Rafael Shimunov ✡️ 🍉 Profile picture
Host @BeyondThePaleFM 99.5 FM @WBAI. Bukharian Jewish HIAS refugee via former Soviet Uzbekistan. #FreePalestine #NotAnotherBomb
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Nov 8 12 tweets 5 min read
Since Maccabi Tel Aviv is trending, come and get to know its soccer/football fans who ignited anti-Arab hate and violence in Amsterdam, leading to reprisals from Arabs who were attacked (and who are universally being smeared as antisemites engaging in pogroms).

🧵 Here is a report from an Israeli agency, who sent observers to every match to find 190 incidents of racist chants, calling 2022-2023 "the most racist and violent" soccer season in Israel's history. Including routinely chanting "monkey" at Black players.

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nif.org/stories/shared…Image
Aug 28 16 tweets 5 min read
As we go into new campus actions for Gaza across the world, you're going to see a lot of our legacy Jewish orgs using polls to tell you how antisemitic our universities are.

The problem with these polls?

🧵 Nearly all of these polls assume that when a student is asked about antisemitism, they have a good analysis of what it means.

One way to examine the polls that are coming, is to look up their methodology, which is rarely reported in articles that mention the polls.

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Aug 28 4 tweets 1 min read
We’ve been told as Jews that the slightest micro aggressions by individuals births antisemitism so dangerous we must have zero tolerance.

Today we’re told that open genocide, apartheid & ethnic cleansing in co-opting our name, faith, history & even synagogues doesn’t fuel antisemitism & we should tolerate it for our survival. 🧵 If some among us can’t navigate through hasbara engineered to rob us of our humanity for Palestinians and Arabs, and instead favor an often outsized moral panic over our daily safety, one would think maybe at least you can attempt to see our own self interest in ending this. This which will fuel antisemitism for decades to come, putting our lives in danger.

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Aug 20 8 tweets 3 min read
From a booklet distributed by @DemMaj4Israel at the DNC today, touting 22 years of Kamala Harris' support for Israel, including this bit of her backing the criminal prosecution of Muslim students who interrupted an Israeli government speaker at their school. 62. 5/8/11: As 11 UC Irvine students “accused of conspiring to, then successfully executing, a disruption of Israel Ambassador Michael Oren's speech in February 2010” sought to evade prosecution, Harris said in court documents that “Orange County prosecutors should remain on the case.” [Daily Pilot, 05/08/11] - Democratic Majority for Israel @DemMaj4Israel The students prosecuted are referred to as the Irvine 11, who were moved by Israel's 2008-2009 massacres inside Gaza which killed 1500 Palestinians and left 100,000 homeless.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_11…
Aug 3 11 tweets 3 min read
9 reasons Josh Shapiro could sink Kamala Harris ‘ campaign. 🧵 Image 1. Josh Shapiro is racist 1 Josh Shapiro is racist.  In college, alongside his classmate’s pro-peace article, Shapiro wrote an opinion titled “Peace not possible”, opposing a two-state solution, claiming Palestinians are “too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” and the Palestinian president who aimed for peace would be killed “by his fellow belligerent Arabs.”
Jul 29 9 tweets 2 min read
Kamala's entry to the race affords Democrats not a reset in swing state voter excitement but an opportunity to reset.

An opportunity she can throw away, in whole, by selecting PA Governor Josh Shapiro as her VP.

Here's why. 🧵 White nationalist aligned Republicans use Gaza protests to do what they've dreamt of doing for generations: delegitimize secular higher learning in favor of far right religious dogma.

Democrats have an opportunity to position themselves in contrast by choosing freedom of speech.

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Jul 25 7 tweets 4 min read
Today Netanyahu paraded an Ethiopian Israeli to Congress as a symbol of tolerance.

But we won’t forget Israel forcibly sterilized Ethiopian Jews in order to maintain its white majority. Today birthdates of Ethiopians in Israel declined by 20%.

🧵

forbes.com/sites/eliseknu…
Image Today Israel’s apartheid system and dominant cultural strains of overt racism, pave the way for suspicion of Ethiopian Jews and their systemic oppression.

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timesofisrael.com/shedding-image…
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Jul 14 10 tweets 2 min read
Whenever I close my eyes, no matter what I am doing, it's as if images of pieces of Palestinian children are burned into the inside of my eyelids.

🧵 The vast majority of this entire planet are demanding an end to this, and won't stop. As our illegitimate leaders continue to ignore us, the more we will all learn the lie of neoliberal democracy.

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Jul 8 14 tweets 7 min read
Because it's important, here's a thread of the Lancet's letter about Gaza death toll.



🧵 thelancet.com/journals/lance…
The Lancet: "Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential" Rasha Khatib Martin McKee Salim Yusuf By June 19, 2024, 37,396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

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ochaopt.org/content/report…
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Jun 24 10 tweets 2 min read
Why does it sometimes feel like hardcore Zionists WANT to fuel antisemitism?

