When we talk about the autonomy of suicide, it's almost always discussed from the side of the right to die — which is definitely important and does need to be accepted by more of society. But there's also the side of the right to live. Until society stops punishing people for their existence and depriving them of what they need, the autonomy of suicide for everyone cannot be reached. Because when people are killing themselves because of changeable, societal structures, that is not a completely autonomous decision. It is one that has been forced upon them.
Suicidal people will always exist and people who will always be suicidal exist and that is not inherently an issue that needs to be solved. But it becomes an issue when people are forced into it. Currently, suicide prevention involves institutionalizing suicidal people, telling them that they must survive, by any means possible, but so many of them have been told the opposite for their entire lives, implicitly or otherwise. Suicide prevention should involve working to improve society, making it a livable and survivable place for all people. Only then will the autonomy of suicide be achieved. Otherwise, so much of it is social murder.
In short, "Don't kill yourself 🥺" isn't enough — solving the why behind it is.
I've been thinking about the obsession with needing a "queer history of the holocaust".
I think it is genuinely an impulse towards a kind of stolen valour via holocaust minimisation and subversion, not because being slaughtered in our millions was in any way valorous, and I think there's assumed to be a level of sympathy that comes with recognition that we were subjects of genocide.
So by making an equivalency between the thousands of people who were interned in concentration camps to the millions of Jews and Romani who were murdered in the death camps, they elevate the travesty of anti-queer violence in Nazi controlled Europe from its own tragedy to being a part of the genocide widely known as the holocaust.
That "people like me suffered too, why don't we get a mention", goes from a conversation about having a memorial, to a demand to be on another community's memorial for their different suffering because it's bigger.
Something I have been thinking about a fair bit recently is how important it is to know how to talk to people with dementia, and how so many people don't actually have any real awareness of how to do that, so, off the top of my head, here are a few things that might help:
the way you frame your conversations is important! People with dementia are often, particularly at the earlier stages, very much aware that their memory is getting worse. This can make them very anxious, which isn't fun for anyone, least of all them. One of the most common things that people say to people with dementia is "do you remember ___?" as a way to try and prompt their memory. This feels helpful, but it's not. Because hey, in all likelihood, that person does not remember ___, and being confronted with this fact is not going to make them feel great. Remember that they literally have a degenerative brain disease; they're not going to suddenly regain their memories because you tested them. Instead, try talking about your own memories. Tell them what you remember. Tell it like a story. If they remember, then they can join in. If not, then hey, it's a nice story.
don't correct them if they say something wrong. Their version of reality is not going to be the same as yours. That's just a given. My grandma is often convinced that she's just on a very long holiday in a nice hotel, and that her dad is waiting outside in the car. I'm not going to tell her "uh, actually, you're in a care home and your dad died 50 years ago," because who's that going to help? Quite literally no-one. It'll just confuse her more, and she's already confused enough. Even if the person is saying something that's making them anxious - a common one is believing that people are stealing from them, or that someone is being unkind to them - then it's easier to try and distract them by trying to talk about something that you know makes them happy, rather than to outright tell them that they're wrong. Being consistently told that they're wrong can make them react defensively; they're not children, and they (usually) know it. It's just easier not to get into a confrontation.
get used to repetition. Don't get frustrated when you have the same conversation 25 times in two minutes. It's going to happen. For them, it's the first time you've had that conversation; they won't understand why you're angry at them for asking a question. It's completely normal to feel frustrated, but the onus is on you not to make it their problem. My grandma's short term memory is, charitably, about 3 seconds long. A conversation with her at this point is like rehearsing for a play; I know her lines, and I know mine. That's just how it is. She gets just as much joy out of telling me that she likes my cardigan for the 86th time as she did the first time she said it. People with dementia are not able to retain the information or the memory of that previous conversation; reminding them that you've already answered their question is just going to confuse and upset them.
don't take things personally. They might say things that are unkind. They might say completely inappropriate things. Again: their brain is deteriorating. It is a medical condition. They're not becoming bad people, or showing their 'true selves' to be evil and rage-fuelled. It's a combination of the fact that they're living in a perpetual state of confusion, which can lead to frustration and anger, and the fact that their ability to process and respond to information is affected by the dementia itself. If they say something cruel to you, you just have to take it on the chin and recognise it as a symptom of a disease that they're not able to control. Step out of the room for a moment if it gets too much. I've been fortunate in that my grandma has never experienced this symptom, but it's very common, and it's no reflection of you, or them.
don't treat them like children. My grandmother is 92 years old and she will look at you like you're the bane of her life if you try and tell her what to do, or use baby talk. Keep your sentences short and clear to avoid confusion, but don't ask them if they need you to clean their wittle fingies.
try and avoid open-ended questions, especially ones that involve memory recall, like "what did you do on the weekend?". My grandma was an absolute queen at making shit up when people asked her that, because she couldn't remember a damn thing, and she never liked to admit that she couldn't remember, because it made her stressed and anxious. "I picked up leaves" was her personal favourite, for some reason. I used to just tell her about my weekend instead, and sometimes she would joyfully tell me (completely falsely) that she also went to the shops, and that was much less stressful for her; she wasn't actively trying to come up with an answer to cover for her own lack of memory, and instead felt like she was part of the conversation on her own, equal terms.
