Shabbat Shalom
Have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe.
Parashat Re'eh (Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17)
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@girlactionfigure
Shabbat Shalom
Have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe.
Parashat Re'eh (Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17)
On This Day — August 7, 1938
They ignored the prophet. Then the volcano erupted.
On Tisha B’Av, the darkest day in the Jewish calendar when both Temples were destroyed, Ze’ev Jabotinsky stood before the largest Jewish community in the world in Warsaw & begged them to flee while there was still time.
Three years he had been warning them.
In that time, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, Germany annexed Austria, every country on earth refused entry for Jewish refugees at the Evian Conference, and Kristallnacht was only three months away.
Jabotinsky’s words cut deep, but most did not listen. He said:
“… it is already three years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry …
I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer.
I became grey and old in these years.
My heart bleeds, that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit its all-consuming lava.
I see that you are not seeing this because you are immersed and sunk in your daily worries.
Today, however, I demand from you trust. You were convinced already that my prognoses have already proven to be right. If you think differently, then drive me out of your midst! However, if you do believe me, then listen to me in this 12th hour:
In the name of God! Let anyone of you save himself as long as there is still time. And time there is very little … and what else I would like to say to you in this day of Tisha B’Av: whoever of you will escape from the catastrophe, he or she will live to see the exalted moment of a great Jewish wedding: the rebirth and the rise of a Jewish state.
I don’t know if I will be privileged to see it; my son will! I believe in this as I am sure that tomorrow morning the sun will rise.”
Most did not heed Jabotinsky’s prescient warning.
Within a few years, three million Polish Jews were reduced to ash. Nearly all aspects of Jewish existence in that country was erased.
Jabotinsky himself died in 1940 and never saw the rebirth of the State of Israel.
But the second half of his prophecy, the redemption, also came true.
The Jewish state rose.
The survivors and their children lived to see the wedding.
The volcano ash is spreading again. The question is whether we will listen this time.
@CptAllenHistory
Six days of creation, and the world still wasn't complete.
Something was missing.
Not a creature, not a law of physics — Shabbat itself. Rest wasn't the absence of the seventh day's work. Rest was the seventh day's work.
The world isn't whole without it.
I think that's why it never felt right to treat Shabbat like a break I'm earning after a hard week. It's not a reward for finishing. It's the piece that was always going to complete the picture, whether I'd earned it or not.
Every Friday night, for one day, the world goes back to the way it was supposed to be from the start.
Shabbat Shalom
alexdduchene
🫠
The Arab Spring is usually remembered in the West as a spontaneous democratic awakening: ordinary people, empowered by social media, rising against dictatorship.
That description captures a tiny part of the story - but it misses the bigger ideological machinery that helped turn local anger into a regional revolution.
The uprisings were driven by real grievances: corruption, repression, unemployment and humiliation. Yet the forces best prepared to exploit the collapse of the old regimes were often not liberal democrats. They were organized Islamists - above all, networks connected to the Muslim Brotherhood - and behind their rise stood a small but extraordinarily influential state: Qatar.
Qatar did not merely report the Arab Spring. It helped construct its regional meaning.
Through Al Jazeera, Doha possessed something no other Arab government had: a television network watched across national borders, trusted by millions and capable of transforming one protest into a shared civilizational drama. A demonstration in Tunisia was no longer merely Tunisian. It became proof that Egypt could rise. Egypt became proof that Libya, Syria and Yemen could follow.
Al Jazeera was not simply a news channel operating inside Qatar. It was the central instrument of a state that maintains close ideological and political relationships with the Muslim Brotherhood, hosted its leading figures and gave Yusuf al-Qaradawi an enormous transnational platform from which to preach political Islam to the Sunni Arab world. Hamas itself emerged from the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
The mechanism was sophisticated.
Al Jazeera did not need to issue explicit instructions. It selected which events deserved nonstop coverage, which grievances represented the “Arab street”, which dissidents became heroes and which political movements appeared authentic, popular and inevitable. It supplied emotionally charged images, repeated slogans across borders and created the perception of unstoppable momentum.
At the same time, Qatar’s coverage was highly selective. Revolutions against regimes opposed by Doha received extraordinary attention, while unrest threatening Qatar’s Gulf partners - particularly Bahrain - received far less. Academic studies have described Al Jazeera Arabic’s post-2011 coverage as increasingly aligned with Qatari foreign policy and sympathetic to Islamist forces.
