From the River to the Sea: Ibaitik Itsasora (210)

Ibaitik Itsasora

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In 1948 Albert Einstein foresaw the Israeli terrorism in Palestine that would eventually bring a catastrophe on the Jewish colonists.

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Russia is not Enemy@RussiaIsntEnemy

Einstein said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” This statement reflects the understanding that a third world war could mean the end of civilization. Today, this realization should restrain us from taking extremely dangerous actions in the international arena that threaten our modern civilization.” – President Putin

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An ANTISEMESTIC bird!

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Bird@TheBirdJo

Irudia

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The world ignorantly thinks that Palestine was empty and completely undeveloped until it was invaded by Israel in 1948!

Palestine was not an empty piece of land before Israel. It was a country. They had streets, cities, airports, schools, colleges, theaters, concerts, culture and art. They had hopes, dreams, futures, and businesses. Generations of Families lived there.

Share it so that the world would know the truth about Palestine’s beauty and development before occupation!

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168 New Doctors Graduated Today in Gaza in the courtyard of Al-Shifa Medical Complex

Despite the chaos, the continued their education and will now help save lives

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004235218245636308

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British politician George Galloway:DNA testing is avoided in Israel because it could reveal that none of them are Semitic or have origins in Palestine.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004172980171980957

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Nadira Ali@Nadira_ali12

Noam Chomsky gets it.

Irudia

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Eyes Of Gaza@Ros10101

Those eyes. How haunting. Free Palestine ?￰゚ヌᄌ

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Hamas has published a 42-page report rejecting claims that civilians were targeted on October 7. The report says fighters were instructed to avoid civilians, hospitals, schools, & medics, and accuses Israel of spreading false information.

It urges the ICC or an independent body to investigate civilian casualty claims.

Irudia

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Ryan Rozbiani@RyanRozbiani

IF PALESTINE NEVER EXISTED, THEN WHAT IS THIS?!

Historical Record Exposed: Ben-Gurion, Israel’s First Prime Minister, was Listed as Palestinian

A newly revealed British transit visa from 1941 identifies Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, as a Palestinian citizen.

Issued by British authorities during the Mandate period, the document lists Ben-Gurion, born in Poland, under Palestinian nationality.

? The document contradicts later political narratives and confirms a basic historical fact: before Israel existed, the land and its citizenship were Palestinian.

History is written in archives. Not slogans.

Irudia

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Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel, carried a Palestinian?￰゚ヌᄌ passport.

From refugee status to building a state on others’ land.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003903873845809589

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?￰ンミレ?￰ンミワ?￰ンミᆬ?@Malcolm_Pal9

A bookstore owner confronts two Israeli men with historical facts: She proved to them through ancient books that the land is Palestinian?￰゚ヌᄌ

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003373257039446357

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En 1994, un coche bomba explotó en frente a la embajada de Israel en el centro de Londres. Ese mismo año otro coche bomba explotó en una zona comercial judía en Buenos Aires. En el MI5 llegamos a la conclusión oficial de que fueron autoatentados del Mossad“. Annie Machon, ex-agente de inteligencia británica del MI5, denuncia los autoatentados que perpetró “Israel” en Londres y en Buenos Aires en el año 1994.

Estos autoatentados se hicieron para conseguir más protección política al sionismo y también poder arrestar en Londres a 2 palestinos exiliados, Samar Alami y Jawad Botmeh, que eran los líderes de la mayor red de apoyo a Palestina en Reino Unido, ambos fueron condenados a 20 años de cárcel por el ataque de falsa bandera.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003815928610382222

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Israel admite abiertamente que no cumplirá el acuerdo que ha firmado y que continuará su perpetua ocupación de los territorios palestinos. Un estado al margen de la ley.

Aipamena

Clash Report@clashreport

abe. 23

Israeli Defence Minister Katz: We will not withdraw an inch from Syria. We will establish new settlement centers in northern Gaza to replace evacuated settlements. We will never withdraw from Gaza.

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– Israeli media (Channel 13) openly hosts and amplifies supporters of genocide:

‘I want to kick them out. We have to exterminate every last one of them [Palestinians].

I’ll tell you what I envision: There’s not a single person, not a single tree, not a single house, and if I could, I’d even poison the fish in the sea.

Everyone there is an enemy. The child who was born yesterday in Rafah, is an enemy.’

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003632591837044808

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Palestinians will never surrender.

