#7-day Colon Cleanse

[vitabase121]

[technicallyhappyarcade]

How to Use Weight Loss Results to Your Advantage

Weight Loss Results: How to Maintain Your Weight Loss

Can you even believe it? Our six-week Summer Shape Up challenge is over, but girlfriend – you are JUST GETTING STARTED. Whether you are trying to maintain your weight loss or keep pushing yourself further, this is how to make it happen this fall.

Finding Your Balance

Maintaining your results doesn’t mean sticking rigidly to the same routine forever. It’s about finding the right balance between sticking to the foundational habits you’ve built during the challenge and being flexible to make adjustments that make sense for your lifestyle.

Schedule Your Workouts

It doesn’t have to be the same time every day, but schedule your MOVE workouts into your week ahead of time to ensure it’s a non-negotiable part of your routine. If you need to change it, that’s ok, but reschedule it now. Don’t wait to “figure it out later.” It’s too easy to let that time slide if it’s unplanned.

Mix It Up…The RIGHT Way

Progress comes from repetition, but that doesn’t mean doing the same workout day after day. The programs in MOVE are designed to give you the best balance of training styles while still providing flexibility. Try out the new videos, take your Weight Loss Results outside, join Katie’s live workouts, or check out a new class with a friend on your cardio days. Keeping it fresh can help you stay inspired and prevent any boredom from creeping in.

Live Guiltless

While it’s outstanding to indulge occasionally, it’s equally crucial to maintain a balanced diet if you want to keep your weight loss progress. The Hot Body Meal Plan is incredible to help lay the foundation for you, and it’s what I always go back to when I want to reset, but the Guiltless Recipe Book will give you so many tools to help you find a healthy everyday balance. There are over 130 recipes and my playbook for living guiltless.

[athingofvikings]

A Brief History Of The Palestinian People And The Jewish Religion According To Widespread Leftist Views

10,000,000-100,000 BCE: The Palestinian People emerge and live continuously in Palestine through to the present day (precise date estimates varies).

50,000 BCE: Evolution of Behaviorally Modern Humans

~1000 BCE: The Palestinian nation-state is founded as a sovereign kingdom under the renowned Palestinian warrior-monarch King David.

0 AD: Jesus Christ, a Palestinian Socialist Person Of Color, is born under Jewish Occupation to Palestinian Refugees.

33 AD: Jesus is tortured and murdered by Jewish occupiers in Palestine. The Romans stand by and don't have anything to do with this.

~50 AD-600 AD?: The Jewish Occupation of Palestine ends and all Jews cease to exist. Details unavailable.

700s AD: The White Khazars convert to Judaism, and are the source of all modern Jews.

700s-1933 AD: Jews spread through Europe, living as rich, privileged bankers, and face no widespread antisemitism, prejudice, or any negative experiences at all; they are the Whitest of White people, simply following a different Abrahamic religion that is just a type of Christianity, and has no ethnic component. They have this degree of privilege even as they scheme and plot against their fellow European Whites by fomenting wars, run the entire Atlantic slave trade, and routinely betray and stab their Fellow White People in the back, being more loyal to their fellow Jews than to their own hosts. Meanwhile, Jews in Arabic nations are also well treated.

1933-1945 AD: The Nazis invent antisemitism, picking the Jews as an arbitrary target, and manage to get all of Germany to hate the Jews for no reason, and supposedly kill six million Jews, possibly in collaboration with the Zionists.

1946 AD: Antisemitism is over and gone, and will never exist again. Any future attempts to claim antisemitism is an effort to distract from legitimate criticisms of Zionist fascism in occupied Palestine.

1947 AD: The Jews go to the other Europeans and play the sympathy card and the other Europeans tell them that they can now have a colony of their very own for the plentiful oil in Palestine.

1948 AD: History formally begins. White European Jews invade the sovereign socialist, progressive, democratically perfect state of Palestine, who accepted the Jewish refugees without any reservations, problems, or other issues, purely out of the goodness of their hearts, and were promptly betrayed, colonized, ethnically cleansed and mass murdered.

1948 AD-2023 AD: The illegal, settler-colonialist, genocidal fascist state of Is-Not-Real proceeds to routinely genocide and cull the innocent Palestinian people. For example, every three days, IOF soldiers kill a Palestinian child, and harvests their organs, and regularly kills tens of millions of other Palestinians out of the existing population of five million. During this time, Israel uses its control over the governments, media, and economies of the West to cement its genocidal control over the occupied Palestinian territories and cover up its millions of murders, while crying "antisemitism" as the Zionists kill Palestinians, who are the only true Semites.

7 October, 2023-Present: Israel kills 1200 of their own people and kidnap hundreds of others as a false flag, managing to trick the innocent and naive freedom fighters of Hamas to broadcast the propaganda killings on their own social media accounts. The IOF then proceeds to kill 14,000 millions of innocent Palestinians, nearly all of them innocent, blameless children, whose bodies are taken by Israel for organ harvesting and to use to fake other Hamas attack victims, because apparently the Brown Palestinians are perfect stand-ins for White Israelis and can't be told apart easily on sight.

[bfpnola]

updated! ID by @swosheep

ID 1: all images are screenshots of an Instagram post by letstalkpalestine. The first is a title slide and reads "lets talk: Why does israel colonize Palestine? Explaining Zionism and Settler Colonialism".

ID 2: the second image reads: "What is misleadingly termed by israel and its Western allies the "israeli-Palestinian conflict" is a single, long-running process of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. This understanding is not new, and was in fact first understood by early Zionist leaders themselves, but has only recently been accepted by Western historians. To understand why the Gaza Genocide and everything else is happening, we need to understand Zionism and why experts consider it a form of settler colonialism."

ID 3: the third image is titled: "But what is settler colonialism?" The body text reads: "We can understand it by comparing it to classical colonialism: Classical colonialism is when a dominant power or empire establishes control over the people of an area for exploitation and expansion. Examples: British control of India and Egypt. Settler colonialism aims to eliminate indigenous populations and replace them with an invasive settler society that develops its own identity and sovereignty. Examples: the United States, Canada & New Zealand."

ID 4: the fourth image is titled: "Settler colonialism is different from classical colonialism in 3 main ways:". There is a table comparing the ways. One column of the table is titled: "Settler colonialism" and the 3 points are: "1. Only temporarily & initially relies on the empire for support. 2. Motivated by desire to take over land. 3. Treats new land as a permanent national homeland for settlers." The second column of the table is titled: "Classical colonialism" and the 3 points are: "1. Always dependent on mother empire. 2. Motivated by exploiting natural resources. 3. Uses new land and its resources to serve the empire."

ID 5: the fifth image is titled: "So What's Zionism?". The body text reads: "It's an ideological movement founded in the 1880s in response to European antisemitism. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, called for a national Jewish homeland in the form of an exclusive ethno-state. Needing European support, Herzl approached Britain because it was the "first to recognize the need for colonial expansion". In 1902, Herzl wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the British leader who colonized modern-day Zimbabwe, saying: 'You are being invited to help make history. It doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor.. How then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out of the way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.' But Zionism had a problem: Palestine was already inhabited."

ID 6: The sixth image is titled: "Zionism & Palestinians". The body text reads: "To establish a Jewish state (israel) in Palestine, Jewish people had to constitute the majority of the population. [quote] 'Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.' [unquote] -[a quote from] Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. But Palestinians were the majority at the time. For Zionism to succeed, non-Jewish people had to be removed from Palestine and, in turn, Jewish settlers had to take their place. [quote] 'We must expel the Arabs and take their place' [unquote] -[a quote from] Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. This was implemented, and in 1947-1949, Zionist militias conducted a mass campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians - the Nakba. 80% of Palestinians in the heartland were expelled to create Israel's Jewish majority."

