#batya ungar sargon

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Sociopaths across the globe finding posters of these kidnapped children. Babies, Holocaust survivors and tearing them down. I saw, they were all over the upper east side, the same posters of the 8-year-old girl, the 9-month-old baby, and someone had literally gone to the trouble of printing it out with the word "occupier" under it, if you would believe that.

And let me explain to you exactly why this is happening. These people have woke mind-virus.

In the woke mindset, there's no difference between right versus wrong. They see the world only through the lens of powerful versus powerless, and then they superimpose race onto that.

So, anybody who is a "person of color" has less power and thus is inherently virtuous, no matter what they do, and anybody who they perceive as a "white" person is inherently morally compromised and an oppressor and has no virtue and is evil.

And they code Jews and Israel as "white." And just like all white people, there's no such thing as an innocent white person or an innocent Jew to these woke people.

And so what they do is, when there's evidence of a Jewish victim, what could be more pure and innocent than a 9-month-old baby, they literally have to destroy the evidence because it destroys their mindset, their worldview.

And let me just tell you one more thing. You know, there's a lot of people walking around saying the Jewish people are shaking, the Jewish people are scared. We're not scared. We are livid. And if these sociopaths think we're going to cede this great nation to them, they're in for a big surprise.

--

"Another aspect of the construction of whiteness is the way certain groups have moved into or out of that race. For example, early in our history Irish, Jews, and Italians were considered nonwhite—that is, on a par with African Americans. Over time, they earned the prerogatives and social standing of whites by a process that included joining labor unions, swearing fealty to the Democratic Party, and acquiring wealth, sometimes by illegal or underground means. Whiteness, it turns out, is not only valuable; it is shifting and malleable." -- "Critical Race Theory, An Introduction" (Third Edition), by Delgado and Stefancic

-

The Role of the Moslem Woman: Article Seventeen: The Moslem woman has a role no less important than that of the Moslem man in the battle of liberation. She is the maker of men. Her role in guiding and educating the new generations is great. The enemies have realised the importance of her role. They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up the way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle. That is why you find them giving these attempts constant attention through information campaigns, films, and the school curriculum, using for that purpose their lackeys who are infiltrated through Zionist organizations under various names and shapes, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others, which are all nothing more than cells of subversion and saboteurs. These organizations have ample resources that enable them to play their role in societies for the purpose of achieving the Zionist targets and to deepen the concepts that would serve the enemy. These organizations operate in the absence of Islam and its estrangement among its people. The Islamic peoples should perform their role in confronting the conspiracies of these saboteurs. The day Islam is in control of guiding the affairs of life, these organizations, hostile to humanity and Islam, will be obliterated. -- Hamas Covenant 1988

Critical Race Theory and Hamas both echo the same "Jews control the world" conspiracy theories as the far-right.

[ex-foster]

I find Meghan Murphy to be an incredibly influential figure in shaping my views on liberal ideology. In this podcast, Meghan interviews author Batya Ungar Sargon about her book titled "Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women".

I found this conversation really interesting but one of the points that was so spot on was the observation about how some liberals appear virtuous but may actually prioritize their own interests over genuine altruism. For instance, those who benefit from hiring inexpensive labor, such as nannies who are undocumented immigrants, may paradoxically accuse working-class individuals of racism.

Woke ideology appears to have morphed into a status symbol associated with wealth. Rob Henderson has also observed this phenomenon, which he terms "luxury beliefs." Henderson cites the "defund the police" movement as an example, noting that while the majority of opposition hails from poorer neighborhoods, wealthier areas tend to express more support. Wealthier individuals can easily virtue signal ideas like "defund the police" when residing in gated communities or having personal security

These are solely my beliefs, but I believe the concept of luxury beliefs also applies to liberal feminists advocating for "sex work is work." As a woman who aged out of foster care, one of my most haunting memories is my social worker explaining that many foster kids end up homeless, with girls often turning to prostitution. The liberal feminist stance of "sex work is work" seems insensitive to the reality of sexual exploitation.

[booasaur]

Ugh, I went through my drafts over the last few months because I really wanted to find this one post that was like, yeah, there's misinformation on both sides about Israel/Palestine but one side is random people online and the other side is random people online and also our mainstream media and politicians, all the way up to heads of state.

I was just remembering it because of the way Jonathan Glazer's winner's speech from tonight's Oscars is being skewed and blatantly misinterpreted by so many people.

The actual speech:

The quote itself:

"Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?"

For quite a while (I just saw they'd corrected during the writing of this post), freaking Variety magazine wrote it as such:

How egregious! How many people saw that and then just went to sleep and won't come back to check in on this article again.

And this the opinion editor of Newsweek! No correction in the three hours since.

There are many such misrepresentations tonight. And this is to smear and disavow someone who's Jewish and who just won an Oscar on an international stage and for which we have video of his actual quote. Imagine how ordinary Palestinians are treated, especially if there's no video.

[plitnick]

Cutting Through: Jonathan Glazer's Noble Speech and The Shame of His Critics

In the latest edition of the Cutting Through newsletter, I take on three examples of so-called “liberal Zionists” who willfully misled their readers about Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars. Glazer spoke out against dehumanization, and specifically pointed to BOTH the October 7 attacks and the genocide in Gaza (he didn’t use that term for it). I break down the dishonesty and also reflect on…

[athis333]

In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

Eight decades later, as a fascistic Russian regime wages war against Ukraine, a motley collection of voices from across the political spectrum has called upon the United States and its allies to adopt neutrality as their position. Ranging from anti-imperialists on the left to isolationists on the right and more respectable “realists” in between, these critics are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term. Few if any oppose the use of force as a matter of principle. But nor are they neutral. It is not sufficient, they say, for the West to cut off its supply of defensive weaponry to Ukraine. It must also atone for “provoking” Russia to attack its smaller, peaceful, democratic neighbor, and work at finding a resolution that satisfies what Moscow calls its “legitimate security interests.” In this, today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.

