Meyrick D'Souza

'This exhibit completely dismantled everything that I thought I knew.' Former pro-Palestine activist Taryn Thomas joins @JoshxHowie to discuss whether the Nova music festival exhibition has the power to change minds on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

@MalePsychology @LtAgosta @guardian @SteveStuWill Interestingly does the guardian ever mention bias against men or consider bias against men in its own journalism?

The @guardian hates stereotypes, but manages to rehash the stereotype of itself as biased and inaccurate when it comes to gender issues. For example, their review @SteveStuWill's excellent new book apparently didn't notice in Chapter 1 examples contradicting their quote (below)

On This Day — May 25, 1948 They put a bullet in the back of his head. The man they executed that day was Witold Pilecki — the only person in history who voluntarily walked into Auschwitz. In 1940, this Polish cavalry officer deliberately got himself arrested during a Nazi roundup in Warsaw. Using a false identity, he entered hell as prisoner #4859. For two and a half years, Pilecki lived as a starving skeleton in striped rags while secretly building a resistance network inside the camp. He smuggled out the first detailed eyewitness reports of the Nazi death machine to the Allies — gas chambers, selections, medical experiments, and the systematic murder of Jews. While he was there, more than 1,000 Jews per day were being gassed and burned. At its peak in 1944, the killing rate reached more than 6,000 per day. He saw it all. He documented it all. He risked everything so the world would know. In April 1943, Pilecki escaped by overpowering a guard at a bakery outside the wire. He rejoined the fight, battled in the Warsaw Uprising, and later resisted the Soviet occupation of Poland. For his courage, the communist regime tortured him, staged a show trial, and executed him on May 25, 1948. One of the great heroes of the 20th century. Remember his name: Witold Pilecki.

Imagine a propaganda machine so well-funded it can paralyze Western cities and take over campuses under the guise of activism. Notice how the loudest outcry is reserved for only one specific conflict, while much deadlier wars elsewhere get zero attention. The coordination is hard to ignore. Islamist accounts were already screaming about a "genocide" in Gaza while the October 7 massacre was still happening. These calls were trending while Israeli women were being r*ped and families were being slaughtered in their homes, weeks (!) before a single Israeli soldier even set foot in Gaza. The disinformation campaign started exactly 4 minutes after the border breach. A major Gazan influencer was already spinning a narrative to flip the facts before the world even knew what was happening. According to X he is in Indonesia currently, even though he said he's in Gaza. This isn't a spontaneous protest movement. This is a pre-planned operation. Will the West finally connect the dots?

Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring. They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died. France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend

Here’s the easiest way to understand the Arab–Israeli conflict. In Egypt, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Christian girls are kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam. By law, once that happens, they can’t return to Christianity, and they can’t marry a non-Muslim. Thousands of such cases have been documented. In Islam, it’s not only people who have religions, lands do too. Christian lands were “converted” to Islam the same way those girls were: through force. And once that happens, the land can never go back. If the “family” of that land, its original people, tries to reclaim it, it’s treated as apostasy. Because in Islamic theology, once a land “marries” Islam, it belongs to it forever. That’s the heart of the Arab–Israeli conflict: Israel is the land that refused to stay kidnapped.

Don’t look away. This is what Khamenei has done and is doing!

My grandfather @RabbiAviWeiss told me this story over the weekend. I'm sharing it for no reason other than it's a beautiful example of the kind of quiet, selfless heroism we should all try to embody. In 1993, my grandfather Rabbi Avi Weiss was leading protests outside the home of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk (A.K.A. "Ivan the Terrible") in Seven Hills, Ohio. At the height of the tension, the mayor of Seven Hills — George Chandick — received my grandfather in his office with dignity and respect. At the end of the meeting, my grandfather spontaneously hugged him in front of the TV cameras. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran the photo on the front page. Residents were quoted saying they would never vote for someone who hugged a Jew. Chandick lost his reelection bid by 30 votes. When my grandfather called to apologize, Chandick stopped him. "If I had to do it again, I would do it no differently." He meant it. He later walked into my grandfather's Riverdale, NY synagogue and received a hero's welcome from the community whose dignity he had defended — at real personal cost. The Plain Dealer followed up two days after the election with the headline: "Rabbi laments mayor's loss." My grandfather lamented it. I'm not sure George Chandick ever did.

The Sewage Doesn't Lie. Polly Toynbee Said So. In 2010, Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian that the census was missing millions of people and that Britain had no reliable idea of how many people actually lived here. Her evidence? Sewage. Thames Water, she explained, could calculate true population numbers from outflow data regardless of who was registered, who had filled in a form, or who the authorities knew about. The sewage doesn't discriminate. It counts everyone. In Slough alone, she reported, Thames Water's data revealed 30,000 more people than officially registered. She was making the argument that inner city constituencies were being underfunded because the state couldn't count its own population. She was right. Fifteen years later, Thames Water commissioned a study using precisely that methodology. The results were obtained by the Telegraph under freedom of information. The study estimated that up to 585,000 people are living illegally in the London water supply zone. Nationally, the figure exceeds one million. David Wood, the former Director General of Immigration Enforcement at the Home Office, told the Home Affairs Select Committee the same thing in 2017, before the Channel crossing surge had even begun. Since 2018, over 200,000 people have arrived by small boat alone, with a removal rate of just 4 percent. The methodology Toynbee championed in 2010 to argue for more funding for Labour inner city seats has produced a number the Guardian would never publish. The sewage still doesn't lie. It has simply started telling a different story. This matters for several reasons. The official population figures used to allocate public services, draw constituency boundaries and calculate per capita spending are wrong. They have been wrong for years and the undercounting runs in one direction only. The people not on the register, not in the census, not in the ONS migration statistics, are overwhelmingly concentrated in the cities and inner suburbs that have absorbed the largest numbers of unregistered arrivals. The schools that are overflowing, the GP surgeries that cannot cope, the housing that is unaffordable: these are not random failures of public administration. They are the predictable consequence of a population that the state either cannot or will not count honestly. The political class that calls concerned citizens far-right for raising these questions has known about the undercounting problem for at least fifteen years. Toynbee's 2010 piece was not a fringe complaint. It was a mainstream left-wing argument made in Britain's most prominent left-wing newspaper, citing official ONS data, Thames Water analysis and the testimony of sitting MPs. The numbers were smaller then. The methodology was the same. What has changed is not the tools for counting. What has changed is what the counting reveals. In 2010 it revealed underfunded Labour constituencies. In 2026 it reveals a population of over a million people living here without authorisation, in a country whose government describes 171,000 net migration as a secure Britain and calls anyone who disagrees a bigot. Polly Toynbee was right in 2010. The sewage doesn't lie. She just didn't anticipate where the truth would eventually lead. theguardian.com/commentisfree/… "The study estimated that up to 585,000 people are living illegally in the London water supply zone. Nationally, the figure exceeds one million."

Former pro-Palestinian activist on the @novaexhibition ‘This exhibit dismantled everything I thought I knew.’

Until 1948, "Palestinian" overwhelmingly meant Jewish. The Palestine Post (1932): Jewish newspaper, renamed the Jerusalem Post after Israel was founded. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra (1936): built by Bronislaw Huberman to rescue Jewish musicians from Europe. The Palestine Electric Company (Pinhas Rutenberg, 1923): Jewish. The Anglo-Palestine Bank: became Bank Leumi. Keren Hayesod was the "Palestine Foundation Fund." The Jewish Agency's official name was the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Jews carried "Palestinian" passports under the Mandate and used the term as a self-identifier. Arab leaders, meanwhile, rejected it. February 1919: the First Palestinian Arab Congress in Jerusalem declared Palestine "part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time." The slogan was Suriyya al-Janubiyya - Southern Syria. 1937: Auni Abd al-Hadi, founder of the Istiqlal Party, told the Peel Commission: "There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. Our country was for centuries part of Syria." 1946: Princeton's Philip Hitti, the most prominent Arab-American historian of his generation, told the Anglo-American Committee: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not." The PLO wasn't founded until 1964. And even its founding charter explicitly disclaimed sovereignty over the West Bank (Jordanian) and Gaza (Egyptian). A distinct Palestinian national identity, defined against Israel rather than as part of pan-Arabism or Greater Syria, is largely a post-1967 phenomenon. PLO Executive Committee member Zuheir Mohsen put it bluntly in Trouw, March 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity. Today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese." None of this means the millions who identify as Palestinian today aren't sincere. Identities get constructed, reinforced, become real. That's how nationalism works everywhere. But the sequence matters. A Jewish national identity tied to this land is millennia old. The Arab "Palestinian" identity, as something distinct from Syrian or pan-Arab, is a 20th-century construction. And for its first decades, the people we now call Palestinians actively rejected the label.

