Let’s talk about the crisis at the US border with Mexico. Is it as bad as conservatives say it is? Turns out when you look at the data, immigrants aren’t the boogeyman that Fox News would have you believe. Let’s talk about what’s ACTUALLY happening at the border.
Even protecting kids from killing themselves and bullying is the target of hate from the “Christian” right. Seriously, you would think the Pro-life crowd would rush to protect children from death, instead they pretend that someone dressed in a costume reading a story is the real danger to kids. Sickening and the world needs to wake up to the cesspool that X, Twitter, and right wing media has become. Hugs. Scottie
The Trevor Project, which has nearly 350,000 followers on the platform, said LGBTQ young people are “regularly victimized” on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Trevor Project at the Los Angeles Pride Parade on June 11.Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images file
The Trevor Project, a national suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, announced it is leaving X, formerly known as Twitter, because of “increasing hate & vitriol on the platform targeting the LGBTQ community.” The decision comes just over a year after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of the company.
“LGBTQ young people are regularly victimized at the expense of their mental health, and X’s removal of certain moderation functions makes it more difficult for us to create a welcoming space for them on this platform,” the organization wrote in a tweet Thursday.
The Trevor Project, which has nearly 350,000 followers on X, said the decision to leave was made with “input from dozens of internal and external perspectives.” In particular, the group wrote, “we questioned whether leaving the platform would allow harmful narratives and rhetoric to prevail with one less voice to challenge them.” But in the end, the group decided that leaving was “the right thing to do.”
The Trevor Project has made the decision to close its account on X.
At the end of its message, the organization directed LGBTQ young people to TrevorSpace.org, its own social networking space for queer teens and young adults. The Trevor Project also noted that it will continue to maintain its presence on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook.
X’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on The Trevor Project’s departure or its characterization of “hate & vitriol” on the platform.
As NBC News reported last month on the one-year anniversary of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, many LGBTQ people say the once-hospitable home for community building has turned toxic.
This, they say, is due in part to a number of policy changes and business decisions at the company, including the layoff of employees who worked on reducing misinformation and harassment on the platform, and the removal of the site’s previous ban on intentionally using the incorrect pronouns or names for transgender people, practices known as misgendering and deadnaming.
GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group, releases an annual Social Media Safety Index and Platform Scorecard that evaluates social media platforms’ policies for ensuring the safety of LGBTQ users. In its most recent scorecard, published in June, X ranked in last place among the major social media platforms.
Since Musk took over the platform, LGBTQ people running some of the most-followed X accounts have abandoned it. Elton John, who has over a million followers, announced he was leaving in December, and Ellen DeGeneres, who has 75 million followers, hasn’t tweeted since April.
And The Trevor Project is not the only LGBTQ nonprofit to leave. The San Francisco LGBT Center, LGBTQ Youth Scotland and the U.K.-based Mermaids, a transgender charity, have also left the platform, just to name a few.
Another calm rational explanation of what is happening and the probable reasons why. The video details of the clear attempt of Israel to reclaim the land for its own use, removing all Palestinians from Gaza. Hugs. Scottie
During an appearance on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, an IDF official admitted to intentionally striking the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza where hundreds of civilians were located. I discuss the details of that event, the response from Democratic leadership, how Biden’s position is affecting his poll numbers, a reaction from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, and a lot more.
A clear rational straight forward description of what Israeli military is doing. Please look at the before and after photos of entire cities, or entire city blocks flattened. Remember all the buildings had children, half the population of Gaza is children! One of the Israeli government claims there are no civilians in Gaza, just terrorists. All the people are dehumanized so that the military has support to kill all the people. Why is Israel attacking the West Bank, where there is no Hamas in charge? Simply because they can kill Palestinians with world support and get more of the land. The world, the US must stop this, must use all pressure to stop Israel. Please listen to the video. Hugs. Scottie
While countless human rights groups call for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, Hillary Clinton, and many in power like her, are on the wrong side of history.
The republicans are on a non-stop attack on her, but she is correct. They just don’t like that her message is the truth, and it is correct. Hugs. Scottie
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) chokes up while condemning the resolution to censure her that the House is considering:
“Speaking up to save lives, Mr. Chair, no matter faith, no matter ethnicity, should not be controversial in this chamber.” pic.twitter.com/4ob7W6NZIB
I am seriously getting tired, scared, and very worried that these terrorist groups can operate openly spewing hate with impunity. This is incitement to committed violence and terrorism. And the right wing fascist fundamentalist Christians groups love these actions, as they are looking forward to a time of legal moral police and the Christian Taliban church doctrine enforcers. This is domestic terrorism.
noun
The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.