To appreciate the bizarrely kaleidoscopic nature of this caucus, consider the career of a catchphrase. “Is Washington Fighting Russia Down to the Last Ukrainian?” asked the headline of a column self-published in March by Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and presidential candidate. It was a strange question for Paul to be posing just three weeks into President Vladimir Putin’s unjustifiable and unforgivable invasion, especially considering the extraordinary lengths to which the Biden administration had gone to avoid “fighting Russia.”

Even stranger than Paul’s assertion that the U.S. was goading Ukrainians into sacrificing themselves on the altar of its Russophobic bloodlust, though, has been the proliferation of his specious talking point across the ideological spectrum.

Ten days after Paul accused his country of treating Ukrainians as cannon fodder, the retired American diplomat Chas Freeman repeated the quip. “We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence,” Freeman declared sarcastically—even as he excused Russia’s “special military operation” as an understandable reaction to being “stiff-armed” by the West on the “28-year-old demands that NATO stop enlarging in the direction of Russia.” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, made these remarks in an interview with The GrayZone, a self-described “independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.”

Although The GrayZone would characterize itself as an “anti-imperialist” news source, the opaquely financed publication is highly selective in the empires it chooses to scrutinize; it is difficult to find criticism of Russia or China—or any other American adversary—on its site. A more accurate descriptor of its ideological outlook is “campist,” denoting a segment of the sectarian far left that sees the world as divided into two camps: the imperialist West and the anti-imperialist rest.

Freeman, who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, seemed to feel at home in The GrayZone. In that Manichaean domain—one that lacks, naturally, any shades of gray—no anti-Western tyrant is too brutal for fawning adulation, and America is always to blame. A Republican foreign-policy hand in conversation with a fringe leftist website might seem like an odd pairing, but Freeman has a fondness for dictators.

In 2009, when Freeman was appointed to serve on the National Intelligence Council during the first year of the Obama administration, a series of leaked emails revealed a window into his worldview. Observing the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman praised the Chinese Communist Party for its bloody crackdown on peaceful student demonstrators; his only criticism of its dispersal of this “mob scene” was that it had been “overly cautious” in displaying “ill-conceived restraint.” It is quite something to read a retired American diplomat criticizing the Chinese regime for being too soft during the Tiananmen massacre, but such views are not as aberrational as they sound. Within the school of foreign-policy “realism,” notions of morality are seen as quaint distractions from the real business of great-power politics.

In April, it was Noam Chomsky’s turn to recite the Pauline mantra in a podcast with the editor of Current Affairs, a leftist magazine. Going out of his way to praise Freeman as “one of the most astute and respected figures in current U.S. diplomatic circles,” the world’s most famous radical intellectual endorsed the crusty veteran of realist GOP administrations for characterizing American policy in Eastern Europe as “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

From Chomsky’s mouth to Putin’s ears.

“A great deal is being said about the United States’ intention to fight against Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’—they say it there and they say it here,” the Russian president mused the following week, prefacing his mention of the gibe with his own version of that Trumpian rhetorical flourish, “A lot of people are saying.” That same month, an American Conservative article by Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute was headlined “Washington Will Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian,” denying Ukrainians any agency in their own struggle by answering the question Paul had rhetorically asked.

Soon after, the dean of realist international-relations theorists, the University of Chicago scholar  John Mearsheimer, used the line as though he’d just thought of it. By then, the argument that America was “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian” had ping-ponged between both ends of the ideological spectrum an astonishing number of times. The point for the anti-imperialist left and the isolationist right, as well as the realist fellow travelers hitched to each side, was that blame for the conflict lies mainly with the U.S., which is using Ukraine as a proxy for its nefarious interventionism in Moscow’s backyard.

That the fringe left would blame America—which it views as the source of all capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and imperialist evil in the world—for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is predictable. It blames America for everything. When, two days after the Russian invasion began on February 24, the Democratic Socialists of America called upon “the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” mainstream Democrats condemned the statement. More significant has been the position taken by mainstream realists, who similarly fault the West for somehow “provoking” Russia into waging war on its neighbor. These politically disparate forces share more than a talking point. They also have a worldview in common.

Consider America’s leading realist think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. This “transpartisan” group enjoyed great fanfare upon its founding, in 2019, with seed funding from the libertarian Charles Koch and the left-wing George Soros. After two decades of “forever wars,” here at last was an ideologically diverse assortment of reasonable, sober-minded experts committed to pursuing a “foreign policy of restraint.” But counseling restraint as a rapacious, revisionist dictatorship wages total war on its smaller, democratic neighbor had a whiff of appeasement for at least one of Quincy’s fellows, leading to a split within the organization.

“The institute is ignoring the dangers and the horrors of Russia’s invasion and occupation,” Joe Cirincione, a nuclear non-proliferation expert and one of the group’s leading left-of-center scholars, said upon his resignation this summer, adding that Quincy “focuses almost exclusively on criticism of the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies.”