What changed in 1948? The Jews stopped being Palestinians. May 14, 1948. Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of Independence. The next morning, the residents of the Yishuv wake up as Israelis. The label they'd carried for decades was simply vacated. The Palestine Post → Jerusalem Post (1950). Palestine Symphony Orchestra → Israel Philharmonic. Palestine Electric Company → Israel Electric Corporation. Anglo-Palestine Bank → Bank Leumi le-Israel. Palestine pound → Israeli lira. Jewish Agency for Palestine → just the Jewish Agency. "Palestinian" passports → Israeli ones. Within 24 months, "Palestinian" had been stripped off every Jewish institution that had worn it. Now the Arab side. Arabs did not rush to claim the empty label in 1948. They didn't claim it for another generation. In 1948, the Arabs who fled or remained still called themselves Arabs. The Arab League's war wasn't fought in the name of "Palestine" as a nation. It was fought to prevent partition and absorb the territory into existing Arab states. Transjordan took the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in 1950 simply annexed them; the residents became Jordanian citizens with Jordanian passports. Egypt took Gaza and ran it under military administration. No citizenship, no nation, no "Palestine." The one institutional use of "Palestinian" that survived 1948 was a refugee category: UNRWA, created December 1949, defined "Palestine refugees" as a humanitarian classification. Not a nationality. It kept the word alive in international bureaucratic language while the Arab world itself wasn't using it nationally. Then came the long appropriation. 1964. Nasser sponsors the founding of the PLO in Cairo. The original charter (Article 24) explicitly disclaims any sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza, or the Himmah area. Read that again. The founding document of the Palestine Liberation Organization renounces claims to the West Bank and Gaza. Because in 1964, those were Arab lands belonging to Jordan and Egypt. The PLO's purpose was to liberate the part Israel held, not those parts. 1967. Israel takes the West Bank and Gaza in six days. Suddenly Jordan and Egypt no longer hold the territory, and the Arab residents there are no longer Jordanians or under Egyptian rule. The pan-Arab framework had just been humiliated on the battlefield. A new identity was needed. 1968. The PLO charter is rewritten. Article 24's disclaimer disappears. The West Bank and Gaza are now central to Palestinian national claims. The label has been fully transferred. Sequence: 1917–1948: "Palestinian" = Jewish institutions and self-identification; Arabs reject the term and call themselves Arabs / Southern Syrians. 1948: Jews drop the label and become Israelis. The word goes dormant on the Arab side, surviving mainly as a UN refugee category. 1948–1967: Arabs in the West Bank are Jordanians. Arabs in Gaza are stateless subjects of Egyptian military rule. "Palestinian" is not yet a national identity. 1964–1968: The PLO transitions the label into a national identity but only after 1967 makes pan-Arabism politically untenable. 1948 didn't create a Palestinian Arab nation. It vacated a Jewish label and left a 20-year identity gap that Arab nationalism took until 1968 to fill.

A rarely mentioned fact: several European regimes didn’t just “look away” from Nazi expulsions of Jews. Slovakia paid Germany 500 RM per deported Jew. Croatia’s Ustaša cooperated and paid too. Romania ran its own deportations and “emigration for cash.” Bulgaria deported Jews from occupied lands. Vichy France used its own police.

History truly shows that the Nazis did Infact work side by side to eliminate the Jewish people ! No one was given a pass not even Christian Jews . Many don't know that the former PLO leader (Yasser Arafat) was the Nephew of the (Grand Mufti) who worked with the Nazis to eliminate the Jews that's why the (Camp David Accords) failed the PLO leader Yasser Arafat was never a truthful broker for peace ,that's why Bill Clinton has admitted ,despite Israel offering unbelievable concessions to appease the PLO in hopes of a peace deal , Clinton said the accords were deliberately sabotaged by Yasser and the PLO .

