"A man waiting for a subway train in Brooklyn, New York shouted anti-Semitic slurs at a fellow-rider and then threw the Jewish man’s cellphone on the tracks in an attempt to destroy a recording of his tirade."
Dozens of anti-Semitic flyers were found in Queens. "The image on the flyer shows a man’s head with a kippah on top of it that has a Star of David in the middle. The words 'Worthless F—ing Cancer Filled Jew' is printed over the image."
In 2018 NYC:
• 353 total hate crime complaints were made. 186 had anti-Jewish bias
• 69 (37%) of 2018’s anti-Jewish hate crime reports resulted in an arrest
• Three precincts with large Hasidic populations, all in Brooklyn, reported the most anti-Jewish hate crimes (7-9 each)
Here's my thread with some of the 2018 incidents listed, with more info and links included.
This morning, The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (COI) released a report on the war crimes committed on and after Oct. 7.
Here's what we know:
Systemic sexual violence
Relying on thousands of open-source materials they forensically collected, authenticated, and analyzed, the COI found extensive evidence of systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas and other Palestinian individuals on and after Oct. 7.
The COI found indications that Hamas and other armed groups "committed gender-based violence in several locations in southern Israel on Oct. 7. These were not isolated incidents but perpetrated in similar ways in several locations and by multiple Palestinian perpetrators.”
The overwhelming evidence of sexual violence committed by terrorists who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7 documented in a new @nytimes investigation is being met with denial.
Because ultimately, nothing — not a blockbuster investigation, not survivors testifying to the carnage they witnessed, not even substantial forensic evidence — will ever be enough to make Israelis human and worthy of sympathy in the eyes of many.
In a worldview reduced to victim and oppressor, there is simply no space for it.
To acknowledge Israeli pain and suffering threatens the reductive worldview in which victim and oppressor are the only categorizations that really matter.
Because if individual Israelis can be victims as well as members of a nation that has occupied another’s territory for decades — and if individual Palestinians can be at once suffer under occupation and be capable of committing horrific acts of terrorism — then the entire house of cards collapses on itself.
My latest in @jdforward discusses the dangers of viewing the world this way:
@nytimes I’ve blocked + reported dozens of replies so far for violent event denial.
“What evidence?,” they say.
A two-month independent Times investigation using videos, photos, GPS data, 150+ witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors is dismissed as Israeli propaganda.
The IDF "had enough warning signs to prepare – at least partially – for the possibility that terrorists would seek to infiltrate from Gaza into Israel.
Despite the fact that the IDF Gaza Division's Northern Brigade approved the Nova music festival's staging in the Kibbutz Re'im parking lot, was responsible for its security, and its commander was aware of the warnings, no one in the IDF notified the thousands of party-goers or the party's organizers of their concerns, or demanded that the event be shut down."
"The festival production team says that if they had received a warning from the army even an hour before the attack, they could have evacuated all the party-goers in time.
Even though the defense establishment did not anticipate the size of the incursion by Hamas terrorists, it received warnings the night before that the organization would try to stage an attack inside Israel."
Layer upon layer of IDF soldier — many of them women — gave warnings that something was up. But
"Throughout that night, no one from the IDF or Shin Bet came to the area of the party to update the party's security team on the warnings, and no one demanded to stop it."
I have been writing about Israel for over a decade. I am no stranger to disinformation and antisemitic vitriol.
I have never seen proliferate as quickly online as it has since Oct. 7.
Here’s some advice I can share for how I deal with it.
🧵:
1: Remember how the algorithm works.
When you respond to someone or quote tweet them, you are amplifying and driving engagement with their feeds.
If someone is engaging in good faith, or has a big following, sometimes it can be worth trying to respond with better info.
BUT
It is almost never worth commenting if you’re not sharing info you feel will be worth doing so.
Sure, you also likely boost engagement with your own thread when you do so. But it’s not the kind of engagement you likely want or that will benefit you.
The strongest poll I've seen on the Israel-Hamas war (conducted Oct. 13) found just 8% of Americans (12% of Gen Z) think that the US gvt should publicly criticize Israel.
That is very different from what I see online / on campuses.