Oren Kessler
@OrenKessler
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“Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict,” winner of the Sami Rohr Prize and a Wall Street Journal best book of the year.
TLV/NY
Joined December 2008
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Follow me on Substack! (please)
A grab bag of obscure, forgotten, and never-seen gems from the vaults of the Holy Land, and the odd deep dive and hot take
Most posts are free, and I’ll only write when I have something interesting (to me, anyway) to say…
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I've been working on the Middle East a long time and I have no idea what these words mean
Do you remember two years ago when Iraq was going to fight the Kurds in a different part of Syria. Many people wanted us to fight with the Kurds against Iraq, who we just fought for. I said no, and the Kurds left the fight, twice. Now the same thing is happening with Turkey......
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She wasn’t “stranded” in Gaza, as if she had missed her bus.
She was sold to a Gazan member of ISIS as human chattel and kept there for years as a sex slave.
A Yazidi woman kidnapped from her home by ISIS terrorists in Iraq when she was just 11 years old has been reunited with her family after years stranded in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Iraqi and Israeli officials said Thursday.
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My brother was on the beach when news broke of the four released hostages. This is how the lifeguard announced the news and how the beachgoers responded:
“Four hostages have been freed” and then reads their names, with Noa Argamani’s last
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Ladies and gentlemen, the New York Times.
Headline: 2 DOZEN HOSTAGES ARE FREED
Photo: Released Palestinian prisoner draped in Hamas flag
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Uncle of hostages Or, 16, and Yagil Yaakov, 12:
“they took the leg of each child taken hostage and burned them with the exhaust of a motorcycle to mark them in case they ran away, so that they could find them. They were drugged, they were treated so badly, but they are with us.”
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The family of Oren Goldin of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak – missing since Oct. 7 – has been informed that he was among those killed on that dark day, 37 days ago.
He leaves behind his wife, Oshrit, and twins Aviv and Illy.
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The first photo of the unconquerable Salman Rushdie since his stabbing in August: In the new issue of the
@NewYorker
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I’ve read the NY Review of Books for many years, but this is journalistic malpractice:
“Seventy-six years ago, Zionist militias drove more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.”
1948 was vastly more complex than this nonsense sentence.
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Jews worldwide have been understandably proud of President Zelensky's brave leadership, but I have it on good authority that Ukraine's Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov is also Jewish...
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Liz Cheney, a member of the House Republican leadership, on Fox News: "There is no question that the President formed the mob. The President incited the mob, the President addressed the mob. He lit the flame."
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She’s worried that talking about mass rape is “dehumanizing” for “Hamas resistance fighters.”
"Now, I don't know if rape happened or not. I am completely open to the evidence that something like that did happen. The problem is when you say it's systematic mass rape & you repeat that over & over again, that implies that it was used as a weapon. It's dehumanizing propaganda
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@LindseyGrahamSC
@senjudiciary
A little-known fact, but one that perhaps Graham, an attorney, ought to know: Judges are meant to be apolitical, not "conservative" or "liberal."
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It seems the media tide is already turning. I can feel the shift.
From here, Hamas’s gleeful mass murder of innocents goes down the memory hole, and we’re back to the usual narrative arcs.
It’s been six days.
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Memories from 10 days ago
"It affects virtually nobody," Trump says of the coronavirus, which has now killed 200,000 Americans and counting
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Gen. Mattis is that rarest thing these days: Someone who knows his history
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This is Bernie Sanders’ ex-national press secretary.
Note the ease with which she throws around “Zionists” as an apparently damning accusation that she seems to believe speaks for itself.
Then note the dismissiveness of testimonies of rape.
This is progressivism in 2023.
Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms.
Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits.
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The mother of hostage Almog Meir Jan receives the news of his release just now, in Tiberias.
Words fail.
