u/Top_Plant5102

Strange people aren't more aware that Abdul El Sayed's sister Eman Abdelhadi is an outspoken extremist. Facing two counts of felony assault on law enforcement officers at an ICE protest by the way. Everyone gets their day in court. But the things she says in public should be a warning.

Some people will say it doesn't matter what his sister does. Abdul El Sayed is a politician and more careful about what he says, but one way you can tell what politicians think is by listening to the people around them. He clearly does share some radical ideas with his more transparently radical sister.

She's a stereotypical activist professor, sociologist at the University of Chicago. They're apparently investigating her for disparaging the university at the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago. She said . “I don’t care about this institution. Like I don’t—like fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord.” She then went on to explain that she sees her role there as using the university to organize students.

Here are a few of her X Posts. We've never had a serious senatorial candidate with a sibling who says such things about America.

• July 5, 2024. “All I want for Independence Day is a world independent of US empire.”
• November 20, 2024. “No one hates us for our freedom. Everyone hates us for being an empire of death and destruction.”
• February 6, 2025. “I hope the whole world rises against US empire.”

We've also never had a senatorial candidate whose father in law has such odd links to the Muslim Brotherhood through CAIR and Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). That's a can of worms. I guess the legal status of these organizations varies by state now and is being contested in courts. Some of their founding members are in prison for their roles in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation case.

Some people will say that's anti-Islam. It isn't about being Muslim. In America, you can be whatever religion you want. It's about being extremist. Same way as happened in places like the UK, France, and the Netherlands. leftists who would be skeptical of Christian political organizations close their eyes to extremely conservative Islamicist political forces. Turned out bad elsewhere.

The Democratic party is in a weird place. How do we bring it back to its patriotic, working class roots?

In early 332 BCE, Alexander III of Macedon wanted to worship at the temple of Melqart in the Persian controlled Phoenician city state of Tyre. Place all that purple came from. Rich dudes. Greeks associated Melqart with Hercules. The people of Tyre were holding ceremonies and had dignitaries from their colony Carthage visiting, so they were like hey buddy, how about you worship at the new temple on the mainland and not at the main temple on the island?

Alexander responded by changing geography to destroy their island city. He had his men build a causeway from the mainland to the island. Tyre had a navy and bombarded his workers the whole time with rocks, arrows, and burning sand. Alexander didn't have a navy to respond so he stole one and destroyed Tyre's navy. When his ground forces reached the island of Tyre, they slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery.

Alexander didn't have to attack Gaza next. He could have gone around it. It was said to be impregnable. His men dug tunnels in the sand under the city walls and built ramps to push up siege engines. The city fell.

He was a big fan of The Iliad. Carried around a copy his teacher Aristotle gave him. Slept with it and a dagger. So when he caught up to the Persian governor of Gaza, he dragged him to death behind a chariot like Achilles did Hector at Troy in The Iliad. His forces slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery.

Word of his brutal siege of Gaza spread fast. Egypt, long one of the most powerful empires in the Mediterranean world, welcomed him without a fight.

There are people who say ancient warfare is not relevant to present geopolitics. This is wrong. We are still exactly the same human animals as in 332 BCE. The Geneva Convention or ICC does not change our basic biology and it's damn strange to pretend otherwise. We are a violent pile of primates.

There are people who think it is possible to achieve lasting regional peace. History does not support this utopian idea. The Near East has always been a bloody region, given the fact it's where Africa, Asia, and Europe come together and so many cultures vied for control of land. How many times has Gaza been taken?

There are people who think brutality should be avoided in war. This overlooks the power of making an example of enemies to terrify other potential enemies. Egypt could have been a serious fight for Alexander. Instead, they welcomed him as a pharaoh and even a god.

After Alexander died, probably of a mosquito bite, in Babylon in 323 BCE, his mummy was on display in Alexandria, Egypt, and worshipping him was the most important cult of the city. Strange but true, there's a serious theory Alexander was later taken to Venice where he is venerated as St Mark in St Mark's Cathedral.

There are people who say that war for the sake of war is evil. Alexander the Great is remembered as one of the most important heroes in world history. His short life was an inspiring example of the power of human willpower and the very human drive to conquer. He became a god (and maybe a saint?!) through his desire to take the fight to the enemy.

There are people who think Israel is evil for fighting its enemies in the region. Isn't it odd that when Jews do exactly the same thing all people to ever come through the region did, it's evil? What's different? The answer is, our understanding of reality is. There's that lovely quote from The Wire, where Marlo says it to a security guard he later has killed. "You want it to be one way, but it's the other way." People get mad at Israel because its tenacity reminds people we still live in that same old world and no tea sippers on the East River at the UN are going to change that.

How do we bring people back to this basic understanding of reality? How do we break through the false education that makes people ashamed to fight for their countries? Israelis are sort of lucky. They have to face the real world at a relatively young age. We in the west suffer from the soft luxury of pretending everyone just wants to get along and share. This pile of primates is always scrapping, whether we admit it or not.

Remember that one time a European country was overrun by 60,000 fighting age men who stormed the border from a Muslim country? Seems like only yesterday...

What the heck happened and what are the implications for the future of border security in Europe? How does this relate to the wider trend of Muslim immigration to Europe?

Quite remarkably, some people in Europe are convinced the entire situation was orchestrated by the US and (wait for it) Israel. Because that makes sense. The reasoning is Spain was against the Iran and Gaza wars, so therefore they conclude US and Israel involvement. Quite a loco theory but here we are. What does it say about Europe that people could actually think Israel had anything to do with this?

