wrong things. And we focus on the fact that they're female, rather than the fact that they are rulers. The Egyptians themselves didn't do this. I mean Cleopatra’s Ptolemaic is right at the end of the dynastic age but throughout ancient Egypt it was possible to have a female pharaoh. And once they were crowned that was it. They were the king, the female king. And the Egyptians were okay with that. But we suspect that there are a lot of women who actually ruled Egypt on behalf of younger sons and who did all the work, but are completely lost in history. And we can't see them, so the few that actually come to us, the four as female rulers, there very few of them... for some reason we choose to focus on the things that don't matter rather than the things that did matter at the time'"

Rocket women: America’s first female astronauts - History Extra podcast - "'Not all of them were in uniform and some of the things that they experienced, just like all, most women are not in uniform and everything. I think a great example of this is the infamous makeup kit. So every now and then the NASA history office will share a picture of the makeup kit and it gets all these opinions and I think most people just kind of go: ugh, I can't believe NASA would think to do that. But the reality is not every single woman was against having makeup in space and I can completely understand that. You know, they were public figures and cameras were on them for most of the time they were in space. And so I don't know about you but when I go do a public appearance I definitely want some makeup and so I completely understand maybe some did want it while others didn't'"

Great Reputations: Napoleon | HistoryExtra - "'It's really a very revolutionary vision. He's not there because of who his dad was. He's not there because of the bloodline. He's not not there because of an existing hereditary principle. He's made it happen because he wants it, because he can. And as a result that kind of destabilizes the whole principle of monarchy that other European powers you know have been, that have been at war with revolutionary France since, since 1792'"

Archaeology’s golden age: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'If you think think about for example, if you were to excavate in in Egypt or in Iraq. You didn't bring your whole team you hired people on the spots to work for you. And often these people had significant amount of experience with excavation, but again they're not remembered as archaeologists. So for example Leonard Woolley worked with M, who's the man who's often remembered as his foreman or as his main fixer for 40 years. So this man had 40 years experience in archaeology. But if you talk about him or if people write about him they always talk a bit about him as Leonard Woolley’s foreman but actually he had a crucial role. He was probably more like the field director or the co-director of the project, but we don't think about it in that way. So it's not just about including women but it's including all kinds of different communities. And about um including also the people perhaps who cooked. They're also part of the team. So what is it about archaeology that wants to create this exclusive club and also wants to make it very very narrow. And everybody has to look like the man with the hat and the whip in order to be an archaeologist"

Shakespeare: Past Master | 6. Macbeth | HistoryExtra - "'It was really common across Europe to to sort of look at skulls and the skull was a contemplative object. You know it was a Momento Mori as it's known. And you can see it in paintings, poets might have a skull on their desk, you know to kind of think about their own mortality, to remind them that you've got to live your life because you're going to end up like that. And even in Montaigne’s essay that I was talking about he talks about how the ancient Egyptians used to bring out an entire skeleton during their feasts to remind them to eat even more and to enjoy themselves like Epicurians because you're going to end up dead one day … we sanitize death really and many of us have never seen a real skull.'...
'In the 18th century Hamlet would have been seen quite differently from how he would have been seen in the uh restoration period. Hamlet is sort of picked apart by people like Samuel Johnson and uh and Voltaire who think that ghosts are ridiculous and that how can you put some, such a stupid device in a play that's asking really big important questions. What's really interesting is the Globe did a world tour of Hamlet um back in 2014 to 2016. And they went into about 150 countries. And we sent a couple of researchers along to do some interviews with audience afterwards. And how Hamlet is received in different parts of the world depends on beliefs and customs, there are some cultures who ghosts for them are real. They represent ancestry. And so the ghost of old Hamlet was hugely charged in some parts of the world and made the play even more believable. And yet in the west we're so skeptical about ghosts and so we kind of almost excuse that aspect of the play... When you you go out and see Hamlet being performed around the world through a kind of global appropriation of Shakespeare you see very different aspects of the play being highlighted and Hamlet himself coming across as a crybaby or as as whiny'"