#FreePalestine

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?￰ンミレ?￰ンミワ?￰ンミᆬ?@Malcolm_Pal9

American Journalist Owen Shroyer exposes the truth that Israeli?￰゚ヌᄆ leaders came from Eastern Europe, changed their names, and claimed the land of Palestine?￰゚ヌᄌ as their own.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003703465386922157

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Putin:Russia is not going to attack Europe.”

“It’s funny for us. It’s laughable because we never wanted to attack Europe.”

“This is a total lie.”

“We don’t have any aggressive plans towards Europe.”

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003421241621782997

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Why would the Russians even need to “Destroy Europe?” Idiots like this are doing a perfectly good job of it all on their own.

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Europe is Infected with SUICIDAL Russophobia

The STRONGER RUSSIA is, the STRONGER RUSSOPHOBIA is in the West’

Russophobia doesn’t solve any problems, it only creates them.

Deep-seated Russophobia

The violation of agreements the West had made

It’s strange, it’s tragic, but it’s a recurring pattern, rooted in Russophobia that goes back almost two centuries

France, Germany, and Great Britain are heading toward a new war with Russia, and even calling for it,” says American economist Jeffrey Sachs.

“For roughly 180 years—since the 1840s—the West has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia or the Soviet Union. This deep-seated Russophobia has repeatedly inflicted immeasurable damage on Europe—through reckless, wholesale, and unjustified mistrust and deception, through the violation of agreements the West had made—whether at Potsdam, in the negotiations with Gorbachev in February 1990, or on many other occasions—and through the rejection of collective security with Russia or the Soviet Union.

This has repeatedly led to European wars or to Europe’s vulnerability.” And what we’re witnessing now is a kind of reflex action by the West, this time, unsurprisingly, led by France, Britain, and Germany, who have played this same flawed, catastrophic game time and time again—and are playing it again. It’s truly sad to watch. It’s profoundly threatening, first and foremost, to Europe itself, because they’re heading toward a new war—indeed, they’re even predicting it, in a sense calling for it. It’s strange, it’s tragic, but it’s a recurring pattern, rooted in Russophobia that goes back almost two centuries.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003764371797799323

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British politician George Galloway: “DNA testing is avoided in Israel because it could reveal that none of them are Semitic or have origins in Palestine.”

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004172980171980957

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Ex-Israeli PRIME MINISTER condemns and damns Netanyahu and the entire Likud party “They

are butchers, murderers, killers terrorists”

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004170487916867709

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Sulaiman Ahmed@ShaykhSulaiman

Aaron Maté: “Netanyahu doesn’t want to have peace. He doesn’t want to see any parts of Gaza rebuilt. He wants to continue making Gaza completely unlivable for its people so that they all leave & he can empty it of its Palestinian citizens & fill it up with Israeli settlers.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004069470218961204

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DINAMARCA declara a Estados Unidos como potencial amenaza a su seguridad.

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We exploit the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to protect Israel from criticism. It is a trick we use” —Shulamit Aloni Former Israeli Minister of Education. In 2000, she won the Israel Prize.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003895954823696873

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Chay Bowes@BowesChay

Merry Christmas from Moscow Ursula.

Russian oil exports have risen to their highest level in two years. Sales reached more than four million barrels a day last week. Unemployment is at an all time low, inflation is dropping, the Army advancing.

Enjoy your Turkey.

Irudia

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Hamas renewed its call for an independent international investigation into the October 7 attacks in a document published yesterday. Celebrated Israeli-British historian and University of Oxford professor Avi Shlaim notes that Hamas has said it would accept an International Criminal Court or other independent probe and punish violations, while Israel continues to bar international journalists from Gaza and rejects any independent investigation of the events that day or of its conduct in 2+ years of military operations in Gaza.

Source: @PDeepDive

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004123861873270920

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Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil@ivan_8848

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: NATO enlargement was wrong, it led to this WAR. Warmongering is a deep part of the Washington culture and very much embedded in Germany, in particular, and in Brussels, which is led by a former German official, Ursula von der Leyen, in the EU Commission, continue the warmongering and Britain always loves a war against Russia. So Britain, you can count on for endless warmongering. It’s been that way basically since 1840.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003955981684748719

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Vladimir Putin News@vladimirputiniu

JD Vance Russia and China aren’t Threat to Europe, The Greatest threat to Europe is within, the treat of Europe from its fundamental values “.

Fully Agree

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2004059644290126243

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Sulaiman Ahmed@ShaykhSulaiman

Israel is blocking 94% of fish from reaching Gaza’s hungry population.

Pure evil.

