Walter Kass

Good morning………

1948 was a genocidal war.

@miadmaleki He will land “boots on the ground.” @CliffordDMay

The internal Iranian regime narrative has shifted markedly in the past 72 hours. Multiple officials have now openly acknowledged Iran’s structural gasoline deficit, war-damaged energy infrastructure, and the urgent need for consumption management. Fuel shortages and tightened rationing are pushing drivers across the country into a rapidly growing gasoline black market. Citizens are describing hours-long lines at filling stations and sharply inflated under-the-table prices. a clear signal that the official quota system is breaking down on the ground. @IranIntl On the export front, the picture is just as stark: Iranian crude exports have collapsed by more than 80% between mid-March and late April, measured against a March baseline of 23.4 million barrels. @Vortexa. And there is no easy workaround. Iran’s overland export alternatives, via Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, have a combined capacity of only 250,000–300,000 bpd. The math simply doesn’t work for Tehran. The cumulative picture: a regime now publicly conceding what it long denied, a domestic fuel market under acute stress, and an export channel with no viable replacement.

He will land “boots on the ground.”

This is a devious rhetorical trick. Labeling someone a “Nakba survivor” is designed to evoke instant sympathy and a false sense of moral clarity, but it is little more than taxpayer-funded propaganda. Consider the absurdity: roughly 99% of Palestinian Arabs alive in 1949 survived the war and its displacements. Calling the displaced a “survivor” stretches the word beyond recognition. It is a newly coined term, crafted in academia and activist circles long after the events. Its real genius lies in creating false equivalence. It places ordinary Palestinian civilians who were displaced amid a war their own leaders launched on the same moral plane as Holocaust survivors (of whom only about one-third emerged alive). It airbrushes away the ~6,000 Jews killed in 1948, elevates the ~12,000 Arab deaths, and erases the thousands of Jews forcibly expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem and other areas. By anointing the displaced as sacred “survivors,” the term invites us to forget that the Nazi-aligned Palestinian leadership rejected the UN partition plan, chose war to prevent any Jewish state, and promised quick victory while urging Arabs to flee. It glosses over Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which explicitly invited Arab inhabitants to “participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” And it conveniently overlooks the ~150,000 Arabs who stayed put, accepted Israeli citizenship, and whose descendants now form over 20% of Israel’s population. This is international grievance politics pushed by the Mayor of New York City, who genuinely believes that Palestinians should be able to “return to their homes” – a nonsensical idea designed to justify perpetual victimhood and violence. The move weaponizes real civilian hardship while inverting roles: turning a war of choice and rejectionism into an unprovoked “catastrophe” inflicted by the intended victims. It sustain grievance and does not nothing to advance peace.

“Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.” —Raymond Carver buff.ly/QASHPfx

Yup.

Editing in cafes

New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. For the overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers, the connection to Israel is not political or social media theater. It is ancestral, spiritual, historic, and deeply personal. At a moment of rising antisemitism, including a terror threat against a NYC synagogue and hateful protests targeting Jewish families in Brooklyn, public rhetoric matters, especially heading into the Sabbath as many Jewish New Yorkers already feel vulnerable and unsettled. We can uphold the humanity of all people while also recognizing that Jewish identity and the deep connection many Jews feel to Israel deserve the same respect afforded to every other community. Referencing this chapter of history without acknowledging the full history, including the post-World War II U.N. partition plan supporting two states for two peoples, which Jews accepted, does nothing to advance understanding. New Yorkers should expect leadership that lowers the temperature, brings people together, and makes every community feel seen, respected, and safe, including Jewish New Yorkers.

Charles Dickens fought his depression by walking through London at night. One October he set out at 2 in the morning and walked 30 miles, all the way to his country home in Kent. In 1860 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 150 years to catch up. Dickens called his bad spells "spectres." They came back every time he started a new novel and sometimes hung on for months. His mood would fall apart, his sleep would collapse, and the only thing that pulled him out was walking. He explained his method in an essay called "Night Walks," published on July 21, 1860 in his weekly magazine All the Year Round. He had tried fighting his insomnia from bed and lost. So he changed the plan. The fix, he wrote, was "getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise." A worried mind cannot fix itself by worrying more in bed. You have to get up and move. Most nights he walked 12 to 20 miles. A friend called it "violent walking." Dickens wrote that on these walks his wandering self had "many miles upon miles of streets in which it could, and did, have its own solitary way." Today, walking is one of the most powerful tools doctors have against depression. In 2012 a team of researchers pulled together eight high-quality studies of walking as a depression treatment. The effect was as strong as the antidepressants doctors actually prescribe. The biggest test came from Duke University. The SMILE study took 202 adults with serious depression and split them into four groups: supervised exercise, home exercise, the drug Zoloft, or a placebo pill. After 16 weeks, the people who exercised did just as well as the people on Zoloft. A 2024 review of 75 studies covering 8,636 patients confirmed it. Walking should be one of the first things doctors try. The reason is the thing Dickens stumbled onto in the dark. Depression runs on rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches. In 2015 Stanford researchers scanned people's brains before and after a 90-minute walk in a quiet park. The walkers had less activity in a part of the brain called the subgenual prefrontal cortex. That spot, deep behind your forehead, is the brain's worry loop. After the walk, the worry loop got quieter. The walkers said they felt less stuck inside their own heads. The brain scans agreed. A walking body shuts up a noisy mind. The street takes attention, the walking rhythm fills the head, and the dark spells lose their grip. Dickens called the streets his cure because they gave his brain somewhere else to be. The science 150 years later says he had it right. Depression hates a brain that is moving.

@simonmontefiore @RoyalFamily Mensch.

The King makes surprise visit to show solidarity to Britain’s Jews. And meet those who were stabbed in the recent terrorist attacks This means such a lot. @RoyalFamily

As a Golders Green boy in the 1950s deeply glad to see this

Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion. The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else. The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject. This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X. Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility. The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting. This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier. Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price. It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence. Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters. The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record. Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously. It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.

There are people who get drunk and expound sports opinions over-emphatically. There are people who get drunk and reminisce emotionally about an ex. If you get drunk and let loose about the Jews - the problem you have is not a drinking problem.

#Emmett ⬇️⬇️⬇️ And Iran knows whats in its arsenal, munition stocks and drone inventory. And we do not.

@Marc_Leibowitz Perhaps that's why URJ President won't confirm his membership numbers are nowhere near Pew’s estimate and his WZC slate lost 15% of its seats?

@WalterKassV It doesn't make me happy, but the numbers are the numbers. Temples and Synagogues are going out of business. Membership and attendance are down. People are assimilating out and not raising Jewish children. I'm not gloating. It's tragic.

Non-Orthodox Jews are an endangered species.

@Maria4Dist6 @NYPDPC @NYPDnews You're right. I'm sure @NYPDPC reads @NYPDnews

@WalterKassV @NYPDPC @NYPDnews @NYPDnews is the X address for NYPD.

Mayhem in Midwood, Brooklyn where I grew up up. This is a mostly Jewish neighborhood filled with peaceful, law abiding, religious families. It is filled with schools and houses of worship. To pick this neighborhood for protests is intentional and spiteful. This is Skokie, Illinois all over again. This is where the National Socialists held a Nazi March in one of the State’s biggest Jewish enclaves. It was terrifying and outrageous and that was the point. The @ACLU in a decision that to this day is viewed as highly controversial, represented the Socialists, and the case went to the US Supreme Court where the court said the First Amendment allows Nazi Socialists to March through a Jewish neighborhood, provided they don’t cross the line into violent action. This protest in Midwood is doubling down on the hate, aggression and anti-semitism. Should they cross the line into violence, the @NYPDnews must act, even if @NYCMayor is on the side of the protestors. @OneCityRisingNY @stick_dynamite @jimfornyc @Megmd514 @StopJewishHate @CUJewsIsraelis @ADL @TheKvetcher @JCAndersonNYC mjhnyc.org/events/when-na…