Terry Constanti

The paradox of tolerance

That’s a one hundred fold increase in under 5 years…

ANALYSIS: Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis. Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget last month that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy — the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara — nearly five times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about 20 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war in Gaza erupted in October, 2023, following Hamas’s invasion and massacre in southern Israel. Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is overwhelmingly skeptical. Read more on The Times of Israel. timesofisrael.com/israel-just-qu…

@VividProwess Rastafarians, like many Haredi and other ultra religious Jewish sects see Zionism, the Jewish homeland, as a state of heart-mind to be inhabited, not a geographic location.

Bob Marley's Jewish Israeli grandchildren.

@MikeCarlton01 More evidence that leaving politics restores some semblance of humanity?

Never thought I’d agree with Peter Dutton, but he’s right - and decent - about this.

@NickBryantNY All British influence, hard and soft power, now decided in Tel Aviv

“BBC News to bear the biggest cuts.” This is nuts. The news division is the backbone of the global brand.

@suzanne_moore @simonmontefiore When you have a major media publisher like Times of Israel editorialising that holding jews to the same moral and legal standards as all other people is antisemitism, it seems that the cause is letting itself be known.

This latest terrible attack on Jews has made me so angry I dont know what to do. All those who have helped create the conditions for murderous antisemitism in this country should ask themselves a few questions. They wont , they will just abuse me here of course.

@ConceptualJames Started well before 1948

The Nakba is what happens when a five armies start a war they think they should be able to win easily and then somehow lose. The Holocaust is what happens when a continent decides a particular kind of people are so intrinsically a problem that they have to be exterminated. No.

@FedUp1stGen @richyphillips @ProfHall1955 100% was my hyperbole. Apologies. The bond yield is inversely proportional to risk. Japan offered -ve yield at one point. Guaranteed! I got a 100% 10 year guarantee on my window awnings. The company was bought out and new owners wouldn’t repair cause they only offer 5yrs.

@richyphillips @tezlefty @ProfHall1955 Really? I wonder why no asset manager on the planet says investing in gilts if 100% risk free then? They must all be wrong I guess.

To buy a bond, you need £s. Those £s came from prior govt spending. There is no other source. Therefore: bonds are not "lending" the govt its own currency. They are a savings scheme for people with excess income. The govt's ability to spend does not depend on bonds. It never did.

@afneil It’s Zionist who conflate semitism with Zionism , and unfortunately they are successful enough that some anti Zionists believe them .

Yet another appalling anti-Semitic attack: Two men stabbed outside a synagogue in north London. Man arrested following incident in Golders Green this morning. Only the latest in a string of attacks in this predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Terrible.

@ProfHall1955 @ProfSteveKeen The concepts now being used to understand & legislate against coercive control as a form of violence need to be adapted to “the marketplace” - and dare I say political funding and lobbying laws.

There has never been, and never can be, such a thing as a 'free market'. It's an oxymoron. 'Markets' are simply collective agreements to replace violence and theft with reciprocal trade. For that purpose, they have always been institutionally, legally, normatively and socially embedded. Set them 'free' from this, and we return to violence and theft. Even the Hayekians understood the necessity for strong but limited law. The larger the market, the more this regulatory framework - contra Hayek - must be centrally anchored and involve a degree of planning. Lack of foresight and planning allows frequent crashes, at which point people lose faith in the principle of spontaneous agreements between individuals, which creates confusion, unworkable dissonance and mounting suspicion and hostility. Criminal markets have always expanded during these periods of chaos - the American homicide rate reached its C20 peaks in during the crime waves of 1933, 1980 and 1991, reduced in C21 only by state-funded mass incarceration and surveillance. More gifts, alongside increased inequality and relative poverty, from 'free(er) markets'. Only the Keynesian period gave us respite. Remove or even disrupt the framework or delegitimise the central authority, and the market rapidly descends towards the Hobbesian 'war of all against all'. Today's anti-democracy anarcho-capitalists take things way beyond Hayek. The only reason why such well-placed individuals would want to impose an extreme 'free-market' experiment on a society would be to atomise social relations, discredit regulatory authority, dissolve democracy and establish themselves as governing oligarchs. Evil men enjoy sitting atop the ashes of what they have destroyed.

@KemiBadenoch @simonmontefiore Two stabbed in North London by one person, a few properties lightly burnt , after decades of tens even hundreds of thousands killed in Lebanon & Gaza, by a whole country supported by British parliament. The irrational reaction is still tiny compared to the rationalised actions

Jewish people in our country are under constant attack. This is no longer a growing pattern. There is an epidemic of violence against Jewish people. It is now a national emergency and needs to be treated as such by the Government and public authorities.

@AvidCommentator Possibly allow NG to apply to only one existing investment property and all other tax concessions to apply only on new builds (not rebuilds) , all other profit from existing property to be taxed as any other income is taxed.

'Increasing supply' must be Labor's top priority for any negative gearing changes, expert demands ahead of budget' We are not resolving the housing deficit with any credible increase to supply. It has to be addressed by reducing migration. skynews.com.au/business/real-…

@FedUp1stGen @ProfHall1955 @richyphillips Exactly. It’s a remnant of when govts used to need to raise funds for war spending then it became another tool to remove excess money/ demand from circulation to keep inflation down, just like other interest bearing deposit accounts, but it’s 100% guaranteed - bc fiat currency

@tezlefty @ProfHall1955 @richyphillips Stuffing money under the mattress does the same thing. Thats not a bond. You're confusing what a thing is, with if it is needed or not.