Resort to terrorizing methods as a means of coercion, or the state of fear and submission produced by the prevalence of such methods.
The act of terrorizing, or state of being terrorized; a mode of government by terror or intimidation.
Brookings, South Dakota. A university LGBTQ+ group is hit with a flood of hate mail, culminating in a bomb threat that terrifies students.
San Lorenzo, California. A drag queen story hour is one of several Pride events across the country stormed by suspected members of the extremist street gang the Proud Boys. The men shout homophobic slurs and threats, and a performer hides in a back room, waiting for police to arrive.
Philadelphia. Boston. Pittsburgh. Washington, D.C. Akron, Ohio. Threats hit hospitals and medical clinics, and some temporarily evacuate their patients while law enforcement assesses the danger.
Then comes summer and fall 2023, at least two dozen public schools and libraries start receiving bomb threats. In California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, they cancel classes and evacuate students.
These cases, and many more, share a common link: The victim of each threat had also been targeted, in the days before, by the enormously popular conservative social media channel Libs of TikTok.
In almost every case, the perpetrator of the threat is unknown, and Chaya Raichik, the far-right influencer who runs Libs of TikTok, says she opposes violence, and that because there have been almost no arrests, there’s no proof the threats come from her followers.
Numerous news reports have covered individual threats, noting the target had also been mentioned by Libs of TikTok. But the new analysis of years of tweets, including archives of many Raichik has since deleted, shows the pattern is more extensive and pervasive than has been previously known – and that threats, specifically against schools, have ratcheted up significantly in the past two months.
Media Matters used searches of published news reports to help identify more than 30 possible threat incidents. USA TODAY verified bomb, death and other threats in more than two dozen cases.
The research most likely undercounts the total number of cases. Other threats may never be reported to police or the media, and some targets are reluctant to publicize their plight for fear of drawing even more harassment.
As Libs of TikTok’s reach has expanded – the account now has more than 2.6 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter – so, too, has the frequency and ferocity of the threats that follow Raichik’s posts.
Hospitals have been evacuated; schools and libraries have cleared classrooms and canceled lessons while police officers search for bombs. Bookstores, Pride parades, cafes, even a dog rescue center, have had to lock down for fear of reprisals – and violence.
“We can only insulate ourselves from what’s happening on social media for so long,” said Ari Drennen, LGBTQ+ program director for Media Matters. “In a country where so many people have the ability to take things into their own hands, that’s a very real worry.”
Libs of TikTok: A far-right force driving the conversation and fueling outrage
The @LibsofTikTok Twitter handle was created in April 2021 by Raichik, a former Brooklyn real estate agent who grew up in Los Angeles.
Raichik created the account to “raise awareness about the situation in America,” she told USA TODAY. “There’s a clear pattern of the sexualization of children going on in public schools, and I think that’s a problem,” she said. “I think it’s super harmful, and I want to call it out, and raise awareness to it.”
The account has become a creator of, and a force multiplier for, right-wing outrage, particularly on LGBTQ+ issues. On X it has been amplified by the platform’s owner Elon Musk, and a hive of conservative politicians, media personalities and far-right online influencers, including former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and podcaster Joe Rogan.
For 2½ years, the account has posted a drumbeat of videos, photographs and links, often featuring TikTok or Instagram videos recorded by progressive leftists, accompanied by a derisive comment from Raichik.
Like most social media influencers, Raichik doesn’t produce all the content she tweets about. Libs of TikTok regularly shares videos and posts created by other far-right accounts, often with inaccuracies, misinformation and thinly veiled hatred mixed in.
But while those other accounts may have a smaller reach, once Libs of TikTok chooses a target, the viral response can quickly spin out of control.
Once Raichik posts something, “it just gets amplified to an order of magnitude larger audience,” said Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic who has been openly critical of Libs of TikTok. “Any tweet she puts out gets – instantly – millions of views and potentially tens of thousands of retweets and likes. So it gets wide dissemination.”
Shortly after – media reports and interviews show – is when the threats often begin.
Hospitals receive threats after Libs of TikTok posts
In Spring 2022, Raichik began directing her audience toward doctors, hospitals and medical facilities that provide care to LGBTQ+ patients, especially children.
On March 16, 2022, Libs of TikTok targeted Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Oregon, part of the Oregon Health and Science University’s health system, for providing gender-affirming care to youth. Almost immediately, the hospital and its staff started receiving harassment and threats.
“The harassing calls, emails and other messages that OHSU received in March 2022 objected to gender-affirming health care. Most of these messages cited social media posts that contained inaccurate or misleading information about life-saving and medically necessary care for gender-diverse patients,” reads a hospital statement provided to USA TODAY. “OHSU and its staff continue to be subjected to anti-transgender harassment today.”
