#useful idiots

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Hamza Howidy, Palestinian from Gaza City

Published: Apr 25, 2024

Protests are spreading across the United States at college campuses, where university students are gathering in the name of Palestinian rights and occupying campus spaces with tents. Sadly, not everyone who purports to support Palestinians is truly interested in safeguarding our rights.

It pains me to say this as a Palestinian from Gaza. As my home is destroyed and too many killed, I never thought I would find myself criticizing those speaking up. And yet, I cannot be silent about what I am seeing. The truth is that the manner in which many gather to voice their support for Palestinians does more to hurt our cause than help it.

You know what would help the Palestinians in Gaza? Condemning Hamas' atrocities. Instead, the protesters routinely chant their desire to "Globalize the Intifada." Apparently they do not realize that the Intifadas were disastrous for both Palestinians and Israelis, just as October 7 has been devastating for the people of Gaza.

They should be speaking up for the innocent victims of Hamas—both Palestinian and Israeli. Instead, they endorse Hamas's ideology with posters announcing resistance "by any means necessary" and chants of "from the river to the sea," effectively glorifying the Al-Qassam brigades, Hamas' military wing, whose ideology is entirely based on the elimination of more than 6 million Israelis from the land.

I assumed individuals who initiated these slogans were uninformed about what they were advocating for. I saw the LGBTQ flag frequently flown among people chanting lines from Hamas's charter, and I initially wanted to educate them, to warn them that the group they are honoring would most likely toss them from the top of a building or murder them like they did to Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander accused of homosexuality. Hamas harasses women who don't cover their heads. Hamas tortures those who demonstrate against their authoritarian rule, as they did me when I protested.

All of this seems to be lost on the people who have named themselves our allies, to our misfortune.

Hate speech on college campuses starting with the one at Columbia has recently reached a frightening pitch. I've seen people yelling antisemitic things at Jewish students, including "Jews go back to Poland" and other horrible phrases. It has deteriorated to the point that Jews are no longer attending university classes due to the current hostile environment, and they are attending their classes online to avoid the demonstrators.

It's unconscionable. But it's not just the antisemitism that has me despairing. It's the hypocrisy. Where were these caring young people when Hamas took over Gaza and slaughtered hundreds of Gazans, or when Hamas held 2 million Gazans captive for more than 17 years? Why didn't they speak out about the fact that Hamas led Gazans into this conflict, which resulted in more than 30,000 dead and 80,000 injured, according to Gazan municipal authorities? Where were they when Hamas's failed missiles claimed the lives of hundreds of Gazans on October 17, or when Hamas murdered young people in order to steal aid and resell it to Gazans at massively inflated prices?

The only conclusion that can be drawn from these demonstrators' silence concerning Hamas' atrocities and their antisemitic chanting is that they are not concerned with protecting Palestinians. They are out in their tents because of a hatred of Jews and Israelis.

As a Gazan and as a Palestinian, I want the protesters and the organizers of these protests to know that their hateful speech harms us. The Jewish person or Israeli you are intimidating during your rally may be the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor or a family member of an Israeli slain or abducted by Hamas on October 7. These folks would be your partners if the protests were about achieving lasting peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis.

I do not accept hateful speech or terrorist chants, and all of these foolish dreams about eradicating Israel are disgusting—and will never be achieved. Both of us—Palestinians and Israelis—are here to stay.

But the protesters aren't interested in peace. Some of the groups have been blocking Palestinian peace activists like me—and I am from Gaza, the very place they claim to care about! Instead of blocking peace activists, they should be inviting us to join these protests and guide them in the right direction—a place without hatred with a focus on calling for the release of the hostages who have been held captive by Hamas for more than 210 days.

If the protesters cared about Palestinians, they would have one central demand: Hamas must surrender, because we have all suffered from Hamas and can no longer live under the rule of a terrorist group. Only then can a ceasefire be achieved.

Hamza Howidy is a Palestinian from Gaza City. He is an accountant and a peace advocate.

==

Told you so.