ID 7: The seventh image is titled: "1. Initial & temporary reliance on the empire". The body text reads: "To colonize Palestine, Zionist leaders knew they needed the support of an empire. Zionists secured British support with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. This alliance protected the project from Arab opponents, facilitated mass settlement, provided state lands & allowed the creation of Zionist militias. But during World War II, Zionist attempts to accelerate the process of statehood clashed with British interests. Zionist militias began carrying out attacks against the British and, in 1948, Britain withdrew from Palestine. Like European settlers who revolted against Britain in the American Revolution to establish their own independent settler colonial state, Zionists also revolted against Britain to establish their own settler colonial state."

ID 8: The eighth image is titled: "2. Desire to take over land & eliminate the native population". The body text reads: "The Zionist movement aims for as much Palestinian land as possible with as few Palestinians as possible. Zionism inherently opposes Palestinian freedom, because its vision of 'Jewish self-determination' needs the exclusion of non-Jewish people. Since nobody would willingly accept exclusion from their own land, Zionism needs the violent persecution and elimination of the existing population in order to fully succeed. [quote] 'If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.' [unquote] - [a quote from] Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism".

ID 9: The ninth image is titled: "3. Permanent homeland". The body text reads: "Zionism's goal wasn't to establish a temporary base for an empire but a permanent homeland for a new settler population. To create a new society in a populated country, Zionists claimed Palestine by moral & divine right, an example of the 'Logic of Elimination'. A pillar of settler colonialism, the 'Logic of Elimination' is when settlers develop moral justifications to eliminate the native population. Zionist talking points like - 'Palestine doesn't exist'; - 'israel made the desert bloom'; - 'israel is technologically advanced'; are used to justify the elimination of Palestinians. Such points were used in other cases of settler colonialism like South Africa, with the 'Empty Land' myth arguing that Black people arrived in South Africa at the same time as white settlers."

ID 10: The tenth image is titled: "Zionism Today". The body text reads: "A Jewish state was created, but the Zionist project isn't fully realized - Palestinians remain & resist, asserting a threatening national identity. In response, israel has doubled down on its attempts to eliminate the Palestinian people while colonizing more land. Home demolitions, ethnic cleansing, segregated settlements, erasing culture, and apartheid are methods of the Logic of Elimination rooted in Zionism as a settler colonial movement. 'But Zionism is just Jewish self-determination.' All settler colonial movements aim to advance the settlers' 'self-determination' by eliminating the natives. It's never justified. Palestinians are resisting the most aggressive ongoing settler colonial project in the world. Freedom, justice & equality are impossible without dismantling Zionism, a form of: Settler Colonialism."

[khlur]

We are a group of individuals and collectives in revolutionary solidarity with the people of  Palestine. As a response to the feminist call to strike for Gaza on the 8th of March (International Women’s Day), we feel the need to put out this statement to recognise the occupational, genocidal deprivations perpetrated by the terrorist settler-colonial Zionist state of Israel that has led to a death toll of over 30000 Palestinians with countless trapped under rubble, decomposed, and millions displaced. We bear witness to the carceral violence, torture, humiliation and murder of Palestinians, especially those held captive in besieged Gaza and hostages taken by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). This includes a wide range of carceral forms of torture including the use of  Palestinian men as human shields, widely circulated dehumanising images of public sexual violation of Palestinian men, sexual assault of Palestinian women in Zionist prisons, enforced disappearance of children, and other acts of violence and debilitation. These largely go unreported, under-reported or misreported because of the Zionist hold over mainstream media.

Humanitarian aid is being withheld by Israel to intentionally starve Gazans as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and genocide. When the few aid trucks are allowed by Israel to finally cross into Gaza, or aid is airdropped by other countries attempting to break Israel’s siege, the Zionist army bomb, shoot, kill, and run over Palestinians rushing to food trucks as seen in multiple incidents including the recent flour massacre. Children continue to die from starvation and severe climate conditions; and those not dead yet are severely malnourished. Since October 7, Israel has incessantly bombed Gaza from F16s using 2,000-pound US-supplied bombs that blow up whole neighborhoods, internationally banned white phosphorus, and smaller lethal bombs dropped from the constantly circling drones. Israel has destroyed the 70% of the housing stock in Gaza, rendered all hospitals unable to provide care, and has further destroyed medical facilities, desalination plants that supplies clean water, schools and universities, public archives, cultural and historical landmarks, mosques  and churches, bakeries, roads and highways, and all civilian resources and infrastructure crucial for survival rendering Gaza unlivable. The sustained targeted attack on medical facilities have necessitated medical procedures like amputations and C-sections without anesthetics while the  neonatals and infants are dying on hospital beds and ICUs for lack of oxygen. Palestinian medics are not only overworked and severely under-resourced but under direct attack. Mass graves continue to pile up and Israel strips Palestinians of dignity even in death. Palestinian families are not allowed to recover bodies. Instead, the occupying forces attack and bomb graveyards and steal dead bodies for organs and skin to be used in Israeli forensic institutes. We have also seen the insidious images of Israeli soldiers posing with looted Palestinian women’s lingerie, mannequins, stealing children’s toys and making videos cooking inside houses Gazans have been forcibly displaced from. The entire population of Gaza has been subjected to collective punishment directed towards the acts of resistance forces, which is, in fact, the right of a colonized people for self-determination and autonomy. Israel has carried out  targeted attacks on journalists, medics, artists, academics and anyone who can help save lives and ensure the survival of Palestinian culture. The Zionist regime has killed over a 100 journalists to suppress news coming out of Gaza. Murdering journalists has been a tool to silence Palestinian voices throughout the 75 years of occupation. We recall the targeted killing of journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 in occupied West Bank. We honour and learn from resilient voices like Wael Al-Dahdouh who survived an Israeli attack and whose entire family was murdered by Israel.

The Zionist entity also has a long history of pinkwashing, touting itself as a queer haven, and using that as a justification for genocide. We see IDF soldiers proudly upholding rainbow flags on rubble or others proposing to their partners amidst the horrors they inflict on the Palestinians. We see from various archives of queerness that Palestinian queers have always resisted this. Queer people all over the world reject Israel’s pinkwashing with the slogans, ‘Not in our name’, ‘Not Gay as in Happy but Queer as in Free Palestine’ and ‘No Pride in Apartheid’, and lately, ‘No Pride in Genocide’. We call for all queer comrades to include the liberation of Palestine in their imagination of queer liberation. Amidst the excruciating, incomprehensible ongoing physical and emotional trauma genocidal occupation inflicts, we call on our mad, queer, crip comrades to unflinchingly demand a free Palestine because disability and queer justice is intimately tied to Palestinian liberation.

On January 26 2024, in the case against Israel brought by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that through the actions of Israel, Gaza is experiencing a plausible genocide. The ICJ ordered six Provisional Measures that under law, Israel must fulfill. The ICJ ordered Israel to take measures within its power to prevent genocidal acts, including preventing and punishing incitement to genocide, ensuring aid and services reach the Palestinian population in Gaza, and preserving evidence of crimes committed in Gaza. As we can see, Israel has completely ignored and defied all Provisional Measures.This also shows the impunity Israel enjoys because it is backed by imperial regimes. It reveals how colonial imperialism undergirds international law that has historically failed the colonised by protecting the interests of colonial imperialist regimes. Yet, the colonised have stood strong in their struggle for freedom and liberation, which has historically led to the downfall of colonial empires.

We understand that our liberation as oppressed people is deeply intertwined with struggles of the oppressed worldwide. We recognise India’s complicity in enabling the genocide and occupation of Palestine. A recent report by Pew Research Center, shows that India leads in support for autocracy and military rule among surveyed nations. Indian right-wing accounts are among leading amplifiers of anti-Palestinian fake news and have used it to fan and escalate anti-Muslim violence in India. As Azad Essa traces in his book Hostile Homelands, despite its official stance supporting the 1975 UN resolution that concluded Zionism as racism, India continued maintaining relations with Israel through security and defense engagements. For example, India adopted Israeli security systems in response to the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. Thereafter India bought its mass surveillance systems infrastructure – the Central Monitoring System – from Israel, which can operate without court orders and access any individual’s communication data. The BJP-led Hindutva regime (under whose fascist vision of ‘Hindu Rashtra (state)’ crimes against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis is at an all time high) upgraded this relation to a ‘strategic partnership’ following Modi’s 2017 Israel visit where the two parties signed a defense deal worth 2 billion USD. This deal included the Israeli spyware Pegasus, that the government used to arrest journalists, government critics, students, especially Dalit and Muslim organisers and throttle political opposition. India is now the top arms buyer from Israel, and our taxes fund Hermes 900 drones manufactured by the Adani Elbit UAV Complex (the first facility in India and outside Israel to manufacture this drone) which Israel uses to massacre Palestinians. Israeli drones ‘field-tested’ on Palestinians are imported to be used on Kashmiris, thwart Adivasi movements in Bastar, and are being used against the ongoing Farmers’ protest.