By the summer, Raichik focused on Boston Children’s Hospital.
From Aug. 11 to 15, 2022, Libs of TikTok tweeted about the hospital at least seven times, Media Matters found. In one post, Raichik shared a debunked – but wildly popular – video claiming the hospital was performing hysterectomies on children.
Almost immediately, far-right message-boards and Twitter caught fire, with one poster threatening to “start executing these ‘doctors.’” On Aug. 16, the official Twitter feed for Boston Children’s Hospital posted a statement saying it had “been the target of a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls and harassing emails, including threats of violence towards our clinicians and staff.”
The statement specifically cited the false video about hysterectomies as the driver of the campaign.
The next day, Aug. 17, the local U.S. attorney announced an investigation into the threats and a month later, federal agents arrested 37-year-old Catherine Leavy, charging her with making a false bomb threat against the hospital. Leavy pleaded guilty in September and faces up to 10 years in prison.
But the Libs of TikTok tweets against healthcare workers continued unabated.
On Sept. 18, 2022, the account posted about gender-affirming care at Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio. The online abuse got so bad, the hospital had to take down a section of its website.
A few days later, on Sept. 21 it was the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s turn, when Libs of TikTok posted about the hospital’s efforts to help parents of transgender children. The hospital soon reported increasing its security because of threats to staff.
And it’s not just big institutions; Libs of TikTok has also targeted individual doctors.
Last October, Raichik posted a video of Dr. Katherine Gast, co-director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s UW Health gender services program, describing gender-affirming operations. The backlash was swift, with thousands of Twitter accounts sharing the post, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
The subsequent harassment campaign against Gast was “scary and overwhelming,” she told NBC News.
“The followers of Libs of TikTok and Ted Cruz lied about my practice to stir up outrage, doxxed me and my family, and my clinic is receiving harassing phone calls,” she told the network.
‘They want to become famous’
Asked for her reaction to the established pattern of harassment that follows her tweets, Raichik has a simple – and standard – response: She’s merely reposting what institutions and individuals have already, themselves, chosen to put out to the world on social media, she says.
“If an individual posts publicly on TikTok, the goal of TikTok is to get views,” Raichik said. “That’s why people post on TikTok – they want to become famous, they want clicks, views.”
But Raichik doesn’t just repost other people’s content.
First, her posts almost always include some kind of commentary. One in October, for example, featured an Instagram video of a New York music teacher, joyfully waving a Progress Pride flag while the message “Happy National Coming Out Day – Black, Gay and Thriving” appears at the bottom of the screen. “An actual elementary school teacher in NY,” reads Raichik’s comment on the video.
That teacher told USA TODAY that while he had not been aware Libs of TikTok posted his video, he had seen an immediate surge of hate mail. “I’m so mortified by this!” Eric Williamson said via email. “I have seen an increase of nasty messages on my post this week and wondered why.”
Other posts either directly or indirectly encourage Libs of TikTok’s followers to contact the original poster directly. In a post last April for example, Raichik sarcastically told her followers “definitely do not keep up the pressure” on a school district in Oregon that supported transgender students using their chosen pronouns. Asked about that post, she acknowledged it was a call to action, but only to “tag” or mention the account on social media. “I’ve done that a couple times, where I told people to tag accounts on Twitter,” she said. “That is nowhere near telling people to call in bomb threats.”
Libs of TikTok also doesn’t post solely public material.
Posts regularly include clandestine photos and videos that have been sent to Raichik or her network, presumably without the permission of a hospital, school clinic or library.
And some of the material she posts is doctored or fake – something Raichik acknowledged in her interview with USA TODAY. In April 2022, she reposted photographs and claims purporting to show an elementary school teaching children about a lifestyle some people believed depicts a fetish for animal costumes. The original post was an easily debunked hoax, and Raichik later deleted her tweet.
“I deleted it, and actually it taught me a lot, because now I’m much more careful in vetting everything,” Raichik told USA TODAY. “But yes, that is one example, I’ll admit, of a story that wasn’t true.”
Early this year, Raichik said, she deleted all of her prior tweets from 2022 and 2021 – an act she called a “one-time editorial decision.” She wouldn’t elaborate on her reasoning.
In recent months, Raichik, who calls herself a journalist, has begun labeling certain posts as “Scoops” – indicating they contain original reporting that nobody else has published, including the targets of her posts.
She told USA TODAY she is increasingly filing requests under public records law, with the hope of revealing previously unknown information. That’s a shift away from her original brand – the idea that she just posts videos the “libs,” themselves, already made.
Whatever her intention, Raichik has clearly spent recent months focused on one target: public schools.