I've been calling these protestors "pro-Hamas" not "pro-Palestine" for months. I've invited dozens to condemn Hamas and none of them will. The "ceasefire" they want is for Israel to surrender so Hamas can murder them all, as they've consistently promised to.

Imagine people who pretend to want a "ceasefire" not just chanting for "intifada" (violence) and celebrating barbarous Islamic terrorism but blocking actual Palestinian peace activists. This was never about peace. It still isn't. They're useful idiots whose antisemitism is being used by Islamic supremacists to undermine western society.

#Hamza Howidy #Gaza #free Gaza #antisemitism #israel #pro palestine #palestine #hamas supporters #islamic terrorism #pro hamas #terrorism supporters #intifada #intifada revolution #useful idiots #by all means #islam #islamic supremacy #religion #religion is a mental illness

[leor01]

If you ask a non-jew what is the symbol of a Jewish wedding they will say it's breaking a glass. But why?

What you don't know is that when the groom breaks the glass the couple are already married. The rabbi has technically already pronounced them husband and wife (though there isn't really that part in a Jewish wedding).

The glass is crushed to represent the grief of the destruction of the temple. The groom says "If I forget you Jerusalem may my right hand be lost, may my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I don't remember you and don't put Jerusalem at the top of my joy" (my translation) Even at the happiest event of our lives we will always remember Jerusalem and Zion (i.e Israel) and how it was destroyed and how we were exiled from it. Then and only then, you may kiss the bride.

The verse is from the same psalm that starts with "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion"

This has been Jewish tradition for over 2,000 years and it doesn't matter if it was Jews in Europe, Africa, Asia - we always yearned to return to the land of Israel.

So if you say we aren't indiginous to the land of Israel or that we have no claim to the land, you need to educate yourself.

#חתונה #לחיים #israel #useful idiots #עם ישראל חי #למי קראת קולוניאליסט? #wedding #jumblr

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Fighting junk fees is "woke"

“Populism” isn’t intrinsically left or right. The distinction between the two is often obscured by jargon, but there’s a simple litmus test (courtesy of Steven Brust): “ask what’s more important: human rights, or property rights. If they say ‘property rights are human rights,’ they’re on the right.”

Which is to say, both the left and the right can be populist, but the populist left seeks to improve peoples’ lives, no matter what that takes, while the populist right is only willing to make the world better when that doesn’t interfere with the interests of property owners.

This is how you get the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire equating publicly produced, free insulin with forcing enslaved Black people to pick cotton in the fields:

https://newrepublic.com/post/174485/libertarian-party-suggests-former-black-lawmaker-pick-crops-free

For right populists, the property rights of pharma giants are human rights, so anything that interferes with those rights is equivalent to any other human rights violation.

This is not only wrong, but it’s also a huge vulnerability in the right populist mindset. It’s a button that, when pushed, produces a reliable and reflexive outrage.

This is essential for the creation, maintenance and expansion of plutocracy. In a plutocracy, a small minority owns most of the property (we live in a plutocracy). By definition, plutocracy isn’t popular, since it’s a system that benefits a small minority at everyone else’s expense. In its natural state, plutocracy is only popular with its winners, and not the vast majority of losers it creates.

So plutocrats need to find ways to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. One important trick is to convince us all that the system is fair, guided by an invisible hand that performs mystic passes over our heads at birth and locates the very best of us and elevates us to the apex of the social pyramid.

But there’s a problem with this: plutocracy is self-sustaining. The story that we’re all just “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who can rise to the top with hard work and smarts falls flat in the face of the reality that nearly everyone at the top was born there. If the system selects rulers based on merit, and if everyone the system selects was born rich, then the rich must have some genetic trait that makes them destined to rule.

This is why plutocracy always turns into aristocracy: the idea that some people are suited to rule because they have “good blood.” Eugenics is, above all, a way to excuse inequality. Fitness to rule is determined primarily by whose orifice you emerge from, and only secondarily by any obvious competence or skill.

