Israel has started putting out loads of "evidence" that the Hamas headquarters are below the Al-Shifa hospital.

Their "evidence" is a CGI video that they made themselves showing the whole hospital and then zooming in and going below ground to show a sprawling, multi-level "headquarters" with little CGI-people with guns roaming around on metal platforms and such. Here's the link to Netan-fuck-you's twitter, and the video. 50/50 odds on it vanishing within 24 hours, so if anyone wants to embed the video into a reblog of this post in order to preserve it in all its bullshit glory, please do.

Their second piece of evidence is a phone call recording where the two people are "overheard" saying THEE most obvious script I've ever heard in my life, which basically amounts to "Well you know how the headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital?" "The headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital?" "Yeah, the headquarters of Hamas are under the Al-Shifa hospital." It's literally that badly done. I can't now find the video of it, but if someone has it, pls link it. The version I saw was shared by SkyNews (🤮)

Make no mistake. This is israel getting ahead of the global narrative. This is Israel justifying their bombing of a hospital before they do it.

They bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, and the world responded with an enormous wave of outrage and recriminations, so Israel immediately tried to claim that Hamas did it, and then they said that actually no, it was Palestinian Jihadists (who don't even operate out of Gaza; they're all based in the West Bank).

They know full well that if they bombed another hospital, they wouldn't be able to claim it was Hamas/PJ.

So now they're laying all this groundwork, disseminating blatantly falsified "evidence" of a sprawling secret terrorist bunker hidden beneath the main hospital in Gaza, where its estimated that 50,000 people are sheltering.

Israel has succeeded in completely cutting off almost all of Gazas communications. Al Jazeera has managed to make contact with one correspondent they have on the ground via satellite connection, but their contact with him has been extremely spotty. People in Gaza cannot call emergency services or upload images/footage to twitter or anything. They are completely and utterly dark, and this is absolutely by design on Israel's part.

If Al-Shifa hospital is still standing by this time tomorrow, I will be shocked.

Israel is laying the groundwork now so that when they level the hospital and kill every single person inside it, the public will justify it for them. "Yeah but Hamas had a huge headquarters underneath," the public will say. "It's not Israel's fault that Hamas hiding underneath hospitals," they'll say. "Israel's just trying to root out Hamas! It's awful that so many civilians died, but that's what happens when terrorists use civilians as shields" they'll say, as though killing a human shield in order to get to the bad guy is acceptable literally anywhere in the world, much less when the "shields" amount to well over 7,000 civilians.

Do not fall for the propaganda. Do not allow Israel to bomb another hospital without forcing them to fave the backlash for it (even if they didn't do Al-Ahli, they've attacked hospitals and health centres repeatedly in the past). Do not let your country's politicians justify the slaughter of a hospital full of civilians just to get at the (alleged!!) terrorist base below. Do not let your colleagues or friends or family justify the razing of a hospital full of innocent men, women, and children.

We can't do much to stop them, but by fuck can we do everything in our power to make sure they don't get away with it.

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[Image IDs: the first is a tweet by Netanyahu, saying Hamas-ISIS is sick. They turn hospitals into headquarters for their terror. We just released intelligence proving it." This is followed by a video, which the at the time of the screenshot was showing a CGI version of the hospital. Image 2 is the same, but the video was screenshotted as it shows the CGI "lair" of hamas that's allegedly below the hospital; a multi-storey industrial-looking space with armed soldiers walking along suspended platforms. Image three is a tweet by @HenMazzig that says "BREAKING: it's now confirmed that Hamas's operational headquarters is stationed below the Al Shifa hospital - Gaza's main hospital." This is followed by an image screenshotted from Netanyahu's bullshit video, this time showing an aerial shot of the hospital amidst the debris of the almost completely destroyed neighbouring suburb.]

I accidentally hit the poll button and now it won't let me get rid of it or publish this post until I've filled it in, so: is bombing a hospital utterly reprehensible, unforgivable, and unjustifiable?

yes

yes

Hey guys, there are eleven votes on the poll, but only two reblogs thus far. With tmblr actively suppressing any posts that have to do with the situation in Gaza, reblogs are imperative; it's the only way to spread word, since the main tags are all being hobbled. Please reblog this. 50,000 civilians sheltering at the hospital, and Israel is almost certainly gonna bomb it - if they haven't already - and they're gonna claim it was justified.