The moral myopia Cirincione identifies is an essential trait of the new online magazine Compact, where self-styled anti-woke Marxists and Catholic theocrats unite in their loathing of classical liberal values at home and their opposition to defending those values abroad. In an article titled “Fueling Zelensky’s War Hurts America,” the left-wing writer Batya Ungar-Sargon took issue with the U.S. supplying defensive weaponry to Kyiv, arguing that resources devoted to supporting Ukrainians would be better spent helping economically disadvantaged Americans.

Pushing the United States to prioritize the needs of its poorest citizens, even if that means forgoing its responsibilities for maintaining the European security order, is at least an intellectually defensible position (if a shortsighted and reductive one). But Ungar-Sargon also went out of her way to give credence to Russia’s specious territorial claims.

“If Ukraine’s territorial integrity were of such immense national interest,” she wrote, “surely we would have climbed the rapid-escalation ladder back in 2014, when Moscow invaded and annexed Crimea—a move that a referendum found was popular among Crimeans.” The plebiscite Ungar-Sargon endorsed was held under Russian gunpoint to provide a legal fig leaf for the first armed annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II. She also identified Donetsk and Luhansk—the two Russian-backed separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine that Putin recognized as puppet states on the eve of his invasion and where he has now held similarly meaningless referenda annexing them to Russia—as “independent republics,” conferring a legitimacy that was in marked contrast to the way she referred dismissively to “the United States and its European satrapies.”

Many commentators have likened Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill for his charismatic resistance to foreign invaders and his ability to raise the morale of his people. In light of this popular association, the headline that the editors of Compact devised for Ungar-Sargon’s apologia—“Zelensky’s War”—is nauseating, blaming the victim while seeming to evoke the title of a notorious book by the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, Churchill’s War.

Condemning the U.S. and its allies for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine requires one to ignore or downplay a great deal of Russian misbehavior. This is a characteristic that unites left-wing anti-imperialists, right-wing isolationists, and the ostensibly more respectable “realists.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe,” Mearsheimer wrote in a 2014 essay titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.” “But this account is wrong.” Eight years on, as Russian forces marched toward Kyiv and Putin issued vague threats of nuclear escalation, Mearsheimer made no acknowledgment of how very wrong his own earlier, sanguine assessment of Putin’s intentions had been.

“We invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine,” he told The New Yorker a week into the invasion. Putin’s apparent goal of overthrowing Zelensky and installing a puppet regime would not be an example of “imperialism,” Mearsheimer argued, and was meaningfully different from “conquering and holding onto Kyiv.” All of this linguistic legerdemain would surely come as news to the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and other peoples of the region who once suffered under the Russian imperial yoke.

As evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians mounts, Mearsheimer has cleaved to his position that NATO enlargement is to blame for the war. “I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO,” he also told The New Yorker. Although the NATO communiqué did express the alliance’s hope that the two former Soviet republics would become members at some indefinite point in the future, it came after France and Germany had successfully blocked a proposal by the Bush administration to offer Ukraine and Georgia an actual path to membership. But even if the U.S. had made such a promise, how would that justify the invasion and occupation of Ukraine? Mearsheimer also ignores the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, according to which the United States, Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons. This concord lasted for 20 years, until Putin abrogated it by invading and occupying Crimea.

Even more obtuse are the excuses for Russian aggression made by Mearsheimer’s fellow academic realist, the Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs has worked as an adviser to a host of international institutions, such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as a development economist. Unlike Mearsheimer, he has no particular expertise in foreign political affairs, but this has not stopped him from pronouncing on geopolitical issues. Last December, as Russia was amassing its forces on Ukraine’s border, Sachs suggested that “NATO should take Ukraine’s membership off the table, and Russia should forswear any invasion.” This ignored the fact that Russia had already invaded the country in 2014.

Seeking to explain “the West’s false narrative” about Ukraine after the war began, Sachs noted, “Since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria and Yemen to name just a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.” This sentence contains two significant qualifications. First, Sachs’s counting only those “wars of choice” that Russia waged “beyond the former Soviet Union” implies that its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were permissible through some sort of Cold War–continuity droit de seigneur. Second, Sachs’s selection of 1980 as the starting point for his comparison conveniently excludes the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and became the Red Army’s own forever war, lasting almost 10 years and playing a crucial role in the Soviet Union’s demise.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin. It has also revealed the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people, who, contrary to Ron Paul’s ambulatory talking point, had no need of any American to prod or gull them into defending their homeland. Here in the U.S., the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign-policy commentators: the “anti-imperialists” who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the “realists” who make arguments unmoored from reality.

[whitesinhistory]

Marc Lamont Hill challenges Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon on her support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Israel has seized the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, forcing tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee the area while shutting down Gaza’s main entry point for humanitarian aid.

In the meantime, university students in the United States are protesting against the country’s unconditional support for Israel, which has resulted in arrests, suspensions and expulsions.

This week on UpFront, Marc Lamont Hill challenges Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon on her depiction of Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “just”.

Batya Ungar-Sargon dodges question about the Israel's Oct 9th strike and pivots to the "vast majority of Israel's operations". Marc Lamont Hill picks specific dates and operations that are examples of Israel's committing War Crimes.

Batya then misquotes Martin Luther King, but Marc corrects her and sets the record straight.

Batya then proceeds to lie and twist the core principles of why Jewish students and their allies around the world want a ceasefire and end to the occupation. Once again Marc has to set her straight.