Much like Israel, the Indian state is a settler-colonial state occupying Kashmir. The abrogation of article 370 in Kashmir in 2019 that catapulted the facilitation of Indian citizens settling in Kashmir is starkly similar to Israeli settler-colonial policies. Kashmir has thus had a long history of what Ather Zia calls ‘affective solidarity’ with Palestine embodied through various ways of resisting whereby the Palestinian struggle is ‘inspirational, cathartic’ to Kashmiris. Following the article 370 abrogation, Palestine-Kashmir solidarity strengthened with the BDS movement’s call for solidarity for Kashmir. Pro-Palestine protests in Kashmir continue to be repressed, a history that goes back to 2014 where amidst chants of ‘Save Gaza’ and ‘Go India, Go Back’, the Indian Armed Forces shot at young boys who were stone pelting, killing a 14 year-old.

We also stand with the workers of India who have made their solidarity to the Palestinian cause clear – the water transport workers who have refused to aid the shipment of arms to Israel on 14/02/2024 as well as the major Indian trade unions who, on 09/11/2023, rejected the Indian government’s move to replace Palestinian workers with Indian workers in Israel. We extend our revolutionary solidarity to the workers of the world resisting the ongoing genocide. We stand with the students who have organised for Palestine and whose protests have been met with repression by several Indian universities. Indian academia continues to receive funding from and collaborates with Israel. We call for an immediate cessation of this act of enabling occupation. We call for a total academic boycott of the Zionist entity – no more enabling of the coloniser’s knowledge production, which is a tool for genocide. The Zionist regime continues to murder academics and destroy schools, universities and libraries. We recall and honour the memory of professor, writer and poet Refaat Alareer. We urge Indian academics to see how Zionism is directly connected to the Hindutva machinery that continues to imprison Indian scholars like Hany Babu, GN Saibaba among others and student organisers like Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, among others, arrested for being dissenting voices. Our universities have long been bastions of resistance and we should strengthen our solidarities in knowledge production with the people worldwide facing violence. We learn from and honour Palestinian resistance in every form and remember Rafeef Ziadeh’s words, ‘We Teach Life, Sir! 

Following the call for strike on 8th March we put out this statement and will be participating with various actions in individual and collective capacities in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We learn from and honour Palestinian resistance in every form and remember Rafeef Ziadeh’s words, ‘We Teach Life, Sir! Actions can range from actively engaging in the Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, raising awareness in-person and on media platforms, sending emails to government representatives to send aid to Gaza and push for permanent ceasefire, amplifying fundraisers, donating e-sims, and more. From Palestine to Sudan, Congo, Western Sahara, Kurdistan, Balochistan, Kashmir all the way to Haiti and Tigray—no one is free until everyone is free. We call for economic, academic, cultural and social boycott. We call upon organisers to honour the call for the strike by addressing and embracing the call for a free Palestine in their 8 March programs and events. We call for the end of patriarchal, capitalist, colonial regimes that oppress us. We demand immediate permanent ceasefire, end of the siege on Gaza, end to settler-colonial occupation and the dismantling of the Zionist state of Israel. We demand a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Do make your support for the statement heard by posting on social media and handing out the handouts we have made here .

Do comment your organization’s name below to be added to the list of signatories.

Signed

Trans Queer Feminists in Solidarity with Palestine Feminists in Resistance, Kolkata  LGBT Academics collective, India COLLECTIVE, Delhi

[azzahrahumaira]

March 7, 2024

A letter to you who claims you love us

You say you love us, but really, is this really what you call as love? You remember us for what feels like barely a minute and then you instantly forget us in the next one. You have some empathy and solidarity for us for a day but then the next following day it all vanishes into thin air. Every single damn day you get distracted very easily and you forget us the way you forget where you put your motorcycle's key. You think we are just a mere content that you watch on social media and when you get bored you'd spontaneously switch it, is that it? You think we are not actual human beings that are constantly being bombed, killed, slaughtered, and vanished into death? You think we are just some sort of "current trend" that will fade away soon?

We've been experiencing this occupation, colonization, genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced starvation and a whole other shit for more than 75 years and yet all you do is dilly-dally and roam around like a total aimless person all day long? You have never taken any real action to help the Palestine liberation movement, have you? Needless to say, your so called love and solidarity literally means nothing if you aren't even willing to do the bare minimum for us.

You always say you love us, right? So tell me, where have you been all this time? Where are you when we need you the most? Why don't you try your best to educate yourself and the people around you about Palestinian cause? Why don't you try your best to raise awareness and let people know what's currently going on here?Why don't you go out there and tell people about the continual atrocities that Israhell has been committing on us for more than 75 years? What's hindering you from supporting us? What's stopping you from speaking up? Why don't you do something, anything, to help us? For God's sake, please, just speak up.

[trascapades]

🚨🇵🇸#CeasefireNow #StrikeForGaza December 11, 2023

The National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of major factions in Palestine, has called for an inclusive global strike that would include all aspects of life in solidarity with the Palestinian people—particularly in the Gaza Strip—who have been facing an Israeli war of genocide, displacement and ethnic cleansing...

Tomorrow 11th Dec. is a global strike day. "If the politicians do not hear us, then we can strike from economic life and daily movement and we can boycott everything, we can put pressure on them to stop supporting and blessing the massacre that is happening in Gaza. CEASEFIRE NOW!!!!" 

Caption reposted from Esraa Alshikh إسراء الشيخ @Esralshikh

🛑We started a campaign to push for a total strike worldwide on Monday 12/11/2023..

⭕️It is necessary to paralyze the movement of life and the economic wheel in all countries so that everyone feels that he is directly affected by the impact of the aggression on Gaza... 

⭕️ Start making your communications today, mobilizing and publishing ..

⭕️The strike must include the transportation, aviation, trade, banks, ports, and even schools and universities.

⭕️Work on gathering the majority of supporters and forget about those who are negligent and discouraged..

⭕️Any personal loss we suffer is worth nothing compared to the massacres taking place against people in Gaza..

Image 2 by artist @heyimsakina 

Images 3 & 4 and caption by artist @shirien.creates: ...I got news that my friend Refaat had been assassinated by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, alongside his brother, sister, and four of her children. There is confirmation that he had received a threatening phone call by the Israeli intelligence saying they have located him.

Refaat was a well-known and loved Palestinian author, poet, and English literature professor. He was also a founder of @we_are_not_numbers. Refaat taught hundreds of students in Gaza English as a way to help them tell their stories and connect Palestinian liberation with the liberation struggles of Black, Indigenous and colonized people around the world.

I met Refaat in 2014 during his book tour for “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of stories from Gaza youth living under siege. Refaat taught me how important art and storytelling are as part of our resistance as Palestinians. His work profoundly impacted and inspired me.

Even under Israel’s relentless airstrikes, Refaat hopped around Gaza to find internet to be able to stay connected with his students, his friends abroad, and to take interviews to shed light about the atrocities happening in Gaza. He bravely spoke up knowing that Israel was systematically targeting journalists, academics, creatives, and all those exposing the truth. His home was already targeted and bombed in October, but he survived. This time, he didn’t. 

It’s hard to believe Refaat is no longer with us. It is a painful loss. His intellect, his love for Palestine, his passion to make life better for Gaza, his beautiful care for his people, and his great sense of humor will be missed. But in his short time on earth, Refaat left a lasting legacy on all Palestinians and on the world.