most importantly: don't try and pull them back to reality. The best way I've learnt to communicate with anyone with dementia is to enter theirs instead. Sometimes, this is referred to as 'validation therapy'. It's about acknowledging that the reality of someone with dementia is as real to them as your reality is to you, and you're not going to be able to 'reorient' them to your version of reality, because they don't have the short term memory or ability to retain information that would enable that. Put simply: if my grandma asks when my uncle is going to come home, I gain nothing from (correctly) informing her that he's dead. This just upsets her, because every time she hears it, she's receiving the news of his death for the first time. That sends her into a spiral of grief and anxiety that remains even after the memory of his death has vanished again. Instead, I just tell her that he'll be home after lunch. She nods, accepts it, and we're both happy. My uncle is still dead, but in her world, he's going to come home soon. It's a way of having empathy for the person with dementia, and acknowledging that your reality, or objective 'truth', is not more important than their wellbeing.
Godspeed, and best of luck to anyone who needs this advice, because I truly wish that no-one did.
It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.
Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”
Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.
She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”
Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”
‘I was confused by what our mission was’
Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.
Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.
While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.
This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.
“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”
Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”
A drastic change of heart
Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.
Nova exhibition
“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’
“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.
“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”
Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”
One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”
Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.
During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.
On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”
Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.
‘It felt like being stoned publicly’
Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”
Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”
She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”
She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.
The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.
“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”
‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’
Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”
But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”
As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.
“I’m not Jewish. I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”
How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?
( @mascula-sappho, your comments elsewhere inspired this question.)
I'd find that bar graph that shows the amount of Jewish Holocaust victims and next to it a barely visible, one pixel high bar of people imprisoned by the nazis for homosexuality.
If it's someone who seems willing to listen I'll explain how the nazi homophobia circles back to antisemitism. If not, maybe some derogatory comments about them and their close family.
Is it the "good" choice? No. But it gets me through the day a bit easier.
the one I always think of is this bar graph, from this post by @jewish-sideblog:
💬 70 🔁 1125 ❤️ 1745 · This is the orange bar btw. Seems like a lot of people are having trouble seeing it which definitely helps make my p
there's a lot of great points in the notes about how the Nazis' homophobia was rooted in antisemitism. Another thing for me is the fact that, had the Nazis been successful, there would be no Jewish life today. Queer people will always continue to be born, but for Jews, the only way to become a Jew requires other Jews - either being born to Jewish parents or being affirmed as a Jew by a rabbinical court of three other Jews. Had all presently living Jews been wiped out, all future generations of Jews would have been wiped out as well. The Nazis certainly would've liked to wipe out all queer existence, but that isn't possible. The complete eradication of all Jewish existence was at stake in a way it simply wasn't for queer people.
I'm Jewish because the Jews who came before me survived. I don't have the same feeling as a queer person - I mourn the history that was destroyed, the research, the communities that existed then, absolutely. But I know that I'd still be queer either way, and I can't say the same thing for being Jewish.
I'd like to reiterate what @jewishmuppet said. I'm a trans and bisexual Jew. I've been out since I was four. My parents were accepting and they made sure I was exposed to queer and Jewish histories. I've spent years studying the Holocaust and studying gay culture in the US. I know what I'm talking about.
There isn't a single gay culture, not really. People talk about it, but they mean gay culture in their country, and usually gay, lesbian, and transgender people have different groupings within that. A Chinese gay man is going to have a different experience than a lesbian in the US. People in countries where people are arrested or potentially killed for being queer are not having the same experiences as people in countries where being gay is more acceptable. That's just how it is. And for most people, myself included, this is a culture you discover when you're older. You're not a child going to ballrooms and drag shows; you start doing that as a teen or an adult (if you choose to. No shame if you don't interact with the wider queer community at all). This is not your experience from infancy onwards.
I grew up Jewish. I grew up attending Seders and lighting yartzheit candles. Our house always had a mezuzah. This was my culture since birth, and it's my mom's culture, and my grandparents' culture. And when I talk to Jews in other countries, we have similar experiences. Yes, we have different minhagim, but we're celebrating the same holidays. I say the same prayers as a Jew living in Israel or Argentina or Russia. If you know Hebrew, you can speak to Jews all over the planet because they know it too. We have a unified culture, even if it's been tweaked a little here and there.
That culture was nearly destroyed. My great-grandparents' village is fucking gone. They escaped prior to the Holocaust, but there's nowhere to go back to. I can't find any info on it because their records and letters are in Yiddish, which their children never learned. (My grandfather and great uncles threw out a lot of stuff from the Old Country.) I don't speak a lick of Yiddish, so even with the letters, I couldn't find my way back to where my great-grandparents lived. There are stories of Jews returning to their homes to find everything Jewish destroyed. I remember one story of a Polish man returning to his town to find that the synagogue had been used to house cattle during the Shoah and was unusable (because of all the feces), and the grave markers in the cemetery had been removed and used to pave roads. (You can still find roads with fragments of Hebrew on them throughout Europe for this reason.) Everything was gone.
There's a difference between a community you enter as a teenager or adult and the community you're born into. Right now, my gaming community could implode and I'd be upset, but I wouldn't be devastated the way I'd feel if the US stopped existing. Hell, I was involved in leftist circles that ate themselves alive (iykyk) and that sucked, but I recovered. I don't think I could if my entire childhood was eradicated. If I couldn't go back home or find people who spoke my language, if the cemetery that housed my grandparents was desecrated, if all the important cultural buildings were filled with animal droppings.
You know how when you visit your hometown after you move away, and the ice cream place you really loved went under and it became a gas station? I think we all have an experience similar to that. It hurts, but imagine that on the scale of thousands. It's not just the ice cream place where you celebrated birthdays; it's your school, your library, your soccer fields, your favorite restaurants, your movie theaters, your malls, your parks, your clubs, your house, your neighbor's house, your best friend's house, all gone.
Look, gay culture in Germany was eradicated, too. We know this happened. But those men got to go back to their cities that were still standing. The same people were there. Of course, not all—I won't pretend that Germany didn't lose people in the war and buildings weren't destroyed. But people still spoke GERMAN. Yes, they were occupied, but their culture was intact. It wasn't suddenly impossible to get German food or hear German songs or read German books. That was true of every country hit by the war. Yes, it was tragic, but their culture remained. They got to remain German.
Jews suddenly had nothing. Our culture was gone. Our little pockets of Yiddish were gone. That culture was ripped from us and from the places we lived. We carried it to different countries, mostly the US and Israel, but it was an effort. There was a concentrated effort in trying to keep Jewish culture going. We built ulpans and yeshivahs to keep our culture going. We worked at ensuring our children knew our heritage and history.
Gay people just... didn't have to do that. Not because they didn't have kids, but because their larger culture was still intact and gay culture was usually transmitted through other ways, outside the families. (Cause let's be honest, if you were a homosexual who had kids in the 1940s, you were closeted and likely didn't tell your kids.)
Yeah, the numbers show how few homosexuals were in the camps, but that's not the important part. The important part is what Jews lost that homosexuals still had. That's why it's so important for queer people nowadays not to compare themselves to those murdered in the Holocaust. They don't have the same culture and their entire way of life wasn't destroyed.
And while I'm on an infodump, this happened to the Roma as well. I'm not Romani and I'm not well educated on how they handled life after the Holocaust, but their culture was also nearly eradicated. (And in some places, 100% of Roma was killed, so they lost whole towns and communities as well.) They suffered in the way that Jews suffered, which was markedly different from homosexuals, communists, "asocials", and everyone else killed in the camps. The only people I'm okay with comparing themselves to Jewish people are Romani people, because that suffering was so similar. And again, the numbers don't matter. There were fewer Roma at the start of the Holocaust, so fewer of them died, but the harm to their community was similar.
Gayness and queerness was also blamed on Jews. Gayness was a byproduct, side effect or symptom of Jews and Jewishness to the Nazis. Jews were seen as effeminate to Nazis. Stands to follow, a subset of that thinking is us (Jews) creating gays. They were containing the spread, so to speak. (This is how it’s always been explained in the books I’ve read, exhibits I’ve seen and docs I’ve watched. But happy if folks have other interesting sources.)
Gays rebuilt communities. Jews continued to be murdered when they went home. Between blood libel and their neighbors wanting to keep what they stole from Jews, drove Jews out of Poland after the war.
I am also not Roma, nor an expert. However, I want to share something from the Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. I took a photograph because I was so overwhelmed but wanted to remember this, because it’s important.
“After World War II Roma were also excluded from the right to restitution, because Federal German authorities denied that Roma were persecued due to racist reasons. After a small step in this direction in 1963, restitutions became possible in small amounts only in 1979, when the West German Federal Parliament declared that the Nazi persecution of Roma was based on racial grounds and Roma survivors were allowed to claim for restitution in a form of a onetime payment. The official acceptance of the Porajmos as genocide by the Federal Republic of Germany followed only in 1982 with a speech by Chancelor Helmut Schmidt. In August 2016, an agreement between the German Ministry for Finance and the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic decided on compensation for survivors of the Porajmos in the Czech Republic. This agreement, which will give 2,500 EUR to each of the handful of survivors, was greeted as a symbolic acknowledgment, but also criticised for its delay and the low amount awarded. However, this agreement has already led to renewed claims from Romani victims from the former Yugoslavia and other regions of 'romocide'.” - Roma and Conflict
Many of people on tumblr were alive when ‘reparations’ were made. It was nearly ten. fucking. years. ago. And yet their history and mention as victims continues to get lower and lower.
SILENCE IS VIOLENCE and 50 Other Convenient Hashtags and Slogans You Can Repeat Ad Nauseam Instead of Trying To Develop a Well Informed Political Opinion or Having and Articulating a Single Original Thought.
How would you go about disproving the claim that Israel is “fascist?”
I’ve seen both the claim that it’s a fascist state and that its goals regarding the current war are fascist as well—but any time I, or someone else, try to refute these claims, the accusations of “fascist,” “nazi,” “genocide apologist” all roll in and I struggle to find the words to defend myself and my stance.
I really enjoy reading your posts, they’re very informative and well thought out, so I figured I’d ask what you thought.
When people call Israel "fascist," when they call Israelis "Nazis," or when they accuse Israel of "genocide," they're not usually making a serious claim that meets the historical or legal definitions of those words.
