Agitation Rising

The City of Bloomington Township is roughly contiguous with the City of Bloomington. A small portion of city residents are not township residents. Check the following website to determine whether you are a Bloomington township resident: ova.elections.il.gov/RegistrationLo…

SPECIAL BLOOMINGTON TOWNSHIP MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT! All registered voters of the Township of Bloomington are invited to vote on adding the following non-binding questions to the November ballot:

@elikowaz The NYT is finally giving voice to Palestinians . A NYC mayor commemorating the Nakba. It must be terrifying living in a world where Palestinians are treated as full blown human beings

🧵on 'NYT rift' 1/22 A NYT article on sexual abuse against Palestinians -accurate but barely scratching the surface- is triggering hysteria in the Israeli govt not bcs of the facts, but bcs of the audience. Apartheid Israel fears NYT readers will finally see and no longer ignore.

@aziz0nomics @johnsplaining It's an intriguing ad hominem for sure.

@johnsplaining Yes. I learned that yesterday. It's an intriguing detail.

Kristof's dad was a literal Nazi. Fought in WW2 and everything

The Zionists protesting the NYT story about how their precious ethno-state systematically rapes Palestinian hostages in the most egregious ways imaginable should be called exactly what they are: pro-rape protesters.

None of the surrounding Arab countries had the infrastructure to absorb that many refugees. Any sane, moral nation would have done whatever they could to prevent 750,000 people from flooding into their lands.

In reality, these were newly decolonized nations, with weak institutions, that had spent the previous 6 months watching over 300k Palestinian refugees flee for their lives into their countries.

The 1948 war is often framed as a bunch of Arab countries attacking Israel in a blind, insane, uncontrollable rage of antisemitism.

THREAD: A Land Without A People? Nothing agitates Israel flunkies quite like statements that the Palestinians are a real people with a long and uninterrupted history in their homeland.

⭕️ The Day After NYT’s Kristof Documented Systematic Israeli Rape of Detained Palestinians, CNN, AP, BBC, and NYT Gave Largely Uncritical Coverage to an Unverifiable Israeli Report One day after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a meticulously sourced investigation—drawing on 14 survivors, the UN, and several international rights groups—documenting systematic rape and sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners, the Times, along with other major media outlets, published largely uncritical coverage of a new report by the Civil Commission, an Israeli NGO claiming Hamas committed systematic sexual violence on October 7. The underlying archive behind the Israeli report—which was covered by a wide range of outlets including the AP, CNN, BBC, and NYT—is entirely sealed. Only AP disclosed that its findings “could not be independently verified.” CNN acknowledged that it “has not been able to verify all of the contents of the archive”—though it claimed it has “seen many of the visual materials included in it.”  The NYT noted the archive was closed “to protect the privacy of victims” without clarifying what that means for verification. The BBC likewise made no disclosure about whether it had reviewed or verified the sealed archive, writing only that “its evidence, which is being kept in a secure archive, may aid future prosecutions.” Not one of the NYT, CNN, or BBC reports stated whether they had independently verified any of the report’s findings that they published in their own articles. The report was led by Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who is both the founder and chair of the Civil Commission. She has faced serious challenges to her credibility over her previous investigations into claims of systemic sexual violence by Hamas on October 7. In 2024, Israel’s largest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a damning exposé in which Israeli government officials said her “methodology was neither good nor accurate” and that “people have disassociated themselves from her because her research is inaccurate.” Officials were particularly incensed that she spread the debunked claim—originating with Yossi Landau of ZAKA—that a pregnant woman was found with her womb cut open. “Slowly, professionals began distancing themselves from her because she was not reliable,” one Israeli official said. Elkayam-Levy even presented an old image of dead female Kurdish fighters as women sexually assaulted at the Nova music festival during a Harvard talk, in an online video shared by The Grayzone. When confronted with the error, she did not correct the record. All four outlets also cited the 2023 UN report by Pramila Patten. The BBC described Patten’s visit to Israel, where she met with ZAKA’s Landau and other Israeli groups and officials to “receive information,” as an “investigation”—despite Patten herself explicitly rejecting that characterization and stating her mission was “neither intended nor mandated to be investigative in nature.” Patten also acknowledged her mission did not include gathering or examining “evidence.” At the same time, the outlets ignored the findings of the more authoritative UN Commission of Inquiry — the UN’s highest investigative body — as well as subsequent findings by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, all of which stated they were unable to verify any individual instance of rape on October 7.  🎥 VIDEO: The New York Times on the rape and sexual violence of Palestinians. Full video and source references in the reply.

I've read the entire Israeli "Civil Commission" report on Oct 7 sexual violence. It consists largely, if not entirely, of recycled second and third hand allegations that were discredited two years ago, many by Israeli media but also by independent outlets like The Grayzone, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss. The most graphic allegations were copy-and-pasted from the NY Times infamously debunked "Screams Without Words" feature, which resulted in the cancellation of a NY Times podcast on the article, a staff-wide revolt, a desperate internal investigation to stop leaks, and the firing of the article's lead Israeli reporter. Many of the other allegations are sourced to Rami Davidian, a star of Sheryl Sanderberg's unintentionally fictional documentary, "Screams Before Silence," who was unmasked as a serial fabricator who spun out fake Oct 7 atrocity stories for lucrative lecture fees. The report appears to have been rushed to print after Israeli intel learned that Nick Kristof was to publish his report on the systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners, and was disseminated through a coalition of Israeli-sponsored MAGA influencers, AIPAC-owned politicians, and mainstream US media outlets.

Israel in English: Accusing us of r*pe is a blood libel😿 Israel in Hebrew: We MUST r*pe Palestinians & make it official "regulated policy of the state"😼 Translation is Israel's Achilles' heel & kryptonite. The worst curse on their Hasbara machine. One click & it crumbles!

Avraham Shalom was the Israeli spy chief who captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann. After decades of fighting with Palestinians, he lamented: Israel became "brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II. Similar, not identical." (From the 2012 doc "The Gatekeepers")

"Blood libel" refers to a specific extreme Christian practice in the distant past where Jews were accused of taking and murdering non-Jewish children as part of an obscure religious ritual. It does not mean "thing that makes Israel look bad." Jesus.

This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opi…

One of the silliest contradictions in the Zionist narrative is that it is simultaneously (A) antisemitic to criticize Israel and (B) antisemitic to conflate Israel with all Jews. Zionists will officially claim that it is possible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, but that's not actually their position in practice. We know this because there is not a single vocal and forceful critic of Israel who isn't regularly accused of antisemitism by Zionists. Not one. They might let you get away with a rare timid critique of individual Israeli officials, but consistently and vocally criticizing the apartheid state of Israel itself (and your own government's alliances with it) is strictly forbidden. When you consistently slam literally all of Israel's critics as antisemites, you are communicating that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and that Israel therefore represents all Jews. You are therefore necessarily doing the very thing you decry as antisemitic.

Health is Membership: Wendell Berry's Wisdom Explained | City of Bloomington Public Forum on Data Centers. #Health #Community #Wellbeing