some dude on the internet i guess

Kiss me I'm jewish💋

They've ethnically cleansed over 146000 Afghan refugees since the start of this year

True you said "the pakistani government is bad" but somehow, it is not as worthy of condemnation as Israel "difference is one is a genocidal settler colony that's committing heinous crimes as we speak." but like, what heinous crimes is Israel currently committing? Just existing? Cuz there is currently a ceasefire, and while there is still some violence it pales in comparison to what Pakistan is doing.

nor did I say that mamdani, like all politicians, wasn't a hypocrite

No, but you are defending his actions.

However, you too are a hypocrite if you criticize the pakistani government, but fully support the israeli government

I never said I fully support the Israeli government

the existence of israel itself.

Yeah you got me there, I support the existence of Israel. And of Pakistan. And Qatar, Iran, China, Russia, the US, and every other country that currently exists. because do you know what wanting to wipe out a country that currently exists is called? Genocidal.

Israel has been doing the same thing and more since 1948,

Doing what now? Again, what Israel is doing isn't even the same order of magnitude as what Pakistan has done.

who proudly calls themselves israeli

Actually I don't, because I'm not. I call myself Jewish, which I am. Interesting that you conflate the two.

has multiple reblogs normalizing israel,

Yeah because it's normal. There is nothing Israel is doing that countless other countries have not done worse.

GENUINELY cares about afghans, hindus and sikhs

So -- here's my contribution to Jewish memes, Magneto memes, Magneto-as-symbol-of-Jewish-rage memes and a scathing contribution to the discourse.

This is the 'angry Jew on Main' version, and also comes with a shout-out to @king-shit-thembo whose sassy textpost about the universalization of the Holocaust inspired both meme sets.

Yes: I am another left-leaning Jew with a lot of rage at how the Left has abandoned and demonized us since October 7th.

עם ישראל חי

DIASPORA FROM WHERE, you intellectually decrepit fucktard??

To an unfortunate number of aggressively ignorant westerners, "Arab" is a skin color/regional identity like "Black" or "Asian", and Kurds, Copts, Bedouin, Yazidi, Druze, Assyrians, and Persians are all subcategories of Arab. I have literally seen them claim that Sepharadi and Mizrahi Jews who fled to Israel from the MENA region are "Arab Jews" who are misled by Evil European Invaders.

And if you try to explain that Arabs are actually a particular tribe in the Middle East rather than synonymous with the whole of it, and what they are saying is the regional equivalent of claiming all Europeans are subcategories of German and any European who doesn't identify as German is either deceived or really from somewhere other than Europe, they insist that you're lying and propagandizing and cannot be trusted.

he forgot to say “zionists.”

“BUT THE JOURNALISTSSS”

Telegraph isn't embedding properly so this is all going to be a clickable link, wish I'd seen this when it was new,

In response to the revelations, the BBC said at the time that it was “not aware” of Mr Elzaenen’s social media activity prior to him appearing on air, adding: “We are absolutely clear that there is no place for anti-Semitism on our services.”

Since when?

Guy is trying to talk his way around this whole thing too, which the only people he's fooling are the fools who want to believe him.

Also there's a paywall so gonna put the text of the article under the cut here.

Their "Diversity Manager" from 2001-2011 who was brought back to consult as recently as 2018 is an antisemite. What kind of institutional culture does that create?

Caro worked as senior diversity manager for the BBC between 2001 and 2011 but advised the corporation on inclusion as recently as 2018 in a freelance capacity. The “diversity” expert reposted a message on X – written in response to a post by an anti-Israel activist – saying he “isn’t the first person to blame the Zionist Jews for 9/11. I’ve heard tons of people, mostly American, speak on who is responsible for 9/11. The ADL is targeting him because of his pro-Palestine stance and anti-genocide stances and nothing else.”

Are we surprised? The BBC has always sucked where Jews are concerned.

I’ve only read Orientalism, and it was several years ago; I found and revised some of my old notes if you want a brief overview:

- It does not acknowledge that for most of European history, the Eastern Other was represented by the Jews and the Romani, which would be more useful to understanding modern European Othering than reaching back to Aeschylus and trying to impose modern racial concepts on ancient Athens and Persia.

- It invents a new and largely superfluous word for racism; Orientalism is structurally identical to most other forms of racism, and Said is parroting what many black American thinkers had been saying for decades, but presenting it as his own new idea, which gets annoying very quickly.

- Said is a literature professor trying to establish a theory of sociology primarily out of European classic novels. I don’t entirely disagree with this approach — I believe that literature is an important reflection of any society — but it would be stronger if there were a precedent that went beyond literary theory. His scope in the book is (among ten other abstractions) to bring literary theory into the decolonial framework, but I think it would be more useful if there were an actual pre-existing sociological foundation that it drew on, rather than inventing the social theory out of literary criticism. He’s outside of his jurisdiction here, and it hurts his writing.