Irudia

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George Galloway@georgegalloway

Noam Chomsky and the city of the damned. Those who dipped their beaks and worse in the poisoned chalice of Jeffrey Epstein’s hospitality

@MoatsTV

#GeorgeGalloway #EpsteinFiles

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003173679090507991

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Epstein’s victim, Maria Farmer, said Epstein’s circle were Jewish supremacists that saw themselves as the “chosen race,” believing their DNA made them superior.

Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/2003480464418619450

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What the Noam Chomsky–Jeffrey Epstein E-mails Tell Us

Chomsky has often suffered fools, knaves, and criminals too lightly. Epstein was one of them. But that doesn’t mean Chomsky was part of the “Epstein class.”

Greg Grandin

Noam Chomsky delivers a speech in the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, on May 30, 2014.

(Uli Deck / picture alliance via Getty Images)

Over his long life, Noam Chomsky—who turned 97 this month—has suffered fools, knaves, and hangers-on, both the curious and criminal, too lightly.

Chomsky earned a reputation early in his career as someone whose door was always open—who talked to anyone who knocked and answered any letter delivered. Then came e-mail.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Chomsky taught from 1955 to 2017, was an early adopter of electronic communication, and he received his first e-mail address, chomsky@mit.edu, around 1985. The stream of letters Chomsky received was largely replaced by a torrent of e-mails. But Chomsky’s open-door policy continued. He still felt obligated to answer all, or nearly all, the people who wrote him, a habit that has been the subject of many a Substack column and Reddit forum.

I wrote Chomsky cold in the early 1990s, and within a week, I was in his Cambridge office. We spent an hour discussing Iran-contra and death squads, and before I left, he gave me his “secret” e-mail address, chomsky2@mit.edu, which, as it turned out, wasn’t so secret. He gave that address to everyone anyway.

Chomsky stayed engaged no matter how tedious and repetitive his interrogator might be. In 2015, author Sam Harris badgered the then–86-year old Chomsky for five days with question after question related to defining terrorism. Chomsky did his best to answer, seemingly to no avail. He even reluctantly agreed to publish the exchanges, though he said that he thought the “publishing personal correspondence is pretty weird, a strange form of exhibitionism.”

Chomsky hasn’t spoken in public or to the press since June 2023, after he was silenced by a stroke. But his communication habits have been in the news recently—because documents, recently made public, reveal his years-long communication with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Chomsky, to be clear, has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes. Rather, he seems to have been one of the many marquee names Epstein cultivated over the years.

The news has, understandably, shocked many. Chomsky’s criticism of the power elite seems inconsistent with his friendliness with Epstein, who has come to embody that elite in all its rottenness. And Chomsky’s long-standing criticism of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land likewise appears to clash with his willingness to associate with someone many thought to be close to, if not an intelligence asset of, Israel. Tunnel focused on geopolitics and on crimes of state, Chomsky apparently didn’t see what others saw clearly: that Epstein was a pimp servicing a privatized global aristocracy, and that his victims were children.

Chomsky’s authority comes not only from his command of linguistics, a field he revolutionized, but also a perceived integrity, a sense—confirmed as true by all close to him—that he has lived a life of self-denial in service to justice. He has given an incalculable quantity of his time, and from what I understand, a good deal of his money, to people trying to make the world a better place (he has also, excessively in my opinion, indulged more than a few leftists looking to bask in his glory).

In 1970, he lectured at Hanoi’s Polytechnic University, a building half-destroyed by US bombs, and then went on to tour refugee camps in Laos. He also lectured in 1985 in Managua, Nicaragua, during Ronald Reagan’s contra war, and then in the West Bank in 1997. In 2002, he arrived unannounced in Istanbul to stand side-by-side in court with his Turkish publisher, Fatih Tas, who was being prosecuted for publishing Chomsky’s essays, including on Turkey’s repression of its Kurdish population. The state prosecutor dropped the charges rather than agree to Chomsky’s insistence that he be listed as a codefendant.

Noam was married to his first wife, Carol Chomsky—herself an influential scholar in the field of linguistic pedagogy—for 59 years. After Carol died in 2008, the inhabitants of two Colombian Andean villages, Santa Rita and La Vega, named a forest after her, El Bosque Carol Chomsky, in appreciation of her husband’s advocacy on their behalf in the fight to protect water rights. In August 2012, it took Noam two days traveling by jeep and on horseback to reach the high woods to attend the dedication ceremony. He sat in silence as villagers described violence, land theft, and water poisoning they suffered at the hands of ranchers, death squads, and gold miners. Chomsky tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. Later, he sent a note to the communities saying that he hoped that “Carol’s spirit” would help them fight the “predatory forces” they face.