[schraubd]

There But For the Grace of God

Over at the bad place, Batya Ungar-Sargon is mainlining copium to explain Donald Trump's debate performance. My take on the debate is that Harris did well because she's a factory settings Democratic apparatchik, and the main skill for doing that well is one she's good at: acting, pretending the neoliberal (or now neoconservative!) agenda of the Democratic elite is your own,… — Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) September 11, 2024 Ah yes, that explains it. Donald Trump is just too pure authentic for this world. His raw untamable independent streak just couldn't be corralled to please "the elites" ("on either side"!). Harris gets "if anything, she was too prepared" version 2.0. It's amazing how hard one has to work to avoid the Occam's Razor explanation* that Trump sounded like a madman because he is one; that Trump's inability to articulate a concept of a plan for America beyond crude xenophobic nativism is because he lacks one. Batya's descent into utter madness brain worms territory (which has been ongoing for years, including being a key player making Newsweek the house journal for the alt-right and antisemitic White supremacists and parroting the crudest Putinist propaganda about how funding of "Zelensky's War" is why Americans don't have manufacturing jobs) legitimately frightens me, because I don't know what zombie bit her and so I don't know how to ensure it doesn't bite me too. My main inference right now is "don't become opinion editor for a Jewish media outlet", because it was her experience at the Forward that seemed to drive her into the arms of madness, but I'm terrified that if exposed to the wrong trauma I too might go from being a reasonable intelligent and thoughtful commentator to a true believer in every fever swamp inanity imaginable. I'm not really exposed to Batya these days, since she's not on BlueSky. There's a line on BlueSky that it's an echo chamber, and that's something I worry about too -- isn't it important that I be exposed to more views like Batya's, to ensure that I'm not cocooning myself in an epistemic bubble? The problem, though, is that while when I expose myself to the Batya's of the world I may pat myself on the back for being a good, virtuous epistemic citizen willing to challenge myself with views-not-my-own, in reality exposing myself to the likes of Batya feels less challenging than it is confirmatory. Reading her takes only makes me feel incredibly relieved that I don't have her takes. She is anti-persuasive.  If the point of reading diverse views is to have that "huh, I never thought of it that way" moment, reading these people makes me go "huh, turns out that the caricatured mental model I have of brain-rotted right-wingers isn't a caricature at all." They're saying exactly what I expect them to say; there are no surprises. I'm unconvinced that confirming that instinct is actually healthier, even along the axis of remaining open-minded to divergent opinions. * Of course, this circle also struggles mightily to understand what an "Occam's Razor" explanation is. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/juXKUBd

[girlactionfigure]

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A post shared by Antisemitism in the news and social media. (@antisemitismtoday)

Incredible. It is a long video but worth the listen. I watched this a few times. Amazing insight.

Batya Ungar-Sargon @batyaus

[dikleyt]

When Ilhan Omar was told by Batya Ungar-Sargon, "Congratulations, Ilhan. You just won the approval of the KKK," the whole progressive left was seemingly in agreement that this was fucked up, because obviously the KKK wants to kill her.

Why, then, are so many leftists so eager - so gleeful - to make comparisons between Jews and Nazis at every chance they can get, even where Nazis hadn't even come up? Usually they won't even say anything so measured as "Congratulations, you just won the approval of Nazis" in a specific instance, but rather, they will just say, "You are a Nazi."

It would be one thing if there were a Jew or group of Jews alive on this planet who had done anything approximating what the Nazis did, but this is obviously not literally the case. The Nazis killed some 2/3 of European Jews in four years. There is not a single Jew alive or dead who has done anything approximating that. Nor is there any group of Jews alive or dead who has done anything like that.

Find a better way to say that an individual Jewish person, group, or government sucks. It's a form of Holocaust revisionism to say that they are the same as, or worse than, Nazis. It may not be in some hypothetical universe where there were such Jews, but it is the case in this universe at this time.

Do people do this without thinking? Yes. They should stop. I used to do it, and I have stopped.

[mightyflamethrower]

Thing of Beauty: Batya-Ungar Sargon Schools Bill Mayer

There is nothing finer than drinking coffee in the morning while watching a hard core regressive get his lunch eaten by a trojan Trump supporter. He clearly did not expect to be taken down so forcefully. Good on her.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Batya Ungar-Sargon

Published: Nov 8, 2023

About a week after the October 7 massacre, I passed a large group of people in an airport who were waiting to check in for a flight to Cairo. One of the women ostentatiously clocked the Jewish star I wear around my neck and started whispering with her compatriots. As I walked by, she shouted at me, “Palestine will be free!” 

I chuckled as I walked to my gate, thinking, Not if Egypt has anything to say about it.

Before October 7, I would have considered this whole scene to be wildly offensive. A stranger shouting an anti-Israel slogan at me, holding me responsible for the actions of the Israeli government simply because I am a Jew. 

But in the post–October 7 world, I had a different reaction: let her scream. 

It’s uncomfortable to be barked at by strangers. It’s not pleasant to find out that your classmates will not condemn the murder of your people, or to hear thousands of them gleefully chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult committed to your erasure from this planet. It’s unsettling to know that your peers have adopted a worldview that allows them to convince themselves that you are the bad guy, you are the privileged monster who wants babies to burn—even as they justify and celebrate the burning of Jewish babies.

It is scary to realize that the same administration that “protects” your fellow students from every perceived slight and insult will side with them against you as they literally call for your annihilation. It can be deeply isolating to open social media and see post after post calling your people the perpetrators of the exact forms of murderous violence that was done to them not three weeks earlier. And it is maddening to watch those who hate us and wish violence upon us fashion themselves as victims—even as heroes.

