What, where am I

On July 20, 1969 - 55 years ago today! - humans first stepped foot on another world.

(ignore the line going through it, my screen is small and the Internet Archive apparently doesn't handle that great):

So that's our bar -- 73.5 percent.

Note: they ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh when they took it over. And I mean it:

Oh.

Well.

I'm sure this happened entirely peacefully.

(the Manchus also committed genocide, it's worth noting, but the Hakka are a subgroup of the Han, and I'm talking about extermination of ethnic minorities.)

Er. Well, then.

Which, of course, happened entirely peacefully.

Well, at least the Ustase carried out their genocides (of Serbs, that is--they were cool with the Jews and Romani being exterminated) in ways that didn't make the Nazis squeamish?

Oh.

Maybe the Fang were the first people there--

Oh. I see.

They don't even bother to list anyone else!

Well I'm sure that's all peaceful.

(on the clarification: there have been a lot of Yazidi genocides)

Ah.

@librastrai has a lot of information on Ireland's treatment of it's Minceiri/Irish Traveller population. Spoiler alert: it's. Not good.

Yes, I know I switched sources. Sorry.

Well, perhaps they--

Ah.

POLAND JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. No wait, I can't say that because that is a big part of how they're so homogenous. But seriously:

It's honestly somewhat impressive! That level of ethnic cleansing of Jews (and others) takes genuine effort!

Meanwhile, according to the same source as Poland:

Oh.

Please note that this only includes genocides in modern-day Russia.

If you want to learn more about the Circassian genocide, may I humbly recommend: past me!

Also other resources I have on Russia's genocides: here, here, and this one on the Crimean Tatars.

I'm sure their takeover of Siberia was lovely and peaceful and doesn't have a whole section on the Wikipedia page for genocide of indigenous peoples.

I mean, look at this section of the Wikipedia page for genocides in history (WW1-WW2)

(Amnesty International's reliability is of course dubious, but this isn't about Israel, and also, may I present to you the rest of this??

I'm going to end here, although I note this does not include the Holodomor, Kazakh deaths (in a similar event to the Holodomor), pogroms of Jews (which were primarily carried out in the Pale, which deliberately did not include much of modern Russia) or their ongoing genocide of Ukrainians today.

I cannot emphasize enough that Russia is a colonialist empire with one of the worst track records on human rights of any country in history. Russian history is deeply entwined with oppression of other ethnic groups, and it has been for a long time. Russia's borders are not natural, its expansion was not inevitable. Anyone who is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist and anti-genocide should make Russia a primary target.

Oh.

Similar principle as with Russia and Japan -- this is only within the borders of Turkey.

Yes, that is who Cenk Uygur named his organization after. (Do you think he means to compliment Israel when he accuses it of genocide? "Oh look, you're just like the Young Turks! I love the Young Turks!")

By the way, Turkey officially denies that Kurds exist. Also Turkey refuses to let people name their children names with q, w, and x. Why? Those are all common letters in Kurdish. Children in Turkish schools, all of them, must pledge each day to be a Turk.

Also, they migrated (invaded?) in the mid-medieval period

I wasn't able to get into this in the Russia section, but there were a lot of Ukrainian massacres of Jews. It was really pogrom central. To be fair, I don't know offhand how many were committed by ethnic Ukrainians as opposed to ethnic Russians, so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but let's just say that the one thing everyone in the Ukrainian civil war could agree on was that Jews should be killed.

And finally:

Seriously, the list of Cham-Vietnamese wars is...long.

For years, the white nationalist leader has called for overt ethnic cleansing or “ethnic redistribution” but has tried to pass off his noxious beliefs as intellectual curiosities. Spencer has told journalists that his vision of a white ethnostate ought to be compared to Zionism. “In the mid 19th century, many Jews in Central Europe had an idea of an ethno-state, an idea of Zionism, and they were considered ridiculous and insane,” Spencer told Vice in 2013. He used similar language in 2017 during his brief national college tour, telling students that one state he often turned to for guidance was Israel. That same year, Spencer even told Israel’s Channel 2 News that he saw himself as a “white Zionist.” “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves,” the newspaper Haaretz, quoting from his TV appearance, said. “Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.” Yet, in the leaked audio from Charlottesville, Spencer purportedly screams to a room of cheering supporters: “Little f—— k—-. They get ruled by people like me.”

