Genuinely sickening to see these attempts at cloaking this as something they’re doing out of care for children, and not the monstrous fascist secret police bullshit it is.
“DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited, abused, and sex trafficked,” the homeland security department said in a statement to Fox 11 Los Angeles.
If you would like to learn a more accurate representation of this period of history, this chapter which has been made freely available and is thoroughly sourced is something I would recommend reading. An extremely relevant excerpt:
In a 1938 diary entry, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and later Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, underlined the “necessity” of “removing the Arabs from our midst”. But he recognised that timing was critical. “What is inconceivable in normal times”, he wrote, “is possible in revolutionary times.” When the 1948 Arab-Israel War broke out, Zionist forces seized the opportunity to bring about what Ben-Gurion euphemistically referred to as “great changes in the composition of the population of the country”. During the war, some 700,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of the population – fled or were driven from their homes in what became Israel. Historians debate the extent to which this displacement unfolded according to a central plan. What cannot plausibly be denied is that Zionist massacres as well as expulsions were a major catalyst of Palestinian flight, that Zionist leaders welcomed the exodus, and that military commanders carried out evictions within an ideological context that had broadly legitimated population transfer as a strategic desideratum.
After the dust settled, Israeli authorities moved to consolidate Jewish domination within the new state whose expanded boundaries (established by armistice agreements in 1949 and known as the “Green Line”) encompassed 78 percent of historic Palestine. Israel refused to allow the return of Palestinians displaced during the war and killed thousands of unarmed refugees who made the attempt. Multiple Arab communities within Israel were expelled long after the war was over, while more than four hundred Palestinian villages, towns, and neighbourhoods inside Israel were destroyed to make way for Jewish settlement. Property owned by Palestinian refugees as well as Palestinians who remained to become citizens of Israel was systematically confiscated. This vast expropriation left the Israeli state in possession or control of fully 93 percent of the land within the Green Line, which authorities allocated almost exclusively for use by Jews. In the half-century after independence, the state established more than seven hundred Jewish localities and zero Arab localities, excepting several townships built to facilitate the concentration and dispossession of Bedouin Arabs. Even as Israeli administrators relentlessly promoted Jewish immigration, they directed Jewish settlement strategically to encircle Arab villages and restrict the Arab minority to “small enclaves”. The overarching policy was to “Judaize” the entire territory by “concentrating the Arabs and dispersing the Jews.”
and another, which illuminates what happened before even WW2.
As Jabotinsky prophesied, expanding Jewish settlement frequently provoked Palestinian opposition as well as resistance. Such opposition was typically overruled by means of discriminatory administration while resistance was suppressed by force. In the Mandate period, the Zionist leadership rejected the democratic principle of majority rule in Palestine so long as Jews comprised a minority, on the correct assumption that an Arab electoral majority would vote to end Jewish immigration and settlement. Between 1936 and 1939, British armed forces along with Jewish paramilitaries viciously crushed a Palestinian national revolt. After the 1948 War, Israel subjected some 90 percent of its Arab citizens to military rule. This emergency regime facilitated the destruction of Arab property and expropriation of Arab land until it was lifted in 1966, by which time the state’s demographic objectives within the Green Line had been substantially accomplished. The pattern repeated in the OPT from the following year. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967: three-quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a state. The occupation has been enforced through harsh repression including deportation, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and unlawful killings. By one estimate, Israel jailed more than 800,000 Palestinians from the OPT between 1967 and 2016; those detained were “routinely subjected to torture”.
“This is what happens in a dictatorship, and these are test cases,” said Eric Lee, a lawyer who represents Momodou Taal, a Cornell University Ph.D. student and advocate for Palestinian rights whose visa was revoked. “If the government can get away with doing this to these students, it can do it to everybody in this country. Your citizenship won’t save you. … Your views will be next.”
Taal sued the government on the grounds of free speech this year. After the case was filed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement called on Taal to turn himself in for deportation. Taal didn’t turn himself in and continued the case until just over a week ago, when he issued a public statement on X sharing that he had left the country.
“Given what we have seen across the United States,” he wrote, “I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs. I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted.”
The suit has now been withdrawn, but Taal’s lawyers say the implications of this case go well beyond their client.
“The First Amendment applies to people who are physically in the United States, regardless of their alienage, regardless of what country they were born in, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their immigration status,” Lee said. “By … saying that attending a protest makes one a threat to American foreign policy, the administration is admitting that the Constitution is getting in the way of the fight for democracy. Something is not right there.”
God damn this is bleak.
Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn’t using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn’t really aware the company was tracking that”.
“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”
Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.
“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”
Genocide is actually very clearly defined under international law. To quote directly from the source:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Any single one of these criteria individually is enough to meet the definition of genocide. Every single one of these has already occurred and is ongoing, and it is only through pure delusion, media control, and wishful ignorance that anyone can claim otherwise.
There is virtually no dissent among actual scholars and experts in the field of international law, Israel is unequivocally perpetrating genocide. They have simply not been held to account for their actions yet, due primarily to complicity from allies and collaborators who do not want to be criminalized for their actions as well. People are also not their rulers, and they have been watching those running their governments provide diplomatic, strategic, and political cover for some of the worst atrocities in human history.
Make no mistake though, justice will come for Israel, and hopefully every state and individual actor who has supported and covered for it as well.
For people like yourself, I hope you understand that at some point in the future you’re going to have to live in a world that sees you for exactly what you are. Israel will be remembered as exactly what it is, and you will know you were one of its defenders.
When you hear stories of traumatized, maimed, orphaned children, of mothers forced to endure c sections without anesthesia, of the weeping friends and family of journalists, medical workers, educators, caretakers, and innocents of all walks of life as they and their loved ones were targeted and massacred by an inhuman genocidal apartheid state, you will have to reckon with the fact that you stood on the side of the perpetrators.
$40 million for this bullshit instead of literally anything useful or productive at all.