Remember, such people are not moved by facts, reasoning, law, or dictionaries - they're moved only by emotional resonance and righteous outrage.
So rather than actually making an allegation based on the meaning of the word, they're reaching for the strongest words of condemnation our culture has. They're using words they can't actually define, driven only by a red haze of outrage which convinces them that their abnegation of reason is righteous. They use these words as thought-terminators.
"Fascist," for instance, doesn't mean "a government I dislike."
Political scientists tend to define fascism with a cluster of traits:
One-party rule that crushes opposition
A cult of personality around a single leader
State control of media, culture, and unions
Suppression of dissent through secret police, torture, and executions
An expansionist or messianic mission to dominate other nations
Glorification of violence as an end in itself
Think of Mussolini's Italy: one-party dictatorship, cult of the leader, suppression of dissent, and glorification of violence.
Can Israel be described this way?
Israel has competitive, multi-party elections where governments rise and fall regularly (too often, say some).
Israel's media are fiercely free and critical, often savaging the government.
Opposition parties, NGOs, and protest movements operate openly, including the massive anti-Netanyahu demonstrations and anti-war demonstrations.
Israel has an independent judiciary that has repeatedly blocked and overturned government policy.
In Israel, governments collapse from too much dissent, newspapers trash the Prime Minister daily, and mass protests shut down highways without tanks rolling over them.
That's not fascism.
"Genocide" doesn't mean "a war with tragic civilian deaths."
It means a systematic attempt to annihilate a people as a people, like the Holocaust in Europe, Rwanda in 1994, or the Yazidis under ISIS.
Israel's critics might argue about proportionality or strategy, but "genocide" has a very precise definition, and stretching it turns it into just another word for "war I oppose." As I wrote previously, we need to be careful, responsible, and honest when we use words like "genocide," because once those words are emptied of meaning, they lose their power to stop the very horrors they were coined to prevent.
And "Nazi"? That's not an argument. That's just an insult meant to shut down conversation - it's Holocaust Inversion.
These words have definitions. If someone wants to use them, they should be prepared to defend their claim by the actual meaning of these words, not just the emotional weight. Because if "fascist," "genocide," and "Nazi" are reduced to "bad," they don’t just smear Israel. They rob us of the language we need to describe real fascism, real genocide, and real Nazis when we encounter them.
So what can you do when these words are thrown at you?
Remember that you don't have to prove Israel isn't fascist.
They have to prove it is.
Start there. Ask:
"What’s your definition of fascism, and how does Israel meet it?"
No snark, no defensiveness, no turning out your pockets for their amusement - just precision and truth.
You're not arguing with their outrage, you're calmly exposing their emptiness.
I expect to get lots of hateful Anon Asks from Israel detractors for this...and probably a couple from Israel supporters.
Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?
If we want to hold people accountable for serious crimes, we need to be serious about the words we use.
"Genocide" is not a vibe or a metaphor. It isn't a synonym for "really bad thing" or "many people dying."
It’s a legal term with a specific legal definition. Using the word accurately matters - not just for justice in this conflict, but for justice anywhere the term is invoked.
Where the Word "Genocide" Comes From
The word "genocide" was coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe what the Nazis were doing to Jews, Roma, and others in Europe. Lemkin combined the Greek word genos (race or tribe) with the Latin -cide (killing) to describe the deliberate destruction of a people.
His idea became the foundation for the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or "Genocide Convention." This treaty - ratified by nearly every country in the world - defines what genocide is under international law. It's the legal standard we still use today.
The Legal Definition of Genocide
Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as:
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:"
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
[source]
Three key points matter here:
Intent is required. Accidental or collateral harm does not qualify.
The targeted group must be destroyed "as such." That means killing or harming people because they belong to the group - not because they are, say, enemy combatants.
The acts must aim at physical destruction. Displacement, hardship, or even occupation are not themselves genocide unless they're part of a plan to wipe out the group.
Does What Israel Is Doing in Gaza Meet the Legal Definition of Genocide?
1. Is there an intent to destroy Palestinians "as such"?
No. This is the core element of genocide, and it’s the one that is not present. Israel’s stated goal in Gaza is the destruction of Hamas—a terrorist organization that murdered over 1,200 civilians on October 7, 2023, and continues to fire rockets and hold hostages.
Israel has repeatedly said it is not at war with the Palestinian people. Its military objectives, whether you agree with their execution or not, are directed at Hamas fighters, infrastructure, and command centers.
Even critics of Israel’s conduct, including legal scholars, acknowledge that intent is not demonstrated.
Intent to destroy a group is very different from intent to destroy an enemy that embeds itself within that group. The tragedy is real—but tragedy is not the same as genocide.
2. Are civilians being killed because they are Palestinian?
No. Civilian casualties in Gaza are not being targeted "as such," but occur in the context of urban warfare where Hamas deliberately embeds itself in hospitals, schools, mosques, and densely populated civilian areas.
This is a tactic Hamas has publicly embraced. Hamas senior leader Khaled Mashal stated on October 19, 2023 that he views the current loss of civilian life in Gaza – brought about by Hamas' strategy of using human shields – as essential: "No nation is liberated without sacrifices... In all wars, there are some civilian victims. We are not responsible for them."