Well, imagine a pharmaceutical company pumping pollution into the air, while it manufactures and sells the medicine for that pollution.

That's why. 🧵 What is the goal of using our synagogues to sell occupied Palestinian land, especially in Gaza, West Bank & East Jerusalem when you can just rent a hall for your crime?

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Jun 23 7 tweets 2 min read
A top Israeli media outlet posts the image of IDF using a Palestinian as a human shield.

The most liked comments (translated from Hebrew) are what you’d expect.

🧵 Image 2 Image
Jun 20 8 tweets 3 min read
The ADL is the largest private police trainer in the US, helping along mass incarceration & slavery of Black people. Sometimes with Israeli assistance. And including the dept that killed Mike Brown in Ferguson. Less than a year after the murder they honored St Louis police, casting them as the victims of violence 🧵 When the grand jury in the Michael Brown killing case refused to indict Ferguson cops, the ADL defended their “integrity”.

When Eric Garner’s killers weren’t indicted, the ADL did similar and celebrated their relationship with the NYPD.

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Jun 3 5 tweets 2 min read
Katzrin is an illegal Israeli settlement on Syrian territory recently colonized by Israel with Jewish families like mine from the former Soviet Union.

It has oil and gas reserves now run by an American energy company from New Jersey. The Geneva Convention and international law considers this city and the Golan Heights illegally occupied.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_ea…
May 17 4 tweets 2 min read
Billionaire CEOs didn't just reach Mayor Adams in a private chat urging him to arrest pro-Palestine Columbia students, they also offered PRIVATE staff to help NYPD. The Mayor accepted.

Members of the group also coordinated with Israel's war cabinet, UN ambassador and former PM. Image And while many quoted Columbia's president as requesting the NYPD, including the Mayor, apparently these billionaires via Ted Deutch @AJCCEO of @AJCGlobal put pressure also on Columbia's board to invite the NYPD, while they encouraged the Mayor to send them.

hellgatenyc.com/mayor-adams-cr…Image
May 13 7 tweets 3 min read
An average olive tree lives 500 years. Some have lived as long as 1500 years. Indigenous people are too attached to their land to do this, this is the work of settler colonialists. If this were Gaza, they would blame Hamas for this too. Yet this is West Bank, in a town where Palestinians are unarmed families occupied by Israeli settlers from New York.
May 2 5 tweets 2 min read
Last year, The View's @JoyVBehar ignorantly claimed "we'll move on" from genocide in Gaza by New Year's day.

This week, she returns with another hateful false prediction.

🧵 @JoyVBehar Here was @TheView's Joy Behar last year.

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Apr 25 5 tweets 1 min read
I don't know how many times this has to be said to so called democratic politicians.

When you say a Jewish state in Israel, it's like saying a white Christian state in the US.

That's what you're endorsing.

🧵 And in order to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, they must expel non Jewish voters.

Which is what Gaza is. Palestinians in Gaza used to live all across what is Israel today, and were removed to change the voting demographics.

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Apr 22 5 tweets 2 min read
This Passover, many of my Jewish family members will place an additional empty chair at the Seder table.

It’s one chair to keep attention on 133 remaining Israeli captives in Gaza.

🧵 Image At that proportion, one might even do another chair for Israeli children killed.

That would be one chair to remember 38 children.

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Mar 28 7 tweets 2 min read
Dear US zionists uncomfortable in left spaces:

Imagine how uncomfortable to non Jewish Queer, Black, brown, trans, disabled, immigrant, poor folks that your plan B is to flee to Israel?

What you're saying is if white supremacy takes hold here, you're abandoning all of them.

🧵 Like, we thought we were in this together?

Not, in this together until I bounce.

And, it's not just a 2nd home, it's the 2nd home based on a possible prospect of oppression, at the expense of a Palestinian's first and only home, and the cost of their daily oppression.

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Feb 23 7 tweets 2 min read
When you tell non Jewish Black, brown, queer and disabled friends you need Israel to be your backup nation in case there’s a genocide here, you do know you’re telling them that you’re going to abandon them right? Like, instead of staying to fight with them for their lives right? And when you tell people your backup plan is a state that practices apartheid, that your backup plan to avoid ethnic cleansing at home is to make room with ethnic cleansing elsewhere, right? You do see that?
Feb 2 4 tweets 1 min read
You know how tone deaf and self defeating Israeli hasbara is when they go after @johncusack who is one of the most beloved actors in our culture.

But there is more to Stop Antisemitism than how dumb they are.

🧵 Stop Antisemitism's business model is to go after people who have not been antisemitic, but who have criticized the government of Israel. Including me and many fellow Jews.

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