You can see the google trendline worldwide of the term "Ethnostate" ticking up from 2016-2018, when Spencer sold his goods and was lovingly covered by press as a "Dapper Fascist" and spiking in 2020 with an uptick later. Spencer is a troll who sold a bill of goods and a bunch of leftists who screamed about "Punching Nazis" bought his bullshit, hook, line, and sinker. They just needed some fauxademic gloss on it. Note the interest in Ireland.

In this case, the people who love what Spencer had to say want to call Jews "The new Nazis" and ignore who they're taking their marching orders from, and who they are targeting.

There's a reason no one else is listed.

No one who isn't Arab lives in Gaza.

Not a soul.

When Israel agreed to pull its forces as part of a truce in 2014, they agreed to remove all Jews from Gaza as well. Ultimately, this led to Hamas being elected as the ruling party over Gaza and the expulsion of every non-Arab: Samaritans, Bedouins, Druze, everyone. Gaza has been ethnically cleansed. It is 100% Arab.

People will argue that there's diversity in Gaza because there are a handful of Christians, but 1) there still Arab, and 2) they're definitely second-class citizens.

It is illegal for anyone who is not Palestinian to enter Gaza. When Avera Mengistu, a mentally ill, Ethiopian-Israeli man, accidentally crossed the border during an episode, he was kidnapped. His family pleaded with Hamas to release him, but they refused. He wasn't part of the IDF. He wasn't a spy. He was a sick man who got lost, for heaven's sake.

Avera Mengistu was held for over a decade.

He was tortured and starved and Lord knows what else. He was entirely nonverbal when he was released as part of a hostage negotiation in 2024.

Mengistu was born in Ethiopia. His family was forced to flee to Israel to escape the genocide occurring there. They had already experienced racial violence, and then Avera was kidnapped.

Hamas got nothing from him. He had no information. He had no connection. They attempted to ransom him and his family was too poor to pay the ransom (and the Israeli government wouldn't let them pay to get Avera back regardless, because it incentivizes such kidnappings). They held him anyway.

Palestine is an ethnostate. Period. Everyone in power, every single person, is Arab. There are some minorities still living in the West Bank but they can't hold government offices. It's illegal to sell land to Jews, publishable by death.

"I AM VERY PROGRESSIVE!" No random dickcheese. You're 'disingenuous' and you liked what Richard Spencer had to say so much you grabbed a different word from a compromised source to defend it.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-editors-hijacked-the-israel-palestine-narrative

from here

Hitler considered Henry Ford an inspiration. nice to see the Jew haters returning to the classics.

A close friend recalled a camping trip in 1919 during which Ford lectured a group around the campfire. He "attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists," the friend wrote in his diary. "The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy…"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/the-dark-legacy-of-henry-fords-anti-semitism-commentary/2014/10/10/c95b7df2-509d-11e4-877c-335b53ffe736_story.html

Ford and his publication attracted attention throughout the world, including from Adolf Hitler. In fact, Ford is the only American mentioned by name in Hitler’s notorious “Mein Kampf,” published in 1925. Anti-Semitic Independent articles translated into German and other languages during the 1920s were used to “prove” Nazis were not alone in their pathological hatred of Jews and Judaism.