Boston Tea Party | 1. Tea and taxes | HistoryExtra - "'The rights of Parliament were something that they had fought for in the 17th century and you know the idea that Parliament could violate British rights didn't make any sense, because Parliament was, you know the bearer of British rights against monarchical overreach. And so British people felt hey the wise men of parliament ought to be able to make laws for everyone throughout the Empire, Americans ought to have no problem with that. They are virtually represented, you know there are plenty of places in Great Britain that are not, you know, that that don't necessarily have perfect representation in accordance with their population. Rotten boroughs versus large cities that only had two members, right. Nevertheless right these wise men of Parliament had the foresight to represent everyone's interests. And so they didn't understand the Americans’ argument  that just because the American colonies weren't directly represented in Parliament, that that ought to be some kind of problem. But the Americans had their own Colonial legislatures which taxed them, made laws for them. They were okay with that arrangement. These were local members of the colonial legislatures who understood their grievances and interests and economic capabilities. You know from the American perspective, those were the people who should be making decisions about who taxed colonists. Parliament should have had nothing to do with that. Parliament might have to regulate trade for the entire British Empire and they could obviously make determinations about where troops were sent, about diplomacy, about all sorts of other things, but the colonists really objected to the idea that Parliament ought to be able to raise direct taxes on the colonies. Americans in general had less of a tax burden than British subjects back on on the British Isles. And so the parliament is trying to rebalance that in the wake of the Seven Years War and charge the American colonists a little bit of money… hey, we fought a war on your behalf, we ought to be able to collect some tax revenue from you as well... In the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years War, you know the British Empire has been triumphant. If you had asked most American colonists whether they felt loyal to the British Empire and to King George III and his wife, they would have said yes. They were proud British subjects'...
'The Navigation Acts had been in place for many years and the colonists would occasionally grumble about them, ignore them, smuggle in defiance of them. But things really come to a head in 1765. Well 1764 and 1765 with Parliament passing the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act. Uh the Sugar Act was actually going to lower duties on molasses to the point that it wouldn't be as profitable to smuggle but still some Americans are like, wait we still want to be able to trade freely with French sugar Islands etc. But then it's really the Stamp Act that seems almost perfectly positioned to create outrage among the American colonists. It taxes legal documents, it taxes newspapers, it taxes dice and playing cards. So in other words tavern goers, journalists or printers really and lawyers are the ones that you're particularly angering. You know and also seaports and merchants, right. Like customs documents having to do with that. So it's directly impinging on the people who are the most vocal to protest against these direct taxes. And so there are protests all up and down the Eastern seab board in objection to the Stamp Act in 1765’"
Americans today keep going on about how income tax is bad. But they hate(d) all forms of taxes

Caesar: Death of a Dictator | Master of his fate | HistoryExtra - "‘Her first meeting with Julia Caesar has been much mythologized. But what really happened there?’
‘She had to come back in a sort of clandestine fashion because she she wasn't in Egypt or she wasn't in Alexandria at that time. Ptolemy’s faction were in control of Egypt, were in control of Alexandria. Hence this whole story about her sneaking in to the palace wrapped in a carpet. Now the carpet is very cinematic, it's it's very dramatic. it's, I suppose looks like it's it's a sort of feasible for somebody to to carry a rolled up carpet uh with somebody uh wrapped up inside it. But it's a mistransation from the Greek. It's actually a sort of linen bed sack’"

Caesar: Death of a Dictator | The dogs of war | HistoryExtra - "This is the *something* Denarius of Brutus and uh if you look at it, the first thing which strikes you, is that we have Brutus's own portrait on the obverse. Which is absolutely amazing, given the fact that when Caesar did it, it was controversial. This is only two years later'...
‘Although Octavian was seeking to establish himself as Caesar's Heir, his first battle was not against Caesar's assassins, but with the formidable Mark Anthony, who was also in the Pro Caesar camp. In 43 BC, at Mutina in the province of Cisalpine Gaul, Octavian teamed up with the forces of Rome's two consuls to defeat Anthony, who himself had been besieging the third leading assassin, Decimus’"