And, throughout all of this time, Chomsky spoke to everyone. In 2004, he let the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, posing in character as Ali G, into his office and patiently and obliviously answered a series of absurd questions:

Ali G: So how many words does I gotta know to be, like, proper clever?

Chomsky: “Well, the average person knows tens of thousands of words, but it’s not really about the number…”

Ali G: (interrupting) “Tens of thousands? Dat’s a lot! Me probably only knows about… three thousand. Is dat why me ain’t a professor yet?”

Chomsky: “It’s not just vocabulary. It’s how you use it, the structure…”

Ali G isn’t the most obnoxious questioner Chomsky has faced, yet I know of no instance of Chomsky refusing to finish an interview.

Chomsky is an unwavering free-speech absolutist. His belief that no speech, however vile, should be silenced got him in trouble in 1969 when he insisted that Walt Whitman Rostow, an architect and enthusiastic defender of the war in Vietnam, be allowed to teach at MIT. The university, Chomsky said, had to remain “a refuge from the censor.”

Friends and colleagues who, on other matters, remained Chomsky’s lifetime allies, including Howard Zinn and Louis Kampf, thought otherwise. They weren’t protesting Rostow’s “speech,” they said, but his war crimes. Chomsky’s defense of Rostow took place at a moment when MIT students were exposing their university as little more than an R-and-D division of the Pentagon, receiving more than half its budget from government defense contracts. Some suggested that Chomsky’s position on Rostow’s hire had more to do with protecting the university’s ties to the defense industry than with free-speech principles. As far as I know, Chomsky never changed his opinion on Rostow’s right to join MIT’s faculty.

All of this is to say that, given his inability to gate-keep himself, it is not surprising, especially considering the close connection MIT had with Epstein, that Chomsky found himself in Epstein’s orbit.

Between 2002 and 2017, Epstein donated $850,000 to MIT and visited the university numerous times. Some senior administrators knew that Epstein, in Florida in 2008, had pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But they took his money anyway and kept inviting him back to campus. It is not known how or when Chomsky and Epstein first met, although the e-mail correspondence we’ve seen between them started in 2015.

MIT had long leveraged Chomsky’s reputation to build its brand. Chomsky has criticized some of MIT’s financial patrons, especially David Koch, but he still occasionally participated in “prestige draws,” lectures or symposia organized by the university meant to develop a network of wealthy donors, like Epstein. Chomsky was one of the “beautiful minds” whom Epstein would target for inclusion in his friends’ group; perhaps the two men met at one of these MIT-sponsored events.

Before his stroke, Chomsky told reporters that he had “met occasionally” with Epstein, including once in March 2015 with Martin Nowak, a Harvard biologist, and other unidentified scholars at Nowak’s office to discuss Epstein’s continued funding of a study headed by Nowak. Around this time, the e-mails show, Epstein brokered a private meeting between Chomsky and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Chomsky has said that he took this meeting because he wanted a firsthand account of why talks broke down between Palestinians and Israelis in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001. The meeting seemed to confirm for Chomsky that it was Barak who ended the talks, under pressure from domestic forces in Israel.

I don’t know what Chomsky knew, if anything, about Epstein’s child sex trafficking network. Nor do I know what Chomsky knew, if anything, about Epstein’s role in advancing Israeli interests in the United States, including aiding Alan Dershowitz’s campaign to discredit John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and to paint the authors as antisemites. The most active years of his correspondence with Epstein were 2015 and 2016, when Virginia Giuffre’s civil suits against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s since-jailed accomplice, and Epstein’s friend Alan Dershowitz were getting some notice (though that story mostly went quiet after Giuffre settled out of court).

The directionality of the correspondence is nearly entirely Epstein to Chomsky, with, as far as I can tell from the searchable databases, all of Chomsky’s e-mails being replies to e-mails first sent by Epstein. The last known e-mail that Chomsky sent to Epstein in reply to an e-mail Epstein sent him was on December 26, 2016. The topic was the recently elected Donald Trump.

Chomsky’s second wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, independently established her own epistolary with Epstein. (On January 22, 2017, she wrote Epstein an enthusiastic e-mail wishing him a happy birthday.) And Chomsky must have contacted Epstein in some form in 2018, given that a bank-transfer record found in Epstein’s papers dated March 28, 2018, related to the dispersal of $270,000 to Chomsky. The money was Chomsky’s—he had requested that Epstein help him complete a difficult transaction relating to his late wife’s estate. Chomsky’s original request isn’t in the public papers.