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Freed hostages Andrey Kozlov (white shirt) and Almog Meir Jan (black shirt) arriving in Israel
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@TheRickWilson
He struggled mightily with "tolerated" and "accomplishments" but dementia coupled with likely dyslexia will do that
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The President of the United States is so cripplingly insecure as to insist on showing us how many people turned up to see him in Duluth.
So sorry, people wanting to get into the already packed arena - I LOVE YOU ALL!
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I went to my bank in Rochester. The teller told me she was born on the same day and same year as me — but in Beirut.
I thought things could get interesting when she saw I was there to make a wire transfer to Israel.
But she says: “I’m glad you guys killed that guy yesterday.”
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“An aunt of Avigail Idan, a 4-year-old US-Israeli citizen who was taken hostage after her parents were brutally killed, said her niece shared one piece of pita bread per day with four other captives and did not have a shower or bath during her 50 days in captivity.”
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I did write an actual book on Palestine in the 1930s, and I can confirm Simon’s description of this as a “grotesque fantasy.”
The Arabs of Palestine were quite clear throughout that they *never* agreed to large-scale Jewish immigration.
That was the core of their argument.
this grotesque fantasy of Palestinians welcoming Jews with open arms in the 1930s - the absolute reverse of the truth and of not one serious Palestinian historians themselves would want to be believed - has become a bizarre myth doing the rounds of the river-to-sea teach-ins...
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This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen on the television set.
CNN: A survivor of Hamas captivity said he was held hostage by an UNRWA teacher. What's UNRWA's response?
UNRWA: I can speak about the flour that UNRWA delivers.
CNN: Does it bother you that an UNRWA teacher held somebody hostage?
UNRWA: Every bag of flour is cross-referenced.
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Iran fans lift up *Israeli journalist* after their team’s stunning 2-0 World Cup win over Wales
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Following the CNN broadcast, the ICC followed up with a statement on its site.
Among other oddities is it referring to the “territory of Israel and the State of Palestine,” as if the latter and not the former were the widely recognized UN member state
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Fun Castro fact: He banned Christmas from 1969 to 1998. Or as Trudeau would say, he was a "larger than life leader who served his people"
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Audio of Noa Argamani speaking with PM Netanyahu:
“I haven’t spoken Hebrew in so long”
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Columbia task force reveals full extent of antisemitism on campus since Oct. 7
@haaretzcom
.
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A colleague at a major Western [left-leaning] outlet writes me:
“The fact the ICRC is countenancing this outrageous way of handing people over is scandalous… Thousands screaming as hostages get out of the car… Hamas is turning these handovers to a show of force. Disgusting.”
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I never thought I would see something like this in my lifetime, but here we are:
Saudi Arabia’s Arab News newspaper wishing Jews a happy new year, in its profile pic, in Hebrew:
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Well this is insane.
In the new Harvard/Harris poll, 67% of respondents aged 18-24 agree that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors."
Consistent with other polls that have found relatively high anti-Jewish sentiment among young American adults.
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Aunt says Hamas forced 12-year-old hostage to watch videos of 10/7 atrocities, aimed gun at him when he cried
“the Hamas terrorists forced him to watch films of the horrors, the kind that no one wants to see, they forced him to watch them.”
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Pakistani secularist activist Khurram Zaki has been murdered. His last English post was 4 hours ago, on Sadiq Khan:
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“I wondered how Hamas would deal with the fact that they held captive a religious Muslim girl wearing a hijab. The answer is a hostage transfer without a [cheering, taunting, mocking] audience, without a close-up of her and the brother like the rest” of the hostages released
תהיתי איך חמאס יתמודדו עם זה שהם החזיקו בשבי נערה מוסלמית דתייה עם חיג'אב. התשובה היא העברה בלי קהל, בלי קלוז-אפ עליה ועל האח כמו השאר ובגדול אם ממצמצים אפשר לפספס את השחרור של האחים אל-זיאדנה
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The smirk with which Magill gives her insane, indefensible reply has to be the kicker.