Please help fight that narrative, and reblog this.

Put salt in your baked goods. Put salt in your desserts. Just do it. Please. Salt isn't just for savory, it's literally a flavor enhancer so even a pinch can take a meh recipe to one people can't stop eating. Listen to me. Your cookies and cheesecake bars are bland and uninteresting. I'm taking your hand. I'm guiding you with a gentle touch to the back. We can do this together. Trust me.

How To Be Anti-Zionist WITHOUT Being Antisemitic

Yes! It's possible! But it's not automatic.

This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.

  1. Don't deny Jewish history in Palestine. There's been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn't succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn't mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn't help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
  2. Don't whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel's Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they're in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying "Jews are white Europeans" is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
  3. Don't invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to "go back where they came from". Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can't return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can't return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on "other people's land", the difference in Palestine is that we're the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
  4. Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It's true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that "most" was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country's Black population, so...) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was "None is too many." Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
  5. Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that "the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing" is specific and precise. To say that "Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want"... do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say "Zionists", what you really mean is "Jews"?
  6. Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don't apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn't involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It's evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
  7. For fuck's sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They're very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they're also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don't give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
  8. Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not "when Jews do a thing I don't like," and a Zionist is not "a Jew I disagree with/don't like". Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn't fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it's oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they're wrong. They're doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they're wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.

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Come on Tumblr, don’t be fucking cowards

Alternatively -  come on nameless intern #102, you have a chance to be the fucking funniest person on staff.

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cowards

Time for manual blazing, tumblr can be a coward but they can't stop us.

Achievement Unlocked:

Fan The Flames

Just because Tumblr won't let you Blaze a post doesn't mean you can light it up yourself!

Slam that button! Do the numbers!

kyraneko:
“veerletakino:
“”
The thing about debate is that it’s supposed to be a fair and reasoned and good-faith discussion about The Thing. It’s supposed to be two people of differing opinions attempting, through discussion, to find the truth.
But...

The thing about debate is that it’s supposed to be a fair and reasoned and good-faith discussion about The Thing. It’s supposed to be two people of differing opinions attempting, through discussion, to find the truth.

But debating with cult members and trolls only mimics this. It’s a nice shiny flower that also happens to be a praying mantis with bodyparts that look like petals.

You’re not arguing with them about The Thing. You’re arguing with them about their opinion of The Thing. Which is 1) entirely in their control, and 2) really isn’t particularly important to you.

Unless you make it important to you.

Like, by conflating it with the thing it purports to be.

The instant you get invested, the instant you feel the need to convince THEM, the instant convincing them becomes synonymous with successfully defending your own beliefs, they have a hold on you.

And they will use that hold to do what predators do.

They’re not interested in being convinced. They’re not interested in finding the truth. They’re interested in arguing you out of everything you believe using the debate process you’ve foolishly placed your faith in and staked your positions on, and using your own convictions that being right makes you a superior debater and/or that being a superior debater makes you right, to convince you that you owe it to them to change YOUR mind, because you chose to avail yourself of their supposed willingness to change THEIRS.

You can, actually, lose a debate while still being right. Debate is a skill contest, not a magical truth-detector. You don’t owe anyone to change your beliefs to their tune just because they’re more skilled at debating, more sophisticated at finding arguments, or just more unwilling to concede points.

But they’ll try to convince you otherwise. In fact, they run on your entrenched beliefs otherwise.

To say “I still don’t accept this” and walk away, to keep your own autonomy at the cost of mockery on a level you probably believe, takes strength and savviness few people possess, and they absolutely prey on that too.

It’s very helpful to be able to be honest with yourself about whether you’re actually willing to believe/accept their position, and fair to your prospective opponent to avoid debates (or at least avoid calling it a debate) over something when you absolutely are not willing to accept the opposing position. Because being fair in a real debate means you risk accepting the opposing position.

And if you’re the only one being fair in a debate only you believe is real, you’re taking a huge-ass risk with only purely illusory payoff.

The trap is that they’re offering you the illusion of an opportunity to defend your beliefs by convincing them, at the cost of you risking your beliefs on the strength of your ability to convince them. And then they use their refusal to be convinced as the “impartial” judge of victory.

The fight is not what you think the fight is, and it’s time to walk away.