But that feeling you get when you are facing those things down, that quickening of your heart rate, the flush on your face, the chill down the spine—these unpleasant sensations are what courage feels like. They are the physical symptoms of a moral compass that works, the manifestations of pride in who you are, of the fact that despite millennia of calls for our murder, we’re still here. You’re still here.

Treasure those feelings. Do not cower. Do not tremble.

I’m not suggesting you put yourself in actual danger. The assaults on Jewish students at Harvard and UMass are crimes and should be prosecuted as such. On Sunday, 69-year-old Paul Kessler dared wave an Israeli flag on a Thousand Oaks street corner and died after being assaulted. His murderer should spend his life behind bars.

But the worst thing that could come out of this moment would be for Jews, especially Jews on campus, to embrace the victimhood narrative that their peers subscribe to—and that universities large and small have reified in sprawling DEI bureaucracies. That worldview is a large part of what has brought us to this moment.

So do not cast your lot as a competitor in the oppression Olympics. Instead, reject that entire way of looking at the world.

Here’s the thing: it’s good to be unpopular with a mob whose worldview has done away with the concept of right and wrong and decided, with a Nazi-like commitment to racial ideology, that you are Jewish and therefore you are white and therefore you are bad. It is good to be unpopular with people who spent the weeks after October 7 on the hunt for Jewish exaggeration, Jewish lies, Jewish crimes. It is good to be unpopular with people who cannot separate evil from power and virtue from skin color. (Unpopularity, for now, is your fate, unless you are willing to cosign your own humiliation and join the left’s token “good Jews” who advocate against Zionism from the comfort of the diaspora for plaudits from the Squad.) We don’t answer to them; we answer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Rock of Israel and its Redeemer.

The good news is: it may not feel like it, but this country is on your side. College students are in one of vanishingly few spaces in America that sides with Hamas. Your professors will live and die in irrelevance, signing their names to their silly little letters and coming up with new jargon with which to defend terrorism while nurturing their grandiose hero complexes. Most of your peers will grow up and abandon their radical chic commitments. The progressive movement has taken a big hit, having shown its true colors to a nation that knows what is good and what is right, that can separate barbarism from civilization. 

But for now, remember this: to be a Jew is to refuse to kneel and refuse to bow. The stakes of standing upright have never been clearer than they are today, in this post–October 7 world. It’s good to have these people as your enemies, because the world will always have people who oppose what’s right and what’s good, and it is our destiny to fight them. Do it with pride.

==

"Sometimes it's better to be known for one's enemies."

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: March 2024

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of March 2024 to make sure that they are never forgotten.  

Of course the only response Itamar Ben-Gvir had to the United Nations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (after countless votes scuppered by a US veto every single time) was to accuse the UN of antisemitism. Hey, why not say there's some of those "Hamas tunnels" under their HQ while you're at it?

...an accusation which Eylon Levy won't be able to use after being suspended and later sacked as Israel's English language spokesman due to a one-two punch of first having his grandstanding about how Israel was definitely allowing aid into Gaza was fatally undermined by Alicia Kearns asking him to cite a source for his claims multiple times, so then Levy thought that he could get back on the front foot by raging at David Cameron on Twitter that there are no limits on aid trucks getting into Gaza...which promptly saw countless sources up to and including the UN quoted back at him saying that what Levy was saying bore no relation to this thing called "reality"

Unelected Prime Minister Rishi Sunak thought it was wise to hurriedly stage a press conference denouncing the voters of Rochdale for electing George Galloway in their by-election as "extremists" instead of, say, and example of a largely Muslim constituency registering their disgust at a party which has several MPs who are casually Islamophobic and yet Sunak sits on his hands at the ballot box. And of course he also casually folded the pro-Palestinian marchers into his talk of "extremists" in the exact same speech, because that's the sort of coward Sunak is

...so of course Keir Starmer was 100% in support of Sunak denouncing anybody who dares look at anything other than one of the two cheeks of the same arse that is the Tories or Keir Starmer's Labour Party, because apparently it's better to do that then consider that maybe spending four years telling a large section of their voter base to fuck off yet having the gall to call them "Tory enablers" at the slightest criticism is always going to blow up in their faces the moment Starmer proved that his only talent is punching left and not, say, maybe suggesting that Israel killing Palestinian children might be something that needed to be called out months ago

Oh boy, it appears that Jonathan Glazer's Oscar acceptance speech for Zone of Interest was a red rag for antisemites as it brought them out in droves, with Batya Ungar-Sargon accusing Glazer of refuting his Jewishness, while Debbie Schlussel went one further and invoked the "self-hating Jew" trope, meanwhile Justin Saba tried to claim Glazer pretends to be Jewish when he likely only visits a Jewish deli once a month while Hillel Fuld tried to suggest that the Oscars was some Nazi-Hamas joint production, while for some inexplicable reason Tracy-Ann Oberman was snitch-tagging Danny Cohen and JK Rowling's agent in her lamentations that a Jew might disagree with her rabid support of Israel, and finally Abe Greenwald decided to dedicate Glazer's award to the IDF as if Glazer's speech hadn't specifically targeted them. And yes, I think you may have noticed a common theme about these people invoking one antisemitic trope after another about Glazer

...soon followed by Ben Shapiro giving a particularly dogbrained take on the films which only served to demonstrate that he hadn't seen it and merely based his argument on reading the synopsis of the film off Wikipedia, which was somewhat of an issue as Shapiro claimed to have seen it while also demonstrating that a Wikipedia synopsis is somehow too nuanced for Shapiro as that too makes it clear there's Jewish characters in the film, let alone scrolling down a little further where the cast list also makes this clear

Isn't it funny how Frank Hester can make extremely racist comments about Diane Abbott and also say that she needs to be shot that the MPs who were just a few weeks earlier howling about their own safety (after blackmailing Lindsay Hoyle, in order to spike an SNP vote on their opposition day) suddenly couldn't find their voices to suggest someone who donated £10m to the Tories might not just be a tad racist but is also a potential threat to MP's safety?

