This is just a blog made by a 20 year old kid from Beverly Hills, California; currently at Santa Monica College, ruminating on my dreams, ideas, and what I'm going to do with myself.
I see Palestinians who espouse hatred and fear and disgust of Israelis and Jews for being bloodthirsty monsters who want to kill Palestinians, and I see that comes from a real place of trauma & being scared to see IDF in the street, but they believe Khazar theory and commit holocaust denialism and insist Jews are bloodthirsty baby killers and european colonizers, and I think "There's no way I can get through to this person." So I block them and I hope they're able to lead a peaceful life.
I see Israelis and Jews espouse hatred and fear and disgust for Palestinians, who clearly all want to kill Jews, and I know in my heart that comes from a real place of trauma and fear (it lives in me too), but they believe 60-fold retribution against impoverished Gazans wasn't enough, regurgitate vile islamophobia, think religious fascism under Netanyahu is the future, that all Palestinians are antisemitic and yearn for the blood of Israelis on their hands, and I think "There's no way I can get through to this person." So I block them and I hope they're able to lead a peaceful life.
For those in between, I try, but it's like trying to put out a grease fire with sand. I will say something--shoveling sand--hoping, praying I can share a balanced perspective that soothes the rage I can see burning in them, and I watch as they respond with new vitriol, the sand igniting in a burst that leaves me raw for days.
How am I supposed to feel anything but despair? I truly believed there could be a future where Israel and Palestine establish themselves as loving neighbors. I wasn't dumb--I knew that might take 100 or 1000 years of people working incredibly hard and against innumerable forces. But now? There is so much more hate than before. So much more fear. I have had friends who previously showed interest in my faith now mock and revile me for it, radicalized in two short years. I have had vile things said to me over the kiddush table with the assumption that I would let them slide or, worse, agree with them.
Every day, I feel that Hamas is winning. The public believes misinformation more readily than fact, and accepts everything done in the name of opposition to Israel, which makes me fear for Jews everywhere. Meanwhile, it is stoking vile hatred in the hearts of my people, making some of us lash out and bite and scratch like caged animals, making the worst eager to kill Palestinians and adding fuel to the fire on the way.
My heart aches when I read a hostage's testimony and when I read about Gazans being killed. I weep over this war and the pain it has caused, and I hate feeling like a traitor for caring even a little bit about the "opposition."
I fear this is destroying all of us, Jews and Israelis and Palestinians alike, and it's not just going to go away. I feel powerless to stop it. The natural end seems to be that we will just all kill each other and the world will look on, annoyed that it took so long.
I cry out to g-d like a child, hoping she will fix all of our hearts soon.
I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should-
wrong, get out of here with that repulsive prejudice. that’s just as bad as the bigots saying there are no innocent Israelis, and if you don’t understand why it’s unacceptable, you need to do some serious reflection.
“Zionism is antisemitic because it was developed by Christian antisemites to encourage Jews to leave their countries!”
OK well good job entirely dismissing the history and ideological arguments within the Jewish community over the past few centuries that lead to the development of modern Zionism but you do realize that’s not a counter argument to me saying that Zionism is a Jewish response to Christians (and Muslims!) being entirely unwilling to allow Jews to live in peace in their societies, you’re in fact agreeing with me (although you seem to want to have license to denigrate the Jews whose response to societal antisemitism was “OK then we’re leaving for Ottoman Palestine/Mandate Palestine/the State of Israel”)
"there were major systemic problems in that era of the past!"
"yes!"
"so nobody in an oppressed group was ever happy!"
"no, some of them were sometimes"
"oh so the oppression wasn't real then!"
"no, it very much was and needed to change"
"but...if they were happy..."
"humans find ways to be happy in even bleak circumstances. it's kind of a defining trait of humanity. they had to live their lives in the world as it was, even while fighting to change it, so. yeah. they made happiness for themselves the way everyone does, even now with the problems we have today. there were good things in their world, too, alongside the bad. even some things we could learn from now, though definitely not their macro-level social attitudes!"
"...ohhh you're a shill for conservative values and you wish you lived back then! got it!"
"Kill your local sex offender!" Oh, you mean the guy who went streaking at his local college football game on a dare one time? That's a sex crime.
"No, I mean-"
Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.
"What? No, I mean-"
Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.
"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"
Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?
Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?
How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.
Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?
People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.
"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"
That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.
Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.
The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.
@the-overanalyzer — #human rights don't disappear when someone does something despicable #I know that's an uncomfortable position to defend sometimes but you just have to suck it up
yeah!
you're allowed to FEEL like you want to kill rapists (esp your own if such a misfortune has befallen you). you're even allowed to WANT and WISH for their deaths. that's all normal natural and dare i say... healthy???
it's perfectly sensible to feel all that rage and bloodlust as we grieve the loss of our autonomy, even if it was brief, or if we grieve the fact that this happens to others, or the prevalence of this crime, etc. whatever the reason you want that person dead, you're certainly entitled to that mental state
all of those feelings are yours, and you are allowed to feel them as long as it takes you to feel them
BUT. that doesn't make those feelings justice. that doesn't make that rage and pain the right thing to base policy on. policy that crushes human rights is policy that crushes humans, both the ones you hate and the ones you love
It reminds me of the Sir Terry Prachett quote "If you did it for a good reason, you'd do it for a bad one. You couldn't say 'We're the good guys' and do bad-guy things."
The cheapest comeback in Hollywood. The most expensive lie about activism.
Variety just ran its big sympathetic comeback profile of Melissa Barrera. She was fired from “Scream 7” two and a half years ago over Instagram posts that compared Gaza to a concentration camp and invited her followers to “deduce for yourself” who controls Western media coverage. Today, she is starring as Rose in “Titaníque” on Broadway and launching a production company. Her hiring list, she told Variety, is “basically anyone pro-Palestine.”
The piece is well-written. It is also a template.
“Canceled.” Comeback. The arc is starting to feel familiar. Speaking harshly about Israel and Jews has quietly become the most reliable shortcut to a sympathetic comeback profile in entertainment media.
Look at Lizzo. In August 2023, three of her former dancers sued her for sexual harassment and creating a hostile workplace. Her wardrobe designer added another suit. By March 2024, after a year of headlines about lawsuits and depositions, Lizzo posted “I quit” on Instagram. Then, in May 2024, she went live with a different message. She thanked activists working for “the liberation and the freedom of the people who have been genocided” in Palestine. She said she had been in a deep, dark depression. According to her account, the activists had pulled her out of it.
Notice what got pulled into the genocide bucket and what got left out. Hostage families were not included on her list. The Israelis murdered on October 7 did not make her list either. The list was not designed to be accurate. It was designed to flip her brand from sexual harassment defendant to anti-genocide ally in a single Instagram video. It worked.
Then there is Bob Vylan. Until last summer, the British punk-rap duo was a niche concern. Then at Glastonbury 2025, the frontman shouted “Death, death to the IDF” into a microphone at an event that the BBC was livestreaming. Their American tour visas got revoked. UTA dropped them. The agency thought it was a punishment. It was a promotion. The Telegraph put it plainly in November: the Glastonbury chant “has catapulted his band to a level far beyond their limited musical talents.” A few months earlier, no one was sending Telegraph reporters to cover them at the O2 Academy in Glasgow. At that same Glasgow show, Vylan named two Jewish businessmen on stage who had donated to the British Education Secretary, suggesting she had been bought.
The Irish-language rappers Kneecap rode the same Glastonbury wave. Small cult following before. International story now, with the help of a US visa fight and a Keir Starmer feud.
Some of this is sincere. Plenty of artists feel something real about civilian deaths in Gaza, including artists I disagree with sharply. Sincerity and career calculation are not opposites. They can sit in the same person at the same time, and usually do. That is not what I am writing about. I am writing about the pattern.
When a Western celebrity’s career stalls, the most reliable career-fixer available right now is loud, extreme hostility to Israel. The path back does not run through coexistence groups, or hostage families, or Israeli and Palestinian peace activists building shared institutions in Jaffa or Haifa. It runs through extremism. Death chants. Concentration camp comparisons broad enough to include everyone except the people who were actually being held in tunnels under Gaza.
This is why people who genuinely want peace get drowned out, and people who want destruction get profiled in Variety. The algorithm is not neutral. It rewards heat. The hotter the take, the bigger the bookings. Bob Vylan admitted as much on Louis Theroux’s podcast. He told Theroux he would lead the chant again “tomorrow, twice on Sundays.”
Piers Morgan figured out the demand side of this market. He does not bring nuanced voices on his show because nuanced voices do not generate clips that travel. He books the loudest combatants he can find and harvests the engagement. Bob Vylan and Melissa Barrera have figured out the supply side. Different positions in the same marketplace, same business model.
Notice what this kind of activism costs the activist. Nothing. You do not have to fund a hospital. You do not have to learn Arabic or Hebrew. You do not have to sit with a bereaved family or visit a checkpoint or lose a single friend. You post. You wear the keffiyeh on the red carpet. You sign the open letter. The signaling is luxury-tier. The sacrifice is zero.
