for wherever you go, i will go

Happy Tu B'Av! חג ט״ו באב שמח! ♥️

henmazzig:

I hate how angry I get in this video.

“I’ll get into trouble for this.”

She won’t.

Nobody has ever gotten in trouble for this.

The takes get softer, the platforms get bigger, and the bravery is announced in advance like a tour date.

Robby Hoffman says antisemitism isn’t the worst thing. In a surprise to absolutely no one, she co-stars on Hacks with Hannah Einbinder, Hollywood’s loudest anti-Israel Jew. Maybe attacking and distancing yourself from your own people is just what that set does for applause now. It’s becoming a genre.

Since October 7th, “not the worst thing” looked like this: Matilda, a little girl shot dead at a Hanukkah celebration on the beach. Yaron and Sarah, shot in the back leaving a Jewish museum. He’d just bought the ring. Melvin and Adrian, killed outside their synagogue on Yom Kippur. Karen Diamond, 82, set on fire at a walk for the hostages. She died of her burns.

They weren’t offended. They were murdered.

My grandparents survived the Farhud in Baghdad, 1941. Two days, their neighbors, the streets full of Jewish dead.

Every massacre in our history started the same way— with someone influential shrugging.

Antisemitism is bad. That’s the whole sentence.

Ruth and Naomi. photograph of Rachel Chang and Natan Rahav by Luis Mercedes Winter for the "Flowers for Our People" exhibition, 2026. the exhibition was directed by Sage Cassell-Rosenberg and produced by Is Perlman with assistance from Ariella Cohen. Saffron Mala Kaplan provides a written reflection for this piece:

For Natalya Reznik and Ed Victor, Tuesday’s primary victory of Melat Kiros, now a Democratic congressional nominee for much of Denver, cut deep and took them back to the horrific first day in June 2025 when they attended an 18-minute protest walk to call for the release of hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on Oct. 7.

That day, Reznik, 54, and her husband carried posters of hostages Lior Rudaeff and Yair Yaakov whose bodies were later returned. As always, the mostly Jewish group of 28 walked quietly, letting their signs do the talking.

“Since 10/7 I was devastated. I expected people everywhere, not just in America, to take to the streets to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages,” said Reznik who came to the U.S. 30 years ago from St. Petersburg, Russia “I was so naive — I really thought this was so horrific that it just couldn’t go unnoticed. But what I saw was the opposite — people took to the streets to protest Israel.”

Reznik didn’t hear a man shouting “Free Palestine” — others did — before she noticed her feet getting hot. She looked down to find much of her lower body on fire, likely from a Molotov cocktail. She rolled over on the grass to put them out. Another woman, Karen Diamond, was engulfed in flames.

Dressed up as a gardener so as not to be noticed in the park outside the Boulder County Courthouse, the attacker, Mohamed Soliman, 46, later told prosecutors he had researched “Zionist” events in the area.

But when a news anchor ahead of the primary asked Kiros whether the attack had been antisemitic, the former lawyer turned doctoral candidate drew a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. She tried to make the case that no one could presume Soliman’s motive.

“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told a local Colorado station last month. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”

That logic found little purchase with Ed Victor, a resident of Louisville, Colorado, who had also been at the Boulder courthouse that day.

“You don’t have to look at his heart,” Victor said. “You can look at his actions.”

Soliman pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony charges in state court but not guilty to hate crime charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The success of Kiros, 29, a Democratic Socialist of America in her first run for public office, echoed the victories of DSA-backed candidates Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, who similarly drew a line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Like those candidates, Kiros has advocated for one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.

Reznik does not live in the deep-blue district Kiros will be favored to win in November, which represents the largest Jewish community in Colorado. But she said Kiros’ victory was the result of a callousness toward Jewish people that now defines the attitude of the general public.

“It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” said Reznik, a Russian Jewish immigrant. “This is not the country I came to 30 years ago. I no longer feel that people in Congress even hold the same values that I do.”

Reznik’s burns from the attack that day covered 40% of her legs and left arm. She spent one week in intensive care and another in the hospital recovering from surgery. It was in the ICU that she first encountered people online trying to downplay the attack as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic – a discourse that seemed to legitimize violence against Jews and continued to unfold in the hours and days after the firebombing.

“They’re encouraging people who are antisemites, who are simply scum, to feel as political activists,” Reznik said. “They speak the language of the murderers.”

Kiros’ equivocating comments ahead of Tuesday’s primary divided Denver Jews, with one rabbi who described herself as a “liberal Jew” writing in the Denver Post that Kiros’ candidacy “scared her.” Another Jewish writer defended Kiros, arguing that the candidate’s criticism is directed at the Israeli government and military, not the Jewish people.

In an interview on CNN the day after her primary win, Kiros tried to allay fears, adding that the “conflation of the actions of the state of Israel and the Jewish people … is putting them at greater risk.”