Libs of TikTok turns its attention to schools
In at least 12 cases in the past two years, Libs of TikTok posts about schools, school districts and teachers have been followed by bomb threats, Media Matters found – often multiple bomb threats against the same location.
Most of these happened in the past two months.
Since Aug. 21, Media Matters tallied, and USA TODAY confirmed, there have been at least 25 bomb threats against schools, libraries, school administration buildings and universities after Libs of TikTok posts.
On Aug. 21, Libs of TikTok posted about a public library in Davis, California, where staff refused to allow a group to continue a public presentation. During a speech about transgender athletes, the speakers broke library rules by repeatedly referring to them as “biological males.” Libs of TikTok then tweeted a video of the confrontation, which has been viewed more than 1.4 million times and liked by 20,000 accounts.
The library almost immediately received bomb threats, and had to close temporarily, according to local media reports and the local police. And though the event was at a public library, the Davis Joint Unified School District also then received at least five bomb threats, and district staff stated publicly that their personal information was posted online. The FBI are assisting local authorities in investigating.
“The County of Yolo unequivocally condemns hate crimes and incidents that have cast their shadows over our vibrant community,” Dwight Coddington, a spokesman for Yolo County, which includes Davis, told USA TODAY. “Hate crimes and incidents have no place in Yolo County.”
In recent weeks, similar bomb threats have been made following Libs of TikTok tweets about schools in Oklahoma, Iowa, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, Washington and Oregon.
Despite the steady, and increasing, drumbeat of bomb threats against the very public schools and libraries her posts have targeted, Raichik said she was not convinced Libs of TikTok is connected to these harassment campaigns.
Schools, hospitals and other public institutions get bomb threats all the time, she told USA TODAY.
“It’s possible that some of these bomb threats were not even real bomb threats, you know,” she said. “Why are these bomb threats – the ones that are allegedly coming after my tweets – why are those making it to the news, while others aren’t?”
Two school security experts told USA TODAY that many schools do, indeed, receive more bomb threats than the public might realize. But victims and experts say the pattern of threats following Raichik’s posts shows more than just coincidental timing.
At the Cherry Creek School District in Arapahoe County, Colorado, for example, a local media station received a threat in September claiming multiple bombs had been placed at three schools and two administration buildings. The buildings, including a day care center, were evacuated.
The day before, Cherry Creek had been the subject of a Libs of TikTok blog post claiming the district kept “pornographic” books in elementary school libraries. The Libs of TikTok post ended with a call to readers to contact the district.
Almost immediately, the district was inundated with thousands of harassing phone calls, emails and social media posts. Then came the bomb threat.
In a letter to parents, the district superintendent, Chris Smith directly connected the threat to “bullying” and homophobic views expressed about the LGBTQ+ books on social media.
“The attacks from last week were driven by hate and have no place in our schools,” he wrote.
Ken Trump, a former Federal Protective Service officer and author who runs a school safety consultancy, said he’d be very surprised if the recent string of threats immediately following Libs of TikTok posts had happened by chance.
“I’ve seen some coincidences in my years doing this work, but that would be a really big one,” Trump said.
Libs of TikTok targets Pride events
Alyssa Gonzales was standing in her parents’ kitchen when she got the phone call late last November: A bomb threat had been made against the South Dakota State University Gender and Sexualities Alliance, where Gonzales volunteered and now serves as president.
Gonzales’ parents knew something was up.
Her father quizzed her about the call, and Gonzales’ reaction to it. The 19-year old took a deep breath. She had never told her parents she was gay. Now, she couldn’t wait any longer.
She came out to her family, explaining she had become heavily involved with LGBTQ+ causes at SDSU, and that she and her colleagues were now the target of a bomb threat.
The chain of events had begun a few days earlier, when Libs of TikTok reposted a video of a drag queen dressed in an outfit designed to make the wearer appear naked. The tweet claimed the video was from a “family friendly” drag show hosted by SDSU’s Gender and Sexualities Alliance.
It wasn’t.
The clip was actually from the previous year’s drag event, at which no children were present. But that didn’t stop the outrage. Replies to the tweet flooded in. The university began fielding hundreds of hateful and threatening emails, and eventually the bomb threat that led to Gonzales’ untimely coming out to her parents and grandparents.
The threats didn’t stop Gonzales and her colleagues at the college. Instead, in an act of defiance, they like to read out some of the more bizarre messages in ridiculous voices at their meetings.
“It feels like, ‘Oh, we’ve made it, we’re making news, and people are going to notice us.’” Gonzales said. “And if they notice us, then we can talk more, too – we can still say that, despite all this, we’re here, we’re queer, we’re out, and we’re proud.”
Other activists and performers across the country have also taken the threats in their stride.
Panda Dulce, a drag queen from the San Francisco Bay Area, hosted the event at the San Lorenzo library in summer of last year. It had been targeted by Libs of TikTok tweet, then was disrupted by a group of men wearing black and gold – the colors of the extremist group the Proud Boys. The men shouted homophobic slurs at Dulce as she tried to read to children, she said.
“They called me a ‘pedophile,’” Dulce wrote in an email to USA TODAY.
Dulce said the men made direct threats at her safety. “It was clear I was the target and focus of their attack,” she wrote.
But more than a year later, Dulce said she can’t let hate win.
“I still lead Story Hours,” she wrote. “I will not stop simply because some hobbyless extremists decided to cosplay Call Of Duty and throw a tantrum in a shameless grab for attention.”
For Gonzales, despite the bomb threat incident forcing her to come out to her family, the process went really well, she said. Her parents were loving and accepting, open and embracing – and all the more so given the hostility they knew their daughter was facing.
“They were very understanding,” she said. “They don’t get everything, but they’re still accepting.”
what a thing to wake up to, a morning news feed about a man who was helpful, involved, loving, caring, preached acceptance and caring for others. He worked hard in the community, helping the best he could during crises. He had something he did that was found out, something he said he did as a hobby With his wife in the privacy of their own home and on social media under a pseudonym. It involved only them from all the stories I have read and I want to read more of them but first I want to share what hate has caused. The online accounts were not offensive or harmful, just someone role playing a part of themselves online. Talking with others who had the same interests and feelings, not harmful to anyone.
See what happen next was due to hate and intolerance. Refusing to see the good of someone, of who they are, because they are different from you in some way you don’t like. Hatred of them not because they harmed you but don’t live just as you do.
Bubba like to dress up as a woman. I must say he looked really good as a woman. He smiled more as a woman than when dressed as a man. But several anti-LGBTQIA hate groups claimed he was a drag queen or trans and to them all drag queens / trans people no matter how much good they do are evil, are sin, need to be erased from society. For something that did not affect / or effect them in any way except, someone was a bit different and enjoyed doing something a bit different from what the anti-trans haters did. These people made it a point to try to turn the community against this good man. They doxed him, exposed his private life to the public, pictures of him in drag, all his home information was doxed to a country wide network of haters who went to work online. The contacted other Baptist organizations to rile up dislike and hate, to get the main church bodies to turn against his smaller church in an attempt to get him removed as pastor. They claimed publicly in meetings and online that he was unfit to lead the community he had been doing so for so long and well. They tried to create an angry outraged mob to attack this man and make his life hell on earth. Just because he put on a dress, a wig, and make up. He had social media accounts in the female persona and according to what I read they were not offensive in any way. That was his sin. That was his great crime. The result they got was he took his own life. He killed himself due directly to them, the haters, the anti-drag, the anti-trans. Are they happy now? Do they think by removing someone who cared about others and worked hard to help his community is better not being there? What did they gain except spreading hate and hardship? What about the surviving members of his family, his wife, his three children, all the others? What has this great religious purge gave them, except more hardship, the loss of a loved one, grief? Yes that is what their hate brings, grief. They spread it thick, far, and wide. That is what their hate does. Don’t help them, please don’t help them. Love, acceptance, tolerance, patience with, for, and to others is what we need to spread. And trust me it will not be a one way street. Hugs. Scottie
Below I will post several videos I have seen. I ask you to please watch them if you can, and to read the Joe My god story and the comments. Best wishes, hopes for a better future for all of us when the hate stops. Hugs
The Alabama Policy Institute is an anti-LGBTQ hate group that has appeared here many times for its lawsuits against same-sex marriage and for its support of Alabama’s leading anti-LGBTQ figure, former Alabama Supreme Court justice and US Senate candidate Roy Moore. They last appeared here in 2021 when they joined a lawsuit to block an LGBTQ rights ordinance in Alabama’s capital. 1819 News takes its name from the year Alabama became a state.
This didn’t have to happen.
After @1819News published pictures of Smith Station Mayor Bubba Copeland wearing women’s clothes and makeup, the official took his own life. https://t.co/Drp0CKTHn2
BREAKING: Alabama mayor and pastor Bubba Copeland commits suicide just days after a conservative news outlet with close ties to Steve Bannon and Breitbart published private photos of him wearing women’s clothing.
Copeland addressed his Baptist congregation on Wednesday night, stating that he was the victim of an “internet attack” and declaring, “Yes, I have taken pictures with my wife in the privacy of our home in an attempt of humor because I know I’m not a handsome man nor a beautiful woman either. I apologize for any embarrassment caused by my private, personal life that has come publicly.”
Unfortunately, bigoted Baptist leaders in Alabama issued a damming statement saying they had “become aware of the alleged unbiblical behavior.”
Today, Copeland took his own life, according to police. They did not release any further details. One of his close friends responded to the tragic news by declaring, “I am so angry right now and heartbroken. I witnessed a good man be publicly ridiculed and crucified over the last few days…to the point that he just took his own life today. I knew he was suffering so I reached out to him yesterday and offered him support and encouragement. He was appreciative and acknowledged that he had been going through some “dark days” over the last few days. I just want to ask you people who thought it humorous to publicly ridicule him, ‘Are you happy now?’ What crime did he commit?”
Other friends of Copeland noted that he didn’t hold bigoted views “toward transgender people or people who enjoy cross-dressing,” so there was simply no need for the conservative news outlet to out him.
The mayor of an Alabama town and pastor of a local church killed himself after a right-wing news website called 1819 News (praised by Steve Bannon) cruelly doxxed him as transgender.https://t.co/qE3uWogGGT
This pastor committed suicide not too far from here today.
We must end LGBTQ+ persecution.
ARTICLE: The secret life of Smiths Station Mayor and Baptist pastor F.L. 'Bubba' Copeland as a 'transgender curvy girl': 'It’s a hobby I do to relieve stress' https://t.co/WedLbd5vFJ
There’s a story making the rounds about an Alabama preacher/mayor who secretly dresses in drag and adopts the persona of a trans woman on social media.
The secret life of Smiths Station Mayor and Baptist pastor F.L. 'Bubba' Copeland as a 'transgender curvy girl': 'It’s a hobby I do to relieve stress' #alpolitics By @CraigMonger1819https://t.co/TBul39wPW8
Reread the title. How can shooting captives in a prison be justified. If the police / prison guards herded all the prisoners in to a small places and started to mow them down with gun fire, it is about what Israel is doing to Gaza. Hugs. Scottie
Israeli air strikes devastated parts of the Jabalia refugee camp in north Gaza this week, flattening buildings in a densely populated area where, Palestinian authorities say, at least 195 civilians were killed and scores more are still missing.
Israel says the attacks successfully targeted Hamas military leaders, their fighters and the tunnel network they dug beneath civilian areas and used for operations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has pledged to destroy Hamas – the Palestinian Islamic militant group that controls the Gaza Strip – in retaliation for its Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
The strikes at the Jabalia camp – the largest of several refugee settlements in Gaza – have fuelled international concern at the mounting humanitarian toll of Israel’s offensive.
In the wake of the first airstrike on Oct. 31, which left deep craters filled with broken concrete and twisted metal in the midst of Jabalia’s tightly packed buildings, the Office of the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Volker Turk said in a tweeted statement that the scale of the destruction and the high number of civilian casualties aroused “serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
Turk had previously said on Oct. 7 that he was “shocked and appalled” at the killings of civilians, hostage-taking, and rocket attacks on Israel by Palestinian armed groups.
Hamas gunmen rampaged through Israeli border areas on Oct. 7, in the deadliest day of the nation’s 75-year history. Israel says around 240 people were taken as hostages into Gaza, where they are believed to be held in Hamas’ extensive tunnel network.
*** There is a drawing of the area and the places of strikes and other stuff talked about. I am unable to copy and paste it here. Please go to the link above to see the information. Hugs. Scottie ***
Erez crossing
Jabalia
camp
Refugee
camps
Evacuation
zone border
GAZA
STRIP
ISRAEL
Airstrike
Rafah
crossing
Jabalia camp
Satellite map of the Gaza Strip, showing the eight refugee camps. The Jabalia refugee camp is highlighted and the site of an airstrike within the camp shown.
Israel’s ensuing bombardment of the small Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people has killed more than 9,000 people, according to health authorities in Gaza. Food and water are scarce, and medical services are collapsing.
At least five other refugee camps in the coastal enclave have been hit during Israel’s ongoing offensive, according to satellite images analysed by Masae Analytics. An Israeli military spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the images.
The United Nations refugee agency for Palestinians said that schools used as shelters by thousands of people have been damaged in the Jabalia, Beach and Al Bureij camps, and nearly 50 of its buildings and assets have been affected across the 360 sq km Gaza Strip. The U.N. agency said that more than 70 of its staff have been killed.
Israel has held Hamas accountable for the civilian death toll in Gaza, saying that it is using Gazans as human shields. Israeli officials note they have repeatedly warned residents to evacuate northern Gaza in recent days.
Reuters has used satellite images, pictures and videos shot by its journalists in Gaza to piece together an account of this week’s attacks in Jabalia.
GAZA STRIP
3
4
2
6
1
5
Evacuation zone
Beach camp
2
Rafah camp
Jabalia camp
3
1
90,713
2023 Population: 133,326
116,011
Buildings damaged
in refugee camps
as of Oct. 29
0.5 km
N
Maghazi camp
Bureij camp
Khan Younis camp
6
5
4
88,854
46,629
33,255
Maps of six refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the Rafah, Jabalia, Beach, Khan Younis, Bureij and Maghazi camps. Estimated damage to buildings within each camp is shown. All have significant numbers of damaged buildings.
At 1.4-square kilometres, Jabalia is the largest of eight refugee camps in Gaza and is home to some 116,000 registered refugees, many of whom are dependent on food, medicine and other aid provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
The densely packed camp was set up in 1948 to shelter the wave of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes amid the fighting that accompanied the creation of the modern state of Israel. Palestinians lament this as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Israel contests that it drove Palestinians away, saying it was attacked by neighbouring Arab states.
The Jabalia camp decades ago evolved from its original temporary tents and huts into a maze of concrete and breeze-block buildings separated by shoulder-width alleyways.
Living conditions are poor: conflict and years of Israeli-led blockade on Hamas-run Gaza have led to high unemployment, poverty, contaminated water and a shortage of building supplies for new homes.
*** Below is a chart / drawing of the area and where the camps are that are being struck. Again it wouldn’t copy over, to see them please go to the link above. Hugs. Scottie ***
Jabalia
camp
Schools and
kindergartens
Hospitals
and clinics
Mosques
Airstrike
250 m
Map of the Jabalia camp with building footprints shown. Buildings which contain schools or kindergartens, hospitals or clinics and mosques are all highlighted. There are many of all categories both within and around the camp. The site of an airstrike within the camp is also shown.
The camp has long been a flashpoint for tensions. Jabalia was where the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation erupted in 1987 after an Israeli truck driver crashed into a vehicle carrying Palestinian workers, some of them from the refugee camp.
Ever since it has been a hotspot. In 2008, Israeli ground forces went into Jabalia when Hamas began firing longer range rockets into Israel, killing more than 60 Palestinians during the military operation.
In 2009, an Israeli air strike killed senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan and members of his family in an airstrike on his home in the camp.
Reuters live footage at 1224 GMT on Tuesday Oct. 31 showed the first sign of the air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp: the camera shakes and then captures a plume of black smoke rising over northern Gaza. Details in the camera shot – a water tower, minaret, solar panels – matched satellite images of the area and confirmed the blast was in the Jabalia camp.
First reports of the airstrike appeared online around 1235 GMT, a few minutes after the blast was seen in Reuters footage.
Standing at the edge of one of the craters in the wake of the attack, Abdel Kareem Rayan, a resident of the camp, held a paper listing the names of the 15 family members that he said he lost. “They were innocent, just staying (in the camp). What wrong did they do?” he said.
Smoke billows above a building. People and medics rush to the scene of an Israeli attack that hit the Jabalia refugee camp in north Gaza on Wednesday, Nov. 1.
*** There is a video of the bombing and people running with injured people / children while others rush to help. But it wont post here, to see it please go to the web site at the link above. Hugs. Scottie ***
Professor Justin Bronk, Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defence and security think tank headquartered in London, said that the Reuters images of the Oct. 31 attack showed “multiple sizeable bomb craters.”
Bronk said that, while it was hard to do an exact weapons identification from photographs, the craters were consistent with the Israeli Air Force’s standard guided air-to-surface Joint-Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) – specifically GBU-31 2000lb or GBU-32 1000lb JDAMs.
“The primary use for the GBU-31 family of 2000lb JDAMs in U.S. service is for striking relatively deeply buried targets or for demolishing large structures,” he said, adding that U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan generally tried to use munitions with significantly smaller warheads such as Hellfire missiles or the GBU-38 family of 500lb JDAMs in densely populated areas. “However, these munitions lack the capacity to reliably penetrate and destroy structures several stories underground.”
Israeli defence officials have said aircraft were involved in the attack. A military spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the munitions used. The Pentagon declined to comment on the assessment.
*** Below is a single image of a complex tool on the orginal post that takes the before of the city and as you move the slider shows you the complete under devestation of that same city now. Hugs. Scottie ***
Oct. 31
Nov. 1
Satellite imagery shows that the location of the strike was near the intersection of Al Mouhawel and Al Almey streets.
Israel’s military said the Oct. 31 attack killed a significant military leader of Hamas: Ibrahim Biari, commander of the Jabalia Battalion and a ringleader of the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli towns and kibbutzim.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that Biari was also “the dominant leader” of Hamas fighters operating in northern Gaza from a network of tunnels beneath the camp.
“He was killed while situating himself inside the Jabalia Camp – with dozens of additional terrorists around him in the same area – which contains a headquarters and other operational facilities located in buildings within the civilian camp,” Hagari said on Nov. 1.
Hagari said the strike caused the collapse of the tunnels and underground military infrastructure, which in turn brought down additional surface structures.
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem denied there was any senior commander present in the camp. Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, said seven civilian hostages were killed in the strikes on Jabalia, including three foreign passport holders. Reuters was unable to verify that independently.
The second airstrike hit on Wednesday Nov. 1 in the Falouja neighbourhood of Jabalia refugee camp, approximately half a mile from the site of Tuesday’s explosion.
The blast flattened several big apartment buildings. The Interior Ministry in Gaza said the strike had destroyed an entire residential block, which Reuters was unable to confirm.
As the wounded were being carried from the scene on blankets and in the arms of residents and rescue workers, one local man told Reuters he said been praying in a local mosque and had rushed out when he felt the blast. “It is a massacre,” said the man, who did not give his name, as emergency workers tried to free survivors from the rubble by hand.
Israel’s military said the second strike killed Muhammad A’sar, head of Hamas’s anti-tank missile unit.
According to the health ministry and the Hamas government media office, at least 195 people were killed in the two airstrikes on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, which left 120 missing and more than 700 wounded.
A third Israeli airstrike hit the Jabalia refugee camp on Nov. 2, Reuters reported. The bombardment hit the UNRWA-sponsored Abu Hussein school, where many displaced Gazans were residing, according to eyewitnesses and a statement from the U.N. agency. Injured camp residents were rushed to the Indonesian hospital. Reuters was unable to determine the number of casualties.
Palestinians search for casualties a day after Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Nov. 1, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Al-Masri
Israel said it has so far killed 10 Hamas commanders responsible for planning the Oct. 7 attack. Hamas – designated as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States, among others – called in its 1988 founding charter for the destruction of Israel.
On a visit to Israel on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated that Israel has a right to “do everything possible” to ensure that there would be no repetition of the Oct. 7 attack.
But he called called for a humanitarian pause: “It is very important when it comes to protection of civilians who are caught in the crossfire of Hamas’s making, that everything be done to protect them and to bring assistance to those who so desperately need it, who are not in any way responsible for what happened on Oct. 7.”
Speaking shortly after Blinken, Netanyahu said: “We are proceeding with all our might, and Israel refuses any temporary ceasefire that does not include the return of our kidnapped hostages.”
Top photo
A man reacts as Palestinians search for casualties a day after Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Nov. 1, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Al-Masri
Note to analysis
Building damage provided by Masae Analytics change detection analysis based on Copernicus Sentinel-1 data. The analysis uses satellite images to estimate areas within the Gaza Strip affected by bombings since the Israeli campaign began. Analysis is further reviewed for false positives (areas that appear damaged in the analysis, but are not) and false negatives (areas that do not appear damaged, but are) by cross checking with other high resolution satellite imagery, media reports and other sources.
What the hell? That is the place they are demanding the Palestinian people leave. No they want them back where the bombs can kill them. Don’t we finally see what this is, it is the attempt to kill all the Palestinians they can? It is a version of the finial solution. They want to push of kill all the people there and take the land. And the Israeli government is starting to be honest about it as other governments including the US pull back support. They will not stop, they don’t need our help to do it, and so they will. Time for threats of sanctions and other actions we would take against any other government doing this. Hugs. Scottie
BY TIA GOLDENBERG AND ISABEL DEBRE
Updated 5:10 PM EDT, November 3, 2023
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel on Friday deported thousands of Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip back to the besieged territory, Palestinian authorities said, capping what many described as harrowing weeks trapped in legal limbo since their detention when the Israel-Hamas war erupted.
Some workers, streaming by foot through an Israeli crossing that had been sealed shut since Hamas unleashed its brutal attack on southern Israel Oct. 7, told of violent mistreatment by Israeli authorities in detention centers. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.
“We sacrificed and they treated us like livestock over there,” one of the workers, Wael al-Sajda, said from the border, pointing to his ankle fitted with an identification bracelet.
Al-Sajda was among the roughly 18,000 Palestinians from Gaza allowed to work in menial jobs in Israel. The permits have been coveted in Gaza, which has an unemployment rate approaching 50%. Israel began issuing the permits in recent years, a measure it thought helped stabilize Gaza and moderate Hamas, despite a broader blockade aimed at weakening the Islamic militant group.
Will Carless
USA TODAY
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