The synagogue was livestreaming its service at the time and the stream remains live. The armed man appears to be a Muslim and is talking about his ancestors, Allah, Mohammed. He says he's been living on the streets for 14 days
The hostage taker says at this moment there are no casualties. He's talking at length, says he likes the Rabbi and is demanding to speak to his sister on the phone.
The hostage taker is threatening to shoot hostages, apologising, saying he didn't want to do this.
He's talking about his children, his "six beautiful kids" he's left and saying over and over that he's got hostages and he's going to die. He's apologising.
Again he's asking to speak to his sister, saying "there's a lot of things I will say" once he does. He appears to be negotiating the release of some of the hostages.
The livestream has now been cut, apparently NOT by the hostage-taker. Perhaps by Zoom. Praying for a peaceful outcome.
All my reports of the hostage-taker's words were based on what I could hear via the open stream, so they might include mishearings, mistakes etc.
I also thought the hostage-taker sounded British Pakistani but I wasn't confident enough to share that. But now this is relevant information because (see next tweet)...
Aafia Siddiqui is incarcerated at Fort Worth, TX. Her father was educated in Britain. She has a brother who is/was an architect in Houston.
During her trial, Aafia Siddiqui demanded that the jury take DNA tests to prove that they weren't Jewish. She also sent antisemitic screeds to President Obama from prison. If the hostage-taker is indeed her brother, his target was probably chosen for a reason.
via @jodamarr who heard better some of the gunman's comments. The synagogue let him in because he posed as a homeless man in need of shelter.
As @DanWilliams points out, it's a common usage among muslims to refer to each other as brother and sister in a religious context. So some caution here over the hostage-taker's identity, though his cause, freeing Siddiqui, seems clear.
Very relieved to hear that the hostages were released unharmed. The hostage taker died, though his comments throughout made it clear that this was something he expected and perhaps wanted.
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@Shayan86 Has there been any MoJ or CPS guidance on dealing with these people? Are there any good guides for Law Enforcement? What about a guide for healthcare staff who are often the targets of small mobs brandishing threats and dodgy 'warrants'?
@Shayan86 This new species of antivax SovCit is a bit different to England's Freemen of the Land from what I can tell. One example: they're into international tribunals, Nuremberg code, UN declarations etc. Quite a contrast from "any law passed in the last 800 years is fake"
Perhaps this is old news, but the Oath Keepers indictment shows they started planning just two days after the Presidential election. The indictment *implies* (though it's a little ambiguously worded) that by Nov 9 they were already planning for January 6.
I'd be interested to know if the Oath Keepers really were planning for Jan 6 so early, or if that's just ambiguous wording in the indictment and it's more that they were planning something in DC at some unspecified time.
While some of the Oath Keepers leadership personally led the mob in storming the Capitol, others wondered if it was really Antifa. It's what @noturtlesoup17 was saying.
Politico has the fake certificates of ascertainment from Michigan and Arizona that were submitted to the National Archives in an attempt to put their fake electors in play. Two very different documents:
Arizona's fake certificate, submitted by one Lori Osiecki of Mesa, AZ, is a Sovereign Citizen thing proposing eleven random Trump supporters as their Electors. It was widely reported at the time.
AZ SecState Katie Hobbs asked the state law authorities to investigate Osiecki for the fraud back in December 2020.
In July during Israel's Delta wave, I caused a bit of a fuss when I said that the data showed previously-infected people were catching Delta at a very low rate — lower than vaccinated people. Well... arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israe…
Now, in Israel's Omicron wave, recovered people seem to be catching the virus at about the same rate as everyone else. Maybe even a little bit higher, proportionally speaking.
It's too early to talk about relative severity, and of course many of the non-recovered cases are among vaccinated people at this point. But the whole infection-acquired immunity is better thing isn't holding up under Omicron.
Star Trek's big-nosed, big-eared money obsessed Ferengi with a numbered list of religious rules they observe, played on screen by Jewish actors. We don't have to look far to find racist Jewish stereotypes in popular fiction.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace introduced Watto, the fat, greedy slaver with a black hat, big nose and beard, a stereotype so blatant that it caused a minor scandal when the film was released. Not a big enough scandal to change the character, of course.
I guess my point here is that this Harry Potter goblins discourse shouldn't happen in a vacuum just cos it suits other agendas. If we're doing this, let's do this. I suspect @jonstewart would agree.
A. wanting things to be a certain way: taxes, welfare, health, immigration, law, policing,
B. wanting things to be the way that the democratic system decides, even if that conflicts with what you want in A.
It's hard. It's complicated.
Trump and his supporters self-define as the majority. An election showed that the majority didn't support their politics; therefore the election must be rigged. It's a rejection of democracy itself.