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 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:

forward.com/opinion/574844…

Absolutely indefensible:

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."

Not the “speaking Yiddish is anticolonialist” discourse again 😂 For starters, no actual societies throughout human history who speak/spoke any Jewish languages have been colonisers in any meaningful sense.

For second…there is a growing and robust community of native Yiddish speakers. They’re not frikken Marxists they’re HAREDI ORTHODOX JEWS

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

Something I'm thinking about:

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.

What gives? The polling data:

And the source of this graph:
maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/upl…
npr.org/2023/10/13/120…

I've tracked and written about U.S. antisemitism (obsessively, perhaps) for years. I'm angry and tired, too.

And I'm also begging folks to stop framing things as "antisemitic events increased by 300% in NYC" when what they mean is "went from 4 to 15."

jpost.com/diaspora/antis…

https://twitter.com/Eve_Barlow/status/1494433776864276481

Any amount of antisemitic hate crimes — any hate crimes — is intolerable. Fully stop. Anyone who follows me knows I track attacks on Jews like a hawk.

But to effectively combat Jew hate, we need to understand it. And to understand, we need to be precise.

https://twitter.com/Laura_E_Adkins/status/1478377027086471174?s=20&t=ME-rMvGKAb4fNUW_iSCaPQ

Someone sprayed "f--- the Jews" on Miriam, a new Upper West Side restaurant.

“I just hope nothing worse than this will happen,” chef and owner Rafael Hasid told me.

“As long as no one gets hurt physically, I can put it behind me and keep on going.”

forward.com/fast-forward/4… Also on Thursday:

2-3 vehicles parked on E 67th and 3rd Ave, near Park East Synagogue, were marked with anti-Jewish graffiti.
The tags included “f— Jews,” “f— Jewish” and “incest,” according to the NYPD.

Both investigations are ongoing and no arrests have been made.

As he decried Hitler and Stalin’s “enterprise of setting the world on fire,” @jdforward’s founding editor implored us to “to remember each hour, each minute, the great accountability of these days.”

His words echo in my ears:
forward.com/opinion/480190… As genocide experts and Holocaust historians have been pointing out for years, the parallels between what the CCP is doing to the Uyghurs and what the Nazis did to the Jews abound.

The world’s indifference, even when confronted with a barrage of evidence, is all too familiar.

My mom has lost three friends from COVID this week. My friend who works at a hospital lost a coworker.

They live in Missouri, where everyone can access the vaccine, but too many have been convinced it’s not safe.

The pandemic is not over until anti-vaccine propaganda is. Yelling at people or talking down to them won’t convince anyone. But personal conversations with family in friends can.

The onus is really on all of us to do so.

Are you an early career journalist looking to learn the ropes of Opinion journalism in a hands-on and fast-paced newsroom?

I'm hiring an intern — come work with me!

forward.com/about-us/emplo… Pay is $15 an hour up to 29 hours per week, and our interns regularly are promoted into full-time positions.

The ideal candidate brings a deep knowledge and sophisticated understanding of the Jewish world — or intense curiosity and passion to develop it.

"In “normal” times... it is hard for us to identify the impetus of such incidents of antisemitic harassment, assaults and vandalism. Often, we do not know or are unable to divine the motives of the perpetrators. Not this time."
— @JGreenblattADL in @jdforward last week

https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1400092401058910211

Of course we know why, Vox.

The question is rather, does this indicate a trend, or that violent flare ups in Israel coincide with a rise in antisemitic attacks elsewhere, due to antisemitic thinking that holds all Jews personally liable for the conduct of the Israeli military?

Antisemitism is not exclusive to the right or the left. It is an adaptable and ancient hatred used by those in power — and those lacking it — to scapegoat Jews.

That's why it's hard to understand and fight.

Jews in the United States, in just the past few years, have lived this. In October 2018, a right-wing extremist murdered 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue — the deadliest attack against Jews in US history, but just one data point in a 10-year trend of predominantly right-wing extremist killings.

jta.org/2019/01/24/opi…

I'm Jewish. My childhood best friend is Asian. I've written about anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence for years.

Needless to say, I've been thinking a lot about hate crimes this year.

I'm not a pessimist. But in my personal and professional opinion, we must brace ourselves. Hate crimes are incredibly hard to understand, and data hard to come by — which is made harder both by police departments' reluctance / refusal to track or share data, and the fact that the minority communities are also often unlikely to report hate crimes to the police.

Just thinking about how we invented The Shidduch Crisis as an excuse to pretend superficial things are the ones that really matter in life We would not have A Shidduch Crisis if people “allowed” their sons and daughters to make adult decisions for themselves about marriage, and if we stopped pretending it is a great sacrifice to date someone middle class, heimish, BT, whose parents are divorced, or one who converted

A lot of folks are grappling with, "What comes next? How do we atone for our part in what happened?"

We Jews have a ~700 page book you can turn to, The Gateway to Repentance. It painstakingly catalogues what true atonement requires.

But I want to tell you WHY we have this book. Have you heard of Maimonides, aka The Rambam, aka Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon?

He was a Torah scholar, Saladin's doctor, wrote widely on mysticism and rationalism, and was super controversial.

He lived in Spain. Here's a common rendering:

Guys. We HAVE to be SO careful with this. @msnbc, the photo @Lawrence had on his show and used to make a very important, true point about the rioters is from December.

Bad actors look for any opportunity to call us fake news and we can’t give it to them by not checking photos.

https://twitter.com/Laura_E_Adkins/status/1347339146470322179

If you see this photo, it is from December.

Nooses. Swastikas. A "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt. Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, dubious Thomas Jefferson quote flags. Signs decrying "satan’s circumcision.”

Your guide to the flags, symbols, and hate groups seen at the Washington, DC insurrection:

jta.org/2021/01/07/uni… An earlier version of our article mentioned reports of a "6MWE" shirt, which stands for "Six Million Wasn't Enough." However, we were not able to substantiate this claim, as the image circulating on social media appears to be from a Proud Boys protest in December.

Idk who needs to hear this*, but purposive sampling tells you more about the researcher than about the population they're attempting to explain! Yes, asking easy-to-reach folks who fit a certain criteria to take your survey is cheap and easy. But it only works if you know with certainty that you're reaching out to a fully representative subgroup.

And that is usually not the case!

The orthodox Jewish community is amazing at being there for one another for “kosher” struggles — having a baby? You can bet you’re getting meals. Death in the family? House fire? There for you. Child with (God forbid) serious illness? We can raise millions. We’re ok at, and there are myriad organisations to support, the “glad it’s not me” struggles — feeding the hungry, supporting orphans and widows, special needs parents, those with infertility issues, those in prison, those who need a job...

In the midst of so much suffering, what does teshuvah entail?

Often translated as “repentance”, we’re told it’s the key—along with acts of kindness and giving charity—to inscribing ourselves into the book of life on Rosh Hashanah.

But teshuvah doesn’t actually mean repentance. Teshuvah means to return—in this context, to our rightful connection with the divine, both God itself and the sparks in our fellow man.

It requires introspection, apology, and a plan of action. But also deep compassion and gentleness with the self, and exiting your comfort zone.