Who actually organized the event? Was it the Moroccan government? Human traffickers?

A myth from the Gaza war gets repeated so often it's worth addressing in a post. The claim that IDF snipers routinely targeted children in the Gaza war is not plausible. The available evidence does not support this claim. It spreads because people don't understand the reality of precision shooting and combat.

Several foreign doctors have claimed that wound patterns were evidence of snipers. For instance, they said to reporters that children with gunshot wounds to the head or testicles showed they were targeted by snipers. They also claimed being hit multiple times in the same part of the body was evidence of snipers.

Expertise in medicine is not expertise in shooting or forensic investigation. These doctors are misinterpreting wound patterns. They may be spreading misinformation on purpose or may just not understand how wounds correspond with events on the battlefield.

There's also the issue of ideologically motivated reasoning. Look into who the doctors who said these things are, there's social media for a lot of them online that shows their extremist political biases, which is a factor worth considering.

Being a fascist city-state, Gaza tightly controls information and uses information warfare to spin up the easily suckered and overly gullible. Doctors operating in Gaza are there only as long as Hamas allows them to be.

If IDF snipers were routinely hitting children in the head or testicles, that would mean IDF has the most accurate sniper corps in the history of shooting. Is Annie Oakley even a Jewish name?

Snipers aim for center of mass because hitting heads at combat distances is incredibly difficult. Head shots might be used in very specific situations like if a target in body armor has a bomb vest or something, but you are very likely to miss multiple times.

Snipers operating in warzones know headshots would waste a lot of ammo on missing and would not do that while on missions. That'd be extremely dangerous.

US sniper training sometimes includes an exercise where they paint chickens different colors. A sniper has to hit his or her assigned chicken. Chickens are about the side of an adult head and move erratically like heads. The point of the exercise is to show foolish headshots are. You will miss. There's a reason we hunt birds with shotguns rather than rifles.

In the many, many times we've discussed this issue on this sub, someone will say something about the knee shooting at the right to return protests. IDF snipers engaged people throwing molotov cocktails and bricks by aiming for their lower legs rather than center of mass in order to stop them without killing them. What people don't understand is this was at very short ranges, and that movements of legs are actually quite predictable compared to heads. Watch how people move sometime. I is possible to consistently hit within 2 inches of the knee at 25 yards with a scoped rifle. Not easy, but not a trained sniper with a good rifle and glass could do that more often than not.

Hitting heads- let alone children's heads- in combat at ranges of 100 to 400 yards, yeah, that's a real different situation. Head bob around all over the place. In combat, there are a limited number of sniper rifles with a limited amount of ammo. If you waste ammo, you won't be on the long gun too long. Stunts get dudes killed.

Children with gunshot wounds to the head are much more likely to have been hiding behind cover during a firefight and poked their heads up. Hundreds and thousands of rounds from both IDF and Hamas flying around. And kids stick their heads up.

Multiple rifle rounds to the same body part are far more likely to be from automatic weapons fire. Think about it. If a person were hit by a sniper round, they would fall down faster than a sniper could take another shot. I would suspect wound patterns like this indicate heavy machinegun fire, perhaps at distance, spraying bullets across a horizontal plane at a high rate of fire.

There are aspects of combat people need to be real about. In combat, nobody's checking IDs to make sure everyone is an adult. You see shapes and shadows moving. Total chaos.

In most warzones, children are evacuated or sent to bomb shelters. This is the responsible thing for adults who care about their children to do. Hamas routinely uses minors in combat roles. And famously doesn't allow civilians in the largest bomb shelter in the world they built for themselves.

Left to their own devices, children will run around combat zones to see the action and collect souvenirs. In Japan in WWII, packs of feral kids would chase American planes to see how close they could get and even waved at pilots during firebombing missions. It is up to adults to prevent them from doing that because it's extremely hazardous.

The deaths of children in Gaza by gunshots, while tragic, is not evidence of being targeted by snipers. There is also no evidence which side fired the rounds that hit them. Enemy gets a say in a gunfight too.

There are reports coming out right now of a shooting at the San Diego Islamic center. I don't know many details yet. Initial reports are saying it was a hate crime and two shooters are dead.

We need to stop messing with other people's houses of worship. Religious freedom and tolerating religious difference is a core American value. If we lose that, it's going to unleash chaos that hurts everyone.

A lot of people think it's fine and dandy to protest at synagogues if they have real estate events about disputed territory in Israel or churches if people who work for ICE worship there. It's a slippery slope when you treat other people's houses of worship like political props. People will argue that protest isn't shooting, but It just takes one crazy person to take it to the level of vandalism or violence. This is becoming way too common. Civilized adults understand that you give respect to religious buildings, even if they aren't your religious buildings. Take the stunts elsewhere.

Right to free speech bumps up against freedom of religion. We probably need better legal protections for houses of worship. At the very least, we need to ensure law enforcement resources are available to protect synagogues, churches, mosques, etc. If cops don't handle that, people will do it, which is less than ideal but better than nothing.

Israel has dealt with violence like this. In 1994, a maniac named Baruch Goldstein shot up the Ibrahimi Mosque, the Cave of the Patriarchs, in Hebron. Almost all Israeli politicians condemned this act in the harshest terms, in part because they understood how destabilizing it would be to have religious violence spread.

Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, it doesn't matter. People who care about America need to be a lot clearer in condemning morons who mess with houses of worship. A modicum of respect for other people's right to worship how and where they want would go long way.