Arbel Yehoud was sexually assaulted by terrorists almost every single day during her 482 days of captivity with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Romi Gonen was raped by four different men on separate occasions during her captivity in Gaza, including a “nurse” who was supposed to care for her wounds. Sasha Troufanov said that his PIJ captor repeatedly tried to force him to perform a sexual act on himself. He was filmed while showering. Alon Ohel was sexually abused by his captor while showering. Guy Gilboa Dalal said his Hamas captor sexually assaulted him after a shower, holding a gun to his head and a knife to his throat. Amit Soussana was sexually assaulted by her captor while held hostage. Dafna Elyakim, 15, said her captor touched her constantly and told her she would stay in Gaza to marry him and have his children. Rom Braslavski revealed that PIJ terrorists sexually abused and humiliated him. Aviva Siegel told the UN that she saw a young girl in captivity crying after her captor followed her into the bathroom and forced her to perform oral sex. Ilana Gritzewsky woke up on October 7 in Gaza, half-naked, her breasts exposed and her pants pulled down, surrounded by seven terrorists. Agam Goldstein-Almog testified that she witnessed another hostage being forced at gunpoint to touch, and be touched by her captor. These are only the stories we know. Hundreds more will never be heard, because most of Hamas's rape victims were murdered. On October 7, countless bodies were found without underwear, with mutilated genitalia, or with broken pelvises. Several Nova survivors also testified that they heard terrorists gang-raping women and men during the massacre. How many more testimonies do you need to believe that Hamas and PIJ used rape as a weapon of war?

For 100 years, Jews were a cherished part of the Left. They built the Labor Movement, wrote the New Deal, marched with Dr. King. Yet today, the Left has turned on the Jews. Why did Jews become Democrats? And why did the Left turn on them? My new book answers those questions:

🚨How Muslim leaders and Nazis collaborated during WWII to murder Jews. Waffen-SS Standartenführer Harun el-Raschid Bey praying with Muslim SS soldiers of the Osttürkische Waffen-Verband der SS in Slovakia, 1944. The unit was backed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, one of Hitler’s closest Arab allies. These Muslim SS units later fought in the Warsaw Uprising and anti-partisan operations in Eastern Europe. A chapter of history many prefer to ignore.

ATERRADOR: Yasmeen Khan, dueña de un salón de belleza, ofrecía cursos gratuitos a jóvenes hindúes para atraerlas. Una vez allí, las drogaba en sus bebidas. Cuando perdían el conocimiento, llamaba a su esposo Mohammed Khan, quien las violaba mientras ella vigilaba la entrada. Grababan los abusos para chantajearlas y obligarlas a tener relaciones con más hombres. Al ser interrogada, Yasmeen justificó los crímenes diciendo que ayudar a violar a “niñas infieles” las llevaría al Paraíso. Esto es el Islam.

@CptAllenHistory World War 2 officially started on September 1, 1939, with Nazi invasion of Poland. Hours later, British troops would fire on and kill 2 jews fleeing the nazis on a refugee ship, the Tiger Hill history.state.gov/historicaldocu… Unarmed jewish refugees were the first war casualties of Brits

Britain suspending arm sales to Israel as it fights a war of survival reminds me today is the 85th anniversary of Britain firing its first shots (& claiming its first victims) of WWII. It was not Nazis the British killed, but Jewish refugees fleeing certain death for their homeland in Eretz Israel. It was this day (Sept 2) in 1939 that the Tiger Hill ship carrying 1,400 Jewish refugees - fleeing mainly Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia - was intercepted by the British Royal Navy off the coast of Tel Aviv. The Brits opened fire and murdered three of those desperate Jewish refugees. The Tiger Hill first sailed from Romania a month earlier, and the Jews on board were already malnourished. After several weeks, several of the refugees came down with dysentery. When they could finally see salvation - the beach of Tel Aviv - in the only land that wanted them, the British stole that hope from them. With the Tiger Hill in sight, Jews gathered on the beach to welcome and help the refugees (see photo below). About 200 of the passengers managed to make it ashore and blend in with the crowd to avoid capture. The remaining 1,200 refugees were arrested and confined as prisoners to the Sarafand detention camp. The British were “merely” enforcing the 1939 White Paper - which was declared to be in violation of their Mandate by the League of Nations. The White Paper was a British capitulation to Arab terrorism and an appeasement of the demands of the evil Mufti to end Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel. The British enforcement of the illegal White Paper was, of course, not the same as the Nazis who shot, tortured, starved, and gassed six million Jews. However, by closing the gates of Eretz Israel to Jewish immigration when it was needed most, the British helped seal the fates of far too many Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities. #Education #Israel #Palestine