- This is a personal pet peeve, but he’s very openly an academic disciple of Foucault and mimics his writing style, which I find tedious. Like Foucault, he is addicted to word vomiting every thought and counter-thought in his mind; it takes him pages to say what really ought to be a single paragraph, and Said doesn’t even have the excuse of writing in French.

- He takes issue with Western academia encouraging its scholars to separate their works from the politics of their life — as a professor at Columbia University, he had an enormous impact on the culture of campus activism in the US — and while I don’t entirely disagree with him on the political events of one’s life contributing to their academic work, his approach to this is very frustrating, considering he outright lies about the events of his life to further his political ambitions.

- His focus in writing the book is on the “intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies” that went into the “making of an imperialist tradition like Orientalism,” including “philology, lexicography, novel writing, and lyric poetry.” I love classic literature, and I have a deep regard for it, but I can’t justify taking a social theory as large and broad as Orientalism and basing a good chunk of it on the poetry of Lord Byron and the first twenty years of Victor Hugo’s work (he uses Hugo as a pillar of Orientalism — which is fair; Hugo renovated his Paris townhouse to look more Japanese, and wrote Notre Dame and Les Orientales with clear contemporary prejudice, so there’s a lot to work with, but I am frustrated that we limit Hugo to the first twenty years of his work and ignore his later writings which would influence many postmodern writers that Said draws from, especially Foucault).

- Said flattens English, French, and American culture into a monolith when it comes to their interactions with and understanding of the Middle East, which I find frustratingly vague and unhelpful, like the rest of this book.

- Large swaths of the book are French quotes without translations. In fairness, much of it is elementary French and fairly easy to parse out if you have a basic French background, but it is a bit of a barrier.

- He tries to create a clear through-line from Aeschylus’ play The Persians, to Shakespeare, to the boom of European interest in the Middle East following the Napoleonic Wars/Greece’s War of Independence, to modern American wars. This is a much bigger task than he is prepared to take on, and it falls apart even before he tries to categorize anti-Turkish sentiment and anti-Indian sentiment as the same social ill. I do sympathize with the trouble of biting off more than you can chew in a thesis statement, but Said only doubles down on the broadness that undermines his argument; his ambitions are much greater than his skill.

- Critique of American culture from an Arab perspective is seen as noble, brave, and righteous, and I do think that American society should be criticized often and well, to make it stronger and better. Critique of Arab culture from an American perspective, however, such as the prevalence of honor killings, social prestige-by-conquest, social shunning of nonconformists, and political inability to admit error, are seen as attacks on the Arab people and a slight upon their honor, which does nothing to disprove the claim. I will say— even accepting the role America has played in wreaking havoc on the Middle East — my greatest frustration with Middle Eastern scholarship is how fiercely its leaders fight against internal critique and introspection.

1. I tried to read his "The Question of Palestine." I really tried. I honestly couldn't get past the intro.

Because it was an anniversary edition, with a new added intro where he brings the reader up to date on every significant Palestinian event since the book was published.

Every significant Palestinian event, except one:

Palestine declaring independence in 1988.

The book was published in 1992.

He even mentions the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference.

He just chooses not to mention that from 1991 on, Israel and Palestine were specifically negotiating how Palestine would become an independent country at peace with Israel.

Or that Jordan had held claim to the West Bank until 1988, something I think is pretty fucking important and relevant here. (Not to mention that it had specifically renounced that claim in 1988 because Palestine declared independence.)

Like. If you don't know that the entire reason Palestine is "the West Bank and the Gaza Strip" is that those are the areas Egypt and Jordan claimed, after they and every other Arab League country invaded in 1948 to retake the land for the Arab world...

Then you're not going to have the context for anything that's happened since then.

Which is the precise trick that most academic information about Palestine uses. It plays a game of careful omission that gives you about a quarter of the story.

Anyway, as a historian, this omission threw me so hard that I spent the next half-hour trying to think of any legitimate reason to avoid mentioning the fact that Palestine had declared independence and - unlike any other country I can think of that has ever declared independence - skipped over the whole "oh no you don't" violent invasion stage, in favor of the "peace talks" stage.

To this day, the only reason I can think of is that it contradicts his position and his narrative.

He was already insisting in 1993, and presumably much earlier, that Israel had outright expelled 800,000 Palestinians and conquered their lands and property.

No Arab League invasion. No 350,000 people leaving its "soft invasion" of volunteer armies before the war even started. No Egypt and Jordan snatching up land with another 300,000ish internally displaced people on it, who then automatically became "refugees" in those foreign countries.

He made that statement in the context of criticizing the preliminary version of the Oslo Accords that the two countries had signed at that point. So he definitely knew all this was happening. It's not like he was just uninformed.

He built his entire career out of the big, broad, easy falsehoods that "everybody knows" today.

Which brings me to my other point:

2. Edward Said is a fucking liar.

He was Egyptian-American. Born to Egyptian-American parents. Given a rich kid childhood in Egypt, until he went to rich kid boarding school in America.

He was not Palestinian.

He was born in Jerusalem. That's the entire part of his story that's true.

He was not a citizen of Palestine. He didn't grow up there. His parents didn't live there when he was born; they were visiting relatives. They didn't own the home he claimed to have grown up in.

Every sad story he's ever told about being dispossessed was an outright lie.

In a way, he even admitted this: his 1999 autobiography contradicts tons of the claims he'd made about his life. He just glosses over that, acting as though it doesn't.

An Israeli lawyer who specializes in Palestinian rights discovered this in 1999.

Here's the de-paywalled version.

Ironically, the guy specifically specializes in helping Palestinians through the legal process of reclaiming, or getting compensation for, property they lost in 1948 or 1967.

This article is how I found out there was even a process for that. Much less an entire industry of lawyers and NGOs to help people do it.

Talk about things that are deliberately never mentioned.

I'm just going to quote a few things. This is a long-form essay, and it's gripping.

As a living embodiment of the Palestinian cause, [Edward Said] has made much in print and on film of his birth, childhood, and schooling in Palestine, telling a story of idyllic beginnings and violent disruption—of a paradise lost—that resonates with personal pain while also serving as a powerfully compelling metaphor for the larger Palestinian condition.

Said's father Wadie did grow up in Jerusalem, under the Ottoman Empire, before moving to America in 1911, and later, to Egypt. He married a Lebanese woman named Hilda, in Egypt, in 1932.

Wadie's brother Boulos still lived in Jerusalem, with his own wife and kids.

To this branch of the family, as to other destinations, the affluent Cairo-based Saids made periodic visits. In November 1935, during one of those visits, Edward Said was born.

On his birth certificate, prepared by the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local address.

Similarly blank is the entry for a local address in the church record of Edward Said’s baptism, an event that likewise took place in Jerusalem two years later.

Of the 29 telephone and commercial directories for Jerusalem and Palestine from 1931 through 1948 that I was able to locate, more than half carry business and/or residential listings for Boulos Said and his wife. There are no listings for Edward Said’s parents in any of the directories, whether in English, Hebrew, or Arabic.

As for the house in Talbieh (Talbiya), that is a story unto itself.

In his article in Harper’s, as in the much longer version of the same piece that he published in the (London) Observer, and as in other iterations of this theme elsewhere, Said has wrenchingly recounted the nostalgic visit he paid in early 1992 to his childhood roots in Jerusalem and in particular to this house at 10 Brenner Street....

In the ledgers kept at the Land Registry Office in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period, the earliest entry for the house in question is dated February 14, 1941. It records a transfer of fractional interests in the property from its registered owner, Yusef Said (Edward Said’s grandfather), to Mrs. Boulos Yusef Said (Edward Said’s aunt) and her five children.

And that is all. There is no record of Edward Said’s parents owning either the house or any interest in it.

If his nuclear family had no ownership interest in the house at 10 Brenner Street, neither did he or they ever permanently reside in it. (Nor, apparently, did his aunt and cousins until 1942.)

OMFG. I'd forgotten that part. He couldn't even have been born in that specific house, or had childhood memories in it! Because his relatives didn't live there yet! The building was a duplex until 1942:

From 1938 to 1946 (that is, from the time Edward Said was roughly three to the time he was eleven), the upstairs level was rented out to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as its consulate general, and then from 1946 to 1952 to the successor government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

...As for the downstairs, main-entrance level of the house, it was rented from about 1936 to 1938 by the Iranian consulate.

Then, after 1938, this and the basement level were leased to the illustrious German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, his wife, and his two teenage granddaughters, all of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany.

The Buber family was forced out of the house in early 1942 (when Edward Said would have been about seven) in a dispute with the owners—that is, Nabiha (Mrs. Boulos Yusef) Said—who broke the lease and reclaimed the premises for their personal use, winning a judge’s ruling in favor of eviction.

Buber’s granddaughters, from whom I heard this account, also accurately remember the names of Nabiha Said and two of her boys, Yusef and Robert. Another tenant of the house during the latter Mandate period remembers George, still another son of the family. None remembers Edward or any of his four sisters.

In fact, Edward Said has actively claimed something I've repeatedly been told: that Martin Buber lived there after 1948, and "didn’t mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."

There's so much more in that article. I'm gonna go reread it.

But first, one little thing I learned today:

In 1966, before hitting on the gold mine of selling outrage porn to would-be white saviors, Edward Said published his very first book.

It was called, "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography."