Dougie777

There was never a $12 billion hole in the budget. That fairy tale was cooked up to justify reckless spending and political theater. I left the incoming administration with $8 billion in reserves, not a financial apocalypse. Albany election-year bailouts are not a long-term economic strategy. The free money dries up after Election Day, but the bloated “free” programs stay forever. And here’s the part the socialists in City Hall never want to admit: the millionaires and billionaires they love demonizing already pay roughly 40% of NYC’s taxes. Keep demonizing the people creating jobs, investing in this city, and carrying the tax base, and eventually they’ll stop investing here altogether. Facts are stubborn things. Even when some politicians aren’t.

Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper > >

Mamdani blasted for planned cuts to veterans services, axing events including parade trib.al/56ZdsxJ

Netanyahu and MBZ meeting

@NetsDaily Before I read the piece I knew ND would end with a fake genocide claim and use false civilian death numbers. Unfortunately he can’t help himself. His years working at NBC ingrained in him the imperative to take every left wing cause and, despite whether true or not, report it.

Sam Zussman on fandom: “you became a fan of a team somewhere between the age of 6 and 10 and it was on account of a slightest touch. You went to a game, you met a player, you got a t-shirt, you went to a clinic. That’s stickier than your bank account.” netsdaily.com/nets-news/1097…

Let’s be honest — and I say this recognizing there are some excellent reporters at the NYT. But as an institution, the NYT has devoted enormous energy to eroding the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Its coverage too often fuels a global campaign of political, economic, and moral warfare designed to isolate Israel, strip it of American support and make it unable to defend itself. What began as reasonable criticisms of Israeli policy has, in many cases, become something far more corrosive: an unrelenting effort to recast the Jewish state itself as uniquely evil and illegitimate.

Hearing from longtime friends @nytimes there are already discussions, including up the masthead, about retracting @NickKristof column. Issues with source credibility and lack of evidence. No indications the Kristof sourcing mistakes were deliberate. Still problematic:

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped. So much has already been said. What more is there to say? My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes. I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of. And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another. Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped? I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here. But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten? So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know. This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve. Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies. Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it. And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report. A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment. But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation. So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors. No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they? A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else. And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews. Yes, alas, it really is that simple. But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't. All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved. "But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere. And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured. Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money. And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests. And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering. And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much. But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real. It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow. And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners. Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them. And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war. Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light. No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning. But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what. We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow. And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world. And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania. I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too. And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this. Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground. So what do we do now? Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown... And we soldier on. We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children. We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves. Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on. Because fuck them all.

@academic_la @abierkhatib Yes I’m sure they called while prepping dogs for rapes and preparing sharp blades for castrations. You’re such an influential IG influencer that of course they called you. Makes perfect sense. Now morally you must release the names and your recordings to the world. I’ll wait

@abierkhatib Israeli guards have admitted most of these things to me.

“ Genocide” feels too small a word for the horror the Zionists are inflicting on Palestinians…. My God!!!! “Some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings…”

Boy George shares message of solidarity with the British Jewish community. “I don’t want to be thanked for doing what is right. I have so many beautiful Jewish friends…even if I don’t know you I send you my love.”

IRAN NEGOTIATIONS RESPONSE WSJ and Al Mayadeen report that Iran is demanding an end to the blockade, unrestricted oil exports, sanctions relief, the release of frozen assets, a ceasefire in Lebanon, and continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz. On the nuclear issue, Tehran is offering to dilute part of its enriched uranium and transfer the remainder to a third country, with guarantees it would be returned if talks collapse. Iran wants all negotiations routed through Pakistan and says nuclear talks would begin only after the war ends. The main sticking point may be Lebanon, which Tehran included as part of the broader deal.

@tiredofthemall @EYakoby Maybe they don’t like dealing with the government and the military with victims that they need to fix. I’m talking doctors in Haiti. How do you equate things is unstable

@Doug1NY @EYakoby Funny thing you don't think Israel uses propaganda. You think only one side does? 😂 You're just as much of a victim of propaganda as you claim we are. Maybe they don't like dealing with a government and a military that produces the victims they need to fix.

Doctors Without Borders says there is malnutrition in Gaza due to a lack of aid. It’s quite literally impossible to host a marathon when there is supposed malnutrition.

@tiredofthemall @EYakoby You don’t know how to engage without making things up it’s a sickness. Of course Israel uses propaganda. Everybody does. The problem is you don’t even know fax from propaganda. Your adept at switching subjects.

@tiredofthemall @EYakoby You don’t respond to Doctors Without Borders as you have no answer. Just the same blah blah blah propagandist slogans. How about DWB refusing to work with Israeli doctors in Haiti and abandoning their site leading to ~ 100 deaths. Of course, you never heard of this Bubble boy

@Doug1NY @EYakoby Lmao. Everyone is sick of the perpetual victimhood. If Israel wants to be less hated, they could start by stopping bombing people. The world is sick of seeing dead civilians killed by the IDF.

@tiredofthemall @EYakoby How stupid are you whistle blowers in the organization have come out left and right about their anti-Israel bias. Plus look at their Provenly, false statements, and their obsession with Israel above all other conflicts. Your wife should divorce you

@EYakoby Doctors without borders is against Israel as well? Do you really expect anyone besides the low IQ to believe that crap? 😂 I'm embarrassed for anyone that believes that is actually true.

Not enough people are talking about this. When so-called journalism receives an award for spreading fake news about Israel, it tells you everything you need to know about where the mainstream media currently is.

Remember when the Free Palestine movement was shouting that the International Court of Justice found plausible evidence of genocide in Gaza? Then why are the President of the Court and the Chief Prosecutor saying there is no evidence? Could it be the same reason Free Palestine was shouting genocide libel even moments after the October 7 attacks? 🤔

🚨 WHATSAPP FOUNDER DONATES RECORD $200 MILLION TO ISRAELI HOSPITAL WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is donating $200 million to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. It is reportedly the largest philanthropic gift in Israel’s healthcare history. The donation is expected to help triple the size of the hospital, which currently has about 1,000 beds, and fund a new inpatient tower that will also include housing for medical staff.

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The U.S. didn't park 3 destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz to defend them, but to be attacked. The USS Truxtun, USS Rafael Peralta, and USS Mason were bait. Iran's mosquito fleet of fast attack boats would strike, satellites and radar would track the launch sites in real time, and the U.S. would destroy them before the smoke cleared. Iran has massive underground stockpiles of anti-ship missiles buried across Qeshm Island, Bandar Abbas, and Bandar Khamir. Getting Iran to reveal and use them was the whole point. This is how modern great power conflict works: you don't wait to be hit, you engineer the hit so you can hit back harder. Source: @AITelly YT

✡️ MAMDANI IN TROUBLE?: Legal expert Rabbi Mark Goldfeder @MarkGoldfeder warned Thursday that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's decision to publicly condemn an aliyah event at Park East Synagogue could expose the city to civil-rights liability if courts find a pattern of treating Jewish institutions as ideologically suspect when they need protection. Speaking with Belaaz, Goldfeder said: “A mayor is allowed to have foreign-policy opinions,” he said. “He is not allowed to use the authority of his office to single out a lawful Jewish religious event for condemnation while that event is being targeted. That is where political speech starts to look like viewpoint discrimination and unequal protection." The mayor is not just another commentator on X. He speaks for the city.” READ ⬇️ 🔗belaaz.com/news/mamdanis-…