u/pwnasaurus253

NPR interview with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

Ahmed was born and grew up in Gaza city, lost 2 friends in an Israeli airstrike when he was 11, eventually sought political asylum when he was 17 during the 2nd Intifada and moved to the US he became an advocate for Palestinians and peaceful solutions. Since he left Gaza he has lost roughly 30 family members to airstrikes in the region.

He places the blame squarely on Hamas. He expertly details the way Hamas rode a wave of Islamism in the 70's and 80's in what he calls a relatively secular region (Gaza) prior to that era. They embedded themselves in the schools, community resources, etc and then pivoted to an armed resistance wing that essentially rejected every opportunity to build infrastructure: airports, seaports, etc because it would've meant disarming. Ahmed voices his optimism prior to the 2nd Intifada and how 20 years went by since Gaza was offered $15bn to build these things (for which he developed a plan with "an army of engineers" and had actual designs at one point)....and Ismail Haniyeh rejected it. Because it meant disarming.

He pulls no punches, he doesn't give Israel a pass, but he keeps his discourse very much focused on what Palestine and specifically Gaza has done that has perpetuated the cycle of violence.

I appreciated his candid, peace- and developement-oriented outlook of Gaza and his continued work for a lasting solution.

Some data from the CDC:

"Overall HSV‑2 prevalence for U.S. adults 14–49 is about 11.9% (age‑adjusted 12.1%).

Age‑adjusted prevalence for non‑Hispanic Black persons (men and women combined) is 34.6%, down from 41.5% in 1999–2000.

Across all races, women’s HSV‑2 prevalence is higher than men’s (15.9% vs 8.2% overall), so within the Black population Black women’s rate is higher than the 34.6% combined figure, while Black men’s is lower."

Why is it so high? Are Black folks more receptive to the virus or something?

I'm not judging, just genuinely wondering. Compared to other racial groups, it's disproportionately high.

**For the record, I am a white man. I have oral herpes (hsv-1, non-symptomatic) and my wife is a Black woman who is negative for hsv-1 and 2 and we've been together for over a decade. We've both been wondering why it's so high in the Black community. Any info/data/insight would be helpful.

From a clinical and psychological perspective, the exact question of Muhammad's mental state—specifically whether his experiences were driven by underlying neurological conditions or organic brain pathology—has been a subject of serious study among medical historians, psychiatrists, and secular biographers for over a century.

When you look at the symptoms described in the earliest Islamic biographies (Sira and Hadith), they present a complex clinical picture that modern medical professionals recognize as sharing distinct features with specific neurological and psychiatric disorders.

1. The Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) Hypothesis

The most prominent neurological theory argued by historians and medical researchers is that Muhammad suffered from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) with complex partial seizures.

The earliest Islamic texts describe the exact physical manifestations that occurred whenever he received a "revelation":

Physical Collapse and Sweating: He would frequently fall to the ground, his face would turn red or pale, and he would sweat profusely, even on freezing cold days.

Auditory and Visual Alterations: He reported hearing the "clanging of bells" or a loud buzzing in his ears right before a vision appeared.

Altered States of Consciousness: During these episodes, he was described as being completely unresponsive to the people around him, entering a trance-like state.

In modern neurology, TLE is well-documented to cause precisely these types of physical symptoms. More importantly, TLE is famous for causing "hyper-religiosity" and intense spiritual grandiosity between seizures (a condition known as Geschwind syndrome). Patients with this condition often experience vivid, lifelike hallucinations of angels or God, a profound sense of absolute cosmic certainty, and an obsession with writing or dictating cosmic laws. To a 7th-century observer who lacked any concept of neurology, a person experiencing an epileptic trance followed by a burst of poetic, authoritative speech would easily look like a man possessed by either a demon or a god.

This explains why he confidently assumed he would appear with great specificity in the Hebrew Bible. In a mind experiencing severe grandiosity, it is a psychological impossibility for the rest of the world not to revolve around them. When the Jewish scholars in Medina pointed out that he was not in their texts, a person with this pathology cannot accept that they are mistaken. Instead, their mind instantly constructs a defense mechanism: The texts must have been altered, and the scholars are lying to destroy me. This is where the doctrine of Tahrif (scriptural corruption) functionally serves as a psychological coping mechanism to preserve the delusion against conflicting evidence.

.....how is this not talked about more ?

Everyone was so sure Ilia would starch Gaethje. Best fight of the night by far (which isn't saying much), but it was a seriously great match.

“Free Palestine.”

I grew up on those words.

In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them.

In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to.

Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all.

Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge.

What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that.

Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine.

In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence?

Palestine is still first.

So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.

So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews.

And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state?

You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.

Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.

-Rawan Osman

--

I’m a Westerner, college-educated, and generally pretty liberal. So on paper, I’m exactly the kind of person who is supposed to instantly nod along with “Free Palestine.” But that slogan has always felt off to me.