When combatants hide behind civilians, it leads to civilian casualties. That's tragic, and under the laws of war, precautions must still be taken - but this is not the same as intentionally targeting civilians for the purpose of destroying them as a group.
3. Are conditions of life being inflicted to bring about destruction of the group?
No. This clause refers to tactics like starvation, medical denial, or forced exposure that are part of a coordinated plan to kill off a population.
While there have been devastating humanitarian consequences from the war - including shortages of food, fuel, and medical supplies - there is no evidence that these are intended to destroy the Palestinian people.
In fact, Israel has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid, even while fighting Hamas. It has opened multiple aid corridors, coordinated with international partners, and even paused military operations to allow supplies in.
The IDF has also implemented leaflet drops, text messages, and broadcast warnings to urge civilians to evacuate combat zones. You can disagree with how effective or sufficient these measures are - but they are not consistent with a strategy of genocide.
Popular Genocide Claims From Social Media
"The International Court of Justice said Israel is committing genocide!"
False. South Africa brought a case to the ICJ accusing Israel of genocide. The ICJ has not ruled that genocide is occurring. They didn't even rule that a genocide could plausibly be happening.
Don't take my word for it, listen to the ICJ's president, Joan Donoghue:
So this claim based on citing the ICJ is misleading at best...and dishonest at worst.
"Israel’s leaders said they wanted to destroy Gaza - what more proof do you need!?"
Several inflammatory quotes have been circulated, and some of them are even real. A few Israeli politicians and military spokespeople have made irresponsible or dehumanizing comments.
They are fucking assholes and I hope the universe eventually delivers unto them the justice they deserve for their callous, disgusting rhetoric.
But genocidal intent is not proven by statements alone, especially not without context and intent. Courts look at official policy, military orders, patterns of conduct, and evidence of systematic destruction - not just quotes in the press.
Many of the quotes are mistranslated, edited, or pulled out of context. For example, the much-circulated quote "we will erase Gaza" was from a political statement about Hamas - not about the civilian population.
What Gallant said:
Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.
In context, we can see that "It" = Hamas.
Hateful rhetoric is wrong and should be condemned, but hyperbole and cruelty ≠ genocide.
"Look at the death toll! That many deaths must be genocide."
Civilian deaths are horrible - but numbers alone don’t prove genocide. The US-led campaign against ISIS in Mosul killed thousands of civilians. So did Russia's bombing of Grozny. These were brutal campaigns, but they were not declared genocides.
Despite the intense scrutiny and global outrage, civilian casualties in Gaza are relatively low compared to historical benchmarks for urban warfare - especially given the population density, the length of the conflict, and Hamas's tactic of embedding itself among civilians.
The UN says 54,607 of 2.3 million Gazans have perished since the start of the war on 10/7/23. Even if we assume every reported death is a civilian (which we shouldn’t), that’s roughly 2.4% of Gaza’s pre-war population - a tragic toll, but nowhere near the catastrophic losses seen in other conflicts of similar scale.
For comparison: In the 2004 U.S. battle of Fallujah, civilian casualties were estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 - out of a population of about 300,000, in just a few weeks of fighting. In the Battle of Mosul (2016–2017), where US-led forces fought ISIS in a densely populated Iraqi city, more than 9,000 civilians were killed in just nine months in a city of 1.5 million. And in WWII’s Battle of Dresden, tens of thousands of civilians were killed over a few nights of bombing alone.
I'm not trying to minimize deaths, but to contextualize them. Civilian deaths in Gaza are the tragic result of a brutal war - not a systematic extermination. Compared to other modern urban conflicts, Israel's operations, despite their flaws, have resulted in fewer civilian casualties per capita and per square kilometer than in accepted wartime precedents. That doesn't excuse mistakes or excesses, but it does challenge the narrative that what’s happening is uniquely or intentionally genocidal.
A legal determination of genocide is based on intent and targeting, not death tolls.
War Crimes Have Almost Certainly Occurred
There are strong reasons to believe that some IDF soldiers or commanders have committed war crimes. Civilians have been killed. Homes and hospitals have been destroyed. There's never been a war in which war crimes didn't take place.
Allegations of war crimes must be fully investigated by Israel's judicial system - and if it fails to produce accountability, by independent international mechanisms. Accountability is essential.
But again: war crimes are not genocide.
Genocide is a unique legal crime requiring specific intent to eliminate a group. Other violations - like disproportionate force, failure to distinguish civilians, or destruction of infrastructure - fall under different categories of international law.
The distinction isn't about excusing wrongdoing. It’s about naming things precisely so justice can be served correctly and according to the rule of law.
"Not Genocide" ≠ "No Wrongdoing"
Some of Israel's supporters seem to suggest if what has happened in Gaza isn't genocide, then everything must be fine.
That's not my argument here.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza is awful. The war has caused immense suffering. There are open questions about proportionality, humanitarian access, and command decisions.
You can believe Israel had a right to respond militarily and still believe that some responses are morally questionable or legally wrong. These are not mutually exclusive and criticism on these grounds isn't just fair, but necessary.
But moral revulsion is not the same thing as a legal definition. The difference matters if we want language and justice to mean something.
Genocides Don't Have Exit Ramps
Hamas could end the war at any time. Genocides are not conditional. The Holocaust didn’t stop when Jews surrendered because the goal was elimination, not negotiation. In Gaza, the war has clear and consistent conditions for ending: return the hostages and disarm.
Israel isn’t fighting Gaza because it exists. Israel is fighting Hamas because of what Hamas did and continues to do. If Hamas were to surrender and release all hostages, the war would stop tomorrow.
That alone disqualifies this war as a genocide.
Holocaust Inversion and the Weaponization of Language
If you've spent more than ten minutes on social media since October 7, you’ve probably seen some version of this grotesque claim: "Israel is doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to Jews."
This is not just a bad analogy. It's not just ignorant. It's part of a long-running strategy called Holocaust inversion - a deliberate rhetorical weapon that turns Jewish trauma inside-out and throws it back in Jews' faces. This tactic is central to the argument that Israel is committing genocide.
What is Holocaust Inversion?
Coined by scholars of antisemitism, "Holocaust inversion" refers to the practice of depicting Jews—especially the Jewish state—as the new Nazis. It doesn't just compare Israel to Nazi Germany—it implies that Jews, once the victims of genocide, are now the perpetrators.
It’s often paired with visual and verbal symbols meant to provoke:
Israeli flags with swastikas scribbled over the Star of David
Cartoons of Netanyahu in SS uniform
Palestinian children dressed in striped pajamas like Auschwitz prisoners
Protest signs reading “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza” or “Gaza = Auschwitz”
This isn’t subtle, and it isn’t new. Holocaust inversion gained momentum after the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism - where Israel was accused of committing "a new kind of Holocaust" - and has only intensified since.
It's not just offensive. It's deliberately false and strategically deployed.
Why It’s a Lie
Bluntly, there is no meaningful equivalence between the Holocaust and Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Holocaust was the state-planned, industrialized extermination of six million Jews - murdered in gas chambers, shot over mass graves, starved in ghettos, and reduced to ash.
Gaza is a battlefield, where a terrorist army rules over a civilian population and embeds itself in civilian infrastructure while carrying out war crimes against Israelis.
The Israeli government is not trying to eliminate Palestinians "as such." It is trying to eliminate a genocidal organization, Hamas, that publicly calls for the death of Jews, hides among civilians, and has vowed to repeat the atrocities of October 7 "again and again."
There are no gas chambers. There are no death camps. There is no plan to exterminate a people. There is no Wannsee Conference. There are military operations - some excessive, some tragically misjudged - but nothing even close to the mechanized genocide of the Holocaust.
To say otherwise is not only dishonest - it’s a desecration of history.
The claim that Jews are behaving like Nazis relies on DARVO:
Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.
Deny the Jewish people's trauma and history.
Attack their legitimacy, self-defense, and motives.
Reverse the roles - so that Jews are no longer victims of antisemitic violence, but perpetrators of racist evil.
This tactic allows people to avoid grappling with what happened on October 7, or why Israel is at war, by flipping the moral script. If Israel is the "real Nazi," then everything else is justified - even Hamas terrorism.
Why Holocaust Inversion Is Dangerous
This isn't just a matter of bad taste. Holocaust inversion is dangerous for three reasons:
It makes justice impossible. If Israel is Nazi Germany, then negotiation, ceasefires, and diplomacy make no sense. You don’t talk to Nazis - you destroy them. That framing encourages violence and eliminates space for peace.
It erases actual genocide. If everything is genocide, then nothing is. When we use Holocaust terms for conventional wars - even brutal ones - we cheapen the language needed to describe Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, or the real Holocaust. It becomes harder to name and stop actual genocides when the term is worn out.
It fuels antisemitism. By branding Jews as the new Nazis, Holocaust inversion turns one of history's most demonized peoples into villains. It justifies hate crimes. It encourages mob violence. It turns "Never Again" into a joke.
This isn't theoretical. Since October 7, antisemitic attacks have surged globally. Jewish students have been barricaded in libraries. Synagogues have been vandalized. Two were shot in DC. Senior citizens were set on fire in Boulder.
And when protesters wave signs saying "Keep the world clean," like these...?
The language of Holocaust inversion is helping to justify that behavior.
Imagine if it was a cross in the trash on those signs. Or the star and crescent. Would this seem acceptable? Would the ghoulishness of the glee on the protestor's face now be clear to you?
Words Matter
So, is what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide?
No.
Not by the letter of the law.
Not by the evidence.
Not by the standards we use anywhere else.
That doesn't mean everything is justified, it doesn't mean no crimes have been committed, it doesn't mean civilians haven't suffered.
It means we need to be careful, responsible, and honest when we use words like "genocide," because once those words are emptied of meaning, they lose their power to stop the very horrors they were meant to prevent.
you’re disgusting and i hope you die. you’re an evil fascist with no regards to human life and if the world is just you will suffer for all eternity you soulless pig.
I sometimes wonder, when reading Hate Asks like this one, what the writer expects to accomplish. I mean...I'm an autistic and habitually hyper-intellectual. Do they think that invective will impact me emotionally? If so, does this not indicate they haven't read me? And if they haven't read me...what is it they're angry about?
Anyway, let's take it point by point.
