Author of A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, Neither Gods Nor Monsters. Founder, @SignalDispatch_ & @firelinepress. Law, power & AI.
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Joined March 2015
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The Genocide Convention was written by a man who lost 49 of his family to the crime it names. Just seven people came to his funeral. My new piece is about what his law actually says, and the people refusing to read it while swearing never again.
"Israel's genocide is a lie."
You've heard it from podiums, editorials, reply threads. Here's a test: ask the next person who says it which article of the Genocide Convention sets out the crime — or backs their denial. They can't tell you. They've never read it. And the denial depends on nobody ever looking.
The Convention. The case law. Srebrenica, Rwanda, the record at The Hague, and why denying a genocide is the same act as denying the Holocaust.
fireline.press/p/israels-gen…
When you can't answer it, call it a lecture. The vocabulary for that has a name.
fireline.press/p/the-vocabul…
What happened in 2016-2017 to cause this? 🤔
In 2017, 19% of American adults read at the lowest levels the OECD measures. By 2023 it was 28%: more than one in four, unable to get much past a simple sentence.
Functional literacy had held steady at about 82% since 2012. Then it fell to 72%.
That isn't just a dip, it's a collapse in the education system.
Brilliant talk by James Graham on how we're stuck rehashing old stories, and how technology keeps us from creating new ones.
Isolation, not polarisation, is what's stopping us empathising with each other.
A culture that can't create new stories can't create new solutions to new political problems, so it reaches back to old ones. Much like AI, built from what already exists.
theguardian.com/politics/vid…
The ADL's 2023 audit counted 1,317 pro-Palestine rallies as antisemitic incidents, an institution using its influence in a way that stifles free speech.
👇🏼🤠
Antisemitism is being redefined, and the people who wrote the definitions are among those warning about it.
Seven of the eleven examples attached to the IHRA definition concern the State of Israel. Kenneth Stern, its lead drafter, told the US Congress it "was never intended as a tool to target or chill speech" on campus.
The ADL's 2023 audit counted 1,317 pro-Palestine rallies as antisemitic incidents, an institution using its influence in a way that stifles free speech.
Now the IHRA definition is heading for British classrooms.
When criticism of a foreign state is counted as hatred of a people, real antisemitism becomes harder to see, not easier.
#Antisemitism
fireline.press/p/the-vocabul…
This 👇🏼🤠
The objection is not to fighting antisemitism for most people. It is to redefining it to the benefit of a foreign state.
Seven of the eleven examples attached to the IHRA definition concern the State of Israel, not hatred of Jews. Kenneth Stern, who drafted the definition, warned in 2019 that it was being weaponised to silence criticism of Israel.
When anti-Zionism is counted as antisemitism, the fight against real antisemitism is the first casualty.
Human beings have never had more knowledge at their fingertips, yet they have never been more confused, and the more it lies within reach, the more it eludes them.
Why does Israel need antisemitism to exist.
fireline.press/p/the-vocabul…
Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, in his 1895 diary:
"The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies."
The plan: use "accredited anti-Semites" to liquidate the property of Jews leaving Europe. Both wanted the same thing. Jews out.
(Complete Diaries, Vol. 1, pp. 83–84)
The poppy isn't only red. It was white since the 1930s, purple for animals, black for Black and Caribbean servicemen.
And that's not a Hamas flag. Red, black, white and green were first flown together in 1916 by the Arab Revolt, Britain's allies against the Ottomans in the war the poppy was made for. The flag is credited to a British diplomat.
Our allies didn't hijack the poppy. They fought in the war it remembers.
Fixed the hat my MAGA mate gave me.
America First means no foreign government comes first, Israel included.
My latest image. M33, the Triangulum Galaxy.
About 3 million light-years away and the third-largest galaxy in the Local Group, after Andromeda and the Milky Way. Around 40 billion stars.
The red knots are hydrogen clouds where new stars are forming, many blown into shells and bubbles by the young stars inside them.
The light in this picture set off around 3 million years ago, when our earliest ancestors were walking the plains of Africa. It finished its journey on my camera sensor the size of a postage stamp.
Captured and processed by me.
© James S. Coates
Despite its own 18.6% Muslim population, Israel and its proxy cutouts are waging a coordinated Islamophobia campaign in Western countries.
Divide and conquer, playing on people's fears. They aren't patriots worried about their country. They're foreign agents.
About 12,000 Palestinian Arabs volunteered for the British Army in the Second World War, Muslims and Christians alike.
Disrespectful? Britain has worn a white poppy for peace since 1933. There's a black poppy for African and Caribbean servicemen, a purple one for animals. A poppy for a people who served doesn't dishonour anyone.
Writing "MUSLIM" in capitals as if that's a bad thing doesn't change who stood with Britain when it counted.
A MUSLIM group in the UK has created a 'Palestine Poppy' causing outrage among British veterans
@antmiddleton
You quoted the verse where Paul renounces nationalism.
Read the one before it. He lists his nation and bloodline, "of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews." Then he says, "these I have counted loss for Christ."
Paul traded his nation for Christ. You're trading Christ for a nation.
And by the research you just shared, only 13% of this movement goes to church weekly. Dismal. How can you build a Christian country on that?