Between 2015 and 2019, Epstein extended multiple invitations to the Chomskys to socialize. Most came to naught, though the couple did attend some Epstein-organized events, including a dinner with Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. Some of those gatherings pulled together political and intellectual curiosities and economic elites. But there were also figures from the political extremes, including Steve Bannon; a picture of Chomsky and Bannon was among the materials found in the recently released files.

More important to Chomsky would have been the scientists Epstein collected. At MIT, Chomsky developed a reputation for splitting his attentions, building his linguistic models around interdisciplinary scientists who brought together biology, evolution, linguistics, computation, and math, and his political critique around humanists. Bannon wouldn’t be the worst person he ever huddled with, as one observer noted that at MIT, he divided his time between the “war scientists” and the “anti-war students.”

Though Chomsky corresponded with Epstein occasionally, he was often treated as an object of fascination by Epstein and his other correspondents. “Really impressive,” Ehud Barak wrote Epstein after his meeting with Chomsky. “Brilliant guy,” Linda Stone, a former VP at Apple and Microsoft, said in one of her e-mails to Epstein.

Joscha Back, a German-US AI researcher and prominent edgelord in “transhumanist” and “effective altruism” circles, was another Epstein correspondent. In one message, after peddling a noxious bit of race and gender science that “black kids in the US have slower cognitive development” and women mostly learn through a “motivational” system based, not like men’s on curiosity, but on “pleasure and pain,” Bach went on to say that these facts negate Chomsky’s egalitarian humanism: “it would mean that Chomsky’s life long hypothesis, that people have a special circuit for grammatical language, is wrong.”

On November 28, 2018, Julie Brown’s bombshell Miami Herald exposé broke the Epstein story open. Brown not only revealed the sweetheart deal Epstein had gotten from prosecutors in 2008. She also reported that police had identified at least 36 underage girls whom Epstein had molested or paid for sex between 2001 and 2006.

After the publication of Brown’s Miami Herald story, Chomsky went silent (as far as we know, based on the released documents). Epstein, however, continued to reference Chomsky in his correspondence with others. As Epstein grew increasingly preoccupied with containing the fallout from the Herald story, he tried to recruit Chomsky’s help, even dispatching Bannon to speak with Chomsky in Arizona, where the Chomskys had moved. But he proved unsuccessful in his effort to have Chomsky sit for an interview with Bannon, which was to be included in a never-finished documentary scripted to burnish Epstein’s image.

There exists in the released Epstein documents a truly cringey undated letter of recommendation that Chomsky is alleged to have written for Epstein. The letter has been extensively cited in the press because, unlike the e-mails, it is effusive, containing several good pull quotes. Chomsky, says the letter, considered Jeffrey a “highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”

I’d wager that Chomsky didn’t write this gushy letter. It sounds nothing like him. Someone should run the text through stylometry software and compare it to other references we are sure that Chomsky did personally write. My guess is that Epstein wrote the letter himself (since it portrays him exactly as he wanted to be portrayed, as a polymath of “limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights, and thoughtful appraisals”). Chomsky’s name appears at the bottom of the recommendation, but only in typed form. There is no university letterhead, signature, or any log or e-mail suggesting Chomsky sent the letter to Epstein as an attachment. The unsigned document was found in Epstein’s private files. Unless future document releases prove otherwise, this letter should not be taken as evidence of Chomsky’s opinion of Epstein.

Those with grudges against Chomsky, either because they oppose his politics whole-cloth or because they disagree with a particular stand he has taken, especially related to Israel, have naturally seized on Chomsky’s contacts with Epstein. An op-ed in the Jewish Standard says Chomsky’s ties with Epstein prove his moral bankruptcy: “Legitimizing evil is what Chomsky does.”

Others on social media think Chomsky’s Epstein contacts, along with his refusal to endorse the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, prove he is just a liberal Zionist. Right-wing antisemites are adding Chomsky to the ranks of globalist Mossad agents. But there’s also some considered criticism of the, to put it academically, gender dynamics of Epstein’s social network, which Chomsky entered into in the decade before his stroke.

The Epstein case isn’t Chomsky’s first scandal. Over the years, he has been accused of many bad things, including denying the Nazi Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia and Bosnia, and downplaying atrocities committed by the Syrian government. Chomsky generally dismisses such accusations out of hand. “Even to enter into the arena of debate on the question” of whether the Holocaust occurred, he once said, “is already to lose one’s humanity.”

In the past, Chomsky needed little help defending himself against charges that he was a Holocaust denier, a Pentagon shill, or an Assad apologist. If he were available for comment today, I imagine he’d respond to Epstein-related questions with considerably less patience than he showed Ali G and Sam Harris. “I’ve met all sorts of people, including major war criminals,” was his curt response in early 2023, when the first reports of his relationship with Epstein came to light.

