no but for real, we left Egypt for /this/??

my partner (Jewish) and I (supportive goy atheist) have made a new friend (Arab Muslim), and we obviously have some different beliefs and opinions but also a lot of shared values, so the friendship has been strong thus far.

there are some instances where we have to bite our tongues, in regard to the I/P conflict mainly, though we are starting to push back in small ways such as, yes Hamas is an armed terrorist group, most Jews/Israelis don't support the government's actions, etc. this all came to a head last night when we made the *very* controversial statement: Jews are indigenous to the Levant.

I'm shocked at how she was unwilling to accept that, she became stubborn, defaulted to her mother's opinion, and started asserting that all Jewish prophets/architecture/holy sites are actually Islamic, and not Jewish, since they were sent/built/assigned by G-d. this, naturally, extends her opinion to that of modern day Jews being totally genetically unrelated to the ancient Israelites. blatant erasure and rewriting of Jewish history, centring Islam even though the Quran is demonstrably younger than the Tanakh. my partner understandably lashed out as their cultural ancestry was being disrespected. we tried to explain that there's a difference between respecting others' beliefs, vs one's beliefs directly erasing an entire group's existence from history, but she kept falling back on "history is written by the victors, we have no real way of knowing anything given that we didn't live back then".

In essence, according to that doctrine, all of the Biblical peoples, sites, and narratives were actually Arab Muslims, but then the Jewish leaders/scribes/people/rabbis/etc got their hands on the texts and maliciously edited them for... reasons. And since this malicious editing meant that the word of god was being hoarded by the Jews, that then required Allah to send additional prophets (Jesus and then, when he "failed", Mohammad) to "correct" things back to where they "should" have been.

It's also the basis for a number of other really nasty bits of Islamic antisemitism--for example, apparently the Jewish tribes in Arabia were not there because of the Diaspora, but that they had moved there in anticipation of another divine prophet to fight against, and when they met Mohammad, they recognized him as their anticipated and intended enemy. (And I'm not exaggerating--that's literally what's taught by Islamists; it's given pretty much verbatim in this video at the ten minute mark). In terms of implications, just think of what that little narrative means--that all Jews, or at least Jewish leadership, knows the "truth" (that Islam is the actual origin and belief system) rejects it out of sheer contrariness, and work conspiratorially to keep it buried.

When that's what is taught to the average, well-meaning Muslim, like your associate, about Jewish history, identity, and culture...

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York (appears to have already called for Platner to step down)

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (appears to have already called for Platner to step down)

Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri

Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire

Sen. Kamala Harris of California

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington

Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin

Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania

Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio

Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota

Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts (note, it looks like he’s up for reelection this year)

Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado (this one is running for governor)

Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware

Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois

Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island

Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan (note, it looks like he’s up for reelection this year)

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey (note, it looks like he’s up for reelection this year)

Sen. Jon Tester of Montana

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island (note, it looks like he’s up for reelection this year)

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

Sen. Angus King of Maine

Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida

If these people (ESPECIALLY the ones who are still sitting senators) can't immediately release a statement saying something along the lines of, "Nine years ago I asked Al Franken to resign his senate seat because of allegations of sexual misconduct. I am now asking Graham Platner to suspend his campaign in Maine for the same reasons. The behavior was unbefitting of a senator then, and it still is now," then I don't think any of them should be holding office.

Bernie Sanders (not a Dem but whatever)

Ruben Gallego

Elizabeth Warren

Ro Khanna

Chris Van Hollen

Sheldon Whitehouse

Brian Schatz

A Boston principal wrote a letter apologizing to Muslim and Arab middle school kids—- because of a holocaust lesson, and the relation of it to antisemitism today. They felt “unseen” and “uncomfortable”.

So basically, a bunch of Arab and muslim kids (his OWN WORDS) got really annoyed about having to talk about antisemitism for a few minutes, went home and told their parents. Those parents got very upset that Jews were being portrayed in anything but an evil and oppressive light— and complained to that school. And this bitch of a principal capitulated.

It’s the worst fucking timeline.

