some dude on the internet i guess

Kiss me I'm jewish💋

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."

That's horrifying to watch… I almost threw up when I was downloading that video.

The most painful quotes:

-When the Russians took me, I was sent to a technical school where I was subjected to daily false stories about Ukrainians and sometimes even insults. One day, I was called to the principal’s office and when I got there, she had citizenship documents ready for me to sign. I was stunned and disgusted. I had never been more afraid, but I refused to become a Russian citizen.

The principal glowered at me with hatred in her eyes. She berated me for being "stupid." Moments later, I was expelled and sent packing, in a country that I did not know, and that hated who I was.

-After Save Ukraine helped me return home, I needed to get my brother out too. I found him in a new foster family, but he was not the boy I knew. He had been subjected to months of Russian propaganda and manipulation. He was like a puppet, saying things that I knew he did not believe – that Ukraine was run by Nazis, that nobody in Ukraine cared about him and that he had no future unless he became a Russian citizen.

-When I begged him to return home with me, he refused. Hour after hour ticked by as we argued. As I was about to lose hope, he came to his senses and agreed to come home with me. We were lucky. But there are 19,000 kidnapped Ukrainian children still in Russia. The Russian government bombards them with propaganda and abuse to weaken their Ukrainian identity. Many are punished for speaking Ukrainian.

I'm in tears: "... I feel very sad and have no desire to live". Russians' obsession is to break Ukrainians mentally, including children.

Ukraine has handed over to Qatar a list with the names of 561 Ukrainian children who were taken to Russia. This was reported by Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets. ▪️Wait for the return of a group of Ukrainian children home. We are not disclosing details at this time. ▪️ Talking about the return of orphans and children deprived of parental care. Qatar agreed to work on the issue of their return to Ukraine. Preliminarily, there may be more than 3,600 such children. ▪️Qatar agreed to participate in negotiations with Russia on the return of civilians illegally detained by Russia. Lubinets also once again refuted Russian propaganda: there were no direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. All negotiations are mediated by Qatar.

Happy Tu B'Av! חג ט״ו באב שמח! 🌸

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 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.

-----

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.

there absolutely are plenty of antizionist jews, particularly in america. their views being a minority among the wider global jewish community doesn't mean they don't exist. but it is wildly disingenuous to insist that a minority of jews must in fact be the majority simply because they agree with you and hold the position you think is the only acceptable one, because you don't want to confront the implications of them being a minority and what that means for your feelings about the majority of jews across the globe.

This is real. I am a Zionist because I believe in self-determination for the Jewish people, yes -- just as I do for the Palestinian people, by the way -- but even more than that, at the core of my beliefs, when you drill right down to it? When you really get in there?

More than anything, I would like Israel to continue to exist because my friends fucking live there and I love them and want them to continue being alive. I want them to be safe. Most diaspora Jews have some connection to people in Israel, whether friends or in many cases family, and at the end of the day the safety of our friends and family is at the core of our positions with regards to Israel and Zionism.

This was the year I fully grasped the extent to which Western anti-colonial activism has never actually been about indigenous sovereignty. It’s about selectively weaponising indigeneity as a geopolitical cudgel, often for antisemitic or otherwise totalitarian ends.