Americans are fond of calling people Good Samaritans.
The point of the Good Samaritan parable is the Samaritan stopped to help a person he was supposed to hate, someone from another culture, one considered his enemy, and he helped after people considered allies had refused to help.
There is a difference between a good person and a Good Samaritan.
Today De Santis called a man a Good Samaritan because he choked another man to death.
FFS you couldn't make it up... at the very same time that Rishi Sunak is looking to restrict eligibility for benefits for the disabled & long-term sick as an 'incentive' to get them 'back to work'.... the Work & Health Programme, that actually does that very thing has lost funding & will close in the next six months!
So with one hand he takes away financial support & tells people to do more to get into work, and then with other removes services that will help them do exactly that.
Elon Musk can say whatever he likes about Mark Zuckerberg and #Threads. Zuckerberg wasn't born into apartheid wealth like Musk. He earned every penny through intellectual property theft like any honest business person.
Some 52 years ago, when I was in 4th grade of primary school, I found a book "who put glasses on the kid's eyes" in a small book shop in open bazaar of my hometown Ahvaz in khuzestan province of Iran.
A few days later, we had to bring a book to school and read it in front of the class. Happy as I was to have found a great book, I took it to school and read it in front of the class.
I couldn't understand why my teacher was acting so scared and stopped me before I had finished the book and sent me to the principals office.
I was nervous, didn't know what I had done wrong and our principal, who was a really nice man, and went to the same university as my oldest sister took the book and asked me where I had bought it. I knew something was wrong, so I said I bought it at the book store of our local mosque, to protect the guy who was my source of cheap and lovely books and would buy back my old ones to help me afford buying new ones.
In the evening my father came home, agitated and clearly upset. Asked me what I have done and I explained the situation, including the fact that I lied about wher I had bought the book. Told him the highlight of the book about a happy child who was living in a town with happy people who were all wearing glasses.
He was seeing flowers, colorful houses. Nice people and happy children all around him, birds flying in the sky and everyone were so friendly to him.
Until one day he fell of and his glasses broke. He couldn't believe his eyes, the flowers, colorful houses and happy people were all gone. All he could see was a run down city, with piles of garbage everywhere, people wearing worn out clothes, looking hungry and sick.
He was nece happy after that, he couldn't believe that everyone were walking around with glasses and we're happy all the time. But he was sad and miserable, because he had seen his town without those glasses.
Anyway. My father took me to a building close to the main police station on the other side of the Karun river, he spent almost entire day in a room where I could people screaming at him and a few times someone his the table very hard. But couldn't hear what they were saying.
My dad came out. Pulled my hand without saying a word, we walked for an hour to get home, didn't take taxi as we used to do.
He didn't say a word during the whole day and told me to go over my books and bring all the books I had bought from that shop, he through them in a metal bucket and poured some fuel over it, set them on fire and waited until they were completely burned, mixed the ashes to turn them into dust, filled the bucket with water and through it in the toilet.
He told me to never go back to that shop and be careful to take any books to school from now on.
That' was my first interaction with the notorious Savak police of Shah of Iran. In the next days, all the 4 book stores in our town were raided. Books confiscated and doors locked. Never heard about any of them again.
Reading the comments of pro Israeli accounts on mastodon reminded me of that book and that experience that changed my life when I was only 8 years old.
This post specially triggered those memories. Unlike the kid in my book and the people living in the town, these people know very well tat what they are posting is not true, they have seen the horror of the past 76 years of occupation, they have seen the 66 times they were subject to UNSC charges, and 45 that were vetoed by the US..
But they don't care, they see themselves as victims. They don't see the millions of starving palestinians, or the millions living in refuge camps around the world as worthy of their empathy or cause of why Palestinians and some of the world is fed up with their out of control criminal behavior
They don't have glasses on their eyes, they have chosen to be selective and above the laws of the world.
More analysis of the #Rwanda treaty; this time from Mark Elliot (via his Pubic Law For Everyone blog); contains this beautiful if critical, summation:
'the Bill reveals an astounding level of hypocrisy in the sense that it is premised on a policy that presupposes that Rwanda will honour its obligations in international law while demonstrating that the UK is prepared to breach its own obligations'!
So, this guy solicited nude videos from an undercover police officer he believed to be a minor in 2018. It took nearly five years to convict him and (apologies but I’m going to use all caps here) HE REMAINED AN ACTIVE DUTY NYPD OFFICER UP TO HIS CONVICTION THIS WEEK. In the press release, the NYPD goes on and on about how he betrayed his oath but they don’t seem bothered with letting him keep his badge for years after he did.
Well, well, well.... the MP's Parliamentary #Pension scheme invests a vanishingly small proportion of its assets in UK equities - under 3% of overall equity holdings & less than 2% of its overall investments.