Today, almost all of Chomsky’s old political comrades—Zinn, Lynd, Eqbal Ahmad, Grace Paley, Daniel Ellsberg, Marilyn Young, Edward Said, Daniel Berrigan, and Barbara Ehrenreich, among others—are gone. These were friends who could speak to his decency and to his uniqueness in a way that could help us understand what some think, for understandable reasons, was either an unforgivable or an incomprehensible relationship.

I disagree with Chomsky on several points, politically (his opposition to BDS) and methodologically (his disdain for Hegelian Marxism). He is stubborn and rarely admits error, qualities which, frankly, I appreciate. It makes him more of a flawed human, as our inspirations should be. And of course he has been right on so many issues: Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Turkey, the New Cold War, NAFTA, Cuba, Chile, neoliberalism, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, the militarization of space, corporate power, inequality, South Africa, Namibia, Libya, global warming as an existential crisis, and, of course, BDS notwithstanding, Israel, and so on and so forth.

Yet what I’ve found most compelling about Chomsky is his contempt for bullshit, the skill with which he exposes the tautologies of the powerful men, their self-confirming arguments that they are powerful because they are good, good because they are powerful.

So for me, too, news of Chomsky’s association with someone like Epstein was a jolt, and it would have been even if Epstein hadn’t run a global pedophile ring. In 2019, after news broke that Epstein had cultivated close relationships with Lawrence Summers, Steven Pinker, and others, I snicker-tweeted: “You know who seemed to be able to work their whole, influential and rather successful career in Cambridge/MIT and not attend any of Epstein’s ridiculous salons?” Well, we know now it wasn’t Chomsky. And who knows, if more e-mails come out on the Chomsky-Epstein relationship, this whole essay may read as wrong as that tweet.

Still, Chomsky’s e-mails display none of the fawning chatter found in, say, Summers’s mash notes to Jefferey and Ghislaine, and none of the affective investment in Epstein that Anand Giridharadas dissects so sharply in a recent New York Times opinion piece, “How the Elite Behave When No One is Watching.” And he does not appear to have been co-opted by whatever access Epstein provided. Not long after he was photographed with Steve Bannon, presumably at one of Epstein’s get-togethers, Chomsky gave a speech at Boston’s Old South Church denouncing Bannon as “the impresario” of an “ultranationalist, reactionary international” movement.

That picture with Bannon is jarring, but from speaking with people who knew him better than I did, for me, the image of Chomsky’s unworldly worldliness holds. He knew much about the world’s evils, but didn’t know what Saturday Night Live was when he was invited on. He was a workaholic under constant, relentless demand—read the memoir of his longtime secretary, Bev Stohl, for a sense of what Chomsky’s everyday life was like—who assigned the royalties of his books to others at signing.

As for Chomsky’s e-mails to Epstein, they sound much like the e-mails he has sent to me, warning, for instance, during Trump’s first presidency about “the sociopathic freak show in Washington” and worried how the “poisons” Trump has “released from just below the surface are not going away.” The handful of notes between 2015 and 2016 that Chomsky wrote to Epstein contain similar concerns. In one exchange, Epstein referenced religious “fanaticism,” on “both sides,” only to have Chomsky correct him: “secular religions—nationalist fanaticism, etc.—are much more dangerous,” says Chomsky, who then goes on to complain about “mainstream academics” who hold on to “myths” of “American exceptionalism” and “Israeli self-defense” and refuse to criticize “Obama’s mass murder campaign.”

Chomsky was not a sentimental member of what Giridharadas calls the “Epstein Class.”

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Mary Kostakidis@MaryKostakidis

Dave Zirin: ‘Many Jews, including myself, have shouted from the hills that Judaism and Zionism are two separate sets of ideas. Judaism is a religion with 5,000 years of history. Zionism is an expansionist, supremacist ideology propping up a state that’s younger than Goldie Hawn. We have argued that it is, in fact, an act of antisemitism to conflate the two, with the implication that to be a faithful Jewish person translates into supporting the leveling of Gaza and the mass killings of children. Our opponents in this fight to define our culture and religion have been gargantuan: the might of both US political parties; organizations like AIPAC; a university system equating pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism; and the David Ellison/Bari Weiss media offensive aimed nakedly at whitewashing Israel’s crimes.’

Don’t Listen to the Ghouls Exploiting the Tragedy of Bondi Beach

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Don’t Listen to the Ghouls Exploiting the Tragedy of Bondi Beach

The dead have one use to these people: They exist to justify Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the Palestinian blood that now will surely be shed. Facts be damned.