@chiky_handlr This journalist doing excellent work doing the fine tooth comb work that few are doing, here critiques the 60 Minutes Aus story as naive facebook.com/share/p/1ENbQc…

60 minutes Australia aired a special about that Ranch (starts with a Z) a few days ago. Many have heard about possible girls buried from the emails but I had never heard about some of the other seriously dark shit. Other countries aren’t going to let this story die. We won’t either. I was surprised to find 60 Minutes Australia YouTube has a playlist with 59 videos on it. Definitely going to be checking many of them out.

@IsraelinNorway Belgians in the Congo, Germans in Namibia, colonisers in the Americas & Australia, slave traders, ideologically crazed tyrants in Asia and Russia, Pope Innocent exterminating the Cathar heretics...

The Norwegian Holocaust Center’s decision to host events drawing parallels between the Holocaust, the “Nakba,” and the war in Gaza is a grotesque distortion of Holocaust memory. It dishonors the memory of more than 750 Norwegian Jews murdered by the Nazis and their Norwegian collaborators, and betrays the very purpose for which this institution was established. A center founded to preserve Holocaust remembrance has chosen political activism over historical responsibility. This is not education. It is moral failure. The planned events should be cancelled immediately, and the center must return to its core mission: safeguarding Holocaust remembrance and confronting antisemitism - not legitimizing its modern forms.

@AvidCommentator And increase public housing construction to menzies era levels -about 15% of all new builds wasn't it? The days when govt spent directly on housing, procured bulk materials & contracts rather than waiting for returns on investments as construction costs rose faster than inflation

If I was Albo, I would use basic math & the Liberals own foundational rhetoric against them on housing. If you want Menzies "Foundation of a sane society" aka home ownership, then the proportion of homes held by property investors has to fall They would tie themselves in knots

@ProfHall1955 Rather than openly engaging to interrogate the alternative views to see if anything can be learnt, how those unwilling to change their ideology tend to respond is with a shallow dismissiveness.

Why do I bother with this place? I've just tried to explain in detail to this guy that bonds are more than simply 'debt securities' - reserve-draining instruments etc. - and this is his comeback. This is why we get the politicians and the economic mess we have.

@NickBryantNY Any relationship is understood by who gives and who takes what.

UK ambassador states the bleeding obvious about the special relationship, an obsolete phase. We expect them to fake it and carry on the pretense to the extent that it’s front page news when they actually say what they think and tell the truth.

@FedUp1stGen @ProfHall1955 @richyphillips Why argue terminology? Bonds draw money out of the economy in the same way interest bearing savings accounts do, parking money. But interest yield on a fiat currency bond is not an outlay like a bank's bc govt doesn't sell goods, services or assets to get the money to pay it.

@ProfHall1955 @richyphillips Straight in with the ad-hominem, pseudo-intellectualising, then back to ad-hominem. Bonds are still and only a debt security. It doesn't matter who I am, how many followers I have or how desperately you need them to be something else. They are just debt securities.

@DavidBCohen1 Just treat all people equally , as you would want to be treated.

Contrary to what conspiracy theorists say, today’s Jews are indeed descendants of the ancient Israelites. But the Israelis’ claim to their land is based on so much more than that. There has been a continuous Jewish presence on the land for over 3,000 years. Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the mid-1800s, before the modern Zionist movement. When diaspora Jews started returning from Yemen and Europe in the 1880s, they settled land they purchased legally. They drained malaria swamps to settle land that was previously uninhabitable. They cultivated desert areas that no one had been able to cultivate before. They created economic opportunities that drew hundreds of thousands of migrants from around the Arab world and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire—migrants whose millions of descendants are considered “Palestinians” today. When the British lopped off 78 percent of Palestine to give to their Arab allies, the Jews were content to stay on the remaining 22 percent. When the British and UN later proposed to further partition the remaining 22 percent of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, the Jews accepted it even though much of their share (which had a significant Jewish majority) was the Negev Desert. The Arabs (not known as “Palestinians” then) refused to accept the partition and tried to genocide the Jews instead. But the Jews defeated five Arab armies and two irregular militias to defend their newly reestablished State of Israel. Although the War of Independence was a victory for Israel, the armistice lines left Jordan in control of Judea and Samaria (which they would illegally occupy and annex and rename the “West Bank”) and Egypt occupying Gaza. Jews were ethnically cleansed from the areas controlled by Arabs (including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem), while Arabs still living on the Israeli side of the armistice lines were allowed to stay. That Arab community in Israel has grown to over two million and they have full rights. In the almost two decades the “West Bank” and Gaza were in Arab hands, there was never an attempt to establish a Palestinian state there. The Palestine Liberation Organization renounced any claim to that land, claiming only the land controlled by Israel. They wouldn’t start claiming that the “West Bank” and Gaza were “occupied” until Israel gained control of those areas in 1967. After Israel won independence, the Arab world exacted collective punishment by ethnically cleansing about 850,000 Jews. Many of them fled to Israel, their only sanctuary in their indigenous region. Those Jews and their descendants are now the majority of Jews in Israel. So no, the Jewish claim to Israel isn’t just based on ancient history, it’s based on their continuous presence and legal migration over many years, their ingenuity in making unusable land usable, their hard work in building a society there that improved the lives of Arabs and Jews alike and attracted economic migrants from throughout the Arab world, their willingness to fight for the land, to die for it, and to make peace with all neighbors who are willing to make peace. Their passion for the land derives from a faith and culture that remained almost entirely oriented around Israel through years of displacement and diaspora. Arguing about Israel’s “right to exist” is pointless. Can anyone argue with a straight face that a typical third generation Israeli, whose grandparents were kicked out of the Arab world, has a moral obligation to “return” to the Arab world (where they’ve never lived and which wouldn’t accept them anyway)? That they must “return” to most racist societies on Earth, where Jews were subjugated as “dhimmis” for over a millennium? Get serious.