Holden Cruz🇦🇺🇮🇱

I am horrified and angered by the swastikas painted on homes and synagogues in Queens, including on a plaque honoring survivors of Kristallnacht. This is not just vandalism — it is a deliberate act of antisemitic hatred meant to instill fear.

There is no place for antisemitism in Queens or anywhere in our city. I stand in solidarity with our Jewish neighbors. Their safety, dignity, and belonging are non-negotiable.

The NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating and I am confident those responsible will be held accountable.

The problem with answering, Owen, is that it's long. Because you aren't a little wrong, but spectacularly wrong in kind of evil ways. But you told me not to evade. So let's do it. 1. “No protests in British history have been bigger than opposition to the American and British slaughter of Arabs in Iraq, so what now?” Let's let the twitterati judge. February 15, 2003, London. Police estimate of 750,000 participants in anti-Iraq War protest. Organizers claim as many as 2 million. The biggest one-off protest ever held in London. But here's what I said: "The slaughter of Arabs has never triggered anything remotely similar in scale and regularity and consistency in the history of British marches." Because there were literally *millions* who marched over Gaza, cumulatively, week in and week out, across the entirety of the UK. And many millions more throughout the West. It was everywhere. ACLED recorded 48,000–51,000 protests from October 2023 through 2025 over Gaza, across 130 countries. A third of the city of Amsterdam marched. Hundreds of thousands in Toronto and New York. A million in Pakistan, a million in Algiers, hundreds of thousands in Rabat and Jakarta. Countries that have no connection whatsoever to Israel, aren’t allies of Israel and don’t arm Israel saw the identical phenomenon. And still your best analysis is “you’re a WESTERN ALLY?” Just as an analyst, you really think that encompasses the phenomenon? And even that’s not the truly remarkable part. The remarkable part was the repetitiveness itself, the regularity, the duration and stamina of weekly protests for months and then years. There’s never been anything like it, not for any war, not in the history of Britain. Not even close. That’s a simple fact. Denying that fact is therefore a bad strategy on your part. A better strategy would be to try to explain it. Maybe it’s not nefarious antisemitism – or at least not *just* an obsession with Jews embedded deep in progressive and Muslim-world politics and identity. Maybe it’s because people could see the victims on their TikTok feeds, something they’d never seen at that scale from any previous war. Maybe. I suppose we’ll know in the next war if this is a profound shift in consciousness inaugurated by changes in how we consume information – which would be a beautiful discovery, because it would mean it isn't a surge in antisemitism, and it would also mean that it will be harder to fight wars in future, because everyone everywhere will see the pain of war up close. That would be a beautiful and redemptive outcome, a huge silver lining flowing from the catastrophic tragedy of Gaza. Or maybe none of that will happen, the only images that will ever flood anyone's feed will be of Jewish criminality, and it really is in the end just a new version of the old civilization-organizing bigotry it was of old, once again, like it always does, masquerading as righteousness. 2. “No British columnist has written more about the Saudi war on Yemen.” Holy shit, Owen, it isn’t about you. What a strange and irrelevant claim. Coverage and exposure for Gaza was and remains orders of magnitude – multiple orders of magnitude – larger than it ever was for Yemen or Sudan or Syria or all other conflicts underway everywhere put together in the last three years. It’s vastly greater than Yemen ever got in the darkest moments of that conflict. Even when tens of thousands of children were dying of hunger. Not three-fold or five-fold, not even 100-fold. We're talking 1000-fold and more. 3. “There has not been a Western facilitated war on the very right of Yemenis to exist as a people going back GENERATIONS” You think you're helping the cause of Gaza here, but you're just minimizing the evils of the Yemen war. There has not, in fact, ever been a Yemeni campaign to erase Saudi Arabia. You notice? Nor a pan-Arab and Iranian campaign that launched multiple annihilationist wars and built vast and sophisticated terrorist movements to destroy the entire Saudi people – which might have led the Saudis to take seriously a Houthi commitment to annihilate them. I voted repeatedly for a Palestinian state. My own politics didn’t destroy those attempts. It was the annihilationists on the other side that did that. Up till now you’re just hedging and wriggling and telling half-truths. Here you get kinda evil. And ironically, over the very thing you think gives you moral weight: Yemen’s suffering. 4. “the thousands slaughtered by Saudi bombs over many years in a Yemeni civil war with multiple armed actors is a) a hideous crime b) not even approaching the number of Palestinians slaughtered either in absolute or proportionate numbers, and certainly not in the time scale of Gaza. About 9,000 Yemeni civilians were killed Saudi air strikes in the space of 7 years." Jesus Christ, Owen. The famine. The fucking man-made famine, Owen. Once again, it isn’t about you. You know there are 377,000 dead from that war and you cherry-pick the sliver of statistics that will downplay that into nothingness just to win an argument on twitter. Tell me again how much you cared about Yemen. Just the deaths from military action were over 150,000. And the blockade wasn’t carried out with Western military hardware? It was, dear Owen. “Do you agree that’s a terrible crime?” Yes, you man-child. One of the greatest ever committed. “(Let’s see if you even do or if you supported the Saudi war - spit it out!)” I’m a big fan of bombing the shit of out the totalitarian, slavery-legalizing Houthis. But the famine, holy shit, man. The famine should have shaken the foundations of the world. It never did. Because Jews weren’t involved. Ball's in your court, buddy.

The Supreme Court just eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. Trump and Republicans are rigging the rules to suppress the right to vote. If that’s the game, Democratic states must fight back to protect our democracy.

Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, served as Israel’s Prime Minister once identified as a “Palestinian” before the state of Israel existed.