“My commitment is to protecting the sanctity of human life and dignity and that includes combating the hate and the rising antisemitism that we are seeing,” she said.

But for the survivors of that day’s attack who heard Kiros’ equivocation ahead of the primary, it was hard not to feel fear – and fury. Reznik saw Kiros’ refusal to call the attack antisemitic as the height of hypocrisy.

“There’s nothing I can say to her,” she said, “because I know she’s one of the people who’s not listening.”

I want to add, a state primary hinging on foreign policy and opposition to another country is not normal:

Sorry if you’ve answered this all before, I’ve been thinking a lot on genocide accusations (mostly because people are calling me a genocide enabler for saying that I don’t know if it’s genocide because I have seen so many scholars arguing and disagreeing) and the bit about ‘intent’ is the portion I am really stuck on.

Love your posts and hope you are well, I especially enjoy how well researched they are!

Hey would you be able to update your post on Israel committing genocide with any new information, if you have any?

Absolutely. While we're at it, I'll tell you what's really going on when they call you an enabler.

Nothing has changed the legal picture since I wrote this post in June 2025.

The ignorant and the dishonest will surely respond to this by citing the September 2025 report from the UNHRC Independent International Commission of Inquiry, announcing its opinion that Israel is committing genocide.

There are at least two reasons this is irrelevant.

First, the Commission of Inquiry is a 3-person body spun up by a Human Rights Council resolution.

It is not a court. It hears no defense, binds no one, and has no authority whatsoever to make a legal determination of genocide.

​The (a priori) conclusion of the COI carries the exact level of legal power as a 67% majority on a three-hour Zoom call at the Park Slope Food Coop.

The board at the Park Slope Coop can make it slightly less convenient for the people of Park Slope to get their Bamba fix, but that isn't a judicial finding - it's just the sort of narrow-minded, groupthink horseshit that happens in every monoculture.

​Second, the report was produced by the COI's three members - Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti.

The COI came at this with an agenda.

Kothari, in a 2022 interview, said social media was "controlled largely by the Jewish lobby" and openly asked why Israel "is even a member of the UN," which US diplomats called antisemitic.

Sidoti, speaking to the Human Rights Council, said accusations of antisemitism get "thrown around like rice at a wedding" and brushed off the IHRA definition.

Pillay, who chaired the @#&*ing thing, refused to condemn either, called the antisemitism concerns a "diversion" and "lies," and had publicly pushed "sanction apartheid Israel" campaigns well before she was ever appointed.

The commission they ran is the Council's first ever open-ended inquiry. It has no end date, but it does have a mandate broad enough to pre-load its own conclusions while sitting inside a body where Israel is the only country on earth with a permanent standing agenda item against it.

The US, the EU, and more than two dozen other countries have condemned that structural lopsidedness for years.

Again, the body that will rule on this is the International Court of Justice, in South Africa v. Israel.

​An ICJ accusation requires unassailable judicial proof.

The standard the ICJ set is that if intent is to be inferred from a pattern of conduct, genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available from the totality of the evidence. Not a plausible reading. Not even the most likely one, but the only one. If the conduct can be reasonably explained by anything else, the standard is not met.

Has the ICJ has ruled on the merits of that case?

No.

Israel filed its response in March 2026 and South Africa's reply isn't due until late 2027 - so we can't realistically expect a merits judgment before 2028.

So without he ICJ, what's the running running total number of tribunals that have found Israel guilty of genocide?

None.

Not a single one is even weighing the merits right now.

...how do you decide ‘intent’ for genocide, especially because people say contradictory things and act contradictory to stated intent?

Genocidal intent has a technical name, dolus specialis: the specific intent to destroy a protected group "as such" (the definition lives in Article II of the Genocide Convention)

When that intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct, the standard the ICJ set is that genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from the totality of the evidence. Not a plausible reading. Not even the most likely one - the only one. If the conduct can be reasonably explained by a different objective, the standard is not met.

If a statement can be read as "destroy Hamas" instead of "destroy Palestinians," it cannot prove genocidal intent, because a competing reasonable inference exists, and the existence of that competing inference is fatal to the charge.

The bar was set this way on purpose, after the Holocaust, by people who understood that the crime of crimes had to be genuinely hard to prove or the word would rot into a slur you throw at any war you dislike...like people are doing right now when they casually spit this word at Israel, using it as an emotional condemnation instead of a legal term.

The court can't decide dolus specialis from statements. It'll ask whether the conduct admits any explanation other than intent to destroy the group as such. In a war against an enemy that fights from inside the civilian population, that's nearly impossible.

There is no Israeli state policy of destroying the Palestinian people. Anyone who disagrees should please show us the evidence to support their allegation. We've been waiting for years to see it.

What would it be called if there was an extermination of people but there was no way to prove intent?