...and yet the inflatable dartboard that is Lindsay Hoyle appears to have forgotten about his handwringing about MPs being abused at the following PMQs, as he repeatedly passed over Diane Abbott when she tried to pose a question - but did allow a question to be asked by Mark Francois, because why let someone who is the target for racist abuse ask a question when you can always let the bloke who was strangely absent from parliament for several months when an unnamed Essex MP was being investigated for rape?

...but luckily the unifying force that is Keir Starmer had a solution: offering to return the Labour whip to Diane Abbott providing she stands down as a Labour candidate at the next election - which once again serves to remind people that Starmer has a real blind spot for abuse of his female MPs if they are any colour other than white

...and then along comes Kemi Badenoch to dismiss the whole thing as "trivia" which was certainly an interesting take for an Equalities Minister to take, not least because a few days prior she called out Hester's comments for the racism that they are

The month of billionaire manchild Elon Musk got off to a great start when he had to grovel to stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik when she howled that Twitter was infringing on her "rights" be reinstating the policy against deadnaming trans people, promising her that she would not be banned from the platform for violating the Ts&Cs which the platform had just reinstated

...and soon afterwards billionaire manchild Elon Musk was using his platform (a platform he didn't create, merely bought before fucking it up for everyone) to Joe Biden of treason - on Super Tuesday

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk demonstrated just how what an authority on immigration he is falsely accusing Jhoan Boada of assaulting a police officer yet not being deported in a tweet (complete with Photoshopped image) when, in reality, Boada was exonerated on all charges, which the Community Note made abundantly clear before Musk threw the usual hissy fit and demanded it be removed - and really, at this point, maybe the billionaire manchild should shut the fuck up about migrants considering his brother unintentionally let slip how they were in the US illegally for several years

...yet don't forget that billionaire manchild Elon Musk is also capable of more than casual dogwhistling as he's also capable of having utterly dogbrained ideas, such as removing the visual record of the number of likes and comments under posts which definitely has nothing whatsoever to do with his audience crying about constantly and consistently getting ratio'd

...and soon afterwards billionaire manchild Elon Musk showed just how devoted he is to FREEEZE PEACH by cancelling the contract with Don Lemon to post his show on Twitter days before the first episode was set to debut, in which Lemon interviewer...erm, that would be billionaire manchild Elon Musk, who clearly realised a day or two after the interview that it was incredibly likely that he came across as a sociopathic weeb

...mainly because billionaire manchild Elon Musk came across as sociopathic weeb who when faced with the mildest pushback to things which he has said got super-defensive, could barely string a sentence together due to being rattled, and was trying to make excuses to get the hell out of there - and to show he wasn't mad, he spent days kvetching about Don Lemon to his echo chamber of TERFs, Neo Nazis and incels who told him he did great

...all the while billionaire manchild Elon Musk demonstrated what a crock his talk of FREEZE PEACH always was by filing a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for having the nerve to catalogue the racism which is rife on Twitter ever since Musk's purchase, a lawsuit which was dismissed and described as "vapid" by the judge who dismissed Musk's suit and was torn apart in the courtroom by the simple question of why Musk didn't try and file a defamation suit against the CCDH - though Musk tweeted shitty comments about the CCDH that made him look like a spiteful cunt, which really helped his case...

...and even more bullshit, as billionaire manchild Elon Musk decided to flex his engineering knowledge and state that the trusses from the Francis Scott Key Bridge could be easily repaired and used to build a replacement bridge in 3-6 months, as if steel trusses which had been exposed to 40+ years of weather erosion, traumatic damage and spent time at the bottom of Baltimore harbour is definitely going to be perfectly safe when, 3-6 months from now, it's reinstalled with a new coat of paint on it. That sound you hear is a lot of people checking the Ts&Cs of their Clustertruck to see if they're due a full refund in case they find if the steel came from the wrecks of burned-out Ford Pintos

This month on Planet Zionism we started with David Collier showing just what an expert on the subject of racism he is by boldly stating that, if the disciples were alive in 2024, they would all be members of the IDF looking to free Jesus

...and soon afterwards fellow racism expert David Baddiel proudly declared that he invented the term "hierarchy of racism", which does beg the question how much research he did on his books where he says what an expert on racism he is

Mask off time for militant TERF JK Rowling as she decided to go off on a rant which she capped off by misgendering India Willoughby at the urging of one of the Gender Critical drones who wanted mummy's approval, and just kept on going after that. But remember, JK Row'ing has never said or done anything overtly transphobic...