Just remember that "Until we are all free, we are none of us free." was written by a Jewish woman who called for a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland up until her death - 13 years before the term Zionism was introduced to the world. She was talking about Jews, btw, so before you co-opt it for somebody else, remember where and who it's from.

Orthodox Jewish groups urged the Supreme Court to take up the case of an Orthodox Jewish man ordered by officials in University Heights, Ohio, to stop hosting prayer services in his home without a permit.

The amicus brief, which was filed Friday by the National Jewish Advocacy Center alongside the Orthodox Union and the National Council of Young Israel, comes years after Daniel Grand, a resident of the suburb of Cleveland, invited a group of Jewish men to his home for Shabbat services starting in January 2021.

At the time, University Heights, citing zoning laws, issued a cease-and-desist order blocking Grand from using his home for prayer.

Grand initially applied for a special use permit to use his home as “a place of religious assembly” in 2021, but later withdrew the application, saying he did not “wish to operate a house of worship as is defined under the zoning ordinance.”

According to the NJAC, the former mayor of University Heights, Michael Dylan Brennan, then encouraged Grand’s “neighbors to watch his home and report any sign of Jewish worship to the authorities.”

“What happened to Daniel Grand is not an isolated incident,” Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, the CEO of NJAC, said in a statement. “It is the latest chapter in a long and documented history of municipalities using zoning laws to suppress Orthodox Jewish religious practice.”

The city’s current mayor, Michele Weiss, who was elected last fall, told JTA that there was currently one residence in the city that had obtained a special permit to host worship gatherings and that another was currently in the middle of applying for one.

“My perspective is that everyone has a right to worship in their home with a small group of people (a minyan) without city involvement, just like a book club might do,” Weiss, who is the first female Orthodox Jewish mayor in the United States, wrote in an email to JTA. “If a congregation wants to worship in a residence with a proper congregation then each city should have a way forward through their planning commission.”

In September 2022, Grand filed a lawsuit against the city and Brennan, alleging that the former mayor was motivated by “animus against Orthodox Jews.” He maintained that the actions blocking him from conducting services in his home were part of a “systematic campaign” to prevent the Orthodox community from growing in University Heights, according to the Cleveland Jewish News.

In January, Weiss told JTA that University Heights’ Jewish community had grown a “tremendous amount” in recent years, and was the “largest Orthodox contingency of residents in the state of Ohio.”

Brennan, who was twice censured by the city council for “inappropriate language,” had faced criticism from the city’s Jewish community during his tenure. In November 2024, he drew backlash for criticizing voters in a heavily Jewish neighborhood who supported Donald Trump, and in April 2025, he accused the volunteer-run Jewish ambulance service Hatzalah of “jeopardizing public safety.”

In October 2024, the U.S. District Court of Northern Ohio ruled in favor of University Heights, and the Ohio 6th District Court of Appeals later upheld the ruling in November 2025.

A petition for Supreme Court review is currently pending, and a decision on whether it will be heard is expected in the coming months, according to NJAC.

I knew about some of that boom--the "absurd and/or dangerous" example that I was referencing in my first reblog was from a house down the street from my parents whose resident had been running a shul out of his house, and kept expanding it... by cutting into the walls and adding illegal additions. The housing inspector who looked it over condemned the house because he'd removed load-bearing walls and rendered it "unfit for human habitation"! They ended up knocking it down (before he could have it collapse on their heads on his own), and he rebuilt it as a synagogue properly a few years ago. That example I knew about, and at first, I thought that this was that case.

It isn't.

This is a different case, and it's hard not to argue that this is targeted harassment of Jewish religious observance. Are there are lot of synagogues in my old neighborhood? Oh yes. Even before I left, well...

Here, this isn't doxxing, because the name of the neighborhood is listed on the article and I used incognito so it doesn't accidentally show my family's addresses:

This is University Heights (named because John Carroll University is there at the lower left corner) and Beachwood. You can see just how many synagogues there are on the map--and this isn't even all of them. I know of several--including the one I mentioned above--that aren't listed for whatever reason (check out Synagogue Row on Green Road there in the middle).