Refaat, in one of his last interviews, said expo markers are all he had as his resistance. But he would never give up, and he wouldn’t want any of us to give up. As he rests, we will continue to tell our stories, to demand an end to the genocide and siege in Gaza, and to keep struggling until Palestine is free.

"Writing is a testimony…a memory that outlives any human experience. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival, and of hope." - Dr. Refaat Alareer   

Images 5-8 and caption by @ajplus Israel has bombed the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in occupied Gaza. Since Oct. 7, Israel has damaged or destroyed over 100 cultural heritage sites in Gaza, along with thousands of historical documents.

Associate Producer: Katherine Conner

Image 9 from @npr The United States vetoed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war at the United Nations Security Council on Friday.

The Security Council vote on the resolution, backed by Arab states, had 13 in favor and one — the U.S. — against, while the United Kingdom abstained.

#News #Gaza #Israel #Palestine #Palestinian #Mosque #History #GazaGeniocide #Gaza

[la-pheacienne]

100% for Palestinian liberation and self determination. You comparing Israel to Hitler/Nazism (as a white European) is so fucking stupid and harmful for those trying to educate about what is happening to the people of Gaza. There’s a reason 80% of Jewish people live in the US and Israel. Europeans are largely at fault.

That's cute except I didn't. That was you. What I said is :

"How do we call the systematic extermination of 7 thousand innocent people in the span of a few days - on the basis of their origin/religion/ethnicity- being an integral step in the pursuit of "living space", proclaimed as a birthright ?"

And it is an open question. I didn't compare Israel to anything. I explicitely stated its core caracteristics.

You want to "educate" people about "what's happening TO the "people of Gaza" (educate? what's happening by whom? a mysterious supernatural power? the will of god? who are the people of Gaza? don't they have an ethnicity? )? You want that?

Let me tell you what's happening. "People of Gaza" (Palestinians, that's their name) are being:

ethnically cleansed

by a fascist entity

by means of terrorism and genocide

backed up by systematic propaganda (ongoing for decades) using fascist terminology in order to dehumanize all members of this particular ethnicity

with the explicit goal to colonize a land that the fascist entity feels it has a birthright to

with the full unwavering support of the western world.

As you see, I am not comparing it to a fascist entity, I am calling it a fascist entity. And that's all I am doing, because I don't need to say anything more to stress the gravity and the horror of the situation. It is plain to see, as it is. As such, any further "comparison" is completely redundant, misleading, and irrelevant. But you did it, so, that's your problem.

"There’s a reason 80% of Jewish people live in the US and Israel. Europeans are largely at fault".

Fuck off. US, a country that is historically structured on racial, de jure segregation, a country that was created through genocide in the first place, a country that has comitted atrocious, ongoing crimes against humanity in modern and contemporary history, does not get to flex any moral superiority whatsoever on any country, ever. Cope.

[notchainedtotrauma]

We the undersigned want to express our solidarity with our students, at an urgent moment of U.S.- backed state violence against a colonized, dispossessed and brutalized population. The United Nations states that at least one million people in Gaza have been forced to flee their homes in one week alone; “A river of people continues to flow south.”

We condemn the brutal killing of civilians that occurred in Israel on October 7th, which constitutes a war crime. We also condemn the massive and systematic violence being perpetrated against civilians both in Gaza and the occupied West Bank even as we write; Israel’s assault on Gaza also constitutes a war crime. We recognize that Israeli state violence against the Palestinians subject to its control has its roots in a a well-documented history of colonization, stretching back at least 75 years, that has produced what human rights groups today describe as an apartheid regime, characterized by ongoing processes of occupation, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and the denial to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic human and civil rights – and of their right as a people to self-determination. These are the root causes of the current wave of violence; history did not begin on October 7, 2023, however horrific the massive killing of Israeli civilians on that day was. 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: David Bernstein

Published: 16 Oct, 2023

Before the blood had even dried on the pavement of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists ruthlessly murdered 260 young people on 7 October 2023, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES) began posting Instagram memes in support of “Palestinian Liberation.” The CLES is a collection of educational organizations that design curricula for US high schools. They aim to teach students about “critical consciousness” and “intersectional forms of oppression.” One of the memes they posted advertised an upcoming “Long Live Palestinian Resistance” event and another gave a shout out to “The People’s Forum,” which organizes events in New York under the banner “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” The academic activists of CLES are not first-generation immigrants from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank; they are largely home-grown ideologues who teach ethnic and gender studies at American universities and are now seeking to disseminate their ideas in US primary and secondary schools.

Even I—the jaded author of the book Woke Antisemitism and founder of a Jewish organization dedicated to countering this growing variant of the world’s oldest hatred—was stunned by their rhetoric. I would have thought that they would say that the murder of civilians was awful, but that Israel had it coming. But there was not even a token condemnation of Hamas’ violence on 7 October. Instead, the decolonizers publicly justified the bloodletting.

And then came the protests. Before a single Israeli bomb dropped in Gaza, the organizer of a gathering in New York’s Times Square celebrated the violent rampages in front of a cheering crowd. Alluding to the murdered festival-goers, he joked, “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party. They were having a great time and then the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

At a massive rally on the steps of the Sydney Opera House three days after the massacre, protesters chanted “Gas the Jews.” And—among other calumnies on campuses across North America—thirty-one Harvard student groups issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas, pronouncing Israel “entirely responsible” for the terrorist group’s slaughter.

There are two distinct but overlapping camps of the social justice left. The radical decolonization camp is made up of extremist academics, anarchists, and Black Lives Matter activists. It is anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic to its core. It would be easy to dismiss these people as ideological quacks—if it were not for their outsized role in US educational institutions.

By “decolonization,” they don’t mean a colonial power extricating itself from a former colony; they mean the process of freeing institutions and spheres of activity from the cultural or social influences of what they perceive as the dominant white Western class. One early leader of the liberated ethnic studies movement, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, has denounced the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” Influenced by decades of anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda, the decolonizers reserve special ire for the “settler-colonial state” of Israel, and call for the “liberation of Palestine,” by which they mean the displacement of the interloper Jews from their homeland. Witnessing the decolonisers’ zeal for obliterating the Jewish state, political scientist Wilfred Reilly quipped, “De-colonization is just ethnic cleansing, but woke.”

Those of us fighting the decolonizers have a golden opportunity to discredit them and undercut their influence in the days ahead. In their rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis, they’ve outed themselves as the extremists they are. School superintendents who might have seen them as credible educational partners in the new “diversity” initiatives will now have a hard time justifying their role to school boards and community members.

Then there’s the reformist, DEI camp, populated by people who have been deeply influenced by the same forms of neo-Manichaean postmodern thought, but who seek not to overthrow the capitalist system, but to reshuffle the deck of power. Unlike the decolonisers, their antisemitism tends to be latent. They insist that Jews are white, place them in white racial “affinity groups” and frequently downplay the validity of antisemitic claims as distractions from the important task of combating anti-blackness. They include mealy-mouthed university presidents and school superintendents, who see Muslims as a marginalized community and thus susceptible to “harm,” whereas Jews are a privileged minority and thus immune from such harm. These administrators are often held captive by the commitments and hires they made in the summer of 2020 during the great American racial reckoning. Some of them see Western cultural norms, such as being on time to work, as forms of white supremacy. They issue endless statements about racial justice and rightly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they found themselves tongue-tied when Israelis were victims of a slaughter, and their Jewish students were in obvious pain. Suddenly, they rediscovered the merits of academic neutrality and free speech. They, too, stand to lose cultural clout in the intensifying anti-woke backlash.

Two and a half years ago, I left my job as CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the prestigious 75-year-old umbrella body of national and local Jewish advocacy organizations across the US. As a liberal lefty myself, I worried that a radical, illiberal ideology was gaining ground in my own ideological backyard, a phenomenon I first wrote about more than twenty years ago, in a 2003 article for Washington Jewish Week entitled “Consistent Moral Message Missing.” In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I watched with dismay as Jewish organizations in my field fell in line with anti-racist pieties, desperate to remain aligned with their civil rights partners, many of whom had long ditched their liberal principles. While still employed at the JCPA, I wrote articles for Areo Magazine and other publications, expressing my concern. As soon as my departure was official, I wrote a widely circulated article “My Cheshbon Hanefesh (accounting of the soul in Hebrew) for Cowardice in the Face of Wokeness,” which sparked much debate in the Jewish community.