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American politics are so dysfunctional, even the Arabic press is at a loss:
"The first Trump-Biden debate: Chaos ['fauda'], accusations and insults"
المناظرة الأولى بين #ترامب وبايدن.. فوضى واتهامات وسباب (التفاصيل كاملة بالفيديو)
#PresidentialDebate
#USElection2020
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More little-known information on Haniyeh:
“Hamas leader’s three sisters live secretly in Israel as full citizens… Some of their offspring have even served in the Israeli army”
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Breaking:
Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, unsure when to formalize, foreign diplomat says .
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Magill, the Penn president, was the worst of this rotten bunch.
If you’re Jewish in America, it’s now on record at the highest level that your kids are not protected at an Ivy League school.
Is calling for the genocide of Jews considered bullying and harassment?
There are two possible answers:
1. Yes.
2. No. Calling for genocide is WORSE than bullying and harassment.
Why couldn’t the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn give either answer?
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The article says Trump wanted to kill Soleimani in spring 2017, after Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen struck the Saudi capital, but Mattis opposed it. John Kelly and chairman of the joint chiefs Dunford also generally opposed his assassination. Now all three are gone.
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The helicopter taking Noa Argamani from Sheba hospital to Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv to meet her terminally ill mother Liora
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"Exhibit six" - letter threatening the president of Fordham University from releasing Trump's grades
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“One professor encountering a Jewish-sounding surname while reading names before an exam asked the student to explain their views on the Israeli government's actions in Gaza. Another told their class to avoid reading mainstream media, declaring that "it is owned by Jews."
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Family of hostage Almog Meir Jan celebrate his release from captivity
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In the second sentence of the same opinion piece, Thiessen also said, “Don’t get me wrong, Trump lies all the time.”
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“Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child,” writes
@RadioFreeTom
.
“This is one more step in the infantilization of American life.”
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@yareezy
Yep - so threatening genocide is cool, but if you act on it there could be consequences. Got it
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I AINT
READING
ALL THAT
FREE PALESTINE
is a pretty good summary of the caliber of thinking going on in the Ivy League today
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Jordanian jets shot down dozens of Iranian drones flying toward Israel, sources say
“a dramatic show of support from Amman, which has heavily criticized Israel’s prosecution of its war in Gaza”
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Massive Tel Aviv protests against planned drastic changes to the judiciary — for the third week in a row
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Mueller is investigating whether the campaign colluded with the Kremlin on changing the GOP platform on Russia. These text messages from JD Gordon, the campaign's natsec representative to the RNC, sound like they come from a pretty worried man.
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Trump's first tweet of 2018. And a happy new year to you too. Gonna be great.
The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
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I know these kids don’t know much history so I’ll help them out.
I’m a citizen of Poland. My mother was born in postwar Poland. Her father was the only survivor in his extended family.
Poland is our killing field and graveyard and we won’t be moving back. Thanks for the tip.
As an undergrad and grad student in the '80s, it's hard to remember a week without a protest against something. But I don't remember physical violence and the moral vapidity of telling a Jewish student to go back to Poland. Deeply, deeply fucked up.
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Donald Trump can activate the world's largest nuclear arsenal with no input from anyone. Think that over a moment.
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It takes precisely 20 seconds for Jones to say to himself "I don't deserve this" 20 times
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Jordanian ex-general and Al-Jazeera’s main Gaza war analyst:
“The hidden hatred that fills the Jewish heart is hatred against the human race throughout history, fueled by the forged books of the Old Testament and strengthened by the Talmud’s explanations and the rabbis’ fatwas”
الحقد الدفين الذي يملأ الصدر اليهودي هو حقد على أبناء الجنس البشري عبر التاريخ ، غذته أسفار العهد القديم المزورة وعززته شروح التلمود وفتاوى الحاخامات ، ومما زاد في غلوه ظهور الصهيونية الإنجيليّة التي تلتقي معهم في ضرورة التسريع في بناء الهيكل، وآثار ذلك تظهر جلية في ما
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Three major terror attacks in Britain since March, and millions of Brits choose a man with a crush on the IRA, Hezbollah and Hamas.
