Israeli police made dozens of arrests on Sunday as tens of thousands of protesters demanding a deal to free hostages in Gaza aimed to shut down the country in one of the largest and fiercest protests in 22 months of war.
Groups representing families of hostages organized the demonstrations, and gave an even larger estimate of attendees, as frustration grows in Israel over plans for a new military offensive in some of Gaza’s most populated areas. Many Israelis fear that could further endanger the remaining hostages. Twenty of the 50 who remain are believed to be alive.
“We don’t win a war over the bodies of hostages,” protesters chanted. Even some former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs now call for a deal to end the fighting.
Protesters gathered at dozens of places including outside politicians’ homes, military headquarters and on major highways. They blocked lanes and lit bonfires. Some restaurants and theaters closed in solidarity. Police said they arrested 38 people.
“The only way to bring (hostages) back is through a deal, all at once, without games,” former hostage Arbel Yehoud said at a demonstration in Tel Aviv. Her boyfriend Ariel Cunio is still held by Hamas.
One protester carried a photo of an emaciated Palestinian child from Gaza. Such images were once rare at Israeli demonstrations but now appear more often as outrage grows over conditions for Palestinian civilians after more than 250 malnutrition-related deaths...
We don't imagine Trump pal Netanyahu will bend to this pressure in closely- divided Israel. But it's good for the world to see that his crushing of the Gaza population isn't supported by all Israelis. Maybe one of the many lines that he's crossed will end up being the one that brings him down in the end, before every ounce of well-earned goodwill for Israel is lost forever.
... American cities, especially in blue states, are safer than they have been in decades. Baltimore, for instance, is seeing the lowest homicide rate since the 1970s (when it first started collecting statistics) thanks to the diligent efforts of Mayor Brandon Scott. A wealthy, passing-for-white male (Mullin has a Cherokee background) member of Congress flipping out about city crime today is like having a panic attack over fear of being assaulted by Goofy at Disneyland.
But cities really are full of everything that conservatives hate: liberals, feminists, diversity, LGBT people, immigrants, and so on—essentially, cosmopolitanism writ large. New York City in particular, with its millions of people from all over the world living cheek by jowl in relative harmony, is living disproof of JD Vance’s Volksgemeinschaft ideology. It proves that immigrants can be a vital part of the American fabric, and in fact always have been—and Republicans can’t stand it.
A consistent thread in the history of American conservatism is the enjoyment of inflicting sadistic violence on helpless members of disfavored groups. This stems from slavery, which required brutal violence to function at all, but was also the central pillar of the subsequent Jim Crow regime. Segregation was only the surface of a system in which “white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them … white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment,” as Hamdan Rice writes. “This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running.”
I think on some level, conservatives know perfectly well that liberal American cities are quite safe. That’s why they have to work themselves into such paroxysms of hysterical cowardice—to give themselves permission to inflict violence on the Americans they hate. It’s what happened in Los Angeles earlier this year, and it’s happening to Washington, D.C., today. Tomorrow it will be somewhere else, and unless Republicans are stopped, the violence will only escalate. “We’re gonna support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said on Newsmax recently. “I think this is an experiment that’s probably needed in a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America.”
The instruments of these racist, paranoid, MAGAt sadists are the masked thugs we see every day acting out their own violent fantasies of retribution- without- accountability. And the target isn't crime, of course. The ultimate targets are the cities that are the power bases of the Democratic Party and, specifically, the intimidation and subjugation of the people living there. The fascists are very quickly and deliberately taking us from a cold civil war to something else. Forewarned is forearmed.
Teachers from California and New York who want to work in Oklahoma public schools will be required to pass a certification test to prove they share the state's conservative political values.
Regardless of the subject or grade they teach, they'll have to show they know "the biological differences between females and males" and that they agree with the state's American history standards, which includes elements of a conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party stole the 2020 presidential election from President Donald Trump, which fact checkers have said are false.
The state Department of Education will implement the new certification test for teachers from the two largest Democrat-led states "who are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" to ensure newcomers "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids," Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, said in an interview with USA TODAY.
Walters has dubbed the new requirement an "America First" certification, in reference to one of Trump's political slogans.
Oklahoma's Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Walters, a Republican, to the helm of the state's Department of Education in September 2020 and voters then elected him for a second term in November 2022.
Oklahoma is offering teaching bonuses that go up to $50,000 to attract teachers from across the nation and has seen "a dramatic increase in teachers wanting to come to Oklahoma," Walters said. The new test is meant to ensure they weed out teachers with opposing views from the state's standards. The state, like many others, has a persisting teacher shortage.
He said the test will only apply to teachers from California and New York, for now, because those states specifically teach lessons that are antithetical to those taught in Oklahoma...
We're certain that the quality of edumacation will soar thanks to this fascist litmus test that will a) determine how much of a MAGAt dullard the prospective hire is, or b) how desperate the prospective hire has to be to lie to get a job in Ryan Walters' hellhole. There's a reason they're offering up to $50,000 bribe to come -- and if you've been to this MAGAt paradise, you'd understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment