“Go Ahead, Privileged Little White Boy From Far Away, Tell Me What’s REALLY Going On Here.” - Via

evebarlow.substack.com

Rape Denial + "Free Speech"

“Those who don't have truth on their side, turn to dishonesty.” It was apt that Katharine Brodsky tweeted this yesterday morning. What’s goi

Anyway back to the scheduled program: a massive congratulations to all of you who have denied rape by Hamas. You have set the clock back on women’s rights against sexual violence even further than it was before. You’re a bunch of fakes. Here’s a note about rape denial. Perpetrators who are successful in discrediting their victims do so because they have dehumanized their victims, and this dehumanization becomes echoed by a world that sides with the perpetrator. That is what Hamas has achieved. The total dehumanization of its victims. Posters ripped down. Rapes denied.

Trauma specialist Judith Herman writes:

"When the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing.… The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain."

History shows us that we need movements around women in order to protect our rights and our bodies. What is happening currently with the denial of sexual violence against women in Israel sets all women back. And it does so by design. Women who are victims of the October 7 attacks are far less likely to come forward and testify knowing how the world has taken enormous pleasure in the suffering of Jewish women, and in the sordid details. Efforts to seek justice often require further traumatization, too. Perpetrators of trauma know this.

The more evidence against the perpetrator, the more extreme lengths the perpetrator has to go to deny the truth, and instead to focus on humiliating the victims, for there is great social currency in this. As we have seen even before this war, rape has become a subject of sickening entertainment on apps like TikTok. Hamas know this too. Hamas know that the more Israel issues evidence, the more those who take glee in the rapes will post their depraved responses. Does that mean we should stop releasing evidence? Absolutely not.

The element of joy found in extreme prejudice is a crucial element of both antisemitism and misogyny. When the two are combined, the effect is nuclear. By the way, this is all fairly textbook stuff. What's shocking is that it should be familiar to and recognized by every feminist. And it's not, because the movement protects all women, except Jews. Jews are imperfect victims. Israel is an imperfect victim. Israel doesn’t just roll over and die when she’s attacked. So Israel’s a little hard to get behind.

The world denies the sexual violence by Hamas because it sides with Hamas, and if it were to accept these acts there is no possible way the world could remain a bystander. All arrows point in the direction of Israel as the victim. Hamas is the perpetrator of unspeakable acts.

There is no justification for Hamas's continued existence, or any group of people who support Hamas. Whereas Israel has a right to exist free from such crimes against humanity, and Israel is perfectly within its rights to wage this war. Rape denial is part of the brainwashing. The only way to continue to ignore Israel's victimization is to discredit the individuals targeted by Hamas on October 7 and since. And failing that, mocking and humiliating the victims and/or anyone who speaks out in their defense, or dehumanizing us with libelous claims (racist! TERF! ZIONIST! — OK that one’s true). They can single us out as "Zionists" and warp the definition of Zionism to suit their needs, but it doesn't absolve them. Those who participate in such antisemitic rhetoric are no longer mere bystanders, but active assailants to the perpetrators, ie Hamas.

The right of return

I was privately asked about a post implying that Israel is refusing to allow the right to return to Palestinians that have been displaced even though Jews have had the right of return for a while now. I thought I’d answer in a post.

Let me address this by first of all pointing out that Palestinians currently do have the right to return… to the Palestinian-controlled territories. If an American Palestinian wants to move to Ramallah, Israel has no say in the matter, meaning in effect the Palestinians have the right of return to those parts of the historical Land of Israel.

Which means that when Palestinians keep talking about the right of return, they’re not talking about the right to return to their own self-governed territories, they’re talking about the right to return to the territories which make up the State of Israel. The Jewish Virtual Library has a good summary on how in international law, the right of return only applies to individual nationals, it’s not an obligatory right that has to be granted to entire groups of people. That means that every country which does grant a right of return to an entire group of people does so because it chooses to, not because it is compelled by international law. In other words, it does grant this right when it believes it’s in the best interest of the country or of the population the country is meant to serve. When Palestinians demand the right of return not to the parts of the land that they govern, but to the parts which make up the State of Israel, it’s equivalent to country X demanding that country Y will grant automatic citizenship to descendants of country X instead of country X giving those people a right of return to its own borders. That’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. And, in fact, if country X did try to make such a demand, country Y would likely see this as a threat, because of the way that a big concentration of nationals loyal to another country had been used along history. This is how Hitler used the people of German descent who were living in Czechoslovakia to take over Sudetenland (and later using this initial split of the country to take over all of Czechoslovakia), or how Russia has used the substantial population of Russian descent living in the eastern parts of Ukraine to demand those territories.