In May 2021, I founded the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values to fight for viewpoint diversity and against the encroachment of radical social justice ideology in the Jewish world. That very month fighting broke out in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, and some of the responses to that conflict foretold our current reality. Media coverage of the ongoing conflict since it first broke out in June 2008, and of each subsequent conflict—in December 2008, November 2012, June 2014, and May 2018, and right up until May 2021—unfolded in a predictable pattern. The stories and editorials first acknowledged that Israel must have leeway to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Then, as casualties mounted, the coverage turned against Israel, and, within a few days, the same outlets lambasted the Jewish state for using “disproportionate force.” In May 2021—when the last round occurred—Israel was not given the usual benefit of the doubt. In even the earliest stages of the conflict, Israel was demonized as the oppressor in some quarters. “If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency,” Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out in a Newsweek editorial. I knew then that the fight against wokeness was not just about preserving free thought, but about combating a variant of antisemitism that grows out of the same ideological conditions that stifle free thought.

I have never been entirely at ease making the case for the growth of “woke antisemitism” in liberal humanist circles. Liberal humanists like me are highly suspicious of promiscuous accusations of racism and bigotry, and oppose dogmatic declarations that only marginalized groups with “lived experience” of oppression are entitled to an opinion on social issues. Such political attitudes are the essence of cancel culture. Yet here I was arguing that the very ideology that produced cancel culture also fueled a new variant of antisemitism that sees Jews as white and privileged. In highlighting the threat of antisemitism, I was concerned that I might be engaging in the same tactics as the people I critique.

From the outset, however, I made it clear that I didn’t regard my analysis of antisemitism as beyond scrutiny. I reject the now oft-repeated claim among some Jews, who, echoing the assertions of minority political activists in other communities, argue that only Jews get to define antisemitism. I sought to discuss antisemitism in liberal, not postmodern terms, encouraging multiple viewpoints about the extent and nature of contemporary Jew hatred. But in the eyes of some fellow liberal humanists, I was still partaking in the identity politics of the day.

Now, in the aftermath of the massacre, I sense a shift. Awakened by the outpouring of Jew hatred in the wake of the massacre in Israel, many liberal humanist friends have expressed their shock. This magazine’s editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann has stated, “I don't think I ever really understood anti-Semitism until now. And it is frightening.” Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer was exasperated by the hypocrisy of many:

When I left my perch at JCPA, I was immediately regarded as a heretic by a number of former colleagues. Some actively tried to prevent me from giving speeches about the topic in their Jewish communities. But, on this front, too, I sense movement. This past week, I received a surprise email from one of my chief antagonists on Twitter, Paul Hackner, a South African-born Jewish leftist who earlier excoriated me for using the term “woke” which, he insisted, “is about compassion and awareness AND you weaponized to express a fragile need to be comfortable when addressing racism.” After the massacre, he told me: “It's clear there is a revanchist left in North America that is allying with Hamas. The firestorm of hatred is raging. Hamas is a death cult. Sad to say you were right. Thanks for engaging with me. It helped me find moral clarity.”

Even among Israel’s most ardent Jewish critics, such as Joshua Leifer, a leftist writer and editor for Dissent Magazine, there’s indignation about moral callousness on the left. “There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for,” he has stated:

I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families and children in their beds I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.

Leifer’s discontent might portend greater willingness among American Jews to take on their own political camp.

A local Jewish advocacy organization in my area, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRCGW), tore into the area school superintendent who originally failed to issue a statement of support for Israel and the Jewish community and later released only a tepid one. Much to my chagrin, the JCRCGW had previously actively participated in the school system’s yearlong “anti-racism audit” and subsequent implementation of DEI training and pedagogy. But when their partnership on anti-racism failed to elicit support for Jewish students in the schools in their time of need, the normally restrained JCRCGW lashed out:

We reserve our greatest anger and disappointment for Montgomery County Public Schools … [which has] consistently ignored our agencies’ urgent appeals over the last three days to respond appropriately and sensitively … if our schools can’t call out the brutal murder of Jews right before our eyes, of what use is the Holocaust education and cultural competency that we have worked together to advance?

I believe that this dogmatic version of “cultural competence,” which rigidly ties identity to privilege or oppression, is the source of the school system’s indifference to Jewish life in the first place. But given recent events, it seems unimaginable that mainstream Jewish leaders will continue to deny or ignore the role of ideology in the callousness toward the murder of Jews and the disregard for Jewish concerns. I, for one, will do everything in my power to place the topic on their agenda.

What could really turn the tide is if Jewish donors and trustees at major universities finally use the power of the purse. Marc Rowan, the chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management and the chair of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has taken his own university to task. “While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it,” he writes in The Free Press:

The responsibility also rests with many of our alumni leaders and trustees, myself included, who have sat by quietly as the pursuit of truth—the ostensible mission of our elite institutions—was traded for a poorly organized pursuit of social justice and political correctness.

“It’s long past time,” he argues, “for donors to take notice.”

It’s long past time for all of us to take notice. Let us hope that the horrors of the moment will not only be a turning point in the battle against antisemitism, but in the larger fight against radicalism and illiberalism in the West.

==

This was the world's easiest moral question: celebrate or condemn far-right religious terrorists who dismembered babies alive? And they got the answer wrong.

Atheists who defend Hamas lose the right to criticize the god of the bible.

Exodus 12:29-30

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Numbers 31:17-19

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day.

Psalm 137:8-9

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

What bible-god did is what Hamas did. You don't get to criticize the morality of bible-god while defending a terrorist organization that did the same kind of thing.

[justforbooks]

How TikTok Shop ads turned an obscure, inaccurate book into a bestseller

If you’ve spent enough time scrolling through TikTok, you might have seen a video from an account like @tybuggyreviews, a handle with half a million followers that exclusively posts videos selling products through the TikTok Shop.

The creator, whose verified Instagram account identifies him as Tarik Garrett, used the @tybuggyreviews account to pitch viewers on supplements, water flossers, earbuds, workout machines, bible study guides, probiotics for women to help “that smell down there,” watch bands, inspirational hoodies, inspirational T-shirts, face massagers, foot massagers, rhinestone necklaces, oil pulling kits, and colon cleanses.

In the TikTok Shop, creators earn a commission for each sale linked to their account. Garrett’s product videos got tens of thousands of views. A few even topped a million views. But nothing from his account took off quite like his sales pitch for an obscure 2019 publication called The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies.

“Now I see why they’re trying to remove TikTok. This book right here? This book of herbal remedies? They do not want us to see this book,” Garrett said at the beginning of one Shop video, referring to a new US law that requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company to either sell the app or face a ban. TikTok is challenging the law in court, arguing that lawmakers citing national security concerns as a reason to pass the bill did not adequately argue why those concerns should supersede the First Amendment. The law, to be clear, does not cite the Lost Book of Herbal Remedies’s availability on the TikTok Shop as a reason for banning the platform.

Garrett posted his pitch for the book on April 15. As of May 7, the video had more than 16 million views. Garrett opened the book and showed pages of its recommendations, urging users to take screenshots (and purchase a copy of their own) before it’s too late.

The camera lingered on a list of plants that, the book claimed, were treatments for cancer, drug addiction, heart attacks, and herpes. As of Wednesday, the listing for The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies that Garrett linked to has more than 60,000 sales on the TikTok Shop. To put that number in perspective, appearing on a bestseller list generally requires 5,000–10,000 sales in a week.

And that interest isn’t staying exclusively on TikTok. Google search interest in the book’s title spiked on the same day Garrett posted his video. The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies was, as of Wednesday, May 8, ranked 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list for books, and has appeared toward the top of Amazon’s bestseller rankings for the past three weeks.