...and because it was mask off time for JK Rowling within a week she decided that Holocaust denial would definitely make for a good career move, because we should ignore all the evidence of the Nazis exterminating the trans community and listen to the hack writer who ripped off The Worst Witch until she needed to rip off Luke Skywalker's character arc to last beyond two books

So nice of Michelle Donelan to decide the £15,000 she owed to Professor Kate Sang of supporting Hamas after falsely accusing her of being a Hamas supporter would not be coming out of her pocket but would be covered by the taxpayer, as paying out of her own pocket would be admitting guilt for libelling Sang

Fascist cartoonist Hans Christian Grabener really didn't like it when they were revealed as the person behind StoneToss and, previously, also being behind RedPanels - so they did what any whiny little bitch would do and whined to daddy, that "daddy" in question being billionaire manchild Elon Musk who thought deleting the thread exposing Stone Toss would be enough to stop people from saying that Hans Christian Graebener is the fascist oik behind StoneToss

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk showed his dedication to FREEZE PEACH once again by deleting the Twitter account of Alejandra Carabello because their username stated that Hans Christian Graebener was the fascist oik behind StoneToss, because apparently it's okay to post people's names, addresses and places of work when LibsofTikTok does it, but posting information which is freely available online is bad now

For the love of every religious deity can Rachel Reeves please find a different euphemism for being chancellor than balancing the household budget, because unless her parent's garden shed printed money there's no way of comparing that to being chancellor...but then again, she can't really use credit card euphemisms what with her government credit card being suspended in 2015

...similarly, it would be nice if Liz Kendall stopped accusing everybody between the ages of 20-30 who are on benefits of being workshy, given it is demonstrable that a large section of benefits claimants in that group are working - it's just their salaries don't cover things such as rent, food, heating bills, and everything else Keir Starmer's Labour Party don't think are issues

...although considering that when Rachel Reeves takes a break from economically illiterate drivel she's using Thatcherite economic policies while sending out Darren Jones to talk up Thatcher's "decade of national renewal", which is something that comes as news to anyone who worked in industry at the time especially coalminers, maybe obviously made up stories about helping with the household budget when she was six is slightly less horrifying

Brilliant PR by the Royal Family when they fought back against people wondering where the hell Kate Middleton has been since she was last seen in public at the end of December by posting an obviously Photoshopped picture for Mother's Day as proof of life - which only further caused suspicion while also showing people that, actually, the Royals have plenty of control of the media - as demonstrated by the tone of all the reports being "Shut up and don't ask questions" while painting those who do have questions as conspiracy theorists

...and oh boy did Kensington Palace looks like absolute wankers when Kate Middleton announced she was being treated for cancer, meaning they knowingly threw her under the bus and blamed her for the whole fake photo incident in spite knowing she was undergoing a course of chemotherapy

...yet this didn't stop the BBC using the term "conspiracy theorists" to describe people suggesting the Royal Family had been keeping things from people even in the days after Kate Middleton made it abundantly clear the Royal Family had been keeping things from us hence the very real concern for her wellbeing just like the BBC had been doing for a good week or so prior, which is the sort of disinformation that BBC Verify is supposed to call out

Congratulations are in order for Adin Ross after he blabbed on a Kick stream about how Andrew Tate was looking to do a moonlight flit out of Romania - so the Romanian authorities swooped in to arrest Tate after receiving reliable information about him trying to sneak out of the country

For some reason Julia Reel thought she could pull a Jussie Smollett by posting a video claiming she was manhandled at a bar before being tossed down the stairs - only for the bar to post the CCTV footage that showed just how much she was lying, as instead it showed her walking down the stairs with the security guard stood a good two feet behind her pointing her in the direction in which she could fuck off

The good news is that Laurence Fox has decided to stop taking people to court, which might be related to him going 0-2 in spurious libel cases in the space of a few weeks. The bad news is that Laurence Fox has pivoted to yelling online about how he won't "poison" his son by giving them their ADHD medication, which is likely going to see him in court yet again pretty damn quick

...yet because Laurence Fox cannot go a week without humiliating himself while being a cringy dickhead, he organised a march against Nike for that whole bullshit about the collar of the England kit where about forty people turned up - and would have seen that Fox was wearing a pair of fucking Nikes

...and then Laurence Fox pivoted back to screeching about his not-so-immediate family when he described ex-wife Billie Piper as a "junkie" in a rapidly-deleted tweet

...yet it wasn't long before Laurence Fox pivoted right back to being a cringy dickhead who may well have a humiliation fetish when he started bitching and moaning about not being allowed on the ballot for the London Mayoral election - at which point it was pointed out that he had not filled out the forms correctly, but on the plus side he wouldn't be losing his deposit as he forgot to pay that too

Just when you thought that Question Time couldn't be any more blatant with its far right platforming, first they host an episode about extremism with Melanie Phillips on the panel without considering that having somebody cited in Anders Brevik's manifesto might be a bad call, then the next week Rod Liddle was on the panel

After reading a whole two Wikipedia articles Destiny though that he could take his debating skills learned from years of screaming at Starcraft players into a debate with Norman Finkelstein about how Israel definitely isn't committing genocide in Gaza as an endpoint to decades of oppression - and it went so well that not only did Finkelstein clown him, but the guy supposedly backing up Destiny was laughing at how badly he was getting clowned

Noted drug cheat Lance Armstrong criticised modern cycling for not competing like they did in his day, apparently forgetting that competing like he did back in the day led to a lifetime ban from cycling and the list of Tour de France winners having a rather conspicuous seven year gap between 1999-2005, something which is much worse than teammates high-fiving each other after a race they had lost

AI scammer Billy Coull had the brilliant idea of whinging to the press about how his life was ruined by the public backlash to the Willy's Chocolate Experience scam. That would be the scam which he was responsible for. And accepted money for. And tried to stage for the least amount of money possible