This is champagne activism. Same shape as champagne socialism. The people who perform it the loudest are the ones who pay nothing for it. Bob Vylan’s chant cost him a UTA contract and bought him an international audience. Kneecap’s visa fight cost them a US tour and bought them a feature film. Barrera’s Instagram posts cost her Scream 7 and bought her Broadway, a production company, and a sympathetic Variety profile. The math is in the bookings.
Real activism is expensive. It is slow. It does not photograph well. The Parents Circle families look at each other’s grief every week and have done for thirty years. Maoz Inon’s parents were murdered in their home on October 7. He has spent every month since standing on stages with his Palestinian friend Aziz Abu Sarah, whose brother was killed by Israeli soldiers, calling for a shared future. They got in a van together last year and drove across checkpoints for eight days to write a book almost nobody outside the peace community will read. That is what it actually costs to do this work. Variety has not profiled them.
We owe those people more attention than we are giving them. They are the ones doing the actual work. Lift them up. Book them. The career algorithm will not change on its own. The least we can do is stop feeding it.
I used to consider myself a leftist. I no longer do.
"What made you change?"
Nothing. I still hold the same beliefs, the same values, the same morals. I'm still the same person I was when I attended Pride, when I volunteered, when I was loudly fighting racism, sexism, and inequality.
But at some point you found a dusty old sign in your grandfather's attic. You gave it a lick of paint and proudly placed it on the front door.
"NO ZIONISTS ALLOWED"
it reads. "Don't worry" you told me. "We like you. We just mean the racists, the fascists, the evil ones. We don't mean you. You're one of the good ones."
But the thing is, I'm not stupid. And you didn't do a very good job. The paint has already begun to peel, and the original words are peeking through.
She called Marjorie Taylor Greene an antisemite. The same crowd that told you not to vote for Kamala came for her, not the antisemite.
This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Marjorie Taylor Greene an antisemite on camera. Her colleagues on the progressive left have refused to do this for years.
Within hours, progressive accounts were posting in defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene, despite no change in her record on Jews. She had recently broken with her party over Gaza.
Far-left journalist Ryan Grim said MTG had sacrificed her career to stand against genocide. A self-described leftist wrote that MTG has more credibility and honor than AOC. Others framed AOC’s criticism as a defense of Israel, and accused her of using “Zionist talking points.”
These are the same people who told Democrats not to vote for Kamala Harris.
They watched a presidential election in which the other candidate was Donald Trump and told their followers Kamala was unacceptable on the question of Gaza. They were willing to absorb a Trump second term, mass deportations, the gutting of the climate transition, the collapse of the Voting Rights Act, and a Supreme Court that will govern for a generation, because Kamala was insufficiently anti-Israel.
One issue, weighted infinitely.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent her career on Jewish space laser theories, “globalist” rhetoric, Holocaust comparisons that desecrate the camps, and conspiracy material you would find on a 1930s pamphlet table. Her own colleagues kicked her off committees for it. She went anti-Israel, and the record was wiped.
Tucker Carlson spent years as the most loathed figure on the American left, until he started platforming anti-Israel voices, and segments of the progressive online world began linking him approvingly. Megyn Kelly was untouchable until she became useful. Ana Kasparian was dismissed by the Hasan Piker wing as a sellout, and is now celebrated for declaring on Piers Morgan that the Jewish lobby controls the United States. Piers Morgan himself is anti-trans, anti-woke, contemptuous of every progressive cultural priority of the last decade, and his clips are passed around by activists who would have boycotted him a year ago, because he platforms anti-Israel guests.
You can hold every other position the far left despises, and the far left will rehabilitate you, provided you arrive at the correct position on Israel.
The very people who tell us every day that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism have just shown they will accept antisemites, as long as they arrive anti-Zionist.
For years this same crowd mocked the GOP for tolerating MTG while treating Liz Cheney as the real threat to the party. The hypocrisy was their joke. They have built a mirror version of it, with anti-Israel as the redemptive position and pointing out antisemitism as the heresy.
The constellation of voices that has accused American Jews of putting “Israel first” for years, and has now turned the same accusation on AOC for using the word antisemite, has organized its own politics around a single foreign policy litmus test. Their test is one position, on one country, smaller than New Jersey and six thousand miles from Washington. Healthcare, climate, labor, Trumpism, voting rights, abortion, immigration, and democracy itself can all be traded away if the position on Israel is correct.
If the accusation of dual loyalty had any honest meaning, it would describe them.
I have spent enough years in this argument to know the merger of left and right antisemitism is not new. My grandmother saw a version of it in Baghdad in 1941, when a coup-installed pro-Nazi government collapsed and the mob came for the Jews and her father pushed her under the bed while neighbors broke into the house. The horseshoe is older than American politics.
The far left in 2026 has built an infrastructure for forgiving antisemites. The price of admission is anti-Israel content. Once you have paid it, your record is yours again. Jewish space lasers becomes a youthful indiscretion. Years of dog-whistles get filed under “she is evolving.” A self-described leftist quotes you approvingly. An influencer in a keffiyeh tells her followers you have honor.
Some will say they do not see what they are doing. I do not believe that.
AOC said one true sentence about a colleague who has spent years saying untrue things about Jews. The progressive pile-on came for her.
The next time you hear the accusation that Jews are putting Israel first, ask which country has organized their entire politics.
Something I think that a lot of leftists and progressives fail to understand, is that the push against normalization with Israel and for the complete dissolution of the state, actively makes the situation worse for Palestinians. It actively makes the conflict worse, and I would argue is one of the direct causes for the war getting as bad as it did.
You are directly harming your own cause.
Refusing to acknowledge the existence of the State of Israel doesn’t materially change the reality that Israel is a sovereign nation with over ten million citizens. When leftists in the west chant “from the river to the sea” and “we don’t want no two states”, regardless of the intention, what do you think Israelis hear? What do you think a people that has faced genocide in living memory, from which our population still has not recovered, gets from that? We don’t hear it and consider your points, we hear it and remember all of the times Israel has been attacked with genocidal intent, and only survived through our own defense.
And what does this ultimately result it? It results in Israelis who no longer believe in the peace process. It results in Israelis who feel a visceral sense of fear which leads to doubling down on national security. It leads to diaspora Jews feeling unsafe in their communities and immigrating to Israel.
It leads to the total dissolution of the peace process, and what happens if there is no chance for peace? If there’s no hope for any type of solution then the only answer is endless war, and this war doesn’t just hurt Israelis, you know that.
whose fault is it that people don't see a world where israel can exist and not be a problem for everyone else 💀
this whole "israel is scared" angle doesn't work when its existence was built on corpses. plantation owners in Haiti were scared when their slaves revolted, do you feel bad for them?
See, this? This is exactly what I’m talking about. Israel isn’t a nation of plantation owners, and your comparison proves your ignorance, but let’s put that aside for a second. Realistically, what do you want to happen? What is the end goal? For every single Israeli (10 million people) to leave? Where would they go? Is a population transfer only okay when it’s Israelis? What about the 2 million Arabs who live here? Or no, you’re advocating for a revolution so you think we should be violently attacked? I’m genuinely asking you, what is your end goal, what do you actually want to happen?
I was wondering why this is three-day-old post getting so many notes (because honestly any nuanced post talking about peace between Israel and Palestine barely surpasses 100 notes)
And I checked the comments and reblogs and I be like: oh
From the reblogs, it seems one of the antisemitic big blogs reblogged with their own rebuttal
There is a DEEP fucking irony in known racefaker STA coming on here to make a point about your race discrediting you like.
STA. Buddy. We KNOW you're not a Jew. We know you're a liar and an antisemite and you think that pretending to be a Jew will help you. Buddy you're from TURKEY are we really doing this, pointing to where people are from and claiming that tells you everything you need to know about them because if we are I have some REAL bad news for you about your location...
...I just read this and I found myself wondering how much of the "vaccines make you autistic! vaccines makes you have pronouns! vaccines contain microchips that control your brain!" comes from antisemites who just couldn't LIVE with things like Jonas Salk, a Jew, inventing the polio vaccine and then not patenting it or attempting to profit off it at all. Because he wanted to save as many people as possible from what would be lifelong suffering at best.
A LOT of people are alive today because of Jonas Salk. Not just because of his brilliance, because if he hadn't made a polio vaccine work someone else probably would have - the techniques he used to develop it were largely not novel - but because of his amazing generosity, which allowed the vaccine to be spread and used widely much more quickly. By 2022, polio cases worldwide are down to less than a thousand every year.
(BTW, his Wikipedia page is one of the ones that mentions he was "born to Jewish parents" rather than call him an American Jew.)
This has a reputation as Derin's most fucked up story. However, I don't think it has this reputation because of some objective horror, but because so many people feel incredibly called out by it due to the central image being a very versatile metaphor.
This isn't horror. This isn't even tragedy. This is a story about learning that hope can fail, and knowing that life is almost unlivable without it.
My rope broke about ten years ago, and I can imagine why people who still have theirs might think of this as a horror story. It's not, even though life is every bit as miserable without a rope as you imagined, if not more so.
It's a story about realizing that hope is delicate and can fail. And that there's nothing you can do about it except never rely on it, or rely on it and risk it breaking. Three different scenarios, only one of which is good. But, of the two bad ones, I'm not sure which is worse. I think it comes down to personality.
Good story, though, especially for how short of a read it is.
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