So right wing footsoldiers are mired in a terrible and shameful swamp of self-loathing. By definition, their lack of wealth and power is their own fault, and not merely their fault, but the fault of their genes. Being on the bottom is proof that you deserve to be there. Your failure to rise proves that you don’t deserve to rise.

No wonder the right is so irony-poisoned. Remember 2020, when gun-nuts got “revenge” on gun safety scolds by photographing themselves pointing loaded guns at their own penises? The participants insisted that they were just trolling, and they were…by pointing loaded guns at their dicks:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

Plutocrats understand that there are limits to irony, and that at a certain point, irony poisoning becomes so acute that your rank-and-file literally start blowing their balls off. To relieve the pressure, plutes scapegoat other people based on their gender, sexual orientation, race, or nationality.

This provides an important resolution to the cognitive dissonance of meritocracy. The reason you’re doing so badly isn’t that you lack merit, it’s that affirmative action has elevated unworthy people to the positions that you deserve. You are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire — but the riches you deserve have been snaffled up by welfare queens and DEI consultants.

Cruelty isn’t the point of culture war bullshit: the point is power. Cruelty is merely the tactic:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Culture war bullshit is a very reliable way to get turkeys to vote for Christmas. Take the campaign against junk fees, which have ticketmastered every part of your life with “fees” for things like “paying your rent by check” and “not paying your rent by check”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/30/military-industrial-park-service/#booz-allen

There is no broad constituency for junk fees. Scam artists (including scam artists in the C-suites of Fortune 100 companies) love them, sure, but junk fees make everyone else furious.

What’s a plutocrat to do? Well, it turns out that culture war bullshit can make right wingers point (metaphorical) guns at their own junk — all plutocrats need to do is put the word out that getting rid of junk fees is “woke” and low-information right-wing thumbsuckers will demand the right to be charged junk fees.

Here’s an example: one especially pernicious form of junk fee is the “swipe fees” that credit-card companies charge merchants. In an increasingly cashless age, these companies — dominated by the Visa/Mastercard duopoly — have figured out how to scrape 3–5% out of every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy.

Every merchant you patronize has to charge more — or reduce quality, or both — in order to pay this Danegeld to two of the largest, most profitable companies in the world. Visa/Mastercard have hiked their fees by 40 percent since the pandemic’s start. Forty. Fucking. Percent. Tell me again how greedflation isn’t real?

A bipartisan legislative coalition, led by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) have proposed the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA), which will force competition into credit-card routing, putting pressure on the Visa/Mastercard duopoly:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1838/text?s=1&r=3

This should be a no-brainer, but plute spin-doctors have plenty of no-brains to fill up with culture war bullshit. Writing in The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein unpacks an astroturf campaign to save the endangered swipe fee from woke competition advocates:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-08-04-wall-street-culture-war-swipe-fee-reform/

Now, this campaign isn’t particularly sophisticated. It goes like this: Target is a big business that runs a lot of transactions through Visa/Mastercard, so it stands to benefit from competition in payment routing. And Target did a mean woke by selling Pride merch, which makes them groomers. So by fighting swipe fees, Congress is giving woke groomers a government bailout!

It’s literally that stupid. It’s being pushed by a dark money group based in Kansas, which is targeting Senator Marshall’s constituents with mailers that warns voters they’ll “lose their credit card points” because he’s thrown his lot in with “liberal politicians”:

https://punchbowl.news/caf-marshall-mailer-kansas/

The fliers also warn that competition could result in “your financial data could be processed by partners of the Chinese Communist Party” (the bill bans foreign companies from routing transactions, and bans China UnionPay by name).

The fliers are anonymous. The only ghoul shameless enough to put his name on the campaign is Grover Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform tells its Christmas-voting-turkeys to “side with consumers, not woke retailers.”

