Champagne Jihadists

My therapist used a great analogy on me once, and I never forgot it. Whatever the situation is, she said, imagine a lake. When everything is healthy and happy and full and functional, the lake is vast with clean water. But over time, if trouble is brewing, and resources are depleted, and energy is low, and life becomes difficult, the lake may drain of its lovely water. And if it drains so much that you can no longer see any water, only the bottom of the lake, you may see all the exposed ugliness and rot underneath all that abundant water. Even if the lake replenishes and fills to the top once again, you would not be wise to discard what you know to lie at its bottom.

I run around a lake every morning, and I think about this analogy. I think about how I will always see the world for what it is now. I have seen it for quite some time, but from this moment on, there will be no need to second-guess a thing. I know precisely what lies beneath.

This morning as I ran around the lake, which is always filled with slogans and signs that are sun-stained from having been up for several years (Black Lives Matter, Fuck The Patriarchy, VOTE!, etc), I saw about half a dozen posters that had been ripped down. On the top was the word “KIDNAPPED” and on the bottom “PLEASE HELP”. The middle was ripped, from every poster. Faces of Jewish mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and children had been removed. Newly taped posters. Next to the ripped posters were posters for missing dogs. They had not been ripped or tampered with or removed. The missing dogs stayed.

It stopped me in my tracks. I have seen the videos from all over the world of hateful imbeciles ripping down these posters, but to see this where I run every day felt like proof of something I’ve dreaded my whole life: this is not a world in which I belong.

PLEASE HELP, said the poster. The faces gone already. This is Holocaust denial in 2023, in the middle of Hollywood

Before I went out to discover this earlier this morning, I saw the following image on Finchley Road in North West London. Anotehr place in the world I once tried to belong in. Again, the image was of the posters. Except possibly this one is even worse than vanishing the faces altogether.

I keep looking at this. And I keep wondering what kind of place you have to arrive at in your brain as a “progressive” person to draw Hitler moustaches on innocent kids who have been stolen by terrorists.

I posted this image earlier on my Instagram account, and some family members of these children found me. What I didn’t realize is that these two girls are two of six hostages from the same family who are still trapped in Gaza under Hamas control.

The family provided these words for me to share with you all from them:

Danielle and Amelia Alony were visiting Sharon, David, Julie and Emma Cunio at Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, next to the border of Gaza.

Around 7:30am in Israel on Saturday October 7th, they got a red alert which means rockets are being sent from Gaza into Israel. Red alerts happen often in Israel. They thought it was business as usual, but nevertheless they immediately went to their bomb shelter, which most Israelis have in their homes.

As the hours progressed, they knew things were not normal and getting worse because they could hear Hamas terrorizing their neighbors’ house. They realized Hamas were setting homes in the Kibbutz on fire. Smoke began entering their home and their bomb shelter so they had to get out of the house even though they knew they’d face Hamas.

While this was happening, Sharon was on the phone with her mother, who lives in Yavne, Israel. The last words that Sharon said to her mother before they got disconnected were “We’re probably not going to get out of this, We love you.”

They lost contact with the family just before noon Israel time.

The family members Alana & Liam saw a video circulating on Instagram and on the news that showed a family being kidnapped from Nir Oz. They thought they saw their cousins in there but could not believe it, until their aunt confirmed a day later that it was them in the video.

The cousins of Danielle, Amelia, Sharon, David, Julie and Emma have asked if I could share their Instagram account here, where they will continue to tell the story of these six hostages: https://instagram.com/bringourfamilyhome

Bring them home.

---

Elsewhere today, at the Cooper Union Library in New York, footage was released of Jewish students scared and hiding inside the library, while Free Palestine protestors attempted to bang down the doors. The police were called but were too afraid to break up the pogrom, so the on-campus security instead chose to lock the students in for fear that if they left they wouldn’t be able to protect them.

Watch with the sound on:

I've been trapped inside a room as a Jewish student with a baying crowd outside. I was 18-years-old at Manchester University. It prepared me for similar and adjacent moments in life. I'm accustomed to angry mobs. It's in my blood. If you're having issues with an angry mob, holler at me. I’ll be your friend.