If you are ever looking for the terms to discuss terrible wartime events that don't clear the genocide bar, that vocabulary already exists. It can be genocide, a war crime, or tragic, lawful, awful wartime death.

Telling these three apart requires depending entirely on the facts - which is why they try to shut you up instead of trying to convince you with evidence.

You used the word "extermination."

In both the Rome Statute and in ordinary English, this word implies a campaign aimed at wiping a people out.

It is ridiculous to suggest that has happened in Gaza.

What's happened in Gaza is a war.

Civilians die in wars, sometimes in appalling numbers, and that by itself is not a crime. Measured against modern urban warfare (Fallujah, Mosul, Dresden, the comparisons I ran in the original post), the reported casualty figures from a fight against an enemy that operates out of hospitals and tunnels do not look like the signature of an extermination. They look like the signature of a hard war against an enemy that embeds itself within these places for the explicit purpose of causing innocent deaths.

So, is what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide?

Not by the definition, which requires a specific intent that no policy reflects and that no pattern of conduct compels as the only reasonable reading.

Not by any ruling, because the one court that can rule hasn't done so. The accusation is unproven, and the burden sits with the people making the accusation.

The burden is on the accuser always.

The party alleging genocide has to prove genocide to the only-reasonable-inference standard. Until they do, the correct default is the one you're taking: it has not been established.

You're not sitting on the fence, you're sticking with the presumption that protects everyone, including every group that has ever actually faced genocide and needed the word to still mean something when they reached for it.

Like I wrote the first time: once these words get emptied of meaning, they lose the power to stop the very thing they were built to name. The people demanding you call this genocide without proof are not guarding that power. They're pissing it away and handing the bill to the future.

Let's talk about the people calling you a "genocide enabler" for saying "I don't know."

When someone calls you an "enabler" for saying you don't know whether it clears the bar of the definition, they have it backwards.

You're not the one departing from the standard. They are.

They are treating an unproven, unadjudicated, burden-not-met accusation as settled fact, and then branding anyone who notices this dishonesty a collaborator. That's moral bludgeoning.

Once you learn to see this move, Anon, you can't unsee it.

Calling you an "enabler" is emotional blackmail meant to turn your uncertainty into your guilt.

Their trick is to convert an epistemic position (I have not been shown proof) into a moral verdict (you are complicit in mass death), because almost nobody can stand being told they are complicit in mass death.

They want you to either affirm or go quiet not because the evidence moved you but because the social cost of honesty got set too high.

A decent person emotionally recoils from enabling genocide, and this tactic feeds on that decency, using your good faith and desire to belong as the prybar to extract a level of compliance your reasoning faculties would never offer.

The question should be: "Is this true?"

Instead, they're asking: "Are you a good person, Anon?"

...and if you hesitate, they decide the answer is "no."

They can't win the "is it true" fight, so they start a second fight about your decency that you cannot afford to lose.

By making "I'm not sure" expensive to say out loud...they get people to stop saying it.

The tactic itself tells you a lot about their position.

An argument that can actually prove genocide has no need to criminalize doubt about genocide.

A person calling you an enabler is not trying to win you over, because winning you over was never the point.

They are instead drawing a boundary and sorting who's inside the tribe from who isn't - and they do it loudly because performing the policing of the line in public is how they advertise their own purity.

They don't ask "is it true," because they don't have the epistemological faculties to grapple with that question. It also doesn't matter to them because the genocide claim isn't functioning as a factual proposition - they're using it like a shibboleth.

When you ask "is it true," it isn't heresy because they checked and found you wrong, but because that's not why they asked you for the password.

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You can hold both of these ideas at once with no contradiction:

The suffering in Gaza is real

The legal charge of genocide has not been met.

As I said last time, "Not Genocide" does not mean "No Wrongdoing."

Refusing to collapse those two isn't genocide denial, Anon - it's reasoning with intellectual honesty.

It's financially rewarding for social media personalities with personal/parasocial followings to specifically hate on and conspiracize about Jews. Also? That shit hits like black tar heroin and absolutely obliterates your brain and rationality centers, especially if you're being rewarded for it.

It's been noted and logged here.

The things I have learned in Hebrew school: 1. This is the Alef-Bet in Hebrew. It is your people’s tongue. It is sweet on yours. 2. They want to kill you 3. This is what you say when they accuse you of killing their god 4. This is what you say when they accuse you of controlling the government 5. The Mishnah has six books, arranged by subject. 6. This is how to hide a kippah in public 7. There are two main commentaries on the Gemara on every Talmud page- Rashi and Tosafot 8. They killed your family 9. This is the prayer for the anniversary of a death 10. This is how to feel afraid 11. This is how to feel ashamed of being afraid 12. Do not read “children”, read “builders” 13. Your children will be afraid of building a life anywhere they cannot flee from at midnight 14. This is how to feel anger 15. This is how to choke 16. On it 17. It back 18. When you are dying 19. When they are killing you 20. Say the shema