The dark money org pushing this line have placed op-eds in newspapers across red states, comparing transaction routing competition to your kids’ data being snaffled up by Tiktok:

https://www.theflstandard.com/senators-rubio-and-scott-must-protect-the-personal-financial-data-of-floridians/

This nonsense was peddled by League of Southeastern Credit Unions president Samantha Beeler, whose org has spent $20,000 fighting the CCCA, claiming that a “cheaper” system would be “less secure”:

https://disclosurespreview.house.gov/ld/ldxmlrelease/2023/Q2/301493985.xml

But that’s small potatoes. Millions are being spent, right now, lobbying against CCCA — $5m from the American Bankers’ Association, $2m from the Credit Union National Association, another $400k from Mastercard.

For these rentiers, corrupting our government with millions is a stellar bargain if it lets them continue to collect rent every time we spend money. And millions of people who’ll end up paying that will demand the right to do so, provided they’re told that they’re fighting “woke capitalism” and China.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

[Image ID: A mechanical credit card imprinter (AKA 'zipzap') emblazoned with a US flag Punisher logo. It is imprinting a blank credit-card slip with a red Visa card bearing the GOP logo. It sits on a weathered wooden plank table, stained a dark brown.]

#pluralistic #finance #junk fees #ripoffs #turkeys voting for christmas #culture war bullshit #useful idiots #visa #mastercard #swipe fees

[angrybell]

Posted @withregram • @adielofisrael “From the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, Palestine will be free (of Jews)”.

This is how you should read it because this is what it means. It is just sugarcoated call for genocide of the Jewish people and ethnic cleansing of Jews from our indigenous homeland. It is not de-colonial, it is the epitome of Arab colonialism and a remnant of the Palestinian Arab collaboration with Nazi Germany under the leadership of Hajj Amin Al Husseini, who coined this phrase.

#israel #palestine #gaza #indigenous

[angrybell: but given what we have seen from the “Free Palestine” crowd, I don’t think that they care the Jewish people will be killed off to make way for their Arab utopia. Its not a bug for them, its a feature.]

#Israel #mythical place called #Palestine #jews #useful idiots

[rejectingrepublicans]

#republican assholes #clarence thomas #illegitimate SCOTUS #political cartoon #traitor trump #crooked donald #political humor #republican hypocrisy #republican family values #maga morons #useful idiots

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

If you’re in an openly racist party led by outlandishly racist figures you have to walk on eggshells in order to remain a grifting useful idiot in that party.

Shame on every marginalized person that sides with the RepubliKKKlan Party of bigotry and prejudice. You are condemning millions to persecution and death just so you can make a few dollars riding on their coat tails.

#Nimaratta Nikki Randhawa Haley #republican hypocrisy #traitor trump #crooked donald #republican assholes #donald trump #Republican racism #Republican bigotry #Republican prejudice #Republican hatred #Republican homophobia #Republican sexism #Republican elitism #Republican xenophobia #Republican classism #Republican corruption #Republican grifters #useful idiots #quislings #traitors #racism #Ron DeSatan #Republican indifference

[ohsalome]

There is something really twisted about how tankies will go around spreading not just genocide denial, but straight up genocide glorification and celebration of the worst war criminals in the human history, but then turn around and say "I'm just an innocent blorbo 👉👈 All I want is free healthcare and people hate me for no reason???" and get hundreds of thousands notes

This is how you get american teens lecturing eastern europeans about "real communism" they learned from memes and breadtube videos

#tankies #communism #useful idiots #propaganda #ussr

[thatjewishzionistscout]

Hey, pro-pails who are cheering for Iran.

This is the little Arab girl they put in critical condition.

#israel #jewblr #palestine #israel palestine conflict #jewish #free palestine #antisemitism #i stand with israel #hamas #israel genocide #israeli arabs #from the river to the see #iran #save palestine #useful idiots #the infinite stupidity of these people #remember Israel isn’t just Jewish

[kelluinox]

"The colonial practice of zionism..." you know, if you don't even know the basic FACT that jews come from Judea and therefore cannot be colonizers in their own land, then maybe you shouldn't be speaking about things you neither know nor understand? Only two words into a sentence and you're already wrong. Truly, every day you absolute uneducated baffoons on here and twitter are just continuously proving that before the age of internet only your family knew you were a fool

#can we go back to when there was no internet and we didn't know how many stupid people there were in the world? #that was nice #this makes me so angry #you don't NEED to retcon history #and goyim should fucking stop goysplaining our history and culture to us #antisemitism #useful idiots #jumblr #goyim shut up challenge

[homochadensistm]

#israel #palestine #licherally #useful idiots

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The enablers who carry water for terrorist organizations like Hamas are exactly the kind of useful idiots said terrorists can't wait to murder.

