When people show you who they are believe them.
I learned it once during covid. And now, once again. I won't need to learn it a third time.
I keep starting to write stuff and I leave it unfinished.
I can’t quite gather my thoughts, find the words.
My friend Clifton Duncan gets at some of what I’m feeling here:
I'm grateful that this app [X] has made it so easy to identify people who relish innocent civilians being kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered by terrorists.
My mind is reeling from the horrific images of dead and injured bodies — old people murdered at a bus stop, young people massacred at a music festival, women being dragged by their hair, blood between their legs, taken hostage; and from the images and stories of the dead and missing.
If you aren’t Jewish, you don’t have friends in shelters in Israel. Your Facebook feed probably doesn’t look like this.
If you aren’t Jewish, you may not think much about the fact that mainstream news outlets seem to not want to call the attack on Israel what it is: terrorism.
And if you aren’t Jewish, you may not think much about the constant stream of #FreePalestine posts on Twitter. They aren’t even saying #AllLivesMatter. They are ignoring the slaughter of innocents to gleefully cheer for what they are calling liberation.
But I am reeling from the celebrating of these barbaric crimes, calling these horrific acts of terrorism de-colonization. People were dancing at rallies over the weekend. Dancing. As shown in this now deleted tweet.
And here, at this “rally”. . . the young woman in the front has a sign that reads: By Any Means Necessary.
Really? Murdering entire families in their homes. Killing a grandmother, filming it on her phone then posting it to Facebook so her family is sure to see it. Those means? You can justify that? Dancing and posing for photos endorsing that?
You can support Palestinian statehood, you can mourn the tragedy that is now befalling innocent Palestinian civilians as Israel declares war, you can despise Netanyahu and the Israeli government. And you can still full-throatedly say that slaughtering innocent Jewish civilians — murdering toddlers and beheading infants — is horrific. And really really wrong.
And yet, the silence from my former cohort of so-called progressives is deafening.
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