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This will require the kind of granular regional knowledge and firm but nimble touch that I'm confident the president possesses.
WH official says Trump will give “blunt” Middle Eastspeech, pointing to some Muslim leaders that "actively abetted” and “funded” extremism
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I'll also be voting down the line for Democrats in November. I share the view of Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, George Will, Tom Nichols et al that the GOP has entirely relinquished any credible claim to being a serious, responsible party rather than a weird, angry cult of personality
Conservative
@MaxBoot
says Trump's "disgusting" attacks on Bush & McCain show why he left the GOP, and hopes Dems take over. Watch:
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"Delegations from Israel and the United Arab Emirates will meet in the coming weeks to sign bilateral agreements regarding investment, tourism, *direct flights,* security, telecommunications and other issues"
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Boot: "I feel pretty homeless because I’m not a Republican [anymore], but I’m not a Democrat either."
"This has shaken me to the core...I feel like this is perhaps not quite the country I thought it was."
Agree on both counts.
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@LindseyGrahamSC
@senjudiciary
I almost forgot: He was for years a judge advocate in the U.S. Air Force. But that was a while ago, before the Trumpocene Epoch, so maybe the memory's rusty.
@djrothkopf
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Freed hostage Mia Schem: ‘I experienced hell.’
Schem says she was held by a family that played mind games, withheld food, taunted her; man who operated on her arm — a veterinarian — told her ‘You’re not going home alive’
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Noa Argamani is spending her tenth Shabbat in Hamas captivity. Her mother Liora has terminal Stage-IV cancer. She needs to come home.
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Tom Cotton: “It's past time for the president to accept the results of the election, quit misleading the American people, and repudiate mob violence”
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Oddly, almost all media accounts of Haniyeh’s life omit his many years working in Israel.
Maybe because it defies the notion (largely aspirational, I think) that more contact between Palestinians and Israelis would bring peace (Sinwar’s life was saved by Israeli surgeons)
Haniyeh was, by any measure, a terrorist with blood on his hands.
And yet: His former Israeli boss described him as a “great guy” in his youth, when he spent nine summers as a laborer in Israel.
“He basically lived with us. A straight and smart guy.”
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Thanks for the tip, but it’s not realistic to expect American college kids to read a book
Dear university students in the US, my advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran.
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“Trump has from his earliest days in office raised the possibility of killing Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani... within five months of taking office, Trump was raising the possibility of killing him”
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The weather is so clear today that an aerial photographer was able to snap this photo capturing from Tel Aviv right up to Mt. Hermon
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I retract what I said earlier about the call not being as bad as I expected. He's a complete and utter moron. HT
@AllisonLMcManus
Trump called New Hampshire a "drug-infested den" & said that's why he won the state.
--> Hillary Clinton won NH.
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@JackiSchechner
@GenMhayden
It's incredibly sloppy history, with all due respect. Not every unpleasant, even egregious, thing can be compared to Auschwitz. Or to Nazism.
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Reminder that the official name of Israel is the State of Israel.
“State of Palestine” is an aspirational description, since as everyone on all sides acknowledges, the Palestinians emphatically do not currently have a state.
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Idea: Instead of always referring to Rick Gates as Manafort's deputy, let's alternate that with Vice-Chair of Trump's Inaugural Committee.
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We’re at that point that even Haaretz has had enough of Roger Waters’ lunacy
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Hamas statement seems to implicitly confirm the assassination of its military commander Muhammad Deif:
“The commander [Deif] will be replaced by thousands of other commanders, and a new knight [sic] will carry the flag”
(Ch. 12)
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Indeed, Hamas’s terror wing is named after a guy who wasn’t Palestinian.