A spokesperson for TikTok said that videos linking to Shop products must abide by both the community guidelines, which ban medical misinformation, and Shop policies, which do not allow misleading content. If a video violates only the Shop policies, they said, they’ll simply remove the link to the Shop but keep the content up. If it violates community guidelines, the video comes down.

The violations were enough for TikTok to remove his product review account. Garrett did not respond to a series of emailed questions.

How e-commerce took over TikTok

TikTok has long been good at guessing what its users might want to see, but less good at monetizing that trick. When the platform launched its Shop feature in the United States last fall, the For You page shifted, pushing video after video like those made by @tybuggyreviews in the hope that its users will start buying the products that go viral on TikTok directly from their store.

The result became a For You page with constant interruptions from random product pitches. The Shop ads, like much of the content pushed on TikTok, are personalized, though TikTok Shop recommendations are heavily influenced by reporting on stories like this one. Your results may differ. And yet, it is clear that TikTok has catapulted the Remedies book into relevance beyond a niche audience. The company earns money off of the explosion of sales on the shop, some of which come from creators who are explicitly promoting unproven cancer “cures” and conspiracy theories about the platform.

Like the Shadow Work Journal, a workbook that went super viral on TikTok Shop several months ago as a mental health tool — despite its dubious effectiveness — The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies is part of a swell of wellness creators, brands, and products that have found success reaching new audiences on TikTok Shop.

Shop videos have become a sort of “loophole” for health misinformation on TikTok, said Evan Thornburg, a bioethicist who posts on TikTok as @gaygtownbae and studies mis/disinformation and public health. Creators, and those with something to sell, know that Shop videos will get privileged on For You pages. Some creators may use those videos to promote dangerous health claims. In other cases, Thornburg noted, “the creator promoting the material isn’t necessarily spouting off disinformation, but the material that they’re convincing people to purchase is.”

A recipe for misinformation

The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies appears to be a case of both: The book contains misleading information, and creators are circulating misleading health claims in order to sell books. A video with nearly 1 million views promoting the book’s TikTok Shop listing is basically a series of ominous, AI-generated images with an AI voiceover. The video claims that the book contains secrets previously locked away in an ancient book located in the “Vatican library,” and that The Lost Book of Herbal Medicine was previously only available on the “dark web” before surfacing on TikTok. (Not true: The book is for sale on Amazon, the author’s website, and appears to be available through some academic and public library systems.) Another Shop video with more than 1 million views is captioned, “Cure for over 550 diseases, even cancer.”

I scanned through a copy of The Lost Book of Herbal Remedies this week. The 300-page book contains a disclaimer noting that it’s intended to “provide information about natural medicine, cures, and remedies that people have used in the past,” that it is not medical advice, and that some of the “remedies and cures found within do not comply with FDA guidelines.” It’s split into two parts: an alphabetical listing of ailments and conditions alongside the plants that the authors believe can cure or treat them, and an alphabetical list of plants, sorted by region, with instructions on how to prepare them.

The list of ailments the book includes proposed treatments for cancer, several STDs, mental health disorders, and digestive issues, among many other things. A few stand out: The book lists cures for smallpox, strep, and staph infections. There’s an emergency medicine section that includes plant remedies for serious medical conditions like internal bleeding and poisoning.

Flip to the entries for the plants and you’ll find lists of claims referring to research that is not cited. An entry promoting Ashwagandha’s “anti tumor effects” and ability to “kill ... cancerous cells” refers to “research,” but does not note that, while there is some indication that Ashwagandha can slow the growth of cancer cells, these studies were conducted on rodents and have yet to be replicated on humans.

Nicole Apelian, one of the book’s authors, while active on TikTok, it’s not her main social media presence. Her TikTok bio encourages her 17,000 followers there to check her out on Instagram, where she has 100,000 followers. Apelain also runs Nicole’s Apothecary, an herbal shop mentioned in the book that sells some of the tinctures she recommends, sells memberships to an online “Academy” for fans of her book, and advertises her paid appearances and workshops.

The endless whack-a-mole

As a journalist, there’s a pattern that becomes evident when writing about health misinformation on social media: something gets views, you assess the real or potential harm and try to understand its context, you contact the company to ask about the harmful thing. Maybe the video or post or group is taken down, maybe it’s not. The company gives you a statement, refers you to their policies on misinformation, and then you publish the article. This happens over and over because writing about misleading health information is a game of whack-a-mole that feels harder and harder to win.

Thornburg, the bioethicist, noted a couple reasons why we can’t climb out of this purgatory. First, meaningful moderation of a platform like TikTok is somewhat implausible. Social media companies are “never going to prioritize the amount of labor that would need to consistently be put into misinformation management,” they said.

Most sites rely on a combination of human moderators and AI, and it’s difficult to create automated moderation tools that don’t also censor allowed content. For example: health misinformation targeting minority communities often taps into legitimate distrust of medical professionals and institutions that have roots in recent history. An AI tool designed to moderate keywords associated with this sort of targeted misinformation might also sweep up criticism of health care systems in general.

And second, the creators who profit off health misinformation are really good at figuring out what they can say where, and what Thornburg calls “life boating” their audiences from one platform to another as needed. “You will have people who will drive interest in something through TikTok because the virality and the algorithm are aggressive,” Thornburg said. Then, their profile will link out to their Instagram or Linktree or YouTube channel.

Health misinformation on social media is a million cross-pollinating moving targets. TikTok Shop is a hot spot right now. Later, it might be something else on another platform. Chasing this content from platform to platform, harm to harm, viral video to viral video, is exhausting.

At the end, Thornburg shared the question that drives a lot of their work in this space, “Who do we consider accountable for these things that are harmful and regulate them or hold them to certain standards?” Often, it’s not really the person behind the individual piece of content driving the incentives for making it.

As a result, Garrett’s account was taken down, along with a few other popular videos advertising a book that has already sold tens of thousands of copies. As long as the incentives remain, it won’t be long until the next product promising a miracle starts polluting my For You page.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[vitabase121]

[xtruss]

The Nakba and ‘Forever Palestine 🇵🇸’ Refugees | Institute For Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Questions and Answers

Palestine refugees load their belongings onto a truck fleeing Al-Falouja village during the Nakba. © 1949 UN Archives Photographer Unknown. Photo used with permission.

What Is the Nakba?

Nakba is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” and refers to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, its exiling of Palestinians and making them into refugees, its dispossession of Palestinian property, its destruction of Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, and its attempt to erase the existence of the Palestinian people from its homeland in 1948.

Before, during, and after the establishment of Israel in May 1948, first Zionist militias and later the Israeli military used terrorism and committed massacres and other atrocities to drive Palestinians from their homes. Zionist militias and the Israeli military also systematically looted and demolished Palestinian property. By the time Israel signed armistice agreements with neighboring Arab states in 1949, there were an estimated 750,000 Palestinian refugees (approximately 75 percent of the Palestinian population of that lived on land that became Israel). Israel demolished between 400 and 500 Palestinian villages, town, and cities.

The Nakba is not only a historical event; Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians and colonization of Palestinian land means that the Nakba is ongoing and accurately defines Palestinian life under Israeli military occupation, apartheid, and settler-colonialism.

What Was Life Like in ‘Forever Palestine 🇵🇸’ Before the Nakba?

Palestinians enjoyed a thriving and multi-religious society in Palestine long before Zionism began in the 1880s. Before World War I, Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in Palestine with equal citizenship rights and religious autonomy under the Ottoman Empire. Palestinians ran for elections to the Ottoman Parliament and represented their Palestinian constituencies there. The indigenous Palestinian economy was self-sustaining and also integrated into regional and global economic trade networks. Before and after World War I, Palestinian identity formed the basis for a modern-day Palestinian nationalism, expressed through newspapers, magazines, civil society organizations, and political parties.

After World War I, Great Britain was given a “mandate” over Palestine by the League of Nations. Mandates were supposed to provide for the self-determination and independence of indigenous populations. However, the Palestine Mandate was different from all other mandates in that it committed Great Britain to promoting the establishment of a vaguely defined Jewish National Home in Palestine. Throughout the mandate (1922-1948), Great Britain privileged the establishment of Zionist political institutions to the detriment of the indigenous majority Palestinian population.