Caesar: Death of a Dictator | The evil that men do | HistoryExtra - "Cleopatra leaves the battle, Anthony follows her cos he he wants to know where she’s going, what's going on. That is presented as they ran, they they fled, they abandoned their forces. But it's not for another year until Octavian goes to Egypt to finish things off and and during that that time, that year, there is a lot of diplomatic activity going back and forth between Cleopatra and Octavian, Anthony and Octavian. And this is a really interesting time because according to our sources Anthony, in the wake of the Battle of Actium, he tries to to gather up more troops from various places but they are understandably not so seen to to align themselves with him and he has something akin to a nervous breakdown. And he goes off into seclusion and spends a lot of time sort of feeling very sorry for himself and wondering how on earth has it come to this. While he's doing that, Cleopatra has clearly decided that their partnership has worn out its welcome. It no longer serves her. So for all that they do seem to have a lot of love and a lot of affection for each other, and a lot of passion as well, apparently, when it comes down to it what Cleopatra values more is her kingdom her dynasty and her children. She is prepared to sacrifice Anthony in order to ensure the survival of those things. So she is engaging with Octavian separately to Anthony. She's saying to him what do you want from me, what do you want me to do. I will give you Anthony. Or I will abdicate and retire to India and my children can rule instead of me. I can be loyal to you now instead of Anthony. And so she gives him a lot of options about how to try and ensure the survival of of Egypt as an independent Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Dynasty as an independent dynasty but Octavian is is not really taken with any of those things because what he's looking at are the the flashing pound signs... the Egyptian people are still very loyal to Cleopatra. After Cleopatra's death they they pay Octavian money to ensure that he doesn't melt down all of her statues... Cleopatra uses Anthony's feelings to manipulate him. She sends a message to him to tell him that she has committed suicide in the hope that he will commit suicide and and that removes him from the situation so she can negotiate with Octavian. And it works. He he gets the message. He he attempts to take his own life. He makes a bit of a hash of it so he doesn't die immediately. He has time to receive another message, possibly Cleopatra had second thoughts about this. Um that she's not actually dead, so so he goes to her and dies in her arms. And her response to this, she's she's heartbroken. So although politically and strategically she wanted him out of the way, he's still been her her lover her husband for a decade, he's still the father of three of her children and he's still bleeding all over her as he dies and the fact that she is so emotional about it when there's no one there to see apart from um uh enslaved people. And and as as far as uh ancient uh Greeks and Romans are concerned they're basically furniture anyway. So she's not performing for Octavian or anyone else. She's genuinely emotionally distraught'...
‘We know that she died and two of her handmaidens died with her, so this this immediately makes the asp story a little bit suspect, because trying to get a snake to bite three people in in quick succession, is both difficult to get a snake to do that, to cooperate with you, but also they just wouldn't have enough venom to to to kill three people that way. So there are different accounts from the very beginning uh in in antiquity, nobody was really sure… there was the snake story but there was also poisoned ointment, poisoned hair pin. Cleopatra was very experienced with with botany and poisons and and toxicology, and pharmacy. So there are accounts of her doing experiments and and trying to find out which poisons are best for, for which situation’...
'If Caesar had lived… the ultimate outcome might have been the same as what we got, which is to say the Roman Republic becomes the Roman monarchy, what we call the Roman Empire. But there might have been a different outcome. Caesar was not a healthy man. We know that Caesar suffered either from epilepsy or from a series of mini strokes, it's very difficult to diagnose this from our distance. One of the things that Cicero said, and he said many different things, was: why did they bother assassinating him? He was going to die soon anyhow. He might well have died in the East, and we don't know what would have happened then. The Roman Republic was fated to change. It had to change for a variety of reasons, but it wasn't fated to become a monarchy and it might have remained as an oligarchy, a reformed oligarchy. An oligarchy that brought in provincial notables as Pompey and Caesar had begun to do. But the Empire didn't have to be governed by one man, it could have been governed by committees as many empires had done. So if Caesar had not been assassinated that was a possible outcome as well. That it might have saved the Roman Republic in a way that another generation of Civil Wars couldn't have. The other generation of Civil Wars just swept everything uh out of the way so that's another reason that it mattered. Another reason that the assassination of Julius Caesar is so important is is not political or pragmatic so much as symbolic. It's one of the greatest symbols of assassination in history and the assassins claimed that they were killing a tyrant. They weren't just killing somebody who was trying to reform the Roman political system, they were killing a tyrant, and in my opinion they had some justification to say that. Whatever Caesar's original motivations and there's no reason to think that he grew up wanting to become the Tyrant of Rome, he really was flirting with... It's a tragedy that the assassins did not have the ruthlessness and the political cunning to make the assassination stick and to save the Republic. But if they could have saved the Republic and then if they had been willing to reform the Republic, and that's a very big if, that would have been a good thing for the world, if the world had been saved another generation of Civil War and everything that came afterwards'"

Nazi Germany: the myth of the innocent bystander | HistoryExtra - "Indifference and ignorance come in alongside impotence, because people find it easier to turn away, not to see the scenes of the crime and to sort of say it's dreadful but I don't want to know any more about it, I can't do anything about it. It's just awful, but what can I do? And I think that's such a common reaction to violence on that scale'...
‘Were there examples of people who actively resisted or examples of individuals kind of wrestling with the dilemma of what to do as these atrocities were unfolding?’
‘I think you've got to distinguish between the peacetime years and the wartime years, and it changes obviously quite radically once Germany is at war. During the peacetime years I think a lot of people managed to lead quite a double life. I've got examples of people who are doing absolutely the right Nazi things in public and still inviting Jews into their home, into social events in private, particularly if they were affluent, well off, lived in a nice house with a large garden, neighbors couldn't see, wouldn't comment... if you were in far more constrained circumstances, an ordinary working class mother whose husband is in a concentration camp for having engaged in communist activities and your kids are at school and at serious risk, you are going to conform and it's not going to be easy for you to want to say anything you shouldn't say and also be denounced… during war time it's extraordinary, it's so difficult because everyone, every German family has someone, some relative, some friend who's been called up to fight at the front. The Fatherland is at war and 17 or 18 million men were called up to fight at the front, of those fighting at the front certainly hundreds of thousands were involved in the persecution and mass murder of Jews on the Eastern Front/ We can't get exact figures, historians debate the exact figures, but either facilitating or participating in mass murder and certainly absolutely certainly witnessing, knowing about it, writing about it, writing home about it, so that across Germany news was coming in about atrocities on the Eastern Front. What do you do about it? Most people where you can see evidence of knowledge record it in their diaries almost as an isolated, so and so told me, and then go on back to their daily lives’...
'It's totally self-contradictory when you look at people's own accounts of their own lives in Denazification reports for example. They very often combine lots of things. They say I never knew anything about it and yet I tried to help a Jewish person. There are so many accounts of I tried to help a Jew despite not having known anything about it... One of the real shifts comes with the trials of key Nazis and the trials of major concentration camps you know through the 60s to some extent in the 70s, where the notion of who is a perpetrator is narrowed and narrowed and narrowed until the perpetrator is seen as either a frontline killer or somebody at the top would’ve given the orders which people had to obey and so that sort of almost means everybody else must have been merely an Innocent bystander…  A whole new construction of Nazi society is born which effectively excludes most of the population from having been complicit or in some way more actively involved in perpetration'"