#free palestine #palestine #useful idiots #islam #hamas #islamic violence #islamic terrorism #religion #free palestine from hamas #free gaza #free gaza from hamas #religion is a mental illness

[leor01]

Leftist antisemites be like

#leftist antisemitism #antisemitism #עם ישראל חי #useful idiots

[socialjusticeinamerica]

🤣😆🤡

Notice “LGB without the T.”

#gays for trump #Republican propaganda #republican hypocrisy #useful idiots #traitor trump #lgbtq community #troll account #fake account

[greencheekconure27]

We gotta start making those conspiracy theory YouTube videos about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You know, the kind that has a picture of some guy making a shocked face with some random flags and photos in the background and is titled something like "What The US Government doesn't want you to know about the NATO war with Russia " "the Ugly Truth behind Ukraine!!!!" except you tell the viewers actual true facts about the war and act like it's a Huuuge secret that Russia is in fact the guilty party in this war and they are all very special clever boys for "doing their own research" aka watching the YouTube video.

Why should the right wingers, the tankies and the pseudoscience crowd be the only ones talking to them? They'll listen to anyone who'll tell them how smart and unique they are for avoiding mainstream information sources and not listening to the big man. It's all a matter of presentation

#just a thought #same with antivaxxers & co #conspiracy theories #russian propaganda #useful idiots #russian war on ukraine

[hero-israel]

This is a way I know a lot of these people have no stake in this. They're not afraid, or even really angry, they're self righteous. They revel in getting to say "Wow the Jews are the new Nazis," because it makes a compelling narrative to them. It's ironic, and makes them feel intelligent and astute, and like they've contributed at all to helping Palestinians. It also gives a lot of people permission to more openly hate Jews because "they brought this on themselves," or "they clearly can't hold onto that victim card anymore," and that's what they were waiting for oh so impatiently.

And it's why they were so mad that Israel was actually getting sympathy from a majority of people for once. They enjoy watching Israel slowly erode its goodwill so they can spread their message and recruit more haters. Because this narrative is for some fucking reason so interesting to them. The Jews are "falling from grace," because they think suffering = righteousness and now the Palestinians are suffering because of Jews so clearly antisemitism is over and Israel has taken up the mantel of the Nazis because there is always 1 singular bad genocidal regime and it always looks and acts the same and has the same mustache twirling motivation and explanation but goes by different names and no more nuance or understanding of history/politics is required... and if the Jews suffer too no they didn't and also the bitch deserved it.

And if your major emotional reaction to an event is vindicated self righteousness are you actually the victim in any way? Is that how victims behave? Maybe, maybe not, but damn are these people annoying and not productive toward anything!

They can only recognize Jews as symbols of meaningful death. Fighting to stay alive, and maybe even killing the other guy, deprives them of a moral reading and they feel cheated by it. Highly educated experts and political leaders will admit in public this is how they see Jews, and they see nothing mean-spirited about it at all.

The fury over any sign of sympathy for Israel - there's something to that too, something of the voice that Richard Landes wrote: "The Jews have been asking for it, and at last we can tell them what we really think." All those marchers on OCTOBER 8, all those pro-paraglider chuds and rape apologists, the BLM group coming out and admitting that they always knew Rasmea Odeh had been guilty and they liked her precisely for that... They were out and shouting and chanting right after the earliest news of the massacre, before Israel had even done anything. They were voting for death and atrocities - and trying to shout down anyone who could say that maybe it was bad.

#leftist antisemitism #israel #palestine #useful idiots #jumblr

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

#republican assholes #republican hypocrisy #traitor trump #marjorie traitor greene #Ukraine #vladimir putin #useful idiots