Why Did Palestinians Not Accept the UN 🇺🇳 Partition Plan?

At the time of the UN Partition Plan, which was recommended by the General Assembly in November 1947, the Zionist movement owned just 7 percent of the land of Palestine and Jewish people constituted only one-third of the total population. Despite this, the partition plan called for the establishment of a Jewish State in more than 55 percent of Palestine. Even within the proposed borders of the Jewish State, there would have been only a tiny majority of Jewish residents (498,000 to 497,000 Palestinians).

Palestinian political bodies, led by the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), rejected the partition plan as a violation of the principle of self-determination and majority rights. Instead, the AHC proposed that Palestine remain a unitary, democratic state with strong minority rights, including proportional representation for Palestine’s Jewish citizens in the legislature, and Jewish communal autonomy in some spheres.

Even though the United States voted in support of the partition plan, the Truman administration quickly realized that the partition plan could not be implemented and instead threw itself behind a proposal to place Palestine under a UN trusteeship until a political resolution could be found. The Truman administration reversed itself again by recognizing Israel.

Was Illegal Isra-ll’s Ethnic Cleansing of ‘Forever Palestine 🇵🇸’ Planned?

Yes. In March 1948, Zionist leaders headed by David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, approved Plan Dalet (D), which called for the “Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris)...In the event of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

The implementation of this plan began before Israel’s establishment in May 1948. By that time, there were already between 250,000-300,000 Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled from their homes often after attacks by Zionist militias on major Palestinian cities–Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias–and villages, bombing campaigns targeting civilians, and massacres at villages such as Deir Yassin.

This ethnic cleansing campaign accelerated and intensified after the establishment of Israel, making an estimated 750,000 Palestinians into refugees by the time armistice agreements were signed with neighboring Arab states in 1949. Even after the armistice agreements, Israel continued to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homes. For example, Israel continued deporting Palestinians from their homes in al-Majdal (known today as the city of Ashkelon) to the Gaza Strip until October 1950.

Who Are Palestinian Refugees Today?

From an original estimated population of 750,000 in 1948, today there are more than 7 million Palestinian refugees worldwide, 5.7 million of whom are refugees registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a specialized UN agency established in 1949 to provide social services to refugees.

In addition, there are estimated to be more than 400,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel who are classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs). These Palestinians were driven from their homes and dispossessed of their properties, too. Although they remained within the borders of what became Israel and received citizenship in the state, Israel has never allowed them to return to their lands and properties.

What Are Palestinian Refguees’ Rights?

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

In addition, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted in December 1948, resolved that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible”.

In addition to international law recognizing refugees’ right of return, refugee status is also automatically conferred on the descendants of refugees. According to the UN, “Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees, considered by UNHCR as refugees and supported as such. Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.”

The Palestinian refugee crisis has persisted for nearly 75 years because Israel refuses to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties in violation of international law.

What Is ‘War Criminal US’ Policy on the Nakba and ‘Forever Palestine 🇵🇸’ Refugee Crisis?

The United States voted both for UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in 1948, reaffirming Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and for the establishment of UNRWA in 1949. Except for a few years during the Trump administration, the United States has consistently supported UNRWA, contributing more than $6 billion to its budget since 1950.

The United States, through its chairing of the Palestine Conciliation Commission, originally pushed Israel to accept the repatriation of a significant number of Palestinian refugees; however, this commitment proved to be short-lived as the United States began favoring schemes to resettle Palestinian refugees in other countries as early as 1949.

The fate of Palestinian refugees was hardly addressed at all by the United States again until permanent status negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis began at Camp David in 2000. Shortly before his term ended, President Clinton issued “parameters” for Palestinian-Israeli peace that undermined Palestinian refugee rights. His parameters stated that “One should not expect Israel to acknowledge an unlimited right of return to present-day Israel,” and that repatriation of Palestinian refugees to Israel would be subject to its “sovereign decisions”.

In the most recent round of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in 2013-2014, then Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly put forward a figure of only 80,000 Palestinian refugees who would be allowed to return to their homes–less than two percent of registered refugees at that time.

How Is Congress Undermining ‘Forever Palestine 🇵🇸’ Refugees’ Rights?

Congress has also taken steps to undermine Palestinian refugee rights. Senate Report 112-172 to the 2013 Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations bill directed the Department of State to issue a report to Congress detailing “the approximate number of people who, in the past year, have received UNRWA services: (1) whose place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who were displaced as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict; and (2) who are descendants of persons described in subparagraph (1).” This reporting requirement attempts to differentiate between the refugee status of original refugees and their descendants, which is contrary to international law.

The intent of Members of Congress to utilize this report to try to extinguish the rights of Palestinian refugees is evident from a 2020 Dear Colleague letter, led by Rep. Doug Lamborn, pressing for the declassification of this report. The letter attempts to erase Palestinian refugees by claiming that their rights are a “fiction”.

Instead of passing legislation to try to negate Palestinian refugee rights, Congress and the Biden administration must center the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as part of any principled effort to establish a just peace. Any attempt by the United States to broker Palestinian-Israeli peace that is not based on principles of international law and justice is bound to fail.

[mightyflamethrower]

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Unhinged Among Us

VICTOR DAVIS HANSONCONTRIBUTOR

November 30, 202310:42 PM ET

October 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation

During peace and holiday, invading Hamas gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants and the elderly.

The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza — to cheers from the Gaza street.

Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard left and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.

When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar.

From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the IDF and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.

Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.

It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.

Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.

They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal antisemitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.

They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police.

The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of antisemitic Klansmen.

Why did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party and the campuses outdo each other in their antisemitic venom toward Israel?

For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protestors suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians and the rules of war.

But none could explain why the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1947-48 still self-identify as victimized “refugees” when 900,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Middle-East Arab cities about the same time do not.

The 200,000 Greek Cypriots driven out from norther Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant “refugee’’ status either.

Few protestors knew that Jews have lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there were Muslim Turks who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost in World War I and were expelled.

How exactly did it happen that the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque was built within King Herod’s earlier Second Temple enclosure?

The pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims have one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.

They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to — “settled?” — supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate, and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.

As far as “disproportionality,” it is the goal of every power at war, Hamas included.

What protestors are furious about is that Israel is more effective at being disproportionate in retaliation than Hamas and its Iranian supporters were in their preemptive mass murdering.

Targeting innocent civilians? Hamas is among the current greatest offenders in the world.

It rockets Israeli cities without warning. It mass murders Jews in their beds during peace. It exposes Gazans to mortal danger by impressing them as human shields. Hamas shoots those who refuse.

The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them and not to execute civilians without trial.

Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?

Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?

Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?

Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia and popular culture?

Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority remaining quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture and commit violence?

Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?

Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur, Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uighurs, Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine or ISIS, Syrian and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims.

Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protestors falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish — and that explains the pass given them by our antisemitic, pro-Hamas street.

[upalldown]

Death Cab For Cutie - Asphalt Meadows

Tenth album from Ben Gibbard's indie rock group produced by John Congleton

7/13

For the most part, Death Cab for Cutie’s music falls into one of two camps: the scrappy, Pacific Northwest indie of their early days or the radio-ready, arena-adjacent hits of their later years. The middle point between these two poles is 2003’s Transatlanticism, a masterpiece that helped Death Cab transition from the winsome simplicity of The Photo Album into the chart-topping sounds of Plans. The group’s 10th album, Asphalt Meadows, blends these two modes of operation in a career-spanning feat. Although some of its songs lean heavily into one styling or the other, its composite package borrows from the whole gamut of Death Cab’s oeuvre, rather than one camp or the other.