This was not democracy promotion in any consistent sense. Qatar itself was not democratizing. It was projecting revolution outward while remaining immune to it at home.
And when regimes fell, the Muslim Brotherhood was ready.
Unlike the secular protesters who could fill a square, the Brotherhood had mosques, charities, schools, neighborhood organizations, clerical authority, funding networks and decades of experience operating under repression. It possessed the infrastructure required to convert public anger into political power. Qatar then backed ascendant Islamist movements across the region and supplied Mohamed Morsi’s Brotherhood-led Egyptian government with billions of dollars in financial assistance.
That is why the Arab Spring should not be understood only as a democratic revolt that mysteriously failed. In many countries, it was an Islamist rebellion conducted through the language and instruments of popular democracy.
The ballot box was treated not necessarily as the final institution of a pluralistic order, but as an entry point: organize society from below, weaken the existing state, claim to represent the authentic people, win political legitimacy and then reshape the institutions.
This is not a paranoid interpretation invented by the Brotherhood’s opponents. A 1991 strategic memorandum written by a senior Brotherhood figure in North America described building an enduring Islamic movement, expanding religious organizations, presenting Islam as a “civilization alternative” and advancing Islam through a long-term process of institutional settlement. It even described the Brotherhood’s work in America as a civilizational struggle conducted from within, revealing a genuine ideological strategy within the Brotherhood's network.
The West should therefore recognize the uncomfortable parallel.
The same process no longer requires a single television channel. Today it operates through a distributed ecosystem: satellite networks, clerics, campus organizations, activist NGOs, influencers, viral video, selective outrage and algorithmic amplification.
The method is bottom-up radicalization.
Take a legitimate grievance. Strip it of context. Repeat the most emotionally devastating images. Portray institutions as irredeemably corrupt. Elevate the most uncompromising activists as the authentic voice of the oppressed. Punish moderation as betrayal. Convert political disagreement into a struggle between absolute innocence and absolute evil.
Then direct the resulting moral rage toward a political objective.
The campaign surrounding Hamas demonstrates how effectively this machinery now operates globally. Hamas is not presented primarily as the Islamist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that massacred civilians and explicitly seeks Israel’s destruction. It is repackaged as an indigenous liberation movement, while Israel becomes the symbolic embodiment of colonialism, racism and Western evil.
Al Jazeera plays a central role in this narrative ecosystem. Its Arabic output speaks to the region; its English-language output translates selected parts of the same worldview into the moral vocabulary of Western progressivism. Islamist ideology is repackaged as anti-colonial justice. Religious war is translated into human-rights activism. Hamas propaganda is repeated as testimony, while the ideology and strategic goals of Hamas are pushed out of the frame.
Antisemitism is not an accidental side effect of this package. It is one of its recurring organizing principles.
The Muslim Brotherhood tradition repeatedly places Jews and Zionism at the center of a global struggle against Islam. Hamas’s foundational ideology drew directly from that tradition. Once this worldview is translated for Western consumption, explicit religious antisemitism may disappear, but its structure remains: Jews possess unnatural power, manipulate governments, control the media, invent atrocities, corrupt Western institutions and stand behind the suffering of other peoples.
The language changes. The conspiracy didn't.
That is why the global explosion of antisemitism since October 7 should be treated as more than a Jewish security problem. It is an early-warning signal that the radicalization system is working.
Societies do not begin by openly demanding Islamist government. They begin by absorbing the movement’s categories: the West is uniquely evil, liberal institutions are fraudulent, terrorism is “resistance”, Islamists are authentic representatives of the oppressed, and Jews defending themselves are the hidden source of global disorder.
The Arab Spring showed what happens when economic frustration, political alienation, religious organization and mass-media amplification converge. The old order can appear stable - until suddenly it is not.
The West may believe it is merely experiencing protests, campus occupations, online activism and isolated street disorder. Arab rulers once made similar assumptions about the forces developing beneath them.
The lesson of 2011 is that a disciplined ideological minority, supported by money, media and institutions, can redirect a much broader movement whose participants do not fully understand where it is being led.
Qatar helped rehearse that process in the Middle East.
Al Jazeera helped broadcast it.
Hamas has helped globalize it.