Dave Zirin

Items left by mourners at Bondi Beach on December 15, 2025, in Sydney, Australia.

(Izhar Khan / Getty Images)

Growing up, I was part of a Jewish family that did not celebrate Christmas. Many of the Jewish families at our reform synagogue made secular gestures toward the holiday: gifts under a tree or a trip to see Santa at Macy’s. But with Christmas, my vaguely religious mother drew a line: no Rudolph, no carols, no Christmas goose. Let the goys have it. Our December would be Hanukkah. For my mother, these eight days would be a gentle shield against cultural erasure. In a time before Adam Sandler’s stylings turned Hanukkah into the most celebrated of our holidays in the goyishe world, this meant that in high school I was often asked about “Jewish Christmas.”

That’s part of what makes the Jewish massacre at Bondi beach so obscene: These antisemitic monsters chose Hanukkah, the holiday that has most connected Jewish culture to the world—my mother’s gentle shield against cultural erasure—to commit mass murder. As of this writing, the count is 15 dead and 27 injured. One of the injured is Ahmed al Ahmed, the hero of Bondi Beach who wrested a gun away from one of the shooters.

And now our world’s least principled actors are telling us, without any justification, why this happened and drawing actionable conclusions about it before anyone actually knows the motivations of the killers—namely, linking the violence to support of Palestine. The dead have one use to these people: They exist to justify Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the Palestinian blood that now will surely be shed. Facts be damned.

Sure enough, in the wake of Bondi Beach, Netanyahu set a land-speed record in finding a camera to stand in front of to blame the massacre on the Australian government’s recognizing a Palestinian state. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens published an article the next morning, while the rest of us were still in shock, titled “Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” David Frum did the same at The Atlantic with “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach.

Don’t buy their bullshit. They are exploiting our dead. They are tying this tragedy to their own nationalist project for personal gain. They are relentless in their message that standing for Palestinian existence in the face of annihilation makes you party to this atrocity, which is an obscene lie.

Many Jews, including myself, have shouted from the hills that Judaism and Zionism are two separate sets of ideas. Judaism is a religion with 5,000 years of history. Zionism is an expansionist, supremacist ideology propping up a state that’s younger than Goldie Hawn. We have argued that it is, in fact, an act of antisemitism to conflate the two, with the implication that to be a faithful Jewish person translates into supporting the leveling of Gaza and the mass killings of children. Our opponents in this fight to define our culture and religion have been gargantuan: the might of both US political parties; organizations like AIPAC; a university system equating pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism; and the David Ellison/Bari Weiss media offensive aimed nakedly at whitewashing Israel’s crimes.

What the Bondi Beach massacre has shown is that these people and organizations have made life far more unsafe for Jews around the world by bonding our existence with theirs. If, indeed, the shooter was targeting Jewish people in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, then these same ghouls have made a fear many Jews share come true: that people will seek retribution for the actions of war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu.

Plus, there is a grander strategy to this. If we can believe that attacking Gaza and slaughtering families will actually prevent attacks like Bondi Beach—an utterly upside-down proposition—then we can sit silent as Netanyahu breaks the Gaza ceasefire, as he did over the weekend. That particular breaking of the ceasefire, according to Axios, even managed to piss off the White House. So Netanyahu must have been thrilled to go back to his happy place: blood libel against his political opponents. It seems like Netanyahu’s guiding political principle is to prove Voltaire’s line, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

While those fighting war crimes are being equated with killers, the Christian Zionists—and lest we forget, there are more Christian Zionists in the United States than all Jewish people combined—continue to be embraced by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and promoted by opportunistic vultures like Bari Weiss. These are people—and they lurk throughout the corridors of Trump’s White House—who love Israel and hate Jews. To see Weiss turn CBS News, the house that Murrow built, into a toilet of Charlie Kirk conspiracies is to see someone willing to profane the public’s right to know in the service of foreign objectives. For Weiss, it’s a devil’s bargain. Better to rule in Hell.

Meanwhile, the names of the dead at Bondi Beach are being released. People should read every story. Learn about people like Holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, who died by bodily protecting his wife, Larisa, also a Holocaust survivor, from the bullets. Feel every tragedy. Do this for them. And do it for Palestinians, who aren’t nameless statistics but people worthy of their own recognition, their own narratives, and each one’s own singular memory.

Please remember that, above all else, there are two sides. One is committed to ending our world’s addiction to hatred, violence, and needless bloodshed. The other stands with a supremacist death cult, willing to justify their own crimes in the wake of every violent tragedy—tragedies that they egg on through their commitment to ethnic cleansing.

In the coming month, Netanyahu will undoubtedly tell the Hanukkah story as a fable of a plucky minority, miraculously victorious in battle against brutal invaders. He will drape his story with the bodies of Bondi Beach, saying that the Israelis are the Maccabees succeeding against all odds.

That’s a lie. The Maccabees of 2025 are those standing against a tide that comprises not only Israeli military might but the whole of the United States government, much of the mainstream media, and all of those who aim to exploit the tragedy of Bondi Beach. We, not they, are proud Maccabees, fighting against a different cultural erasure from what my mother feared.

It’s not Christians with tinsel and holiday cheer trying to erase who we are. It’s Zionists committed to branding our beautiful religion with the stain of genocide and preventing us from preventing a Bondi Beach from ever happening again.

Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.

oooooo

ettore cauli@ettorecauli

@gazanotice

erabiltzaileari erantzuten

Solidarietà e sostegno agli studenti di medicina di Gaza che sfidano il genocidio e si laureano in mezzo alla guerra all’istruzione, portata avanti a Gaza e in tutta la Palestina dallo stato genocida di Israele.

Irudia

oooooo

B’Tselem בצלם بتسيلم@btselem

75 days into the “ceasefire”: the genocide in Gaza is not over

Since the “ceasefire” was declared on 10 October 2025, Israel has been continuing its onslaught on the ground. Israeli forces have killed 405 Palestinians and injured 1,114 throughout the Gaza Strip (as of 22 December).

Israeli forces continue to shoot residents and target Internally displaced people (IDP) compounds on either side of the “yellow line”, which left 58% of Gaza in Israeli control under the deal yet was never clearly marked. Nearly 1 million people who lived east of the line before the genocide are now crowded west of it in unlivable conditions.

Israel continues to systematically demolish buildings and infrastructure east of the “yellow line”.

Updated satellite images show hundreds of structures flattened in eastern Gaza City alone. Israel continues to heavily limit the entry of aid, allowing more trucks in but hampering full-scale operations by the UN and its partners through access and bureaucracy restrictions. As of 16 December, only 57% of 556 planned aid missions were completed, including delivery of essential supplies, medical evacuations and infrastructure repairs.

Israel continues to restrict the operation of crossings in and out of Gaza. In mid-December, only two of the crossings were operating at any given time, and Rafah Crossing remained closed despite commitments to reopen it.

More food has entered and market prices have dropped. However, after months of severe malnutrition, with limited variety and prices still unaffordable for most, the UN estimates that 1.6 million people in Gaza “are projected to face extreme levels of acute food insecurity” in 2026.

Nearly 1.5 million displaced people are still in camps. Storm Byron flooded thousands of makeshift tents, inundating the Civil Defense in Gaza with emergency pleas for shelter and basic supplies. The Gaza Ministry of Health has reported 11 people killed by structures that collapsed in the storm and two children, one a newborn, who died of hypothermia.

More than 18,500 patients, at least 4,000 of them children, are still awaiting medical evacuation from Gaza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Israel has allowed only 260 patients out of Gaza for treatment in this time, after decimating the healthcare system there.

Israel continues to bar the entry of medical teams and journalists, preventing lifesaving treatment and upholding the media blackout on documentation and reports from the ground.

The so-called ceasefire has been in effect for 75 days. In practice, Israel is continuing its campaign of killing, destruction, displacement and complete control of Palestinians’ lives in Gaza. The international community must stop enabling this façade and take action to help the people of Gaza.

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Geure herriari, Euskal Herriari dagokionez, hona hemen gure apustu bakarra:

We Basques do need a real Basque independent State in the Western Pyrenees, just a democratic lay or secular state, with all the formal characteristics of any independent State: Central Bank, Treasury, proper currency1, out of the European Distopia and faraway from NATO, being a BRICS partner…

Euskal Herriaren independentzia eta Mikel Torka

eta

Esadazu arren, zer da gu euskaldunok egiten ari garena eta zer egingo dugun

gehi

MTM: Zipriztinak (2), 2025: Warren Mosler

(Pinturak: Mikel Torka)

Gehigarriak:

Zuk ez dakizu ezer Ekonomiaz

MTM klase borrokarik gabe, kontabilitate hutsa da


1 This way, our new Basque government will have infinite money to deal with. (Gogoratzekoa: Moneta jaulkitzaileko kasu guztietan, Gobernuak infinitu diru dauka.)

Utzi erantzuna

Zure e-posta helbidea ez da argitaratuko. Beharrezko eremuak * markatuta daude