So, sure, there are already a lot of synagogues in the area. But I would argue that this isn't any more dense in terms of synagogues than your average American city has churches, and this area has one of the highest population densities of Jews outside of Israel. But you wouldn't see them saying, "You can't have a Christian prayer meeting in your house".

There's also accessibility issues and the like at hand as well; while I doubt that it's the situation for this particular case, I've been to minyans in houses where the resident had limited mobility and wanted to say kaddish, not to mention Shiva calls. Is it against zoning to have a group prayer in the house of someone grieving the loss of a close relative?

pro tip: if your "encourage[ment]" could also be from the authorities in the Spanish Inquisition, you may want to reconsider

Important note: Weiss is the first frum female mayor in the US

Brennan he was trying to make a minyan!

Brennan get your story straight!

Also in 2022 the guy (tried to?) sell his house:

Not creepy behavior at all:

Brennan is apparently trying to up his antisemite cred:

like, race is a concept that so many people consider biological/set in stone and strictly define by blood quantum, but for whatever reason, that logic doesn't apply to jews - we're always whatever racial category goyim hate the most: to conservatives, we'll never truly be white. to leftists, we'll always be white (and in extreme views, we're even whiter than the whitest christians!) unless we have Leftist Council-Approved Person of Color status due to additional heritage in our immediate bloodline(s).

tl;dr: do I think jews are inherently POC by virtue of being jewish? no. ("people of color" as a term was coined for a very specific western movement of solidarity, specifically with the intention of amplifying black and indigenous voices re: defining their relationships with their phenotypical traits and bloodline-based heritage. many jews are poc, but imho, being jewish doesn't necessarily make someone a person of color.)

on the other hand, are jews inherently nonwhite by virtue of being jewish? yes.

it's like simultaneously existing outside of race while also being shoved into the cracks between every other race, prohibited from identifying with any of them - we have to take on whatever racial identity outsiders assign us.

Rules for commenting on this take: at least understand the smallest bit of race theory - especially how race isnt JUST skin tone, its not the same as ethnicity, its a complex social construct made for oppression. I don't wanna hear some american goy in my ear about how the only two races are black (anyone whos brown) and white (highly specific lightskinned europeans)

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A war between Israel, the US, Iran, and possibly other countries will be devastating and it would be best to avoid war entirely,

AND

Iran was committing massive human rights abuses and needed to be stopped,

AND

The Islamic Republic has been funding terrorist groups and waging proxy wars throughout the region

AND

Other countries that are creating similar amounts of death (Russia, China, Sudan, etc.) should also be stopped,

AND

The US shouldn't be the world's cops,

AND

The UN should have acted more decisively instead of hemming and hawing while thousands were murdered,

AND

This is going to make Israel even more unpopular than it already is,

AND

Trump shouldn't act without the permission of Congress,

AND

No other countries were going to intervene, just like no countries have intervened in Ukraine or Sudan or Palestine,

AND

Iranian people deserve a better, democratic government,

AND

Creating a power vacuum is usually a bad thing,

AND

The Ayatollah needed to be deposed,

AND

This was still the US and Israel overstepping,

AND

A lot of innocent people will die.

Hey, thanks for your response! I just wanted to add some context here.

The "school attack" has actually been debunked on several levels as regime propaganda. In general, the regime is pulling a stunt of wanting to embed itself among civilians to maximize civilian casualties, which is a violation of international law.

In this case of this school, an account with familiarity this this has posted the following tweet:

I studied mass communication in Qatar – a country routinely described as a heaven for journalists, though the description has always struck me as more aspirational than empirical. I completed my master’s thesis on Israeli media framing of Morocco across three distinct phases – before normalization, after normalization, and during the Gaza war – analyzing the coverage according to three distinct editorial ideologies: left, center, and right.

I arrived at the subject carrying every assumption my academic environment had furnished me with: that Israeli media operates under military censorship so pervasive it functions as state propaganda, that the press serves as an extension of the security establishment, that the entire information ecosystem is engineered to manufacture consent for occupation. I was trained to see Israel as the graveyard of journalism.