Not because I think Palestinians shouldn’t have rights, safety, or self-government. They should. But because the slogan skips over a huge amount of history and turns it into a lazy, malicious trope: one side is morally righteous, the other side is cartoonishly evil (think "training rape dogs"), end of story.

The way this gets framed in the West, you’d think Israel just appeared out of nowhere and shoved aside some ancient, unified Palestinian nation that had been peacefully sitting there forever. But that’s not what the history looks like. The land was ruled by the Ottomans, then the British. Modern Arab nationalism was forming. Modern Jewish nationalism was forming. Borders were being drawn all over the Middle East by empires and war. The whole region was in flux.

And yet somehow, when people talk about all this today, the one thing they act like is uniquely illegitimate is the existence of the one Jewish state.

That’s what I can’t get past.

There are over twenty Arab states. Arab identity, Arab nationalism, Arab-majority rule....none of that is treated as some shocking moral scandal. But one Jewish state, in the historic homeland of the Jews, is treated as an offense against humanity. If self-determination is good, then why does it seem to apply normally to everyone except Jews? If nationalism is bad, then why is Jewish nationalism treated as the special evil while everyone else gets a pass?

And then there’s the part nobody seems to want to talk about: most of the original British Mandate of Palestine did not become Israel. The land east of the Jordan River became Transjordan, later Jordan. In other words, the vast majority of that territory was already split off into an Arab state. But when that happened, nobody built a global moral movement around it. Nobody treated that as some unforgivable theft. Somehow that was fine.

But a much smaller Jewish state in the remaining land? That became the great crime of history.

Why?

That question alone blows a hole in a lot of the activist talking points, which is probably why it almost never gets asked.

Another thing that gets consistently overlooked is how badly Arab states themselves treated Palestinians. If the Western activist version were true, then you’d expect Arab governments to have welcomed Palestinians as brothers, integrated them, given them full rights, and helped build a Palestinian state whenever possible. But....nope.

Jordan fought Palestinians. Lebanon restricted them for years. Egypt controlled Gaza for nearly two decades and didn’t create a Palestinian state there. Syria used Palestinian groups when it suited Syrian interests and crushed them when it didn’t. Palestinians were often treated less like beloved brothers and more like political tools.

That doesn’t mean Israel is innocent. It means the story is not “good guys versus bad guys.” It’s a regional power struggle where Palestinians were often used by Arab regimes as a weapon against Israel, while being denied a normal political future.

And that matters, because in the West the entire moral burden gets dumped onto Israel, as if everyone else in the region had clean hands.

They didn’t.

The slogans are another problem. “From the river to the sea” gets defended by a lot of Westerners as some vague call for freedom or equality. But the Arab translation is much more straight-forward: "from water to water, Palestine is Arab" and, the slogan has had a pretty obvious meaning: the whole land, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean should be Arab. No Israel.

And if that’s the vision, then what exactly happens to the millions of Jews already living there? Do they just vanish? Leave? Submit and pay the jizya? Become a minority in a state founded by people who spent generations denying the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in the first place?

A lot of people chanting that slogan never answer that question honestly, because the honest answer is ugly.

The same pattern shows up in the history of peace deals. A lot of people today talk as if Israel simply refused peace over and over again because it enjoys domination and cruelty and plans to exact a genocide on the Palestinians despite simultaneously innoculating 1,000,000+ Palestinian children against polio during a potential outbreak. But....partition plans were rejected. Two-state ideas were rejected. Negotiation windows opened and closed. Palestinian leadership repeatedly chose "winner take all" over compromise, and ordinary Palestinians paid the price for that. Yahya Sinwar reduced their suffering to strategic value: "we only make headlines with blood...no blood, no news."

Israel has made mistakes. But the cartoon version, Israel bad, Palestinians rising up against apartheid opressors, is patronizing horseshit.

Yasser Arafat is a good example of how history is conveniently trivialized. In the West, he was often treated like the face of a stateless people heroically demanding justice. But he was an Egyptian-born product of the wider Arab political world, and when serious opportunities came, he did not prove to be a great architect of peace. He kept ambiguity alive because ambiguity preserved leverage. That may have helped his politics, but it didn’t help build a functioning Palestinian future.

And then there’s the identity question. Palestinian nationalism developed within a broader Arab nationalist world. For long stretches, “Palestine” was treated by Arab leaders not as a separate nation with its own fixed destiny, but as one front in the larger Arab struggle against Israel....basically a strategic pawn. As Zuheir Mohsen, former head of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) famously said:

"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... Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. "

He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

But modern Western discourse hates complication, especially in academia. It wants every conflict translated into its preferred categories: white versus brown, colonizer versus colonized, oppressor versus oppressed. Once that template gets slapped onto Israel and the Palestinians, a lot of people stop thinking altogether. Israel gets shoved into the “settler colonial white power European” slot, Palestinians get shoved into the “indigenous brown resistance” slot, and then history becomes optional.