Attempted wrestler Bill Goldberg probably shouldn't whinge (and definitely shouldn't sound like a bigoted moron) about Asuka having a longer undefeated streak in wrestling than he does, what with Asuka actually winning all of those matches instead of having half a dozen added to the list between episodes of Nitro and Thunder - oh, and Bill? It definitely doesn't help if you congratulated Asuka, while pronouncing he name correctly, about beating your streak when you were under WWE contract

Bonehead messiah Tommy Robinson had a real clever day where he attended the Crystal Palace vs Luton Town match, announcing he would be doing so on a podcast - and was promptly arrested due to a combination of him being under a banning order from all English football grounds as well as the minor inconvenience of having a ban order from literally the entirety of London, so violating two banning orders at once means he was effectively arrested for taking the piss

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance. For instance, after the Washington Examiner’s Byron York tut-tutted that Zelensky was about to tell Congress that U.S. aid to Ukraine so far was not enough, the former First Son weighed in with this:

“National conservative” pundit and Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who played the “obviously Putin is a thug and Ukraine is the victim here, but . . .” game in the early days of the war, went full Putin this time around.

To top it off, Hammer, who shares Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, also accused the Ukrainian President of being a bad Jew—unseemly under any circumstances, but all the more so considering that only a few days earlier, Hammer had been spotted at a New York Young Republicans’ Club Gala in the company of various alt-right types with, shall we say, a complicated relationship to anti-Semitism. (Among them: Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene, the founders of the white-nationalist website VDARE, and erstwhile Jew-baiting troll Jack Posobiec.)

Hammer’s deputy op-ed editor, progressive-turned-populist Batya Ungar-Sargon (for whom, I must mention, I used to write during her stint as an editor at the Forward), at least made an effort to stay classy while making a de facto pitch for throwing Ukraine under the bus:

That’s more than can be said for the vast majority of the “no money for Ukraine” crowd, from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh (“Get this grifting leech out of our country please”) to Tucker Carlson, who referred to Zelensky as a “Ukrainian strip club manager”—apparently because he was dressed in a olive-drab sweatshirt—and asserted that “it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.” He also insisted that Zelensky is seeking not just to “push the Russian army back to pre-invasion borders,” which even Carlson conceded “sounds reasonable,” but to topple Vladimir Putin and bring about “regime change” in Russia. After Zelensky’s speech to Congress, Carlson brought on former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the “maverick” Democrat from Hawaii, to sing along with his assertions that Zelensky was actually an autocrat muzzling critical media outlets, jailing opposition politicians, and now trying to shut down an entire church because he finds it insufficiently loyal.

(In reality, the situation involving the Moscow-affiliated branch of the Orthodox Church—one of the two Orthodox denominations in Ukraine—is massively complicated; in wartime, there are legitimate security concerns about its clergy’s reported activities in support of the invaders. However, a quote Carlson attributes to Zelensky, threatening “economic and restrictive sanctions [on] any Christian caught worshiping in unapproved ways,” does not seem to have any source other than Carlson himself.)

Then there was this from Red State commentator Brandon Morse, asserting that Zelensky has done much more damage to the United States than the January 6th rioters:

A few other right-wing pundits, including career plagiarist-turned-conspiracy-theory-peddler Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA grifting leech Charlie Kirk, homed in on the really important stuff: Zelensky’s outfit.

Of course Zelensky’s clothes were meant to visually convey the fact that he’s in the middle of a brutal war. When you’re just back from a visit to the front lines in an area that looks like a ghost warscape from World War I come back to life, you’ve earned the right to make that particular fashion statement—even on a visit to Washington, D.C.

But wait, is it a military outfit or a mafia one? The American Spectator’s Melissa Mackenzie has got the goods:

I could go on and on. But perhaps this parade of indecency should come back full circle to a literal obscenity from Don Jr.: a photoshopped image that put a naked Hunter Biden next to Zelensky on the podium addressing Congress. (Warning: this tweet may be hazardous to your eyes.) It’s vile, of course. It’s also the sort of thing you post when you have no substantive way to attack someone.

* * *

The extent and purpose of U.S. military aid to Ukraine is certainly a legitimate subject for debate. Right now, there is a powerful consensus in the United States and Europe that Ukraine, for all the flaws and imperfections of its still-young democracy, is fighting for freedom against an authoritarian Goliath and that its fight is also a fight for the free world and its values.

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely “anti-woke” following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine’s cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.

There’s a nineteenth-century Russian fable called “The Elephant and the Pug” in which a pug yaps furiously at an elephant to get attention and show off how tough it is, while the elephant simply ignores it. Zelensky would obviously be the elephant in this scenario; but that would make the Zelensky haters the pugs—and that’s frankly a hideous insult to pugs.

[garythingsworld]

Batya Ungar Sargon on The War Room: It's Getting Through to Black and Hispanic Voters - Trump Was First President in 60 Years to Shrink Income Inequality (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

[portalimaranhao]

Jornalista chama Harry e Meghan de “ocos” e “pior tipo de celebridade”

Alguns jornalistas têm raiva declarada do príncipe Harry e da ex-atriz Meghan Markle. Nesse grupo, consta o nome da norte-americana Batya Ungar-Sargon, autora e editora-chefe da revista Newsweek. Em entrevista ao programa GBN America, ela teceu uma série de críticas aos duques de Sussex, que moram atualmente nos Estados Unidos. Na avaliação de Batya, Harry e Meghan são “o pior tipo de…

[andizi]

Batya Ungar-Sargon - Understanding the Impact of Israeli Military Airstr...