The Trump administration is trying to deport 30-year-old Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who was arrested by ICE agents over the weekend, for activity that is “contrary” to US foreign policy based on his involvement in protests critical of Israel’s war on Gaza at Columbia University.
The Trump administration has frozen funding to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US-funded organization that meddles in elections and pushes regime change around the world in the name of “promoting democracy.”
According to The Free Press, an order from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to the US Treasury Department that blocked the disbursement of funds to the NED has crippled the organization’s activities.
As anti-Palestinian provocations by notoriously racist Israeli football hooligans triggered riots in central Amsterdam on Thursday night, Israel and the far-right government of the Netherland along with other Western leaders are rushing to portray the violence as ‘anti-Semitic pogroms’ even as the Dutch police said investigations are ongoing and refused to comment on the ethnicity of the Dutch citizens arrested overnight.
The previous generation had their own Left Behind series – another mega-bestseller (28 million copies) futurist geopolitical fiction mapping Darby’s doctrines on to the 1970s it was called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. Lindsay’s genius was to update versions of the book as America’s enemies changed. In 1970, the threat to Israel came from Russia; by the 1990s, it was a joint Russia-Muslim operation; by 1999, China was in there too. “It is amazing, is it not”, wrote Lutheran critic of Christian Zionism Joseph Neuberger in his Master’s thesis, “that the great enemies of God’s people just happen to coincide with the national enemies of America at any given moment?” In the Christian Zionist reading of the bible, unlike non-Zionist Christian readings, “Israel” means the state of Israel – this is to be read literally. But Israel’s enemies in the bible are tribes (Canaanites, etc.) that don’t exist any more – these enemies have to be read figuratively and flexibly, which the Lindsay and the Left Behind authors do.
…
It is apparent that God’s will coincides perfectly with joint US/Israel geopolitical ambitions.
…
The murder of literature teacher Refaat Alareer, the target had been put on his back by social media figure Bari Weiss (Refaat had said, after the death threats started pouring in, that if he died he held Weiss responsible), looks like it was a targeted assassination. He had apparently “received an anonymous phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli officer and threatened Refaat that they knew precisely the school where he was located and were about to get to his location with the advancement of Israeli ground troops.”
Max Blumenthal writes: “According to EuroMed’s report, he then returned to his sister’s apartment to avoid endangering others in the school/shelter. There, he was killed by a “surgical” strike by the Israeli military.” Refaat Alareer’s murder was celebrated online by many pro-Israel people, “publicly, under their own names celebrating and cheering the killing of Refaat Alareer and his family which includes children”, as one tweeter noted. His poem, “If I must die”, is being translated into many of the languages of the earth in this twitter thread.
…
On one of the telegram channels where Israelis watch the carnage, one poster expressed concern about how the glee would be seen from the outside.
“It’s fun to watch and all,” wrote ben, “but these videos reach social media and portray us as psychopaths who commit genocide while smiling and laughing. I don’t know if it’s wise or not, but I’ve come across a lot of posts like this that are used by the enemy.”
Axios (10/31/23) reported that in a two-week period, TikTok saw “nearly four times the number of views to TikTok posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine globally compared to posts using the hashtag #StandwithIsrael.” As a result, the conservative outrage machine kicked into high gear.
With the conflict in Gaza provoking debate over what constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law, The Onion asked Americans to define a “war crime,” and this is what they said.
The disabling of the Twitter Files threads even temporarily made me nervous right away about leaving them to the whims of the company. I know other sites have already copied the TF material, but as of today we’re uploading my threads at least to a number of different platforms, including Facebook, Substack (see the new section atop the face page), and, yes, TruthSocial, among others.
So when the Intercept’s Lee Fang kicked off the 8th installment of the Twitter files, I was not expecting much at all. After all, Fang was one of the authors of the very recent garbage Intercept story that totally misunderstood the role of CISA in the government and (falsely) argued that the government demanded Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. The fact that the evidence from the Twitter files totally disproved his earlier story should at least result in Fang questioning his understanding of these things.
…
LibsOfTikTok was ‘whitelisted’.
Thus, it’s not at all surprising that Twitter clearly has a similar whitelist feature. This was actually somewhat revealed in an earlier Twitter File when Bari Weiss, thinking she was revealing unfair treatment of the @LibsOfTikTok account, actually revealed it was on a similar Xcheck style whitelist that clearly showed a flag on the account saying DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING an executive team.
Twitter’s most recent transparency report, published in July, shows that it took action on 4.3 million accounts in the second half of 2021 and removed 5.1 million pieces of content. You could cherry-pick a few of those decisions to fit almost any ideological narrative. Right-wing commentators aren’t the only people complaining about platforms’ actions. Some Black and LGBTQ social-media users have also objected that they’re being unfairly moderated, as automated tools take down posts containing words and phrases deemed offensive. Distrust of Big Tech’s power is universal.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
You must be logged in to post a comment.