Because *Islam* and *jihad* are the core of their mission. Not “colonialism” or “white supremacy.”
CC: Hamas stans at Columbia, NYU, Yale, MIT, Emerson, et al.
Reading
@OrenKessler
‘s 1936 and had no idea that Al Qassem was actually Syrian and had fought in Libya
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Fifteen minutes later, "hamberders" is still up. At what point do we acknowledge the fact that Trump is almost certainly dyslexic but too insecure to admit it.
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Pew: “82% of Jewish adults in the United States said caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means”
These are Ivy League students announcing proudly and publicly that 8 out of 10 Jews are not welcome on campus.
But again, nothing to see here.
“We don’t want no Zionists here.”
Protest video sent to me by a Columbia student:
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Glazer is Hamas’s dream Jew:
Standing before the world, blaming the October 7 massacre on “occupation” and wondering aloud how best to “resist” that occupation.
Imbecilic and deeply damaging.
Jonathan Glazer - you hijacked the Oscars for your naive, selfish and vile narrative blaming the victim. Gaza was not occupied on October 7 when Hamas savages butchered your brothers and sisters. Shame on you.
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This is one of the restaurants of my friend Mike Solomonov. And it’s completely insane.
WATCH: terrorists in Philadelphia shriek outside a Jewish restaurant, “Goldie, Goldie you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide”
Every Democrat in Pennsylvania except
#PASEN
@SenFettermanPA
has been siding with these freaks
(62/xx)
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Norway's FM: Recognizing ‘State of Palestine’ is an 'anti-Hamas' step
Hamas: This is a glorious day for the Resistance and thanks very much
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@ddale8
"subsidary"?
I've never heard that word and the Internet doesn't seem to have either. Even if he meant or said "subsidiary," it doesn't seem that word is ever used to mean a beneficiary of a subsidy.
@RobinSimcox
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At today's congressional hearing on the shameful surge in campus antisemitism
@RepStefanik
asks: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your school's code of conduct?
President of
@MIT
: Something something context something something
President of
@Penn
: Something
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Hey
@SenSanders
, your former national press secretary
@briebriejoy
is on a weeks-long campaign of denying the mass rape and sexual assault of Jewish women.
From my family to yours, happy Hanukkah to all those who are celebrating around the world this week.
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Hey remember this. Trump in '04: 'I probably identify more as Democrat' He had been registered as a Democrat since 2001.
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The ICC’s intended arrest warrants were announced not through official channels but on *CNN.*
BREAKING: In an exclusive interview with Christiane
@amanpour
, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan has announced the Court is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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.
@marcthiessen
is a failed Bush speechwriter whose work was so bad that he has never been able to make a comeback. A third rate talent!
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In which an Arabic linguistics expert drops some basic facts that any history major in college should know:
The Arab-Islamic conquest of the 7th century was among the most rapid, effective examples of colonization and imperialism in the recorded history of the world.
@hoffman_bruce
There were the Umayyids and Abasids, the Fatimids, the Ilkhanids. The Islamic empire that started its expansion in 634CE was one of the most successful colonization campaigns in the history of the region, and that within 100 years spanned the ME, North Africa, Europe, Asia….
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Colin Powell: Trump is responsible for “one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen in all my years as a government employee...He should be totally ashamed of himself, and he should take that shame and turn it into a resignation quickly as possible.”
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Leonard Cohen performs for Israeli troops in the Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. At his left is Ariel Sharon.
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I’m proud and deeply moved to see my grandfather’s concentration-camp diary published this week, 8 decades after he wrote it.
Dr. Arthur Kessler was both a prisoner and physician to his fellow inmates in Transnistria, the “forgotten cemetery” of Romania’s “forgotten Holocaust.”
Based on notes kept while incarcerated in the concentration camps & ghettos of Transnistria, Dr. Kessler's gripping Holocaust memoir tells a story of calculated murder, resistance, & survival. A Doctor’s Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust is out now.
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