Why did medieval Europe become Christian? | HistoryExtra - "'If one were a Christian in the third century or fourth, you still assume the old gods exist. They don't disappear for you…  Anthony of Egypt… for him the old gods just become demons. But they don't disappear. The long shadows of the old Gods still follow Christians everywhere they go. So they don't think of the universe as totally Christian, it's still full of these old gods... One of the great seductive achievements of religion as I say earlier is a denial of history… if you are someone now who thinks that, say Christian or Muslim, whatever, you are exactly the same kind of person when you pray as someone who prayed a thousand years ago. That there's a continuity, that not just a continuity, it's the same kind of idea. That's not history… the idea that Christ is even important, fades, in much of the early medieval world... For a lot of people in the west what it means to be Roman without an Empire is to be Christian...
One of the great myths of sort that the Battle of Poitiers and all that that Islam was going to sweep through the West. No it wasn't. I mean if nothing else most Western writers just thought initially thought of Islam as a form of heresy'"

On the trail of a Nazi war criminal | HistoryExtra - "'It may be hard for people who haven't looked at World War II, but not every Nazi who went to a concentration camp to serve liked the work. Some were sadists and they enjoyed it. Some were pathological and they enjoyed it. But for many it was not considered a great assignment. It was out in Poland, the winters were freezing, the summers were, were hot. That was bad for the prisoners but also those who were at the camp… this is terrible, we get infected with the very same diseases in the camp, we have problems with typhus. No one likes it. We don't get extra pay... He volunteered for extra time in picking those who would live and die. That's something that a lot of the the doctors hated but Mengele said give me more time doing that...
South America was a popular destination first of all because it was far away… Although Argentina, which was the country that most of the Nazis went to was technically neutral in World War II, it was really the largest Nazi listening post for intelligence outside of Europe. And Juan Peron and Eva Peron… they were very pro-Nazi, they accepted Germans. There was a large German community inside of Argentina and that part of the German community that was in South America thought that the Germans had been punished too much after the war. They had paid what they called Victor's Justice. The Allies won the war, they put all of these Nazis on trial for war crimes and if it had been the other way around and Germany had won the war maybe they would have put on trial the British pilots firebombed Dresden and the American pilots who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki...
He started to feel as though the hunters, the Nazi Hunters, the Americans, the British, the others were looking for him weren't that interested. So much so he was so confident of this that at one point in the mid-50s he walks into the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires and says by the way my name is not really Helmut Gregor, that's the fake name that he had arrived on a fake passport in 1949. My real name is Josef Mengele. I'd like a passport in my real name and nobody in the West German Embassy said, you're German, at the right age for somebody who served in World War II, you're living here in Argentina, you arrived under a fake name and you're asking for this name. I'll check to see if it's on the Wanted list. It's a remarkable bit of incompetence and apathy that allows him to spend time in Argentina with, in great style and in great comfort... [He] felt so comfortable that not only did he get a legal document in his real name but a couple of years later in 1958 he's listed in the Argentine phone book on Buenos Aires under his real name which is remarkable. All you needed to do was know which city to look in and you would have found the name of Mengele there...
There had been sightings of him over a period of time and there were these books that had come out. There were movies about Mengele made essentially. The Marathon Man, Boys from Brazil, in which the common perception was that he's hiding somewhere in the jungle surrounded by, you know killer dogs and armed guards, riding around in a Mercedes limousine and being funded by his family. And that image of the fugitive is one of the reasons he got away. Because instead of doing that he was actually living a very low life. He had gone into the poorest parts of Brazil, he'd gone into the poorest barrios outside of Sao Paolo. He wasn't the superhuman Nazi fugitive living the Hollywood version of a Nazi existence. He was the Nazi who was doing anything to survive and and that kept him free in many ways'"

Friday, June 14, 2024

Links - 14th June 2024 (2 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

Liam Neeson Criticized For Killing 31 Innocent Human Traffickers Just To Get Back One Hostage | Babylon Bee - ""We are absolutely disgusted by this rampage of violence against innocent human traffickers trying to make a living," said U.S. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. "One measly little hostage is no excuse for Neeson's horrific actions."  According to sources, Neeson began hunting down the human traffickers after they kidnapped his daughter to sell as a sex slave. "Terrorists violently taking his daughter to rape is simply no justification for violence," said British politician Jeremy Corbyn. "We called for an immediate cease-fire when Neeson began his genocidal campaign, and demanded he instead spend the next year negotiating with the traffickers while they raped his daughter. Moreover, we condemn in the strongest possible terms Neeson's failure to give food and electricity to the people holding his daughter hostage. His behavior has no place in civilized society." Despite the hostage rescue operation being successful, several international bodies, including the United Nations, castigated Neeson for the collateral damage he caused. "He should have shot the terrorists in the legs," said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. "We have issued an immediate arrest warrant for Neeson, and vow to hold him accountable for his totally unnecessary use of violence against poor, helpless terrorists. Just because they are holding your daughter hostage does not give you the right to resort to violence.""