“You can tell Herr Ford that I am a great admirer of his,” Hitler said. “I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany. ... I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”

it really was the canard that Jews are greedy predators, and what people don’t seem to get is that they’re basically reinventing Henry Ford’s extreme antisemitism and racism. they’re out here repeating stuff from the Protocols and The International Jew. Ford demonised Black and Jewish musicians and called jazz “Yiddish moron music.” he believed it was a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt American youth and destroy white Protestant values. this is a Nazi belief too, that Jews puppeteer Black people and push civil rights to destroy white society. I know that what’s being repeated now has been around for a long time too and that BHI and NOI are responsible for most of it, but it’s sad and fucked up seeing it. it’s like the same thing reversed, Jews are malicious thieves who prey on Black artists to destroy them, because we have no ability to create art on our own, as Hitler also said. we’re subhuman because we’re not white, now we’re subhuman because we’re ultra white. we’re destroying culture because we’re to blame for racial integration. no wait, we’re destroying culture because we’re the most powerful racists. it’s demoralizing and sick.

I guess it’s time to revisit Ford’s despicable antisemitism, so in addition to this post, here’s some specificity:

The Attack on Jewish Hollywood: A Chapter in the History of Modern American Anti-Semitism

this piece is from 26 years ago. only an introductory excerpt is available, but it’s unfortunately relevant.

As the United States became a magnet for mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, the imprecation was born: "New York is not America." A continent away, with the advent of the movies a few decades later, the coda was added: "Neither is Hollywood." In tandem with the entry of emancipated Jews into the mainstream of modernity, traditional anti-Semitic images of Jews as economic parasites and moral polluters were complemented by a new image of Jews as corrupters of popular culture. First, in the nineteenth century, the new popular journalism was anointed as what Sander Gilman calls the "the secret language of the Jews." Then, in the twentieth century, the cinema supplanted the newspaper in the popular imagination as the magical source of the Jews' insidious power over culture. The Nazi purge of the Weimar film industry, deemed corrupted by "Jewish-Syrian influence"; Stalin's persecution of Yiddish filmmakers, pilloried for "the bourgeois cosmopolitanism in the motion picture arts," and Jewish performers, whose "Semitic features are blatantly obvious in close-ups"; and the more recent Muslim Fundamentalist assault on "satanic" American moviemakers, who are viewed as modern-day, secular "Crusaders" out to destroy Islamic culture as well as to promote Zionism--all are variations on the same theme. So, too, is America's own attack on "Jewish Hollywood."

A vituperative ethnocultural critique of alleged Jewish domination and degradation of the entertainment industry has been a constant on the modern American scene. As we shall see, however, this attack on Jewish Hollywood has ebbed and flowed and evolved significantly over time. It began predominantly among old-stock white Protestants as a right-wing reflex that targeted African Americans as well as Jews. But in recent decades it has mutated increasingly among white leftists and black radicals into an enthusiasm that symptomizes deepening Black-Jewish estrangement.

The first of three waves of anti-Semitic-tinged animus against the film industry peaked in the 1920s. Virtually all European observers have viewed the Hollywood "dream factory" as quintessentially American since its inception. But this is not the way it looked early in this century to culturally conservative Americans. They saw instead a nightmarish undermining of Victorian religious, racial, and sexual hierarchies. In their vision of American decline, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were victims of typically Jewish popular-cultural entrepreneurs. Not least among the perceived sins of these Jewish entertainment merchants was their responsibility for unleashing libidinal impulses imagined as synonymous with African Americans. After World War I, former Progressives fearful that the movies were corrupting American youth shared anxieties with Ku Klux Klansmen who equated Jewish producers with big-city brothel owners. Ironically, American Catholics demonized by the Klan shared some of its concerns over moviedom's decadence. When in 1922 the New York Civic League's William Sheafe Chase asked, "What ground is there for thinking that the motion picture industry is in the despotic control of four or five Hebrews, such as Messrs. Lasky, Loew, Fox, Zukor and Laemmle?" his question answered itself in the minds of millions of anxious Americans.

