I attended some protests, and contacted my congresspeople about stopping aid for Israel back under Biden. What did you do?
The pretense that me saying "I didn't want Trump to make things ten times worse" equates to me claiming "things were okay before, and Biden wasn't complicit" doesn't become true, no matter how loud you pretend it.
I had a feeling this wouldn't be productive lol
Biden funded UNRWA
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56665199
I didn't know he'd stopped it in late 2024, so fair enough. Seems like more of his support for genocide, sure. Trump still made what had been a temporary shutdown permanent.
put sanctions on Israeli settlers
Entirely performative sanctions on a handful of individual settlers does not materially help Palestinians at all.
Probably true. How does refusing to vote for Democrats help Palestinians at all? If that's the metric.
directly provided humanitarian aid
What does this even mean, what are you referring to?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-resumes-humanitarian-aid-delivery-gaza-repaired-pier/
That stuff's not really enough. Stopping the killing is what's needed, and Biden never did that. My point is that he directly provided humanitarian aid. That's citations for when he directly provided humanitarian aid.
You mentioned a couple of times that "not a single Palestinian life" was saved by various performative gestures. Sure. The humanitarian aid probably saved some Palestinian lives. Can you really not see the difference between these pitiful efforts, and what Trump is doing?
the pace of the killing has greatly accelerated
Bullshit. Show your evidence or admit you're actively lying.
Here's what Statista says:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1616501/monthly-gaza-fatalities-injuries/
That shows no real increase in the pace of dying, so according to that, I am wrong. I don't believe it. It looks like that's the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, which are limited to only specific identified people and subject to how much civil organization is still in place to track dying people. I think the pace of death by starvation, disease, and malnutrition has greatly accelerated this year. You're free to say I think that because I was giving a free pass to Biden, I guess, but I anticipate that when people look back at what happened when the flow of food into Gaza was cut off, that will be the beginning of the end. You cannot just not feed an entire population and expect them to live.
The result has been a massive increase in suffering.
Bullshit. You were just a denialist when Biden was in.
Not really.
I was and still am horrified by the genocide happening in Gaza. I was alarmed by Biden's support for it, I was in favor of things like the "uncommitted" movement trying deliberately to put pressure on him. I posted stuff about the horror happening in Gaza throughout. Like I say, I was a mod of a Palestine news community for a while.
I was also even more horrified by the idea of what Trump would do to accelerate it. That's what I kept talking about. This thing where people try to backflip their way around to where that means I'm a genocide denialist or apologist, that I don't really care about Palestinians, as a way of presenting a reality that is totally bonkers when aligned with the facts, but aligns very smoothly with the stuff in their head they're trying to back up or justify, and makes them feel better about their own actions, is totally weird to me.
Maybe there is some kind of way to analyze why people cling to looking at things that way so hard, instead of just coming to grips with the idea that Trump is bad for Palestinians and admitting that it's accurate. IDK, I am too tired to really get into it.
I would add to that: It is also vitally important to see horrible, monstrous, evil people as human. It's a hell of a lot more important than the (also vital) virtue signaling "homeless people / ethnicity people / etc are people too" brand of refusing-to-dehumanize.
For one thing, if you understand why they bombed this city, polluted that river, cheered for this insurrection, whatever they did, then you're a hell of a lot further ahead towards stopping them in the future. You can see how they operate, you can understand it. Even if it's horrible and evil, you can grasp it, come to grips with it, start to work to limit the damage in an effective way, instead of just the "abstinence-only" approach to criminality that is so popular in cities that don't fight their crime very effectively.
For another thing, being evil and doing horrible things is very much a part of being human. It's how we operate. If you can't see that and accept it, if anyone who does something horrible or is just lazy, dirty, crooked, whatever, becomes "not human," then you can't really understand yourself, either. The version of morality where everyone "allowed" to exist in the world doesn't contain some evil is just not useful, in the real world. The Nazis were absolutely human, they were doing human things. They're indicative of a problem with humans. They're not some wild outlier you can safely place outside of "humanity" because they don't count.
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Solzhenitsyn
No, you couldn't. Because he isn't. How would you even determine "objectively horrifically worse
Biden funded UNRWA (after Trump 1 defunded it), put sanctions on Israeli settlers, directly provided humanitarian aid, "paused" delivery of some weapons, and also provided billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover (as of course did every other US president in history) which undermined any claim any of those things might have had to keeping him out of hell. On his watch, this new phase of the genocide started, and two years went by with a steady pace of dead Palestinians, mostly families and children.