1. I'm disgusting
This ad hominem would be stronger if it wasn't so vague. You could at least specify the form of disgust. Is it my odor? My browser history? My affection for novelty music?
2. You hope I die.
Anonymously wishing death on a stranger sort of undermines any moral high ground you believe you occupy...and a death wish from an Anon is like the Hallmark card version of internet fury. Hatemark: When You Don't Even Care Enough To Send the Very Worst.
3. I'm an evil fascist.
This blog contains no evidence of totalitarian control, militia, or snappy uniforms. I've never promoted or supported any fascist organization or philosophy, here or anywhere else. I have repeatedly spoken/written/acted against it. So what's most likely here, Anon, is that you don't actually know what fascism is.
4. I have no regard for human life
On the contrary, I've repeatedly written about my universalist humanist values and implored others to care about all lives. Meanwhile, you just wished for me to die...and say I have no regard for human life...? Huh.
5. I will suffer for all eternity
That's a lot of cosmological certainty. Despite having been told for centuries by Christians and Muslims that we're going to Hell, Jews don't buy it. Don't get me wrong, you do you. If it's what you want, I sincerely encourage you to go to Hell.
6. I'm soulless
It feels more righteous to say terrible things when you dehumanize your target, right? If they're not really human, whatever you do or say to them is justified. Of course, if it is true I have no soul, that soul cannot be tormented forever as you've hoped for in point #5.
Maybe choose a lane? Am I soulless, or should my (presumably extant) soul endure the eternal torment I don't believe in?
7. I'm a pig
Again, this is an attempt to dehumanize. If I'm not human, anything done or said to me is morally justified. Do you know who else in history used tactics like this?
(Oink once for yes, twice for no.)
General notes:
Your heavy reliance on pathos and ad hominem is meant to mask the total absence of logos and ethos. If you had counter-arguments for any of the wholly reasonable and supported arguments on this blog, you'd make them...but invective is all you have.
Your Ask says nothing about me, my beliefs, my views, or my writing. It says a great deal, however, about you.
It tells us about your difficulties with emotional dysregulation, your inability to engage on the substance or merits of an argument, and your preference for cathartic performance over coherent critique. Accusing me of having "no regard for human life" while wishing me dead exemplifies a psychological mirror effect in which the trait you condemn is the very trait you display. You don't even actually know why you're angry at me.
I mean this earnestly: A good therapist could probably help you with a lot of the difficulties you're experiencing. Therapy is great, and most people would benefit from it. You, however, have some acute issues which I urge you to address with qualified assistance sooner rather than later. These issues won't get any easier until you start working on them.
Anon, you are not disgusting. Like all of us, you're made in the image of the divine. I hope you live a long life filled with love. You're not evil, you're just hurting and that hurt is leaking out in weird places because it isn't being addressed constructively. I hope that fear of eternal torment isn't a regular feeling for you, and hope you can one day believe in a theology with a deity too benevolent to torture anyone for eternity. Your soul is unique and precious. You are a human being. Your pain, your fears, and your feelings are all proof of that.
Since @closet-keys doesn't have any of their own, let's exercise our media literacy skills.
The claim:
Israel deliberately rotates which baby formula it lets into Gaza, banning each type right after infants become dependent on it, specifically to cause malabsorption.
The Source of the claim:
Truthout, June 2026, quoting Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, head of pediatrics at Nasser Hospital.
The framing:
This is a strategy of Israel to systematically "torture and kill Palestinian babies."
The Template:
"Jews deliberately poison or torture children's bodies as policy" is one of the oldest blood libel templates in existence, going back to medieval host desecration and well-poisoning accusations.
This post is built on that template and reskinned with the vocabulary of supply chains and pediatric malabsorption to disguise it as humanitarian reporting instead of the racist libel it is.
The nugget of truth:
Al-Farra is a real doctor describing a real shortage.
So what is Truthout, and what did it do with al-Farra's words?
The motives:
Truthout is a nonprofit advocacy outlet that has run pieces attacking other publications for treating "Israel's right to exist" as a legitimate editorial value, framing that position itself as disqualifying.
This is an outlet with an explicit institutional position that acknowledging Israel's right to exist is a problem...reporting on Israel.
This isn't journalism and it isn't social justice activism.
Where did Truthout get al-Farra's words?
In April, the New Arab quoted the same doctor on the same situation:
"the types available change constantly. One type lasts no more than two weeks before it runs out and is replaced by another, which negatively affects children's health"
That's describing chaos. Formula shows up inconsistently, brands run out, whatever's available gets swapped in. No intent, no plan, and no attack on babies.
The New Arab is owned by Fadaat Media, a Qatari company. Qatar has spent two decades bankrolling Hamas's government.
An outlet funded by Hamas's primary patron covering Hamas's war isn't neutral either - but it's less egregious than what Truthout did.
The method:
In June, Truthout turned the same observation into "one of the Israeli strategies," turning a shortage into a malicious plan to attack babies.
They invented the idea that Israel maliciously executed a plan to let one brand in until babies depend on it, then ban it on purpose to cause malabsorption issues in infants.
The medical explanation is recycled almost word for word from April. The verb does all the dishonest work. "Runs out and gets replaced" became "is allowed in, then banned."