And the accelerating normalization of antisemitism is evidence that the same ideological package is already penetrating the West.
The next “Arab Spring” may not occur in an Arab country. It may arrive inside Western democracies convinced that the movement hollowing them out is merely demanding "justice".
@destinationXIX
“Out of nowhere, he started beating me viciously and bit my ear"
“We have injuries all over our bodies, everything is swollen. We went through what felt like a terror attack. It was horrifying.”
An Israeli mother, 62, and her daughter, 23, were brutally beaten in Thailand by a French tourist.
“He started beating me viciously,” the mother said. “My daughter tried to protect me and was beaten too. We both fought him. I was hit in the head, and at some point I apparently lost consciousness.”
The two women were on the Thai island of Koh Phangan when they were approached by a French national asking where they were from. When they said Israel, he became irate and demanded a debate.
They told him they did not want to discuss Israel/Palestine, and he appeared to walk away, after stating he was "against violence." Then he launched himself at the mother and started biting her ear and punching her until she lost consciousness.
Attacking women on vacation will not help Palestinians. Everyone silent about this violence isn't helping anyone, either.
All you are doing is harming innocent Jews.
@HenMazzig
One of the biggest propaganda victories in modern history was convincing millions of people that Palestine was basically a frozen civilization: an ancient Arab population sitting in the same villages for a thousand years until, one day, foreign Jews suddenly showed up from Europe.
It’s an astonishingly dishonest version of history.
Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Its population was never frozen in time. People, including Jews, Arabs, and others, migrated throughout the region, settled, moved, intermarried, and crossed boundaries that were nothing like today’s national borders. Arabs came into Palestine from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere, just as people moved out of Palestine and throughout the wider region.
Yes, Arabs lived in Palestine before modern Zionism. So did Jews. And yes, much of the later Arab population boom came from natural increase.
But somehow Palestinian ancestry gets treated as if it comes with a 1,000-year certificate of authenticity, while a Jew whose people originated in that exact land is automatically branded a “foreign settler.”
And the irony is incredible: an Arab can immigrate to America or Europe and immediately call himself American, British, French, or German. Yet a Jew can return to the land where the Jewish people originated, where Jewish civilization was born, and where Jews have maintained a continuous presence for thousands of years, buy land, build a house, and somehow he is still the “foreign settler.”
It’s a political mythology built around one ridiculous rule:
Every Arab is presumed indigenous, no matter where he immigrates to.
Every Jew is presumed foreign.
@Average_NY_Guy
The Journey Matters | Parashat Re’eh
The same people who’ve spent years turning “AIPAC” into a dirty word suddenly have absolutely no questions. Fascinating.
jtilch
*PLEASE SHARE* and lets take this mural viral - FUCK The Haters - Show them its too late. We have already captured it in ALL its Glory 💜🔥🕊 As some of you may already be aware .. sadly yet inevitably this stunning mural of @boygeorgeofficialhas already been destroyed and is continually being tagged by bigots and haters - Shoreditch, London - United Kingdom
moxsblag
📸 @moxsblag 🎨 @benzibrofman 🎶 @boygeorgeofficial
Why Does the UN Keep Coming Back to Israel? The Story No One Tells You
For 50 years, one political coalition has shaped the world's conversation in the UN. To understand why, you have to go back to the Cold War, the Arab boycott, and the rise of the Red-Green Alliance.
If you asked most people under 35 which country the United Nations condemns the most, they probably wouldn’t know.
But if you told them the answer is Israel, and that’s the case, then Israel must be one of the world’s worst human rights offenders.
Some of them will wonder: Wait, isn't Israel constantly attacked by Islamist terrorist groups? What about Russia, which is massacring Ukrainians while also sending countless of its own citizens to die in a needless war with no end in sight, silencing opposition voices, and abducting Ukrainian children?
What about Iran, which killed tens of thousands of people during protests against the regime, with some estimates claiming more than 30,000 people were killed in just two days, while launching missiles across the Middle East in the name of a radical Islamist jihad?
What about Eritrea, one of the world's most brutal and repressive dictatorships, where citizens are conscripted into military service for life?
Or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, often described as the rape capital of the world, where rape has been used as a weapon of war, millions have been displaced, children are forced to serve as soldiers, and countless other atrocities continue alongside catastrophic human rights abuses?
Yet Israel is the worst?