Anyway, we appear to have lost the universities because - as I keep saying – Iran, Qatar and Hamas have managed to brainwash an entire generation of kids by hijacking every social justice cause going. People keep asking me why the most antisemitic demographic on campuses are young Black females who have overcome their own cycles of oppression to be where they are. It’s as if the oppressor was trying to pit minorities against one another, and abracadabra alakazam it worked!

Here’s NYU Law School’s Student Bar Association President Ryna Workman refusing to condemn Hamas live on ABC. Ryna just wants the genocide to end. No more Apartheid. (Girl, apartheid ended – in South Africa). Ryna has big words. But where is her heart?

Shout-out to the kids over at Princeton today who chanted “Long live the Intifada” en masse. And to these angels in Washington Square Park. Here’s a group of high school students from Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. They were accompanied by their teacher for a day out to participate in New York University’s walkout for Gaza. (It was covered by Teen Vogue!) Does this young girl know she’s a Nazi, or…?

I would really love to hear from the “words are violence” crowd about why it’s permissible for Jewish students to put up with micro-aggressions like this, and actual threats of violence, all over America. Those people are very quiet right now. Except for when it comes to Palestinian students, who refuse to decalre that they don’t identify with the actions of Hamas. The things people refuse to do for an easier life…

But fear not: you don’t have to be on a university campus to get a beating for being a Jew. This morning a story broke from Studio City in LA, where police were called to a family home to arrest a man who had broken in at 5am to run around the house screaming FREE PALESTINE while two parents and four kids hid inside. I’m sure this incident too just had something to do with, uh, criticism of Israel…

It’s probably fair to say that statements like that of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres haven’t helped to assuage people’s anger towards Jews at large. Yesterday good old Antonio claimed that the Hamas attacks “did not happen in a vacuum” because “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of… [blah blah blah]”

Wait, 56 years? 75 years? 18 years? 2,000 years? How many years is it? Can they stick to one lie for longer than five minutes?

The United Nation (full name: the United Nations Against Israel) have been kinder to Korea than they have Israel, the one Jewish state, over the years. Given the UN exists to prevent a genocide, rather than excuse a genocide, it’s utter failure to do its job means that now human rights advocates everywhere think there may actually be context for hunting Jews, wherever we are. According to the Guardian, we can’t hide behind the Holocaust any more, guys. Time’s up!

How easy it has been for everyone to become a puppet for Iranian/Qatari propaganda. All it tooks was some old-fashioned antisemitism. As Yossi Klein Halevi argues today in the Times Of Israel:

Blaming Jews for their own suffering is an indispensable part of the history of antisemitism. Whether as the Christ-killers of pre-Holocaust Christianity or as the race-defilers of Nazi Germany, Jews were perceived as deserving their fate. Invariably, those who target Jews believe they are responding to Jewish provocation.

In other words, Zionism is racist and Israel should not be allowed to defend itself. Leave Hamas alone! Their rockets are made of Play-Doh and sand! Or as one Jordanian man in the gym said to me tonight: “Stop with your bullshit.” To which I did and will always quote the late great Joan Rivers: “They started it.”

I don’t know where all of you are at, but I have personally experienced more offline antisemitism in the last few days than I have in 37 years. So I can say with total authority here that the fascists are Hamas. Their brown shirts are western champagne jihadists. And all the Jewish people who know what is going on are terrified. The fear only increases when non-Jews laugh in our faces and tell us we’re paranoid. Those same people always obsess over what they would do if it were them in 1930s Germany. Would they be against the Nazis? Would they take a stand for their Jewish neighbors? All of them glorifying themselves: Oh yeah, Oscar Schindler, that would have been me. Well, tick-tock all you wannabe Schindlers! We are ringing the alarm. And I just want to remind you all that we Jews don’t just think of SS Officers as Nazis. We think of the bystanders as Nazis too.

Anyway, here’s the magnificent Blake Flayton who rearranged last night’s projections on the buildings at GW University, thereby summarizing the, uh, real projections of students who wish to eradicate Israel.

Am yisrael chai.