The Last of Us Part II - Photomode (93/?)

"We lost members who shouldn't have lost," Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a moderate who narrowly won her race in Virginia, said in a heated speech, confirmed a source on the call. "We need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again because while people think it doesn't matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of that."

She specifically pointed to the defund the police movement and said it hurt her and other moderates who were in tight races.

“A variety of wild animals visiting a water fountain”

The Irgun was a Jewish Terror organization in Palestine that operated in the 30′s and 40′s, carrying out attacks and massacres against Palestinian civilians in their [successful] efforts to use terror to establish the state of Israel.

The Irgun was responsible for numerous shootings and bombings, from drive-bys, to planting bombs in crowded markets and cafes, to targeted assassinations, to full-on massacres. 

Two of the Irgun’s most notorious actions were that of the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 that killed 90 people, as the Deir Yassin Massacre in 1948 in which over 100 Palestinians were murdered.

The Deir Yassin Massacre was one of the worst massacres of the Palestinian Nakba, the campaign in which Jewish forces ethnically cleansed the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians from their land, creating over 750,000 refugees and destroying over 500 towns and cities in order to establish the state of Israel. 

During the massacre in their attempts to control the village, Jewish forces went door to door with TNT and blew up houses containing Palestinian civilians and those defending their village from the attack. Irgun forces would throw grenades in through the windows of houses they passed, killing those inside. To add to the atrocity, those taken as prisoners by the Irgun were lined up and systematically shot.

The images above represent the Irgun’s emblem, which features all of Palestine and Jordan. The Irgun believed that the entirety of both Palestine and Jordan belonged to the Jewish people, and their end-goal was to establish the Israeli state across the two of them. 

Palestinians are frequently demonized as refusing to accept peace or seeking more land for ourselves [despite the fact that the entirety of our land was stolen from us, and continues to be stolen from us by Israeli settlements], yet ignore the fact that one of the most prominent groups responsible for carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish Israel /themselves/ believed that both all of Palestine AND Jordan would be theres.

“Why is this relevant?” you might ask.

The answer is because leaders of the Irgun eventually went on to hold leadership positions within Israel, among them Menachem Begin, who lauded and celebrated the massacre of Deir Yassin as being vital for the establishment of Israel:

Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of “Irgun butchery,” were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.

- Menachem Begin 

He also celebrated the massacre as a “splendid act of conquest” meant to serve as a model of the future:

His violent and pervasive genocidal mentality followed him all the way to the positions of power within Israel, where he ruled during future massacres that I will come back to.

Begin, who was leader of the Irgun at the time of the Deir Yassin Massacre, eventually went on to serve as Prime Minister of Israel and found the “Herut” political party. For context, the Herut party went on to become the Likud party, the current party in control of Israel.

Begin, leader of a terrorist organization responsible for numerous civilian deaths through bombings, massacres, and shootings, who supported the idea that Israel should encompass all of both Palestine AND Jordan, who celebrated the massacre of Palestinians as important for the establishment of Israel, went on to become the head of the state, and he brought his ideology of terror to Israeli leadership.

Begin was a major proponent of Israeli Settlements, which are recognized internationally as illegal due to their construction on stolen Palestinian land and their segregational nature. His support of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory underlines his Irgun ideology - that ALL of Palestine and Jordan were to be Israeli territory.

Time and time again, Israel gives the world some sad story about how it’s the Palestinians who don’t want peace, how the Arabs refused to accept the partition plan, etc, etc. Yet, it’s clear to anyone familiar with history that the goal was always to control the entirety of Palestinian territory, and preferably have the Palestinians removed from it all. 

Begin was also Prime Minister of Israel during the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, which left over 500 Palestinian refugees murdered by Lebanese Phalangists and Israeli forces.

So why is it that Israel, a country founded on terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and the massacres of civilians, headed by terrorists directly responsible for massacres who went on to carry out even worse while head of the state, continues to preach this double-standard and narrative of victimhood while those responsible for all the reprehensible actions mentioned above never faced justice and are instead lauded and celebrated?

Israel continuously asserts that Palestinians celebrate terrorists and murderers, yet Israel itself has been run on multiple occasions by terrorists and murderers responsible for the deaths of thousands, who are then hailed as heroes.