That’s the power of the UN.
It doesn’t just pass resolutions, It shapes global perception. Journalists cite it. Universities teach it. NGOs amplify it. Millions of people who have never visited the Middle East absorb its conclusions without ever questioning how they were reached.
Here’s the problem: I don’t believe the UN’s obsession with Israel is primarily about human rights, it’s about politics.
To understand why, we need to rewind to the 1970’s.
The Cold War was at its peak. The Soviet Union was looking for every opportunity to weaken the United States and its allies. At the same time, Arab governments were expanding their diplomatic campaign against Israel, building on the long-standing Arab boycott by seeking to isolate the Jewish state internationally, as in the Middle East, colonized by the Arab Muslims, there cannot be a non Muslim sovereignty.
Israel is the only non Muslim sovereignty in the Middle East. Every minority in the Middle East is being persecuted by Islamists - Yazidis, Christians, Druze and others.
Those interests converged inside the United Nations.
Many describe this as the Red-Green Alliance: not a formal organization, but a political partnership between Communist/socialists, Arab states, and, in later decades, Islamist movements. They shared little ideologically, but they shared one strategic objective: isolate Israel and undermine American influence in international institutions.
One vote captured that shift more than any other.
In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism” brought to you by the red green alliance. For many, this was more than another diplomatic resolution. It was an attempt to redefine the national liberation movement of the Jewish people as a form of bigotry. The resolution was eventually repealed in 1991, but its impact on international discourse was profound.
From that point on, anti-Israel majorities inside parts of the UN became increasingly entrenched through bloc voting.
That legacy, never really disappeared.
For years, the UN Human Rights Council maintained Agenda Item 7, a permanent agenda item dedicated exclusively to Israel. No other country had its own standing agenda item. At the same time, governments with deeply troubling human rights records often secured seats on the very council responsible for judging others.
The pattern extended beyond Geneva.
The 2001 Durban Conference on Racism, intended to combat discrimination, became notorious for anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric during parallel NGO events, reinforcing concerns that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy was increasingly intertwined with efforts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence.
None of this means Israel should be immune from criticism.
Like every democracy, it makes mistakes. Its governments should be criticised.
But that’s not the same as applying a different standard.
When one liberal democracy receives extraordinary attention while some of the world’s most repressive regimes receive comparatively less, it is fair to ask whether universal principles are really being applied universally.
For me, this is the central question.
The credibility of international institutions depends on consistency. If geopolitical alliances determine who is condemned, who is ignored, and who gets to define the moral narrative, then those institutions stop functioning as impartial referees and begin functioning as political arenas.
You don’t have to agree with every decision Israel has ever made.
You don’t have to identify as pro-Israel.
But you should ask why one country has occupied such a unique place in the UN’s political imagination for nearly half a century.
Because before accepting any institution as the world’s moral compass, it’s worth asking who has been holding the compass all along.
Ella Kenan
Baruch Dayan HaEmet
This was 33 year old Sergeant Major (Res.) Tamir Vaknin, a combat soldier in the 2855th Battalion, 55th Brigade, from Eilat who was killed in action in Lebanon
May his memory be for a blessing.
I've been thinking about it a lot lately: How did we get to the point where millions of people who were never harmed by Israel in any way made hating Israel their entire identity? Even assuming Israel's actions are evil, there is nothing unique about them, so why is Israel the subject of unique attention? Why not Turkey, whose actions led to the creation of the term "genocide," that's ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of people in Cyprus and Syria and is colonizing their land with Turks and Arabs? Why not Iran that massacred tens of thousands of protestors and is involved in all wars in the Middle East, both through its proxies and by directly attacking half a dozen countries that never attacked it? Why not Myanmar that's been engaged in ethnic violence for 80 years and recently kicked out millions of Muslims? Why not Afghanistan, which is the most oppressive regime in the world for women and treats religious minorities terribly? Why not Lebanon, where Palestinians are the victims of an apartheid which prevents them from working most jobs and living in most areas? Except for the obvious thing, what makes Israel unique that it attracts such unique attention?
Uri Kurlianchik
Baruch Dayan HaEmet
This was 34 year old Major (Res.) Harel Birenstock, a company commander in the 2855th Battalion, 55th Brigade, from Nokdim who was killed in action in Lebanon
May his memory be for a blessing.