That’s not to say that Asphalt Meadows lacks an identity of its own. The band’s latest work contains some of the heaviest, noisiest songs in their catalog, and it makes that clear from the outset. Opener “I Don’t Know How I Survive” starts like most Death Cab for Cutie songs would; a melodic guitar line gives way to frontman Benjamin Gibbard’s rumination on an existential dilemma: “Listen to the ringing in your ears / The scrambled voices of your fears.” By the time the chorus enters, though, a blast of cacophonous noise rings out that wouldn’t sound out of place on last year’s Low record. The BJ Burton-esque, clipping levels of volume are, generally speaking, novel to Death Cab, a band often aligned with a reclusive, bookish demeanor that you wouldn’t expect to get really fucking loud.

The Seattle stalwarts keep up the pace on the next track, lead single “Roman Candles.” In a quick, two-minute burst, Gibbard explores the ephemeral nature of joy while a growling low end lurks underneath. An ascending, distorted guitar line enters the fold shortly thereafter, and the song only keeps building upon itself from there, adding layers and layers of heaviness that contrast the soft tunefulness of Gibbard’s distinctive voice. It’s these louder moments that expand the notion of what a Death Cab for Cutie song can be. For such an established band over two decades into their career, it’s an impressive achievement, and it’s part of what makes Asphalt Meadows their best work since 2008’s Narrow Stairs.

On a similar note, it also has one of the best Death Cab for Cutie songs to date. “Foxglove through the Clearcut” switches between pensive spoken-word sections and Transatlanticism-indebted catharsis, like Cassandra Jenkins’ “Hard Drive” with loud, alt-rock guitars. Gibbard chronicles the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Indigenous peoples in the United States, evoking a quote from Cheyenne Chief White Antelope (though it’s misattributed to another Cheyenne leader, Black Kettle) to underlie the sense of placelessness that can result from occupation. The penultimate song, “Fragments from the Decade,” which features some of Jason McGerr’s most tasteful drumming this side of “What Sarah Said,” also examines how we all live on stolen land: “Days are lonely and long / Walking in place where you don’t belong / Here on paved Native lands / Time disappears from the palm of your hands.” Whereas Death Cab’s 2010s output littered some good tracks throughout, such as “Your Hurricane,” “You Are a Tourist” and “No Room in Frame,” Asphalt Meadows houses a bunch of them in one place. It makes for a more gratifying, consistent experience compared to its most recent predecessors.

Death Cab for Cutie also indulge some proggier tendencies, albeit without the classic-rock guitars they are often accompanied by. The title track (not that one) is what a Thank You for Today cut would sound like if its verses were in 10/4. Following it is “Rand McNally,” which hinges on a guitar arpeggio and gauzy synth melody in 7/8. Aside from its odd time signatures, however, it’s fairly standard late-era Death Cab fare. Parts of Asphalt Meadows draw their frames of reference from certain records more blatantly than others, such as how the title track and “Rand McNally” conjure the glossy textures of Thank You for Today. The pandemic bop “I Miss Strangers,” for instance, is a modern take on the frenetic pace of 2011’s “Doors Unlocked and Open,” right down to its themes of isolation: “These days I miss strangers more than I miss my friends / And the waves of conversations breaking on the shores of my head again.” The show-stopping centerpiece “Foxglove through the Clearcut” summons the escalation of “Transatlanticism” and “Bixby Canyon Bridge” with its towering, simmering magnitude.

The band gets even more meta on “Here to Forever,” in which Gibbard reckons with the self-doubt that can stem from major success. “I wanna know the measure from here to forever,” he sings in the chorus, reflecting on the future of his band and possibly his entire life trajectory. However tenuous it may seem, he remains a reluctant optimist: “The only way I seem to cope is by trying to hold on to hope / If just for a while.” Even if it contains a gauche line about doom-scrolling that doesn’t quite land, “Here to Forever” is a brief reminder of the slivers of hope that can peek through even the thickest clouds of cynicism.

Asphalt Meadows’ closer, “I’ll Never Give Up on You,” is a more overt affirmation. Gibbard enumerates the many things that have disillusioned him, whether they be politicians, dilettantes, affectations or mind-altering substances. He has lost his faith in so much, but he makes one exception. “I’ll never give up on you,” he sings, backed by his own vocal harmonies in a call-and-response refrain. Despite the fact that people reductively memeify them as a one-dimensional “sad boy” band, Death Cab for Cutie underscore their range and numerous eras on Asphalt Meadows. Uniting the past and the present, it’s the perfect mnemonic for this band’s legacy.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/death-cab-for-cutie/asphalt-meadows-album-review/

[natural-body-detoxification]

Discover 9 Science-Backed Methods for Natural Body Detoxification! 

Detoxification, once a term reserved for medical interventions, has evolved into a popular health trend in today's fast-paced world. The stresses and toxins of modern life have led many individuals to seek ways to cleanse their bodies and minds naturally. But amidst the abundance of detox programs and products, it's essential to understand science-backed methods for effective detoxification. 

Understanding Detoxification: 

Detoxification is the process of eliminating toxins and harmful substances from the body to promote overall health and well-being. It targets vital organs like the liver, kidneys, colon, and skin, aiming to enhance their function and vitality. While detox has gained popularity in recent years, its roots lie in medical practices for treating conditions like alcohol poisoning and drug overdose. 

The Importance of Natural Detox: 

Natural detox methods prioritize holistic well-being, addressing both physical and mental health. By adopting a natural approach, individuals can support their body's inherent detoxification processes while promoting sustainable lifestyle changes. Unlike quick-fix detox programs, natural detox focuses on long-term health benefits and encourages mindful living. 

Nine Science-Backed Tips for Natural Detox: 

Stay Hydrated: Proper hydration is essential for optimal detoxification. Start your day with warm water and lemon juice to kickstart your metabolism and support liver function. Aim to drink plenty of water throughout the day to flush out toxins and maintain hydration levels. 

Eat Clean: Opt for whole, unprocessed foods rich in nutrients and fiber. Incorporate fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins into your diet to support liver health and promote digestion. Avoiding processed foods and excessive sugar can reduce the burden on your body and enhance detoxification. 

Embrace Antioxidants: Antioxidant-rich foods like berries, green tea, and dark chocolate help combat free radicals and reduce oxidative stress. Incorporating these foods into your diet can protect against cell damage and lower the risk of chronic diseases like liver cancer. 

Include Lean Proteins: Lean protein sources such as fish, chicken, tofu, and legumes are essential for muscle repair and growth. During detox, prioritize these protein sources to support tissue maintenance while eliminating toxins from your body. 

Try Herbal Teas: Herbal teas like dandelion, ginger, and chamomile have natural detoxifying properties. Sipping on these teas can soothe your digestive system, reduce inflammation, and promote overall well-being. 

Avoid Processed Foods: Processed foods are often laden with artificial additives, preservatives, and unhealthy fats that hinder the detoxification process. Focus on whole, nutrient-dense foods that nourish your body and support its natural cleansing mechanisms. 

Exercise Regularly: Physical activity promotes sweating, which is one of the body's natural ways to eliminate toxins through the skin. Incorporate regular exercise into your routine to boost circulation, improve lymphatic drainage, and enhance overall detoxification. 

Practice Mindfulness: Stress can impede the body's detoxification process and negatively impact mental health. Incorporate mindfulness practices like meditation, deep breathing, or yoga to reduce stress levels and support mental detoxification. 

Prioritize Sleep: Quality sleep is essential for overall health and well-being, including detoxification. Aim for 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night to allow your body and mind to rest, repair, and regenerate. 

Conclusion: 

Natural detoxification offers a holistic approach to cleansing the body and mind, promoting long-term health and vitality. By adopting science-backed methods such as staying hydrated, eating clean, embracing antioxidants, and prioritizing self-care practices like exercise and mindfulness, individuals can support their body's natural detoxification processes and achieve optimal well-being. Remember, consistency is key, so make natural detox a part of your lifestyle for lasting benefits. 

About ToneOp 

ToneOp is a platform dedicated to improving and maintaining good health through a comprehensive range of goal-oriented health plans with up to 3 Coach Support. With a range of Weight Management, Medical Condition and Detox Plans, the app also provides premium health trackers, recipes and health content. Get customised diet, fitness, naturopathy & yoga plans and transform yourself with ToneOp.   

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