Trump cancelled funding for UNRWA, unpaused all weapons shipments, and started drawing up plans with Netanyahu for the complete destruction of Gaza. It's been about six months, and the pace of the killing has greatly accelerated, mostly due to the complete starvation of the entire population. The endgame started pretty much as soon as he got into office. Domestically, he started attempting to deport people who organized protests in favor of Gaza, and de facto banned Palestinians from speaking at the UN or getting visas. Instead of weakly pumping the brakes, he hit the gas hard. The result has been a massive increase in suffering.
I'm not trying to defend Biden's support for genocide. I'm pointing out huge substantive ways in which Trump was worse, if you want that.
What do you want to pivot to now? I told you what I thought would happen in the conversation, let's see.
It's always a pivot to something else.
They said that I never talk about Palestine. I offered to show them a bunch of screenshots of me yelling about Palestine and what a fucking catastrophic horror it is. So now, they've fallen silent, and someone else has popped up, saying something different, continuing the hostile back-and-forth with different details.
I could mount an extensive factual discussion of how Trump is objectively horrifically worse even than Biden for Palestine. I actually started looking back through my comments, searching for one that I know is there that is extensively prescient talking about what types of new horrors are going to start happening in Gaza now that Trump is here, as well as some accurate details of the new horrors we have here now, in this country. Some of the people on "your side" roughly speaking were, at that time, trying to point to the cease-fire as strong evidence that Trump was better than Biden, because everything has to twist and shape itself around the narrative. I could point to that too.
But what would be the point? You would pivot to something else. That's how it works, Sartre explained it very succinctly.
I never see you hypocrites condemining israel terrorism
You must not be looking real hard. At one point I was a moderator of palestine@lemm.ee, I think because one of the existing moderators watched me [ yelling at / trying to talk sense into ] someone who was talking about October 7th in a particular type of way, and generally trying to put home to them what a fucking catastrophe is going on in Gaza right now. (That was a while ago, it's gotten worse.)
I can dig up screenshots about me yelling about Palestine, if you want me to find them. Do you want me to?
No there was equal chance of getting worse no matter who won.
Get the fuck out, man. You know that's not true. Like I say, you're safe in the air conditioning, you can say stuff like that with a straight face, no one around you hasn't eaten for a week so you can use this stuff as a little crutch to make your political point.
There is yet another fundamental problem with this: It is absolutely possible to hold trials for people where some of the evidence is classified. The US does it all the time. The system that was set up for it post-9/11 is sorta bullshit, stacked in favor of the government to an almost unbelievable degree, but it does function well enough that the more authoritarian elements have been moaning about how horrible and unfair it is that they have to deal with the FISA courts instead of just "do what I say to this poor helpless person, because I am king."
Of course, now it's all ICE, so they're bypassing the courts entirely. But for over twenty years we were running semi-due-process trials that included secret information as evidence, for this exact reason.
In their own moral framework, it's okay to kill literally anyone, as long as you're in charge and are willing to say a few words about "national security." Good to know, I guess. Presumably they mostly live in places where that's (for now 🥲) not the rule, and would be horrified if someone forced them to go back to places where that is the rule.
Honestly, I think mostly what this means is that they've done a good enough job of chasing away all the reasonable people that they've entered into an increasing spiral at this point. Everyone has to be most unreasonable in order to stand out, and with no one sensible to compare themselves to, they have to get more and more outlandish in order to be the outlandish-est one.
This dude is really just 180 degrees out of sync at all times
There was a guarantee that things would get horrifyingly worse if Trump won.
There was a chance of things getting worse if whatever Democrat won, and also a small chance that strong vocal protest would produce an improvement in US policy producing some improvement for the Palestinians.
With Trump, they had no chance at all.
President Donald Trump has has long considered both the media and higher education as his enemies — which makes college media a ripe target. The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed that she co-wrote for the Tufts University campus paper proved that student journalists are at risk, especially foreign writers who dared criticize Israel’s war on Gaza.
But one student newspaper is fighting back.
The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.
“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.
“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.
Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.
“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.
Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.
Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.
In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”
“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.
The next week, the Stanford Daily editorsran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.
“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”
Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.
The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”
There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.
[
In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.
In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.
The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.
“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”
[
Read our complete coverage
In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.
In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”
Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.
Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.
“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”
Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”
[
“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.
“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.
Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.
“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”
The post The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.
This you?
(I got the feeling it wouldn't be productive a few messages ago, you didn't like that and got amped up, so fair enough, I went back in and engaged with you factually a little and went point-by-point with some citations, even openly indicating where I couldn't really find evidence of one of my points. You didn't like those responses, and declared yourself the arbiter of whether they were valid and announced that you had won the discussion. Alrighty then. Sounds like our business is concluded. Call me Mr. Anti Semite I guess.)