Characterizing Prohibition-era whiskey as "(n word) gin" and jazz as "Yiddish moron music," Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent fused, crudely but effectively, the racism and anti-Semitism animating this antimodern critique. "As soon as the Jews gained control of the 'movies'," Ford observed, "we had a problem . . . . It is the peculiar genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority." About producers "of Semitic origin," Ford's newspaper also observed that "many . . . don't know how filthy their stuff is--it is so natural to them." The movies deployed Jewish "cleverness" to "camouflage the moral filth" of "the monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps" of African American popular culture.

read his words for yourself and the origins of things being said now are quite clear:

Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of calf love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted in homes where the thing itself, unaided by "canned music," would be stamped out in horror. The fluttering music sheets disclose expressions taken directly from the cesspools of modern capitals, to be made the daily slang, the thoughtlessly hummed remarks of school boys and girls. /Is it surprising that whichever way you turn to trace the harmful streams of influence that flow through society, you come upon a group of Jews? In baseball corruption – a group of Jews. In exploitative finance – a group of Jews. In theatrical degeneracy – a group of Jews. In liquor propaganda – a group of Jews. In control of national war policies – a group of Jews. In control of the Press through business and financial pressure – a group of Jews. War profiteers, 80 per cent of them – Jews. Organizers of active opposition to Christian laws and customs – Jews.

In this miasma of so-called popular music, which combines weak-mindedness with every suggestion of lewdness – again Jews.

The Jewish influences on American music is without doubt regarded as serious by those who know anything about it. Not only is there a growing protest against the Judaization of our few great orchestras, but there is a strong reaction from the racial collusion which fills the concert stage and popular platform with Jewish artists to the exclusion of all others. If they were superior artists, nothing against it could be said; they are only better known and racially favored in Jewish musical circles.

“Let me make a nation’s songs and I care not who makes the laws." said one; in this country the Jews have had a very large hand in making both. It is the purpose of this article to put people in possession of the truth concerning the moron music which they habitually hum and sing and shout day and night, and if possible to help them to see the invisible Jewish baton which is waved above them for financial and propaganda purposes. Just as the American stage and motion picture have fallen under the control of Jews and their art-destroying commercialism, so the business of handling "popular songs" has become a Yiddish industry.

[…] Jews did not create the popular song; they debased it. The time of the entry of Jews into control of the popular song is the exact time when the morality of popular songs began to decline. The "popular" song, before it became a Jewish industry, was really popular. The people sang it and had no reason to conceal it. The popular song today is often so questionable a composition that performers with a vestige of decency must appraise their audience before they sing.

[…] The general directors of the whole downward trend have been Jews. It needed just their touch of cleverness to camouflage the moral filth and raise it half a degree above that natural stage where it begets nothing but disgust.

[…] In this business of making the people’s songs the Jews have shown as usual, no originality but much adaptability – which is a charitable term used to cover plagiarism, which in its turn politely covers the crime of mental pocket-picking The Jews do not create; they take what others have done, give it a clever twist, and exploit it. Plagiarism is the result of mediocre artists being spurred on by non-artistic promoters to produce something that can be dressed up with sufficient attractiveness to draw the public’s money.

The Jews bought up all the old song books, opera scores, collections of folk songs, and, if you stop to analyze some of the biggest "hits" of the early days of the Yiddish song manufacturing Trust, you will find they are woven on the motif and melody of the clean songs of the pre-swamp era. The music jazzed and swung out of recognition, the sentiment sensualized very much, and pushed upon their smutty road across the world. Because of absolute Jewish control of the song market, both in publishing and in theatrical performance, it is next to impossible for anything but a Jewish song to be published in the United States, or if published, to get a hearing. The proof of this is in the fact that the Yiddish trust owns all the business and the so-called "song-hits" all bear Jewish names.

The insidiousness of the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity is due partly to the speciousness, the superficial charm and oriental persuasiveness of Hebrew art, its glitter, its violently juxtaposed extremes of passion, its poignant eroticism and pessimism, and partly to the fact that the strain in us which might make head against it, the deepest, most fundamental strain in our nature is diluted and confused by a hundred other tendencies of the Jewish age.

[…] The diabolical cunning with which an unclean atmosphere is created and sustained through all classes of society and by the same influence, will not be overlooked by any observer. There is something Satanic about it, something calculated with demonic shrewdness.

And the stream flows on and on, growing worse and worse, to the degradation of the non-Jewish public and the increase of Jewish fortunes.