The problem is that Jews are not foreign to that land. Jewish history there is ancient. Jewish exile from that land is ancient. Jewish longing to return is ancient. Large-scale modern Zionism may be recent, but the Jewish connection is not. So the whole “European invaders stole somebody else’s homeland” story works great as activist theater, but not nearly as well as actual history.

Another ridiculous aspect is the refugee issue. In most conflicts, refugee crises are tragic but eventually resolved through resettlement, citizenship, and rebuilding lives somewhere. The Palestinian case became different. It became permanent. Refugee status became hereditary. Camps remained camps. The problem was preserved instead of solved.

Why? Because solving it would have reduced its political usefulness.

That is one of the cruelest parts of this whole story. Generations of Palestinians were taught not to build a normal future where they were, but to remain symbolically suspended until history was reversed. That may be emotionally powerful, but it is not a recipe for a stable life or a workable peace.

And this is where the modern Western left really loses me. It claims to care about human rights, democracy, pluralism, women’s rights, gay rights, and minority protections. But then it turns around and romanticizes movements and regimes in the Middle East that are openly hostile to all of it, as long as they can be marketed as “anti-colonial/anti-western.”

It’s treating powerlessness as innocence and treating success as guilt. It’s assuming that if one side is weaker, then it must also be morally purer. Weak groups can be cruel. Strong groups can be justified. Reality does not care about activist templates.

None of this means Palestinians deserve misery. None of this means Israel should never be criticized. But criticism that starts by erasing Arab agency, ignoring repeated rejection of compromise, downplaying Islamist extremism, and pretending Jewish self-determination is uniquely illegitimate is not serious criticism. It’s just propaganda dressed up as morality.

That’s why “Free Palestine” lands wrong for me. In theory, it could mean something reasonable: build a real Palestinian state next to Israel, guarantee rights and security for both peoples, end the fantasy that either side is going away.

But in practice, a lot of the people shouting it are calling for something simpler and more malicious: that Israel should not exist. Full stop.

So no, I don’t buy the simplified Western narrative. I don’t buy that this is just a story of one innocent people being crushed by a uniquely evil state. I don’t buy that Arab nationalism is normal but Jewish nationalism is unforgivable. I don’t buy that every failed peace effort was Israel’s fault. And I definitely don’t buy that chanting slogans in English while ignoring the actual history of the region is some kind of moral wisdom.

If the goal is peace, then both peoples have to be treated as real. Both have claims. Both have histories. Both have suffered. And both are staying.

Any politics that cannot admit that basic fact is not serious. It’s just performative.

I found this:

Across all branches, modern rabbinic consensus agrees that typing any name of God on a computer screen, smartphone, or website does not violate Jewish law. Because digital pixels are constantly refreshing and not physically permanent, deleting or backspacing over the words is universally permitted. The restriction only triggers if the digital document is physically printed onto paper.

So this would also apply to the Hebrew name, ie, tetragrammaton, yes? Can someone clarify?

Israel has been losing the "war of public opinion" post 11/7, but this loss has continued to ramp up on a continual basis, especially as of the last year or so.

Paid (and unpaid) propagandists on various social media platforms post in droves to drive and amplify anti-Semitic rhetoric by way of "anti-Zionism" and none of the platforms have done a damn thing. Completely fabricated news items, AI generated content/images, congenital defects framed as being from malnutrition, Hamas/Hezbollah violence pinned on the IDF and other manufactured outrage abounds.

Highlighting this supposed cruelty and inhumanity has led to real-world consequences. An Israeli couple murdered in cold blood outside of a US museum simpy for existing. The Bondi Beach Channukah massacre. And people (and/or bots) openly celebrated on social media! Countless instances of public violence toward Israelis and more broadly Jews worldwide, that, while not entirely new, certainly marks a recent shift in frequency and severity.

The IRGC and their proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis have certainly been driving a lot of it. Intelligence shows an inordinate amount of influence coming from Iran in the form of funding efforts both within the US in form of college campus protests, and without. And yet, despite this public knowledge, their vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Israel propaganda continues on social media unabated. TikTok has been trending anti-Semitism and resurrecting old Soviet-era blood libel and propelling a meteoric rise in open, public, wide-spread anti-Semitic tropes and rhetoric masquerading as "anti-Zionism". Kids film themselves wearing yarmulkes and standing outside jewelry stores rubbing their hands for "likes", attempting to replicate a meme.

And behind it all is not only hate....but monetary incentive. Engagement. All of the ragebaiting, fear-mongering, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda has found a home on social media and they're being rewarded for it.

Here's a single case-study with a relatively small platform who made $8,000/wk posting bald-faced anti-Israel lies. And he admitted it.

https://x.com/TheModerateCase/status/2048489156242702742?s=20