To make the current situation clearer, I’ll add that many Jews were originally from territories that are now under Palestinian control (meaning they were displaced from those places, not from the parts of the Land of Israel which today make up the Jewish state). Those Jews don’t have a right of return to those parts of the Land of Israel either, they can’t return to Gaza, they can’t return to areas A and B of Judea and Samaria, they can’t return to Jewish communities that existed on the eastern side of the Jordan river and which were ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians as a part of Jordan’s actions against Israel during the latter’s War of Independence (despite reaching a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, signed in 1994). To be accurate, even within the State of Israel, Jews don’t have a free right of return to every place they used to inhabit. In antiquity, all of Israel used to be Jewish. Even in later times, there still were Jewish communities in places like ShefarAm, Nazareth, Pekiin and Huseifa, all places that were originally Jewish towns. They are today all under Israeli rule, but the Jews don’t get to return there. The demographics of these places had been irreversibly changed.

Certainly when we look at borders between countries, two states for two people where each gets to self-govern means the right of return is and will remain limited geographically for both groups.

If the right of return won’t be limited, it’s clear which of the two groups will become the minority, losing in practice the right to self-determination. Because it has to be emphasized that the right to self-determination is not considered a right that is fulfilled when a group of people is a minority. As long as a group is a minority, its power to determine its own fate is dependent, either (in a democracy) on the good will of the majority (for example, in the 1920′s and early 1930′s in Germany, Jews who made up 0.8% of the German population didn’t get to decide who will lead their country, they were dependent on the majority of Germans voting against the Nazis… and we all know how that turned out) or it’s dependent on the minority’s use of force to override the majority (which is the case in Syria, for example, where the Alawi minority reigns over the Sunni majority through the use of force. We all saw how bloody that got during Syria’s civil war, and nobody wants that for Israel). If the Palestinian right of return were to be applied without limitation to the entire Land of Israel, it would be the Jews who would become a minority and lose the right to self-determination.

This is why the push for the right of return of Palestinians to all of Israel is considered such a red flag by a majority of Jews. Because it’s understood to be a tool in destroying the State of Israel serving as the one place where Jews get to have self-determination, and to deny Jews this universal right is discriminatory in nature, and therefore considered by many to be antisemitic. This is one of the reasons why so many, including actual governments, have declared the BDS movement (which calls for the boycott of Israelis and Jews) antisemitic, because one of its three stated goals is a return of Palestinian refugees to all of Israel. Note here that the one of the founders of BDS is Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian man living in Israel thanks to his marriage to an Israeli Arab. He states he wants a right of return of Palestinian refugees, while ignoring the right of Jews to return to Israel. He knows exactly what this means for Jews.

More than that, most conflicts around the world aren’t resolved through a mutual and unlimited right of return. When two countries were in a conflict and many people were displaced on both sides, conflicts were usually resolved through eventually agreeing that there was a population exchange, and whatever harm befell one country and its population, it was more or less balanced off by whatever harm befell the other country and its population. A population exchange is a bad thing, since it points to many people being displaced, but once it has occurred, recognizing it can allow both sides to move on. The Israeli-Arab conflict could have been resolved like that long ago. About 800,000 Arabs were displaced in Israel during its War of Independence (most of them because they fled the war that their own side started), about 850,000 Jews from Arab countries were expelled from those countries following Israel’s victory in that war, and most of the Jews displaced from Arab countries ended up in Israel. Agreeing that this was an exchange of populations, that Israel would take care of the displaced Jews, and the Arab countries would take care of the displaced Arabs (presumably by creating a new Arab state on the parts of the Land of Israel that Egypt and Jordan had occupied during Israel’s War of Independence) could have been a resolution for this conflict over 70 years ago. In fact, Israel agreed to this when it told the UNWRA in 1952 it assumes all responsibility for the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries. Here’s a mention of Israel taking that responsibility in an excerpt from an essay looking into how UNWRA today discriminates in favor of the Palestinian refugees in comparison with how all other refugees worldwide are treated by UNHCR (for example, mentioning that refugees treated by UNHCR have no right of return):

If this conflict wasn’t resolved through accepting the mutual population exchange, if the Arab countries didn’t create a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Jordan and Egypt, if the Palestinians today continue to insist on the right of return even as they gain citizenship in other countries, and they insist on a right of return specifically to the territories that now make up the State of Israel, it’s because they’re not interested in a resolution. They know that applying the Palestinian right of return to all of the land will effectively wipe out Israel as the one Jewish state, and that’s what those who are advocating for it are really interested in.

Here’s a statement by a UN official from 1952, convinced that the Arab states are purposely using the Arab refugees as a political weapon against Israel:

Here’s what a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization said in a 1977 interview he had with a Dutch newspaper:

“There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are part of one people, the Arab nation. Look, I have family members with Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian citizenship. We are one people.

Only for political reasons we do carefully maintain our Palestinian identity. Indeed, it is of national importance for the Arabs to insist on the existence of a Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.

Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is only there for tactical reasons.” - Zuheir Mohsen, PLO, March 31, 1977

Source

Valid analysis? GAJ

Extreme Science: Launching Sounding Rockets from The Arctic

This winter, our scientists and engineers traveled to the world’s northernmost civilian town to launch rockets equipped with cutting-edge scientific instruments.

This is the beginning of a 14-month-long campaign to study a particular region of Earth’s magnetic field — which means launching near the poles. What’s it like to launch a science rocket in these extreme conditions?

Our planet is protected by a natural magnetic field that deflects most of the particles that flow out from the Sun — the solar wind — away from our atmosphere. But near the north and south poles, two oddities in Earth’s magnetic field funnel these solar particles directly into our atmosphere. These regions are the polar cusps, and it turns out they’re the ideal spot for studying how our atmosphere interacts with space.

The scientists of the Grand Challenge Initiative — Cusp are using sounding rockets to do their research. Sounding rockets are suborbital rockets that launch to a few hundred miles in altitude, spending a few minutes in space before falling back to Earth. That means sounding rockets can carry sensitive instruments above our atmosphere to study the Sun, other stars and even distant galaxies.

They also fly directly through some of the most interesting regions of Earth’s atmosphere, and that’s what scientists are taking advantage of for their Grand Challenge experiments.

One of the ideal rocket ranges for cusp science is in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, off the coast of Norway and within the Arctic circle. Because of its far northward position, each morning Svalbard passes directly under Earth’s magnetic cusp.

But launching in this extreme, remote environment puts another set of challenges on the mission teams. These launches need to happen during the winter, when Svalbard experiences 24/7 darkness because of Earth’s axial tilt. The launch teams can go months without seeing the Sun.

Like for all rocket launches, the science teams have to wait for the right weather conditions to launch. Because they’re studying upper atmospheric processes, some of these teams also have to wait for other science conditions, like active auroras. Auroras are created when charged particles collide with Earth’s atmosphere — often triggered by solar storms or changes in the solar wind — and they’re related to many of the upper-atmospheric processes that scientists want to study near the magnetic cusp.

But even before launch, the extreme conditions make launching rockets a tricky business — it’s so cold that the rockets must be encased in styrofoam before launch to protect them from the low temperatures and potential precipitation.

When all is finally ready, an alarm sounds throughout the town of Ny-Ålesund to alert residents to the impending launch. And then it’s up, up and away! This photo shows the launch of the twin VISIONS-2 sounding rockets on Dec. 7, 2018 from Ny-Ålesund.

These rockets are designed to break up during flight — so after launch comes clean-up. The launch teams track where debris lands so that they can retrieve the pieces later.

The next launch of the Grand Challenge Initiative is AZURE, launching from Andøya Space Center in Norway in March 2019.

 For even more about what it’s like to launch science rockets in extreme conditions, check out one scientist’s notes from the field: https://go.nasa.gov/2QzyjR4

For updates on the Grand Challenge Initiative and other sounding rocket flights, visit nasa.gov/soundingrockets or follow along with NASA Wallops and NASA heliophysics on Twitter and Facebook.

@NASA_Wallops | NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility | @NASASun | NASA Sun Science

The statement is worth nothing if it is not finally implemented.

She was so great, I adore her very much. RIP

46 years ago

Poly Styrene with X-Ray Spex at CBGB, New York, March 1978.

Photos by Ebet Roberts

"A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) American economist.

It's been 94 days

Agam Berger (19)

Liri Elbag (18)

Daniela Gilboa (19)

Karina Ariev (19)

These girls are held captive for 3 months by the monsters of Hamas.  Look at them.