So, while telling us to invest more in Britain, and while trying to force other pension firms to do so, the MPs scheme isn't doing so.
So, once again we find MPs doing for themselves what they don't want us to do... its yes more Westminster #hypocrisy
Well now, what a surprise. Another #MAGAt caught committing #voterFraud. Remember, these are the same people who have been ranting and raving about #election#fraud, and how it's the #Democrats who are engaged in election fraud. But if you look at who's committing the overwhelming majority of voter fraud, it's the #Republicans. Of course #hypocrisy and #shame mean nothing to these people, but the rest of us can see exactly who they are.
Anyone remember the fiction that the Conservatives were "The party of law and order"?
It seems that a Facebook Group that praises and highlights law-breakers is run by a Tory Council Leader and contains a Tory Minister - Minister for Policing, no less.
As always with the Tories it's "one law for you and another for us".
Bons mots from Rick Wilson's incendiary takedown of Florida's hypocrites-in-chief, Christian and Bridget Ziegler:
"It’s excellent odds some of the same people eager to call every drag queen a pedophile on the floor of the Florida House left the Governor’s Club to have their asses professionally beaten by a dominatrix or to sleep with an escort."
I'm sure none of my American friends have heard about this.
It's not like they were Muslims or citizens of Iran or other Muslim countries, because THAT would have been on the news 24/7 and tomahawk missiles would already reaching Tehran and other locations already.
Not a word about the attackers being (former) IDF soldiers.
At Columbia, Student Protesters Say They Were Attacked With Chemicals
After pro-Palestinian students said they had been sprayed with a foul-smelling substance during a demonstration, the university began an investigation and barred those accused from campus.
Columbia University and the Police Department are investigating reports that pro-Palestinian student demonstrators were sprayed with a foul-smelling chemical during a protest last week, leading the university on Monday to bar the people accused of spraying it from campus.
In a statement that was emailed to all #Columbia students and faculty members on Monday night, Dennis A. Mitchell, the university’s interim provost, said that the individuals had been barred while the Police Department investigated “what appears to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes.”
"This can’t go on. If #Sunak really wants to know why the country feels as if it’s falling apart, it’s because we haven’t got a functioning #government. All that he did get right was “enough is enough”. It is. Time for an #election.
Israel has completely ignored the demand and not shown even a hint of complying with the UN demand.
The silence of world leaders and their inability to hold Israel accountable is once again proving that their talks about rule of law and human rights are anything but empty talks.
Well, well, well, after ranting at #universities for supposedly 'no platforming' people whose views were deemed 'unacceptable' t transpires that across the #civilservice, the #Tories have issued guidelines to staff to ensure exactly that when it comes to events they are hosting/convening.
So, as so often with those championing #freespecch, its free speech for us & our supporters but for you (critics), not so much.
Last year the Financial Ombudsman received around 3,900 complaints about debanking... up from 2,700 the year before.
Around a third of cases were upheld (in favour if customers) up a little from 2022.
The proportion of complaints from small businesses has also risen.
You'd perhaps have expected (after his promises) that Nigel Farage would be campaigning loudly on behalf of these customers... but actually once his case was resolved, of course, he moved on.
All the red lines, all the warnings, all the empty talks about Rafah is once again showing to be nothing but, well, hot air.
Israel is bombing Rafah, it is bombing palestinians fleeing Rafah, it is bombing medics helping the injured in Rafah and it is doing it with full view of the so called "world community", the British FM was brave enough to say "we do not support the attack against Rafah", as if the weapons they sent to Israel are magically have stopped exploding when they are dropped over civilian targets in over crowded city.
Biden have stopped sending bombs to Israel, after almost 3000 shipment of weapons that no one seems to care about, one single shipment was "delayed" and the propaganda media, the loonies at the congress and Bidensitas are all talking about it as if it is an unbelievable act of bravery and show of moral grounds.
Germany is quiet, and instead stepping up it's attacks against pro-palestinian activists and using their power to block the entry of Palestinian activists outside EU to enter Schengen,
Sweden, busy with celebrating their 12 points support of the Israeli song and attacking pro-palestinian protesters is preparing their fighter jets to receive the new Israeli weapons tested to be efficient against people of Gaza to be attached to it's fighter jets and hand over some $500M to genocidal regime of Israel.
The rest of Europe is also sitting and quietly watching the atrocities in Gaza to go on, some speak and talk about recognizing Palestinian state (like they have done in the past 6 months) and stopped selling the shipment of weapons to Israel (directly, but replacing the weapons US, UK and Germany are sending to Israel without any hesitations).
"The story of a key anti-LGBTQ+ activist engaging in same-sex activity as part of a threesome sent Moms for Liberty hurrying to say that Bridget Ziegler was no longer on their board (although both Zieglers were still on their advisory board) and purge her name from their website."