Silverseren

joined 3 months ago
 

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., repeatedly suggested a leading Arab American activist is a Hamas supporter when she testified Tuesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes, and he told her she should hide her "head in a bag."

The activist, Maya Berry, said repeatedly that she did not support Hamas and was "disappointed" by the minuteslong exchange toward the end of a hearing called "A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America."

"You are the executive director of the Arab American Institute, are you not?" Kennedy said at the beginning of the exchange. She said she was and agreed with Kennedy that she is a Democratic activist.

"You support Hamas, do you not?" Kennedy asked, referring to the militant group behind the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. The question prompted gasps and surprised laughs from the audience.

"Senator, oddly enough, I'm going to say thank you for that question, because it demonstrates the purpose of our hearing today in a very effective way," Berry responded. Kennedy then cut her off and insisted he needed a yes-or-no answer.

 

As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.

 

As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Sure, there's plenty of preservatives we don't use anymore because there are way healthier alternatives. But there's also plenty of anti-science people who fearmonger about any and every preservative despite knowing nothing about its chemistry or even any claims of harm.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I really don't understand the people who fearmonger about preservatives. Do you want food to go bad? Preserving things in salt and other methods are as old as cooking itself and are responsible for feeding people around the world in horrible famine times.

 

Israel had initially agreed to facilitate the medical evacuation of hundreds of sick and wounded children from Gaza for treatment in the UAE. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel called the decision 'a cruel game by the Israeli government with children's lives'

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

One funny thing to note is that, outside of just overt racism, all the arguments to use against Harris (that were used in the last election and primarily from the left) are ones that...won't exactly make her seem bad to conservatives. Like, are you really going to use a "she's tough on crime" argument against her?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)

 

The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.

The constant begging for money, the malnourished population, the open sewage — all of that was familiar to us as veteran war zone doctors. But add in the incredible population density, the overwhelming numbers of badly maimed children and amputees, the constant hum of drones, the smell of explosives and gunpowder — not to mention the constant earth-shaking explosions — and it’s no wonder UNICEF has declared the Gaza Strip as “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”

 

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

"Earshot found that with the minimum registered interval of 24 milliseconds, this tank would have to have been positioned just 13 metres away from the car. With the maximum interval of 40 milliseconds, the tank would have still been only 23 metres away from the car. This analysis suggests that the tank had to be positioned within close range (13–23 metres) of the car when it fired the shots that killed Layan. At such proximity, it is not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children.

Earshot’s audio ballistic analysis supports the final words of Layan Hamada: the gunfire came from a tank that was next to them."


"Comparing the exit hole and varying levels of destruction helps reconstruct the cone of impact from the explosion, and in turn, reveals the direction from which the ambulance was shot (Figure 13). This direction is consistent with the location of Israeli tanks visible in satellite imagery from between 29 January and 8 February.

Our assessment of the position of the tanks at the time of the attack, together with the direction of the shot, suggests that the ambulance was likely hit by ammunition from an Israeli tank."

4
The Killing of Hind Rajab (forensic-architecture.org)
 

On 29 January 2024, a six-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza City, Hind Rajab, pleaded over the phone for emergency workers to rescue her from a bullet-ridden car. Her body was found two weeks later, alongside the bodies of six of her family members. FA was asked by Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines to investigate the circumstances of their killing.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago

Those of us who aren't being harassed and sent death threats by them can, sure. But that's kind of the problem.

 

While some of their language has changed, the sentiment of this latest aggressive movement is just as distressing. It’s time for the games industry to stand up to it

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

The Gamergaters really wanted the game to get bad reviews so they could use it to fuel their self-victimhood.

 

While some of their language has changed, the sentiment of this latest aggressive movement is just as distressing. It’s time for the games industry to stand up to it

 

Jenin has endured plenty of rough days lately, but May 21 outdid them all. In the course of one hour in the morning, snipers killed seven of the city's residents, all of them innocent passersby, even though the streets were quiet and the soldiers had no cause to open fire.

They shot from high up in two buildings, called Rabia and A-Rein, just outside the camp, and the dead included two teenagers and the director of the surgical ward at the Jenin Governmental Hospital, who was just getting out of his car in the hospital's parking lot.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago

They're claiming it's because of weather again, but it feels more likely that they're trying to remove evidence and discussion of the pier being used by the IDF as a staging point for the recent massacre of Palestinians.