[…] Two facts about the "popular" song are known to all: first, that for the most part it is indecent and the most active agent of moral miasma in the country, or if not the most active, then neck and neck with the "movies"; second, that the "popular" song industry is an exclusive Jewish industry.

There is work here for the Anti-Defamation League! That League knows how to put the screws on anyone who disparages the Jews! From important publishers down to inconsequential country newspapers, the Anti-Defamation League makes itself felt. There is work for it in the movies and the theater and popular song industries. Why does not the League put the screws on those Jews who have degenerated the movies and debauched the people in their "arts," sports, and entertainments? /On those who have brought shame on the racial name? Why not?

Is the answer that only non-Jews are to be controlled, and Jews let to run loose? Is the answer that the gentle Gentiles can be curbed as by bridle and bit and the Jews cannot? American Jewry is desperately afraid of opening a single seam in its armour by means of a single investigation or reform. They are afraid of how far the fire of correction may spread!

Hitler’s belief that Jews were incapable of creating art or anything of beauty echoed Ford’s racist ranting.

pardon me, but everyone aligning themselves with Nazi sympathizing white supremacists is a disgrace. dividing us is serving no one’s purpose but theirs.

Not only is he a fucking rapist who serially harasses and pimps out women, but he was friends with multiple open neo-Nazis until recently.

Just for money and clout, you all piss in the face of our community/victims of misogyny, and are only rewarded with antisemitism from his dipshit fanbase. And I feel 0 fucking sympathy for any of you.

I’m struggling to find the words to describe how difficult and upsetting the last couple of days have been as an Israeli woman.

Everything surrounding the debate over the online looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular’s visit to Israel, both publicly and privately within activist circles, has shown far too many women that there may be no line left that cannot be crossed.

When someone is politically useful, or their following can be leveraged, even allegations of sexual assault can suddenly become negotiable.

This has opened up an important conversation that we need to have within the Jewish and pro-Israel community. Are there lines that we simply should not cross? Have we reached such a low point that we will accept anyone as an ally?

Even a man who is friends with hateful groypers and who has been accused of sexually assaulting a minor? Are we really comfortable pimping out Jewish women to the manosphere for the sake of effective public diplomacy?

I had never heard of Clavicular before Thursday, when several social media content creators said they were planning on collaborating with him. Right away, it sparked a long and heated debate.

When his name was mentioned, the only thing I recognized him from was footage of the so-called “Miami Nazi Party,” where he appeared alongside some of the worst antisemites on the internet.

The group included Myron Gaines, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Clavicular, and Sneako, all proudly singing “Heil Hitler.”

Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Eric Peters, rose to prominence through “looksmaxxing” content promoting extreme cosmetic procedures, steroid use, and hypermasculine self-improvement.

He has openly said that, as a teenager, he repeatedly hit his own jaw with a hammer as part of a practice known as “bone smashing,” claiming he believed it would stimulate bone growth and create a more angular, masculine jawline.

Clavicular has no shortage of legal controversies. In March 2026, he was arrested in Broward County, Florida, on misdemeanor battery and criminal conspiracy charges related to an alleged altercation between two women.

In May 2026, he and another influencer pleaded no contest to unlawfully discharging a firearm after a livestream showed them shooting at an apparently dead alligator in the Florida Everglades.

Right now, Clavicular is the defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by a young woman who alleges that, after meeting him when she was 16, he provided her with alcohol while she was a minor, injected her with what she claims was a mixture containing meth and a fat-burning substance without her informed consent, and sexually assaulted her while she was incapacitated.

Clavicular has denied the allegations, which have not been proven in court.

To most women, this is where the debate should have ended.

Yet despite all of this, there were people who insisted that engaging with him was still the right move.

They argued that his large Gen Z following, an age group that has been so heavily influenced by anti-Israel narratives, presented an opportunity to reach people who are normally exposed to nothing but anti-Israel propaganda.

Views vs values

In my line of work, I have met and learned from many people who once held extremist and antisemitic views. There have been incredible cases where people fundamentally changed their beliefs, especially after visiting Israel and actually speaking with Israelis.

In almost every case, whether the issue was Israel or something else entirely, those individuals said they changed because people were still willing to engage with them patiently and respectfully.

That willingness to have difficult conversations is what ultimately helped pull them away from extremism.

This is why cancel culture is so dangerous and why I understand why certain people would want to engage with a figure like Clavicular.

But where is the line? When someone is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a minor, do we look the other way?

When someone’s entire online persona is built around demeaning and sexualizing women, do we still want them in our circle for the sake of views?

Even worse, do we put Israeli women in a position where they are encouraged to meet an alleged predator simply to show him how “hot” Israeli women are?

How is this any different from what happened with Graham Platner?

I criticized mainstream Democrats for ignoring his history of alleged sexual misconduct and his Nazi tattoo, and now people within my own community have shown me that they are willing to look the other way if they believe they can still benefit from the relationship.

Some people who are unfamiliar with the details have dismissed this as a simple disagreement over strategy, arguing that calling this out and creating internal conflict within the Jewish community is the wrong approach. I respectfully disagree.

When women’s safety is at risk, and the people enabling that risk are men who are our friends, men we warned and pleaded with not to do this – then we have a responsibility to speak out.

This goes beyond strategy. It forces us to ask what our community is willing to tolerate and who we are willing to embrace.

These past few days have been incredibly painful, particularly for many of my female colleagues who work in media and public diplomacy.

What we have witnessed is that, in a post-October 7 world, there are still people who are willing to look the other way when it comes to allegations of sexual assault if they believe there is something to gain from it.

That realization has been truly heartbreaking.

I already know how this ends, because I’ve watched it play out my whole life.

Someone pulls the alarm on something rotten, a crime, an abuser, a man who should never have been welcomed in, and instead of putting out the fire, the community turns on the person who pulled it.

They don’t even have to doubt the fire is real. Saying it out loud, where outsiders might hear, is treated as the real offense, because the group’s reputation matters more than the wrong being done inside it.

Calm down. It’s not that deep. Don’t make us all look bad.

And more often than not, the one told to calm down is a woman, and the word for her is emotional, as if her reaction, not the crime, were the thing that needed managing.

So let me say it out loud anyway.

When speaking up becomes the real offense

I’ll start with the easy part, because he is the easy part. This week, American influencer Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, flew to Tel Aviv.

In January, he was filmed in a Miami nightclub singing along to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” beside the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and refused to apologize. He is being sued over the alleged rape of a minor. He came for content, and his content is the exploitation of women.

On livestream, in Tel Aviv, he told one of his Israeli hosts to tell the Israeli women he was offered that he was “looking to have sex in a bathroom for five seconds, 10 if they’re lucky.”

The criticism, though, is on his hosts, the Israeli and Jewish creators who were warned, clearly, who he was, and dismissed it because the warnings mostly came from “women,” too “emotional about sexual assault” to grasp the broader PR “strategy.”

The women were right; the weekend detonated exactly as they said it would, and now they’re told to stop making a big deal of it, for the sake of “unity,” or “lashon hara” (malicious gossip). The demand to stop talking always arrives right when there’s something someone would rather we didn’t talk about.

It’s a soundtrack I know by heart, played on repeat since the beginning of time.

It’s compounded by a second, more “respectable” instinct, the one used to justify the first: don’t air our dirty laundry. Don’t hand the antisemites ammunition. It’s the Three Weeks; we should be kind to one another.

Whether it comes from fear or from “holy” aspirations, silence is not neutral: it’s the exact condition an abuser needs. He offends because he’s judged, correctly, that the community will protect its reputation before the girl in front of him.

The cost of protecting reputations

Growing up, I watched it happen in my own community in Australia. I was about 12 years old when I first heard of the rampant institutional sexual abuse across the Melbourne and Sydney Chabad communities and saw that the first instinct was to bury it so we wouldn’t look bad.

Leaders treated going to the police and secular news outlets as a chilul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) and aimed their anger at the victims who spoke, like Manny Waks, whose family was hounded until his father left the country.