Nobody found a new fact. Truthout invented a motive, bolted it onto an old quote, and kept the doctor's name on it so it would appear to be damning testimony.
This isn't bias, this is a lie - and this is how a blood libel gets laundered in 2026.
The anatomy of a modern blood libel:
Writing "Jews poison children" might make someone hesitate. Instead, a real shortage gets a manufactured motive, attributed to a real doctor, published by an outlet that's told you it considers Israel's legitimacy itself the problem, and run through a wire from an outlet funded by the regime bankrolling the other side of the war.
Each layer gives the next one a laundered source to point at. By the time it's a Tumblr infographic, suckers like @closet-keys feel confident saying it's "confirmed repeatedly" without ONCE having actually examined the unconfirmed claims.
The reality check:
Who would actually run a "ban a formula brand every two weeks" policy?
COGAT, Israel's aid office, has publicly denied restricting formula at all, ever - but Truthout doesn't mention this. A journalist investigating an atrocity allegation talks to the accused. Truthout skipped that because engaging with it means admitting "strategy" is their word, not their source's.
Meanwhile, Hamas was repeatedly documented stealing baby formula from UNICEF trucks, creating or worsening the supply issue.
The shortage is real.
What's invented is the accusation that Jews are running a calibrated infant-torture program. This accusation is disguised in the language of pediatrics and laundered through two outlets that each have a direct stake in the war they're "covering."
The idiot spreading transparently racist lies:
@closet-keys
------------------------------
For more short lessons in media literacy, check out #Signal > Noise
there are places where honor killings are legal and queer people get the death penalty and you can’t sell property to people of a certain ethnicity and virtually everyone is part of a singular religion. the supreme court just upheld birthright citizenship, something most countries don’t even have.
please understand that the rightward trend in US politics is alarming but mischaracterizing the US as the Worst Place On Earth is just fucking dumb as shit!
I work with kids and I've had two occasions where a little boy straight up won't listen to anything I say because I'm a woman. and like yeah he's gonna continue to be raised by terrible role models and probably grow up to be a sexist douchebag but I have three hours a week to get through to him and so far I'm crushing it. I got six year old boys who previously didn't listen to a word I said telling their shitty dads to not speak to me like that. yeah that's right I'm the teacher making your kid woke. go fuck yourself about it.
you left your kid with me and I taught him that women are people. and also to question authority. and also how to kick someone in the nuts. have fun with that.
honestly there's nothing that's going to work for every kid but I've found just turning kid behavior back on them usually works pretty well. like if they say something about "girls are like this and boys are like that" be like why. why. why. why. exactly the way little kids do. they'll try to come up with an answer but usually after like five rounds of me asking why they'll eventually be like huh. idk.
in my case it definitely helps that I teach kids martial arts classes at a boxing gym with a lot of women. so little boys just factually cannot tell me that girls can't fight or aren't strong or something, because they're constantly surrounded by proof that isn't true. also rules are very different in a boxing gym so if a kid is being a little shit I'm allowed to pick them up and put them in upside down air jail. you probably can't do this in most contexts.
I think the biggest thing is that they need to see men and other boys listening to women. they're following the example that's been set for that. at home maybe their dad never listens to their mom, but when they show up at my class all the other boys are following my instructions. peer pressure is real and you can use it to your advantage. I make a point to tell the biggest buffest manliest dudes what to do in front of the little boys. now this works because those dudes already listen to me, but getting any dudes to follow your instructions could probably work.
the best punishment is the natural consequences of your behavior. if a kid isn't going to listen to me, he doesn't get to do class. this works because class is fun and he wants to kick stuff and hit people with noodles. kids want to have fun more than they want to misbehave. as long as listening to me is more fun than misbehaving, they'll listen.
because these boys are learning this behavior from their dads, the dads also tend to be the kind of tough strict emotionally distant parents that would yell at "girly" behavior or crying. even when I'm strict with the kids, I never yell, I obviously never hurt them, and I always listen. they want to yap at me about pokemon or youtubers. it can be tough when they're really sexist at the beginning but eventually they will show you something that their dad wouldn't approve of, whether they want a pink noodle or quietly mention they like a girly show. this is the part where you simultaneously act like it's no big deal while encouraging it. you need show it's completely normal for a boy to want or like that. if you can, bring up another boy or man they know who likes the same thing. I always show off my nails to the kids and bring over the guy who also paints his nails. you'll probably get "boys can do that?" comments and I usually just go "well he's a boy and he did it, so unless his hand falls off right now I think it's okay"
for me, it's always eventually gotten to a point where the boys realize that everyone else thinks it's normal to listen to women, and that if they want to have fun they need to listen too. they also realize that these people and these women are nicer and listen to them more than their dad does. they notice how all these nice people that make them happy talk to women very differently than their dad does. when those boys yelled at their dads for being rude to me, I made a point to thank them and say that they were right and their dads were rude.
encouraging the behavior you want to see is even more important than punishing the behavior you don't want to see. you can't tell kids what not to do without giving them something to replace the behavior with.
Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...
Hey, if anyone’s curious, this IS making a serious impact — this handbook was taught as standard practice for my EMT license course, as well as several other programs. A lot of new providers are being taught this as a matter of course.
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