Anthony's answer to If Israel does not allow Palestinian workers to return to work in Israel, what is that going to do to the economy and stability of the Palestinian Authority? - Quora - "Imagine you lived in a semi-detached house. Your next-door neighbour was a waste of space. But you felt sorry for him.  You let him use your electricity, gas and water all for free. You gave him a job where you paid him significant wages, way more than he would get anywhere else.  One day that neighbour came next door at 5am and raped and killed your daughter. Then after your neighbour did that, he went into the front garden laughing and cheering what he had just done. Then to add insult to injury he started making up lies about you saying he only raped and killed your daughter as you were brutally oppressing him and he was in fact the victim in this scenario…  Tell me, seriously, would you ever give a single shit about helping that neighbour ever again? What if that neighbour started screaming you must help me I am human. I need your free shit and work money you were giving me. What then. Would you help him….  The Palestinians have ruined any chance of working in Israel again.  Luckily Gaza has a 10-mile land border with Egypt. They can go and try and get work and receive help from the Egyptians if they can. But strangely enough, the Egyptian Muslims hate the Gazans even more than the Jews do."

‏Let’s talk about the differences between Israeli society and Palestinian society - YouTube - "I have a lot to say about the lies of the Palestinians and about the history of the conflict, but let's talk about the main difference between Israeli society and Palestinian Society. Israel wants to free Israeli children and women who were kidnapped from their homes, and young Israelis who were dancing at a party. The Palestinians want to free terrorists, who killed Israeli civilians. That is the difference between Israeli Society, a democratic Society that cherishes life, and Palestinian society, an Islamistic society that cherishes death. Their words, not mine. If you don't get that, you are as smart as a pro Palestinian students at Colombia University"

Doug Hensley's answer to Why doesn't Israel agree to open the borders of Gaza for them to receive food, medicine and other necessities? - Quora - "Hamas operatives just raided a hospital and took all their fuel and anything else they wanted. UNWRA tweeted a complaint, then retracted it. (At gunpoint, no doubt).  All necessities sent into Gaza will either be consumed on the spot under the watchful eyes of armed men NOT answerable to Hamas, or they will be requisitioned by Hamas.  But Egypt controls the Rafah crossing. It is up to Egypt what do do at that crossing.  The US didn’t open up the front line along the Rhine for Germany to receive food, medicine, and other necessities while preparing to once and for all overthrow Hitler. Ya think?"

"Let Me FINISH My Sentence!" Julia Hartley-Brewer CLASHES With Palestine MP Over Hamas Assassination - YouTube
Petition calls on TV host to resign after 'Islamophobic' comments - "the presenter came under fire and was labelled ‘unprofessional and rude’ during an interview with Palestinian MP Dr Mustafa Barghouti."
Muslims are bigger victims than women, especially white women, so it is good for the former to interrupt the latter. Which is why the left, which usually champion men over women, slammed her, even though he refused to answer her question and deployed whataboutism. Of course, it doesn't help that she condemned Islamist terrorism, since the left supports Hamas
Journalists are supposed to be neutral, yet he kept trying to get her to make declarations. OTOH, he is a government representative, yet he was so cagey

Just ignore Sarah Jama's keffiyeh. Next she'll be wearing a turban - "Given the modern left’s fixation on intersectionality, one might imagine that it’d be near impossible for a female, Black, disabled politician to get thrown out of an NDP caucus. But Sarah Jama somehow managed the task. In 2021, two years before becoming the MPP for Hamilton Centre, Jama likened Zionists to Nazis, and claimed that Israel was killing people all over the world, including right here in Canada. When asked about this bizarre outburst, Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles meekly explained that, hey, we *all* find ourselves in situations “where maybe we didn’t use the right choice of words,” right? And besides, that was the old Jama — the one who wrote for a communist magazine and got arrested at a political demonstration. Surely, she’d be cleaning up her act now that she sat in Ontario’s legislature. Not so much. Just months later, Jama retweeted a post praising a convicted terrorist as a “martyr for freedom.” This time, Stiles rebuked Jama publicly, and the rookie MPP deactivated her Twitter profile. Alas, she couldn’t stay quit, and her account soon popped back up.  Then came the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, which inspired Jama to excoriate Israel (on NDP letterhead, no less) for all its nasty “settler colonialism.” She seemed unbothered by the fact that, just three days earlier, more than 1,000 Jews had been massacred by terrorists.  It says something about how desperate Stiles was to keep this intersectional triple threat within the NDP fold that Jama’s Dipper career didn’t end then and there. It was only two weeks later, with Jama still refusing to delete her offensive statement (even pinning it to the top of her Twitter feed at one point), that Stiles cut bait and kicked the rookie MP out of caucus. The NDP might have known this was how things would end. As a photogenic presence at Hamilton-area protests, Jama had become a minor celebrity in local progressive circles. But she also relished the opportunity to make those in power (such as party leaders, apparently) feel “uncomfortable” through acts of “disruption.” Some of the attention-getting stunts in which she participated included painting “defund the police” on Hamilton’s Main Street and leaving a coffin in front of the mayor’s home. Hamilton Spectator editors never seemed to tire of publishing her picture. I’m guessing her short NDP career at Queen’s Park proved dull by comparison. Getting turfed by your party would be a career setback for most politicians. But for Jama, who seems more interested in the activist limelight than angling for committee assignments, it was arguably a plus. Now sitting as an Independent MPP, and so freed of adult oversight, she’s found herself enjoying the best of both worlds — earning a six-figure salary from Ontario’s own “settler-colonial” government while co-opting the legislature as an activist backdrop, all without schlepping any coffins. To bring the cameras out, she merely had to don a keffiyeh — in defiance of the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who’d deemed it “an overt political statement.”... like many of her fellow activists (including those making an odious nuisance of themselves on campuses across North America), Jama never wore the thing until after October 7. And she was admirably forthright about her motivations: “This is a political issue, my job is to be political, and so I will continue to wear this garment.”... One reason I’m wary of any kind of keffiyeh ban is that we’re just coming out of a period of progressive social panic in Canada, during which even the mildest articulation of conservative viewpoints, or display of traditional Canadian symbols, was denounced as a “dog whistle” for white supremacy or some such. (To take one particularly ludicrous example: Recall that in 2022, an “anti-racist” group got a six-figure grant from Justin Trudeau’s government so it could author a report denouncing the Red Ensign flag — Canada’s national symbol until about 60 years ago — as a coded endorsement of white supremacism.)"
Oddly, all the pearl clutching articles about her being kicked out of the NDP and the provincial legislature don't mention all this important context. Spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation is only bad when it threatens the left wing agenda
Left wingers like to accuse those they disagree with of being insincere in not caring about issues before they become pertinent, but they always hop onto the latest bandwagon themselves. Once again, projection is typical of SJWs