It was lashon hara, I was told, to speak badly of these men, who’d “probably done teshuva” (repentance), we assumed for men who never apologized, not stopped abusing. But more so, it’s a sin to shed a bad light on our community.

A rabbi later admitted to Australia’s Royal Commission that there exists “a culture of cover-up, often couched in religious terms,” which has “pervaded our thinking and our actions.”

In a neighboring community, Malka Leifer abused girls at Melbourne’s Adass Israel school; when it surfaced, the school flew her to safety in Israel, beyond the reach of Australian police.

Her victims were shunned, and she fought extradition for 13 years before her 2023 conviction on 18 counts, including rape, while parts of the community kept defending and funding her. One of the victims, Dassi Erlich, told Tablet that the community accused her of “throwing Adass under the bus.”

Years later, at Beis Rivkah seminary in New York, my school hosted a convicted predator as a speaker. When we confronted the school, they refused to apologize, claiming they “had no idea” (as if vetting weren’t their job).

They warned us against lashon hara about a man who “still has good qualities” and the importance of loving every Jew. They kept sending girls to his home for Shabbat meals.

It’s a decade later, and we’re still running the same machine. As people denounce Clavicular, many are worried first about our national reputation, about outsiders seeing us fight and “tear down our own” for hosting and cozying up to him.

Mostly American, male, self-appointed hasbara influencers are attacking Israeli women for being angry at the Jews who welcomed this predator into our home. Same priority as ever: protect the image, punish the one who spoke, let the predator keep his cover.

Lashon hara is not a shield for abuse

But lashon hara was never a gag order. The Chafetz Chaim, whose name is synonymous with this halacha, codified the exception himself: speech for a protective purpose, to’elet, is not just permitted; his laws of rechilut (gossip) oblige you to warn anyone about to be harmed.

He roots it in Leviticus 19:16, which opens with “do not go about as a gossip” and, in the same breath, commands: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” Two halves of one verse, set so no one could quote the first to bury the second.

Invoking the Three Weeks is the lowest move of all: the Temple fell not because people spoke up against injustice, but because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred. If anything brings the Messiah, it’s the courage of women (and righteous men) who risk everything for their values.

It doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us. The wrong is there whether or not anyone names it, and it always comes out. And when it does, the shame belongs to the man who did it and everyone who built him a shield, not to the woman who refused to look away.

So no, we won’t calm down, because the desecration of God’s name was never the exposure; it was the abuse, and the cover-up.

It is a community deciding, one more time, that the reputation of the powerful matters more than the safety of the girl in front of them, and then blaming her for the noise.

which part?

the “my grandma is old than your country” part?

https://www.memri.org/reports/senior-hamas-official-ali-baraka-north-korea-part-our-alliance

And by the way yes that also by their lights includes Palestine, since we're not counting a claim of "interrupted governance". You lose it, you lose it.

For what it's worth here's the territorial history of Palestine as far back as I care to trace it:

2007-: Gaza strip becomes de facto different under Hamas

1995-: Oslo Accords!

1967-1995: Israeli control

1948-67: Gaza under Egyptian control, West Bank under Jordanian control

1922-1948: UK/Mandate. De facto British control from 1918.

1517-1918: Ottomans in control

1291-1517: Mamluks (Turkish/Circassian)

1100-1291: Kurdish Ayyubids and Crusaders trade back and forth

747-1100: Arabs from Saudi Arabia (Abbasids), Turks, Berbers. I think. Not sure. Lotsa hand-changing between different caliphates.

637-747: Rashidun and Umayyad, what we'd now call Saudi

313-634: Byzantine, brief Persian rule

66 BCE-66 CE, 70-132, 135-313: Roman rule

132-35, 66-70: Jewish rule!!

130s?-66 BCE: Hasmonean Jewish rule

332-130s? BCE: Greek/Macedonian rule

Beyond this honestly it feels like things rely a lot more on Biblical stuff.

Regardless, one could claim Israel is newer than Palestine, in that an independent Jewish state was intermittently around long after the Philistines were gone.