What I found, when I actually engaged with the material – and later, with the institutions themselves – was something my professors in Doha had never prepared me for: a media landscape so free, so plural, so aggressively self-critical that it makes every Arab media ecosystem I have encountered, including the Moroccan one I belong to, look curated by comparison.

Let me begin with my own experience, because personal testimony is harder to dismiss than theory. I have written for The Times of Israel and continue to contribute to it to this day. Not once – not a single time – was any article of mine rejected, altered, or suppressed. I wrote pieces critical of Israeli government policy. I wrote pieces questioning Zionist narratives. I wrote pieces that would have made any nationalist editor in any Arab country reach for the delete button before finishing the first paragraph. Every single one was published. Every single one. I want the reader to sit with that fact for a moment, because it is not a small thing.

Here is a news outlet, operating in a country that much of the world has declared a pariah state, that accepts opinions from a Moroccan journalist even when those opinions challenge the very ideological foundations upon which the state was built. Name me one Arab outlet that would do the same in reverse.

Would Al Jazeera – which presents itself as the gold standard of Arab journalism, the fearless voice of the voiceless – publish an op-ed praising Zionism? Would it run a piece arguing that Israel’s existence is legitimate and its security concerns are valid? The question answers itself, and the silence that follows is the sound of a double standard so enormous it has become invisible.

In fact, I have been contributing to the Times of Israel since 2023 – writing freely, publishing without interference, never once told what to say or what to soften. The outlet that the Arab world brands as a propaganda arm of the Zionist entity never touched a comma of my criticism. It was not Israel that silenced me. It was Qatar. The university itself – the very institution that taught me to champion press freedom, to interrogate power, to speak truth without flinching – instructed me to stop writing for an Israeli publication.

The irony is not subtle; it is obscene. The country that hosts Al Jazeera, that markets itself as the citadel of Arab journalism, that hands out press freedom awards and convenes media ethics conferences in five-star hotels, could not tolerate a graduate student publishing opinion pieces in a newspaper three thousand kilometers away.

And the excuse will come – it always does – that these are merely opinions, that opinions do not represent the outlet, that the disclaimer at the bottom of every op-ed absolves the platform of its contributor’s views. Fine. Then explain to me why, if opinions truly do not represent the outlet, Arab media treats them as if they carry the explosive force of state policy. Explain why editors in Cairo kill columns that question normalization. Explain why Algerian platforms scrub comments that deviate from the regime’s position on Western Sahara. Explain why Qatari institutions panic at the sight of a Moroccan byline in an Israeli newspaper.

If opinions are harmless – if they are, as every Arab editor insists, the sole responsibility of their authors – then why does the entire Arab media establishment behave as though a single dissenting paragraph could bring down the house? The answer is that Arab media does not fear opinions. It fears the precedent of allowing them – because once you permit one voice to think freely, you lose the ability to guarantee that every other voice will remain obedient. And obedience, not journalism, is the product that Arab media actually manufactures.

A volatile marketplace of ideas

Israel is a country where Haaretz – a mainstream, widely read daily newspaper – routinely describes its own government’s policies in the occupied territories as apartheid, as ethnic cleansing, as moral catastrophe. Where +972 Magazine operates openly, publishing investigations that would land journalists in prison in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in my own Morocco.

And here is the irony that should embarrass every Arab newsroom invoking press freedom: these are the very same Israeli platforms that furnish Arab media with the ammunition they later use to attack Israel. When Al Jazeera runs a segment on IDF violations, the sourcing is almost invariably Israeli – B’Tselem reports, Haaretz investigations, +972 exposés, Breaking the Silence testimonies. Arab media does not produce the critical journalism about Israel; it imports it – from Israel itself.

Israel is a country that does not fear outside critics because it manufactures its own critics in industrial quantities, funds their newsrooms, protects their legal right to publish, and tolerates their conclusions even when those conclusions accuse the state of war crimes. Israel investigates its own military, publishes its own failures, airs its own atrocities on its own evening news – and then watches as Arab networks repackage that self-criticism as evidence of Israeli villainy, without ever pausing to ask why no equivalent self-criticism exists in their own countries.