Meme - "He's probably thinking about other women..."
"how come gaza always runs out of everything except rockets?"

Joe on X - "The problem with calling Israel’s attack on Gaza a genocide is that it makes most every war between nation states with significant civilian casualties a genocide. Including defensive wars. Was Dresden a genocide? Hiroshima? Bombing of London by the Luftwaffe? And so on.  It’s one thing to despise a particular war or battle or raid due to their being too many civilian causalities. We can discuss that with every war—including Gaza. That doesn’t make any of those wars genocides. Stop cheapening the concept."

Marina Medvin ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ on X - "Palestinian civilians cheered on the kidnapping of 19 year old Naama Levy— her pants stained with blood from rape, her heels sliced open to prevent her from running, her hands tied behind her back so she could not resist. Today is her 225th day in Gaza."
wanye on X - "In order to believe that the combatants on each side are morally equivalent, you have to imagine IDF soldiers parading a girl they’ve just gang raped through the streets of Tel Aviv as crowds gather to cheer them on.  It’s incomprehensible and every American teenager chanting, “free Palestine” knows it, which means they’re all cowards and moral degenerates."
wanye on X - "The biggest lie that gets told about the American left, about modern-day communists, is that their heart is in the right place, they’re just mistaken. No, these are resentful, selfish, cretinous moral degenerates."

Anti-Israel groups call for 'worldwide escalation' with 'intifada in every capital'

Colby Cosh: Courts can't save pro-Palestinian MPP Sarah Jama from parliamentary exile - "In the moment it looked like appalling wormbrained opportunism even to her NDP colleagues, who soon ushered her out of their caucus . The day after Jama’s offending tweet, she apologized and found the strength to write “To be clear, I unequivocally condemn terrorism by Hamas on thousands of Israeli civilians.” Despite the new-found clarity (which was mixed with denials of the use of sexual violence by Hamas), the legislative assembly voted on Oct. 18 to censure Jama and to authorize the Speaker not to recognize her on the floor. She is still now condemned to invisibility in debates of the full assembly, although she is allowed to participate in committees and vote. This led her to launch a lawsuit against the Speaker seeking judicial review of his decision to allow a vote on the censure motion. Despite the patent improbability of her cause, she found lawyers willing to go looking for unknown holes in the ancient constitutional axiom of parliamentary privilege . It turns out that the rules protecting a legislature’s right to regulate its proceedings are pretty thoroughly copper-bottomed . The Superior Court decision is mostly a repetitive recitation of quotes to this effect from earlier rulings and authorities; one feels it could have been a great deal shorter. It’s established black-letter law that an assembly can penalize a member for outside acts or deeds: “The legislature … has the power to impose rules and sanctions pertaining to conduct that occurs outside their chambers.” And while a court can potentially decide that some actions of a legislature (and a speaker acting on its behalf) are not shielded circumstantially by privilege, the regulation of debate is the innermost core of that privilege. It’s the substantive central reason it has been recognized and upheld against all comers for 300 years. Jama’s expensive and famous human rights lawyers know all this, and they did not recoil from wasting a court’s time and resources in a partisan cause. This is approved behaviour in their social circle and they will wear their cataclysmic defeat on the constitutional merits as a badge of heroism. As a matter of mere sincerity, one hopes they were honest with their client about the inane hopelessness of her suit, and that she was capable, as a legislator, of understanding it."

Video: Ireland 'refuses to accept' violence as it recognises Palestinian state
Of course, what they mean is that they refuse to accept Israeli violence, even in self defence. Palestinian violence is good though.

Jewish girl pulled out of Burlington high school over antisemitism - "An Ontario mother has pulled her Jewish daughter out of high school fearing she is no longer safe, saying the school is allowing and encouraging pro-Palestinian activists to display and promote threatening antisemitic messages.  “I live in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and my child is not in school because she’s Jewish. That’s insane,” said Anissa Hersh, after withdrawing her daughter from Burlington Central High School... They said it started with students making antisemitic comments to her daughter and to her friends about her being a Jew. There were student walkouts about Gaza. One day, a van pulled up beside her on school property and people inside started yelling that everyone needs to rise up and free Palestine, they said.  “But this is not anything that I would have pulled my daughter out of school for; I wasn’t happy about it, and we always contacted the school, and the inaction of the school is infamous,” said Hersh. The breaking point came last Thursday. Her daughter had artwork included in a school exhibit and Hersh went to see it, she said. In the school auditorium there was an “Arts & Culture” event. The main event seemed like a Gaza protest.  “They had a huge booth, and it was labeled Palestine. There was a map: the state of Israel was relabeled as Palestine with the Palestinian colours on it; (there was) information such as Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, Bethlehem is in Palestine. So literally a cultural day that is erasing Jewish history and rewriting history to suit a particular narrative,” Hersh said.  The school permitted students to wear T-shirts and jewelry depicting the eradication of Israel, mother and daughter said.  “When I approached the administration — they were in the room — they told me to calm down because they were just kids.  “Jews are the only minority marginalized group that gets to be told by other people what is and what isn’t offensive. No other group would be told to calm down and to relax. “When the teachers said those things — calm down, it’s not a big deal — the students are emboldened and start saying things like ‘there is no Israel there is only Palestine.’ So don’t tell me that that’s not inappropriate, or calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. The denial of the state of Israel is being endorsed by these teachers and the administration.”"

Police arrest 14 at Gaza solidarity rail blockade in Vancouver
If you don't let "pro-Palestinian" supporters shut down the world, that is "censorship" and "fascism"

Two Ottawa mothers express fear for their children’s safety amid rising antisemitism - "she advised her 11-year-old daughter to no longer leave the house with her Star of David visible after a schoolmate told her a few months ago she has to end her life because of her heritage. “She said… ‘one boy told me a lot of Jews have to die and I have to (commit) suicide because I’m a Jew’”... After moving to Canada and starting a family, she says she never imagined her children would experience the adversity that she did in Russia for being Jewish... her son recently confided in her husband that an older child on his school bus had “asked everyone Jewish to raise their hand.” “And my son told his father that he knew not to raise his hand because the kid sounded mean”... The response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel has sparked a dramatic surge of antisemitism across Canada... A 15-year-old was arrested on terrorism allegations in December 2023 for what the RCMP said was a plot toward the Jewish community in Ottawa."
Clearly just "anti-Zionism"

Tens of thousands march in London to call for release of hostages - "Under the banner “United we bring them home,” the peaceful rally garnered some 40,000 participants, according to organizers, making it the largest pro-Israel gathering in the UK since war erupted in Gaza after the terror onslaught. There were no reports of violence or arrests at the march, which set out from Central London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields and ended at Whitehall, accompanied by police guard. Supporters waved Israeli flags and held placards with photos of the hostages... British Jews say they have been subject to verbal abuse by some pro-Palestinian supporters since October 7, and there have been recorded incidents of physical violence as well."
Clearly, the reason why there're reports of violence and arrests at "pro-Palestinian" events but not pro-Israel ones is the nefarious machinations of 'Zionists'

Palestinian student 'full of joy' after Oct 7 attack faces deportation - "Dana Abuqamar, 19, a law student at Manchester University, had her visa to stay in the UK revoked in December after she was filmed just a day after the Hamas terrorist attack saying she was “really full of joy” and “proud that Palestinian resistance has come to this point”.  Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, the home secretary and immigration minister at the time, ruled that her presence in the UK was “not conducive to the public good” and revoked her visa, meaning she had no right to remain.  Ms Abuqamar is, however, understood to be fighting the decision on the basis that rescinding her student visa has “violated her human rights” on the “baseless” accusation that she is a “risk to public safety”... Ms Abuqamar confirmed she was appealing the decision and said her remarks in October, which were publicly condemned by policing minister Chris Philp, had been misrepresented. She told Middle East Eye: “My words were taken out of context and they were framed as me supporting harm to innocent civilians, which is completely false and completely untrue... Ms Abuqamar was speaking to Sky News in Manchester when she praised the assault on Israel.  She said: “We are full of pride. We are really, really full of joy [at] what has happened.... We are proud that Palestinian resistance has come to this point.”  However, after widespread condemnations, including from Chris Philp, the policing minister, she claimed her comments had been misrepresented, and later told BBC: “The death of any innocent civilian should not be condoned ever and we don’t condone it at all.”"
It's only a "dog whistle" if misrepresenting it helps the left wing agenda. But when you openly celebrate left-supported terrorists killing civilians, your words must have been taken out of context

Elder of Ziyon ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ฑ on X - "Fun fact: Gaza has the largest transgender community in the Middle East with as many as 15,000 men identifying as women and children. (seen on Reddit)"

Meme - "Starting a war and losing it doesn't make you the victim *Palestinian bulldozer tearing down fence*"
This describes the Arab-Israeli conflict too - the Arabs keep declaring war on Israel and then playing the victim

Trudeau to give 5,000 visas to Palestinian refugees for resettlement in Canada - "the Trudeau Liberals revealed that they had decided to quintuple the number of visas they would be issuing to people in Gaza with family members in Canada. A total of 5,000 temporary resident visas will be granted to those fleeing the war-torn territory, far more than the original 1,000 announced in December."
When you want to bring in more anti-Semitism and terrorism for votes

Open Source Intel on X - "BODIES FOUND IN UNRWA BUILDING. The IDF released videos and images showing the entrance to a Hxmas tunnel system where the bodies of four hostages—Ron Benjamin, Amit Buskila, Itzhak Gelerenter, and Shani Louk—were found last Friday. Israeli officials reported that the tunnel entrance was inside a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building."

Pro-Palestine protesters occupy Israeli consulate in San Francisco, 70 detained
Storming government buildings is only bad when it threatens the left wing agenda

University of Michigan regent's law office vandalized with pro-Palestinian graffiti - "Pro-Palestinian graffiti spray-painted on the exterior of a Michigan law firm is being investigated as a hate crime, police in suburban Detroit said Monday. University of Michigan regent and attorney Jordan Acker called the vandalism “antisemitic” and said staff at the Goodman Acker law firm’s Southfield headquarters discovered it Monday morning. Splotches of red paint were left on the “Goodman Acker” sign above the building’s doors. “FREE PALESTINE” was spray-painted in black upon the building’s walls, while “DIVEST NOW” and “U-M KILLS” — a reference to the University of Michigan — were spray-painted in red upon at least one window and a sidewalk."

Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden's biggest donors - "President Joe Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for his reelection. The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis... The trail of donations shows a series of blurred lines when it comes to liberal causes and Democratic politics. The money is sometimes, but not always, directed toward specific issues — even if it is, it contributes to an organization’s larger pool of funds, which could go toward opposing causes. Often, missions between the donors and nonprofits are aligned, but they also sometimes have different and — particularly when it comes to Gaza — conflicting agendas and tactics. And a small group of wealthy heavyweights are often playing an outsize role funding many of them... as protester tactics have grown more intense, like taking over university buildings and shouting antisemitic remarks, the groups behind them are now attracting criticism from prominent donors on the left. “Why [is the Rockefeller Fund] giving significant grants to Jewish Voice for Peace, [which] blamed the horrific Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the United States rather than Hamas?” said Elisha Wiesel, a Democratic donor who chairs the Elie Wiesel Foundation, an organization that supports anti-genocide work... Some donors may use this moment to reevaluate where their money goes, something that Conlon, the Democratic bundler, acknowledged."
Big money funding protests and agenda-pushing is only a problem when it hurts the left wing agenda

Palestinian flag in B.C. classroom ‘forces politics’ on kids, mother says - "A Vancouver Jewish mother says she has been told a disciplinary process has begun after a teacher “repeatedly” put up Palestinian flags and symbols in the classroom. Merav Nider told Global News that she complained after her son’s Grade 7 teacher hung up a Palestinian flag in her son’s classroom. It was taken down but later replaced with a flag showing the outline of the state of Israel in red, green and black. Nider says the image is widely seen as a call for the destruction of Israel. After talking to the principal, she said that flag was also removed. “We’re doing a disservice to the kids by forcing politics on them when they’re not old enough to be able to handle it and make an informed decision about what side they take,” Nider said. “And therefore, it’s better if the schools just provide the kids with a safe learning environment where all kids are welcome.”... Nider’s experience is the latest in a string of similar instances reported by Jewish parents across B.C. In Burnaby, the school district apologized after 12-year-old kids were asked in an exam to weigh in on Israel’s right to exist. On Monday night, Global News reported that 11-year-old students were faced with similar material in Victoria."
Of course, left wingers will claim that the Palestinian flag is needed so students feel "safe" and "welcome"
Clearly, if you think teachers are trying to indoctrinate students, you are a far right conspiracy theorist who has fallen for misinformation

Vile video shows anti-Israel protester saying: 'I wish Hitler was still here, he would’ve wiped all you out' - "Horrifying video captured a vile anti-Israel protester telling Jews honoring hundreds of Israelis killed on Oct. 7 that he wished “Hitler was still here” because the Nazi leader would have “wiped all you out.”... On top of the hundreds of concert-goers killed at the festival, a United Nations envoy found in March there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that Hamas terrorists committed rape and “sexualized torture” during the horrifying assault in southern Israel."
More "pro-Palestinian" speech only Islamophobes oppose
This black guy must be a white supremacist!
It's amusing how all the terrorism supporters claim Israel has been found to commit genocide but claim there's no evidence that there was rape on Oct 7th. Their comprehension skills are really bad, which is why some of them support terrorism