Where far-right outlets like Israel Hayom and Arutz Sheva push narratives so nationalist they would make the most hardline settler blush – and all of these exist simultaneously, in the same media market, funded, read, and debated without anyone being detained at three in the morning for what they wrote.

This is not a controlled information environment. This is a marketplace of ideas so volatile, so unmanageable, so ferociously competitive that it produces more self-criticism per square kilometer than any country in the Middle East and North Africa combined.

Consider i24News, which broadcasts in four languages – English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew – each with a distinct editorial personality. The Arabic edition operates with such sensitivity to Arab audiences that it frequently feels less like an Israeli channel than a Palestinian one broadcasting from inside Israel. Arab citizens of Israel operate their own media outlets – Makan, Panet, Arab48, Kul al-Arab – covering their communities in Arabic, criticizing Israeli policies, advocating for Palestinian rights, and doing so under the legal protection of the very state they critique.

Where else in the region does this exist? In Morocco, where the majority of the population is Amazigh, we struggled to secure a single television channel in Tamazight until 2010 – and even now, its editorial independence is a subject best discussed in whispers.

In Qatar, where Al Jazeera is headquartered, can any journalist publish a critical investigation into the Emir’s finances? Into the Al Thani family’s real estate empire across London and Paris? Into labor conditions that built the studios from which Al Jazeera broadcasts? Into Doha’s documented channels of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, for Hamas, for Islamist movements across the region that every neighboring Gulf state has designated as threats to national security? Into the billions spent on a World Cup built on the backs of migrant workers whose passports were confiscated under a kafala system that human rights organizations have called modern slavery? The answer is not merely no – the answer is that the question itself is dangerous to ask.

‘Graveyard of journalism?’

The accusation that Israel is the graveyard of journalists has become a reflex, repeated so often it has acquired the texture of established fact. And yes, journalists have died in conflict zones where the IDF operates – deaths that deserve investigation, accountability, and institutional reform. I do not dismiss them.

But the phrase “graveyard of journalism” implies the systematic destruction of press freedom as institutional practice, and that is a description that applies far more accurately to the countries making the accusation than to the country being accused. Journalists in Egypt rot in prison for years without trial. Saudi Arabia dismembered one inside a consulate. Syria buried its press corps under barrel bombs. Algeria prosecutes reporters under counterterrorism laws for covering protests.

And yet it is Israel – where Cabinet ministers are called criminals on the evening news, where a sitting prime minister’s corruption trial is broadcast live, where the Supreme Court is criticized and defended in the same newspaper on the same day – that the Arab world has decided is hostile to journalism.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, has been called a fascist by Haaretz columnists, a dictator by protest movements covered sympathetically on prime-time television, and a criminal defendant in a corruption trial that Israeli media broadcasts live, dissects nightly, and editorializes about with a ferocity that would be unimaginable in any Arab capital.

President Isaac Herzog fares no better – routinely dismissed as ceremonially irrelevant by right-wing commentators and criticized as insufficiently vocal by the left, his every public statement parsed, challenged, and often ridiculed in real time across Israeli social media and broadcast networks.

These are not fringe voices operating from exile. These are mainstream journalists, on mainstream platforms, in mainstream Israel – treating their most powerful leaders not as untouchable sovereigns but as public servants accountable to public scrutiny. Now ask yourself: in which Arab country can a journalist call the head of state a criminal on the evening news, keep their job, and sleep in their own bed that night?

This is not analysis. It is projection. Arab media establishments that cannot tolerate a cartoon mocking their head of state have appointed themselves arbiters of press freedom in a country where the head of state is mocked, investigated, indicted, and satirized as a matter of daily routine. The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is architectural.

Let me be clear: Israeli media is not perfect. Military censorship exists on narrow security grounds. Editorial pressures operate, as they do everywhere. But the distance between Israel’s media reality and the Arab world’s media reality is not a gap – it is a chasm so wide that the two sides cannot see each other.